Hi, Everybody!
Mondays!
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Jesse Lee Herndon has caught up to Dave and I on the Please Hold Transcripts, And since I'm out of Proto-Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, I may as well start knocking out these transcripts.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
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[guitar music]
Matt: Hello!
Dave: Hello, Matt! How are you doing?
Matt: I'm all right.
Dave: Good. This is the earliest possible Thursday you can have in a month.
Matt: [laughs] Yeah it is! I looked at the calendar like a week ago and went, oh, okay, we're doing it on the first!
Dave: Really? Really. Okay, “Seiler, my turn.” No, uhh, yes it is your turn, but I'm gonna take your turn.
Matt: Okay!
Dave: Because Steve Swenson sent me the in-dispute Guide to Self-Publishing for me to take a look at personally, and so that's kind of unfinished Jeff Seiler business, because it's dedicated to Jeff Seiler, and got the sketch in it, and saw Seiler's notes. So I always think if I could just see it personally, then I'm gonna see more here. I'm not sure that that turned out to be the case. It is a different experience. I have never looked at a ballpoint pen on newsprint, relatively cheap newsprint, under the jeweler's loupe. And the same with the description I had for the Alex Raymond “Rip Kirby” original. There's a whole topography that you just don't realize is there until you're looking at it under that level of magnification. Anyway, having examined all of the scans that got relayed to me, and then now having looked at the original, I can definitely say, looking at the sketch, yes, it is a Japanese brush pen that I'm using on the fur around Cerebus, and it's a Japanese brush pen that's just about out of ink, and I'm obviously aware that it's just about out of ink. Which was one of the questions that I had, why would I use Japanese brush pen on newsprint? That's gonna be an absolute mess on the other side of the page. Yes, if it was a fresh pen then yes it would be a mess, but because it was running out of ink, that was why I went, uh okay, I can do the fur with this, this will be pretty cool. Inking on the face, the details, the hatching on Cerebus' ear, and on his eyebrow, and the shading behind his snout. I think it looks like I used an archival pen, but I used probably a zero one archival pen that had gone a little mushy, and I would have been aware of that as soon as I started inking the thing, going, mhmm, well I'm at the Off-White House, I can just go upstairs and grab a fistful of zero ones and see if I can't find a fresher one with a finer line. But I think my attitude was, well, it's just for Seiler, he won't know the difference.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] So, yeah but I definitely did… this was when I was starting Strange Death of Alex Raymond, so I did the Warren style block lettering on Jeff Seiler's name, and I did use, it looks like a zero zero five archival pen on that, so it looks pretty good, and wrote the “On the occasion of coming to Canada to get his stuff back” and this is when it moves over into Jeff's world! Because he's written definitely underneath it, “Good stuff” and then sort of went over the lettering in “good stuff” to emphasize it and underlined “good stuff”, but “good stuff back” and it took me a while to figure out that he's got an asterisk there, but it doesn't have an asterisk at the bottom, but it means he's writing mostly that guy and that's when he drew his convoluted arrow pointing at Cerebus. What he's saying is, that he came to Canada to go to, we will call her G, G's place because he moved his Cerebi there and that was one of his top concerns was, “I have to go and get my stuff back and I have to get my good stuff.” Which, for him, amounted it to his Cerebi, which probably most of them were autographed by that point, certainly the trade paperbacks from him bringing them to Columbus for S.P.A.C.E. and whatnot. So mostly he's going to get his Cerebuses, “or err, um, dude. Really nice hair.” I think he's trying to figure out what he's gonna write next, and just sort of got hypnotized by the the inking on Cerebus’ fur and went, like “really nice hair.” He's going back up to the top, he's dated it 7-8/9 11 so I did the drawing on July 6th, 2011. That was when we were here at the Off-White House and then he was giving me a lift down to Toronto, and he was going on from Toronto to G's place. So the 7th, I believe was a Saturday, so I would definitely have been either coming back here, or staying at the hotel and observing my sabbath on the Sunday. I wouldn't have been doing anything besides that. Jeff, I think, obviously went to G's place, got there sometime on the 7th or early on the 8th, and grabbed his his stuff, and I have no idea, I never asked him and he never told me, “Okay, what was the experience like going there and getting your stuff from her?” knowing that this was ending as as badly as it did. The fact that it's 7-8/9 11 suggests to me that one of the things that he did as soon as he left her place was to go somewhere and start drinking, and that was when it seemed to him like a good idea to start writing in his Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing. Probably not while he was drinking, but when he got back to his vehicle, stuffed full of his Cerebus stuff. Anyway, “really nice hair J.A.S.” is Jeff, what was his middle name again?
Matt: Alan.
Dave: Alan?
Matt: Alan, yeah.
Dave: Okay yeah, so it's J A S, Jeff Alan Seiler, in parentheses, and then in presen-- percen-- prevent-- pre-- ahh, you know what I'm trying to say! “But. He will die.” and in parentheses “unloved unmourned alone”, which is interesting because that's the reverse of what it is. It's “alone, unmourned, and unloved”. And I thought that was interesting that he got it backwards. That's when we turn the page and it goes, “Good thing his creator didn't”, and he had trouble spelling “creator”, I think he got the E and the A in wrong order the first time, and then again corrected them with the ballpoint pen. “Good thing his creator didn't”, [laughs] he should have said “didn't yet.” I mean we're all gonna die, and whether I die alone, unmourned, or unloved, well, we don't know. It's 2022, let's see what happens over the remainder of my life. And then we got, “Also it's a good thing that… some people who will read this will.” That's when it gets confusing on, oh, “Will realize that..” No, I thought I had that one. There's one word that I definitely not, “Even though I have a pension for margins”? Did he just misspell penchant? I've looked at that under the jeweler's loupe, I've pulled back the facing page as far as I dare, and looking at it under good 400 times magnification, and I'm still not certain what it is that that word is, for pension? Yeah, penchant, is maybe what he was trying to say? “For margin. Someday when you buy this book and you will laugh, by J.A.S.” and that's the end of the dedication. So still a little bit of a mystery as to why he did this. It looks like an alcohol related thing he just felt compelled to editorialize on his personalized book.
Matt: So, you never asked and Jeff never said, but when Jeff was getting back from this trip, he was coming back to Manitowoc cause that's where he was living, and he and I talked about it, and he did tell me what happened when he got to her place.
Dave: Oh okay. And it wasn’t pretty?
Matt: Well, as with everything involving her, it just was weird. So he let her know he was coming, like, you know, okay, because he couldn't get into Canada because he had a drunk driving on his record, in Canada you have to be 10 years past the incident and your record has to be clean to get in.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: Like not even to move there, just to visit! If they run your record and you got a drunk driving, Canada says, “Nope, sorry, we're not letting you in” is the way Jeff made it sound, but then again he did show up at the border going, “I'm moving here” and they said, “No, you're not.”
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right.
Matt: So he let her know he was coming and part of the breakup was that she was hanging out with a friend named Wally, whose nickname was Cowboy Wally between Jeff and I because I've read Kyle Baker's “The Cowboy Wally Show” and as soon as he said, “Oh yeah, there's this guy Wally” I'm like, how old is he? “Oh he's older than her, about her age” so he's in his 50s, and like a 50 year old man named Wally is Cowboy Wally. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Right. Okay. Point taken.
Matt: So she was hanging out with Wally, and because she and Jeff had this long-distance relationship where they would call each other and write letters and stuff. And they had like a regular, “Okay, it's Saturday night, one of us is calling the other one.” Well, she was missing some of the phone calls because she was hanging out with Wally, and Jeff, reading between the lines, was starting to suspect that she was quote unquote cheating on Jeff with Wally, and I went, well, you know, I mean, we don't know, but you're gonna decide whatever you want, Jeff, because in your head you've already, you know, you're mad at her about this.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So of course she's cheating with Wally, so he was afraid when he went there that Wally's going to be there and there's going to be a big confrontation or something you know. And he's by himself in Canada, if anything goes wrong, he's screwed.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And so he gets to her place and she had messaged him to say, “Let me know when you're wherever and so that I know that you're almost to the house” and so he did that. Well, that was her cue to get out of the house, so it was, “The back door is unlocked, your stuff's in” I guess the way the house was set up is she had like a storage area garage under the house. That's where all of Jeff's stuff ended up, and…
Dave: Okay.
