Hi, Everybody!
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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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1/2026
Matt: Earlier in the week, I had an idea for a “Captain America” story that I’m like, this is really really good! And then I went, how the heck do I get someone who does anything at Marvel and “Captain America” to do this idea?
Dave: And what did you come up with?
Matt: Well, the idea is, in 80 years, as far as I know, the Red Skull’s never been captured or never been captured long enough to go to trial, so what if Cap finally caught the Red Skull and they had to put him on trial? Because, I’m sure, it’d be, Nazi war criminal, so it’s gonna be in Germany. And the idea that Steve Rogers is like, “I’m calling in all the favors I have with every superhero in the world. He’s not getting away this time.” And it was one of those, I was at work, and for like five hours, I’m going, this is the greatest “Captain America” idea I can ever think of, and no one’s gonna ever read it!
Dave: [laughs] Never say never!
Matt: Well, true. Ahh! Okay.
Dave: Alright. Are we r--
Matt: We are recording, yes.
Dave: We’re recording, okay. “Hooray hooray, it’s the first of May, outdoor screwing, hey yo!” and you've got the first part in quotation marks, what's that from?
Matt: My dad's posted on Facebook every year on May 1st.
Dave: [laughs] Hooray hooray, it’s the first of May, outdoor screwing?
Matt: Starts today.
Dave: Starts today, okay! Well, you must be living in a sunnier clime than I am, apart from being celibate since 1998, I wouldn't be thinking about outdoor screwing on the first of May. Maybe we can substitute “Gwenevre’s Song” from “Camelot”. [sings] It's May, it's May, the lusty month of May! Which is, you know, basically the same sentiment, but just not quite as overt as your Dad tendes to get.
Matt: Well, he posted it, and by me it was in the 30s and snowing, and somebody commented of, “No no, that's not happening” and somebody else says, “Why don't you just do it year round” It's like, because eventually it gets cold!
Dave: [laughs] These people, like I say, live in sunnier climes than we do. “We should wish all the people who didn't get laid in high school, happy May the 4th be with you, present company included.” And, uh, yeah, that was pretty clever, whoever came up with May the 4th be with you. That has spread like wild fire, and apart from people like me who just aren't engaged with modern society, probably there's very very few people that don't think on May the 4th, Star Wars.
Matt: So, you're not gonna believe who actually came up with that.
Dave: I’m not?
Matt: You're not gonna believe it.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: It does have a Cerebus connection. I mean, and not the tangible, “they both came out in 1977” or “Gene Day was a huge fan and there was the portfolio ad in the back of issue one.” May the 4th was originally proposed by Margaret Thatcher.
Dave: Really?
Matt: She gave a speech, back when Star Wars was super popular, and said “May the 4th be with you” type thing, and people latched onto it. Because the first movie came out, I remember it, it's the end of May.
Dave: Good for Margaret Thatcher, or one of her speechwriters, anyway.
Matt: Well, Star Wars Day, for the old school High School virgins, is I think May 22nd, but then after she gave this speech about May the 4th and supporting Star Wars, it spread because it's one of those viral things of, “Well, it just makes sense, yeah, let's do that.” It's like, well, all the grumpy fans are going, “Well, but it's not actually Star Wars Day.” It's like, yeah well, you guys… everybody lost that one. It's May the 4th. I mean, George Lucas kind of sort of wrote the concept when he said, “May the force be with you.”
Dave: Yes. Yes. “And since the Saturday this is going up is Free Comic Book Day 2023, we should also acknowledge that.” Yes, Happy Free Comic Book Day for everybody tuning in today who has either just got back from the comic store or is heading out to their LCS for Free Comic Book Day. That started a long time ago, and it's been in continuous operation for, it's gotta be decades now.
Matt: Uhh, I'm trying to think… I can't remember when the first one was.
Dave: It was the Four Colors Comics Store guy in California, and Grandpa's memory is playing him false. Uhh, we don't want to be just listening to me going, “uhh, umm” for 20 minutes. Joe Field! Joe Field at Flying Colors Comics and Games in Concord, California was the one who came up with Free Comic Book Day. And as far as I know he still has a supervisory capacity of deciding which publishers get to do new Free Comic Book Day comic books, and which ones don't.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: All right. ”I hope everybody picked up the *Hot* book that will ONLY increase in value and not whatever crap Marvel and DC throw out there.” Do you go to the Free Comic Book Day to find out what they've got going?
Matt: Some years I go, some years I don't. Back when it first started, the comic book store that I went to all the time, I wouldn't go on Free Comic Book Day, I would go a week later, and the guy that ran the place would give me… cause most places limit you to like three or four free comics, and I'd go a week later, and he'd give me everything that he had left. So that, you know, if there's 20 books, I'd get all 20.
Dave: That’s pretty cool.
Matt: Well, they went out of business, and now the place I go is limiting me to three, but I have two kids, so technically I can get nine.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: If I bring the wife, I get 12!
Dave: [laughs] That's probably why they went out of business. They gave all their profits to you. I'm just kidding! I'm just kidding.
Matt: B-back in my second…
Dave: “Anybody remember 2020 and the free ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ issue I got made for everybody? You’re still welcome!” And yes, we still owe you a massive debt from three years ago, Matt.
Matt: Well that was, the COVID hit, and okay you know, we did the first three Coronavirus books, and okay, we're done. We're not doing this anymore. Everybody agreed, we're killing ourselves. This isn't gonna work. And then I'm like, hey you guys, you know Saturday's Free Comic Book Day, you think we can get an issue done in a week? And it immediately was, everybody, uniforms back on, we're going back out on the ice! We're gonna do this, one more time. [laughs]
Dave: And so it was done!
Matt: And you can supposedly still get a print copy because Diamond still has “League of Extraordinary Corona” in stock, according to the latest “Cerebus in Hell?” that I saw the back cover of.
Dave: So there you go. Just, go to your LCS and tell them you want one of those, and if they want to give you an argument, just say, “I've got the back cover of the comic book right here and it says you can still get these.”
Matt: Well, I'm going to double check with Eddie and make sure that it's in stock, cause he's pretty good on, “They gave us the list and this is what they say they have right.”
Dave: Right. They do have troubles with the disconnects between the warehouse and the office. Tends to be getting more the rule than the exception, where books disappear and then reappear inexplicably, and then disappear again because somebody counted them, but they just got grandfathered into the inventory list. And then you point out, “It's my turn to remember Jeff Seiler, and this particular memory involves something that's in the large flat envelope I sent you, which the internet says was delivered yesterday. If it was, could you please have Rolly scan and email the drawing that isn't by Neal Adams. Thanks in advance. And if it wasn't delivered yesterday, what the hell internet? I'm a beginning to think I can't trust you anymore, I thought we had something special! I let you into my home! I've given you my credit card number, and this is how you treat me? God day, sir, I say good day!” Yes, it did come in, and I was just getting to the end of the eight or nine hours that I put in processing the stuff that you sent in the last week or so for the Cerebus Archive and thought, okay, that's finally behind me, and then I read this, “the drawing that isn't by Neal Adams.” And I'm going, that's right. I got the six Neal Adams prints, and I definitely processed those immediately, because there is a a place for the prints now in the Cerebus Archive. But there was a drawing with it, and it was a strange drawing. What did I do with that? Well, then it was off on hunt mode going, well wherever it is in the debris field, it's at the top of the pilem because it it just came in last week. I haven't gotten anything else on the Cerebus Archive except what I got from Matt Dow. So that's the segue, because I did find it, and I did give it to Rolly, and he did scan it, and it has been emailed to you.
Matt: Okay. So, now that I can put this in the video so people will be able to see what I'm talking about, back in one of the early S.P.A.C.E.s where all the Yahoo's got together, so 2005 at the earliest, more likely 2006, Jeff… in fact it was the first year of “Cerebus Readers in Crisis,” so I believe that's 2006. Now I'm getting to be Grandpa-y, I can't remember.
Dave: [laughs] I know! These are gonna degenerate to the point where we don't even know what the other guy said five minutes ago. But keep going, because they will be able to look at this.
Matt: Jeff got a table, I had a table, and we got tables next to each other. And Bob Corby or his wife had walked around taking photos, and got a picture of Jeff, Paula, and me, and it went up on the S.P.A.C.E. website, credited as “Jeff and Paula Seiler, and Matt Dow.”
Dave: [laughs] I never heard this one before !
Matt: And somebody pointed it out, that someone made a mistake, and Bob was all apologetic, “Oh I'll fix! I'll fix it!” We're like, no no, we think it's hilarious, because it became a running joke of she's his wife and he's only letting me borrow her.
