Hi, Everybody!
Mondays!
Yeah...didn't get a new one. But there's like 268ish of them. I'm sure you can go back and re-enjoy an old one...
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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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Dave: …now is the point where, the evening prayer time is about 6 o’clock. Just 6:12 or so. And that was when the last prayer time was around Christmas. And it’s like, oh, that actually makes sense. Christmas is almost a season ago now. Now we are almost into Spring. Although, with our parts of America, it’s “Spring” in quotation marks.
Matt: Right.
Dave: And then the last prayer is like an hour after that. And then the morning prayer every day has been sort of locked in around 6:12, it’s 6:12 almost forever, and then all of a sudden it just starts jumping backwards 2 minutes at a time. And it’s like, okay, now I have to set my alarm again to get up for my first prayer, whereas when it gets locked in at 6:12, no that’s fine. I will wake up as a programmed Muslim.
Matt: [laughs] At work we switched from doing five 8 hour days to four 10 hour days, so I have to get up an hour earlier. And after like two weeks, I was going, oh okay! My body wants to be awake now! And I’m like, it’s Saturday, it’s 4 in the morning. I don’t need to be awake, I can go back to bed. No, no, no, you’re up now.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. The diurnal and the weekend realities are in a head-on collision.
Matt: Well, it could be worse, I could be my Dad, who, I mean he’s gonna be 74 this year, and I’ll call him when I get out of work, and he’s like, “I was sleeping”. I’m like, why were you sleeping at 3 in the afternoon? He’s like, “Cause that’s when my body will let me sleep!”
Dave: Right. Right. Your Dad’s got a handle on it.
Okay! Let's start. “Has it been 28 days already?” is the first question from Matt Dow. Yes, it has. And next one is, “Let's go to the big board and see where the Remastered TMNT #8 Kickstarter stands!” Good plan! Uh, you're gonna have to do that, I don't have internet access.
Matt: Uh, come on now. There it is! I'm using my old phone and my old phone's going, “Whaa?”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Really? Oh okay, that makes sense. I'm hitting the refresh button, it's not doing anything. Well, it's refreshing the page that I was on, not going to the home page. And the big board says, as of this recording…
Dave: Which is Thursday, 5:30 Eastern time.
Matt: The Kickstarter’s at 206 backers, a pledge of $29,280 out of the $5,000 you guys were looking for, but that number is gonna change tomorrow when I post this audio, and then again on Saturday when I post the video. So there will be two more updates to that amount, hopefully it'll be a higher number.
Dave: Yes! Yes, well we'll keep our fingers crossed. I've asked Dagon to compare the “Spawn” 10 Kickstarter and the “Turtles” 8 Kickstarter, head to head, and it's, “Spawn” is definitely the hare and “Turtles” 8, not coincidentally, is the tortoise. So we're at the 24 hour mark, “Spawn” 10 was at 32,000, so we're still lagging behind that. We're gonna see if they just keep going in lockstep, or if there's a sudden T8 surge.
Matt: Well, to be fair, the only promotion I've done so far for T8 was the countdown video that I scheduled to go up at 10 o'clock my time instead of 10 o'clock Dagon's time, so it actually went up an hour after the Kickstarter started. And that's it, that's all I've done. I haven't mentioned since. I haven't started beating the drum, I haven't put a bunch of links up on Twitter or Facebook or anything, so I have a feeling that it's gonna be one of these, tomorrow when I start beating the drum and marching to the band, that all of a sudden it’s gonna be, “Oh wait, that thing started already?!”
Dave: Well, that's why they call them races, is the classic race of fabledom, is you don't know what's gonna happen, and you'll have plenty of time to Monday morning quarterback it.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay let's get on to “I remember Jeff” and you're remembering Jeff this time.
Matt: So I actually looked back, cause in my notebook at work one time, I was like, it was Please Hold was coming up, like, it's my turn for Jeff, I gotta write down things I remember about Jeff because otherwise I'm gonna forget. And the second thing was “two women grinding”, which we did, and the third thing is an easy one, but that involves me going in my records and finding stuf. So I'm going back to the first one, which is the roast book. Which, for all the people at home who haven't been around since, [sighs], all right, everybody brace yourself, especially you Dave, March 9th 2007. I sent a message to the Cerebus Yahoo Group, which was all Cerebus fandom online was essentially the Yahoo Group, which if you were there you know what I'm talking about. If you weren't there, oh did you miss a great party! We had the best time ever, which is why it died and went away.
Dave: [laughs] Well, don’t sugarcoat it, Matt! Give to us straight. Sorry, I interrupted, go ahead.
Matt: I mean, in the past in the Yahoo Group there was times where people would look at the engagements, and like around the time that issue 300 came out it was like, you know, 2,000 unique posts a month. And by the time everybody had pretty much stopped, it was Lenny posting responses to messages from three years previously that he was just getting around to reading.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: It was a drop off, this is what I'm saying. There was a drop off. So anyway, the message I posted was, “Hey, so because of that doo-doo head Ray,” 2023 Matt has no idea what that means, “I’m putting together a 30th Anniversary tribute project, think the Allan Moore 50th birthday book, and then oh so famous the comics creators are on this list, so I hereby officially invite anybody here with mad phat comic skills to contribute something officially. Either comics or articles about your love for Cerebus, Dave, or Gerhard. All entries are due by the end of the first week of August. Any questions reply here or email me off list at,” my email address, “Please mention the project in the subject line. And any non-comics pro-type peoples who know a pro-type person can feel free to pass the message along, the only rule, don't tell Dave (we're being sneaky).” And then I signed off. When I first proposed this, before I went public with it, I sent an email to Jeff Tundis, Margaret Liss, and then Jeff Seiler. Tundis, because he was essentially AMoC before AMoC at that point, you know, he was the the go-to internet Cerebus guy, and he was one of the moderators of the Yahoo Group. Margaret, because she was Cerebus fangirl #1, and one of the moderators of the Yahoo Group. And Jeff Seiler, because he was gonna help edit this, because that's the kind of… you know, “A book about Dave? I want to get involved!”
Dave: Right.
Matt: So that was the initial post I sent out, and there was a bunch of replies, I mean, I had to look back to find this, but there was a bunch of replies, and we started getting the ball rolling, and Jeff Seiler had the brilliant idea of, “Let's contact any retailers that are out there and see if they want to contribute something” and managed to get two people to say yes. And then, a lot of the enthusiasm, we were getting a lot of “Thanks for the offer, but no”, “Thanks for the offer, but no.” And at some point, the book changed, because it was obviously going to be a very thin volume, much closer to “Cerebus Readers in Crisis” #1, than say, oh I don't know, “Melmoth”. And that's when somebody on the email chain came up with the idea of, “Well, instead of doing it as a tribute to Cerebus, which is what the original idea was, why don't we do it as a celebrity roast of Dave Sim?” And all of a sudden everybody's going, “Oh yeah! I can do a page or two” or ”I can do this” or “I got ideas” and we're getting a lot more yeses than we were getting. And again, this is all a secret, Dave knows nothing. And at some point, apparently Jeff must have said something, because there's another message in these very… you know, it's fun for me to go back and look, because it's like, oh yeah, I used to post like 30, 40 messages to the Yahoo Group every day.
Dave: Every day?!
Matt: Responding to this response, I mean it was very much the reason why Dave Sim doesn't have email, because any thought that went through anybody's head, hey, hit send!
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right.
Matt: So, in one incarnation of this book, Jeff finally contacted you and went, “Hey we're gonna do a 30th anniversary book. We've contacted a couple of retailers. It's starting to form up”, and with the 30th Anniversary idea in mind, and I forgot this, like when I found this today I'm like, well that's just insane. So the 30th Anniversary Book was gonna be the home of the 1982 Tour Book!
Dave: Right.
Matt: When Jeff contacted you, I forgot that this had ever happened, but yeah, you had agreed that, “Hey, I have a bunch of stuff that's never getting published anywhere else. I'll send it to you guys” and then it became the roast book, and you said, “No, I don't want anything to do with this. I don't want you guys to ever do this!”
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: I mean, part of the idea was, it was gonna be a tribute to Cerebus, and it was going to be a fundraiser for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. And, there was a Blog and Mail post about it. If anyone wants to search the Blog and Mail up and find #323 “Dave has a response to the idea of a roast book”, and the short version is, Dave doesn't like it. [laughs] The longer version--
Dave: Yes. Wait a minute, Dave wasn't going to stop it because Dave doesn't stop things, because that’s censorship. But the last thing that I needed in 2007 was, “Hey, let's all pile on Dave, but make it into a benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.”
Matt: It was very much one of these, Matt's “Hey kids, let's get together and put on a show!” turned into “Hey kids, let's put on RuPaul's Drag Race!”
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: The, “okay, yeah, you guys want to do a book? Sure” turned into “okay, you guys can do a book, but if that happens, I'm not doing Secret Project #1,” which turned into “Judenhass”, “or Secret Project #2,” which turned into “glamourpuss”. It was very much the public statement was, if you guys are doing this, I'm not doing anything until this is all blown over. And when that hit the Yahoo Group, I was like, okay Jeff, we're done. It's not happening. And like everybody, there was a lot of back and forth of, “Well, you know, Dave's blackmailing us”, I’m like, no, Dave's saying, “You can do it, but if you do this, my counter move is this.” It's that simple. So my memory of Jeff is, hey, I remember that time Jeff almost killed “glamourpuss”. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Well, that’s a way at looking at it. Yeah, yeah. We were definitely not all on the same page at that point. Can you understand now, particularly knowing how things were in 2007, why it was that I was thrilled about this?
Matt: I understood the second I read the Blog and Mail, I went, oh okay. Yeah, well, it was one of those, I kept pushing for, okay, it's a tribute thing, and then it was, “Well how about we do it as a roast?” I'm like, you can do a roasty, because the Alan Moore book has some of the stuff's kind of roasty, some of the stuff's kind of praisey. It's kind of a mixed bag, so okay, we'll widen our parameters and allow both. And then it shifted more towards roast, and I'm going, guys, it wasn't a good idea before we told you. And once we told you, it was, hey guys, remember when I said it wasn't a good idea? Guess what?
Dave: Yes.
Matt: You know, we all kind of saw the writing on the wall before you found out. Once you found out, it was like, I think, and again, you know for anybody that looks back, because I have all this stuff archived and eventually I can do something with it. It wasn't that you said no, it was, “I’d prefer you didn't, but.”
Dave: Right, right. It was one of those things, where, do you not understand the difference between Dave Sim and Alan Moore? Which, from the Cerebus side of the fence, the ever-diminishing audience for Cerebus, it's like, “Um, no, we're Dave Sim fans and Alan Moore fans. Anything that Alan Moore gets, or that is done in connection with Alan Moore, this would be a good idea for Dave Sim. We'll do our version of it.” And it's, umm, okay. You're really not grasping reality accurately, which is probably the the nicest way to phrase that of the many ways to phrase that. The less nice way is, are you people crazy?! You people are crazy, but you don't know that you're crazy.
Matt: The slightly nicer way is, it speaks of self-absorption that borders are the pathological.
Dave: [laughs] Right, which I will take kudos as the author of that one. Okay, definitely a blast from the past. Sort of links to, I had a much longer digression to one of the questions that brought me to Peter Manso's “Mailer: His Life and Times” book, and every time that I go back to that book, it's like I gotta drag myself back out, because it's this amazing traffic accident of everybody remembering Norman Mailer and Peter Manso interviewed all of them and different traffic accidents points in Mailer's life. And I have thought, reading that, you could probably do that with Dave Sim. It's, “here is Dave Sim’s life, minute by minute, between 1977 and 2004, and here's what each individual's recollection of it is.” And boy, you talk abou a traffic accident on a near cosmological scale. That would be more of the thing, because of the public perception. It's like, Alan Moore is considered absolutely fautless, absolutely without blemish, and particularly in 2007, or particularly whatever year it was in, I guess, 2001 when they did the 50th birthday thing for him. But it's, Dave Sim has never been in that category, and Dave Sim isn't in that category, and Dave Sim is pretty sure he never will be in that category, but unfortunately he has an audience that really doesn't grasp that. So it's very difficult to even begin to discuss sensibly.
