Hi, Everybody!
Mondays!
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Jesse Lee Herndon has caught up to Dave and I on the Please Hold Transcripts, And since I'm out of Proto-Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, I may as well start knocking out these transcripts.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
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[guitar music]
Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt! How are you doing?
Matt: Better then most, worse than some.
Dave: [laughs] Or a vice-versa.
Matt: Possibly. Possibly.
Dave: It's really hard to tell, we don't have that much overview. So are we recording?
Matt: We are indeed recording.
Dave: We are recording. Okay. You start off with, “Dave, April (not the broad in the overalls who hangs out with underage mutants and a giant New York rat),” uh, are we allowed to say that these days? “A broad”?
Matt: I'm allowed to say whatever I want, as they drag me kicking and screaming to the gallows.
Dave: [laughs] Okay, you’ll take the rap for that one. Okay. It's interesting that you would mention April, because that's one of the things I'm trying to work up my nerve to ask Kevin about, because April was his girlfriend the time, either at the time the Turtles were created, or shortly after the Turtles were created, and later became his first wife. And he also, as far as I understand, briefly dated whoever the actress was who played April in the first Turtles movie.
Matt: [laughs] That..
Dave: And it's like, well, I would really like to know, like how weird is that, from a fairly subjective viewpoint, and with 40 years of retrospect at this point, was any of that a good idea? And then wanted to ask him about the, either I think it was a birthday present the one year, that April gave him a U.S. army tank.
Matt: [laughs] Well, going back to, he named the character April after the girl he was either dating or he soon started dating. That, kids, is comic book metaphysics writ large!
Dave: Yes, which is kind of intentional, as well. It's like, if there was any kind of blowback out of that, you have no nobody to blame but the man in the mirror. Anyway, okay, we digressed on that. I'm still mulling that over for the next time that I talk to Kevin, promoting the Kevin Eastman Collection Part 2 at Heritage Auctions in June. “Then question/agenda, I must admit to a rabbit season/duck season as to whom is supposed to remember Jeff Seiler. So if you know, you tell me when we talk, and if it's me, I'll remember Jeff. And if it's you, it's Jeff who?” It's my turn, and comic metaphysics again being what it is, as I was mulling over, okay, what am I going to talk about Jeff this time? I've been cleaning the Off-White House, as distinct from tidying the Off-White House. Really getting right down to cleaning all the corners and nooks and crannies and vacuuming and etc etc. And I was cleaning the Weekly Update room, where I record the Weekly Updates, and I had found the pile of “Cerebus in Hell?” variant covers, which Rowley has scanned and will be emailing to you or already has emailed to you. And under that pile of covers was a copy of “Cerebus in Hell?” #0 and with it was Jeff Seiler's corrections for “Cerebus in Hell?” #0 from December 2016. [laughs] And this was one of those, we both described how Jeff could be pretty much the most annoying person on the planet inadvertently. I don't think he was ever intentionally annoying, but it was just something in his DNA. Here I'm doing “Cerebus in Hell?” with Sandeep Atwell, the first one has come out, #0, and I'm just hoping, can this catch on? Can I keep this going longer than I did “glamourpuss”, let's say, or “Cerebus Archive” the comic book. And mission accomplished on that score. And just waiting for the reaction as we're debuting the strips on A Moment of Cerebus, and virtually the first and only reaction is Jeff Seiler doing corrections of what he considered typos. And it's like, [sighs] it's a humour comic! I'm hoping people are laughing. Can somebody say at least “lol” or something like that? I think people eventually did, but definitely the first response each time that we debuted the strips was Jeff Seiler finding corrections to what he thought he was I was doing wrong. His first correction on this list, is page two, panel two, balloon two, line one comma two. “It's okay as is, but it just doesn't quite work. I would either change the period after Virgil to a comma, or I would leave that period and instead change the period after buddy to a comma. I prefer the former.” And it was like, oh now here's another can of worms that I don't mind being opened, but not when I'm just trying to get a humour comic rolling. The line is.. where are we here? Dante is saying, “No, Virgil, buddy. That's the 95.7 FM traffic helicopter.” When they're looking up at the star in the heavens. And it's like, no Jeff, I'm writing comedy. You don't punctuate comedy the way that you would punctuate a newspaper article, where it's like there’s hard and fast rules. You have to take those hard and fast rules and say, okay, what does a period do, what does a comma do, in terms of the reading speed, and so that the reader is reading it in their head in the comedic tempo that I'm trying to get. So it's “No, Virgil, buddy.” It's, okay, how do you get that so that you get the exact spacing between Virgil's name and buddy the nickname? And I did, I think it was a phone conversation, not a fax or a letter to Jeff, try to explain this, and I think I was still trying to explain it at the time of his passing. That it's just, no, you punctuate comedy differently than you do in terms of formal proofreading. And it was just, the perfect storm of I'm sweating bullets hoping that this thing is going to be successful, or at least can be kept going, and Jeff Seiler’s is treating it like a page out of the New York Times and there's a style guide where, “This is where a comma belongs, and this is where a period belongs.” So I'm gonna keep that one next to the phone, and we will revisit the next time it's my turn, Jeff Seiler proofreading in formal typographical terms, “Cerebus” #0.
Matt: [laughs] I think you kind of nailed that, it's supposed to be funny, it doesn't matter if the grammar’s “correct” as long as you chuckle when you read it. Hopefully you're not chuckling, going, “Ha ha, that comma's in the wrong spot.”
Dave: Right! [laughs] And that was the only reaction from him. He never said, “These are really funny” or “I got a good laugh out of this one.” It's like, I know you're not trying to cut my throat, Jeff, but you're cutting my throat. Okay, and then we move on from that one, and you say, “And we should probably pause to thank all the suckers,” uh we'll come back to that, “I mean, lovely patrons who are filled to the facemask with unbridled Turtle Power! for all their lovely financial support on the Waverly Press and Aardvark-Vanaheim's Remaster of ‘Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ #8 featuring Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark (just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?) So thanks! Thanks so much!” Yes, very very sincerely, everybody, this was announced from the outset as “Grandpa's last payday”, I don't really expect to ever have a Kickstarter that will come anywhere close to this one, or to the “Spawn” 10, so I will be making avid best use of every dollar that I end up getting. and I will let everyone know what Aardvark-Vanaheim’s share of the T8 Kickstarter ends up being when we get down to that point. But definitely, every penny will go toward getting me uninterrupted working time on Strange Death of Alex Raymond.
Matt: Which leads to the Indiegogo supporting, the stripped down version of the Kickstarter that's on Indiegogo went live today. The link’s right here in the video, if you're watching this on Saturday. But Dagon sent the email out, and I'm like, this is perfect timing! And I think there might be one more payday for Grandpa, but he's gotta wait like two to three years, because I had to be one of them genius Matt ideas that Dave goes, “No, Matt, that's stupid. Don't say that out loud.” In a couple of years, you should do a “Swords of Cerebus” collection of both “Spawn” 10 and “Turtles” 8 collecting both issues, and maybe all the “Pieces of Turtles 8” material in one nice “Swords of Cerebus” size volume, and kickstart that!
Dave: That’s an idea. That’s an idea.
Matt: But it's a very much “not today” idea.
Dave: Right! Right. Which is the same as, the more Kevin talks about all of the stuff he has in his archives of “Turtles” 8 that's never even been addressed, the more I think I would really like to write a book about “Turtles” 8. I'm thinking of saying to Kevin, is there anybody that you know that could use a few bucks and you trust that you could have scan that whole section of your archive, and send it to me so that I can look at it, and we'll start putting a book together, and we'll split on it 25/75 or something like that, depending on who ends up doing the most work on it. But yes, not something that is is going to be done today, or soon.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: And, in terms of the suckers, that's one of the things, only posterity is going to establish that. It's, I don't think I can be completely written out of comics history, and I think it would be really really awkward to try and completely write me out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles history. In which case, no matter which way you slice it, these are going to be very very rare Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle artifacts, which is probably going to establish them as having a different criteria from Cerebus artifacts. And from anecdotal evidence of “Spawn” 10, Dagon says there's not a week that goes by that he doesn't hear from a Spawn fan going, “Argh! How did I not hear about this?”
Matt: See, I think I have a near complete second set that I got, as extras that Dagon sent me, and it's like I should sell them, but now it's tracking down to Spawn people going, okay, hey you missed out. This is what I have, how much do you want to give me? The classic one is, so Todd McFarland got a bunch of the “Spawn” 10 copies. I don't know if Dagon sent him to him or, no I take that back! No, he was doing a CGC Signature Series thing where if you went to see, he’d sign it.
Dave: Right!
Matt: But the deal was, on the bag the comic’s in they would draw a box of where they wanted him to sign, and he had the hands through the bars cover and he was using it as a demonstration of, “You want me to sign? You got to think of it like a parking lot, where is the best place to park in this parking lot?” And it was, somebody wanted him to sign right by the hands, and he's going, “Okay, there's this much room for a signature, but up in this corner, it's wide open. And like, I'll sign it where you want, but you'll get a better signature if you want me to sign it where there's space.” And like, he went on and he had a couple different covers, and they were all the “Spawn” 10 Remasters, and it was kind of funny cause it was these people going, “Oh yeah, front and center, right at the bottom, where it's real nice and easy to see” and Todd's going, “But that's not the good place to sign. The good place…” And like, you're watching the video, if you're gonna get Todd to sign, now you know where Todd will sign.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: It was one of these, I think Oliver shared it on the Facebook Group as a, “Hey look what Todd's got!” and I'm like, okay, you know, it's just Todd with it, whatever. And I watched it, I'm like, this is really funny if you know what it is, and you know who's talking, and what they're talking about.
Dave: Right. And it's, I think that’s Todd’s sense of humour of this is gonna be driving all the Spawn fans insane, going, “What is that? I've never seen that before!” and not telling them what it is. Just talking about it as a parking lot. And, “Yeah, that's okay. I don't sell these so it's not like I'm gonna hype them or anything.” So yeah, that takes care of our suckers angle.