Dave: [laughs] Okay, that explains Paula’s note on the drawing that they're looking at right now.
Matt: So that particular drawing is, the next year at S.P.A.C.E., Jeff Tundis had Faber-Castell color markers, and we're showing them to you, and you were like, “Oh that's neat!” And grabbed this random piece of paper, and was just, we're all sitting hanging out and you were playing with them, going, “Okay yeah, these are neat, but you know I'm really not a colour guy, but if ever I need type thing” and had set it aside. And then you went off, cause it was getting close to the end of Saturday, beginning of Sunday, so you had to go back to your room. And we were all hanging out, and someone on the Yahoo Group and, as we have said it in past Please Holds, Jeff had a tendency to get on people's nerves. He just he would get pendantic and people would just take him to task, and he would take to task, and it would become a bit of a row of, Jeff being Jeff and other people getting mad at Jeff for being Jeff, and whoever it was, and I can’t honestly… I probably could remember if I really wanted to try but at this point, ehh, it doesn't pay cause it's not like I'm gonna do what we were gonna do, Which was, I grabbed the piece of paper and wrote what I wrote around the color that you had scribbled on there, and then I passed around like, alright, everybody, I did my drawing of Jeff and what I wrote about Jeff, and I passed it around everybody in the room of, hey, sign this, write something nice about Jeff, and if you have the talent do a portrait of Jeff. And everybody was, you know the few guys that could draw are like, “Oh yeah sure no problem” and everybody else was like, “I really don't want to draw.” And I'm like ah come on, it'll be fun.
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: And finally got to Jeff who wrote what Jeff wrote, and the idea was I was gonna mail it to whoever along with some other stuff as, okay, you know, we understand you and Jeff don't get along, but let's just let bygones be bygones, and here you have original art from the Yahoos including the moderators, and work by Dave. We swear those scribbles aren't just scribbles, Dave actually put pen to paper, and it's an original, no one else has this! And it was gonna be, that was the plan, whatever package I was gonna send was a small box and this is a like 11 by 17 piece of paper or slightly smaller, and it's like, I just couldn't figure out a way of mailing both together without it being a pain in the butt, and then I moved twice, and it got shoved in somewhere and then, every time I'd stumble over them, oh yeah I thought I mailed ths. Aand it's okay, put it in my to-be-mailed pile, and then I'd forget about it and stumble over it a year later going, oh yeah I should mail this. And finally it was in the pile of, okay I'm just gonna send this to Jeff and Jeff can have it, that's when I got the call of, “Hey Matt, I'm dying.”
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And that's why it ended up with the Neal Adams prints, because, okay I'll send it up to the Archive, and it'll be one of the remembrances of Jeff that's permanently on file in the Cerebus Archive in the future when the Off-White House is open for tours. Anybody that wants to go and see this, that isn't happy with the picture on the internet, okay here you go, and it's going to be in this drawer. I look forward to when Eddie has to do the index of what everything is and where it is.
Dave: Yeah, when you get to something like that, you tend to, I'm speaking from personal experience as the first Cerebus Archivist, you get to something like that and you're sitting and staring at it. And you stare at it for like 10 minutes going, no, just put it aside, because if you're going to be finishing the Archive, you can't let these kinds of things throw you off. But yeah, what category does that go in? “Other people's art”? “Jeff Seiler”? In so many ways, Jeff’s in a category all his own, in terms of, yes, he was irritating. How many people that are that irritating to a specific group of people, do those people sit down and then do a document drawing testimonial to that person, and actually carry through on it? It's like, that seems completely contradictory, that you just wouldn't do that for somebody that was that irritating, but we did! We did. It was like you always wanted Jeff to be included, and so many times in spite of his own best efforts to sabotage that.
Matt: Very true. Very true. I mean…
Dave: And then you… go ahead.
Matt: Well, and that was, so I sent you the unsigned cards, because this way everybody that wants a card, it'll be signed by Dave. That way there's no two-tier system of, well, you didn't really know Jeff, do you really deserve…? You know, it takes the, “well is this signature worthy?” out of it. Everybody gets a signature, it's just easier that way.
Dave: There you go. Yes.
Matt: And when I sent a message to you saying, hey I sent the cards, I also sent it to Margaret because Margaret has cards and that way okay Margaret, you send up, you know, do what I did and get the cards back, that way everybody gets a signature. And she's like, “Well shouldn't Jeff be signing the cards?” And I'm like, hey if my Ouija board worked, I’d get it to work, but it's not working, so Dave's gonna have to do.
Dave: That's right. That’s right, because whatever else you can say about Dave Sim, he's still here. Yeah, I got a kind of funny look from Rolly when I handed him the stack of Jeff Seiler cards. It's like, “I thought this was a solved problem from from long long ago” and it's like, yeah, I'm kind of hoping this would be the last time that the Jeff Seiler cards come through here. But major brownie points to Dagon for doing the 301 card in the first place, and it's a beautiful job with the silver incorporated. “If you have any questions about anything I sent,” you say in parentheses, “feel free to have Rolly send a picture of you holding the item and I'll explain as best I can. Since my old friend the internet says you got the 15 pound box at the end of April.” And yes I did, and yes, it cost you like $92 to mail that?
Matt: Yeah! Yeah, that's, I went to the post office and the lady's like, “Well you know it's going to be 92” and I'm like, yeah I know, and she just kind of looked at me like, I know going to Canada is expensive and I know this box is not light, so those two things together… I mean, it was under 100. I was kind of happy at that point.
Dave: Yeah. Yes. And it's, like you have to factor in the, you're finally getting rid of this stuff. It's like this has been haunting you in your “I need to mail this” pile, and getting rid of one of those is is easily worth $92.
Matt: Well especially because I had everything, including the Neal Adams prints in a nice big box that was wide enough and deep enough to fit everything, and I'm going, I can make this smaller and lighter. We'll just break it into two. It'll be better. But the box I had was sitting on a chair in my dining room, and oh, once a week my wife would look at me and be like, “When are you gonna clean that crap?”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I'd be like, I'm working on it! I'm working on it.
Dave: Really.
Matt: Taking the time to figure out what's in the box, to type up a letter saying, this is what's in the box, instead of just randomly saying, well here's a box, and hopefully I didn't drop my car keys in it.
Dave: Right. Right. And of course, Paula is looking at it, going, “I'm not seeing dining room here.”
Matt: Yeah, pretty much, that's, I mean, it was, oh, I'd say at least a dozen times of, “Okay when is this getting gone?” It's like, as soon as I take an hour or two to just, okay, empty everything out, put it back in one at a time, make sure… The other one was, you know, I'd have something and I tell the kids to, hey go put this on my desk, and immediately it went into the box. And like, the box is on the other side of the room. How exactly does this thought process work? And the child just looks at me like, “Well, you said go put it over there” and I'm like, I pointed where I wanted it!
Dave: [laughs] You're arguing at their level now.
Matt: The fun part for me is when they pretend that I have a laser pointer at the end of my finger, and I point at something, and they come up to my finger and put their finger on it, and then start walking in what they think is a straight line trying to see what I'm pointing at, and I'm going, you're off by 45 degrees. How exactly did you think this was working?
Dave: Really?
Matt: Kids are great, Dave! Years ago you should have said, “Ah screw it, I'm gonna have a baseball team” cause right now you'd be probably going insane.
Dave: Uh, I think that’s a fair bet, although you’d get an argument out of a lot of people over that one.