Matt: Right. I mean, we’re a dedicated bunch.
Dave: Either you're all crazy or I am, and it's like, well, I'm pretty satisfied that I'm not the crazy one here, but that's a matter of opinion as well.
Matt: Well, I mean…
Dave: I mean, that is the perception of Dave Sim. “Dave Sim was this brilliant creator, but then he started believing in God, and went completely insane, and how sad. Let's all move along so that we're not standing here embarrassing him.” And that's the 98% of the comic book field consensus, certainly in 2007. We might be down to 95% consensus now. [laughs] I'm being charitable. It's like, I don't know, because I don’t have my finger on the Facebook internet Meta Instagram pulse of things.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Okay! So, it's a good recollection of Jeff, because it was situation where, as you're indicating, he was a lynchpin presence, and was probably the only person who couldn't keep it a secret, and was going to tell me, whether he intended to or not.
Matt: Well, and that the particular Blog and Mail post, #323 if anybody wants to look it up, is [laughs] that's the post where the accusations flew a little bit about about you... Jeff had joined the other side basically, and that was the incident where, as Jeff has said,”There's two incidents in my life where Dave and I didn't communicate for six months.” This is one of them, and this is the incident that led to Jeff, as he said to his girlfriend at the time, “You know I'm angry when you get a 25-page handwritten letter.” [laughs]
Dave: Right.
Matt: We've mentioned in the-- I thought it was the “two women grinding” that led to that, but no, it was actually this where in defending himself and the project and everything, Jeff had written the 25-page handwritten letter that you returned with a cover letter saying, “I'm not going to read all this, Jeff. We'll let bygones be bygones and if you want to get succinct about what you what your point is, I will read that, but I'm not going to read, again, a 25 page handwritten letter.”
Dave: Right. Well, particularly because I knew what it was that he was going to be talking about, and it's like, as sensible civilized human beings, you have to get to a point in those situations where you just agree to disagree. It’s not “you don't understand my position clearly enough, so I will write you a 25 page handwritten letter that will allow the radiance of of common sense to descend upon your consciousness.” [laughs] It's like, that's not going to happen. Let's just leave this alone.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Or, you know, if you can distill it down to a quick two pages or something like that, “Here's your two pages. I'll answer it with my two pages, and then we're at the ‘agree to disagree.’” But even at that time, our society had completely lost the notion that there is such a thing as agreeing to disagree just to be a civil human being. “No, we're the wave of the future . We are the children of the Civil Rights Movement. We are determining the right way to think, and lead, follow, or get out of the way.” [laughs] It's like, well, “lead, follow, get out of the way” I don't think is the right way to think, but we'll just have to agree to disagree about that.
Matt: I believe at the time when Jeff said “I wrote a 25-page letter to Dave and and sent it to him” I believe some of the comments in response that were, “At what point in 25 handwritten pages did you think maybe this is a little crazy?”
Dave: [laughs] Well, yes and, particularly in the sense that, however much time Jeff had to put into 25 hand written pages, and it would have been, at that time that was one of his individual OCD things of he will just automatically start doing that and never really reassess “Is this a good idea?” or “Is this something that you should be doing to any other human being?” with the compelled inference that “Okay, now it's your turn to write your 25 pages, and then if must needs comes to must needs, then I will write a 60-page handwritten letter which will refute all of your points.” It's like, no, that sounds intelligent, but that's really really quite infantile, and it's not something that you want to do in a, again, civilizational context. The internet, I think, by that point had driven a lot of people insane who were encountering people online who were no longer saying “in my opinion” and no longer saying “as I see it” and trying to limit themselves to that. Again, it's like, “We're children of the Civil Rights Movement. We are determining the right way to think and I'm here to tell you what that is.” Which, first of all, why would you be spending your own time on a CB radio listening to this? And it's like, “Well because it's the internet and because obviously this is the apex of communication. This is what our society is all about.” And it's like, [laughs] well okay, I disagreed with you back in the 1990s on this one, and I think the chickens are coming home to roost, but again, that's just my opinion. If you really think that disappearing inside of your television and subjecting yourself to this, subjecting others to yourself is a good use of your self-admittedly limited human lifespan, don't let me get in the way, but don't try and persuade me that you're right on it. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
Matt: Yeah, yeah. I mean that was, last weekend my mother-in-law was over, she started watching “The Alamo” because it was on TV and and it's John Wayne being a cowboy! And I'm kind of doing something else, but I'm half paying attention, and after about 20 minutes, I’m like, you know, it's John Wayne. It's historical fact. I'm sure it's John Wayne's take on history. And I looked up the battle of the Alamo on the internet, I'm reading about it, and I'm going, yeah, this doesn't sound like the John Wayne movie at all, and then, because it's Wikipedia, I get to the bottom of it and they're talking about “in popular culture”, like, it was “The battle of the Alamo was featured in the Walt Disney Davy Crockett TV series in the last season, and it was also John Wayne directed and starred in an adaptation” and it's got a note that it's widely perceived to be historically inaccurate. I’m like, okay that's what I was pretty much expecting to find.
Dave: Yes.
Matt: But, I mean, 20 years ago it’d be, “Hey, you're watching ‘The Alamo’! Hey, does this does this seem like it was accurate?” “Ehh, who cares?” and then you can finish watching “The Alamo.” Now it's, “Are we sure this is right?”
Dave: Right. Right, and the people who are real devotees of the Alamo, which looms large in the consciousness of pretty much every Texan that I've ever met, they're all in fundamental disagreement. [laughs] But they came to the “We'll just have to agree to disagree” point probably in the late 1800s.
Matt: [laughs] Right, right.
Dave: Okay. We’re gonna try and squeeze a “you've got any other new business that Dave NEEDS (in caps)” on here before we go to the questions from the audience at home. And I actually do have one. I have a indie cartoonist who sent me his first graphic novel, and his first graphic novel is called “Octaves the Artist”. The creator is Adam J Elkhadem, and I got Rolly to scan the cover for you, so he sent that along. The graphic novel is actually published by Caesura Magazine, which is an online magazine. Www.caesuramag.org. And it's an interesting book. And he sent me a three page [laughs] handwritten letter, which has a lot of questions in it. So Adam is is going to be with us, he's, actually speaking of Texas, he's in Houston, is going to be with us for the next several Please Hold for Dave Sim. And because I'm not going to answer all of his questions in a letter, and he sent me his cell phone number, and his number at work. He works at a courthouse. They’re good questions and I do want to address them because I think they’re of general interest to indie creators, but one at a time will be fine in terms of answering the questions. As opposed to answering all the, being conservative here, let's say 20 to 25 questions that he’s got. He got it like A, B, and C, but he's got like eight questions in each category.
Anyway, the first one is, “What non-Sim comics shall I read to learn the spatial awareness demonstrated in your comics?” And it's a good question, because he's talking about something very specific in my work. Spatial awareness, in terms of a visual. How do you break up the space in the panel, and how do you just know how to do the inter-relationship of the of the shapes and sizes and densities? And, as he said, he's asking about non-Sim comics that he should look at for that. I think that would be, you're trying to translate things too early in the process, would be my answer to that. Which brings us to Matt Dow's video of the cards that I've done, the “75 Sleeps” cards. [clears throat] Those were all done very very quickly, and all of them were done in terms of spatial awareness, that's the first thing, Okay I finished that Turtles Sleeps card, now I'm on to the next Turtles Sleeps card. And I have to instantly move into spatial awareness. I've got the blue pencil, I got the card, it has to have a Cerebus or a Turtle, and it has to have T8. So each of those things has to go into the composition. Once I have it in pencil, then everything after that is either Japanese brush pen, or Hunt 102 pen nib, with the idea of hurry up offence. I got to get this done as quickly as possible, because I'm doing 75 of them and I don't want to just do this for a living for the next three or four weeks. So my suggestion, in terms of understanding Dave Sim’s spatial awareness would be to take Matt Dow's video and use the play/pause function to go through one card at a time, and for yourself decide, “Okay, this is a good one, this is a not so good one. This one sucks. This one's really good. I like parts of this one, but this is things that I think are wrong with this one that I would have done differently.” And I think, over the course of the 75 of them, you will understand my spatial awareness thinking, when it's pretty much pure spatial awareness. That's all that I was doing was trying to be as interestingly spatially aware as possible so I could do a good card, and this is the result that I came up with. You're looking at very basic elements. You're looking at a fixed size card, you're looking at blue pencil thinking composition that was really really quick because it's time to get inking on this, then the Japanese brush pen, Wally Wood’s “I like to put in my solid blacks and then see how much drawing I have left to do.” And then, okay, now here's the minimal number of Hunt 102 fine point pen that I need to do to finish that off. What are the most successful, and why are they the most successful, and apply that to your own thinking. This was a weekly comic strip that he was working on for Caesura Magazine, now he's doing an actual graphic novel, so he's slowing down and I think he's gonna slow down a lot more because he's not doing a weekly comic strip that's going to get collected into a graphic novel. So this is a way to get that hurry up offence thing in your own work. Look at somebody's own hurry up offence thing, here's how he solved the problem of here's the limited options, Japanese brush pen on, Hunt 102, blue pencil, rinse, repeat. “How do I how do I apply that to my own work?” And do a panel, or do a sequence of panels, and do them in hurry up offence mode. Work them out on another sheet of paper in blue pencil, and then really quick spontaneous Japanese brush pen inking, and see what it is that you do. You can learn the concept, and you have the template in terms of the 75 cards and looking at the video. But yours is going to be different. You will evolve in a different direction because you're a different person than I am, but this is a good way to get right back to the very beginning, and start finding out who it is that you are, and how it is that you do your own spatial awareness thinking. Okay! I have to go for my prayer time now, and when I come back I want to find out what music it is that you did on your video.
Matt: [laughs] Okay!
Dave: That’s the cliffhanger. We’ll be back in a few minutes, Matt.
Matt: Okay! That works. Talk to you in a minute, Dave. Bye!
[guitar music]
Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt! Okay my suggestions when you “axed” me for suggestions on music for your video, I suggested either “The William Tell Overture” or Beethoven's “Fifth”, and juiced up a little bit, so that they're going just a little bit too fast. And your decision was…
Matt: I don't have “The William Tell Overture” and I think I have Beethoven's “Fifth”, but when I was looking… I did it with what I originally was gonna do, and then I tried to play it for Janice, but I had set it up so that it's the fax you sent me about the cards, and then the cards. So the music doesn't start till about, there's like a 30 second gap where there's no sound, and the kid was having trouble with, “I can't hear anything! I can't hear anything” and it got really.