Matt: And the back door is unlocked, so, okay, he can just go in and get whatever he needs and then leave. And there's a connecting door to the rest of the house, and it's one of those, and Jeff tells me this, I’m going, Jeff, don't tell me you went in her house. Don't tell me you went in her house. Don't tell me you went in her house. Just, you got your stuff and you left, right? You didn't do anything? And he's like, “No, I went in the house and looked around!” and i'm like, why?!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: What if she was sitting on the couch with a shotgun? And Jeff stopped, looked at me, and went, “Yeah, yeah, this is one of those conversations, isn't it man?” And I’m like, yeah! When it comes to this woman and going to Canada you need to mind your P's and Q's! Why would you go into the house? And, “Well, you know, there was one thing that I thought might be in the house that I didn't see” and I'm like, okay, you have your justification for why you walked into the shotgun blast, but it doesn't mean that you weren't thinking about it.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And he got all his stuff packed up, and it's like, “Well, okay, I have no business here. The whole point of the trip was to retrieve my things because I am now out of her life” and he left. So I'm assuming he left, probably went to a hotel, and went to the nearest bar to the hotel, and then probably that's when he had the Guide to Self-Publishing, and it was his poor me pity party, because you know he thought he was gonna live with her for the rest of his life.
Dave: Right.
Matt: That was, I mean, as I've said to him over the years when we talked about it, I'm like, okay, so you got to the border, right? “Yeah” and what'd you say? “I said I'm moving here” and what’d they say? “They said, ‘no, you're not.’” and I'm like, okay, what did you do wrong? And he's like, ”What do you mean?” I'm like, alright, step one, you hadn't even met this woman when you were at the border the first time.
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right.
Matt: In the “Cerebus Readers in Crisis” story about this that I was gonna draw for Jeff, when I got to this part of the story it was going to cut to Iguana and Beer explaining “what was the mistake here? Well, you know, what if she had been a serial killer who invites men from around North America to her house in the middle of nowhere and you know she's the Canadian black widow? She kills and buries them.”
Dave: When she's not teaching public school.
Matt: Right!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Aand the panel was going to be Bob and Doug as Mounties, and the caption was gonna be, “Oh no, Canadian black widow got another one, eh?” [laughs]
Dave: “Oh geez, eh? This one's a real mess. We'll be cleaning this up for days, eh?”
Matt: Yeah! I mean, it was one of those, I mean and Jeff went, “Well, no, she seemed real nice.” Like, yeah, I'm pretty sure a serial killer that's luring you to her kill house is gonna be the nicest person in the world, Jeff. And he just kind of looked at me, like, “You're weird.” And I'm thinking you're the one that showed up at the border with a van full of everything you own and said, “I'm moving here” instead of getting to the border, renting a storage unit, emptying the van, going and meeting her, escaping with your life, and going, “Okay, that was a mistake.”
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: You know, the whole issue stems from him, like I said at the time, I'm like, in “Hogan's Heroes” they didn't try to escape from the camp on day one. They got guys out in trickles over the years, and he went, “Okay, yeah, you're right.” Like he was laughing, he's like, “I gotta write that down” and so in his script for this story, that pops up because it was something that when I said it, he's like, “Hold on, let me write this down.”
Dave: The penny dropped. The penny dropped.
Matt: Yes.
Dave: Okay, that's… is there more?
Matt: No, that's the story!
Dave: Okay, I'll tell you, that's a heck of a story, with we have to rewrite G completely as a serial killer that teaches public school, and at the Lakehead in Northern Ontario, and, yeah, I think we’d probably get Bob and Doug McKenzie interested in being in that one.
Matt: In my script, I refer to her… at the beginning, it's “the names have been changed to protect the innocent” and so she's referred to as Madame X, and somebody comments, going, “Wasn't that a Captain America villain in the Golden Age?” and the action continues. And then the next time those characters show up, somebody's flipping through the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and it’s like, “Yeah, she was the Red Skull’s sister-in-law, but it doesn't say whether she was the Red Skull's brother's wife or the Red Skull's wife's sister.”
Dave: I'm not gonna be able to sleep tonight now worrying about that.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay…
Matt: Alright, moving on!
Dave: “This came in on the first Thursday of August, so it's sat until now.” So apologies to Nadab Art, who I guess got the question in just a little late last month. “Question for Dave, assuming Please Hold is happening this month and that I make it in time.” Well, you didn't, but you made it in time for this one. “Hi, Dave. My question is about Archbishop Posey. Did you consciously decide not include him in the double page spread in issue 300?” And yes, I don't remember consciously deciding that, but I definitely went through all 300 issues when I was doing the double page spread, and just going character by character. Obviously I don't have an encyclopedic memory of all of them, and each character that I came across going, is this a major enough character that they should be in the two-page spread? And is there a reason, apart from that, a contextual reason that they shouldn't be in the two-page spread? “I ask because you've said the reason Rick isn't there is that he's one of the most devout monotheists in the story.” Yes, exactly. “I couldn't help but notice some similarities between the two characters. They were both devout in their respective faiths, they were both martyred (though, maybe they killed Posey for simply stepping out of line),” I'll interrupt at that point and go, well, that's really why they do that. I mean, I think you'll find that most martyrdoms in the history of Christian Church was a matter of of interpretation between what the martyr thought was their duty to Christ and to God and to Christianity, and what the person who killed him thought and for those people it was always they were simply stepping out of line. “Your first loyalty is to the Roman Emperor, your loyalty is to whoever is the local bully boy who is dominating any Christians at the time. If you don't understand who your first loyalty is to, then, yes, we're going to kill you or at least make things very very unpleasant for you.” “and they were both not in the spread in #300. Put another way: If Cerebus had a thought bubble of Posey with a question mark instead of Rick as he jumped into the light, would he have had a similar reaction to his absence?” And then Nadab adds in parenthese, “(Maybe not since Cerebus might associate Rick with his faith in God and Posey with his faith in Tarim.)” And I would refine that even further, that Cerebus really went from his faith in Tarim, to faith in God, not at Rick's behest, but because of what Rick was saying about, “Tarim is actually God. You're giving Him the wrong name.” And Cerebus’ Tarim, as we remember from “Church & State”, there's definitely a very northern barbarian take on Tarim far closer to Odin or somebody like that, than to God and so there would definitely have been a schism between Cerebus the northern barbarian who believed in the northern barbarian Tarim, and the Cerebus who then came to believe in God. And Posey who, to Cerebus would have been one of those strange people whose first loyalty is to the Western Church, in the case of Posey. Was Posey the Western Church or the Eastern Church? I know he was sort of assigned to indoctrinate Cerebus into how you are a good Pope. I can't remember if he was sent by the Western Church to do that, where he was delegated by the Western Church as an Eastern Church member.
Matt: I want to say Eastern Church, but let me grab the phonebook real quick.
Dave: [laughs] Okay! I'll keep talking while you do that, how about that?
Matt: Okay!
