Hi, Everybody!
Dave Sim is trying an eBay experiment to see if his own (signed and numbered) comic copies from the Kickstarter will sell.
This time he is selling a total of 5 comic books over the next six weeks. There is only one comic book to start on eBay. Each week there will be another comic added to the eBay listing.
The first auction is live. Sim wanted a two week auction; the longest Dave's eBay guy can run it is 10 days, so it'll end Monday Feb 16 at 8 pm ET.
The item title is Dave Sim POSSUM-AT-LARGE VS. SUPER-CEREBUS (CIH? #85) Signed 1/5 (#104/185)
Anyway, Mondays!
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| Did Dave miss one? Did Dave misnumber them again? |
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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):
1/2024 2/2024 3/2024 4/2024 5/2024 6/2024 7/2024 8/2024 9/2024 10/2024 11/2024 12/2024
1/2025 2/2025 3/2025 4/2025 5/2025 6/2025 7/2025 8/2025 9/2025 10/2025 11/2025 12/2025
1/2026 2/2026
[guitar music]
Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt. How's it going?
Matt: [sighs] Tired.
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah, I just finished 25 days in a row.
Dave: 25 days in a row? Yikes!
Matt: Yeah. Everybody's like, “You're not working this weekend?” and I'm like, no, I'm going to sleep.
Dave: [laughs] We need to sleep as well. Man does not live by work alone, but I'm with you on that. I tend to lean in that direction just as much as you do.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Okay, are we recording?
Matt: We are indeed.
Dave: Okay. Your cover message here says, “Dave, (Lilly Tomlin voice), what's you holding now? Manly.” What's that from?
Matt: Lily Tomlin when she was on, I think it was Laugh-In, did the telephone operator, and one of her jokes that she would do, would be you know, “Please hold” and she would be switching stuff. At one point she goes back on the line and goes, “What’s ya holding now?”
Dave: [chuckles] Okay, all the way back to the Laugh-In days. Yes that was, uh Ernestine? Ernestine the telephone operator?
Matt: That sounds about right.
Dave: Yeah. Well, I would respond to “what’s you holding now?” with the tagline for “Cool Hand Luke”. “Sometimes the best hand is no hand.” Okay! “It's June 1st, and you know what that means!” I do indeed. It's Bashful Benjamin Dow’s 47th birthday! [sings] Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday Bashful Benjamin Dow. Happy birthday to you. Now he's gonna have to listen to it. “And how are we celebrating? Did you say ‘by answering inane questions about Cerebus minutia?’ Because we are! ‘What is Jaka’s inseam?’ Who asks this crap?” [laughs] That would be pretty esoteric. What is Jaka's inseam? Besides something of great fascination to Cerebus.
“Anyway, it's your turn to remember Jeffrey Seiler. You know, Jeff. Shuck--” How do you pronounce that? Shucky McAsscrap was what I thought it was, but it looks like it's AssCrepe.
Matt: It's Asscrape, the E is silent.
Dave: Oh the E is silent. Of course. “Baldy guy, glasses, had a thing for Jimmy Buffett and the Kansas City Royals? Ringing any bells? Uh, no? He sent you a letter that time. Yeah, Grandpa, that guy!” Yes it is my turn to remember Jeff, and I'm starting to get a little lost on which parts we’ve talked about, and which parts that we haven't talked about. But I guess, at this time what I want to talk about, and probably for the next couple of times, is the really inexplicable things that happened in proximity to Jeff Seiler. Through, I would say like the last [sneezes] excuse me. The last six months, the last eight or ten months of his life, and he died September 18 2021. And I just checked that on the memorial plaque here at the Off-White House because I was going, I'm pretty sure that Jeff died, and was still alive, during the peak fever of the COVID-19 thing. Which is why this became to me at the time, and is is still in my mind a completely inexplicable thing, that one of Jeff's few activities. He led a really really sedentary existence, particularly toward the end, partly because of was bad hip, partly because of his bad knees, partly because of the inclination just towards a sedentary lifestyle. But the inexplicable thing was, first of all that his major activity that he was engaged in was karaoke night. Do you remember that? That he was a devotee of this karaoke bar in Minneapolis?
Matt: Yeah, I remember, towards the end of the Yahoo Group he was posting about that quite a bit of, or when I would talking to him, “Well, I gotta go to karaoke.”