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: So I made a second version, and I was going through all the music I have, that's just loaded up on my computer, and I found… [sigh] it's the soundtrack to “Buckaroo Banzai: Adventures Across the Eighth Dimension.” So the track I have is the end credit music, but before that it has the opening music, which is very electronic John Williams-inspired. And I went, oh that would work, and I grabbed that and I hit play, and the first eight seconds is just this. [music plays] So I put that on a loop for 56 seconds, so it's got the fax, it's got all 75 cards, and then when it gets to “One More Sleep” it cuts to one of your three covers, and then a 10 second clip of the “Ninja Rap” by Vanilla Ice from the second movie soundtrack, where he's saying “Go ninja, go ninja, go” over and over for 10 seconds. And then that's the end of it. It's only a minute and six seconds. And when I put it up on YouTube, they do copyright checks, if you use copyrighted music, like when I did the “Kurtz Versus Kurtz” video with a version of “The End” by the Doors, it flagged it, going, “That property’s of the Doors, you can't use it. You can publish it privately, but it won't be available. It won't show up on YouTube.” So like, if I send someone the link, they can watch the video, but they can't just search for it on YouTube. Well the copyright check for this one said, “You have 10 seconds of Vanilla Ice, but it's okay! This artist allows samples.” And I'm thinking, well he Goddamn better, he made his career off of sampling Queen!
Dave: [laughs] Yes! If you live in a glass house, you really shouldn’t spend your livelihood throwing stones.
Matt: And so it was, it shows up as there's a red flag of “There's a copyright violation but it's okay we're gonna let you publish the video” and I'm like, ah you know, let’s. And then the other thing with this particular video, I always just hit publish and it goes up and anyone that subscribes immediately gets a notification that I have a new video. This time they have a thing where you can schedule a premiere, and I'm like, all right. And it's like, “How much of a countdown do you want?” and the maximum was five minutes and I'm like, well, five minutes. And then and then it's like, “And when do you want to schedule it?” I'm like, well, the Kickstarter goes live at 10 o'clock tomorrow, so the video goes live at 10 o'clock tomorrow. And then, just as a test, I shared the link, and when you click on it, it goes “this video will be live in 13 hours” and I'm like, oh okay, this will be fun. And then I showed it to the Cerebus Facebook group, and I'm wondering how many Please Hold regulars were watching 13 hours of “Video’s coming! Video’s coming!” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] We hope not too many.
Matt: I’m hoping none, but I got a feeling.
Dave: Yeah. I don't know, there could be a few people out there who had a little inset screen just to keep track in case it goes , “Only kidding! It’s coming up in five minutes!”
Matt: [sighs] I mean, I'm not naming names or pointing fingers, because these are all our listeners and we love them dearly.
Dave: Yes! Yes. ”Okay, that answers my question, so now first up is a can of worms,” boy you got that right, “ that comes our way from the Cerebus Faceybookee Group, Darrell Cook posted,” and I'm gonna say, Darrell, that the structure on this is is very difficult. I was going to go, well okay, Darrell should get his uninterrupted say on what it is that he's saying, and then we got the, as you say, “tip of the shiny metal helmet” to Jeff Tundis for finding and quoting what I had to say on the subject. And then followed by Darrell's follow-up on what it is that he's talking about. It seems to me that the fairest way on this is, if you can post uninterrupted Darrell Cook, “here's what Darrell Cook posted, and then here's his follow-up after what Jeff Tundis posted,” because it's, this is already getting pretty long even for Please Hold for Dave Sim, and I'm trying to figure out how to make it manageable. It's a can of worms, we don't need it to be a can of boa constrictors just for the sake of coherence, and we're sitting here talking to each other, and worms are bad enough, boa constrictors, I think we're actively driving people away. So Darrell, I apologize that this is as close as I can get to you getting your side of the thing out and me getting my side of the thing out. So here’s Darrell's direct quote, what he posted, “Lord Julius is a child molester. That he raped Jaka as a child is never explicitly stated, but very clear through the subtle force of Sim’s intimations.” And while I was looking at that, I went okay, first of all I circled “raped” because I think there's a… you'll have to get down to technical qualities when you're saying something like that about the scene in question. The compelled inference of the visual metaphor suggests sexual interference, which is a very specific term relative to child molestation. Possibly invitation to sexual touching, which is another technical term, and the courts and the law have definitely, because this is a centerpiece of of western jurisprudence, the specific terms mean specific things. The upshot of which is visual metaphor doesn't suggest penetration, which I think is implied by the term “rape”. So, that was, I appreciate the “subtle force” because that's definitely what what I was doing there was, I want this to be a very forceful double page image, and I want it to also be subtle. So that even when you get, okay, I think I know what we're looking at here, it's still forceful and still subtle.
Then referring to Lord Julius, Darrell writes, “He's also consistently hilarious. Sim’s genius,” and I'll interrupt to thank you for the description of whatever it is as genius, “is modeled roughly after what Nabokov achieved in ‘Lolita’ with Humbert.” And I'm pronouncing it that way because I still remember Valdimir Nabokov's “Playboy” interview where he specified that he prefers the European pronunciation which is “Lah-litta” as opposed to “Low-leeta.” “It goes something like this, most moral theory has it that moral demands are relatively relaxed. For example, right now there are starving kids in Africa. It's likely that you could well afford a $50 donation, instead you buy some Cerebus memorabilia. Except for some variant of strenuous utilitarianism, almost all moral theory would say, while it might be praiseworthy to donate it's not obligatory such that buying the Cerebus memorabilia is wrong.” I wrote next to that, arguably relaxed moral demands don't qualify as genuine moral theory, but instead as moral relativism. “Most”, when you use “most” as a descriptor of moral theory, you're possibly looking at a less moral spectrum than what's available to you, and I would suggest that what that was definitely the category that Nabokov was in in terms of, okay, you're going to say that Humbert is wrong with his pursuit of “Lolita”. But there are starving kids in Africa, you have $50 that you could donate, you didn't do that. They're both wrong, but those kinds of moral demands are relatively relaxed. It's like, mhmm, I'm not sure that that's accurate. I mean the comic art metaphyics here is interesting because Mike “MJ” Sewall later on talks about buying Cerebus memorabilia, and I qualified that, because he's apologizing that he keeps making the wrong decision. He's spending all of his money for Cerebus stuff online instead of buying stuff from Dave Sim. If you buy something from Aardvark-Vanaheim, or you buy something from Waverly Press, the share that Aardvark-Vanaheim gets I do pay the zakat on it, the Muslim zakat. “The fifth part belongs to God and the apostle.” So however much money you're giving to me, a 20% of that goes to the food bank of Waterloo region, so there you have what I would say is an available moral spectrum that exceeds what at least Nabokov was talking about. It's, where the money ends up has a lot to do with, okay, this is what you decided to do. So if you gave directly, let's say, $1000 to Dave Sim as opposed to $1000 to Aardvark-Vanaheim, or $1000 to Aardvark-Vanaheim, $200 of that went to go to feed the poor. So at that point we have a wider moral spectrum, with at one end the destructive. If you're buying CGC graded “Cerebus” copies on eBay, and the guy that it’s going to is a crack junkie, let's say. And he's got a serious problem with crack and he's hitting the Vodka a little too hard, and apart from that he gets the occasional prostitute, well okay, there you've got the the destination of the money that you are giving to him for his Cerebus memorabilia. Not only is is not no part of it, or 20%, going to feed the poor, it's going to personal self-destruction on the guy's part. So you've got destructive versus neutral versus benign versus beneficent, and I would suggest that buying something from someone who pays the zakat is at the beneficent end, at least partly. Whatever problems that individual has, and whatever addictions that person has, and whatever bad decision making that they're making about what they do with their money, 20% of it is still going to feeding the poor.
So, and then Darrell goes on, “We have our own interests. We know evil exists and in the pit of our stomachs suspect it is ineradicable. We laugh at Lord Julius. Funny guy. Lord Julius is a child molester… …wait. Suddenly, he's not the silly funny man anymore.” Okay, I've got a thought on that, which is why I read all the way to that part. I also circled “ineradicable”, as we “suspect that evil is ineradicable.” I would suggest it's eradicable within yourself. Everybody knows their own evils or suspects their own evils, at any time you can eradicate it. If you are the guy selling Cerebus memorabilia who's got a crack cocaine habit, you can stop doing the crack. You have free will, it's going to be very very difficult. You can go and get help from mental services, but it's still going to be you that has to eradicate the evil within yourself. Eradicating evil in others, to me, is morally parallel. How are you certain that what you're seeing in someone else is evil? And to what lengths are you willing to go to eradicate it? I mean, you can try and make a second amendment case for that and say, “Well this neighbour of mine is just completely evil in my view, so all I can do is shoot him. It's really the best good that I can do .” No, it's always stick to what's on your own plate. You can make your own free will choices about yourself without interfering with other people's free will choices. And that was what I wrote next to “shun evil personally”, and then annotated that with, shun inferred evil personally. What you think is evil in yourself, is possibly not evil, or not evil in the way that that you sense that it is. So just accept the fact that you're a human being, you're flawed, and what you infer to be your own evil that you're keeping hidden from everybody else, it could be or it could not be. That's where Judgment Day comes in, where, okay, you will find out at some point because nothing is hidden from God. “Suddenly he's not the silly funny man anymore” I wrote, Bill Cosby, next to that one, because that's certainly the most profound experience of that,”Wait, suddenly he's not the silly funny man anymore.” Well, he still is. I mean, Bill Cosby, I had all of his records back in the 1960s when I was eight, nine, ten years old. “To Russell, the Brother with Whom I Slept”, “Why is There Air?”, all of that stuff. “Fat Albert”, all of the things that we can't do and say anymore, Fat Albert would be, you know, fat shaming would be right at the top of that list. But, [as Fat Albert] Hey, hey, hey, hey! I will never forget and no one who is a Bill Cosby fan will ever forget first hearing Fat Albert done by Bill Cosby as stand-up before the animated cartoon, when just your imagination could make a Fat Albert that just put the cartoon Fat Albert to shame. But you know, that having been said, when we discovered that Bill Cosby had decided that drugging women and having sex with them when they're unconscious was a sensible option, or whatever it is that was going on in his head that said, “This is what I'm going to do, because the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” It's, okay, well I'm laughing at someone who definitely who thought and did things, and possibly still thinks that that was a sensible option. “I'm probably one of the richest black men in America and this is how I am going to get my sexual gratification.” And that's one of those, mhmm, we could talk about that forever but you're never going to get me to agree to disagree on that. It's like, no, that's just completely, completely unconscionable, way way way way over the line. But you know, at that point do you go, “Well, okay, we have to burn all of his record albums. We have to make sure that ‘The Cosby Show’ is never seen.” A lot of people worked on “The Cosby Show”, a lot of good performers on that show, Phylicia Rashad. You just say, “Okay, we can never see her performances. We can never see these scripts again, because Bill Cosby just overrides the whole thing.”
“And like a detective you piece together hints at insidiousness that Sim injected from the beginning. We didn't see them. Too busy laughing. And that's the point, honest to goodness, the entire message of Cerebus is, finally, its own self-effacement, and the great irony.” And then followed by a colon. “Would Sim himself rather someone, A) Buy Cerebus phonebooks. Read them. Or B), make a meaningful impact in the life of someone struggling to stay above water? Lord Julius. Funny guy.” And I think his A and B, I would probably break up into A, B, and C . Would Sim himself rather someone A) buy Cerebus phonebooks, B) Read them, or C), make a meaningful impact to the life of someone struggling to say above water. Certainly my preference is that people would buy Cerebus phonebooks. Whether they read them or not, [laughs] it's not really germane to me. I'm in the business of selling Cerebus phonebooks, and A and B are two different things in the internet age. Menachem Luchins, at Escape Pod Comics, frankly admitted to me when he was first corresponding with me, that he had downloaded illegal copies of the Cerebus phonebooks because he didn't have money for Cerebus phonebooks. But he wanted to read Cerebus, and it's like, well okay, that's your decision. I can't stop illegal downloads from happening. I hope you enjoy them. And of course, Menachem eventually got to the point where he bought all the phonebooks and now sells the phonebooks, so there you go. There's a moral destination to these things where, to whatever extent I would be the Arbiter of whether Menachem has anything to atone for in his choice to buy illegal downloads, I'm fine by that. He's now the retailer that actively makes Cerebus phonebooks available to anyone who wants to buy them. You can buy them at Escape Pod Comics and he will send you the books wherever you are. And that's an irreplaceable benefit that Aardvark-Vanaheim and Dave Sim have that wouldn't have been there if I had, I think, either shunned or had a profoundly negative reaction to Menachem Luchins illegally downloading the Cerebus phonebooks.