Then you write, “Then we get to answering all these goshdarn questions. Maybe some month you people can send us answers and we can give questions, Jeopardy-style. I'll take potpourri for a thousand, Alex.” Uh, we can try that one month. You send us the answers, and we'll come up with questions that match it. “First off is the next question from Adam J Elkhadem, creator of ‘Octave the Artist,’ that you, Dave, have and me, Matt, can only guess at. Is it bigger than a breadbox?” Um, conceptually you could probably make a persuasive case for that. Um, the question, where does he come up with the next question here? Oh, this continues on from his, “As a mere flat-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?” He goes on, going, “I've built a few models,” [coughs] Excuse me. “But I don’t think this is how you learn this skill.” And, no, Gerhard did models. He did a model for the Melmoth street in the “Melmoth” storyline, and also did the barge in “Going Home,” but even he had a limited appetite for models. I think, because we're talking, Adam, about your new graphic novel, which I have no idea about. It would be one of those situations where if you were going to do that, then you would probably want to save that for a graphic novel or a storyline that was going to take you years, plural, to do, and where everything was taking place in one location, because otherwise there is a point of diminishing returns, where I think even Gehard with the “Melmoth” street scene, it's like, “Considering how long it took me to put this together and make all of the pieces fit so that I could look at the streets from different angles. There's probably a better way to do this.” And by the time that he was doing various floor plans and whatnot, then we were into the computer age, and he was able to take various lamps and things like that for specific heights, and, “Okay, here's this floor plan in three dimensions inside the computer, so that I can turn it around, and then print it out from specific angles.” And then Adam takes this strange turn where he goes, “Is ‘Savage Sword of Conan’ useful in this regard?” And I do think that “Savage Sword of Conan” I definitely used quite extensively but for a very short period in the early 1970s. The only work from that time period that I remember specifically being heavily influenced by “Savage Sword of Conan” and heavily influenced specifically by Alfredo Alcala's inking over John Bucema's layouts, was “The Pickman Portrait!” storyline, which as far as we're able to determine, was about 10 pages long. I had the last page in the Cerebus Archive continuously, and then Eddie Khanna found another page, and bid on it successfully and donated it to the Cerebus Archive. And definitely the idea of rendering all of the details that human beings, and the backgrounds, with parallel lines. Probably the best person that I ever saw doing that was John Totleben inking Steve Bissette on “Swamp Thing”, and I wouldn't rate mine as particularly successful. Alfredo Alcala was successful. It's one of those, you might find out that you just want to do one storyline, keeping that in mind, saying, “I want this to have the same quality as Alfredo Alcala inking John Buscema on ‘Savage Sword of Conan.” If you're going to do that, then I would definitely recommend finding a black and white version of “Swamp Thing” and looking at John Totleben's inks, because for that specific illustration look in comic book storytelling, I don't think you can do better than John Totleben did at the time. So that's that question, I think we've got maybe about somewhere between 9 and 12 more questions. So Adam will be with us for a while.
Matt: [laughs] Okay.
Dave: And then “Dodger asks,” and Dodger, of course, is MJ “Mike” Sewall, and thank you Mike for ordering one of the Remarque Editions. It has been personalized to Mike and we are about, I'm gonna optimistically say, about a week away from being able to get those out? I did get the mystery ashcan proof copy in today, there's very small tweaking on it that I will be relaying to Alfonso and Studiocomix Press and saying, I don't need another proof, just fix these one or two little small glitches, and then print out the 100 copies. Mike asks, “A question for Dave. Who designed the ’Cerebus’ covers? Always Dave? Sometimes Gerhard?”” And I went and got the Cerebus covers book, and was flipping through to refresh my memory on it. I think the most concise answer that I can give to that, is any time that there's a “Cerebus” cover that's all background, in other words there's no characters in it, I'm looking right now at the “Jaka's Story” covers after Jaka has been arrested. So that's cover of 130 with the door splintering inwards and the doorknob and doorknob plate buckling . And then the actual in the tombs cover 132, 133. Of those run of covers, those are the three that don't have characters on them. In that case, I would just give Gerhard a verbal description. I would just say, here's the information that needs to be conveyed. Like I sayM the description that I just gave, the doors splintering inward and the doorknob and the doorknob plate are buckling. The alcohol lamp globe with the skull on the ground and just the pool of light around the skull, you could never actually make that work trying to do it in real life because the light would get too diffusem but that was part of the description that I gave Gerhard. Picture that it's like a spotlight and an extremely focused spotlight, and you just get the pool of light at the top of the cover, and the pool of light at the bottom of the cover, and trust me. It'll look really good. It won't be accurate, but cool beats accurate nine times out of ten. Then there would be a situation like the “Melmoth” cover for 146, which is Reggie looking out of the top floor in the upper right corner, and then the rest of it is background. I would be looking at either one of the previous backgrounds in the book, or looking at Gerhard’s model and saying, this section. And that would limit Gerhard's options just based on how large Reggie was in the picture. 167 is probably a good one to look at, in terms of the description for that was, okay you know the demon heads and skulls that the Upper City is is built on? Picture the fact that the road goes around the outside of that volcanic outcropping, and at some point it reaches the top, and when it reaches the top, it's like a gate going into a city ,but it's obviously strangely compressed because the roadway is only as wide as a ribbon that has spiraled up the demon heads and skulls. So, at that point it's, okay you have to make this look plausible. Picture that in your head. The entryway to a medieval or perhaps Victorian City, what the gate would look like, and what it would look like in in the context of Iest. So in terms of the question, getting back to your specific question, “who designed the ‘Cerebus’ covers?” I wasn't designing the cover, I was saying, this is the information that needs to be on the cover, and then Gerhard would take it from there. “Okay, this is what Dave is telling me visually. This is the picture that I'm getting in my head. Now I have to have to figure out how do I make the picture that I see in my head appear on this piece of illustration board to be penciled and inked and watercoloured in way too short a period of time.” Mike goes on, “I know the photo covers for ‘Going Home’ were Gehard,” and we'll skip down to Matt's, “The ‘Going Home’ photos were also your dad, Ken Sim’s photos, as well, or were those photos on the ‘Latter Days’ covers? I'm getting to be an old interim editor and it's all starting to blend together.” And yes, the problem comes in because of the use of the “Latter Days” title, because they're all “Latter Days”’s photos but Gerhard's photos and a couple of those photos were Rose’s as well. Those were on “Fall and the River”, which was the first part, the Fitzgerald part of “Latter Days,” but saying “Latter Days” on the front cover, and my Dad's photos were for the Hemingway half, which was “Form & Void.” So “Form & Void” and “Fall and the River” together make up “Latter Days”, and they're all numbered as “Latter Days” issues, which is where that part gets really confusing. Um…
Matt: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Dave: Go ahead.
Matt: No. “Form & Void” and “Fall and the River” are labeled “Going Home.”
Dave: Um, yes. Right.
Matt: “Latter Days” starts with “This Aardvark, This Shepherd.”
Dave: Right. Right. See? I can't even keep it straight anymore. You're right it's the “Form & Void” and “Fall and the River” are both “Going Home.”
Matt: Because--
Dave: It's all “Going Home” and has “Going Home” logo on the front of it. “Latter Days” starts with the”This Aardvark, This Shepherd” is the first one, which is 265, I think. And then that's ”Latter Days” is 265 through to 288, when it becomes “The Last Day” 289 to 300.
Matt: Wait, 289/290 was the double issue, and I think that's still labeled as “Latter Days” on the covers.
Dave: Mm, yes.
Matt: Ahh! I win, I win!
Dave: [laughs] That’s right! You win the Samsonite luggage! It was an in-betweenish, it was not really technically “Latter Days,” but it also technically wasn't “The Last Day” yet.
Matt: But that was, the end of “Latter Days” were the movie poster covers, and I know that those two are the last two movie posters.
Dave: Right, which incorporated my Dad's photos. There was one of my Dad’s photos, however weirdly manipulated digitally, incorporated into the movie posters. There might be an exception to that, or a couple of exceptions to that, but I tried very hard to go, okay, I wanna keep using these photos, so I will get really really imaginative as to how these photos, these nature photos, fit into a movie poster parody.
Getting back to Mike’s question, we've interrupted him… well, he interrupted himself a few times, but, “My question is prompted by the cover for ‘Following Cerebus’ #10. This mirrors issue #36 of “Cerebus”, “The Night Before.” In the original all Dave cover, the roof is made up of simple cross lines of support. In the Gerhard background ‘Following Cerebus’ #10, the supports are beefed up Victorian-style ironworks Was this Ger’s structural engineering passive aggressive revenge years later?” It's like, uh, no, I don't think so. That's, if I had to think of a term describing any elements on Gerhard's psychology “passive aggressive” and “revenge” wouldn't even make the top 200, I don't think. “Did you two have a laugh about such things?” There wasn't really anything very funny about this, on either of our parts. I know that I always would get a a world-class Gerhard background whatever the situation was on, on the background. If I was just describing it verbally, then yes, I would definitely get something, it would have two elements to it, it'd be completely unexpected, and it would be way way better than it needed to be. And the “Following Cerebus” #10 cover is a good example of that, because it's, well okay, here's what I did when I was doing it on my own, it's a greenhouse. A greenhouse has a specific look to it, but because I was doing the backgrounds and the characters and the writing and the lettering, it was, okay, how do I convey a greenhouse as simply as possible, so that I can put all of my time in on the stuff that interests me, which is far more of the writing, the lettering, and the characters, the pacing of the pages, and whatnot. And having decided that this was going to be the “Following Cerebus” #10 cover, it was, well, here's what I did, you know what I was trying to convey here. Now you have to apply your 100% faithful, OCD, this is going to be much much better than it needs to be, to that specific background. I think that he did actually find a Victorian greenhouse background. or it was something from one of those Victorian festivals, or what they called the World's Fairs before they were World's Fairs. Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, something or other. And it's one of those, well, okay, you found it, how faithful are you going to be to it? Because it's not just gonna land on the page on its own. And it's absolutely gorgeous. I mean, you know the one that we're talking about here, Matt?