Dave: Right. Which always seemed odd to me. Like, if I had to guess somebody who would be up for karaoke night, Jeff Seiler wouldn't be in the top 20 list. And so, getting to the inexplicable part, the City of Minneapolis at some point in 2021, which like I say, was still when the lunatic COVID-19 rules were in effect, suddenly lifted the rule on karaoke bars, and allowed, I don't know how many karaoke bars there are in Minneapolis or that there were in 2021, but at least the one that Jeff was going to, they lifted the restriction on karaoke bars. And I'm going like, okay, every time I think, all right, you know, give it the benefit of the doubt. There is something to this COVID-19 thing. Um, it's no, now you're doing that thing again where you're taking a hard and fast rule that you said, “This is the science and this is the science that we are following” and not only were karaoke bars banned, public singing in a public venue was banned, and singing in church was banned, because of the notorious droplets. This was what we all had to fear for our mortal lives was droplets. And nothing produces droplets in a greater profusion that can't be screened by masks. Not even the legendary N95 mask could save you from droplets when they were reduced to aerosol levels. And singing did that. So that was one of those inexplicable, why did the City of Minneapolis, which is definitely hardcore Blue State, it's definitely a liberal environment , why did they suddenly allow this genocidal level activity? But of course, Jeff was thrilled, because that was the biggest thing that he missed, apart from just going out to get groceries and stuff like that, or going to the occasional restaurant, Jeff was a complete homebody most of the year. Because Minneapolis is one of those places like Kitchener where there's only two seasons, Winter and bad sledding. And with good reason, spent most of his time at home. So that's as far as I'm going to go on that one. Next time it's my turn, I'm going to pick up on the karaoke thing, and it goes through a few more inexplicable situations that, if they didn't just occur because they were in proximity to Jeff Seiler, it certainly had that illusion for me.
Matt: Well, as Tundis named him, he was the Effin’ Magnifier.
Dave: Right! Right. Exactly that thing, and one of those, because he was so extravagantly focused on me, for which I was very grateful because he was a great patron and a great fan, it was, is this directed at me? Did I somehow get Jeff Seiler and in a metaphysical possessive sense, how careful do I have to be about Jeff Seiler? So I tended to be very very careful about Jeff Seiler. Which he appreciated it as well. I definitely kept track virtually of everything that he told me, and that ties into the karaoke story, as well.
“And we answer the practical avalanche-e of questions from your many adoring and adorable fans. Beginning as we have for the past few months with Adam J Elkhadem, creator of...” Uh, he left me a phone message and I don't think he pronounced it “Octave” I think he pronounced it “Octav”, so I'm gonna go with that conscious memory and call the character, “’Octave: The Artist.’ Who sent his own little avalanche-e. What is half an avalanche? A quarterlanche? Does that converted to metric at the border? All of these questions. Questions, questions, questions. And the next one is, and here Dave reads and answers Adam's next question.” Oh I'm on! I have Adam's letter here, and it hasn't budged off of the floor for the last few months. I'm terrified of misplacing it. “Do you have any advice for writing dialogue that doesn't sound like a monologue in two voices? I find that creating extreme characters...” I'm having trouble reading this word. Oh, “aids in developing distinct voices. For more reasonable characters, it seems one sounds like all the rest. I.E, The Thing and Doctor Doom are clear but also I'm a bit reluctant to create a comic populated entirely with that class of character with good reason. Anything you do to make this possible, or do you stick to writing insane people most of the time?” Uh well, not insane people, but idiosyncratic people. In your case, Adam, I would suggest, I'm going on the assumption that you're sticking to a largely minimalist style in your drawing with the new project that you're working on, although it sounds like it's going to be drawn different from the way you drew “Octave.” Because of the minimalism, the Reader's Digest on the answer would be, you need to write characters where they're portraying themselves in what they're saying, but also inadvertently revealing who they actually are, and their actual nature as a subtext that actually becomes the dominant text. And I would say the textbook I would suggest for you is, read as much Jules Pfeiffer, back when he was doing the Pfeiffer comic strip in “The Village Voice,” because he was a master at exactly that complementary form of minimalism. Very very very simple drawings, and very very very simple dialogue, but very very richly textured dialogue, because you would read what it was the character was saying, and one of Pfeiffer's earliest collections was called “The Explainers” which really summed up the kind of characters that he wrote, people who compulsively needed to explain their own behavior, and explain situations. They don't just live their lives if they can't explain everything at a deep psychological level, then that's when they start to become unhinged, insane characters. So they have this complete level of restraint to how they express themselves, but the restraint reveals more about them than they would want to reveal, and indicates that they're very different people from how they perceive themselves. So that would be my suggestion. In terms of my own writing, I'm not sure that I would recommend that. Most of the writing that I do now in a dialogue sense is confined to “Cerebus in Hell?” and that's all id. That's Dave Sim having spent a good 25 years trying to eliminate id from his own life, and diminish id where he can't completely eliminate it. So consequently, because I'm documenting characters that are in… if they're not in hell, they're in hell with a question mark. They're in purgatory, or they’re atoning, or most of them are just chasing themselves around in circles. So consequently it's just, as soon as I have a cover from one of the guys, Birdsong, Hobbs, Sean Robinson, then it's just, okay, where's the id in it? And the id is always readily apparent, because I was definitely an id driven person up until 1996 when I suddenly realized, reading the Bible, that that's not the way to be. It's not a matter of, “He who hits his own pleasure centers in his brain as hard and fast and constantly as he possibly can wins in the end.” And boy, I definitely lived that kind of lifestyle.