And yes, another tip of the shiny metal helmet to Jeff Tundis for finding and quoting what I had said about the Lord Julius molesting Jaka. “I should probably have made clearer in my earlier answer that Jaka was indeed molested as an infant, but that the recollection was very deeply buried, only coming out in fever dreams as an example. That is, by having conveyed that information, there is a part of Jaka you know more about than she does. Which is a unique quality both to graphic novels and to literature in general, where you can know, depending on what the author is doing, you can know more about the character than the character knows about the character. It would actually be unlikely that Lord Julius would be the culprit. In the context of absolute political power, there just wouldn't be any occasions when the Grandlord of Palnu would be left alone with his infant niece. What would even be the pretext? Of course, at the Caesarian level, you don't need a pretext, but it would be an extremely unlikely for an Augustus, although I grant you it would be less unlikely for a Nero or a Caligula.” And we can add to that list, we know now Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, you know the whole “first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women” kind of thing. It's like, mhmm, a bad way to look at it, but definitely a way to look at it. Darrell then rejoined, “Another clue hinting at Lord Julius as child molester (of Jaka). The first time I read it, Julius' comment only kicked up the most vaguely intuitive embers but I didn't think too much. Going back and revisiting the context, it's clear that the initial sense of disquiet was onto something… ‘The incident,’ poor Jaka thought it was her birthday they were celebrating only to discover that was for Astoria. Leading up to this moment there's an intense sense of foreboding, the rushed preparation, Jaka is awkward sense of coming to grips with her physicality a ‘picture of womanhood’ (at 12?), she repeats to herself ‘I'm a pretty girl, Mama,’ all such that when the imageric reveal is made it has something of the revelatory curtain being pulled back.” Okay, annotating that, the line “I'm a pretty girl, Mama” is from uh the play, the musical, “Gypsy” which is a watershed moment where, let's go by the movie version, Natalie Wood is transformed in that moment. Her mother wants her to strip in the burlesque house, because she wants to go out a star. They're at the end of their rope, but here's the opportunity for them to go out a star. Rose Louise Hovick is going to become Gypsy Rose Lee, and she just sort of automatically does what her mother is telling her to do, and puts on a very slinky black dress, and does her hair up, and does some makeup tricks, and astonishes herself went when she looks in the mirror and says, “I'm a pretty girl, Mama.” And she's not much older than Jaka. We don't really know how old she is in the movie's context. We know that she's at least a teenager. Okay, so the extreme of that is the sexualizing of pre-adolescent girls. Think JonBenet Ramsey. At what age is makeup appropriate, is the question. And we don't really address that as a society, because there's a whole faction that just goes, “Well, it's just makeup. It's just it's like Halloween. They want to put makeup on and clomp around in their mother's heels, what's the harm?” At what age is makeup appropriate? That was more of a question for decades and for centuries. 15, 16, 17, 18? I would say it presupposes that makeup is appropriate. You don't actually look the way makeup makes you look, so consequently I don't think that makeup is a good thing, particularly for a gender that prides themselves on authenticity. “You have to be authentically who you are.” Well, why are you wearing makeup then? You don't look like that. Which brings us back again to Gypsy, with the vaudeville versus burlesque. Burlesque was considered a lot more vulgar than vaudeville, but they were both essentially the same thing. People on stage pretending to be people that they're not, and making their living that way. It's like, well, there's at least an inauthenticity to that. We do a disservice to ourselves by not confronting that head on, that anytime you're professionally pretending to be someone that you aren't, I think you're getting into problematic moral areas. But that doesn't mean that I want Madonna banned, but it does mean that, no, don't try and make me celebrate Madonna, and celebrate you know her “relationship” with the Catholic church. If you want to celebrate that, that's fine. That's your free will choice, but don't try and force other people into making those moral choices and holding those moral opinions.
“Several of the men CLEARLY gaze upon the child with a sexual desire, the two women seem so familiar with the abuse associated with aristocratic mobility that their smiles betray themselves, as if, somewhere, deep down, in certain rare introspective moments, they know of their own brokenness. And finally, Lord Julius, ‘Doesn't look a day over twelve, does she?’ Referencing Astoria. But that's Jaka. When you place the comment in the totality of its context, Jaka's nightmares with phallic beings, the events leading up to this moment, it's clear there's a deeply sickening sexual innuendo.” Yes. Very astutely put, I would say, on that one. And that's one of the, going back to again the “subtle force of Sim’s intimations,” I always see that going on in society. I mean, you don't have to be in an aristocratic context. You don't have to be a member of the British royal family to not know that there is a strong current in society of turning a blind eye to things like this because your status depends on turning a blind eye to it. The universities are getting into serious serious trouble now with, you know, this is supposed to be a bastion of open discussion and the exchange of viewpoints, and everyone's turning a blind eye to the fact that, “Okay, we are agreeing for the sake of tenure and agreeing for the sake of maintaining our status at the University that someone else has the right to force moral opinions and moral decision making on us. We are children of the Civil Rights Movement, and this is the natural logic of the next step.” It's like, mhmm, no, that's as insidious as deeply sickening sexual innuendo. Darrell goes on, “Astoria knew Julius had molested Jaka.” Well, I underlined that and wrote, that's speculative, as well. I'm reminded of the Jeff Jones female character in his “Idyl” strip, “There are some things I don't even tell myself.” And we don't reckon with that as a society, that there are people who have that aptitude of, there are some things I don't even tell myself, and consequently I scrupulously don't know them. And unfortunately those are the people who are controlling our society right now, are the people who go, “Well, I’m not going to tell myself that I am joining the totalitarians, and the authoritarians, and the censors, and if I don't tell myself that, then that means that I'm not doing that.” Those are the dangerous people. So again, that's speculative, as well. Darrell goes on to say about Astoria, “She's no dummy. Which makes her marriage even more insidious. The conscience is blunted, the unacceptable becomes acceptable, in the drive for power.” Like I say, that's pretty much across the whole spectrum of our society right now, depending on whether you're a First Amendment absolutist or a First Amendment pragmatist, those people are quite happy to get rid of freedom of expression for anybody. Not only in the drive for power, but in terms of material success, in terms of social acceptance of being in with the in-crowd. [laughs] That's why you wrote, “Somebody asked you if you had confirmed any of that.” And I said, so Please Hold I guess! Can I have one month where the next month's questions don't start the week after? And then you write, “Since there's a lot to unpack from all of this, let me break it down as best I can.” And then you wrote, “What's better, ambiguity or certainty?” And I wrote next to that one, inference isn't implication. And then amended that to, inference isn't necessarily implication. To which I would add, inference isn't not necessarily implication. So is that ambiguity or certainty? To me, all of those taken together triangulate a barricade, a balustrade for freedom of expression that has certainty to it, but is certainly completely informed by ambiguity, because the one without the other without the other, doesn't exist. And then, number two, you wrote, “If you give a concrete answer this time, what's to stop us from having to cover this again in a year or two?” And it's like, well, again, everybody has their different opinions. They can try and persuade other people, you don't have to wait a year or two, you can do it tomorrow, you can do it five minutes from now, you can do it a week from now. Let's go around the circle again, and you're still going to end up at, we'll just have to agree to disagree. And I wrote next to that point of yours, my answers are as concrete as I can make them, which when it comes to the sex lives of my characters is, “not very”.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Then you put, “3), Did Julius molest Jaka?” It fits the known facts in the fiction that I wrote, but so do any number of other scenarios. It's one of the centerpieces of my own thinking. When I'm doing the Monday Reports and commenting on John's Gospel, I'm basically saying the conventional Christian interpretations of John’s Gospel, they're just way too many loose ends. I read what's there, here's as close as we can get to the original Greek, here's what I understand about the Torah, and here's how, for me, these jigsaw puzzle pieces fit together. It fits the known facts. I assume that there are other scenarios, that someone would say, “Okay, here's the conventional Christian interpretation of John's Gospel, here's what Dave has to say about it,” when I'm finally done commenting a page at a time 15 years from now or whatever, and possibly synthesizing those and going, “Okay, understood. We have to accept what Dave is saying, that what our interpretation is has to fit what the text is saying, which we haven't been doing up till now, so here's another take on it. I don't think Dave Sim’s YHWH theories hold water, and here's why I don't think they hold water, and here’s why everything that's in John's Gospel fits the known facts of my theory in the same way that Dave Sim’s does.” Number four, you wrote, “As the author do you even know, or is it like Cirin and Po’s genitalia? You never turned your imagination to it.” I wrote next to that, in the same sense that my imagination doesn't stray, and I put a box around “stray”, to the sex lives of my female neighbours, or my ex-wife, or ex-girlfriends. All I know and ever can know is what they look like or looked like, and what they say. Turning your imagination to something, is different from how I see my imagination. I limit my imagination from straying to things like that, whereas we live in a society where everyone is actively turning their imagination to what should be individual private things. I don't think that sexual preferences are genders. I think that's what happens when, as a society, you make those decisions. Not only letting your imagination stray to that, but actively turning your imagination to it, it's, okay, well, gender is gonna go out the window, and you're going to try and replace it with sexual preferences. And it's like, that's more titillating, but it's far more inaccurate.
I think five and six of your points, I would argue that they're in reverse order. “I think we can all assume that Astoria isn't Lord Silverspoon's mother, so how many wives did Lord Julius have?” and then followed by, “5), was Julius Jaka’s father's brother, or Jaka's mother's brother, or Jaka's father and due to palace intrigue, was raised as his niece?” And I wrote next to that, and when did they become his ex-wives? How many children did he have, and what was that context of when he was married and when he became unmarried? The center point to me becomes that I was doing Groucho Marx. Lord Julius is Groucho Marx, but the Groucho Marx character. Which raises the question, which is valid? Your five and six are, okay, we've gotten all the way here with Jaka as Lord Julius's niece, and Lord Julius is Lord Julius, the Grandlord of Palnu. To how many children was Groucho Marx “Uncle Julius”? I'm a big Marx Brothers fan, I wouldn't know that offhand. Uncle Julius isn't really the larger point of Groucho Marx, and that's a personal inference on my part. The larger point of Groucho Marx is the Groucho Marx character, created by SJ Perelman and others, and particularly in the early Broadway plays and the early movies. [as Groucho] “You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco. It's either foggy outside or make that five more hard-boiled eggs. There's my argument, restrict immigration.” “Doesn't look at day over 12, does she?” is a good Groucho punchline, which supersedes all other considerations with a Groucho-based character. And that flies in the face of our society, and is a helium versus hydrogen thing. Women want to know, “Okay, yes, how many ex-wives did he have? How many children did he have?” You're defined by whatever is procreatively in orbit around you. And it's like, no, that's not Groucho Marx to me. Groucho Marx to me is, “You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco!” That person, that written character, which is not only written, but is who Groucho became. You know, Julius Marx became Groucho Marx and portrayed himself that way. Which was a real nutcracker existence, you meet Groucho Marx and you expect him to talk like Rufus T Firefly. But most people don't come up with stuff like that just off the top of their head. It's impossible. That's crafted comedy. And that's what's interesting to me, and I think that's what's interesting to most guys about Groucho Marx. I don't care whose Uncle Julius he was, I don't care who his ex-wives were. I know he married one of his secretaries, and I know that he was living with Erin what's-his-name at the end, but those are irrelevant people compared to the importance of Groucho Marx to me.