Dave: Alright. So, yeah, the sort of Odin style Tarim monotheism would have definitely not have had much to do with a someone highly placed in the Western or Eastern Church hierarchy as Posey was, so would he have had a similar reaction to his absence? Probably not. Similar but different, definitely not identical. Cerebus' reaction to Rick not being there would have been a stronger reaction than to Posey not being there. “There's also the fact that in #160 Suenteus Po said Posey "died happily and at peace." At peace with God perhaps?” And yes, I mean, for a monotheist that's really, the only genuine peace is peace with God, and it seems obvious to me that as very limited creatures with limited perceptions and limited understanding, not everybody who thinks that they're at peace with God is actually at peace with God. And we don't really know what the criteria is, or what the criteria are, the criterion is, or what the criteria are for being at peace with God, which sort of leads over in the direction of Enoch. Saint Enoch in the Christian Church and Enoch, one of the patriarchs of the Jewish religion of the Hebrew people dating all the way back to to Genesis #5, and as the first and possibly the only God YHWH dichotomist in my faith, I infer from the end of Genesis 4. the last verse, “And to Seth to him also, there was born a son, and he called his name Enosh, then began to call upon the name of the YHWH.” So, Seth was the son that Adam wrought after Cain murdered Abel. So it's significant to me that ”then began then to call upon the name of the YHWH” doesn't occur until that point and then chapter five begins the genealogy that usually knocks everybody out of the Torah right away where they go, “Uh, I just can't read this anymore. “This is the book of the generations of Adam, and the day that God created man in the likeness of God, made he him male and female created he them and blessed them and called their name Adam in the day when they were created.” It seems significant to me that if you follow the genealogy, it says, “And Adam lived 130 years and begat a son, and begat in his own likeness after his image and called his name Seth, and the days of Adam after he had begat Seth were 800 years. And he began sons and daughters and all the days that adam lived were 930 years and he died.” That's the template of the genealogy, and when you start breaking down the numbers in chapter five, Adam procreates, creates eldest son Seth at age 130, Seth begets Enosh at the age of 90. Enosh begets Kenan at the age of 70. Kenan begets Mahalalel at the age of 65. You see the pattern? It's going down. They're procreating earlier and earlier and earlier, until Jared, who doesn't procreate until he's 162, and he procreates Enoch. So you have the Enosh/Enoch dichotomy, which is really significant, and you'll see why I'm tying all this into what we're talking about, the “Peace with God”. “And all the days that Jared were 960 and two years, and he died, and Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah, and Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah 300 years and begat sons and daughters and all the days of Enoch were 360 and 5 years, and Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.” That's the flat inflection of that passage. I think it's a response to the Enosh that was at the point where then became to call upon the name of the YHWH and what it's saying is “And Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.” It's like, my inference is, that Enoch was a God/YHWH dichotomist, and was like me, the someone who said, I’ll pick God. Like, I am following the plot so far, and no, I think these are two different beings and I pick God instead of YHWH. So Enoch creates like this whole industry around this exceptionalism in chapter five, where he's the only one who's described as walking with God, and I don't infer that that means that he and God, you know, went for walks together. It meant that everywhere that Enoch walked, he walked with God, not with God and the YHWH, and not with the YHWH. I mean the the mythologies that have sprung up around Enoch in the early… this is from the New Bible Dictionary, “In the earliest tradition his scientific wisdom is prominent. Acquired on journeys through the heavens with angelic guides and including astronomical, cosmographical, and meteorological lore, as well as the solar calendar used at Qumran. He was also God's prophet against the fallen angels. Later tradition, second century BC emphasizes his ethical teaching and especially his apocalyptic revelations of the course of world history down to the last judgment.” And that really brings me to what I consider the bottom line on the questions of peace with God. We don't know what God's criteria are. Certainly we have Churches that have sprung up and flourished and entrenched priesthoods who will tell us, “Yes, very specifically. We know exactly what God wants and we know exactly what He doesn't want” and it's like, well, you would have to know where everybody's going after they die. You would have to have sort of like a checklist. “This person went to a glorious reward, and this person went to the infernal depths”. And go, “Okay, well, we know what this person believed, we know what that person believed, so clearly this person walked with God and this person over here didn't.” And I wish that more monotheists would admit that. You don't know, first of all, where it is that we go when we die. Second of all, what it is we do when we get there? And third of all, what the criteria is. I mean all of the cartoons of people going up the escalator to meet with Saint Peter, it's like, that could be a very apt visual metaphor for what we're all going to go through, or it could just be a millennia-long misapprehension as a depiction. It's like, you know, you come to judgment day and God says, “I never said anything about that. I just said like , walk with God. If you had kept your lives clear of debris, and focused on prayer”, my assumption, “focused on scripture”, another assumption of mine, “focused on feeding the poor”, another assumption of mine, “then you would know what walk with God meant.” Walk with God is what the Muslims are doing, you know, submitting to God's will. Not figuring out God's will, or understanding God's will, just going, “I'm taking my hands off the steering wheel and I will let God do the steering for me.”
Matt: Okay, checking “Church & State” Volume Two, Cerebus is the Pope of the Eastern Church and Astoria ascends to being the Pontiff of what used to be the Western Church, and as long as Cerebus kills her, he'll become the Pope of the United Churches, but because he goes out the window, that's where it ends for the rest of the series. So he was Eastern, and then the other side was the Western.
Dave: Oh, I knew that. I was just wondering which side Posey was on. I couldn't remember if he was Eastern…
Matt: Posey is an Eastern.
Dave: He's Eastern? Okay that's what it was. He was sort of delegated to the task of, “Weisshaupt has decided to make this little thug the Pope, so go in and do the best you can with turning him into the most Pope-like thug that you can come up with.”
Matt: And I know that, at the end of “Church & State”, Posey disappears. He shows up again in “Melmoth”, where he gets arrested, and then we don't see him again until “Mothers and Daughters” during the chess match. And at the end of his life, he sees Cerebus, and as Po says, he died happy and content, and I'm thinking, well he was whipped to death, I don't think he was that happy, but okay!
Dave: [laughs] Well that's also, Po’s a Pagan. I mean, it's one of those, for a Pagan, seeing sincere martyrdom that would be your reaction. “I don't know why this guy died happily and at peace, because I certainly couldn't do that. You know, my whole life revolves around chess.” But obviously that's what happened, that they were both observing what happened to Posey in a spiritual state, which meant that they were perceiving, you know, much much deeper levels of what was going on than just, “This is what's going on. They're beating this guy to death for getting out of line.” For Po, it was, this is what a Bishop is. This is a really good example of what a Bishop stands for in the larger contextual significance of chess, which is inexplicable to non-Bishops, or non-hierophants people for whom a way of religious thinking isn't central to their existence. And of course, the really glaring thing for Cerebus was, “This is only happening to this guy because of you. Because of the choices that you've made. You have to understand that there are implications to that. You can't say, ‘Uh, well, it was because of his own decisions and nothing that Cerebus had anything to do with that this is happening to him.’ It’s like, well, no, by virtue of your existence, and your choices, and the position that you put yourself into, that led him to this point, your hands aren't clean in the situation. You could maybe make a persuasive argument that they weren't as dirty as they could have been.” But that brings us back to judgment day again, of what does happen to you when you make the kind of choices that you do, and do it without realizing that there are major, potentially dire implications for other people. And as we know now, it leads to 65 or 70 monthly issues of well, read “Cerebus in Hell?” with a question mark, there that's what it gets you!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay! Ah, where do we go from there? We go to “Mike Sewall asks, question for Dave, September 2022. Hey there, Manly Matt.” Are they actually calling you that now?
Matt: Some people. I mean, I sign everything Manly if I can remember to do it. Sometimes I'll only put Manly.
Dave: Right, right. Well if you do it often enough, I'm sure they'll allow themselves to be battered into submission. “Question for Dave: I couldn’t help but notice a vast number of comics are printed in Canada. Question - Is Dave Sim the reason so many comics are printed in Canada?” Oh, sure, blame it on me. I think we would have to go back and and research that, if somebody was interested, as to when did DC and Marvel decide print the majority of their titles at Quebecor? The questions that Mike has then, “Cost of kindly labour?” That question, as well. I don't know if Quebecor is an organized labour shop or a non-organized labour shop. Quebec tends to have a lot of both kinds and they both tend to be very firmly entrenched, knowing the long time president of Quebecor who had a real presence in Canada and a real presence in Quebec, and I would suspect that it was a non-labour shop. “Quality of socialist paper?” As Eddie Campbell figured out when he was self-publishing, you print where the trees are!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And that's Canada. That's maybe going the way of all flesh, as well, because individual communities are going, “Uh, not in my backyard.” Paper mills pollute rivers to an unconscionable degree in the eyes of environmentalists, but then everything pollutes the environment in the eyes of environmentalists. They're really advocates of preventing microaggressions against Mother Nature, which, it's very difficult to actually run a civilization by limiting your microaggressions against Mother Nature. I think Mother Nature was put here by God for us to make use of, and we can dirty up our crib, but it's still a pretty high quality crib. That's why God made it that way. “Canadian OCD persnickety-ness?” Uh, that figures in, I think. One of those, people who go into the print business, just about anywhere, but particularly in Canada, definitely bring their persnickety A-game to printing. But going back to, at some point DC and Marvel decided to print all of their books at Quebecor, and I'm sure that was… they called it Ronalds. I think Quebecor had a a schizophrenic, “We're Ronalds to the Americans, and we're Quebecor to the Canadians and the quebecois because we really don't want to hear how Americans would pronounce Quebecor left to their own devices. It would just be too painful for the quebecois. But, my recollection is that DC and Marvel started printing at Quebecor because of the exchange rate, which in its optimum at almost 50 cent dollars early in the 2000s, but they made the decision before that. My gut instinct, to the best of my recollection, DC and Marvel were both still distributing on newsstands and in comic book stores when they started printing at Quebecor, which got into, “Okay, what's our logistics, in terms of how we get these books to market? These books we have to figure out how to get to Capital City in Madison, Wisconsin. These books we have to get to Baltimore, Maryland. These books we have to get to Longhorn in Texas. These books we have to get Bud Plant. These books…” back when there was multiple distributors. “And we have to get these to the ID distributors who will then sub-distribute to all of the newsstands.” That was a complicated enough question that I think they printed at Quebecor but then broke down the distribution side of it from there and went, “Okay, this is where all of the books go to, and then they get broken down into these shipments, and this is the most logical place for all of them to go first, and then from there to all the different points that they had to get to.” Then the Exclusive Wars took place where Diamond knocked everybody out of the business, and it's like, “Okay, we now only have to get these books to Diamond” and by that point, the newsstands, if they even still existed, were a minor concern. All of these books are going to Baltimore, Maryland or one of the neighbouring places and possibly to the different Diamond warehouses, a time when Diamond had a good dozen or so warehouses of the different distributors went out of business and Diamond took over their distribution warehouses, the leases and whatnot. And then, I think there has been a migration? I'm not sure if it's thorough-going and completely, where Lebonfon started taking over a lot of the business, because they were in Val-d'Or, Quebec, which was right across the river from Plattsburgh, and Plattsburgh was where Diamond had their warehouse. So everything could just be trucked cross the border to Diamond and dumped there and then Diamond distributed all the comic books from there. I think, and this is where my personal role in history is non-existent, I think at that point Quebecor became an unworkable monolith to be dealing with. “This was fine when we were having to get all of these books multiple different places. Now that we just have to get them across the river from Val-d'Or to Plattsburgh.” I think at that point pretty much everybody started printing at Lebonfon. Lebonfon couldn't handle the volume of work, and got into financial trouble, and then got taken over by Marquis, and Marquis has just been plugged into the whole system from then on. But again, the end game on that, I wasn't in on that. I think about the only, “Is Dave Sim the reason so many comics are printed in Canada?” My role in that would have been, well, okay, Preney Print & Litho’s going out of business and all of the self-publishers printed at Preney Print & Litho, “Where's Dave Sim going? Wherever Dave Sim is going, that's where we're going.” And Dave Sim ended up going to Lebonfon because that seemed to be where everybody else was going, not… I don't think Marvel and DC at the time, but Dark Horse, IDW, all of these places were going, “Okay, they've got a good price for the size of print runs that we're doing. Some of the print runs their prices are better than others, but you really can't beat that ‘just truck it across the Saint Lawrence, there it is in New York state, and we're all done. We can go back across the river and and work on printing next month's book’.”