Matt: Yes, I was gonna say, I believe that the “Following Cerebus” cover is part of the series of “what if Gerhard had been here the whole time.”
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: I was thinking about it, because that’s technically Gerhard’s second stab at that scene, because in “Melmoth” there's the bit where the one waitress asked Cerebus, “Do you know what I mean?” and he’s thinking about Jaka and page 188 is giant Jaka, little Ceebus, and then the greenhouse background, and looking at it, it looks a lot closer to issue 36 background than the “Following Cerebus” cover.
Dave: Right. Right. It was also, I would do things with the background [coughs] excuse me, that Gerhard tended not to do. If you look at issue 36, it actually resonates with “The Last Day,” which is, if you think about it, there's hiding just below the surface, “The Night Before the Last Day” and it was a technique that I didn't really revisit between “The Night Before” and “The Last Day” of having the background visible, but compressed, so that it was there's at least I think a half dozen panels where the background is visible but only as a halo around Cerebus or a halo around Jaka, and I didn't really revisit that extensively until “The Last Day” when I did that because Cerebus is old. And there a definite metaphysics to that of being old and having your reality collapse around you is a lot like those those conversations with the Beloved, this is my other, when the conversation's not going real good, and I think we can all agree that the conversation in #36 didn’t go really good. And I was kind of proud of the fact that, here you go, here's the same motif, and here's why I'm using the same motif, because there's “The Last Day” and then there's the last day where it's the “last day” in terms of your life, but it's probably even more brutal than your last day on Earth. The conversation with the romantic partner that’s just not going the way that you would want it to or would hope it to, and then it just goes over the brink of the falls, and that's all she wrote.
Matt: Now I don't want to get up and grab the book to look, but I think you use the same motif in “Going Home” right before “Fall and the River” when it's the, when they get get in the carriage, I think right before they get in the carriage it's the similar motif of the background get subdued. And then at the end of “Form & Void” it's a white landscape, but it also has a lot of that where it's the spotlight of the characters, a little bit of background, but a lot more white.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Thanks Dave, now I gotta do a day on the blog of, hey guys, look at this motif that Dave pointed out that nobody really picked up on.
Dave: [laughs] Which might be idiosyncratic to Dave. “Did anybody else ever experience this?” Uh, yes, I could picture a few of those. We won't spoil anybody's treasure hunt by bringing them up now, but yes, definitely having been married and having an ex-wife and having several ex-girlfriends , I was very aware of, okay well, whatever it is, here I am again, and here we go.
And Michael R is back! Michael, we missed you last time. I think that was the first Please Hold for Dave Sim that didn't have a Michael R question. And we're making up for that with three attachments to this question. “I was reading ‘Madman: Atomic Comics!’ issue #3 from July 2007. In this issue, Mike Allred attempted many art styles of various artists. 255 if I counted right.” I have never seen “Atomic Comics” #3, but just looking at the one that you sent through, that's a very very very impressive piece of work, which is always interesting when you're looking looking at something that blows your socks off you find out it’s from 16 years ago! And you know, why haven't people been talking about this ever since? Well, because we had a lot of amazing stuff happening in the comic book field. “You were on the list, and I believe you were on page 25, second row, and second image from the right. It looks like Swoon.” And I'll go along with you on that one, which, again, I'm very impressed that Mike Allred could do a Madman that if I was just scanning that page, I'd go, yep, that looks like Swoon to me. “I'm guessing on this. Some were very easy to match up, some artists not so much, and some I never heard of. But anyway, my questions are, did you ever meet Mike and Laura Allred?” Yes, I did. “And how did Mike Allred get involved in drawing the ‘glamourpuss’ cover #19?” And here we get into Grandpa's memory territory again of, my memory isn't what it used to be, so anytime these situations come up, I try to start from what I do remember. I specifically remember, yes, this did happen. What the sequence of events leading up to that was? That I'm a little fuzzier on and so I will say that the tag end of the story was I had done Cerebus as Madman, an actual colour piece, and I contacted Mike Allred and I'm pretty sure that I had done an episode of CerebusTV where I was where I filmed myself doing the Cerebus as Madman, and had Mike and Laura's phone number, and phoned and said, you might want to check out CerebusTV this week because I did Cerebus as Madman. And, “Oh great! Yes!” He definitely wanted to check that out. I didn't realize at the time, and this is where I'm starting to try and piece it together so I'm on kind of thin ice saying this, but I didn't realize how big a deal it was for Mike Allred to get as many different cartoonists doing their character as Madman, or doing their version of Madman. And if it was on CerebusTV, if I am remembering that part correctly, then that would be about 2009? 2008? Mhmm, I'm kind of fuzzy on those dates, as well. But I do remember Mike getting back to me and I would say, you know, if you want to buy it, you're the obvious top of the line customer. You tell me what you would be willing to pay for a colour piece Cerebus as Madman that you can see on TV. This is what it's gonna look like, this is how big it is. And he said, “Laura won't let me buy artwork.” And it's like, okay, part of me is, you know, Dave Sim the evil misogynist going, dude, it's your artwork. How can Laura want to tell you that you can't buy artwork? But then, that’s one of those, if you're an OCD art buyer, either you have to do an intervention with yourself, or your wife has to do an intervention at some time and go, “No more buying artwork! You cannot buy artwork because you're cutting into our grocery money, or you're not actually doing and going that far, but we got two kids, we got a house. The money has to go for that. No more buying artwork. You can trade for artwork.” So that was how that one happened, was I went, oh okay. Well if you're talking about trading for artwork, how about if you do a “glamourpuss” cover. I will send you pages that I’ve already got done. That was the [laughs] League of Extraordinary Hosebags, thinking, wow, this would be great, because Mike already does superheroes, so he can draw one of them. But he glommed on far more onto just doing a glamourpuss with the tongue hanging out and the eyes crossed. And it's gorgeous cover. I love the cover for “glamourpuss” #19. But that's how that happened was, “I'll do that cover for you, and then you send me the Cerebus as Madman.” At some point out of this I got, and I have to bend over and pick this up, a book that is easily 900 pages long “Madman Gargantua” published by Image Comics, when Madman has landed at Image. And I'm going, where did I get this in the process? I'm looking inside it, and it's not personalized by Mike, but it definitely has all of the early issues of “Madman” and that was another trip to comic book school for Grandpa today going, I had forgotten so much of this history that the first few issues of “Madman” actually came out from Tundra! That was one of the earliest Tundra titles, and then it went from there to Oni Press, and then from either from there to Dark Horse or from Dark Horse to Oni Press.
Matt: Dark Horse to Oni Press sounds right.
Dave: What's that?
Matt: Dark Horse to Oni sounds right cause--
Dave: Right!
Matt: I have a bunch of the Madman stuff and if I remember, the first appearance of the character was self-published, but he wasn't Madman, he was just Frank Einstein.
Dave: Right, right. Madman was, I think, a Tundra Innovation. “We have to call this something that's that's catchier or whatever.”
Matt: And then it went to Dark Horse, then it went to Oni, then he self-published for a while, or else then he went to Image, then he self-published.
Dave: Right. And what's interesting is the pin-ups in this book. I don't know if “Madman Gargantua” is still available from Image, but each issue had a pin up. And the pin-ups, just to make your head spin like the propeller on a beanie, Jack Kirby, Frank Frazetta, Alex Toth, Barry Windsor-Smith, Moebius, Dave Stevens, Joe Kubert, Bill Stout, Mark Schultz, Brian Bolland, Kevin Nowlan, Frank Miller, Geof Darrow! Who are all of these people?! Charles Burns, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Dave Gibbons, Art Adams, Mike Mignola, Adam Hughes, Richard Salla, Seth, Bernie Mireault, Frank Cho, Jeff Smith, Frank Quitely, and Eric Powell. With bonus pinup section in the volume, Jim Lee, Erik Larsen, Marc Silvestri, Jim Valentino, Todd McFarlane, Mario Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Paul Rivoche, Peter Kuper, Bruce Timm, Dan Brereton, Paul Pope, and Darwyn Cooke. Is that like, how in the hell did you put that together?! So it's at that point, it was, okay, now I understand why wanting a Dave Sim Cerebus as Madman was such a big deal. But it's, did I get the book first, and then decide to do the pinup? I don't know if it was a false memory, but part of me is going, I got the book and by the time I had read almost 900 pages of “Madman,” you couldn't have stopped me from doing a Cerebus as Madman. I wanted to do a whole issue of “Madman”, because it's amazing idiosyncratic work. Mike Allred makes it look so easy and fun, and obviously it's not easy and fun, but boy, I'd like to do one of these. So that's the best I can do in terms of piecing that together, and I'm trying to figure out where “The Golden Plates” figures into this. That was an another thing that was a bolt from the blue, was Michael Allred, who I believe is a Mormon and I believe Laura is a Mormon, decided to adapt The Book of Mormon and self-publish it. And at some point I got that in the mail… from him? In which case, why don't I still have a cover letter in the Cerebus Archive, and why do I not have “The Golden Plates” issue one in the Cerebus Archive? How many issues did he get done of “The Golden Plates”? Because it's, the Book of Mormon is not a slender work, and couldn't find it in the Overstreet Guide. Mike Allred’s “The Golden Plates” isn't in the Overstreet Guide? Well, if it is now, it wasn't three years ago. So, I've answered your questions, Michael, as best I can, and those are all the questions that, as I was running around today trying to research Please Hold for Dave Sim, which I always like to do, it's like, mhmm, for every question that I'm answering, there's another bunch of questions coming up.