So there you go, Darrell! Thank you for a very lucid series of observations. It's definitely gratifying as an author that, like, man oh man, I wrote most of what you're talking about almost 40 years ago now, and you're still talking about it in a very very immediate sense that this is important. So thank you for doing that. I hope you don't take offence at anything that I said, or that I essentially answered what you had to say by interrupting you continuously.
Matt: Well, so Darrell's been posting on the Facebook Group as he's doing a reread, and he finally did a post where he's essentially working on a book about the series at this point, because he, as he says, he's got nothing better to do with his free time. And a lot of his posts, I mean, they're very jagged as far as you just can't pick him up and hold them, you know. That it's a wet cat with claws of, you can try, but you're gonna get hurt. This particular post was, when he did the first one, and it's like, well you know this is something we've talked about in the past as fans, and back during the Yahoo Group we would ask the questions, and of course, it’s the multi-part, “Hey Dave, we get five questions, here's question one, there's 14 question marks in it.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Right!
Matt: I mean that's, if anyone goes back and looks at the Yahoo Group you'll know when I joined because that's where we started getting questions where there was a three paragraph preamble to a basic question. You know, explain this is what we're driving at, this is what we see, are we right? As opposed to the Lenny questions, which were written by a lawyer, so it's “the party of the first part.” [laughs]
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And I have all those questions, and every time I go back and look at the early ones before I joined the Group, I'm like, I'm surprised Dave kept doing this. At a certain point I would have said, no, I just don't want to do this anymore!
Dave: [laughs] Well, no, that's part and parcel of me devoting 26 years of my life to it, and thinking about it constantly. So it's like, okay this is this book that I'm working on right now, but there's implications of this book that I'm going to have to address up ahead. 6,000 pages, you can have loose ends, but there are some loose ends that you just can't leave loose. You better tie it off, at least in terms of your own perception of it. A lot of authors talk about that. Good writing has an iceberg effect to it. There's 9/10ths of the thinking isn't in actually in the book, it's just the 1/10th that's distilled. So it is very gratifying that so much of of the audience, the core audience, the Yahoos, and the people who listen to the Please Hold for Dave Sim. It's, okay, that's what you're responding to, is somebody putting that much of his personal mental candle power into his work. And as Cerebus fans, we've all dealt with the top 10%, we've gone down 10% further than that. It sounds like Darrell’s the possibly the first deep sea Cereus reader/diver going, “No, I'm really gonna get all, all the way to the bottom of this.” And it's like, mhmm, it's going to retreat away from you the more you try to catch up to it. And it's, I will do my part, at least in terms of two or three hours once a month. Hey, you know, these people are this interested, and as an author, that supersedes, did you buy these books from me or did you get them on eBay because somebody had given up, or you were just watching for bargains? It’s like, mhmm, don't make that your criteria. God will make sure that enough people buy Cerebus, or whatever other work that I'm doing, that I'm keeping my head above. Okay, I'm not JK Rowling in terms of income and audience, but I'll offer for what I got.
Matt: So, the second post that Darrell did, where he posted the “happy birthday Astoria” two-page spread, with Jaka in the doorway. And I got my copy of the remastered “Jaka’s Story” next to me, and I'm looking at that page and it just dawned on me, hey, this is one of those, okay, if everyone's paying attention, you'll catch up, you'll see this, and I never noticed before, but when you first introduced Julius, and you've talked about this in various times is that, when you're imagining Palnu, it was essentially the same as Imesh and you had to come up with a different absolute dictator leader, and that's when you decided on Groucho. But one of the things that, I forget where I even read it, but one of the things you've said was that when you introduced Palnu part of the idea here was everybody dresses the same becaus it's the style of whatever the Grandlords were and that's what everybody else was gonna wear. And so, in this two-page spread, everybody's wearing Julius's outfit, which is the same outfit he was wearing in the “Silverspoon” strips when he first showed up. And I'm like, that's a commitment. I mean, this is how many hundreds of pages later, and you're still sticking your guns with, okay, no no, this is the original Julius, not the Groucho without glasses.
Dave: Right. And the other element is, Jaka is the only one who isn't dressed that way, and it's like, what does that say? And it’s… go ahead, I interrupted.
Matt: The two women that Darrell mentions are both wearing dresses, but you know they're not as fancy of dresses, but they're still fancier than all the guys that are wearing the same burlap outfits.
Dave: Right. Right, and it's, that's a commentary as well on how far would Groucho Marx as absolute dictator go for a gag? And well, there you go. It's whatever it costs to get Jaka all dolled up in exactly that way, was like couch change to him, but was probably the revenue of the average worker in Palnu over the course of the year, and hurry up offence. It's like, “You're gonna do this, and you're gonna do it by three o'clock tomorrow, because that's when I'm springing the gag.” And it's like, [laughs] yeah that's a good reason you wouldn't wanna have Groucho Marx as dictator. It's a gag to you, but you've just transformed your niece's life, and not in a positive way, with the… what's the noun for, of precocious? Precofany? Precociousness? You're enforcing a sexual precociousness on Jaka as a 12 year old that resonates in a profound way on the female side, where they're looking at the 12 year old and looking at her as a woman because only women could afford dresses like that and could get all dolled up like that. Darrell definitely called it with the “a picture of womanhood at 12.” It's like, yeah, you can do that. Look at Hollywood, look at star’s daughters who, okay, when does a movie star's daughter get to wear makeup? You know, Jamie Lee Curtis, when was she first wearing makeup, when was she first wearing designer clothing, and how unhealthy is that? And I would say, really really unhealthy. Okay, I gotta go and do my final prayer, and we'll be back with MJ Sewall's question.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Back in a few minutes. Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye.
[guitar music]
Matt: Hello once again, Dave!
Dave: Hello once again, Matthew! Please Hold regular MJ Sewall asked, “Hey there, Manly Matt. First , thank you Dave, for reading the freebie list of ‘Cerebus’ subscribers last month. I didn't expect such a comprehensive recap, but it was awesome.” No problem. I thank you for your interest, and it's one of the reasons that I like getting the questions ahead of time, because I can sit there and go, okay, what's the best way to address this? And it's like the red binder is sitting right over there in the filing cabinet. Hey, dig it out, and how big a problem is this? And it's like, well, if I talk fast enough I can I can get it all out there. “Recently reading ‘Cerebus Companion’ #1 & 2. Finally! Where have I been since 1994?” Yeah, gotta give Craig major marks for doing “Cerebus Companion” that far back and that thoroughly. I still use it as a reference. “Where I had to ask, is there really an LP recording of the early ‘Cerebus’ issues?” An actual record? No. I did draw the cover of Cerebus and Elrod in a recording booth. “Did they actually go on air over the radio?” Yes, they did. It was a group called Shockwave, a volunteer group. I believe a University radio station? It was in Minneapolis, and yes, they did go on air over the radio. Probably struggled to reach St. Paul from Minneapolis. But in terms of was it actually broadcast, yes it was. It was just very very limited, like a University radio station is going to. So it got as far as, okay, I've got the jigsaw puzzle pieces here. I was still familiar with and had a connection to, as Dan Graham calls him, “Kurt the crook,” the bootleg guy who did the “Hot Wacks” magazine. So I knew that he knew how to get record albums produced. It's not rocket science, he had a place that pressed albums, and they were on the down low willing to press his bootlegs for him. It would have been no problem for me to say, hey, can I get in on this? And can you just press 200 copies of the “Cerebus” radio show? And told the Shockwave people that that's what I wanted to do and could they send me the best recordings that they had. And they sent them at the time on those big reel-to-reel tapes. So there's two giant reel-to-reel tapes that would have fit onto a giant recorder at the time. I still have those, those are in the closet with the assorted pre-Cerebus artwork that I did, lettering, rejected pages, the jam story that I did with Chester Brown. All of the originals are there, so somewhere at the bottom of that pile there is two cardboard reel-to-reel containers that have two tapes in them. Where and how far you would have to go in 2023 to find somebody who could take these Paleolithic tapes and turn them into digital files. I'm sure the technology exists, but it's probably not as available as it was. So do I still have those recordings? Yes I do. “Thanks again for being awesome and feeding my obsession.” No problem! Thank you for being obsessed. “I recently sprung for ‘Cerebus’ #2, 3, 4, and 5. Several of which were graded by CGC. I can't justify pursuing a genuine or even counterfeit #1, but my collection is nearly complete at issues 2 through 300. I even bought a ‘Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD’ #2 to put next to the ‘Cerebus’ cover.” Yes, I remember that from the photos that you sent me when you first contacted me, that there was “Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD” #2 next to, I guess, a reprint of #2 at the time. “I am not bragging, I just felt compelled to prove once again that when given the chance of giving of getting Cerebus-related back issues on eBay or buying something that will put money in the pocket of Dave Sim, I consistently make the wrong choice. Sorry Dave.” And it's like, uh, no, absolutely no need to apologize. The obsession expresses itself in different ways. The people who read and reread “Cerebus”, I think a lot of them have repented of going, “Okay, I don't need these valuable back issues because I've got the trade paperbacks,” and are now going, “I kind of want to trade paperbacks and I want back issues.” And some of them like CGC, and some of them don't like CGC. Now that you've sort of hit the wall on the back issues, which I assume that you have, maybe you could think about something that would put money in the pocket of Dave Sim. Remember, every dollar you put in Dave Sim’s pocket, 20 cents of it goes to the Food Bank of Waterloo Region. So if you're looking for a good reason or at least a good rationalization, maybe that'll do you good.
Matt: So, two things. One, Tundis’ Cerebus the Aardvark site has digital files of all the radio shows because there's only six.
Dave: Oh they do? Great! Alright.
Matt: They only did the first six issues, right?
Dave: Yep, yep.
Matt: Okay. So yeah, he's got them there. I'll put a link up. Every time the radio show comes up, I'm like, well you know they're available on the internet. I put the link and people like, “Oh wow, this is amazing!” I'm like, ehh, tell me that after you've listened to all six of them once.
Dave: Meaning what?
Matt: I have trouble with adaptations.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: But I've tried listening to the first one, and I'm like, it's the Vaughn Bode Cheech Wizard thing all over again.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: The voice in my head and the voice they do, ehh, they're not quite the same voice. It's the same thing with Oliver's movie. I started watching, and I'm like, I know what this is, I should be a hundred percent supportive of it, and I am up to the point where it involves me actually watching it..
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: Like my friend watched it and was like, “I have questions.” I’m like, I'm sure you do. I'm the wrong guy to ask, because I got eight minutes into it and went, this-- I was trying this thing that Paula does where she'll watch TV on her phone while she does stuff.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: She does the dishes and she's watching TV, and I’m like, how do you do that? She's like, “What do you mean?” Like if there's a noise, don't you not hear the dialogue? And she's like, “Yeah.” So I’m like, so then you gotta back it up? She's, “No, I just don't care.” And I'm like, see I'm a little more invested in what I watch.
Dave: Right, which is probably better on Paula. You can consume a lot more pop culture if you just go, ahh, it's no big deal. Like me watching “The Avengers” film at the Kitchen family, where they've already seen all “The Avengers” films 50 times each. So it's like, I'm gonna miss most of this with all of the chitchat going on, but it doesn't matter! It's certainly more spectacular to watch than anything I've got at the Off-White House with absolutely zero technical stuff. My association with the radio show mentally, I always remember the issue six was recorded live at whatever the University was, it was a science fiction/fantasy convention. and I was invited, and I was in the front row, and the whole crew was on stage and performing issue six, “The Secret.” The first appearance of Jaka. And Kara Dahlke, who was a little Asian girl, cute as a button, was Jaka. And I remember they came to the, you know, Jaka has got like the last three lines in issue six, and she was just so bubbly and excited that they got all the way through it, Dave Sim is right here and he got to see it, that she just sort of turned back into Kara Dahlke on the last two or three lines, and came bounding off the stage to come running up to me. [laughs] And it’s like, uhh, Kara, you probably should have stayed Jaka for, ehh, 15 more seconds than that. You're getting a nice round of applause. So anytime somebody says “Cerebus the Radio Show”, that's the memory that comes to mind.