Matt: I very much was wrong in my supposition. I was figuring the answer was, well, back in the 20s all the printing was in Canada cause that's where the Bootleggers were using… Bootleggers were using printed books to hide all the liquor, but I was wrong. Completely wrong! [laughs]
Dave: Uhh, no, that’s probably pre-history that I don’t know anything about.He was asking about the reason that so many comics are printed in Canada, that's probably the answer to that question.
Matt: I just grabbed a random comic I had from the 80s from Marvel and it says printed in the United States and I'm thinking, okay, well that kinda shoots the Canada theory for bootlegging. I'm sure it's a factor, like the reason there's a lot of print shops in Canada was that they were set up back… it’s their legacy, they were set up back then because, A, there's trees, and B, there's lots of water. There's everything we need to print, and to make paper and then print print, and then it's you know, it's one of those, why are there so many roads in Detroit? Well this is where we started making cars.
Dave: [laughs] Right, exactly.
Matt: I mean, the first paved road in North America was put in place in Detroit and it starts at the end of the assembly line at Ford and goes from there because Henry Ford didn't want people buying a car from him and then it being bumpy right away. So like, the first, I think it's five or ten miles of road in America wee from the end of the assembly line until you got into Detroit proper, and it was okay, now you're on your own.
Dave: [laughs] And hopefully you'll forget where you got this car, so you don't bring it back and go, “Look at my suspension! What the hell happened to my suspension? I've only had this thing for 48 hours.”
Matt: But the other reason I think there might be so much printing in Canada is, partially it's the “not in my backyard, we don't want a paper mill down in America.” That most of the printing plants down here probably were driven out of business and it was, “Well, where are they still letting us pollute the river?” And it's, “Oh, up North.”
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. And we'll see how long that's going to go on, it's one of those, I think the environmentalists are coming to the end of people actually listening every time that they say that the sky is falling. It's like, uh, we can work on this. I'm sure we can figure out a way to make paper that definitely diminishes the amount of pollution that's involved. It would be great if Kindle had worked the way they had hoped that it would, you know the environmentalists are also the Kindle people, but it's, no, we're not getting rid of paper books anytime soon, or paper magazines, or paper newspapers. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but it's the same as if we had stayed on track with liquefied natural gas in Canada and the United States, building pipelines for it, exporting it, Germany would not be facing Vladimir Putin deciding how much warmth they get this winter. I mean if you're one of those people who prays to God for things, definitely pray to God for a mild winter in Germany this year.
Matt: One of the big environmental things that J Michael Straczynski figured out in his “Rising Stars” series was, you know, the superheroes take over the Earth and one of the things they say is, “The output the outflow pipe from your factory has to be upstream from your intake, so whatever you're putting in the water you're sucking back up, because that is your incentive to keep the water as clean as possible.” And I read that when it came out and went, that's one of them genius ideas that nobody ever thought of until it was too late. Like if you put the intake downstream from the output, yeah, you're not gonna be kicking chemicals into the water because any chemicals you kick in you're gonna be sucking up and if they mess the machines up…
Dave: Or you'll figure out a way to clean it. At least to a livable level, yeah. Yeah.
Matt: I mean as somebody at work constantly says, “Hey, no brains, no headaches!”
Dave: [laughs] That’s true. That’s true.
“Steve Swenson asks”, and hello, Steve, and thank you for sending me the Self-Publishing Guide. As I said to Steve, I'm not sure if I want you sending this to me if it's potentially stolen property and shipping it across an international border, but it got here okay, and I will be talking to Steve about where it's going to be going from here. Does he want it back, and does he want me to add to the sketch or uh…” But we'll get to that. “Steve Swenson asks, Dave, what foreign editions of Spawn #10 are already in the Archive? I hope that South African copy was a new and welcome edition!” Yes, it definitely was. I can't remember the last time that I got a foreign publication with anything Cerebus or Dave Sim related to add to the foreign publication archive. I got Rolly to scan that, did he send you the scans of the pages?
Matt: He did, and I already posted them, and when I posted, I said, “Okay, so for all you Spawn 10 completists, just print these out. There's no reason to chase them down, it's mostly Gen13.”
Dave: [laughs] Is it really?
Matt: Yeah, there's a preview for Gen13 in the back of it that goes on for I think like six or seven pages, and I'm just kind of looking at it, going, I understand that the publisher is going, “Hey, we're gonna publish more stuff” but at the same time it's like, if you're a Spawn 10 completist, “I have to have every edition of this book” you're gonna spend way too much money on a book that has nothing new under the sun. There's four or five pages total of material that's not in the US edition that you could conceivably say, “Oh yeah, I need that.” Like there's a “Previously in Spawn”, I think it's on the inside front cover they added a previously in spawn of what was happening, and it's like, okay, but you don't need that context to read this issue, realistically. There's some fan art, and I'm going, okay, I don't think anybody really needs to get the South African fan art.
Dave: The fan art was from the original, I think? Wasn’t it?
Matt: No, no. This is specific, these are South African fans have sent stuff.
Dave: Oh, okay. Alright.
Matt: “The Spawning Grounds” letter page is replaced with a “South African Spawning Ground” that instead of being like two or three pages like in the original, it's only like one page. [laughs] And reading it, I was kind of like, yeah, you kind of get a hint that the guy's like, “Oh crap, I gotta write a letters page, don't I?”
Dave: [laughs] Yeah! It comes with the territory, but getting back to Steve's question, what foreign editions of Spawn 10 are already in the Archive? That's the only one that I've seen so far. I sort of gave Todd the business way back when, just because Todd gives everybody else the business, just to see what their reaction is. He did that once with me when I sent him the script for Spawn 10, and he phoned me and said, “Uh, Dave, I got you script for Spawn 10, and I can't use it.” Just yank my chain and see what I'm gonna do, and I said, well, Todd that's the only script you're getting, and he went, “Oh, okay, I'll use it.” So it's not like he really leans on it, but he loves to… at least at that time, this is 30 years ago. He just loved to find out where somebody's hot button was and see if he could make him go ballistic. So I relayed a message to Todd through Larry Marder at the Chicago Spirits stop, I think. No, Chicago 92 tour, I think. And I said, you tell Todd he better not reprint Spawn 10 anywhere without talking to me!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And it's like, Larry Marder goes, “Uh, okay, I'll make sure that he hears that.” Alright. Good. And it's like, I'm going, anybody that's followed Dave Sim knows I wouldn't do that! It's like, it's your character, I just did an issue with Cerebus, and it's like, you just tell Todd you better not reprint Spawn 10 without asking my permission, and it worked! He didn't license Spawn 10 anywhere for years and years and years. And it's like, [laughs] okay, I didn't mean for it to be that long a joke, but yeah, there you go. So I think you might find that the Spawn 10 foreign editions are few and far between on the ground just because of Dave Sim’s weird sense of humour.
Matt: Well , I'm fairly certain that it's been reprinted a handful of times, but it was one of those like, I think Todd did a complete collection of the first like 25 issues, and there's a version that doesn't have 9 and 10, and there's a version that does have 10 but I don't think it has 9, and I think there's one version during the lawsuit where 9 and 10 are both in there. And it's one of those, I have Spawn 1 and 2 in Turkish that a friend got me, and I kind of wonder if they did 10 or if they just skipped it.
Dave: Right. Right. And it's like, in the case of 9, which is you know Neil Gaiman, that was like genuine hostility. I don't picture that Neil would have sued Todd for reprinting Spawn 9, but what do I know? It seemed a very strange thing to do, but there was certainly no intention on my part to use up scarce resources suing Todd McFarlane for reprinting Spawn 10 anywhere without asking my permission. My deal with Todd and my deal with Pete Laird after he bought the Turtles, and with Viacom after they bought the Turtles from Peter is, it's reciprocal ownership. You do whatever you want with it, and you don't have to send me a cheque, and I'll do whatever I want with it, and I won't send you a cheque.