Matt: It was a six issue series.
Dave: It was a six issue series. And it was finite.
Matt: It was first Illustrated in 2005.
Dave: That makes sense, because there my reaction was, how about this? Somebody else is actually putting their religious convictions into a comic book, knowing what a snake pit that is in the almost exclusively atheistic comic book field. So it was like God’s Clockwork Mechanism, it was also God saying to me, “No, you're not completely unique in this, but the bad news is you are almost completely unique in this. Really, it's just you and Mike Allred doing this.
Matt: What the…
Dave: So there you go! That's, well, welcome back Michael R, and it would be interesting to revisit some of this and find out, okay, how many of these questions are even answerable at this point? Thank you for telling me that “The Golden Plates” was 2005, because that would definitely hang together with “Cerebus” coming to an end in 2004. Uhh, I skipped past something here… go ahead.
Matt: Well, because I'm connected to my buddy the internet , Blog and Mail #268 from 2007, I just did a search, because I remember Blog and Mail, I think, talking about the “glamourpuss” cover, but the timing might be off there. So I just did a search for Mike Allred, and Mike Allred's mentioned in there, but it doesn't… [sighs] yeah, it doesn't look like this particular Blog and Mail talks about “The Golden Plates.”
Dave: Anyway, Sherlock Holmes is on the case. You will have plenty of time to pursue all of that, and hopefully give all of the viewers all of the Mike Allred intel that's available. And if we get to the point where we get something figured out on CerebusTV, it'll be interesting to find out if that's a false memory. “No, Grandpa, you did not film yourself doing the Cerebus as Mike Allred’s Madman,” or, “by God Grandpa, you haven't lost it completely! Here's that episode right here.” So there you go! Look at the treasure hunt that you set us on, Michael R, of Easton, Pennsylvania.
Uhh… I think… after the Madman page which was faxed, there's a note, “Say congrats to you Dave, on the first day of ‘The Last Day’ sales.” This is you talking?
Matt: Yes!
Dave: Okay. “When you, Dave, decide to sell to the swarty foreigners, we're not prejudiced, we sell to white foreigners as well, that live on the other side of the planet, will you give them a 24 hour discount?” No. “Or maybe a whole weekend? Owing to time zones and the fact that it's Friday in Kitchener and shrove Tuesday where they are. I promised I'd ask.” No, my biggest concern with the international was, I hate the idea of ballparking foreign or international prices, so that was one of the reasons I didn't want multiple buttons on CerebusDownloads. I'm going to be experimenting with selling stuff at CerebusDownloads that I want to be able to just add a new, whatever it is, and that button goes above the Remarque Head button, instead of “these four buttons go on top of those four buttons.” I want the thing that I'm still selling that I've already sold, or started selling, to be as available as this brand new thing that, “Oh I didn't know this was available. Yes, I'll pick up one of these.” And doing a Canada button, a US button, and an international button, at that point, it really starts getting too complicated. Rolly reminded me today of another complication, which is international has surface, which it gets sent by boat, and air. So that's another one of those situations where we we did get three international orders, we got one from Slovakia, one from Spain, and one from another country that starts with an S that I can’t think of! [laughs]
Matt: Sweden
Dave: And it’s like, okay, Rolly, these are the three, take them to the post office, find out on each one what it's going to cost for surface and what it's going to cost for air. Slovakia is gonna be a different situation from Spain, because Spain is on the water whereas Slovakia isn't on the water, in terms of surface. So that's going to have a different price. Find out the different prices by taking the book in, each of the packages is gonna be the same. And email the person, “Here's what it's going to cost to send this to you in Slovakia, or send this to you in Spain. Surface or air, your call. Go to CerebusDownloads and just make a donation for that amount.” So I'm not overcharging the guy in Slovakia, because it's more expensive than Spain's rules, or overcharging the person in Spain because Slovakia has Draconian post office rules of some kind. So that it is available, and you know, at that point I'm not having to make up six buttons for each item. And it's already complicated enough to say, okay, now we throw it open to the international without saying, okay, here's all of these different variables that apply for the first day, here's all of these different variables that apply from now on. So, that's the answer to that.
Matt: Well, again, I said I would ask, [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Well it's one of those, this is the same reason that I decided to go with “we pay the HST,” because the harmonized sales tax in Canada have to be added on to anything that I sell to somebody in Ontario. I've got to call into my accountant going, it’s a very popular ad approach in Canada “we pay the HST” and which is about 13%, and I'm going okay, I've offered this. How does that actually work? How do we actually pay the HST on somebody's order of $99, which is gonna be a shade under $113. But I did that because I wanted it to be one button, so that the Americans aren't paying the HST, and the Canadians aren't paying the HST. One button, one price. So like I say, I'm not really sure how that works, but we will be keeping track of it. Out of the 31 copies sold, three of them were to Canadians, which is pretty close to the the ratio that you always get. The joke in Canada is, how do you do the census in Canada? You take the U.S. census and you divide by 10. And it sounds like a joke, but almost everything works that way, that whatever you did in the United States, divide it by 10, that’s what you gonna do in Canada.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Aren’t you glad that you don’t have to worry about these cross-border things very frequently? Did you do the thing that I asked you about, of updating the exchange rate as we were getting closer to the first day sale?
Matt: I did. It was varying between 75 and 73 cents, and every time I posted, I'm like, here's the price, $79 Canadian. It goes up to after 24 hours to 99, and then I would have, and this is today's exchange rate. And it was like, because I was following it, and on Google where you can get a trend, and it's like you can do the past week, the past month, the past year, or ever, type thing. And I was doing it so that it was every day, and it was these giant spikes, and I'm like, well how much did it move? And I scroll over the spike, it's 75 cents. I'm like, what's this valley? 73 cents. I’m like, okay, apparently I had it on the daily. [laughs]
Dave: Right. Right. Yeah, it does look like you're trying to revive a cardiac victim or something like that, because it's really, yeah, Canada is massively, massively in debt. Not to the tune of the Inflation Reduction Act numbers that are being banded around, which is really throwing everybody off in the money markets, where they're going , “Well okay. Canada is just spending an insane amount of money that is never the going to exist, even theoretically. But there's still less than 10% total debt than what the Biden Administration is talking about doing. So what does that do to the Canadian dollar?” It's like, I don't know! The one day it drops and they go, “Okay, it should be knocking hell out of itself because Canada just doesn't have this kind of fiscal capacity.” And then it's, “But nobody's ditching their Canadian dollars and stampeding into the US dollars, so that makes it go up.” But then it goes up and it's like, “But we're comparing it to the Biden Administration, which is like, you know, trillions and trillions of dollars over the next 10 years or whatever. Uhh, no, we're gonna have to have this drop again.” The closest analogy is, if you take a raisin and a glass of champagne, because of the nature of the dried gasses in the inside of the raisin, the raisin will drop to the bottom of the champagne glass, and then rise to the top, and then sink to the bottom, and then rise to the top, until you actually take the raisin out of your champagne because it's not doing any favors for the flavour of the champagne, trust me.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: So, that was why I suggested it. I thought okay, the average American knows absolutely nothing about this. The average Canadian knows nothing about this. Those of us who are OCD, check the exchange rate on the Canadian dollar on a daily basis. I look at the headlines, I look at what Chrystia Freeland, what hallucinations she put in her budget, and I go, okay, so what did that do to the Canadian dollar? And it's like, it went up. How could it go up?! These are hallucinations! These have nothing to do with reality. And it's like, this is why I can never figure out, should I be depositing my Diamond cheque into the US dollar account or into the Canadian dollar account? I don't know! Depends on the day. There are days that, when I used to do the deposits, I could have just stood at the teller and deposited the money into the US account, and withdrew it, and deposited it into the Canadian account, went to the back of the line, and then did the reverse process, and would be making out like a bandit. There are other days where, that would be a good way to just completely eradicate a Diamond cheque, by not just sticking with the one thing that you did, standing in linem and it was just a a happy coincidence. Sometimes, if I knew the teller, I would say, there's nobody in line behind me, can you just run that whole process again and tell me if I just withdraw the cheque from the US account and deposited it into the Canadian again, how I'd be doing? Ad I'd end up making $45, $47 or something like that. And it's like, well, you can do that but Grandpa would really rather write and draw a comic book.