So, unless you're doing a a comparable kind of work to “Cerebus in Hell?” I would definitely recommend Pfeiffer, and I'll say from your own work, one of the things that really jumped out at me in “Octave”, and I thought, that's good. That's really really good because that's consciously arrived at, and it's, again, the two different levels. The moment was when Octave the artist, who is trying to maintain a strict art for art’s sake lifestyle, and debates this and discusses this pretty extensively both with himself and with the other characters in the story, that art for art's sake is being lost, and this is what Octave is obsessively pursuing in his own life, is art for art's sake as an absolute. [laughs] And what he does is a coffee mug that says “Art For Art's Sake” and it's like, I just couldn't stop laughing when I got to that part. It was yeah, there you go. Somebody who understands the concept of art for art's sake, and understands the levels that exist to art for art's sake and is determined to arrive at an absolute human peak of art for art's sake, and he merchandises it! And it was very funny that then you actually merchandised it, so you could get your “Octave” art for art’s sake coffee mug, just by sending in this much money to this address. And I definitely wondered how many of those coffee mugs you sold, and how many of the people were reading your weekly strip and went, “Oh! Great! A coffee mug. I'll order one of those.” And didn't realize exactly what you were doing, exactly the extent of the cross wires you were presenting people with. If you're reading a comic strip about a character who is an absolute art for art's sake, you don't want to buy a coffee mug with a picture of that character on it. Or maybe you do! Maybe it's it's one of those 2023 things and I don't get it. [laughs]
Matt: Okay! Uh, the other thing, what I would suggest would be, get a book where it is a dialogue, like “Will Eisner’s Shop Talk” and just read that, and you know you get the idea of, okay, these are two people talking, so, like you and I are talking! It's like, okay, are we interrupting each other? Are one of us going off on a tangent and the other one's trying to drag it kicking and screaming back to what we were originally talking about?
Dave: Right. And that's when you have to make the decision as to whether you're gonna stick there and go, “Okay, everything that I'm doing here is completely surface. It's just conversation badminton. This guy says this thing, that guy says that thing. This guy says this thing.”And gradually that leads to something. Because it definitely complicates writing dialogue when you get to the point of, “What is this character actually saying? I know what they think they're saying and I know how they perceive of themselves, but who are they really?” And that's definitely one of the great sources of humour, both in the real world and again in fiction, is the contrast between what people think that they're saying, and what they're actually saying. And what they're actually participating in, that very possibly they don't want to be participating in that or they would be horrified if they thought, “Is that what I'm actually saying?” And it's like, arguably? Yes. Which comes down to, arguably, somebody could argue about that. Or arguably, I would argue that. Which is one of those things that I've started doing in my commentaries a couple of years back. If you use the term “arguably”, you really do have to qualify it and say, “I'm not just talking about a hypothetical other person who might argue this. This is what I'm arguing. This is what I think hews closer to the truth than what is ostensibly being said.”
Matt: Right.
Dave: Right. [laughs] Okay, “Moving on to Dodger.” Good old Dodger. Mike, what would we do without you? “Gets his questions in early because he's hoping I'll forget.” No one can forget you, Mike. Does he participate a lot on A Moment of Cerebus?