Matt: So, speaking of Spawn 10…
Dave: Yes?
Matt: From the department of “Matt, you're way too lazy. Come on, we know you don't get paid but you gotta at least pretend to put in an effort”, Kevin Harrison, who's our man in Texas doing the scanning at Heritage, knows the guy who bought the original script to Spawn 10 at the show where you guys auctioned it off all those years ago.
Dave: No way!
Matt: It's sitting on a shelf and he doesn't really know what to do with it, and I got to get a hold of the guy to be like, well if you really want to get rid of it, I know a bunch of people who'd be willing to throw money at you.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And at the very least, can I get scans of it to send up back to Dave so he's got a copy of the original script for the files?
Dave: And how far along are we on that one?
Matt: Uh, I gotta email him initially to say, hey! I run the blog, Kevin mentioned this, I'm interested in it. How much do you want? Because Kevin said that the guy’s got a story about how he got the script and I'm like, well, I know part of the story is Dave and Todd auctioned it off at a comic convention at one point for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Like, I know part of the story automatically cause that's what happened, but now it's, okay, well, did anything happen afterward? And if so, just how weird is this story gonna get? Cause it does involve Cerebus and Dave Sim and there's a chance that it gets really weird. [laughs]
Dave: Yeah. Yeah, it's not a guarantee, but it's a possibility. If you're looking for a weird story, always go and look for a Dave Sim/Cerebus connection.
Matt: So I'm gonna, this weekend, I swear, hand to God, I will send the guy an email or a Facebook message, and I will start the process of, okay, what do we got to do to get copies of it, and how much do you want, if you're going to sell it? And what's the story? And I will let you know what I find out as I find out.
Dave: Okay, that's cool. I would definitely be happy to send him an autographed Spawn 10 with a CereSpawn head sketch on it, and maybe you know a couple of the rare CereSpawn editions that Waverly Press did, if we can sweeten up the deal without fattening up the dollars and cents price.
Matt: Well, when I got the message from Kevin, I'm like, you know, if we can get a copy of it, then… because back when the Waverly Press was starting to put together all the Spawn 10 stuff, somebody up in Canada sent file folders through the computer of various things that were related to Spawn 10, including the script to Spawn 9 and Neil Gaiman's hand-drawn layouts for Spawn 9, and some blog editor may or may not have stolen them when he saw them, going, “Oh, I want those!”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I was thinking that this guy may have, since he's got access to the 9 script, if we get access to the 10 script, we can talk to Todd about, “Hey, how about we do a printing, these are the scripts, no original art from Todd, just these are the scripts of these two controversial Spawn issues, call it ‘Spawn Bad Blood’ and sell it as a giveaway to the Hero Initiative.”
Dave: [laughs] Sure!
Matt: I know one guy will say yes, and I'm pretty sure the other two guys are not going to return my emails!
Dave: [laughs] And I’m the controversial one! I'm the guy that goes, yeah, what the heck, let's go for it, and everybody else says, “I have to talk to all my lawyers first.”
Matt: I sort of have a relationship with Jim McLauchlin, who last I checked was the President of the Hero Initiative, like back when I was at Wizard, and he would go to Wizard’s comic convention in Chicago, I'd go down, and he remembered me because the first year they had the Wizard Wheel of Doom, and it was a stupid wheel you spun it, you won a prize. But to spin the wheel, you had to trump them on a trivia question. The intent was it's a comic book trivia question, but of course, my friends and I all realized if you ask them a topic that they couldn't possibly know the answer to, you're guaranteed to win. So I asked about rock paper scissors, and Jim and I played rock paper scissors because the question was what's the most uhh… or, it wasn't, you didn't ask them a trivia question, you gave them a topic, and they asked you a trivia question. So I said rock paper scissors and the question is, “What shape of the three comes up most often when you play?” and I went, it's an even split. It's all, you know, it's random, and Jim swore, “No no no, there's one that comes up more” and I'm like, okay, I give up. What is it? He goes, “Scissors.” I'm like, bull crap! And we played rock paper scissors…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I threw scissors, and he's like, “See?” and I went, you tricked me! So then I went back later in the convention ,and said, okay five bucks says that I can beat your rock paper scissors, and we played and I got a picture of him holding my money, and he gave it back, but I got a picture of just because I was going to send it into “Wizard” so they could run it, and then a year later we went back, and “Okay, give me a topic”, and I went, rock paper scissors, and he went, “Oh yeah that's right, it's you.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And so, like, the six or seven years that I went every year to this convention, and I would run into him, it was he knew me from the con, and when he took over as the head of A.C.T.O.R., because that's how old Matt is, I remember when it was “A Commitment To Our Roots” before they turned it into the Hero Initiative, and the “Ultimate Spider-Man” #100 project, where they got all the guys to do blank sketch covers, and you did the awesome Spider-Ham parody of whatever issue it was, I want to say like 33?
Dave: 24!
Matt: 24!
Dave: [Makes buzzer noise] You lost the Samsonite luggage!
Matt: [laughs] Well, they had it at this convention, just to show off, because they were going to start auctioning them off, so I got a picture of me with Jim holding this cover, and everybody that I was with at the time, was like, “So what's so important?” I'm like, and I started explaining it, and I think I was with Paula at the time, and her eyes started to glaze over, and I'm like, this is one of those stories that Margaret Liss and like three other people are going to care about, everybody else is like, “Yeah, great, it's whatever.”
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: But because I kind of know Jim, I think if I were to contact him going, hey, I have access to this script, I have access to this script, what do you think about trying to get the other two guys to sign off on doing a printing of it for the Hero Initiative? And he might actually have enough pull with Todd to get Todd to say ”Okay, yeah”, and then at that point it's just, “Hey Mr Sandman, let us print a comic!”
Dave: Right. And you could just say to Jim on the phone, “It's me, the paper rock scissors guy!”
Matt: Well I'll say it in an email, but yeah!
Dave: [laughs] Oh so, yeah, he'll know exactly who it is. Okay, well, all of these cliffhangers courtesy of Manly Matt Dow, and we're all on the edge of our seat, but hopefully we're leaning back, so we don't get a stiff back in the meantime.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania asks, “Hi Matt, hope you're enjoying your labor day weekend.” Well not yet, that's next weekend, isn't it?
Matt: No, it's this weekend! It's Monday.
Dave: No way!
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Everybody's going back to school on the 7th up here.
Matt: Uh well, my kids go back next week Tuesday, but the neighboring town went back this Monday.
Dave: Okay. Well, you parent people have gotten really weird since COVID-19. So, just leave me a phone message, or send me a fax telling me when Labour Day is, as far as all the parents are concerned, because they're the ones who are going to decide, as far as I know.
Matt: [laughs] It's…
Dave: Okay, so, sorry to interrupt there on the Labor Day weekend, Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania asks, and I’m gonna interrupt myself to say, I'm getting ready to start “Spore/Batvark” tomorrow, and thank you for the suggestion, Manly Matt, because I was just coming to the point of going, okay, time to hit the slush pile and figure out which one of these “Cerebus in Hell?” I want to do, and “Spore/Batvark” was perfect. I don't know if you've let everybody in on where we're going with it, but I'm looking forward to working on it, and the reason I'm mentioning it now is because Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania will be a character in “Spore vs Batvark.”