“And we should probably acknowledge that ‘mistakes were made’ with the Remastered ‘The Last Day’ and the spine reads ‘Form & Void’. Ahem. Mistakes were made. How we gonna fix it, Kimosabe? And by ‘we’, I very much mean ‘not me.’” What we're working on right now is getting Alfonso to print glossy title-sized permanent stickers that we will be stickering to the copies that we have here. There was this weird, undernote from Diamond that some of their copies said “The Last Day”, and some of the copies said “Form & Void”, and I don't think that's the case. I think they all say “Form & Void”, and they found out because a retailer sent a copy back and said, “This doesn't say ‘The Last Day’ on the spine, it says ‘Form & Void’”, so they replaced it. How they could have replaced it, I don't know, because they were completely sold out at “The Last Day” as far as we know. And the previous printing isn't remastered, so we're waiting to find out how that shakes out. I think if, following it to its logical conclusion, they’re gonna find out that all of their copies say “Form & Void” on the spine, at that point, I don't think they're going to want to sticker them. They're stickering the earlier mistake which, it doesn't have a barcode on it. And charging whatever they do per book, and a penalty, $150 penalty for violating the guidelines for what they get in, everything has to have a barcode on it. But stickering the title is going to be a very very delicate process, because it's a very narrow parallel line space, and you want it lined up so that it doesn't look like we got the lettering on there crooked, and that's going to be Rolly's job when the stickers are produced. Fortunately, he doesn't have to do 800 of them a week from now, because we're not going to sell 800 a week from now. So it's a matter of, as they are reordered, and I already had Eddie give Diamond his resolicitation for them, an offered again, because they only ordered enough copies for what they had orders on hand, and those have already gone out to all the stores. So now people who are late to the party, and people who are finding out about the Remastered Edition are going to be ordering the book and Diamond's not going to have them. So let's get out ahead of the problem, Diamond works best with stuff that's in Previews. It was in Previews, this is how many orders we got, here's how many we need. Diamond also got the 50 overage. Marquis doesn’t print exactly to the copy, they have a 5% leeway either way on the print run. You either get 5% fewer copies or 5% more. This turned out to be 48 copies, and Diamond got those and went, “What the hell are these? We didn't order these! Not only didn't we order these, these don't have barcodes on them!” So they were talking about, “Are we supposed to ship these back to you guys or do you want us to just get rid of them?” And then started looking at the orders that were coming in and went, “Okay okay, we'll keep the 48 copies, but why did we get them? Why did we get the 48 copies?” And it's like, that was I guess what Marquis did. Ordinarily you would send the overage to the publisher, to me, or find out where you're going to send them, but they sent them to Diamond, which turned out to be a very happy coincidence that that was the best place to send them because now I don't have to ship them to Diamond. So, we're estimating, if you offer it again, and we're offering a signed version, and an unsigned version, and the signed version is $90 as opposed to $30, going on the same basis as the “Cerebus in Hell?” autograph copies where it's a $4 comic book, but it's $15 autographed. And the orders on that, mhmm, I'm guessing, but I'm assuming that when that Preview comes out, which will be two months from now, three months from now, we'll maybe get orders for 75, you know, 50, 48. Pick a number out of the hat, you'll probably guess closer than I do. And at that point, Rolly will have to sticker those copies, and put barcodes on those copies, and then take them to Packaging Too, and they'll ship them to Diamond according to all of Diamond's specs. So that's the not-so-short answer to your question, “How are we gonna fix it, Kimosabe?” And… go ahead.
Matt: I was wondering, if you're gonna try to get stickers where it was the correct name with the artwork so that, you know, trying to line the sticker up so that it looks like… but the problem is, it's gonna turn into that Beatles album where they were dressed up like butchers with all the dead babies, but they put the white sticker over you can see George's black shirt, and so everybody peeled the sticker off.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: At this point, do we need to put a sticker saying, “Yes, this is a sticker. No, don't pull it off.”
Dave: [laughs] Uh yeah? You're still gonna have people pulling the sticker off. I even said in the fax to you, I don't know if you've had a chance to post that yet, I am thinking of putting the sticker on the spine or getting Rolly to put the sticker on the spine, but then putting another sticker inside the book that says, “Rolly put these on by hand. If you think you can do a better job, than Rolly, knock yourself out. Here's your sticker, and you can line it up as close as you want, and hopefully you have the fingers and nerves of a brain surgeon, because I think that's what we're talking about here.”
Matt: Having put stickers on stuff where it has to be precise, I've learned that the secret is to get your hand to do the work and your brain to not think about it, and then it goes on perfectly. But as soon as you’re like, “Well I gotta make sure it's on straight,” that's when you're all of a sudden on a 35 degree angle going, “How the hell did that happen?”
Dave: Right. Right. Let's get the brain out of here. Hands, do it correctly. You're the ones closest to the problem, you do it. I'm inclined personally, like with the copy that I will be keeping for the Cerebus Archive and with the Remarque Edition, which we can talk about a little bit here, I'm gonna leave it as the rare “Form & Void The Last Day,”this is “The Last Day” with “Form & Void” on the spine.
Matt: As I said to myself, and I've said a couple of times, I'm calling them “The Last Void” or “Form and Day,” because it's funny…
Dave: Right.
Matt: And because that way if the thousand copies sell out and the hardcovers come and go, and then all of a sudden it gets a reorder kicked in, or okay you're gonna print another thousand copies, that edition will most likely be a 100% perfect. Everything will be golden, cause we're gona go over it with 14 fine-tooth combs, and then every edition after that'll be, oh yeah, it's that same file and as long as nobody grabs the wrong file, it's gonna be “The Last Day” of forever. So yeah, I mean, I kind of think having it where it's a printer mistake, but at the same time, it's real funny.
Dave: Yes, it’s really funny and it's unique. It's in that category. The same as, it also raises the question of, because it says “Form & Void” on the spine, and it doesn't have a barcode on it, presumably it's in mint in that condition. So if we put permanent barcode stickers on the books, then we're basically defacing a specific artifact, that this is what was printed, this got added to it. Overstreet is very very strict on that. You can't you can't stick something onto the book and say that it's still in mint. Mint is how it how it came from the printer. So again, I'm inclined in the direction of saying, uh, I'm pretty happy having “Last Day” copies that don't have barcodes on them. And the barcode situation will be addressed for Diamond’s purposes, but Diamond’s really the only people where that purpose exists, apart from copies that we’ll sell in town at Lookin’ for Heroes.
Matt: Which now leads into the, okay, for all the Cerebus fans who have stopped listening to this and stormed out of the house and driven as fast as they can to the local comic book store to see if the copy of “The Last Day” that they ordered in their file, so they can buy it and have it mint without any stickers without anything on it. The Johnny-come-latelys who come in six months and get them with stickers, hey, Dave's got mint copies for a hundred dollars! Shipped directly to you. Not only will Dave not sign them, he'll send you a picture of him breaking a pen!
Dave: [laughs] That’s a theory, too, but now you're confusing everybody. Because I don't know how many of the books are in the stores. I don't know how the store that returned the book or complained about it got the book, since Diamond has this fine mesh screen that everything has to come through, and if it doesn't have a barcode on it, it doesn't enter the Diamond system. That's not a suggestion, that's an order from the top.
Matt: So Michael G commented on a post saying, “Hey”, because the Chris W Remarque Edition picture you sent me I posted that with the faxes to Chris, and what was going on type thing, and he commented going, “Does that copy say ‘Form & Void’ on the spine like the one I just bought?” So apparently someone at Diamond must have went, “Ehh, we can figure this out!” and just started shipping them.
Dave: I guess! I guess.
Matt: I mean, it seems odd that they would do that, but at the same time I'm thinking it's a case of, orders in orders out. If it screws the system up, I mean there's only 200 of them.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: If they all came in six boxes and somebody just went, “Oh yeah sure whatever” and received the six and then somehow threw them on the trucks.
Dave: See that's, I don't think the Diamond system works that way, which is why this is becoming such a such a mystery, is, in order for the books to be processed so that they can be shipped to the stores, that's done with the barcode, as far as I understand. It's not as if anybody ordered a box of “The Last Day” Remastered. The most anybody got was like two or three or whatever. That means the boxes have to be opened, the books have to be broken down, and somebody has to say, “Okay, we're putting this box together for Jim Hanley's Universe. And [makes three scanner beeps]. Okay, there's his three. This is how his order has been produced.” Otherwise, they're sending him free books. How are they going to tell, how did Jim Hanley's Universe get these? Now called JHU, I understand it's not called Jim Hanley's Universe anymore, but I digress. So, it will be interesting, and yes, I hadn't even thought about that angle, that there are only 200 copies at Diamond. What is Diamond's situation on them right now? Have they said, “Okay, don't ship any more of these,” in which case are they going to put permanent barcode stickers on the books? And if they do, yes, you might be wanting to get in your car and drive out to your LCS, go in and go, “Have you got ‘The Last Day’ by Dave Sim Remastered? It just shipped” and yep, it's a non-barcode copy. I don't know that Diamond will tell us how many non-barcode copies there are in circulation, but as the saying goes, even as we speak, this is going on. That's so dramatic!
Matt: I just love that it's not my problem!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I mean I feel bad for you, and Eddie, and Sean, and the whole team, and everybody at Diamond that's gotta deal with this headache. I just enjoy the fact that it's not my headache!
Dave: Yes. Yes.
Matt: Anything I can do to help the team, yeah let’s go, but at the same time it's like, well, I didn't get asked to proofread this one, and if I did, I didn't do a real good job. [laughs]
Dave: Well, that’s why I feel really bad for Eddie particularly, because when he proofreads the trade paperbacks, he's reading them like multiple times. I won't even say how many times that he reads them, but it's like he's going through with a fine-tooth comb to get everything. Sean is an absolute OCD perfectionist on everything. I found out about the barcodes because this was Matt Demory at Diamond and Eddie Khanna going back and forth, “okay, what is the situation? What's your vector, Victor?” kind of thing. But it wasn't until Rolly took a copy of “The Last Day” over to Alfonso's place, and we were trying to figure out how to, and this will lead us into the Remarque Edition thing again, does Alfonso have a process for protecting a painted image on the cover of a book that doesn't look intrusive. Basically lamination on top of the lamentation. And it was Alfonso that said , “I think this is the wrong name on the spine” And it's like Rolly went, “Yeah, it is.” And came back after they had finished doing what they were doing, and went, “Okay, I have to go through all of these boxes” and it's like, I don't think you have to go through all of the boxes. I think it's a slam dunk that they all say “Form & Void” on the spine. That's a mind-boggling coincidence that it could go through all those layers, all that length of time, and this was the first time that somebody noticed that. It's all almost, I dare say, supernatural. I think I sent my copy to Rick Veitch because I finished proofreading it and he had sent me his most recent book. So it's like, well okay, you're sending me your Pagan Allan Moore stuff, here's my monotheistic “The Last Day.” But I would bet dollars to donuts that the copy that I sent to him, A, didn't have a barcode on it, and B, had “Form & Void” on the spine.