Matt: Not often, but we do Please Hold, I post Please Hold, and within a week or two I get a question of, “Hey, here's a question for next time.” It's like, that's pretty optimistic that there's gonna be a next time! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Why don’t you wait until closer to the first Thursday of the month, and see if we're all still here?
Matt: Don't get me wrong, I appreciate having at least one question in the kitty when I go, oh yeah, I got to start reminding people to ask questions.
Dave: That's true. That’s true.
Matt: It’s him and Michael R are usually the ones that get them in early, get them in often.
Dave: Yep. Yeah. ”Anyway, Mssrs. Manly Matt and Ron Essler, question for Dave. You discussed sales numbers for ‘Cerebus’ last month, mentioning that issues one to five all had a print run of 2000 copies,” with the qualifier of the conversation that I had with Harry Kremer, where he said, “Don't you remember with issue #2, they over printed by whatever they over printed by? And you sold me the excess? You remember? Remember?!” He was very emphatic about it, so it was obviously something that he definitely remembered, and I tend to take that as gospel. If someone’s that emphatic about their memory, usually it's not a false memory. “I loved you reading freebie list in a past episode. Thanks for that, by the way.” Oh, no problem. It was one of those, as soon as I had the question, it's like, well you know where the freebie list is, Dave. It's in the red binder and it's in the top drawer of the two drawer filing cabinet. Go and get the damn thing and let's cut to the chase on it. “But I'm not asking you to do the same thing for the print run numbers.” Which is unfortunate, because I've got the print run numbers. [laughs]
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: “Instead, can you please talk about the comic era crash of the 1990s when you stopped printing the distribution numbers next to the Notes from the President letter. How bad did it get? Did sales drop off a cliff, and did you fare better than other creators?” In order, when I was talking to Kevin Eastman, promoting the T8 Kickstarter and the auction of his pages, the Kevin Eastman collection, through HA.com, he talked about the black and white bust, which definitely happened. And that was one of those, how bad did it get? It got worse for the people who were doing “adjective adjective adjective collective noun” books, knockoffs of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” where they would ship 50,000 copies, and then by issue three, they weren't getting enough orders to keep going. So that was a disaster for those people. Did sales drop off a cliff? Yes, again, for those people. Did you fare better than other creators? Uh, yes, in terms of, I didn't experience the bounce that everybody was getting, because “Cerebus” was a pretty entrenched commodity by the early 1990s. So when black and white comics boom was going on, sales didn't really go up that much on “Cerebus,” because the stores knew how many “Cerebus” they could sell, and they weren't suddenly going to buy twice as many “Cerebus” just because “black and white comics are hot!” It's, “No, I might have to do that with these titles over here, because I don't know what they're doing, because they're at issue one, or they're at issue three, but ‘Cerebus’ is at issue 95, 96, around there, and I pretty much got ‘Cerebus’ figured out.” Then it was a drop in sales because it wasn't just the black and white publishers that went through boom and bust, a lot of the stores that banked on the black and white boom and bust, they went out of business because they just got overextended in that area. And consequently a store that would have been selling 10 or 15 copies of “Cerebus” every month, “Swords of Cerebus” volumes repeatedly, Suddenly, they weren't there. And if they're not there, and sometimes the neighbouring stores will pick up the slack, but usually that guy's customers were that guy's customers. One of those weird realities in direct market that when a store goes away for some reason, a good 90% of their customers go away, they don't just find a new place to buy comics.
Then, I think, Mike, edging back in the other direction, “The highly coordinated super secret obsessively detailed fan list of ‘Cerebus’ print run issues is blank for issues 6 to 45, 110 to 114, 125 to 201. The highest print run in this list is issue 90 at 33,000 copies, and ‘Cerebus’ #0 at 50,000 copies.” Do you know the list that he's talking about? Is this something that is widely known among the Cerebus aficionados?
Matt: It might be something Margaret had cobbled together, it might be something that Philip Frey put up on the Cerebus Wiki? I mean, it's a question that pops up every now and then of, “Hey what were the circulation numbers for the entire run?” And it's like, what's printed and known is what's printed and known, and the issues that don't have the numbers, it's anybody's guess, except for Dave, who has the list but, you know. [laughs] It's just funny to me that you have the list and it's the thing that everybody goes, “Oh if we get the list,” it's like, well okay, we can get the list, but it's not… because people are trying to figure out what's the rarest issue type thing. And it's like, well, the early ones are. It only went up until it started to come down.