Matt: And now he wants 10 copies signed with head sketches, please. [laughs]
Dave: Now you know why I did that. This is why we're also talking about making Margaret Liss a character in “Spore/Batvark”, if there's no other way for us to build circulation on “Cerebus in Hell?”, we're not above exploiting and leveraging comics collector completist’s addictions. Particularly the people who, as you say, will buy multiple copies for friends and family who'll go, “Why would I want this?”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: “In your fax to Matt on "24 August 22" you wrote, "do I have to change to take the wrist stress down to zero and get everyone the same level of sketch? By the time I hit #26 - MICHAEL R. :) of EASTON PA, IS ALWAYS #26!!! - I pretty much had it figured out." My question is: Now that you "pretty much figured it out" does this mean you found that sweet spot in your penciling and inking where you are feeling more comfortable to increase your artistic workload?” Uhh, well you're kind of talking about two different things here. Oh, and he's got a PS, “The heads sketches look awesome! So happy I switched some stuff around in the Cerebus No. 4 6-7/78 & POT 8.2 Kickstarter and got one.”And we’ve got photos incoming of me holding up proof copies that were finally at the proof copy stage of those. Thank you, I’m glad that you think that they look awesome. It wa, those aren't really drawings. I’ve tried to explain this before, and there's no real easy way to explain it, but it's just a designed… again, as soon as I say “drawing”, then it's like, “Oh okay, so you're doing drawing.” It's like, well no, it's a design for a drawing. I figured out here's the most picture for a buck that people will be able to get if I figure out a way to just pencil the same thing over and over again, with a variation just because of the human element. But I know exactly what I need to do with this, with the the inked heads on the individual issues, that was a matter of, okay, almost half of the head, or a quarter of a head, or a third of it, is going to be solid black. So consequently, I can do all of that with the Japanese brush pen, and if I move the cover around while I'm doing the solid black so that the wrist is fully extended on that side, I can do the Wally Wood trick. I like to fill in my solid blacks and see how much drawing I have left to do. And by the time you've got a quarter or a third of the picture blacked in, then it's a matter of just taking the Hunt 102 and doing very very limited finished inking on the lid side, the right side of the face. What you'll be seeing over the next couple of days, or possibly even while I'm talking about this, I decided to try to do actual drawings on the uncut covers, partly so that Alfonso is still getting paid for the uncut “Pieces of Turtles 8.2” covers, so that we're not just wasting paper for the sake of, “This has gold glitches on it, so Alfonso saw that right away when they came off the press. Don't want to staple the guts to one of these and then trim it because we can already see that it's got a flaw in it, but no point in throwing it out. Send it over to Dave and see if there's something that he wants to do with it.” What I decided to do with it was to put in Matisse the Unknown Turtle drawings in and around the two Turtle figures in gold, and ink those, and then send those to Dagon at Waverly, and that's going to be our, we're trying not to have a lull in the middle of the January Turtles 8 Kickstarter, and this is one of the things we're going to be doing is, Dagon will be deciding what these are going to go for, and then offering deep discounts on some of them. But wait! There's more! This is what this one would ordinarily go for, but to keep all of these eyeballs on our Kickstarter site uh for the entire month of January, you wanna be watching constantly, especially you, Michael R, who I know is already watching constantly. You never know that one of these that would otherwise go for, let's say 200, might go for, mhmm, I won't even say, because like I say, that's going to be up to Dagon, so that I don't have to anguish about it, going “You sold it for how much?!” It’s, no, the idea isn't to make these a major profit center, it's to make these a major draw for eyeballs in the middle of the Kickstarter where it would ordinarily start to sag.
So, getting to the wrist stress down to zero that was, I've tried figuring out what this is that's in my wrist. I mean, any time, on the the rare occasions that I talked to medical professionals, I'm going, no, that's interesting what you're talking about, but I can see that what you're talking about is going to surgery, because that's what you get paid to do, is surgery. And surgery you can't undo. So that would be very low on my list of priorities, and the more that we talk about the risk, the more I realize, it doesn't matter what I say to you, you've already decided what this is, and what it's going to be. It was just when I was doing these pictures, which is very different from designing a picture and then just repeating that eight or ten times with the minimal stress. This is now all the cornering and shifting, and shifting gears, and moving the wrist around that I've been avoiding for the most part. And just while I was doing it, that was the first time that I thought maybe this is like COVID-19, where, you know, not only did they somehow change a head cold into the flu somewhere in the last 20 or 30 years, now they're turning the flu into the black plague, which isn't a flu in the first place, it's just a head cold. Different people have very different opinions on that. That's my opinion, and it has hasn't changed from the beginning of COVID-19. This was the first time that I thought, maybe this is a wider-ranging thing where, there's obviously a huge industry that has built up around carpal tunnel syndrome, and this was the first time in the last couple of days that I went, maybe this is the same kind of thing in the same sense that they're giving a head cold the fancy name of COVID-19. This is just writer's cramp, but you can't make money off of writer's cramp, because writer's cramp is just, “Well, you've been using your wrist or your fingers or whatever it is that's hurting, too much, and just don't do that for a little while and then try it again because it's just writer's cramp.” It's like, “Uh no, I don't really want to have a medical consultation with you, you have writer's cramp.” Unless of course you're somebody who charges thousands and thousands of dollars to operate on people's wrists, in which case you're part of the carpal tunnel syndrome industry, and it's like absolutely nothing to those people is just writer's cramp. Everything is carpal tunnel syndrome and leads to surgery, or leads to very expensive therapy sessions, on and on and on and on that are supposed to bring the wrist back into shape, and never really do. I've never really heard a success story on physical therapy for wrists, although, again, it's a giant industry that's sprung up around it.
So, so far, you'll see these. You're probably might even be looking at them now while I'm talking to you, if Matt gets the scans and gets them up in time for Please Hold. So these are, “Okay, stick with the dead hand concept, but just treat it as writer's cramp, and do what you would do with writer's cramp.” Wow, I’ve been doing too much drawing today, so I’ve got writer's cramp, so I'm gonna stop drawing today. So, the first day I got three of them done. Second day I only got one of them done, and went, uhh, no, that'll do it for me today. I hope this doesn't mean that I've got a permanent writer's cramp, which is what this always led into, was anytime I was getting any kind of pain or resistance or discomfort right in the joint, then it was like, okay, what if this becomes permanent? And it's like, well you've been doing that for years now, let's assume that this isn't permanent. It's just, any given day and I've got 30 of these uncut covers to work on, and I've done I think seven or eight so far, so it's like well okay, how long does it take to do 30 of them since I've got seven or eight done already, and the wrist is still, the hand hasn't fallen off. The wrist is still there so, so far so good, and we will see what happens with that as well, on that basis. I became a sucker for the carpal tunnel syndrome industry instead of going, well, you don't really believe in that kind of stuff anyway, so let's try “This is just writer's cramp” and just work until it starts cramping, and just assume that none of this is permanent. So, over the next however long it takes me to do 30 covers, Rolly will be scanning them when he comes in on Thursday, and then packaging them up and sending them to Dagon, and emailing them to Matt, and you can watch the progress or lack of same.
Matt: So I assume you don't use the wrist brace when you're trying to do any art, correct?
Dave: Oh no no, I always have it on.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: That's one of the things is that I need the solidity, which, that's one of the things that went away was, it really feels like my hand is sort of detached from my wristM and the wrist brace takes care of that. I did, I forget how long ago that was, just a few weeks ago, tried one without the wrist brace on, and it's like, mhmm, no. Really not working. That whole placement problem where the line's not going where I'm putting it. It's not going too far away from where I'm putting it, but it's definitely not going where I'm putting it. Without the wrist brace, it's like, oh it's definitely not going where I'm putting it down.
Matt: Well and then the next question is, when it starts to cramp up, do you ice it or put heat on it or anything like that, or do you just leave it alone?
Dave: I just leave it alone, because again, that seems to me like part of the carpal tunnel syndrome industry, where, “If you do this it will work” and it becomes, like the global cooling versus global warming thing. It's like, uh the planet is warming way way too fast. No no no no no, it's cooling way too too fas! No no no no, it's warming! And it's like, try icing the wrists. No, don't try icing the wrist, try keeping it warm.
Matt: Paula had carpal tunnel surgery because she had bad carpal tunnel, like her fingers would go numb, and one of the things was at one point was, you gotta ice it for 20 minutes and then take the ice off and then you know heat it for a little bit, and it kind of worked. I mean, the science of it makes sense to me, of, okay, you have inflammation, and it's ice to dull the pain, heat to soothe it away. So I just was asking, I mean…
Dave: Right.
Matt: It's your wrist, I don't control it. I mean, that's just something I thought of, because Paula's work gave her this heating pad, but instead of being like a regular, what, one foot by two foot heating pad or you know, it's a strip with velcro on it that you wrap around whatever hurts and then plug it in.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: So it'd be perfect for like a wrist or an ankle or a knee or anything, you know. And it's one of those, I'm like well, you know, if you are heating it, we could get you one of these heating pads, and you could try it and be like, “Hey that feels a little bit better”, the next day the wrist doesn't hurt when you wake up.