Matt: From the little bit that we shared back and forth, Sean's pretty sure it was his mistake, that he had the wrong overlay for the cover. He was using the “Form & Void” overlay for lining everything up, and went through to change things so that it was correct, and I think it was, deleted the barcode and forgot to change the name on the spine, but changed the front cover for what it's supposed to be. Reading between all that, that sounds like what he said, but it's one of those, it came up and and the emails started to fly a little bit, and then Sean's dad I guess fell, so he's down in Florida dealing with family stuff and it's like, yeah, Sean's busy. We're not gonna hear from him until him unless the house is on fire and we need his help moving stuff.
Dave: Right.
Matt: It's not gonna happen. And it's like, at this point the thousand books are printed, I don't see them going back and Marquis fixing it, because it's gonna be one of those, “Well, who made the mistake?” and it's, “Well, you guys approved this proof.”
Dave: Well, it's, uh yeah! It's, mistakes happen. Looking on the bright side, it does say volume 16. [laughs] It doesn’t say volume 14, which is “Form & Void.” It's one of those, there's no real explanation of how this could have happened. And I had no idea that Sean has the family emergency in Florida. Best wishes to Mr Robinson, and I hope it's, not bad enough that you would have to fly to Florida, but obviously is bad enough that you have to fly to Florida. So that's obviously the major concern there, and I don't think, from the outset on this, it's like, no, this is not a finger pointing kind of thing. If I had caught it right out of the box, then I would say, okay, somebody has to take the responsibility for this. It's like no, everybody was completely, completely blind to what was going on. Now we just have multiple different ways that this is going to be solved, or if you're of my philosophical bent of mind, it’s not going to get solved. I'm perfectly happy with the book as it is. I can understand people not being happy with it and wanting it to be fixed, and we will do our level best to accommodate you. If you go, “I really want this to say ‘The Last Day’ on the spine, and I will accept a glossy sticker. Dave Sim, I'm sending this back to you. I want you to do it personally.” I'll be happy to do that, and then you can blame me if it's crooked because I let my brain into the deal instead of just, as Matt says, letting my fingers do the walking.
Matt: You know, it sounds like a fun party game. Pin the title on the spine!
Dave: Yes! There's an idea, a convention activity. Fun, prizes! How much have you told the AMoC readership/viewership about the Remarque Edition?
Matt: Other than the picture of Chris' and the next two prototypes, nothing.
Dave: Okay. All right. And you've got the scans emailed of the Brain Trust personalized copies.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Did you?
Matt: If I haven't gotten them yet, they're gonna come over the transom tonight.
Dave: Right. Right. So I think that’s probably the best way to announce it is to say, here's what it is. This will be the next thing that Aardvark-Vanaheim will be doing. I'm trying to do smaller scale quick turnaround items, coming off of a Waverly Press bells and whistles, 30 days, and 75-day countdown to it, Kickstarters, to, you can just go to CerebusDownloads.com and there's a button there and you can order one of them. That's what I'm trying to get this one down to. So I'm perfectly fine with you running all of the materials that's been going back and forth between you and me and getting the Brain Trust to give me ideas on pricing. Here, I've never done this before, I don't think this is done too commonly. What do we charge for this, so that I can make back some of the money on “The Last Day,” which is really $12,0000 worth of soft covers that Diamond has ordered $3000 worth of, which leaves a $9000 gap. Which I would like to close up so that I'm not um using $9000 worth of Strange Death of Alex Raymond creative time on dead books. What can I do with these books so that people will buy them, will be happy with them, and it'll help bring the $9000 down to, [laughs] I dunno! You tell me how quickly we can get the $9000 down to smaller thousands. So we'll leave it at that for now, and you're completely authorized to explain all of the back and forth that we've been having on that. Most of which is having to do with preservation. If you have them in the video for this Please Hold for Dave Sim, and they can be looking at them as we're talking about it. It's silver metallic ink Sharpie Cerebus head, and then I ink on top of it, which works really well. Gerhard has signed 100 copies, so potentially there's a hundred of these, although only the 10 have been produced so far. And not only can I ink on top of the silver metallic ink Sharpie, just as if it was a piece of illustration board, I can also erase, because the silver Sharpie covers up India ink just as if it wasn't there, so if I put in a line and I don't like that one, I can just put the Sharpie metallic pen over top of it, it dries in about three or four seconds, and then I can just ink the line that I did want on it. So it's really cool. I really like doing them, and because it's “Last Day” Cerebus, you really get the sense of [laughs] this is a cartoon character where, okay, you've read 6,000 pages where suddenly his mouth goes three times in size, suddenly his eyes go three times their size, his ears pivot, they swivel, they expand, they shoot straight up, when he comes to his last day, all of the elasticity is gone out of that, and if you just do all of the Cerebus heads that I've done so far as an animated film, that'll tell you what he looks like rattling around in his last day bedroom. It's just sort of like five or six little bags of jello all pasted together and they're all moving and it's like, really creepy to look at!
Matt: I'm just making myself a note of okay, when we get to this part, put in the quick 15th of a second shot so that it is a little animation!
Dave: I think it'll be an interesting effect, because it's obviously I can't make them all, I could, like I could cut out a stencil of Cerebus' head, but then everybody's getting exactly the same head and with just the features being different. And it's like, mhmm, no, I think for a cartoon character who's however many hundreds of years old Cerebus was at the time of his death, with the elasticity gone, this is what I picture it looking like. Okay, that’s… go ahead!
48:46
Matt: So for everybody that's going, on the audio portion of our program, going, “What the heck are they talking about?“ Dave's doing silver Cerebus Remarques on the cover. It's signed by Dave in silver, it's signed by Gerhard in silver. Dave inks over the silver. The video people are going, “Yeah, we've been looking at this for five minutes, Matt. Why are you explaining?” Again, for the people at home who are only listening…
Dave: Oh, right! [laughs]
Matt: They're gonna be, it's “The Last Day” signed on the cover in silver by Dave and Gerhard, with a Old Cerebus head sketch remarque. They're gonna be available on CerebusDownloads at some point for XX, possibly X, Canadian, because CerebusDownloads is in Canadian. I think there's a way of getting it so it's in American money when you're doing the PayPal, but that's the technology part that we all go ehh, just throw money at Dave until he's happy.
Dave: Right. Right. It’s also simpler if it’s all in Canadian funds. Which is why, at the launch point, there isn't going to be an international version. There will be an international version, but that has to be worked out on a completely different scale of values. I'm definitely interested, as the Cerebus backers and Cerebus fans are getting aware of this and seeing what it is, what would you expect to pay? And not in a rhetorical sense. No ,what would you expect to pay? What would be a price that would make you happy on that? And because it's in Canadian dollars, to convert it US, just deduct 30% or so. Although that's, now the Canadian dollar is just absolutely soaring, as soon as I started doing this, and it's like, oh stop that! So, you said you could check it online, just Google search Canadian dollar/US dollar conversion rate, it'll give you a number.
Matt: So, for everybody at home, Dave faxed me to fax a bunch of Cerebus, let's say, fan muckeymucks. You know, people of renowned, like Margaret. Margaret gets a vote of, eh, okay Margaret you'd throw money at this. How much money is a reasonable amount to throw at it? So. we've been going behind the scenes, backstage, throwing numbers around, and there's certain baked in costs, like, we can't go below this amount cause then Dave loses money
Dave: Right.
Matt: And so, when we're throwing money amounts around, and it's, this is the cost that in American, this is the cost of in Canadian. I'm like, well, it's going on CerebusDownloads which is Canadian. Anyway, so I went on Google and they got this really handy currency calculator, and you type in, you set it to what you want, so I'm going Canadian to American, and as an example, a hundred Canadian dollars the last time I checked which I think was last night, is 74.40 cents American.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Or 74.30. It's right around there. Iit makes it real convenient when we're kicking around numbers of, well, I think it should be $90 Canadian, I think it should be… We can immediately convert it of okay. At one point, as I said, one of the faxes is, I'm starting to smell bacon, you know, pigs gets fat, hogs slaughtered. At a certain point, we're not gonna get all the lettuce, because at that point they're making BLTs out of us.
Dave: Right. Well put! Well put.
Matt: And again for the people at home, go ahead and comment on wherever, or send an email to momentofservice@gmail.com of, “I would pay X, X, X. A fourth X, we’ll send you two copies!
Dave: Right.
Matt: But look at the photos, because I'll put photos up on A Moment of Cerebus, and they'll be in the videos for people watching at home on the YouTubes, but this is what it looks like, how much would you be willing to spend? Here's a picture of Dave, how much do you want him to starve to death because he has no money because you didn't spend enough?