Matt: [laughs] I remember, years and years ago when I was a little kid, we were going through Canada on a trip, and we stopped for gas. And I had like two American dollars, and I was buying something. I had exact change for what the price was supposed to be, and when I handed it to the cashier, they handed me my change and I'm like, what? What? And then it dawned one me, oh yeah. I'm in Canada. The price is different!
Dave: That's right! That's right. And it's completely unpredictable. When COVID hit, I happened to be in the bank when all of the lockdowns happened, like March 18th or whatever it was, and I was depositing a cheque, and the teller said, “I've never seen this before.” It was actually 50 cent dollars. ThE Canadian dollar was valued at a $1.50 US, or the US dollar was valued at 50 cents Canadian, or the reverse of that. But anyway, I was sitting there going, is this just the start of it and it's going to get even better than that, or should I just take all of the money in the US account and deposit it today? Just transfer the whole works, leave $1 US in the US account. And that would definitely have been the preferred course of action, but same as in Las Vegas, you don't know. You don't know, am I acting prematurely or is this strike while the iron is hot?
Okay, Leo Loycannon[???] I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, from Finland. Hello, Finland. “As a Finnish person, I do not have the same degree of cultural knowledge of North American and Canadian comics as readers of ‘Cerebus’ have. As such, I have two questions regarding the phonebook edition of “Guys”, second printed edition, released in 1997. One, is the character ‘Gently Bent’ the product of your own imagination, or is he based on a previously established North American or Canadian comic book character?” Gently Bent was essentially a direct lift of a character called Genital Ben, in Marc Hempel’s “Tug & Buster”, self-published Art and Soul Comics. The reason that you probably wouldn't have heard of it is, Marc only did the book for a little while, and I guess at that point it wasn't viable. I believe he did seven issues of “Tug & Buster”? 1995 to 1997. Oh, I forgot to look up this part. Hang on, hang on. I gotta go grab my copy of “Guys.” Hang on, Matt!
Matt: Okay.
Dave: [commotion noises] 220. Holy smokes! I opened right to that page.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: How often does that happen? Okay, thank you God! Okay, page 220 ,yes, “On page 220 panel one left hand side page, is the character below Gently Bent a product of your own imagination, or is he a character belonging to self-published author?” And, yes, that's Tug… no, that's Buster! Buster of “Tug & Buster”. I think I got that right. Tug was the big muscular guy that never said anything,and Buster was his devout fanboy, and just did a continual monologue to the story while Tug,with hi…, geeze, how I would describe him… the guy was built like a Sherman tank, and this was terrifically impressive both to Buster and Genital Ben. Genital Ben was, to me, a brilliant character, because everything to him was related to sex. It wasn't anything in any conversation that he couldn't read a double entendre into and in a very creepy, suggestive way. He was also, as I recall, very ambiguous sexually as to whether he was heterosexual or homosexual, and boy oh boy, was Marc Hempel ahead of the curve on sexual identity politics in “Tug & Buster.” It is one of the great disappointments of my life as a champion of self-publishers that “Tug & Buster” I guess just didn’t find a large enough audience for Marc to be able to keep it going, and consequently, I think every time that the “Guys” gets reprinted, the Gently Ben character is more and more often going to get attributed to me, that this was a character Dave Sim came up with. And no, it's not. If you're one of those people that buys books on on eBay, and you like shopping around on the internet, I would assume you could probably get a pretty good deal on “Tug & Buster” issues 1 to 7, and I think there was another issue through Image? Maybe I'm misremembering on that one. But you would get my copies of “Tug & Buster” out of my cold dead hands. It's a very very funny title, very very idiosyncratic Marc Hempel work, and definitely at or near the top of the list of self-published titles wish had been able to find audience, so that 30 years later I would still be able to read “Tug & Buster.”
Matt: I remember “Tug & Buster” being a real big deal back then. Like, I remember, that was back in the days when everybody read “Wizard” and the guys in “Wizard” were real big fans, so it got mentioned quite a bit.
Dave: I'd forgotten that! You’re right. You’re right.
Matt: Now that might have just been a Tom Palmer of “Palmer's Picks” thing, but I vaguely remember being the kind of thing, like… I want, this could be Matt misfiring the brain cells, but I vaguely remember there was like an animated series or a movie deal, and that was part of, you know, it just stopped because it was, “Well, you know, we're gonna focus on turning into something else.” But that was back in the 90s, when all of a sudden everybody! The “Spawn” movie came out, “Oh we're gonna do comic book movies now!”
Dave: Right. Right. Yeah, there was also the fact that Marc Hempel did draw one of the sequences in “Sandman.” So it did have this sort of textbook quality to it, like, well if this doesn't become a big deal, if Marc Hempel isn't able to take his “Wizard” cred and his “Sandman” cred and parlay it into some kind of success for his self-published title, well, I just don't know what's going on. And it's like, well unfortunately that's the point it got to, where, okay, if this didn't work, I don't know why this didn't work.
Matt: Now that you said “Sandman,” it's sparking the memory. He may not have been at the Norman Rockwell Museum exhibit, but he had work in the exhibit because his Sandman's on the poster for the lit graphic show.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I only remember that because Paula kept looking at it going, “I think I'm gonna get this as a tattoo” and I'm like, all right, I mean that's, you want a Sandman tattoo. You want to read “Sandman” first? And she's like, “No, I just really like this image.” I'm going, okay. She never actually got that particular tattoo, but it was on her list for a good year of, “I think my next tattoo is going to be this Marc Hempel image of Sandman” and I'm like, all right. You know, if that's what you want, it's your body, whatever. And it was one of those, I think because, in our old apartment, we had two computer desks, one of them had the computer on it, the other one just had all my crap. And next to it, we had the bag from the gift shop that we had a number of prints and posters, and they just kept getting thrown in this bag, and every now and then I would pull it out, like, what's in here ? And I'd start cleaning, she'd see like, “Oh yeah, that! I was gonna get that as a tattoo” and I'm like, all right and then I'd put it away and forget about it until the next time I pulled it out. And now that you're saying that, yeah, I should probably pull that poster out and be like, hey do you still want to get this tattoo?
Dave: Right. Right. Well, that wasn't my intent, but. And it does illustrate that there was something there, there was definitely “Beetlejuice” of some kind attached to “Tug & Buster,” because the Norman Rockwell Museum people were all comic book civilians. And, obviously they glommed onto it, of all of the stuff that was in the exihibit that they could have pulled an image out, it's like, “Uh, I like this one.” And it's like exactly like Paula, as you say, don't you want to read “Sandman” first before you get a tattoo of it? “No, I just like the picture.” And it's like, it's very difficult to parlay that into a career, but there's something to it. It would be interesting to find out what it was like from Marc Hempel’s perspective. You know, how did this go down? What was the animated movie deal or animated television show deal? Why didn't that work? And has he ever looked at “Tug & Buster” and gone, “Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Maybe I should try this again?” Or was it one of those, “Uh no, you can only break my heart so many times, and then, Homey don’t play that.”
Matt: Right. I mean, it's one of those, there's all those guys over the years that, they call them flash in the pans, but no, these guys were really talented individuals who, you know, just ran out of steam, ran out of money. Ran out of something, and then it turns out it's one of those, “Oh no, he's been doing it online for the past 20 years and just we don't know about it.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Right! Right. Which is the other possibility. Or Marc Hampel just raised $275,000 on Kickstarter because as soon as he said he's got an unpublished 48 page “Tug & Buster” graphic novel from back then, it just spread like wildfire and people have been throwing money at him ever since. Leo concludes, “P.S. you might not know this, but the phonebook editions of Cerebus have been a somewhat steady stable of Finnish libraries in southern Finland.” Leo says. And why Southern Finland? Is that like one of those, that’s where all the black Finns are? Like, [southern US accent] they’re all from South Finland! Or is it just that Leo’s in South Finland, and that's where he knows the libraries. Anyway, gratifying to know that Cerebus is a steady stable any place, because I tend to be in that Marc Hempel category not infrequently myself in 2023. Do I actually exist? Am I a stable source of revenue of some kind? It's like, yes, but “stable”, definitely not capital S stable, count your blessings, it could be a lot worse. You’re still making money off of Cerebus, when you were making money off of Cerebus 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. Count your blessings, Grandpa.