Dave: Right I mean, that's one of the things that's not really consistent either, because it's… I'm also going back and forth between drawing and typing, where it's definitely a lot easier typing the Kubert font than it is hand lettering stuff, but at the same time there's a lot of Kubert font in Strange Death of Alex Raymond, depending on what I'm talking about in a given section. It's like, mhmm, I can leave this out, but it really is kind of interesting. So I want to include it, but that means instead of typing a section of Kubert lettering that's three inches long, it's gonna be five inches long. And then I'm definitely one of those guys who has to write it long first, and then correct it from there, going, this is roughly what it is that I'm trying to say, but I can't really picture how it is that I want to say it. And that process can take anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours until I get the text saying exactly what I want it to say, I'm not going to get to the therapeutic part of my working day, which is the cutting stuff out and pasting up panels and pictures and images to go with the text. And it's like, well, okay, there's nothing that says that that isn't writer's cramp as well. Just I know when that happens, if I'm really trying to go pedal to the metal, I'll type with both hands. If I'm going, okay, the wrist has pretty much had enough today, then I just type with the left hand, which slows me down, but sometimes that actually helps the writing. It's like, no, that's pretty good, you can slow down the pace of your writing, and you don't have to fix as much because you're thinking while you're typing just with your left hand, and you're coming up with better phrasing. Where the subordinate clause goes. It's, well, okay, I've tried it at the end of the sentence, and it makes it sound like i'm saying this, and I tried it at the beginning of the sentence, and I can live with it at the beginning of the sentence, but I put it in the middle of the sentence and I can live with it in the middle of the sentence. So it's probably one of those two, but I don't know which one it is. And then I have to keep going back over all of the text for the page that I'm working on, and just bringing fresh eyes to it each time, and sometimes I go, okay, I thought the problem was the subordinate clause, but the problem isn't the subordinate cause, the problem is the wrong noun and the wrong verb, and I don't know what the right noun and the right verb are, so now the laptop’s thesaurus and dictionary are going to get a bit of a workout. It's like, I'm not going to write for an extra hour in order to say, “And I never use a thesaurus!” [laughs] It's like, Grandpa's wrist only has so much time on the meter, and if it's a word that I'm looking for, it's probably going to be in the thesaurus someplace, which isn't true all the time. I use it the way that you're supposed to use it, here's the word that's like what I'm looking for, here's the most predominant word that links to it. Let's try that one. And is there a noun in this whole list that looks like what I'm looking for? And it's like, uh, that's got a fail record that's at least as long as its success record. where it's like, well okay, maybe the problem isn't finding it right now, maybe it is the subordinate clause problem. And some of them can take a while to really untangle, and go, this is what I was trying to say. The part of me that wishes that I was really living backward and forward in time, so that I could go, can you just show me what this page looks like when it's done? It's like, I've worked on this caption for the last hour and a half, and it's like I never remember or recognize one that I worked on for an hour or an hour and a half because as soon as I find what the problem is and then fix it, then it's on to the next problem. It's the same reason, why is it always in the last place that you look? Because when you find it, you stop looking.
Matt: Yeah. That's my Dad's favorite phrase!
Dave: [laughs] Okay, so that's the best i can do on that one, Michael R. And, let’s see, oh, then we move n to, finally, Colin Upton says, “Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier. I might have to change the copy on the Poison Elves panel, I forgot he”, and he’s referring to Drew Hayes, “was picked up by Siruis so wasn't self publishing at his death. I am thinking of adding some copy about online crowdfunding is making self publishing a viable option,” and then significantly adds, “for some.” And I think that's true, as well. There are people for whom crowdfunding is going to work, and there are people for whom it isn't going to work. But I do think that it would make a nice addition to the comic. ”Drew Hayes was such a tragic figure, I remember meeting him in Seattle, it may have been Spirits, and how enthused he was over his goal of producing a page a day and more. The next time I saw, months later, he was a broken man. Very sad.” I definitely had that impression about Drew Hayes. The Seattle stop, whether that was Spirits or the 92 tour, I think that was the last time that I saw him. My impression was that his marriage broke up, and had I think a daughter, and he was the caregiver for his daughter and trying to do that and be a productive comic book artist and writer. Definitely got to be a lot more than that anybody could handle. I dug out my first seven issues of “Poison Elves” when it was called, “I, Lusiphur”, and got Rolly to take a picture of me with them today, so that will be coming your way, Matt.
One of the interesting things about Drew Hayes was, he was born the day of the moon landing, the actual day, July 20th 1969. And I didn't know anybody else who was in that category. In retrospect, trying not to offend Wendy Peni by doing a “Poison Elves” preview, I probably shouldn't have done that, because Drew definitely… his self-publishing company name, Mulehide Graphics, was definitely Drew. It's like he was going to do this and he was gonna do what I talked about, doing a page a day, keep your book on schedule, and he definitely had much more of an uphill struggle than I did in doing that. And I probably should have done the preview of “Poison Elves”, if not “I, Lusiphur”, back in 1991 when he started it. So I would be interested in, when it was that you saw him and what made you say that he was a broken man, because he may have been broken, but he was definitely dead man walking because, you know, how many people actually get 80 issues of a title done, and then another 38 issues of a number of “Poison Elves” in any series? So I'd be interested in hearing more, Colin, and we can just communicate through A Moment of Cerebus, since we’re working on the story. Anyway, this was his post postscript, “I looked at faxing through my computer but I couldn't figure it out... besides being old I have learning disabilities.” You want to give it another try, try Fax Zero, it's evidently pretty user-friendly for people who just want to figure out how to send this Word document as a fax to this phone number, and I don't know if it's as easy as it used to be, but it used to be pretty darn easy.
Matt: I think Fax Zero limits you to three pages now…
Dave: Uh-huh.
Matt: Or if you pay more, you can get more. I use my fax only because my fax I can send and receive and in this job receiving faxes is kind of a deal.
Dave: Right. Right. [laughs] Yeah, it sort of comes with the territory. Okay and then you add a last minute question from Brian West! Hello, Brian West, our Cerebus Twitter volunteer. You want to talk about your sisyphean task, rolling that stone permanently uphill, being the guy who does Cerebus on Twitter, now that's got to be a living definition of it. “Has anyone ever asked you to sign an autograph onto their body so they could create a tattoo from it later?” [laughs] And it’s like, uhh, no. You have to remember that I did The Last Signing in 2010, and I had only done a handful of comic book conventions between around the time “Cerebus” came to an end and however many years before “Cerebus” came to an end, and tattoos are a far more recent thing than most of the people who are your age or younger, Brian, than they understand. It's like, I'm old enough that I remember when tattoos were just on failures. I mean, even Army and Air Force guys didn't have tattoos, and the only reason that Sailors had tattoos was because they came into port cities, and the dockside area of a port city was the absolute scuzziest part of the city, so that was the perfect place for somebody to have a tattoo parlor. It is definitely its own thing, but, I'm trying to remember when the Rolling Stones album “Tattoo You” was, I think it was 1981, 1982, and this was,could you just imagine Mick Jagger with a tattoo that went all the way onto his face? And it's like, a tattoo all the way onto your face is virtually nothing now. I mean, tattoos are everywhere and on everybody, but for me that's just, in the entire civilization formerly known as Christendom has now turned into a universal scuzzy dockside environment, where all of these things are like, “Oh cool” instead of ”Ew, that's sincerely creepy.” So, no, I had a neighbor, Scott Nash, who owned the place next to the Off-White House, and noting the comic art metaphysics of the last name Nash, and he was gung-ho on he was gonna get me to design a tattoo for him that he would then get put on his entire chest or something. And it's like, uh no, I can't do that. It's just, if that's something that you really like, that's something that you really like, but take my word for it, 20 years from now, 25 years from now, you're gonna go, “What the hell was I thinking of and how could I possibly get this off of me?” And then find out what laser removal will costs and go, “Well, I'm stuck with this for the rest of my life. This is really really dumb.” Nothing against Margaret Liss, she certainly got a very nice Cerebus tattoo, she might even have multiple nice Cerebus tattoos at this point, but it's just one of those, that's when you realize you're getting the Grandpa age when something that is just universally accepted by everybody else, and nobody even remarks on it anymore is, I don't want to see what comes after this. [laughs] I really don't want to see what comes after this. Unfortunately, at age 66, I can't be too far from the finish line.
Matt: [laughs] You always say that, and I always think of my Grandma.
Dave: [laughs] Well it is one of those things where, this goes back to the discussion about God, nobody knows what God thinks of them, and as an omniscient being, God has perfect knowledge of everybody. And it's like, I would be really happy to check out at any time because I'm just too old for all of this. The entire world stopped making sense to me 20, 25 years ago, and so it would be just my luck to find out on Judgment Day that that God went, “Well, if you hadn't started doing the Monday Reports because that links to John's Gospel, stuff that you don't know about yet, but will trigger whoever is going to actually come up with very beneficial commentaries on John's Gospel. So if you haven't made yourself indispensable, I wouldn't had to make you live to 108, but there you go.” It’s one of those, I don't think we do get multiple lives, but if there is reincarnation, I always picture God going, “I've sent you back dozens of times already. One of these times can you just like get married, have a couple of kids, put them through school, move into the old folks home, and die? It's the only thing that you haven't accomplished!”
Matt: I mean, if you get to come back and you get to make different choices, does that mean you still finish on March 2004, or do you sell to DC and just ride off into the sunset?
Dave: Right. Right. Well, I tend to think of it as…
Matt: One and done.
Dave: You follow the track that you follow and you end up where you end up. If you start getting into alternative realities, that's not helping your decision making. That's opting for science fiction over what you already know, this is how reality works.