Dave: [laughs] And I'm also doing this right on the heels of the “Turtles” 8 for the specific reason that this is the point where the Cerebus collectors’ wallets are hurting the most. Which means, this is the point where they're gonna go, “Oh, I don't know. I'd be willing to give you this much.” And it's not going to be as much as they would have said if I had done this back a month before the Kickstarter, because I think that's one of the things that I want to establish is, the Waverly Press, it's definitely lucrative, but the fulfillment time is so telescope that I can't treat it as revenue. It's the world's biggest windfall when it gets here, but in terms of revenue, it's not really revenue. So this is, uh okay, what can I do once a month, let's say, or once every two months more likely, at CerebusDownloads where it's real simple? You go there, you hit the button, you input your information, boom, it goes to you. And how much revenue can I get from that so that it is actually revenue? This is how much Aardvark-Vanaheim makes every other month, if we can sustain it. Which is a big if. Or if it this one sells better than that one. So, at some point there's a core of this is how much money Aardvark-Vanaheim can make every two months on these. Sometimes a little more, but this is the lowest common denominator. This is how much comes in, so that I can do some planning on Strange Death of Alex Raymond. So I can say, okay, I want uninterrupted working time, not work for a month and then have to stop and figure out something that's going to bring in $8,000 or $10,000 so that I'm able to keep this this whole creaking Aardvark-Vanaheim mechanism moving forward without having to sell the Archive or parts of the Archive. Like, the situation that you have, whoever is listening right now. You know how much you make, because, here it is! This is, you get this every week or you get this every two weeks. I don't have that, and it's definitely causing Grandpa whiplash to have to keep moving from, okay, Grandpa has no money coming in, but he has to work on this obsessively complex storyline. Okay, now Grandpa has to move completely over in this other direction so that he has money coming in. And it's gonna be a long process, it's not gonna happen overnight, but I'm hoping everybody can indulge me on this. So that, coupled with the $400 dollars or so, a little less than $500 that comes in on the Strange Death of Alex Raymond supporters site, the Patreon, coupled with, so far so good, the GoFundMe SDoAR 2023 that Jennifer is doing, which brings in about $900 this month? We actually went up from the $900 to like $1200, and the few hundred dollars that “Cerebus in Hell?” makes, and windfall amounts from strange licensing deals and stuff, you know, a thousand dollars, here five hundred dollars there, just trying to scaffold the whole thing so that I have a period of time when I'm doing something like these cover Remarque Editions and doing them on an ongoing basis. That's the other thing that I'd like to introduce is, okay the Kickstarter is one thing. This is, if you want one of these, I'll do you one of these, you buy it. And it's not a matter of, “Well, how many are you doing?” It's like, I'll keep doing them, and I'm sure Gerhard will be happy to keep signing them at $5 per until all of the 800 copies are gone. And Rolly, it'll just be one of the other things that he's doing as part of the mailing on Thursdays, and it'll be a revenue source. How much of a revenue source? I think we're definitely more interested in slow and steady, rather than a sudden burst of orders, and then nobody ever orders one of these again. And we're also working on, and this is top secret, only in the sense that if you're listening to the sound of my voice, you're in very very small select company, we will have a first day special, that the first day that it the Remarque copies are made available, this will be the cheapest that you ever get them. And, this is why we're looking at, okay, what’s the ongoing price gonna be, and what's the first day price gonna be? But I want the first day price to be as low as possible as a reward to the people who are within the sound of my voice. If you're that OCD a Cerebus fan, that OCD a Dave Sim fan, and not meaning that in a prejorative sense, you should have a reward. And it should be, okay, you knew about this two months ago when we were just designing the whole thing. It's two months later, the first day for this, the first day for “The Last Day.” [mock laughter] The first day for “The Last Day” is gonna be, fill-in-the-blank, whatever the day is, and you will have had two months to decide, “Okay, how many of these are am I going to get, definitely if I'm only getting one of them, this is on my calendar, because there's no point in spending money that I don't have to spend if I am by definition an OCD Cerebus/OCD Dave Sim fan.”
Matt: Right. So there's nine of us in the Brain Trust and so far half of us have kicked out numbers that are within a degree or two of each other. I mean, there's no major variance, for the people at home going, “Oh geez, how many hundreds is this gonna--” Ehh, we're trying to keep the price low, but not so low that we're crazy.
Dave: And we can't discount Oliver's suggestion, which was a million dollars. It would be expensive, but you'd only have to sell one of them.
Matt: True, and for a million dollars, I think Dave might deliver it to your house.
Dave: Yes! Yes!
Matt: Big “might!”
Dave: [laughs] Actually, Dave would probably fly you here.
Matt: You know…
Dave: OKay, that’s as far as we’re gonna go on the Remarque Edition. And moving on from there, you right, “And Rolly should have delivered the digital file of ‘The Cat’ #2, which comes from James Windsor-Smith, at the request of past Dave for future Dave to look at and quote,” and quoting me, “You can send me scans of ‘The Cat’ #2. I can see if any of the pages trigger any memories of the layouts versus finishes, but as I say, that's the only conscious one I retained from 50 years ago”. And this just to refresh everybody's memory, this is talking about when I was interviewing Jim Mooney, he was doing finishes on “The Cat” #2 over Marie Severin’s layouts. And because I was obviously a very eager comic artist aspirant, he was very nice to send me all of his blue pencil tracing paper, pencils over Marie Severin’s pencils, and sent me photocopies of Marie Severin's layout pencils, and what the difference was between them. And I haven't looked at the book for 50 years. So, now I am going to get scans, and be able to look at them, with James Windsor-Smith, who is the Matt Dow of the Marie Severin blog. Has he forwarded them? No, Rolly, I think has been up to his eyeballs last week in… just complete “just get it done” and completely unexpected, everything coming out of left field. So, no, he hasn't given me these cans yet, but I look forward to seeing them. And yes, we will postpone that for discussion somewhere up ahead either Please Hold for Dave Sim or I might actually write something that you can run on A Moment of Cerebus, and that James can run on the Marie Severin site, and that way both constituencies are getting, we hope, well served.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: As you said, “Yeah, we could push those to next month so you have time to really look at them if you want.” [laughs] “He sent them a while ago and Manly is just a lazy fill-in-the-blank. Ahem. ‘Mistakes were made’.” I think we all have all kinds of stuff that more of a priority than these, but I am looking forward to it. ”James also sent in, ‘I found an index of every issue of ‘Cartoonist Profiles’ Alex Raymond was mentioned in. You may want to fax Dave if he's interested, I'll share the entire index.’ The index is in ‘The Cat’ #2 file, I hope, otherwise to be safe,” and yes. So, I’m pretty sure I've got these “Cartoonist Profiles” cited, but I'll be checking that probably through Jennifer. Jennifer is the most amazing, “Can you go and find me this person on the internet?” who does all kinds of other kinds of work. but I have this picture that she's always got 19 different windows open, and is more than willing to stir you into the mix. If I say, “Jennifer, can you find me whatever! Something on Jim Raven, Alex Raymond's brother, can you give me the Wikipedia?” Most of the time I'll have it five minutes later. So she might be the person to look at this and go, “Okay, ‘Cartoonist Profiles.’ Here's the different citations. Are these online somewhere? Can I find them?” If anybody's gonna find them in under five minutes without breaking a sweat, it's Jennifer. And thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, Jennifer for having that capacity. And trust me, I'm trying not to abuse it, to the extent of going, “Uh, can you find me this weird thing that just sort of crossed my mind five minutes ago that I'm interested in finding out about?” Uh, no, I try to keep it strictly to the The Strange Death of Alex Raymond and SDoAR-related things.
And you write, “And here's where we take a moment, [chuckles] a moment! A Moment of Cerebus! To remind everyone that James has a Kickstarter for a “Papa Balloon and Cactus” #2 that ends in 14 days from now, 12 days from Saturday when people listen to this, or if you take a while to get around to this, then the clock is ticking. And James has Dave Sim variant cover. A Dave Sim variant cover! How can you say no?” And as soon as I read that, I went, gyaaah! The last time that I heard from James, he was on page seven of issue #2, saying, “Really love the Neal Adams variant cover that you're doing, no big rush on it because I'm still working on the book, and I don't want to be imposing or setting deadlines for something that I haven't got done yet.” And it's like, well okay, if he's not done, he's getting closer to done if he's doing a Kickstarter. So everything that I was going to be doing today, I put aside, and finished the “Papa Balloon and Cactcus” #2 cover. I told Rolly to do everything else that you have to do today, and then knock on the door, and wherever I am on the “Papa Balloon and Cactus” #2 cover, I will give it to you. You scan it and email it to Matt Dow. Couldn't find an email address for James, so I'm gonna ask you that if you can relay the “Papa Balloon and Cactus” #2 cover to James when you see it. And I got to tell you, I just love James’ book. It’s only issue #1 and the Christmas special that he did so far, but both of them are very very funny, very very charming, charmingly draw, beautifully composed. And I really couldn't wait to do a Cactus cover because I saw the way that he used the tones on the one page in the Christmas special where uh instead of Cactus being in colour, he did black and white drawings, and put a little bit of mechanical tone on it, digitally, I assume, and put in inking highlights. And I went okay, how would Neal Adams have done that? And that was really what I was doing the whole cover for, was to get down to the point where, okay, now the cover is finished. It's all inked. Now I get to put the tone on in James Windsor-Smith-style, and I get to use actual tone, because I did take one of my last few LT3 Cerebus tone sheets, full sheet, and actually cracked into it so that I could do the Cactus figure, and it came out really good. I was really really happy with it. I don't know if James wants anything else with his Kickstarter, I would be happy to sign full-size prints of the variant cover and get Rolly to mail them out. There you’re talking about [laughs] $20 Canadian mailing and probably I think three or four dollars for the actual copy on cardstock, but I'd happy to do the fulfillment for James from here, if he's interested in making that an item on his Kickstarter. Price it at whatever you think will sell the most number of copies of it.
Matt: I will let him know tonight, cause I'm sure he'll be floored when I send him the message of, hey! Dave had a thought! What do ya think? [laughs]
Dave: Right. Well, having just come off of a Kickstarter with 14 days to go, 12 days to go, 10 days to go, you're going, “What can I do that will get these people to buy more stuff? It’s only now, I have to come up with it now. 20/20 hindsight is not going to help with a Kickstarter where a week later you go, ohh, I know exactly what I should have done there!” So, yeah, if he wants to update that to all of his backers, Dave Sim's more than willing to do that. It’s gonna put him in the nutcracker of going, “What am I going to charge for these?” And it's like, ehh, don't look at me! I don't even know what to charge for my Remarques, which is why I am dragging the whole Brain Trust into it. And the Brain Trust is really everybody who's regularly posting and is part of the A Moment of Cerebus experience, because even Matt Dow, as Manly as he is, can't do everything on A Moment of Cerebus by himself.
Matt: Well I could, but I'd be a lot crankier than I normally am.