Matt: Right. I mean, I'm reminded of the Ye bookes of Cerebus show in Salt Lake City, when we were wandering around the library, and they only had like three or four of the phonebooks, and not sequentially, and it was one of those like, you kind of looked at Mimi like, “What's going on?” She's like, “Uh, uh, yeah, I'll take care of that, Dave.”
Dave: Right. Right. Yeah, and if I get, I never think in terms of going back and talking to my younger self, but it's like, isn’t 16 volumes and 6000 pages overdoing it? Can't you anticipate that even if you're successful at this, that you're creating a bookstore stocking ordeal of almost unimaginable proportions, so that even a Mimi Cruz finds this not possible to stay on top of. I'm doing everything I possibly can, and you just can't keep 16 books in stock, and have all of the holes plugged. And nobody is going to buy a series of books if they look at them on a shelf and it's like, volume one, volume two, volume five, volume six, volume eight, volume nine, volume ten, volume 16. It’s like, let me know when you get it together on this, and I'll think about whether I want to actually dive in with both feet on this one.
Matt: Well, I mean that's everything, I mean.
Dave: What’s that?
Matt: That's everything. That's like, Brian Hibbs a long, a while, a couple of years ago, had his column and he was talking about ”Ultimate Spider-Man.” And it's like, only the only the first five volumes sell, after that it's hit or miss. And on the one hand as a comic book store you have to have everything otherwise people won't buy, and on the other hand it's like, “But I have everything and no one's buying!”
Dave: [laughs] Right! Right. I mean, what hath Dave Sim wrought by starting us down this path? And the last time I was at Lookin for Heroes, I was asking Akira, because I was doing the “Akimbo” parody. And okay, you know, do you have it in stock? And it's like, “Uh, go over and take a look. No we don't have it in stock.” And then start in on the computer, “And here's the three different places buy from. One of them in Canada, two of them in the United States. No, no, no, it's coming up, and you can get volume one, you can get volume three, volume five, but those are the only ones that you can get.” And it's becoming a universal condition that there is virtually no series that you could get all of the books just by going online and going, “I want all of these.” So as much as the internet “solved” that problem, it's now compounding the problem, and turning it into a different problem, where you don't go bookstore to bookstore to bookstore to bookstore doing a treasure hunt, you go online online online looking for whatever it is that's missing everywhere. And why is it missing everywhere? It's like, we don't know it's missing everywhere. Why that one is hard to come by, and why this one's impossible to come by.
Which segues nicely into our final question? Yes, our final question from Charles Duncan. Hello, Charles. “Hi Ron, I certainly appreciate it, but I found one on eBay. It is quite the read. On another subject, I seem to remember for some reason back 35 years ago, but why are #5s hard to find? In my original collection, I remember being pretty happy to find a fair condition one. If I remember, it has something to do with distribution. Maybe you might recall?” And that's when you interject, “He's talking about a copy of the ‘Secret History of the Counterfeit Cerebus #1’ I had. The print runs of ‘Cerebus’, are a topic that comes up a lot. I know the circulation numbers were printed in some issues for a while, but everybody that asks wants all the numbers. I'm just throwing it out there. No worries if you don't have the answers. These people are the lovely obsesses we can't live without but we can try.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And that was actually something that I missed last Please Hold for Dave Sim was, Chris Hunwardson [???] had asked basically the same question. “What was the circulation on the early issues of ‘Cerebus’?” Yes, everybody wants all of the numbers. All of the numbers would be a much bigger treasure hunt to take place. The information does exist in the Cerebus Archive, but it's a real hunt in the first drawer, Cerebus Archive documents eight and a half by eleven and smaller, where there's… Deni's order book of invoices to the distributors. So let's just start from the beginning, and I can tell you, okay, these are, when you're talking about the first five issues, the first five issues were all 2000 copies. And I'll qualify that in a minute, but basic bottom line, 2000 copies on #1 was what printed. Pre-sold was 500 copies to Harry Kremer at Now and Then Books.h 500 copies to Jim Friel from Big Rapids Distribution in Michigan, who I ran into at a convention in Toronto, and he saw “Cerebus” #1, and said, “I'm interested in this. I would be happy to take 500, if I could get 500 of these.” This was before the book actually went to press. When the book went to press, there were, when Deni and I were at 48 Weaver Street East, in the second floor of the office/residence that existed at that time, that was fictionalized in “Jaka's Story.” I was in the living room and I had all 2000 copies of “Cerebus” #1 had been delivered. A bunch of them were badly printed, and at some point I'm going to do mock up “this is what the bad printing was,” but basically the worst of it was around Cerebus' hand where he's holding the sword, where the hand and the sword meet ,there was blotching on the black, and the same thing around one of the horns on Cerebus’ helmet. And that became obvious when I opened one of the boxes, and I looked at it ,and I went, uh, this looks terrible. Considering what the artwork looks like, and I was closer to the artwork than I was to the printed copies, this was the first time I was seeing the printed copies,s this is unacceptable. Deni was at work, but I was working myself into a fever pitch of rage, which I was very good at the time, particularly anything having to do with my comic books. And, so I started trying to figure out, okay, how many of these are any good, and how many of these are crap? And separating them into different piles. These are good, these are good, these are good, these are good, these are crap, this one’s crap, this one’s crap. And then it would be across the entire box, that it wasn't like a whole box was bad, it would be half of a box, or 10 of them would suddenly be bad. Which was Moir Press doing doing the covers, so I was getting really irritated. Didn't you have any quality control? And it's like, well, no, not on 2000 copies. They weren't making that much money on it, so it was just get them done, get it as close to good as you can, over and done with. While I was separating them and then counted them, and I went okay, there's a thousand good copies, so that's good. So I will be able to give Harry his 500 good copies, and we'll be able to mail Jim Friel his 500 good copies. The rest of these, Moir Press is just gonna have to eat, and is gonna have to redo, and redo the guts, and get the guts reprinted at Fairway Press. and put them together, and satisfy me with a thousand copies that are as good as the thousands of copies.
Comic Art Metaphysics being what it is, at that point I got a phone call from Phil Seuling, who was phoning he had just gotten his copy of mock-up of “Cerebus” #1, and yes, he was interested in carrying “Cerebus” #1, and he would be interested in taking a thousand copies. Did I have a thousand copies of “Cerebus” #1 to sell? Looking around the living room, and I'm looking at these thousand bad copies, which is completely unacceptable, and have to go back to the printer, and I'm going, well, he's in Brooklyn. He'll never see a good copy. And I went, yes, Phil, uhh, Mr Seuling, sir, I will be happy to sell you a thousand copies of “Cerebus” #1. I’m looking at them right now. And he went, “Great! Nice doing business with you.” That was our market, was Big Rapids Distribution, Now and Then Books, Sea Gate Distribution. So essentially everybody ordered the same thing on #2, and then ordered the same thing on #3, because the #1s, they weren't selling out but they were selling fast enough that, “Okay, well I want to have #1s to sell people and #2 so I will stand pat with the order that I had on #1 on #2.” And then the same thing with #3, and then the same thing with #4, and then the same thing with #5. Part of that was because it was a bimonthly comic, and it's, apart from Marvel and DC, nobody was doing a bimonthly comic. Ground level comics tended to come out, what, every six months, every eight months if you were lucky, if it was a successful book. Sometimes a year. So you had plenty of time to either eat the books or go, “I need to get more of these.” But on the bimonthly schedule it was, “Okay, I still got some, not a lot, but I still got some. They're not selling like hotcakes, but I'm not eating them. So yeah, give me the same again, give me the same again.” When I said that I was going to qualify that at some point, I had a conversation with Harry Kremer. He died in 2002, so we'd be talking about probably late 1990s, and I was talking about the circulation on “Cerebus,” that the first five issues were all 2000 copy print runs. And Harry said, “No no no, you're forgetting #2. Remember on #2 that there was an overprint on them?” And you know, printers give you a high/low number of 10% margin where they can either under print by 10% or over print by 10%. And he said, “They over printed on #2. You contacted me and said, ‘we've got this many more #2s.’” So I forget what it was, but it was proportional to Harry's order, so he was getting 500, he had ordered 500 #2s, and there was another hundred. Where there was another 150 or something like that. And I'm going, I don't remember that at all. And he goes, “No no no, you have to remember that! You had like whatever it was, you know, four or five more boxes.” And, Harry, I don't really have storage for that many more #2s. Do you want the #2s? And he said, “Yeah! I'm crazy!” Harry always said that. “Oh, I'm crazy! Give me the extra #2s that you got there. They'll sell eventually.” And so, he's asking about, why are #5s hard to find, and I've definitely heard that, but I've heard the same thing about #2s. I don't think there's one of the first five issues issues that I haven't heard that, this is why you can find all of the other of the first five issues, but you can't find #5. And apart from that qualification from Harry, which I'll take his word for it, that that's what happened, nope, there's there's 2000 copies of the first five issues of “Cerebus”. At that point, once I realized, okay, we're able to keep going and these guys are are buying the same number of each issue over a six month period so far, and now at the 10 months period, that was when I contacted Mike Friedrich and said, can I get your your distributors list? Figuring that he would go, “No, that's privileged information. I can't give you that.” And he went, “Oh sure! No problem. You know, you got a pen?” [laughs] It’s like, have I got a pen? I’ve got a pen! I’ve got a pen and a piece of paper. And he just read me the names of all the distributors that he for ”Star*Reach” at the time, and their address, and the contact name for who he was selling to. And at that point, the circulation went up. I'm not entirely certain by what the circulation went up on #6, but it went up by, 1000? 2000? Maybe not even that, because it was substantial, but it was substantial relative to what we were selling, which was 2000 copies. So it might even have gone up to 3000? 3500? Like, Bud Plant was one of them at that point, where I had no awareness of Bud Plant, but suddenly it was, yeah, he's not going to take a Phil Seuling size quantity, but he was probably at or close to what Harry and Jim Friel were taking.