Matt: The second thing is, Mike sent me an email saying that he's missing some issues of “Cerebus in Hell?” and does AV sell? And I haven't responded to him yet, because the answer is… sort of?
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Like, if you were to send you a list and a check, you'd send him a bunch of issues. But at the same…
Dave: Uhh, yeah. Yeah. Keep going.
Matt: But at the same time, the other part of it is, if he sends Hobbs a check, Hobbs will send him the issues. If he sends Birdsong a check, Birdsong will send the-- I mean, you know. They're out there if he wants them, it's just, well what is he looking for?
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: Like, “I need issue two of the miniseries”, well you're gonna get a copy of “Swords of Cerebus in Hell?” buddy! [laughs]
Dave: Yeah. Yeah, I'll tell you that one of the things that I'm wrestling with right now is phoning or faxing Todd Hignite at Heritage Auctions and going… look, if this is a major cancel culture thing, how far do we have to drive sales down on “Cerebus in Hell?” before Dave Sim gives up? And it's like, mhmm, I don't think that's gonna happen this time, but if you want to do that, and you think that getting the sales down to 1500 is gonna do it, at some time that's worm’s gonna turn, and a bunch of people are going to start reading these and going, “Actually, Dave Sim was way ahead of the curve on the whole cancel culture thing and weird liberal jargon and all the rest of it. These are hilarious. How do I get these?” And of course, we started numbering the individual copies with “The Varking Dead” Issue, which I think was 37. And so, part of me wants to phone Todd Hignite, and go, okay, they're all individually numbered. The Cerebus Archive has the first 105 of them sequentially. I'm hanging on to one, two, and three. What if I pick a number and go, Rolly, pull out all of the #10 from 37 through whatever the latest one is that's just come out. I think we're just at the low 70s now, and it's like, would Heritage be interested in getting all of the #10s, and slabbing them? Presumably they're all 9.8, or pretty close to 9.8 because they were all bagged and boarded as soon as they came in from Marquis. So they are a pedigree collection, these are Cerebus Archive copies. And what would they auction for, all of the #10s. If only because, people are now rethinking it and going, “Oh these are disgusting. These are terrible. This shouldn't be allowed to be printed. How can decent comic book stores sell this crap? Dave Sim is destroying his legacy! Blah blah blah blah blah blah.” And okay, well, there's now 50, 60 issues, where there’s only 1500, 1800 copies of them. And that's in perpetuity. All of those are, they have smaller circulation, smaller print runs than “Cerebus” #1 did. So when does the worm turn? And I don't have as many copies of the early issues of “Cerebus” now, because there wasn't this active campaign to drive down the circulation and eradicate this horrible horrible comic book that shouldn't be allowed to exist. But when I saw that that was happening, it's like, okay, I want 100 of these. I don't know how I'm going to end up selling them, but I'll end up selling them at some point. Mike Sewall is definitely part of the family. If you want to send a cheque for “Cerebus in Hell?” that you're missing. The early issues, probably not going to happen. So it would be after issue 37 where the Cerebus Archive has like 100 of them. If I recognize your name, [laughs] and it's like, I definitely recognize Mike Sewall's name at this point. Mike, you want to work something out, you decide what it's worth to you, send me a cheque for that, and I'll get Rolly to tell you what the postage was, and we're all done. We're straight ahead.
Matt: Well, I'll let Mike know, but first I'm gonna get the list of what's he looking for, cause I started buying two copies of each issue after I think the second one, because, well, you know, I can throw $10 at Dave a month, or $8, or whatever it is. So I have my copy, and then I have a second copy, and some months I was getting two copies, some months I only got one. Some months I didn't get any, and that's when I’m on the email to Hobbs of, hey Ben, can you help me out? And then he sends them to me, but they're signed and personalized. And I'm like, well, I can't read that!
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: But, you know, if the AMoC guy has any of the issues Mike's looking for, I would cut him a deal. And then after that it'd be, well, okay, if they're real early, yeah, you're probably s.o.l. but you know if it's something that Dave's got, yeah, we can go through Dave. Otherwise, like I said, Hobbs and Birdsong have boxes of comics that they're starting to wonder what did they get themselves into?
Dave: Really. Really. If you're gonna fill up your living space just trying to stay current with the book that you're a part of a team on. I understand that syndrome more clearly now, what it is that I'm doing to people, because I'm having the same problems with “Comics Revue,” which has filled up every available space I have given it, and it's like Rick Norwood keeps publishing them, pretty darn regularly. So I now have a stack of, I think, five or six of them under my bed, [laughs] and it's like, no I don't want these under my bed. It's like, Rolly, how are we doing over on the storage unit? Because he's already moved all of the correspondence over there, and you start bagging, boarding, and boxing 100 copies of a monthly comic book, year after year, that's pretty much what Camp David is devoted to now.
Matt: So what I'm hearing here is, I shouldn't send the copies that I've signed that are in a box waiting to get mailed out?
Dave: You can do whatever you want! We're, we don't know how extensive a problem this is. I tend to picture most of the Cerebus audience as being, “Okay, I wasn't crazy about ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ I didn't buy it when it was coming out,” but we're re-listing them with Diamond on a regular basis where they're filling the orders on “Swords of Cerebus in Hell?” out of their inventory, and we've still got inventory. If you're cool with “Swords of Cerebus in Hell?”, just go to your local store, get the order code, and there you go. You can you can “complete your collection.” If you're OCD about having the actual back issues, we haven't really worked anything out on that yet.
Matt: Oh no no, I'm saying I have a box of every time I'm involved in an issue, and they send me the 25 copies. I signed five of them to mail back up to you, and it's like, oh yeah, I gotta get that box up to Dave. And then you know the next set comes in and it's, oh yeah, I really gotta get these signed and put them in the box and get it up to Dave.
Dave: Right. Right, I see what you're saying.
Matt: And then Eddie sends me an email, “Hey, Hello Spawnee’s in this year's calendar issue. Do you want any copies?” I'm like yeah, you probably should send them to me. And the box showed up, and Paula’s like, “What did you order this time?” I’m like, no no, this is the freebie stuff I get in the mail that you don't want to deal with, it's not the stuff I'm paying money for.
Dave: Right.There’s a difference here, Paula! [laughs]
Matt: I have two short boxes full of issues I'm involved in, and it's like, the one’s all “Vark Wars”, that makes sense to me, like yes, I have a crap load of these because I put a lot of work into them. But then it's like, there's the other boxes, like what's in here? And I'm like, oh yeah, the copies of “Spider-Whore” that I got that my name's on the cover but I had nothing else to do with it. Yeah, yeah, I should probably do something with those. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Well, some days those will be rare. No Matt Dow, but with his name on the cover. This is the only comic book that you can say that about.
Matt: Well, I don't know if I sent them up the last box I sent up, or if they're in the box that's to go up, but it was one of these, well, I didn't do anything so I really shouldn't be signing them. I’m like, well, I can do stuff to it now!
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: It's like, my Grandparents had a “Peanuts” paperback collection, and one of my Uncles one day got bored and went through and drew mustaches on every single character.
Dave: [laughs] That's pretty bored!
Matt: And then put it back on the bookshelf, and 30 years later when I'm visiting the Grandparents as a little kid, I’m like, I'm bored! It’s, “Well, you can read something” and it’s like, all these novels. I'm sure they were great, I'm sure it was probably like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and the literary giants. It’s like, yeah, here's a “Peanuts” trade paperback, I'm you know five, I'm gonna read comics. And I started reading, like, hey, somebody put mustaches on this! And my Grandfather rather quietly grumbled, “That was your Uncle.” [laughs]
Dave: That was your Uncle.
Matt: “We didn't throw the book away because it's a book and you paid money for it, but at the same time there's a reason why your Uncle's as short as he is, because I smacked him down.
Dave: [laughs] And he will never live that down! Okay, you've got “don't read the bracketed bit out loud!” Okay, I'm not reading the bracketed bit out loud.
Matt: Alright. [clears throat] Say Dave, whenever I'm in Huntington, New York, I shop at Escape Pod Comics.
Dave: [stiltedly] And how often is that, Matt?
Matt: Shut up and read the copy, Sim.
Dave: Celebrating 10 years! How about that? 3,650 sleeps. 1.43 in dog years. 10 years in business. Escape Pod Comics. 302 Main Street Huntington, New York 11743. It's a zip code that just rolls off the tongue. And all sorts of events planned to celebrate, but unfortunately, things haven't turned out that great, as Menachem says (you're supposed to say it like you've got a Brillo pad stuck in your throat) Menachem says, “More than the general climbing out of the lockdown, which put us back on the unsteady ground of our first few years financially, the approach of our 10th anniversary meant that I spent a lot of time working on projects that would be done in conjunction with that milestone than our usual Winter ‘income enhancers’ such as rare back issues and specialty sales. As we entered into 2023, it became clear that for a multitude of reasons these events were not going to happen as planned. Things culminated when our ‘centerpiece’ signing's book was delayed, and hence the event canceled. And that's when I realized, we were further behind on things finance-wise than I had realized. And now had even fewer options to increase business as I had intended to for January and February.” So, he's asking people to buy e-gift cards from the Escape Pod Comics’ website. ‘http://escapepodcomics.com/”. Because even though Escape Pod Comics is based in Huntington, New York, they'll ship anywhere. And thanks to the modern miracle of PayPal, you can literally change every penny you own into Escape Pod Comics e-gift cards. It's like “Jack and the Beanstalk” with your bank account as the family cow, and Escape Pod Comics e-gift cards as the magic beans. Escape Pod Comics e-gift cards, they're like the goose that laid the golden Bitcoin, except these are always worth what you paid for them.
Isn't that neat, Dave? Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Matt: That's http://escapepodcomics.com/ , tell them Cerebus sent ya! Okay, Matt, what's the next question?
Dave: I'm more confused than I usually am during these things.