Dave: [laughs] Well said. Well said. Okay. Before we move on to Travis H, I've got my questions that I think I told you Adam Elkhadem, who we talked about last time with his graphic novel “Octave the Artist” that he sent me, and he also sent a bunch of questions. So we're going to answer one of Adam's questions on each Please Hold for Dave Sim. And it's gonna take us a while to get through, but advice for Adam I think is probably advice for any guys who are aspiring to be professional cartoonists, or semi-professional. “As a more flat and stylized cartoonist, I tend to struggle with creating believable areas for my characters to walk through. Where did you learn to compose these very atmospheric castle corridors and things?” Uh, that's not really something that you learn, it's something where either you have the ability to picture it or you don't have the ability. But I have to say from from the multi-decade experience on “Cerebus”, it does help to work from the background in. What location are they working in? Do the background first, and then put the character into it. Don't try doing the character and then putting in the background, because the background is going to be part of the composition. Certainly with Gerhard, I didn't have to do that beyond a certain point, unless I had something very very very specific. That, this is exactly what the background has to look like, and this is why it has to look like this, because it has something to do with the storyline that this background element has to be in there. It was, no, I'm going to put the character in the panel, and then Gerhard is going to fit the background in around the character based on the storytelling. Gerhard has, of course, immaculate composition chops for, Jow do you make this background look realistiC? How do you keep it from interfering with the character and calling attention to itself? But also being the eye candy that everybody's looking for from their comics. In terms of, as you say, a more simplified style that you have, which is more in the direction of Jules Pfeiffer or Art Spiegelman, very simplified, very stylized. I would just practice doing background. Just, what backgrounds are you going to need, and do them on tracing paper, and just say, okay, here's what I picture this background being. It's a house or it's whatever. The more depth that it has, put in a horizon line, put in a vanishing point, and build the background inside of there. Unless you're really going for the complete “South Park” approach of everything being super flat, you're going to need a three-dimensional element to it. On the graphic novel that you're doing now, what is the look of the graphic novel? How much depth are you working in? For the most part, you have to fill in the blank and say, okay, it's not as flat as “South Park”, but it's not as a deep focus as MC Escher. So where is it between those two? And if it's far far closer to “South Park,” well okay, that tells you what backgrounds you're going to do, what angle you're going to show them at, and how steep the angle is going to be. That's about as helpful as I could be on that one. You have to make up your own mind as to what depth you're seeing in your mind, and how do you reproduce that on the comics page itself. I mean, it is one of those things where I've always thought if we could just get a cross-pollination going between architectural schools and places like that, which, now of course Architects don't really draw their buildings, they do everything digitally. You might consider finding a collaborator. Finding a background artist, and saying, “Okay. I'm really just interested in the characters and the writing, and the lettering. Can you design backgrounds for me? This is the locations that I'm going to have in my graphic novel. Can you give me five or six drawings that cover all of these backgrounds that the whole story takes place against?” And then you can manipulate them digitally, tilting them, and building them in 3D space, and then tracing them off for yourself. And saying, “Okay, if I have this front of the candy store, let's say a lot of story takes place in the candy store, okay, I just have to do one perfect drawing of the candy store, and then I can just tilt it at different angles. I can enlarge it, I can reduce it, I can do close-ups on it, and then trace it off in behind the character, and not have to really say, okay, how do I make this a perfect background while I'm drawing this panel?” It's like, mhmm, you might want to put the characters on first, and then view all of the manipulation that is available to you. Tracing it off on the light box, and saying, “Okay, what's the best angle I can tilt the front of this candy store at where I'm getting enough of the detail that it's an establishing shot but it's not interfering with the story.” So there you go! There's your A Moment of Adam Elkhadem that is going to be part of Please Hold for Dave Sim for the foreseeable future, he said looking down at this lengthy list of questions.
The next one that I have is Michael Rayder, and this came in through you way back when, and now this is moving on to its next phase. This is the guy who is collecting every comic book published in April 1968. Which is interesting! I've never heard of anybody doing something like that, but it's certainly an interesting collection to have. And as part of his collection, the April 1968 issue of “Spider-Man” was #59. And what he's finding is, that he just wants a copy of each issue, but he would like, you know, if he finds a better condition copy than he’s got, then he wants to upgrade to a better condition copy. But what he's finding out is, you can only upgrade so far, and then with something like the “Spider-Man” 59 most of them have been encapsulated by CGC because it's a pretty expensive book. So, it's not that he's overly thrilled with CGC, but if that's where you gotta buy better condition copies, that's where you where you buy better condition copies. So if you're watching the video, what you're looking at right now is photos that Michael sent me of the 6.5 CGC copy of “Amazing Spider-Man” 59, and on the back of it, there's what looks like a Dave Sim autograph and a Mark Gruenwald autograph, and the Mark Gruenwald autograph says “To Jim.” And Michael was wondering “A, is that an actual Dave Sim autograph? And B, do you know why you would be signing the back cover of ‘Spider-Man’ #59?” And it's like, well, I gotta tell you, that's a good one. And when I got the pictures in, and I was actually reading the letter, and I hadn't really done much thinking about it. He had faxed over the same stuff, but it's like a fax you can't really tell what you're looking at, but when you're looking at a colour photo in the digital age, it's just like having the thing right there in front of you. It's like, I'm sitting there going, okay, it is a Dave Sim autograph. It's either a Dave Sim autograph from the early 1980s, or it’s the most immaculate counterfeit Dave Sim autograph forgery that I've ever seen. It looks exactly like one of my 1982 to about 1984 autographs where I'm not really bearing down on it, it's not a complete throwaway, like I was just signing a stack of books, but it's kind of over in that direction. Not really all there but definitely a Dave Sim autograph. And I’m going, okay, Mark Gruenwald, from what my recollection of conventions, and as far as I can tell it would have it would have been a convention, Mark Gruenwald was definitely one of the Marvel lifers. Everything was about Marvel Comics to him professionally, although he was a comic fan, it was Marvel Marvel Marvel. So that narrows down where it would have been to a New York City or New York City area convention. But then, the only exception to that that I could think of, off the top of my head, was I could picture Mark Gruenwald going to Mid-Ohio Con, particularly in the 1980s, for a specific reason that Mid-Ohio Con was, for a period of time, the only convention that John Byrne did. And John Byrne did that specifically at the height of his fame, where you just had to say “John Byrne guest” and convention organizers’ brains would melt. “Are you kidding? That's a license to print money.” And John, very very notably, chose only to do a Mid-Ohio Con because it was a benefit for the March of Dimes. And consequently, Mid-Ohio Con became one of the few locations where you would see Marvel lifers outside of New York City. And a lot of the reason for that was, “I want to go to a convention that John Byrne’s going to be at, because John Byrne is pretty much the franchise at Marvel right now with X-Men, and this will be at least a chance to hang out with him, and go to the convention parties, they have a night before party.” And I'm going, okay, that's about the only plausible story that I could attach to it. And that was when I went, I flashed on the back cover of “Cerebus” #81, which if you're watching the video you're now looking at, which is the picture of me in full “Miami Vice” garb with a cigarette sticking out of my mouth and sunglasses on. I think we have to get in the habit of anytime we look at one of those pictures we go, “You know Dave, it's really not that sunny in here. We're inside. There's lighting here just like for everybody. You know, you don't need to have sunglasses on.” And I’m signing a copy of “Cerebus” for the guy in the Spider-Man costume that Marvel hired to go to conventions and walk around in a Spider-Man costume. Who I met at the the night before party and was a huge “Cerebus” fan. I didn't remember his name, but that was the thing, he was in “Cerebus” fan. “Can I get a signature from you tomorrow?” It's like, no problem. And then came up that the reason he was there is because he was the guy that walks around in the Spider-Man costume. And it's like, oh actually, this would be funny if we went, oh you're in the Spider-Man costume, and I could be signing a “Cerebus” copy for Spider-Man. And he was more than willing to do that. And I think what happened was, later on he came over with a copy of “Spider-Man” when he was out of the costume and said like, “Turn about is fairplay. Can I get you to sign my copy of ‘Spider-Man’?” and I think that might be the “Spider-Man” comic. If it's not the story behind that autograph, I defy anybody to disprove it. And it makes a great story!
Matt: I was gonna say, if that's not the story behind the autograph, it is now.
Dave: [laughs] The next time that you see that 6.5 up for sale, I'll bet you that story is attached to it.
Okay! Now we're going on to the questions that you submitted. Moving on, Travis H asked, “Dave, you brought up Frank Thorne while chatting with Kevin Eastman. It reminded me of an interview with Mr Thorne in 2019. He mentions being a follower of Raymond, Foster, ‘And so forth,’ as opposed to being influenced by Ditko or Kirby.” Okay, I'm gonna go through Travis's whole post and then we’ll talk about it. One of the quotes is, “’My stuff on Perry Mason was mostly Raymond swipes.” Do you have any thoughts about swiping influential artists as a method to better learn the craft of comics? Do you have a favorite issue or strip by Frank Thorne?” Okay, first of all, I have to say, in trying to find the information on this, because I knew what I wanted to talk about. It's amazing where Frank Thorne doesn't show up. Like the “World Encyclopedia of Comics” doesn't mention… G-- name slips my mind. The Guy Bennett MD strip that he did. He did the drawing on Perry Mason, and did all of this work for DC and Gold Key, and Frank Thorne isn't mentioned, and none of those things are mentioned in the “World Encyclopedia of Comics.” I end up always having to go to my paper bound “Art of Frank Thorne” fanzine and the essay that his daughter Wendy wrote back in 1978, 1980, when the Red Sonja thing was in full swing. And so, if it's not too much trouble for people, if there are Frank Thorne interviews that are starting to surface, where he does talk about Alex Raymond, I would be very very interested in those parts of the discussion. Because this leads into something that I haven't been able to find, which is that, by way of explanation, Frank Thorne started drawing their Perry Mason comic strip for King Features Syndicate in 1951, which makes him one of the earliest of the Alex Raymond clones, and he was definitely an Alex Raymond clone. When you're looking at Frank Thorne's Perry Mason strips, you're looking at really really bad Alex Raymond Rip Kirby. And you can see, well, I can see different faces, different compositions and stuff, that are actually definitely lifted from Alex Raymond, and Frank Throne would have been the first to admit lifted really badly. And Frank Thorne had told me this story, or I had read the story, and I don't know which of those two it is, where he had gone to a National Cartoonists Society meeting when he was doing Perry Mason, and enthusiastically brushed up as the world's biggest Alex Raymond Rip Kirby fanboy. Obviously, because he's making his living trying to make Perry Mason look as much like Rip Kirby as he can, and enthusing, and Alex Raymond cut him dead. Which is one of those, that's very very rare that a cartoonist would even tell that story on himself, because it must have been the most devastating moment of his professional life to that point. 1951, he was in his 20s, I guess? And to be cut dead by Alex Raymond, who just obviously took a very very dim view, first of all, of people swiping his work for a living, as opposed to the same thing he did, just you pick up something here, something there, but worst of all doing it badly, so that it made him look bad. Which is, you know, be careful for what you wish for because Stan Drake is coming up ahead in two years and he's not doing you, and he's not doing it badly and that's going to be a gut punch for you. So, there's a very very limited spectrum of Frank Thorne material that I've got. I've got his autobiographical strip that he did in the “Streetwise” collection for TwoMorrows. I've got his autobiographical graphic novel, but that's mostly teenage and adolescent. I don't.. there's anything in there about being a cartoonist or being a professional cartoonist, I don't remember it. Is there an essay in it? It was published by Fantagraphics, but I think it's mostly about music, and the music that he liked, and if I’m not mistaken, the music that he played. So like, I don't really have time to.. I wish I had time to listen to an hour and a half Frank Thorne interview, or read a 75-page Frank Thorne interview. What I'm interested in is what he had to say about Alex Raymond specifically, and where the anecdote is of him meeting Raymond and being cut dead at the National Cartoonists Society meeting. And there's no no great rush on it, but if anybody knows where they've got a Frank Thorne interview, as you do Travis with wherever you found this interview online. I don't know if it was a print interview or an audio/visual interview. Either one, I would definitely appreciate ”this is what he specifically had to say about Raymond, about Perry Mason, and about his swipes.”