Matt: Okay. Well, that makes sense. I was just thinking, Mike Friedrich of “Star*Reach”, who's famous for “Star*Reach” and for passing on “Cerebus” and “Elfquest” in the same month.
Dave: Yes! Yes.
Matt: And I’m sure that the fact that you and the Pinis were successes played into when you asked for the distributor list, no it's not confidential information it's, “Well, hey, you know, I screwed up, but if you guys can make it to the stars, I will give you all the fuel I can.”
Dave: Right! Which was pretty standard operating procedure. We're all helping each other, and all just finding out what is this ground level comics environment made up of? Like a little bit of it was underground, because Mike was selling “Star*Reach” and “Imagine,” and the other books that he was doing. “Quack”, to Last Gasp. [coughs] Excuse me. Speaking of last gasps. And as far as I recall, I sent “Cerebus” #1 or #2 or #5 or one of those to Ron Turner at Last Gasp. And Ron Turner was in the situation of, “Okay, I'm an underground publisher and an underground distributor. ‘Star*Reach’? I’m looking at this ‘Star*Reach’ thing. Well, it doesn't look completely like an underground, but it doesn't look like a Marvel a DC Comic completely. Yeah okay, I'll carry these.” I think when he go “Cerebus” in, and it's like, “No no no, funny animal aardvark? No, that's not underground. I don't know what that is, but I'm already sort of watering down my underground brand as far as underground comic fans are concerned. I'm drawing a line under the aardvark. No, keep your aardvark comic book for yourself.” So it was, and yes, Mike Friedrich, these are all guys that he knew just from the Bay Area. These are people that he knew from conventions. And it's like, no, it's not a zero-sum game where, “If you start selling this aardvark comic book to these guys, that's going to come off the bottom line on my ‘Star*Reach’ comics.” It's like, we had no idea why anything was selling or where it was selling, just that was the problem for whoever was buying them. Ron Turner was selling to bookstores and selling to head shops, and head shops were still flourishing at the time. So it was, each head shop had their decision to make. “No, as many of these ‘Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers’ as you can get me, and as many ‘Zap Comix’ as you can get me. Just, you know, back up the truck and and dump them into the store, but ‘Star*Reach’? No, I bought three or four of these, and they're just sitting. I don't have any customers for these.” Or another head shop would be going, “This ‘Imagine’ thing with the Steve Ditko story, can I get some more of those? Because I probably sold five of them, and I've had 10 people come back and ask me for them.” Just like, you know, the Golden Age of Comics, but on a much much much much much smaller scale of 2000, 3000, 4000 copies kinds of thing.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: All right. How about that? It's only 7:30. So it looks like we've got another two hour Please Hold for Dave Sim in the can!
Matt: I keep thinking that they're going to go back to the three, three and a half hours, but I think everybody's like, “Oh, poor Matt and poor Dave. They have lives. We really shouldn't bother them with stuff.” It's like, no no, any question I get, I'll send up, and any question you get from me, you'll try to answer to the best of your ability.
Dave: Yes! And I keep thinking, it is so much the core Cerebus audience that we're dealing with on AMoC and with Please Hold for Dave Sim. I thought about writing Rich Johnston a fax email relay, and saying, okay, you never have anything good to say about Dave Sim, or what he's doing now. You know, “Cerebus in Hell?” But you're also the only person that talks about what Dave Sim is doing now of all of the news sites that exist. Have you ever thought about asking a question on Please Hold for Dave Sim? It’s, you know,s here's what Rich Johnston, who is bitterly bitterly bitterly bitterly disappointed in Dave Sim and what Dave Sim is doing to his legacy. Can we talk about this? Can you put that in the form of a question as to, “Boy, if I had Dave Sim in front of me, this is what I'd like to know from him” and it's like, well, I do that once a month. If you're bitterly bitterly bitterly bitterly disappointed in Dave Sim, and you have been for at least for the 20 years since “The Last Day” concluded, why don't you ask it in the form of a question? I'll be happy to talk about what it is that I'm doing, but it would have to be a question from somebody who thinks in those frames of references, of, you know, “Dave Sim, defend yourself!” And it's like, I'll be happy to, but you have to ask me a question about what it is that I'm defending myself on.
Okay, say hi to Paula and her tattoos for me, and Bullwinkle and Janice Pearl, and God willing, we’ll do this again next month.
Matt: Yes! Yes we will. Next month, I'm really looking forward to the June, because it'll be June 1st, which is Bashful Ben Dow's birthday.
Dave: How about that? How about that. Also Marilyn Monroe's birthday.
Matt: Well, at the comic book store that I used to go to, they had a one of those laminated calendars where it's giant squares, and you dry erase marker what month it is in the days, and then you wipe it off at the end of the month. And we walked in one day and they said, “What's your birthday?” And my brother goes, “June 1st” and they're like, “Oh we got that one. How about you, what's your birthday” I’m like, June 11th. And they’re like, “Ah, good!” and they wrote my name on the calendar and we're like, what's going on? “Oh, well, we figured out that June, there's so many babies, we can have a customer's name on every day of the calendar.” And we're like, what? And we looked, yeah, they were only missing like three, four days. And they were all proud of when I walked in because they were really looking for an 11 and I'm going, what?!
Dave: [laughs
Matt: How is this a business? How do you make money?! [laughs]
Dave: Really? Really.
Matt: But you know when you run a comic book store, and you're there all day, you get kind of bored!
Dave: That's true. Especially when somebody coming in whose birthday happens to be on the 11th just lights up your world.
Matt: And--
Dave: Have a good night, Matt!
Matt: You too, Dave!
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye.
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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 February something.*
*Sale dates are not final and therefore subject to change.
Speaking of Merch, if you want a strange near-antique, shoot an email to momentofcerebus@gmail.com, and I'll tell ya where to send the $20USD I want for these. No shipping charge in the States or Canada. Everybody else add $10USD for shipping. I'll send 'em anywhere the postman is willing to go...
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| Back and front. |
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You can get all 16 volumes of Cerebus, many of them Remastered for $99CANADIAN at CerebusDownloads.com (More if you want the Remastered Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing...)
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Heritage has:
- The original art to Cerebus: the Six Deadly Sins Cover, Avarice, and Gluttony? Why doesn't Dave have this? (Coming soon)
- Cerebus #81 page 11 (coming soon)
- Cerebus #81 page 12 (coming soon)
And ComicLink (remember ComicLink? Seiler brought us ComicLink. R.I.P Jeff.) has:
- Cerebus #39, page 8 (coming in February)
- And a list of ALL the issues they got
Thanks to Steve for sending the links.
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Oliver' Simonsen's Cerebus movie: The Absurd, Surreal, Metaphysical, and Fractured Destiny of Cerebus the Aardvark it's currently available on "Plex", "Xumo", "Vimeo On Demand", "Tubi". If you're in Brazil..., "Mometu", "Nuclear Home Video".
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