Dave: Right. Right. And I was just funning you as Cerebus fans, I'm sitting here with Deni's invoice books one, two, three, four, and five from the eight and a half by eleven and smaller Cerebus Archive, drawer number one. And invoice book #1 goes from November 13th 1978 to May 30th 1979. And what I'm thinking I'm going to do is I'm gonna read some of it. You tell me when this gets to be “even Cerebus fans don't want to hear Dave Sim reading the phone book” because this is pretty close to that. So this is “Cerebus” #6. The first invoice is Phil Seuling, Sea Gate Distributors, November 13 1978, and it’s for 1000 copies of “Cerebus” #6. And the back cover ad that Phil took back then, he was paying $100 for that, for the back cover of “Cerebus” #6. So the thousand copies, that tells us that Sea Gate definitely didn't boost their order at issue #6 when I got the list of Mike Friedrich's “Star*Reach” distributors and contacted them, and drummed up some more business. Same thing with Now and Then Books, which is the next page, “Cerebus” #6, 500 copies. Bud Plant was new, I'm pretty sure with “Cerebus” #6, and he took 500 copies. Comic Art Distributors, Bill Morse. And when I got to that page, I went, I do not remember a distributor called Comic Arts Distributors, and I don't remember Bill Morse, but evidently they were at 319 6th Avenue in N’york, N’york and he took 350 copies. So there you go. There's a boost in the circulation. Another big surprise, Last Gasp, Ron Turner. The same “Last Gasp” underground publisher was also a distributor at 280 Bryant in San Francisco, California, and Last Gasp took 300 copies of “Ceebus” #6. Jim Friel, who was there from the beginning, 130 East Kilborn in Lansing, Michigan. And there's a note here, “Picked up in Toronto.” So we didn't ship “Cerebus” #6 to Jim Friel, he went, “I'm going to be in Toronto. Can you leave it with…” We probably would have left it with the people at Silver Snail. And 500 copies of “Cerebus” #6, holding steady again from issue #1. Another surprise, Wells News uh Steve Bobroff? It looks like… or Stan Bobrof, 2400 North High Street. Columbus, Ohio. And I'm going, hmm! I didn't know that Columbus, Ohio entered the “Cerebus” storyline at issue #6. Anyway, Wells News took 250 copies of “Cerebus” #6. Big Rapids Distribution in Madison, Wisconsin took 200 copies of “Cerebus” #6. Real World Distribution out in Vancouver, Ron Norton, who was with us pretty much all the way along from there, started buying with #6, taking a hundred copies. Gary O’Gorman, and I'm going there's another name, if JDG was playing tricks on me again and saying, “Who is the important figure in Cerebus’ background named Gary O'Gorman in Detroit, Michigan? I would have said, he got me. Was this a distributor? It doesn't have a distribution name, just Gary O'Gorman, 230 Adair Street. Detroit, Michigan, and he took a hundred copies of “Cerebus” #6. And that takes us through all of the #6s. Is that enough?
Matt: Well, everybody's got to break out their calculators and start adding up those numbers.
Dave: [laughs] That’s what I’m thinking, you should probably have a warning before you post this, going, “Grab a piece of paper and a pen, because we got some numbers you're gonna want to write down.”
Matt: I mean, I was tallying it in my head, and I'm going, it was what, 4000? Or just about?
Dave: It was up there. It was a good jump. It was one of those, with issue $5, okay we're able to keep calling barely, but keeping going is keeping going early on with the business, and then suddenly it was, this is a little extra money, more extra money than we usually have around here. Inexplicable one on the next page! Now and Then Books, November 1978. 500 “Cerebus” #4, then 500 “Cerebus” #5. Why would he be getting billed for those in November 1978? They would have come out before that, which is why I wish that Deni had been using invoice books before issue #6. Did he not pay for #4 or #5? Or did he not accept delivery of #4 and #5. Curious minds would like to know.
Matt: I mean, I doubt there was a second printing.
Dave: No, there wouldn't have been a second printing. Did we over print? Would be an interesting question. But I don't think so on that either, because it's like, no, the non-returnable was part of it, and the other part was being able to sell the entire print as soon as it was published, so that we knew exactly how much money we were getting in, and when we were getting it in. So yeah, mystery on that one.