Moving on to “Do you have any thoughts about swiping influential artists as a method to better learn the craft of comics?” Uh, well, yeah, I definitely think it's a great idea, as you can see from the conversation that I’m having with Kevin Eastman, he's in the same boat. We're magpie cartoonists. We look at what other cartoonists are doing, and going, “That's a really really effective way to do that. I would never have come up with that on my own in a million years, but I just love that, that you're doing. And I want to do that. Not my version of it, but trying to copy you as faithfully as I possibly can.” For those of us in that category, like me, and Kevin, Rich Buckler, there's a whole bunch of us. That's a a good 50% of the fun of writing and drawing comics is doing that. Wow! It's not the absolute worst Neal Adams version that anybody's ever done, which is the most that I can say about my “Papa Balloon and Cactus” cover. What Neal Adams would have thought, that would have been interesting. If you gave Neal Adams a list of Neal Adams clones and asked him to put them in order, who's the best, and who's the worst? I would hope that I would not be at the bottom of the list, but I'd probably be pretty close to the bottom of it. For guys who aren't that way, like Neal Adams, apart from the fact that he did lift Stan Drake style. Went, “Okay, Gillott 290 pen nib, Johnstone and Cushing illustration style. I'm gonna branch off from there, but definitely that's what I'm grounded in.” And the same thing with Bill Sienkiewicz, it's all their drawing, it's all their thinking, and thinking that is just orders of magnitude above anything that I'm capable of when I'm doing illustration. Steve Ditko, who definitely started out riffing on Mort Meskin, and Jerry Robinson was one of his mentors, and he developed his own style within the confines of a lot of their storytelling thinkingm but pretty much overnight became Steve Ditko. And Steve Ditko always looked like Steve Ditko, and he was never swiping other people's drawings or stealing other people's layouts. Which is why it's interesting that he remained friends with Wally Wood, probably one of the few professionals that Ditko was genuinely a friend of. Because Wally Wood was, you know, this is why he had assistants. “Go through the swipe file, find me a Stan Drake girl's face that looks like this. Light box it under the page, and then I'll ink it and make it look like Wally Wood.” And completely opposite and something that Steve Ditko professionally found abhorrent, but he was just in another category that way. I personally, I don’t know how many other magpie artists would be this way, I personally definitely revere the guys where everything does come out of their own head. “This is how I draw people. I'm just drawing. I sit down at the drawing board and draw. I don't sit down at the drawing board and riff,” which is what I do. I draw until it starts looking like somebody, and then I start riffng on that person. Oh this looks like an Al Williamson thing, so then I start riffing on Al Williamson. Or, wow, this looks like Jeff Jones. So I start riffing on Jeff Jones, because that's how I see, and that's a big part of the pleasure that I get out of it.
Last part of Travis's question, “Do you have a favorite issue or strip by Frank Thorne?” I would have to say issue 137 or 140 of “Son of Tomahawk” May/June 1972 , which I looked up in “Overstreet” because I know that it was a “Son of Tomahawk” job that I saw by Frank Thorne that made me write to him, care of Marvel Comics, and ask if he would be willing to do would he be willing to do an interview with me by mail. And it was an all handwritten interview, we went back and forth a couple of times. And it's gone. It never ran in Comic Art News and Reviews, or if it did, only excerpts of it did it in my back alley report. And it was, when I looked it up in “Overstreet”, Frank Thorne only drew two issues of “Son of Tomahawk”. The last one, issue #140 May/June 1972, and issue 137. So I'm pretty sure it's #140. And I think the reason that he wrote back to me, because he was just one of the journeyman guys. He was the guy working in the Joe Kubert style that wasn't Joe Kubert or Russ Heath, and closer to Joe Kubert than to Russ Heath. But really really an amazingly talented guy from the perspective that he would pencil and ink the story and letter it. He could do lettering that would pass muster at DC or Marvel, and he would do the colouring. And I'm pretty sure he did the colouring on #140, although I haven't seen it for 50 years. And I think he was, as the British say, reet chuffed, to hear from a comic book fan about “Son of Tomahawk” because it was the last issue of the title and was probably just given to him for that reason. It's like, “We're getting ready to cancel this. Frank Thorne, you want to do the last issue of this? Here's the script.” And it's like, that's not one of those things that you're going to be including in your QV as a cartoonist, and it's not one of those things that tells you that you're very high in the pecking order at DC when you're given a last issue of something just to close it off. So, he actually sent me a Guy Bennett original that I don't have anymore, and did the interview with me and answered questions, this was 1972 May/June. Coincidentally, June 16/17 was the weekend of the Watergate break-in, also the weekend that Richard and Wendy Pini got married, and the weekend of the Southern Ontario Comic Art Festival where I met T Casey Brennan for the first time. And it turns out, rereading Wendy Thorne's introduction to the “Art of Frank Thorne”, Frank Thorne's birthday is June 16th! Stick that in your comic art metaphysics and smoke it!
Matt: [laughs] That's one of them really important weekends, isn't it?
Dave: And you don't know that until later on that not only do all of these episodes take place simultaneously, but in terms of the longevity, 50 years later all of these people are still engaged in this same profession, this same professional capacity, and had no idea about each other, and certainly had no idea that this is where they were going in 1972. Which is, that's why I talk about God’s Clockwork Mechanism. It's like 50 years for God is a cosmological eye blink. He built everything so that it goes like this. So that you do get these confluences, and where a confluence like that occurs, the odds are it's going to go on a very fixed regular elliptical trajectory that matches that of any planet, or any moon, or any asteroid.
Matt: Right.
Dave: And then moving on! And then it must be that time of the month, Mike Sewall says, “Hey Manly Matt, I noticed the scarce Diamondback cards are rising in price.” Have you noticed that or has anybody mentioned that elsewhere?
Matt: Uh, I'm trying to think when the last time Diamondback came up from anybody. I haven't heard anything, but then again, I stopped looking for Cerebus on eBay, because it's either stuff I have, stuff I can't afford, or stuff that I have but still can't afford.
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right. Because that's interesting, because I think a lot of people are in that category. Mike's kind of new to the whole Cerebus collecting things, so he's gonna notice if they're starting to spike. “Maybe a remastered add-on would help with the next campaign. Just a thought.” That's been a thought that's been bounced back and forth between me and Dagon since before the Remastered High Society hardcover of, what Diamondback deck would we do, and how would we package it? What would the back of the card look like? Would it come in a box, and would it come in an illustrated box? How many decks would you put in it? Because Diamondback, the more players you have, the more decks you need. [laughs] That's me designing a game that I want to sell a lot of. And in a more prosaic sense, I've still got a box of probably 50 of the last pressing of the Diamondback decks when they were in the white envelope, which are autographed, and I had been looking for a Kickstarter to include them in. And Rolly knows where they are. I gave them to him, told him what they were, they’re somewhere out back at Camp David. So it would be possible to offer a remastered add-on, Dagon definitely has scans of the original artwork of the illustrations that were on the cards, the actua magician, priestess, priest, etc etc. But it only goes so far, and then it becomes, well, okay, if you do it as part of a Kickstarter then you're making the package three-dimensional, and we try to keep the packages at Aardvark-Vanaheim two-dimensional, as flat as possible. Dagon, yeah, I could see him doing it, but it's one of those, again, how many decks are you going to do? Because the more decks you do, the more three-dimensional that it becomes. You could do a real high-end thing, it's like, what do the card shoes that they have in Las Vegas, an absolute professional card shoe where you put the deck into the card shoe and it dispenses one card at a time irrefutably. That would be interesting. Selling a Diamondback card shoe and with a Diamondback deck inside it. What do those retail for? And at that point you're going, well okay, [laughs] we're getting pretty close to Oliver's ”charge a million dollars, but then you just have to sell one of them.”
Matt: Well, and the other problem with selling Diamondback is, A, you still have 50 decks. B, do you make them original authentic size where they’re tarot card size, or do you make them playing card size so they're easier to play with, C, have you ever played Diamondback before?
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Because there's a group of us who've sworn that Diamondbacks one of those, “You should try it! You should really try this game!” and afterwards everybody goes, “Why did you say that?” It's like, “Because now you know why no one plays Diamondback professionally!”
Dave: [laughs] Yeah…
Matt: It's a fun game for… I mean, to be fair, when I first started playing Diamondback, my brother had a deck of blank playing cards that he bought that he never did anything with, and I took a Sharpie and made really crude Diamondback cards, and I played with the college kids while we were drinking. So the game was a lot of fun because we were drinking .
Dave: [laughs] Right!
Matt: I mean, it was one of these, we went out, we bought scotch, we bought tubes of Pringles, and we bet potato chips. We also decided at one point, because the game really is so simple that if you got a priest priest it was called an altar boy and you had to do a shot of scotch. And the first night I ever started drinking, I had a chart that we found the next day, that was titled “Matt's Fuckin It Up List” of how many shots I had to take, and I think I stopped recording them at 12?
Dave: Right. That was back in your bucket of scotch days.
Matt: Yes! I mean, that was when I went to Goodwill and found a glass candle holder in the shape of a bucket and went, hey, we can drink out of this! [laughs]
Dave: That's right. That’s right.
Matt: I mean a deck of Diamondback cards, if you're a Cerebus fan, is a great item to have on the shelf. 12 decks so you can play with your family at Christmas? You people have problems.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, unless you're drinking at Christmas. There are households where Diamondback and Christmas would go good together with some lubrication. I remember it was the the Books of Cerebus exhibit where you guys played Diamondbacks and you invited me to come down to wherever the area was. Was that the one?
Matt: That was Olean, yeah. That was [laughs] we invited, because Gerhard was still with Rose then, and it was Gerhard and Rose came, and then after about, oh, enough time for Rose to go, “These people aren't right.” They left, and then you showed up with Jason, because you guys had gone out to the choral concert, and we're all in the lobby of the hotel playing Diamondback, and I was the one that was gung-ho of, come on, this will be fun! Because it was fun when I did it with my buddies! And I remember at one point, I think it was either Jeff Seiler or Jeff Tundus turned to you and said, “What idiot designed this game?”