Moving on to Easton, Pennsylvania Michael R asks, “Hi Matt, not sure if you'll be calling Dave for Please Hold…” [laughs] We still got him shaken up about the fact that this is this is temporary. It's okay Michael, I think we're here for a while. “But here's my question. Hi Dave, in ‘Jaka’s Story’, leading up to page 213, Jaka was at the bar telling Cerebus that every place she visited, she asked for water, and was given wine. Was this a conscious or unconscious act done on your part to use an apposite Biblical reference for having wine given instead of water? I'm guessing the same thing when ‘Dave’ asks Cerebus for Coors Light and was given red wine. Then Jaka actually tasting Coors Light.” Yes, I appreciate you mentioning that, because I had forgotten writing that part. Which was, my assumption is that Rick, after his part of “Rick's Story” went off and essentially started reenacting John's Gospel, including chapter two with the wedding in Canaan and the water into wine. So the the question for me was, [sneezes] excuse me. With Rick now having gone off panel to enact that, what would be the opposite of the Johannine Jesus’ mother? And so just to, let's refresh everybody's memory, this is the interlinear, “And to the day the third, marriage occurred in Cana of the Galilee, and was the mother of the Jesus there. Was called however also the Jesus and the Disciples of him into the marriage. And having become lacking of wine, is saying the mother of the Jesus toward him, wine not they are having. And is saying to her the Jesus, what to me and to you woman not yet is arriving the hour of thee. Is saying the mother of him to the servants, what likely he may be saying to you do you. Were over there of stone water jars six according to the purification of the Jews lying, having placed for up measures two or three, is saying to them to Jesus fill you the water jars of water, and they filled them until upper part, and he is saying to them draw you out now and be bringing to the governor of the dining room. He however brought, as whoever tasted the governor of the dining room the water wine having become, and not he had known where from it is, he offers servants to know having drawn out the water the assounders of the bridegroom the governor of the dining room and is saying to him, every man first the fine wine is placing and whenever they might become drunk, the inferior. You have kept the fine wine until right now.” So what I was essentially doing was saying, okay, what is the opposite of that where Johannine Jesus mother, which to me is distinct from the Blessed Virgin, who is the synoptic Jesus’ mother. Having become lacking of wine, she was desirous of wine, and all that was available was water. So I thought it would be the sort of reciprocal analogous enactment that Jaka as she's just traveling in her mind randomly, is going from bar to bar to bar, trying to get somebody to give her a glass of water, as opposed to being lacking of wine, she's just lacking water, and everywhere she goes they give her wine. And don't even register when she says, “I asked you for water” and just walk away. All you're getting is wine. And trying to include myself in the enactment, it's like, I'm not Jesus and I'm not Rick, so that's why I asked Cerebus for Coors Light, I was still drinking Coors Light at that time. And I'm given red wine! So it's, okay, this is definitely the opposite side of the equation. The actual enactment is taking place off-panel, and this is like the distinction between burlesque and vaudeville. This is the burlesque of John chapter two.
“And just for fun, after listening to last month's Please Hold for you, you and Matt spoke about toadstool among mushrooms. By sheer coincidence, I found that you used ‘toadstool among the mushrooms,’ where are we going? “On the bottom of page 233 in ‘Rick's Story’, where Bear was talking to Marty,” and let's remember that 233 was the “Kryptonite no more” issue of “Superman” with the Neal Adams cover that later became a Canadian stamp. That's really stretching, stretching, stretching comic art metaphysics, but that's part of what we’re here for.
Matt: Well, when Mike must only listen to the podcast, because when I made the video I put that panel in the video.
Dave: Oh that's okay! Yeah, I understand now you wrote under here, “Matt says, I put that panel in the video, twice!” [sneezes] Okay. There you go Mike, thanks for participating as always. And another other regular, and another Michael, Mike Grabowski asks, where are we here? “Hi Dave and Matt, I apologize if that has been asked before, and you can move on to the next question if it has, I just finished reading ‘Going Home’ again, and it occurred to me how weird the Cirinist adulation of Jaka seemed. She had an abortion, wouldn't that make her anathema to a religious order that idolizes motherhood? Yet she's traveling freely with a male companion, such as he is, and basically being treated like Princess Diana. I'm curious,” [sneezes] excuse me. “I'm curious how she received her peculiar redemption.” Well I'm not sure that it's a redemption. I wouldn't call it redemptive. Let's finish letting Michael have his say. “I can understand the general populace being foolishly charmed by her, but I assume that all the ones in robes, habits? What do you call their uniforms?” Uh, yeah, habits will do it. “Would have been indoctrinated away from indulging in celebrity worship. If it's a political compromise with a presumably still-powerful Palnu that she receives good diplomatic treatment, I still don't get why some of the adoration that we witnessed is allowed.” [coughs] Excuse me again. I can't seem to clear my throat. Adoration, particularly, I want to select my words carefully here, of the iconic female totem sort, tends to slip the surly bonds of Earth despite all efforts of those surly bonds to contain it. The Adoration of Princess Diana is a good example, whatever you thought, and I'm going to specifically address this on the female side of reality, which is really what you're talking about. This relationship between the Ciriists and Jaka, the princess of Palnu seems off, [coughs] so what we're talking about is an exclusively female side of reality thing which is what I was documenting in “Going Home,” [coughs] whatever you thought as a woman, as a female royalist, as a female British subject. Let's upscale it to its highest hierarchical situation, as a female member of the Royal Family, as a female member of the Fleet Street Press in the UK, as a female member of the world wide press, Everyone, everyone went weak in the knees, not just in meeting Princess Diana, but in proximity to her. Which meant she lived in the molten core of her own cult of personality force field. And so it is with Jaka and the Cirinists, what they were indoctrinated to feel and think about her turned itself upside down in proximity to her, which meant her reality superseded theirs at the point of interface. It's a mind-boggling factual circumstance that we still haven't really come to terms with, that this is what happened. That the glamour that Queen Elizabeth brought to the throne in 1953, and the same sort of week in the knees. It's not her majesty the Queen, [coughs] God's anointed on Earth, and you know, the defender of the faith. It's also a hot chick, which is a really really interesting meeting point as society is degrading to the point where there becomes a co-equivalence and then an inversion where the hot chick becomes more important than the contextual figure in the God’s anointed on Earth, defender of the faith thing. We saw that when Princess Diana died, with the completely excessive, I would suggest completely pagan bombardment of balloons and teddy bears and everything outside of Buckingham Palace, and really, really extreme signage. Heaven has its Queen. The people's princess. Princess Diana was definitely a hot looking chick, and was definitely a very, very glamorous woman, but it wasn't coincidental remotely in the larger scale of things that, I think it was a week after Princess Diana died that Mother Teresa died. And it's like, okay, reality check. This one's important, this one is just a weird corruption, but a weird corruption to which, not only does the whole female side of reality not have a resistance to, but is just absolutely, you wanna talk about a pandemic, and you wanna talk about going viral. That subdivided into the present Princess of Wales, and the future Queen consort Kate and Megan. It's, okay, this is the best that can be hoped for, is that Princess Diana subdivides into two versions that, again, the whole female side of the universe is completely enthralled to. Has absolutely no immunity to it, and that's what I saw taking place at the time. I didn't know how it was going to hatch out, but it's hatched out very, very predictably.
Michael continues, “Outside of the story, I can say that I enjoy rereading this book, and remembering the year and a half or so that ‘Cerebus’ was a romance comic. I was a sucker for Princess/Lady Di back in those days, as I suppose the previous generation of our culture was for Princess Grace or Jackie K/O.” Couple of good analogies there, yes, definitely along the same genetic and spiritual stream, one decending into the other. “And in my now advanced years I can see the stick with which you were poking me about it in this book, as well as generally showing all the Jaka fanboys in your then-readership what we must have looked like to a more objective bystander.” Yeah, I'm not gonna pretend that I'm an objective bystander in that. Whatever, again what I think and feel, mostly think, but to some degree feel, about Megan, the Duchess of Sussex, sitting here talking to you on the phone, if I was in proximity to her, I would go weak in the knees, and I would be completely tongue-tied. The “I want to connect with this. This is, we don't even have words for this in our society, but if I can just think of something that I could tell her that would amuse her and and make her laugh” it's that's the thing devoutly to be wished. Which is why you can't really can't fault what those people turn into, it is the molten core of a cult of personality where whatever it is that you're reading about yourself in the newspapers and reading about yourself online, you don't experience that in any kind of personal contact. Everybody is just weak in the knees when they meet you and completely tongue-tied. What a very very strange way to live. “Thanks to you and to Gerhard for producing such a great looking and great reading book, and to Sean R and any other art/restoration/financial contributor for making it look and read even better in the relatively new edition.” And I'll second that. Thank you, Michael Grabowski for reporting in.
And we're down to the last three, right? We had some some late arrivals here.
Matt: Yes, they miraculously showed up.
Dave: [laughs] Hey, it was like bing bing bing?
Matt: Hey, you'll see. I'm not gonna spoil the surprise till the end. [laughs]
Dave: Okay. All right. “Jolly hello to you Dave. Long long time reader, first time on Please Hold. Fingers crossed I make the cut.” And yes by the by the blessings of grace and Matt Dow, who arbitrates these things, you've made the cut. “I heard that you're doing a Turtles/Cerebus Remastered. Can you provide details?” And on the technical side, no. I know that Sean had one of the early, early printings of the Turtles collection that Kevin and Peter did at the same time that I had done “High Society,” which is easily the clearest copies that exist, and then Sean did his Sean thing, which we all have to agree is just jaw-dropping restoration. Even in the ashcan size, which when you're talking about reducing duotone shade to that size, I still thumb through that, going, it's all here. Even under the jeweler's loop and under the magnifier lamp, absolutely nothing is missing here. So it's Sean's usual amazing remaster. Waverly Press is publishing it. Matt can give you a link to the Kickstarter, which is ongoing. Creeping up on or exceeding thirty thousand dollars in the first 24 hours, and with a lot of great covers, variant covers. It’s, we're really devoting a lot of time for this to try and get it connected to as many Turtles fans who, like most of the comic book field exist in the lariv, the antiviral world that Dave Sim inhabits, so that we're hoping that more people don't find out about the Turtles/Cerebus Remaster after the fact, and we got 30 days to do that. I had to take today off to do all of my, I hope usually thorough, research on Please Hold for Dave Sim, but I will be right back at it again trying to think, and Matt trying to think, and Dagon trying to think, how do we let people know about this in the information technology age? Anybody that wants to help with that, the worst that happens is that you tell people about the Turtles/Cerebus Remastered crossover, and they just don't register at all. But, in just about any age group in their 40s or younger than that, Turtles definitely lights up their world in a “I remember the Turtles and that's one of those things that makes me happy.” Well, if you weren't there back before the Turtles movies and back before the mass merchandising, here's a chance to visit it, and I hope you find something in your price range, and I hope you enjoy it when you get them.
And Tom Richards, “Dear Dave, I saw on the Turtles Eight Kickstarter that there are add-ons for ‘Cerebus’ #1, ‘Cerebus’ #2, and ‘Spawn’ 10. Are any of those completely new versions?” As far as I know, no. The cover on “Cerebus” #1 is new. I think that was a decision on Dagon's part, because I had done a number of riffs on the “Cerebus” #1 cover on the Cerebus Sketchbook cover, which basically just has the Aardvark-Vanaheim presents logo, the “Cerebus” logo, and the top of the flames. And I thought, well okay, apart from not literally tracing cover of #1, which I didn't really want to do, what can I do in terms of a a new drawing that I can auction or that people can commission that is the same cover but just viewed a different way? This is the essence of the Cerebus figure, but here it is through Dave Sim’s sensibility 40 years later on, which is going to be a completely different sensibility. “The covers to the ‘Cerebus’ #2 and the ‘Spawn’ 10 seem to be the same as those in the remaster.” Yes, because I did several “Spawn” 10 variant covers for the Remastered Spawn 10 Kickstarter, and I think one of those particularly stuck with Dagon and he went, “Let's not quarrel with success, if you missed the Spawn 10 Kickstarter, here's the one that you probably are going to want.” And “Cerebus” #2 is, mhmm, it's “Cerebus” #2. I did three versions of that. I think the same thing, Dagon’s decided, “Okay, let's pick one. Let's not make this too complicated. We've already got, whatever it is, 17 variant covers for Turtles Eight? Let's just do ‘Cerebus’ #2. If you got in on the ‘Spawn’ 10 and the ‘Cerebus’ #1, and ‘Cerebus’ #2 Remastered versions” unless Pagan's done something different this time, as far as I know that's exactly what's in the Turtles Eight Kickstarter. So, if you've already got those, save your money for something else.