Matt: So wait, Harry said there was an overrun on which issue?
Dave: Two.
Matt: Two. Well there goes that theory!
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, I admire your enthusiasm on that one, Sherlock. But yeah, because it was definitely when he was telling me about it, it was just that issue. Which again shores up the thesis that the print run was the print run was the print run. We didn't mess around with that because it did stand out for Harry that, “Okay, I ordered 500 ‘Cerebus’ #1s. I'm pretty happy with that. I could probably be argued into buying more copies of #1 if they were available, but I definitely understand they're not available.” And suddenly, #2 there were excess copies, and when we had the opportunity, he did buy more. But it was the print run, is the print run, is the print run. The next invoice is Victoria Bowlarama, here in Kitchener. I don't think Victoria Bowlarama still exists over on 280 Victoria Street South, but that's, this is an example of, I was doing “Cerebus,” but I was also still doing commercial work because this was an ad original that I did evidently for Victoria Bowlarama where Deni drummed up some business. And they paid $60 for the ad original, which says in brackets “on loan” and another ad original. I think that wa,s I wanted the original artwork, and they wanted the original artwork, and it was, okay, you can have the original artwork for whatever x amount of time, and then I get it back, and they settled for that and $60. I don't even remember doing an ad for Victoria Bowlarama, so it would be interesting if somebody was a really OCD Pre-Cerebus or during the early days of “Cerebus” fan and wanted to go through the Kitchener/Waterloo Record microfiche files at the library around December 1978, and go, “Is there a Victoria Bowlarama ad that looks like Dave did it?”
So I think what I'm gonna do is, here's the deal, is there's five, as I say, five of these invoice books. Invoice book #2 goes from May 30th 1979 to June 5th 1980, just going to the first page, the first page is “Cerebus” #10, and at that point, this is May 30th 1979, and Sea Gate Distributors has gone up in their orders. Instead of taking a thousand, they're taking 1500, and not only taking the back cover four color ad, but the inside back cover ad, which was the Cerebus the Hologram. So okay, I say that I'm not going to go through this, and I accidentally flipped to page three, which is Bud Plant, 500 copies of “Cerebus” #10, $200. And Deni's written at the bottom, “Just a note. I received several letters in the last month from California, no one seems to be able to find ‘Cerebus’ out there. Could you look into this, rather than I having to send these people to someone? Thanks.” And it's like, well that's chutzpah on Deni’s side. It's only 500 copies of a comic book. It’s not Bud Plant’s job to go out and find customers, customers are going to have to find Bud Plant stores and go, “Hey, can you get me this weird ardvark comic book called ‘Cerebus’?” So that's invoice book #2. #3, July 1980 to October 1981. First page, Sea Gate Distributors. This, I think, would have been the exclusive time period, when we were selling exclusively to Sea Gate Distributors, and they were taking 6000 “Cerebus” #18. Yes, just looking through the pages, I think we had an exception for Now and Then Books, but everything else is just the ad. So there you go. At the time that we went exclusive with Sea Gate Distributors, they were taking 6000 of each issue, and that lasted until the early 20s sometime. 24? 23? We will be able to look that up. And then invoice book #4 goes from October 1981 to January 1982, and invoice book #5, last one, and Deni didn't write on the front what the dates were. It goes to May 10th 1982 from January 13th 1982. So that shows that we were making pretty good bucks back then, and actually shipping a lot of books to a lot of people once we stopped going exclusive with Sea Gate Distributors, because we were using up a whole invoice book between January and May of the same year. So things were definitely looking up.
My proposal is going to be, does anybody want to chip in and get Rolly to scan all of these invoice books? One possibility is he can scan all of the invoice books, or he could just write down the numbers. Anytime it says, “This is how many copies of this issue” he could just write down, “Okay, this is the name of the distributor, this is the issue number, this is how many there were.” I don't know how long it would take him to do that. I'm guessing two hours, maybe three hours, $15 an hour, who's up for $45 an hour for filling in the blanks on the highly coordinated super secret obsessively detailed fan list of Cerebus print run issues, and filling in the blanks for, I think we're looking at issues 6 to 38? So that would be a good chunk of them off off the back end.
Matt: I will throw it out to the mob and we'll see who wants to throw money at us.
Dave: There you go. We'll throw it at the wall and see if it sticks.