Dave: [laughs] And you invited me into the game, and I went oh no, not even on a bet, not a single chance. And I glommed on to Paula's “In Touch” magazine. She had a stack of “In Touch” magazines for some reason. And it's like if I'm going to do something completely brainless and the opposite of efficacious and edifying, I'm gonna read gossip magazines, rather than playing Diamondback. Okay, go ahead.
Matt: And we were all very shocked about, “Dave, why are you reading slanderous trash?” And as you said, “It's like having seven girlfriends at once.”
Dave: [laughs] Oh, I didn't remember my saying that! But it's true. It’s true. All of the female concerns, if you buy “In Touch” magazine, you get it, and most of them, drop dead gorgeous. And it's way too much information about them, and sometimes it's really really nasty. Like, you know, Paula Abdul without makeup on, and this is what the paparazzi caught her looking like. And it's like, oh, I'm not proud of myself for reading these, but man these are like salted nuts for me. So there you go, MJ “Mike” Sewall, that's the answer to that one, probably TMI, and now I'm gonna take a break for my combination Passover/Ramadan prayer time, where I read from the Quran and I read the second book of Moshe chapter 12, also known as Exodus, for Christians, which is the Passover narrative, which I read with each of my Muslim prayer times for the eight days of Passover, for a total of 40 readings of Exodus 12. Just like the wandering in the desert for 40 years. So I will be back momentarily, Matthew.
Matt: Okay, Dave, I will be here!
Dave: Talk to you soon.
Matt: All right! Bye!
[public domain chiming music that goes on for way too long]
[guitar music]
Matt: Hello again, Dave
Dave: Hello again, Matt! [clears throat] Excuse me. Okay, and we're recording?
Matt: We are recording.
Dave: Okay! Another MJ “Mike” Sewall question “Question for Dave, the only frustratingly off limits information continues to be from CerebusTV. Going back and listening to all the Please Hold for Dave Sim podcasts, there is scant mention of CbTV. Although many clips do appear on YouTube, will the episodes ever be released? Where are they now? Can you talk about how CerebusTV came to be?” Um, yeah, it was an idea that I had to do [coughs] excuse me. Coincidentally, Max Southall, who was a fellow comic fan back in the 1960s, and then moved away, moved to California, moved to Florida, came back to Kitchener around the time that I was developing the idea of CerebusTV, and we decided to collaborate on it, because he's a computer guy. A very high-end kind of computer guy, and he could he could solve the problem of doing what essentially was the broadcast. I produced the actual content with Dave Fisher, and then Max would figure out how to stream CerebusTV to interested subscribers. The collaboration got off to not a great start and didn't really work out for for either of us, but in the meantime CerebusTV was still being produced. And I was working on it on the the same basis that I tend to work on anything with anybody with. We both worked on this, if you want to do something with it, you do something with it. If I want to do something with it, I'll do something with it. The deal that I've got with Todd McFarland on “Spawn” 10 and at the time with Peter on “Turtles” 8, and now with Paramount Pictures on “Turtles” 8. Dave Fisher was fine with that. It's like Fisher can do whatever he wants with CerebusTV, I can do whatever I want with CerebusTV, and Max can do whatever he wants with CerebusTV. If you can figure out a way to make money off of it? That's great. If it's not a lot of money, you just keep it. Which was the, as everybody knows, the deal with Oliver Simonsen on the 3D Cerebus movie, when we came down to push came to shove and I said, if the revenues from it are, you know, Chinese food money, you keep the Chinese food money, and you and Carma can just order Chinese food every time that the X amount of money comes in on the Cerebus movie.
So that's where it stands right now. I have no real interest in doing anything with it, Dave Fisher has no real interest in doing anything with it. While I've been cleaning up the Off-White House, I did find mock-ups for DVD cases for the first five episodes of CerebusTV. Dave Fisher had mocked up a cover for it and a back cover for it. This is what he's thinking of, and I think we've, that is Dave Fisher and I, still have the first five episodes. We've got first few episodes, Max has X number of episodes that he put together that he hasn't shared with us. We've shared all of the CerebusTV episodes with him, but he's got CerebusTV episodes that he’s just decided he's the only one that's going to have them. He did do CerebusTV as a website, and set up his own PayPal system as to how it would run, and I assume made some kind of revenues off itm but ultimately not enough revenue to warrant keeping it going. Which is what he was doing for a period of time. It's not one of the concerns is that, of course, it's all copyrighted material that I'm talking about. That was more of a concern back in 2009 than it is now, where I think a lot of copyrighted material is on there and as long as you're commenting on it or it's got some historical or scholastic attachment to it, then it's considered fair usage. So I think we're moving from the point where this was an outlaw enterprise on the internet, to a point where it's just what people do. A lot of people do podcasts, this would be Dave Sim’s streaming podcast of him talking about different comics things. I can't see any real way to make money from it. Dave Fisher has the digital files for all of the CerebusTV episodes. He produced DVDs for me that had Illustrated covers. I would do the episodes, he would cut it together, do the sound and the editing and then post it to the internet, and whoever wanted to watch it, could watch it . And then, like I say, produced these DVDs starting from about, I'm guessing episode 37 or 50, somewhere around here, and then I've got most of them in these Illustrated cases up to episode 100, and I think it went for a few episodes after number 100? So all of those cases, the Illustrated cases that Dave Fisher printed out and included the DVDs, are in a stack in the Off-White House Library. And every once in a while, if I have to dig out one of them to check on something, it's there. But in terms of is, there a market for 100 episodes of CerebusTV? Mhmm, I don't really think so. It's probably there will be, as time goes along. Most of these things are just you encountering them because you're new to this whole obsessive Cerebus fandom thing. So it's like, “There's a thing called CerebusTV? It's Dave Sim talking about comics, and showing him drawing, and interviews with other cartoonists? Why isn't this available?” And it's like, well, I think most of it has to do with the fact that Max tried making it available, and to make enough money from it to make it worth all of his investment of time, investment of computer power, and computer technology. And that didn't happen. Dave Fisher is, I don't think, not really inclined to do anything with the material for the reason that he can see how big and arduous a task it would be, and if you invest all of these man hours in building a website and making it Dave Fisher's CerebusTV website and posting all the videos, and it costs this much to download them. I think we know that the illegal downloads will follow very very quickly , that'll be where people go to watch CerebusTV. So however much time and money Fisher, or Max, or me would put into it to make it available, that money is gone. And we'll make Chinese food money from it. And there's only so many hours in the day, it's only so many things that you can work on. So consequently it's not something that any of us are going, yeah, I really have to do this. I think we're all proud of CerebusTV. I know I'm proud of CerebusTV. I favorite episodes that I think, yeah, if I had the time I’d sit down and watch that one again. But in terms of, I think it's it's one of those, in your previous question… where, I wasn't gonna flip backwards here. But I’ll flip back. Um, Matt, you wrote, “He's Dodger now because I let him in the Little Orphan Aardvark Secret Society, because he gave me a buttload of money for ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ back issues.” Well you know, if you're one of those guys who has a buttload of money, I could certainly put you in contact with Dave Fisher, and Dave Fisher could ballpark you, “This is what I would charge you to download all of these onto a thumb drive so that you have all of the CerebusTV that we have. It won't be all of CerebusTV because it won’t be the episodes that only Max has.” We're all just trying to make a living, and pay for groceries that're getting more and more and more expensive, and trying to figure out when does this finally max out. So, you know, it would be a matter of contacting Dave Fisher and saying, “I will pay you x amount of money for all of the episodes of CerebusTV that you have.” Then it would be a matter of, well, okay, how long is it going to take Fisher to do it, and what format is he going to put them on? Probably they would fit on a thumb drive now. That was one of the problems back in 2009, how do you store all of these, let alone how do you disseminate all of these? Make him an offer! It's not something that he's thought about, I'm sure it's not something that I think about, although again, cleaning the Off-White House and really cleaning it, I found like two boxes of CerebusTV material, just, here's the history of CerebusTV. I know there's a CerebusTV box out the back at Camp David that has everything that I had ready at hand in the Off-White House that I went, okay, I don’t want to throw this out, but I don't really have any need for it in the foreseeable future. So Rolly, here, make a CerebusTV box and put all of this stuff in it. It’s one of those, it almost calls for a division head, which is one of the things that I’ve started doing, making Jennifer the division head of Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and Leverette Butts, a professor in Florida who I did a seminar class remotely with his community college class on “Judenhass”, and I've persuaded him to be the “Judenhass” division head, which he's going to be working on on his summer vacation. “How do I ‘Judenhass’? Who do I sell it to? How do I get it into schools?” All those kinds of things. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. That's fine, but it's like, here's something that I don't have time to work on, but here's something that if you want to have time to work on, here's what you can work on. We possibly need a CerebusTV division head. Where, you know, okay here's everything having to do with CerebusTV. If you can figure out how to package this in such a way that people will buy it and there will be revenue generated for me, and for Fisher, and for Max Southall, I can't see anybody standing in your way. But in terms of, who is going to do thisM and how much of their own time and money are they going to put into this? That's always the variable. There’s all kinds of stuff. The Cerebus archive, it's a very very big archive, and there's lots and lots of stuff in it, and lots and lots of different categories, and CerebusTV is one of them. Nobody has figured out how to make it work in such a way that it doesn't just go on to YouTube as illegal downloads, and everybody watches CerebusTV there and doesn't pay for it.
Matt: Well, to be fair, when it was on YouTube it was SimTV, and I remember SimTV. It was great because Friday nights CerebusTV would get the new episode, but if you weren't there at 10 o'clock you'd miss the beginning of the episode and you had to wait for it to repeat, and as more episodes got made, it was longer to wait for the repeat to come back. So Saturday nights, when it went up on YouTube as SimTV, I was a big proponent of, “I want my SimTV!” It was great. I love SimTV, because it had a pause button! You could stop and go to the bathroom if you had to.
Dave: [laughs] Right!
Matt: The problem with Cerebus TV was it was a live stream, and we kept complaining back in the day of, can we get a pause button? We don't want to fast forward through anything, we don't want to rewind, we’d just like to pause for just a minute. And it was, “No no no, that's not what this is designed for.” It's like, I got what the idea was, but at the same time, it's like, I don't want to wait three hours to find out what what Todd's answer was when you asked him a question because I had to walk away.