“Greetings Dave! I can't wait for the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ #8 Remastered to hit my mailbox.” We hope it's gonna hit it lightly, because we want it to stay in mint. “The new covers are great, and a lot of amazing variants. Count me in! That does beg the question, however, ‘Cerebus’ #1, ‘Spawn’ #10, ‘Cerebus’ #2, now “TMNT” #8. What's next? Nuff said, Arthur Graham.” Thanks for checking in with us here, Arthur. I have a “Cerebus” #3 blue Line print out, where Alfonso prints a copy of the, in this case, “Cerebus” #3 cover in light blue on artboard that I can ink on. It's not as big as the original covers on the early issues. It's definitely bigger than the size-as cover for “Cerebus” #2 original that I did back then. And whenever I do have like the spare moment, and I don't have very many spare moments these days, it's always sitting just on the other side of my drawing board. And particularly, if I've had a good session inking other things. TMNT #8 covers, the original art cards, a good session of that, I will grab the #3 cover and do some inking on it. So I've got most of the Red Sophia figure done. I've got Cerebus done. I've got a little bit on the foliage. As to whether that's next, it'll be Waverly Press. This will be, “Cerebus” #3 will uh… Dagon is our rainmaker, our Kickstarter rainmaker, so he will be rain making, but whether it would be next, that's another question. Dagon’s also got almost everything done, virtually everything done, on the book about the 1982 U.S. tour, which includes my tour diary and photos and sketches from the tour. Dagon always wants to schedule a bunch of things simultaneously, and I go, no, we're gonna go one at a time. After Turtles Eight, after whatever the next thing is that Aardvark-Vanaheim will be doing a Kickstarter on, it could be “Cerebus” #3 Remastered, or it could be the tour diary, or it could be the next trade paperback/hardcover.
Matt: “The Last Day.”
Dave: What's that?
Matt: “The Last Day” is the next one.
Dave: Uhh, we’re not certain about that. There’s little noises being made, about… well, “The Last Day” is in the pipeline, but it's one of those, okay, what's our next best shot. “Guys” is another book that we probably have the same treatment. We're still trying to figure out how to get the softcover and the hardcover to play together nicely. Whichever one it is, which is we might be doing “Cerebus” #3 Remastered or the 1982 book about the tour, before we do the next hardcover/softcover. So, it seems like an easy question, Arthur, to say, what's next. Next in what sense? Immediately coming up next on the program? Everything is very, very fluid at this point, as the politicians say.
Matt: So, what were the name of the three guys?
Dave: Arthur Graham, Tom Richards, and Ed Coates.
Matt: Do you remember those three guys?
Dave:Uhh… ehhh… oooh…
Matt: As my father has said for years ,because he's a drinker, “Alcohol kills brain cells and at this point I'm down to the last one and we're deli slicing it.”
Dave: [laughs] It’s from that time period.
Matt: Well, so, he has since evolved to, when I ask him a question he doesn't remember, he'll say, “The brain cell isn't slowing down,” or “the brain cell isn't stopping.”
Dave: Okay.
Matt: So I'm gonna go on a limb here and say you don't remember these three famous Cerebus fans?
Dave: Famous Cerebus fans?
Matt: Oh yeah!
Dave: Oh yeah.
Matt: In the history of Cerebus fandom, these three names, these three individuals rank up pretty high. Margaret might know who they are. I doubt it, but she might. Everybody else in fandom’s probably right now going, “Wait, what did they say?” and try to back up the recording.
Dave: Ed Coates, Tom Richards, Arthur Graham. Boy, you'd think it would be at least bringing a dim bell somewhere. Grandpa moment for Dave!
Matt: Well,as I said, these three miraculously showed up today. For anybody that's backed previous Waverly Press Aardvark-Vanaheim projects, if you have “Cerebus” #2, flip to the letters page. Those are the first three guys to ever write letters in.
Dave: [laughs] Okay! All right.
Matt: So Dave, you remember these guys? [laughs]
Dave: I don't remember the guys, but now that you're saying the “Cerebus” #2 letters page. One of them I made up. I mean one of the letters in “Cerebus” #2 I made up because I didn't have enough letters. But it sounds like these are the real guys.
Matt: Well, no, what happened is our good friend and the, how did she phrase it? The interim Aardvark-Vanaheim Strange Death of Alex Raymond fundraiser organizer, Jen DiGiacomo sent me an email asking about something else, and my response was, she's asking about a fax and I'm like, I haven't gotten that fax or it's one of the many faxes I have that I'm not dealing with cause right now it's Please Hold time, all I'm thinking about is Please Hold.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And she responded to it and said, “Oh well, if you need a couple ringers to bring up the topic of the Kickstarter, here you go.” And the first letter of the first sentence of each one of these spells out “JDG”.
Dave: Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck.
Matt: And she put those three names cause she thinks you made up all the letters in #2.
Dave: [laughs] No, no. There were real letters in #2. Oh, that's such a JDG thing to do.
Matt: Well, it's one of those, I got the email and I'm like, well, considering that the first topic on the list of questions is “let's check the big board to see where it's at”, I don't think I need to find a subtle way to bring it up. But at the same time, if I get a question and it's reasonably before you call, I will send it up. I'm like, well let's see if he recognizes the names as, “Oh wait, I made that guy up.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Oh that's funny. And it's, yeah, I'll tell you, one of the centerpieces of Please Hold for Dave Sim, is you take everything at face value. If one of them has been signed Napoleon Bonaparte I would be answering very earnestly and as sincerely as possible, whatever Napoleon was asking about. Because that’s part of the job description.
Matt: Well, and--
Dave: Okay! [laughs] I think that's a wrap now, are we gonna close with the big board and…
Matt: Wait, let me just hit the button here and get to the big board. No, that’s not it.
Dave: Because we're at ten to nine Eastern Standard Time.
Matt: Come on, button! Oh, that'd be why. I'm on the page, but I zoomed in. The big board says, and we're loading, and we're thinking, and we're loading, and we're thinking… we're at $31,188 with 221 backers.
Dave: [makes fanfare music sounds] That's pretty impressive. That's still not up to “Spawn”’s first day, but we’re in a completely different reality from that one. That's the giant pile of question marks. How much is printing costing more than it did? How much less money do people have to throw around? How actively can we get to people that we've never gotten to before? The third one is the only one that I can have any kind of impact on, and you can have any impact on, and Dagon can have any impact on. And trust us, folks, we are gonna be running flat out for the month of March, and we'll see if the tortoise can actually beat the hare.
Matt: So, leading up to this, doing the countdown, I made the mock-up of Sim & Dow's ”Teenage” Mutant Ninja Cerebi with you and the ninja weapons, and I was using “it'll be X number of days until that image from the Waverly Place launches” and then it would be the sleeps card. And now I'm going to replace that with an AMoC news, The Newsroom with Iguana reading what's on the big board. So you know every day as I post it's going to be, okay, here's where we're at as of when I hit post.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I still have to make the second version where you actually did the ninja poses that the Turtles did. That was on my “oh I gotta get this done” and then I got busy.
Dave: Okay. I decided to really go as authentic as possible. Rolly, we had the page that I tore out of one of the Heritage Auctions catalogs of the 9.2 “Turtles” #1 with a Kevin Eastman autograph and head sketch on it, and I would tilt it toward me and go, okay, this I think is the pose, and then turn it towards Rolly, and he would say, “Uh no, the one arm's got to be up a little higher. Over a little more, over a little more.” And we got it done, and he was kneeling on the one side of the chair, and the last thing that I did I was kneeling, and it's like when we stood up, both of our ninja days are over. Our knees were a mess! So I hope you'll send a scan of that through Rolly. I would like to see how that one turns out. I had my original UK tour 86 sleeveless t-shirt on for those poses. We're gonna go completely authentic 1986. And 1986 just as if it is 37 years ago.
Matt: Well it's, looking at the first one I did, I'm like I screwed up cause you're wearing the “Approval is an Authoritarian Construct” shirt, and the angle's pretty good. I'm like, I should have replaced that with one of the three covers you drew for each of the three Daves I had, ause I'm like, oh that would be perfect. And then I looked at the the new pictures, I’m like, nope, the angle's all wrong. I can turn the image but you're not gonna see that it's the cover.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So I’m gonna leave the UK shirt probably. It's something I'm gonna be working on tomorrow and Saturday, and by Saturday night I should have it done, cause it's one of those, it's too stupid to not work on.
Dave: [laughs] And where everybody else is, it is Saturday, we're the only ones still stuck in Thursday.
Matt: Well, the way it works is, the first thing I do is make the audio, that gets post and goes live, so it'll usually be Friday nights, and then I share the link on Facebook and Twitter. And I always say, AMoC Gold VIP Members get early access, and I've had two people now respond going, “How do you become a VIP access member?” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: You click the link! It’s not any… it’s a made up thing. It's, you know, I should make t-shirts and put them on the TeePublic shop and see if we can sell a gold logo AMoC. You know, the “Cerebus” #4 gold AMoC logo that was on the back, put that on a shirt in gold ink, and be like, it's the AMoC VIP Gold members, and see if all of a sudden the site instead of getting $12 in sales gets like, I don't know, two or three hundred. And it'll be like, well that's it. That's apparently was the one we were waiting for.
Dave: No, the only person who would do it is the person who asked the question. We already know the answer to that one.
Matt: Yeah, but there's two different people..
Dave: And probably they wouldn’t. They just, they’re sitting at their computer. They might as well type the question and his send. It's the internet of things experience. Okay, that's gonna do it, Matt. It's almost nine o'clock and Grandpa's hungry.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: So Grandpa's gonna go and eat.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Okay. Say hi to Paula and Janice and Bullwinkle for me.
Matt: Will do. And hopefully we'll be doing this again next month, and you'll be dancing around because of all’s the monies that we threw at the Kickstarter.
Dave: Oh, I think that’s a guarantee already. I’m doing that tomorrow!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Have a good night, Matt.
Matt: You too, Dave. Bye!
Dave: Buh-bye.
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
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Friend to the Blog, James Bing-Bong-Shama-Lama-Ding-Dong Smith has a new Papa Balloon and Cactus Comic on the Kickstarter. 44 hours to go, and he needs $104 to make it. He's got bundles of all the issues he's made so far, so if you're new to Papa Balloon & Cactus, you can get all caught up for fifty bucks. Dave recommends it:
And, coming in February, The 1982 Tour Book (click the link to be notified on launch). They've been sharing updates on the Instagram.
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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)
Wanderland (Hardcover for the guys who get "hard" for hardcovers...)
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:
Hardcover
Paperback
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.
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Larry Shell could use a hand to keep his house.
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Dave also wanted me to post this:
Friend to the Blog, James Bing-Bong-Shama-Lama-Ding-Dong Smith has a new Papa Balloon and Cactus Comic on the Kickstarter. 44 hours to go, and he needs $104 to make it. He's got bundles of all the issues he's made so far, so if you're new to Papa Balloon & Cactus, you can get all caught up for fifty bucks. Dave recommends it:
 |
| Highly! |
And, coming in February, The 1982 Tour Book (click the link to be notified on launch). They've been sharing updates on the Instagram.
______________
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)
Wanderland (Hardcover for the guys who get "hard" for hardcovers...)
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:
Hardcover
Paperback
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.
____________
Larry Shell could use a hand to keep his house.
____________
Dave also wanted me to post this:
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Up to 35% off January 28-February 1.*
*Sale dates are not final and therefore subject to change.
Speaking of Merch, if you want a strange near-antique, shoot an email to momentofcerebus@gmail.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:
- The original art to Cerebus: the Six Deadly Sins Cover, Avarice, and Gluttony? Why doesn't Dave have this? (Coming soon)
- Cerebus #81 page 11 (coming soon)
- Cerebus #81 page 12 (coming soon)
And ComicLink (remember ComicLink? Seiler brought us ComicLink. R.I.P Jeff.) has:
- Cerebus #39, page 8 (coming in February)
- And a list of ALL the issues they got
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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1 comment:
Thanks again for the shout-out!
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