Matt: Right. Wel that's, I mean, that's, you know it's, I'm at work and my brain's starting to daydream, and it's okay, if you can go back in time, how far back do you go and what do you do? Well, if you go back 10 years? Well okay, 20? Okay, well okay, why not 40? At a certain point it's, okay, why don't you go back and stop the first amphibian for crawling up onto the onto the Earth and throw them back in the sea for another couple weeks? And okay, now you're ready to come up on land. At a certain point, it's like, if you could go back, yeah, you could go back, but why would you stop there and not go further back and fix something from before that? That's the part where I'm like, that's why I don't think time travel is ever gonna happen.
Dave: Yeah, and the more you think about it, like I say, I think the more the more you're distracting yourself from the actual task at hand. It's God's comedia of, this unspools the way that it unspools, and there's learning that goes on, but I don't think God learns anything out of creation. It's the creation that has limited learning, but it's always there, and available, if that's what you want to do. But most people opt not to, but that's one of those, “Well okay, you were a rebel spirit and you didn't want to submit to my will. You wanted to run away. So you ran away and you made all of these decisions and it ended up exactly the way that I said it was going to end up for you. So, you have no complaint on Judgment Day now, because you did have all of these choices to make. You made enough wrong choices that you ended up where you ended up, which was the discussion that I had back with you when you were one of the five Giant Suns that formed after the Big Bang. We had this discussion, I said this is what's going to happen, you said no way, I won't do that, and here we are on Judgment Day, and I was right, and you were wrong.”
Matt: Right.
Dave: Okay! We've got a couple of minutes actually even before we're up to two hours. We're really cutting these down. So uh… anything…
Matt: Last month I didn't post, “Hey Dave is gonna be calling, get your questions in”, just to see what would happen, and it was, last month was the regular people that are gonna send a question in no matter what, and then this month I'm like, okay, it's about a week beforehand so I posted, “Okay Dave's gonna be calling but understand last month it was under two hours and I didn't say anything. This month if I say something, we get a bunch of questions and it's three hours again, I don't have a problem doing three hours, but it’s just, on Friday night and Saturday when I’m getting everything ready, that's longer that I have to play around to get everything up and going. So that's why Steve said something about he didn't want to go over the time limit, it's like, well, I mean the limit is not a real limit, it's just a construct of well, if we go over, we go over. If we're under, hey we're golden.
Dave: Yes! Yes, it feels like Summer vacation any time that we do Please Hold for Dave Sim and it’s under three hours.
Matt: I'm thinking everybody's figured out that it's a, “Well you know, I got a question.” If it’s urgent, hey, yeah, send it, and if it's something that you've been wondering about for a long time and you don't think anyone's asked, well yeah, go ahead and send it in, but I haven't had to weed out a question in a while, which is getting really nice because I remember when we used to get the, “Hey didn't we already do this one?”
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right. Okay! I appreciate all of your time and effort. We all appreciate your time and effort, Manly Matt Dow, and I'll be watching for your quotes from the 1989 “Batman” movie.
Matt: Actually, I got the fax yesterday, and I turned on the movie, and started watching it, and then I went on the internet, I'm like, oh half the quotes I was thinking of that popped up in my head are on the list of quotes from this movie! But we watch it, Paula’s like, “Why are you watching this?” I'm like, I'd explain it, but it wouldn't make any sense to you. Just enjoy Jack Nicholson while you can.
Dave: There you go. There you go. Okay, you have a good night, Manly Matt.
Matt: You too, Dave!
Dave: Talk to you next month.
Matt: Talk to you next month.
Dave: Buh-bye.
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
I was instructed to post:
Hi Matt,
Please put this information on the website. Thanks. There is a link to the auction page and there are links to Dave Sim's artwork.Larry Shell Benefit Art Auction on Heritage for Taxes & House Repairs
Longtime collector and comics professional, Larry Shell, is having a difficult time right now. Due to his being disabled from two spinal surgeries over the past ten years, he is unable to work and earn a living anymore. This has caused his home of close to 50 years to fall into disrepair and the township he lives in has given him a limited time to make at least some of the repairs or face consequences of thousands of dollars in fines. which could ultimately lead to the house being condemned. It is livable and just needs a lot of work.
In addition, property taxes for 2025 are overdue and non-payment would result in the township putting the house up for tax sale!
To this end, Larry has contacted many of his comic book and strip cartoonist friends to donate a piece of Original Art for an auction to help pay the taxes and for the repairs, starting with his front porch which is falling apart and needs to be completely rebuilt! This needs to be dealt with asap!
The auctions are part of the weekly Heritage Wednesday Comic Art & Animation Select Auction #322550 and will be live and open for bids later today, Wednesday, December 3rd at 7pm CST and end on Wednesday, December 10th.
Among the artists whose work will be auctioned are:
Dave Sim, Bill Sienkiewicz, Bill Morrison, Geof Isherwood, Peter Bagge, Shannon Wheeler, Rick Parker, Mark Schultz, Mitch O’Connell, Gary Panter, Doug Latino, Mark Bode, Steve Mannion, Timothy Truman, B.K. Taylor, Joseph Michael Linsner, Fred Hembeck, Kim DeMulder, Ron Randall, Gary Hallgren, Hunt Emerson, Bob Smith and others!
To view all the auctions being held for the benefit, click on the link below!
https://www.ha.com/c/search.zx?saleNo=322550&collection=90&type=friend-consignorlive-notice&FC=0
Dave Sim's Artwork:
https://comics.ha.com/itm/memorabilia/portfolio/dave-sim-cerebus-archive-number-ten-signed-limited-edition-portfolio-2-150-aardvark-vanaheim-2004-total-19/a/322550-47374.s?ic4=GalleryView-ShortDescription-071515
https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/story-page/dave-sim-and-gerhard-cerebus-200-story-page-11-original-art-aardvark-vanaheim-1995-/a/322550-47372.s?ic4=GalleryView-ShortDescription-071515
https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/story-page/dave-sim-and-gerhard-cerebus-200-story-page-14-original-art-aardvark-vanaheim-1995-/a/322550-47373.s?ic4=GalleryView-ShortDescription-071515
Thank you,
Larry
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And, coming in February, The 1982 Tour Book (click the link to be notified on launch).
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The Help Out Bill Messner-Loebs Go Fund Me, or buy Rodney Schroeter's book with proceeds going to Bill. OR(!) you could buy Bill's book with the Dave backcover. I have discovered links:
Wanderland (Paperback but slightly more expensive...I dunno why...)
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
And if you wanna see how the book looks in Real Time...
Over on the Facebookees, Mike Jones shared that Dave has a five SEVEN page Strange Death of Alex Raymond story in YEET Presents #68. Mike Jones still has 30 copies of the second printing available, ya gotta back them on Patreon to get it.
And I got my copy of #69, and it has a Journey story in it.
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Our very own Jen DiGiacomo is part of a film production titled The Day Elvis Died. She'll never ask anybody here, but they're crowdfunding to finish the post production on the movie. (It's set in 1977, will a certain obscure Canadian cartoon aardvark make a cameo? (No. Elvis died in August. Cerebus wasn't published until December. Any appearance in the flick would be an anachronism that would ruin the movie for everybody. EVERYBODY!).) Here's the first trailer.
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Up to 35% off December 8-18th*
*Sale dates are not final and therefore subject to change.
And I've been instructed to say:
Make sure to remind your customers to place their orders by the shipping cutoff dates to ensure their goodies from your shop arrive before Christmas! (*Note: These dates apply to all regions.)
- Standard Shipping: December 14th
- Ground: December 16th
I don't think any of you care, but as the TeeGods command...
Speaking of Merch, if you want a strange near-antique, shoot an email to momentofcerebus@gamil.com, and I'll tell ya where to send the $20USD I want for these. No shipping charge in the States or Canada. Everybody else add $10USD for shipping. I'll send 'em anywhere the postman is willing to go...
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| Back and front. |
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You can get all 16 volumes of Cerebus, many of them Remastered for $99CANADIAN at CerebusDownloads.com (More if you want the Remastered Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing...)
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Heritage has:
- Page 11 of issue #200 (on behalf of Larry Shell) (and featuring the first appearance of Cerebus' tavern on the Wall of Tsi just down the road from Castle Wallace)
- Page 14 of issue #200 (on behalf of Larry Shell)
- A Cerebus sketch (that I think looks like one I won a few months ago...)
- Wolveroach preliminaries?
- That Larry Shell CAN10
- 2 different slabbed copies of #1.
- Other stuff.
And ComicLink (remember ComicLink? Seiler brought us ComicLink. R.I.P Jeff.) has:
Thanks to Steve for sending the links.
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Oliver' Simonsen's Cerebus movie: The Absurd, Surreal, Metaphysical, and Fractured Destiny of Cerebus the Aardvark it's currently available on "Plex", "Xumo", "Vimeo On Demand", "Tubi". If you're in Brazil..., "Mometu", "Nuclear Home Video".
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And our friends in The Great White North are back:
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Next Time: Jen?
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