Matt: I mean, I can't imagine that everyone's gonna be, “Oh no, there's no way that we're gonna be willing to pay that kind of money” and I'll be like, you guys spend more on coffee a month. Come on!
Dave: [laughs] You’re gonna have to get Manlier and Manlier on them, I think. It’s like, get a grip people, it's coffee money! It's 2023.
Matt: Well thinking about your cash flow problem one time it dawned on me that if I could get everyone on the planet to give you a penny, that would be $80 million.
Dave: Can you get on that? [laughs] That would be really, really handy.
Matt: I was wondering, it was like, you just get everybody on the planet, there's you know about eight billion people, that's $80 million, and I'm going, on the one hand it seems like that should be a no-brainer. We could totally do that! And on the other hand, it's like, there's no way I'd be able to get everybody to do it just a penny. People going, “Hey well, here's $50”, it's like yeah, okay, but now we got to get the next guy to step up and at some point it's gonna be the people that are living on pennies a day going, “That's like a week's worth of food. No, you can't have the money.”
Dave: [laughs] Right! I mean, it's a study in contrast. Today I ran into Brian, a guy that I know who works at City Hall, and no I didn't hurt him.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And the last time that I had seen Brian was the third week in March 2020 at the Shoppers Drug Mart across the street from City Hall, and I said, hey, you know, what's up? And he's going, “They're closing City Hall.” And it's like, that's when I knew, okay, we are way way over in Alice in Wonderland territory right now. They're closing City Hall. Anyway, he was asking me today, “So what's up with you? What have you been doing?” and since I've been spending a good chunk of the day, mentally, anyway, on the bifold postcards, and the other three “Can You Help?” postcards, and the Remarque Editions, I said to him, I can show you exactly what I've been up to. And it's taken me a long time to get my 50-year career down to one bifold postcard. So, I'll tell you what, what's your full name? Because I only know him as Brian. And he gave me his full name. And I said, where do you work, and which floor you work on? And he's on the sixth floor. And it's, okay, I will drop off something for you. And I actually wrote a postcard to him saying, can you put together a chain email for everybody who works at City Hall? I mean, I know there's your department, but you connect with other people in other departments. Here's this guy from Kitchener, who’s in the World Book of Records, can we get some donations? The same sort of idea, donations at CerebusDownloads.com, the Cerebus Book Club allows you to donate a dollar a month, our biggest, most generous patron at CerebusDownloads.com in the Cerebus Book Club, is Eddie the successor, is actually is in for $50 a month. Which is great, but that's high end kind of stuff. I'm thinking, these are city officials. Everybody's getting a lot more money working at the city than working at non-government jobs. Can you help some of us that don't have city jobs? And just scan your postcard. I gave them a bunch of them. It's a “hope you can help, Dave Sim” and write a little note underneath it, and email it to everybody who's on your email list at City Hall and just say, can you help this guy? And we'll see what happens, because I just dropped off the package. [laughs] I thought it was pre-COVID days, where I'm just gonna walk in, go over to the elevators, punch 6, go up there, and then give it to the sixth floor receptionist. No, all of City Hall is closed off. You can only get into the lobby, and you'll have to go through somebody. So I went over to the guy's desk, and went, I was just gonna go up to the sixth floor and give this to Brian. And I gave his whole name, and you know, holding up the Remarque Edition of “The Last Day” and the postcard packages. And they go, “Uh, you can't go up in the elevator anymore, unless you work at City Hall.” It's like, okay, can you see that Brian gets this? He said yeah, he would do that. So I think that's one of those side effects of the “safe” injection sites being diagonal to City Hall. And [laughs] it's one of those, well okay, you thought that this was harm reduction, and unfortunately you ended up with votes to have it diagonal from City Hall, and they're getting some fun people coming in on a regular basis. And it's like, okay, well, harm reduction doesn't work. What you're talking about is harm exacerbation. I say this as a cautionary note, because this has spread all the way across Canada. Try and stop it in your community in the United States, because it's on its way. This is a major major major Blue State thing. “Yes, we're gonna reduce harm by giving the junkies a clubhouse” and when that doesn't work, and you just suddenly have three times as many opioid overdoses and deaths, now they're going “safe supply.” It's like, “Okay, these are dirty drugs, and we're gonna give them pharmaceutical grade drugs, and as many as they want.” And it's like, if you really think that's going to work, and I will show you over to the Brooklyn Bridge here, which I own personally, and I will sell you for $125 cash.