Dave: Right. Right. And the weird part about SimTV is, after CerebusTV kind of died and went away, SimTV disappeared off of YouTube, and like I don't think any of that content's on there anymore.
Dave: Right. Yeah, it was one of those, nobody wanted to step on anybody's toes. I didn't want to offend Max, Dave Fisher didn't want to offend Max, we didn't want some big disputatius series of overlapping concerns, so it was kind of, well, okay that'll about do it for me. It was an idea that I tried. It lasted about three years? I'm guessing, maybe two years as weekly episodes?
Matt: I know there was at least 104 episodes because episode 103 or 104 is where page nine from “glamourpuss” 25 first showed up.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: It was in the opening bit, therewas just a bunch of quick flashes of art, and I'm like, wait a minute, is that an iguana? But wait a minute, is that a beer can? Oh, is that the script I wrote? Like, that's how I found out that the story made it to press.
Dave: [laughs] Okay yeah, it looms large in your legend,
Matt: Yeah, and that was one of those, I know that episode 100, I get a shout out. The earlier episodes, it was just hard to catch them. I mean, the talk you had with Todd where over the phone you guys made the gentleman's agreement about what to do with “Spawn” 10, I think I've watched half the episode six times, and it was never the other half.
Dave: [laughs] I'm sorry!
Matt: Well, it's like I said. I mean, I remember there was fundraising involved with the Yahoo Group of, “Hey here's a new episode of CerebusTV and if you kick in money, you get your name on the banner, and if you kick in enough money you get merch and stuff.” And every single time I rather Jeff Seiler-like would say, how much does he effing want for a pause button?! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Okay, well, we've got the technology now for pause buttons and I done been told. So I think it's really a matter of, we will leave it there, with the amount of time that it would take for a Fisher to put them all together onto a memory stick for somebody, or a thumb drive for somebody. That's the issue. I don't even know if he'd be willing to do it. I don't know how much disposable time he has. Last time I spoke with him, I apologized for overloading him with with the Kevin Eastman discussions, plus the Weekly Updates, and it's there's no way of telling when you're prevailing on somebody to an extent that you shouldn't be prevailing upon them. So it would be a matter of how long would it take Fisher to download all of the episodes of CerebusTV onto a thumb drive, where you will have your own pause button and fast forward and rewind and all of those things! And I would suspect it would be a matter of, once he had done it once, and went okay, that's how you do that, then it would be, okay, I can tell you that it's gonna cost you this much if you want the complete CerebusTV.
Matt: Well, for the people that missed out, they did miss out. I mean, my favorite episodes were the ones where it's you talking about whatever you were working on, and then the next 25 minutes was just Dave inking.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And all the comments on those videos, almost every time were, you know, the usual gang of Yahoos going, “I could watch this all day.”
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: That's the kind of stuff where I'm like, you know this page from “glamourpuss”, that whatever, I think some of the IDW covers may have even made it into there, but I could be wrong on that.
Dave: Right. Yeah, and I appreciate that, and I'm sure Max Southall appreciates that, and I'm sure Dave Fisher appreciates that, but it's a matter of, again, you know, there's only so many hours in a day. How many times have we gotten to this place in the conversation where we realize that it's a matter of people saying, “Somebody should really…” and it's like, somebody's fine, but to quote you from from earlier on, definitely not me.
Matt: [laughs] Ed Zachary.
Dave: Right. So, MJ “Mike” Sewall, I will leave it at that. Matt, you've got Dave Fisher's email address, right?
Matt: I do. So if anyone wants to send their…
Dave: Not not not, wait wait wait wait. Not anyone. Give it to Mike, because if he’s willing to give you bucket loads of money for “Cerebus in Hell?” back issues, I'm sure that Dave Fisher is in the market for bucket loads of money for CerebusTV episodes.
Matt: What I was going to suggest is, anyone that wants CerebusTV can email me, and I will forward the request on to Fisher, and if Fisher wants to respond with, “Nyah, I don't think so”, well that's what I'm gonna tell people.
Dave: No, let’s start with one person. We’ll start with Mike.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Like Mike can just explain, Dave Fisher doesn't listen to Please Hold for Dave Sim, I'm pretty sure, so Mike, if you can just explain to him, that this is how this came about. And this is what you would be willing to pay for all of the episodes of CerebusTV and SimTV that Dave Fisher has. Dave Sim said that's fine, and if Fisher wants to talk to me about it, I'll talk to him about it, but this is in the category of, this is why we have reciprocal ownership, so that Max can do whatever he wants with all of the episodes, I can do whatever I want, Fisher can do whatever he wants. We'll start this one as just Mike Sewall and Dave Fisher, and then if they can play nice and work something out, and Fisher goes, “Okay, this is my report on that. This is how much time it took me, this is how much money I made.” Then, [laughs] you know, I could say, well I want some of that! Or, I want half of that! Or, I want 25% of that, or whatever it is. Or if it's like Chinese food money, well okay, Dave Fisher gets to order Chinese food for the next four Fridays, courtesy of Mike Sewall.
Matt: Okay I will do my behind-the-scenes magic, and see what the two of them come up with, and I will report back if I hear anything good, and if I hear anything bad, you're not gonna hear about it. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] All right! I get plausible deniability on it now. That's good.
Okay, and coming up to the last question. Am I am I right on that? Yes, I am! Last question from John Glismann, and hello, John, “Question, can anyone explain Dave's fixation on the number seven in The Strange Death of Alex Raymond? There are many examples, but here are just two, one, ’Stan Drake is born November 9th 1921. The day after Margaret Mitchell's 21st birthday. 7, 7, 7. Fitzgerald works 21 days, 7, 7, 7, as a contracted writer on ‘Gone with the Wind’ movie script.’ I've had the book for a while and I'm finally getting around to reading it. Was something explained earlier in the text and I just missed it? I'm honestly trying to understand. Is it just an odd numerology thing? What's going on here?” Uh, no, you haven't missed anything. It's in the text because it's a central element of Strange Death of Alex Raymond. What I'm trying to do is to broach it in the way that I have boached it, it doesn't actually get addressed in a more specific form until much later in the mock-ups, which people are unlocking right now with the SDoAR 2023 that Jennifer is doing.d I could check on what pages it's on, [coughs] excuse me, but we're a long ways away from unlocking those pages. So, no, you haven't missed anything, yes, it is central. As a matter of fact, it goes all the way back to the Bible. Specifically, and I'm trying to condense this as much as I can, this is from Genesis chapter 4. This is Cain being expelled, “And Cain said unto the YHWH, my punishment greater than I can bear. Behold thou has driven me out this day from the face of the Earth, and from thy face I shall be hid, and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the Earth, and it shall come to pass everyone that findeth me shall slay me. And the YHWH said unto him, therefore whoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the YHWH set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” And, okay, to me that's the YHWH side of things. God's response to that actually takes several generations, hundreds and hundreds of years before it comes up at the end of chapter 4. There's Enoch, Mehujael, Methushael, Lamech. “And Lamech took unto him two wives, the name of the one Adah and the name of the other Zillah. And Adah bear Jabal, and he was the father of such as dwell in tents and have cattle. And his brother's name was Jugal, he was the father of all such that handle the harp and organ. And Zillah, she also bear Tubal-Cain, a wetter of every artificer in brass and iron, and the sister of Tubal-Cain, Naamah.” Here's the reply, “And Lamech said unto his wives Adah and Zillah, hear my voice ye wives, hearken unto my speech, for I would slay a man in my wound and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.” So there's the first occurrence of the 7, 7. It crops up again in the flood narrative, where the YHWH tells Noah to bring all the animals onto the Ark by two and two, except the unclean animals, which he’s instructed to bring in by, and the Hebrew is literally, 7, 7. So it's weird, because this is in Genesis. The distinction between clean and unclean animals doesn't come up until Leviticus, and I have an explanation for it, but you've got to be patient, because no, it's not numerology. It's the structure of the reality that we inhabit. And thousands of years after that, then there's, this is from the Kingdom Interlinear, John's revelation at the end of chapter 1. “The mystery of the seven stars which you saw upon the right of me, and the seven lampstands the golden. The seven stars, angels of the seven Ecclesia are. And the lampstands the seven seven Ecclesia are.” All of the Christian translations of the Greek that specifically says “seven, seven,” just says, “Oh, um, means the seven congregations.” Well, it doesn't say “seven congregations.” it says “seven seven congregations.” You change the content of the last book of the Judeo-Christian Bible that contains a reference that is central to the first chapter of the Torah. And it's like, this is the stuff that just drives me around the bend! So okay, it takes a long time to explain it, and that's the teaser that I will give you. Yes, it is explained up ahead why these 7s, and 7 7s, and 7 7 7s are centrally important, not just to The Strange Death of Alex Raymond, but to reality itself.
And on that note, it's time for me to read the second book of Moshe, chapter 12, the Passover narrative, and a chunk of the Quran, and do my final prayer for the night, and then I get to eat!
Matt: [laughs] Okay. Then I won’t keep you.
Dave: Well, I appreciate that, Manly Matt. And thank you as always for this.
Matt: I do have one quick question though, does that mean on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, you'll do from the Quran the Passover narrative, and then something from the one of the Gospels?
Dave: Uh, all of John’s Gospel will be tomorrow on Good Friday.
Matt: Okay. Well…
Dave: So, [laughs] it's, if I do anything else besides read scripture aloud, it would be interesting to examine this and find out how often does this occur, that Passover and Easter both occur within the confines of Ramadan? Easter and Passover chase each other around the calendar, but they're always within range of each other. This is probably the only time in 38 years when they both occur within the confines of Ramadan. So if you're talking about God's Clockwork Mechanism,here's a real confluence right here, where tomorrow is the halfway point in Passover, and is Good Friday, and is the second day of Passover.
Matt: Okay, well that's, I mean, I knew that this was gonna be, I want to say, busy time. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: But you know, that's why I gave you the option of, you could walk away, or you can come to the table, and you chose coming to the table, and I always appreciate that. So thank you.
Dave: Well, no problem at all. We'll find out how many confluences there are at this point and we’ll have a Please Hold for Dave Sim to listen to, or people will 50 years from now. I won't be here, I don't think. Have a good night, Matt!
Matt: You too, Dave!
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye.
[public domain chime music again]
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
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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:
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...
 |
| 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:
- Cerebus #122 page 13
- Cerebus #122 page 14
- 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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