Matt: Right.
Dave: There you go! I think we covered that. Did we cover that?
Matt: Uh, yeah, pretty much. I mean I don't think, like I said, I'm pretty sure that somebody's gonna say, “Oh yeah, I'll kick in for this.”
Dave: Well, it would be nice. I'm beating the bushes these days, is all I'm doing. I'm trying to be a dutiful Johnny Appleseed with my postcards and my bifold postcard. You got them all printed, anybody that you can think of, or anybody that you read about in the newspaper, you go, “they sound like they have way too much money,” what the heck, let’s send them this and see if they're interested in helping out. Like, the thing with rich people, if they look rich, like they have a very rich lifestyle, sometimes they're just living the way that the average person is, where they bought too much house, and yes, they're making a lot of money. One of the ones was a Waterloo Region executive, one of the top executives I was reading about in the newspaper, and he's pulling down like $312,000 a year, Canadian dollars, but still $312,000 a year. And it's like, okay, a big chunk of that is going in taxes. And then okay, did he buy too much house? Like, is he trying to impress people with how rich he is? What kind of a car does he drive? Does he own a cottage? Is it a really good cottage? Is it on one of the preferred sites in Georgian Bay? You don't need too many of those things as a rich person before you're spending at capacity, and you find yourself in Biggie Smalls’ “mo’ money, mo’ problems.” But we will revisit this subject repeatedly, and anything that you can do, if you're within the sound of my voice, and you're good for $1 a month or $5 a month, CerebusDownloads, Cerebus Book Clu is set up for that. You just go, “Here's how much I want to give. Here's my financial details, and the email address to verify that this was me.” And you're off to the races!
The Jeff Stoltman question, I thought this was funny, you emailed this to me ahead of time. “Hey, I love your blog, but I can't find information because there is so much stuff to read through.” Yeah, if you want to talk about an occupational A Moment of Cerebus hazard, there's one near the top of the list. “Anyway, I can't find the answer to this question. Do you know if I'm able to get one of ‘The Last Day’ stickers that Dave has to correct the spine on the collection? I bought the book right away from InStockTrades, so mine doesn't have it. If you don't know the answer, do you know how I can find out ? Thanks for your time.” And the good news is that Rolly mailed you, Matt Dow, I believe, a couple of dozen of the stickers?
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Did they arrive?
Matt: I haven't gotten them yet, but when did he mail them?
Dave: Uhh, I'm going to say… not last Thursday, the Thursday before that?
Matt: Okay. That means they're probably gonna show up tomorrow.
Dave: You volunteered because most of the demand is gonna be in the US, which is very kind of you. Just, “Anybody who wants one, I'll throw it in an envelope, and I'll mail it to you.” So, and the same thing with Canada, we got a bag full of “Last Day” stickers. So they're sitting right there. I even said to Rolly, in case their aim isn't really good, and their hand starts to shake or something like that, send them like three stickers, so they have like three chances to get it as straight as they want it to be . Whether or not that's actually straight, they could have eyesight problems that they're not aware of, but that's all that's really important is that it looks straight to them.
Matt: Okay. So anyone in your neck of the woods should send a self-addressed stamped envelope to PO Box… oh man, I should remember this off the top of my head and I don't remember it anymore.
Dave: 1674 Station C. Kitchener. Kitchen with ER on the end. M2G 4R2. Just think of R2D2’s retarded younger brother.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: So, there you go, Jeff. You will get your sticker, and all you have to do is contact Manly at A Moment of Cerebus, and say, “I'm up for a sticker. Here's my address” and as soon as Manly's got them, you'll get yours.
Matt: Unless, of course, Jeff is in Canada, in which case I'm gonna refer him back to you. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] There you go. That’s true! You don’t know that necessarily, do you? They've got their email address, and they're inside your television, but that's all you know about them.
Matt: Well that’s, when Ian won “The Last Day” panoramic Remarque auction, he’s like, “So how do I pay? and I'm like, well, the easiest way is go to CerebusDownloads and just donate and he emailed back going, “Well, I can't. It's one, five, or ten. That's all I can do.” And I'm like, okay, when you click on it, it'll say quantity, and you just up the quantity of the $5 to 73, I think it was.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I did the math of, you know, you bid 205 or whatever, divide that by five, and that's how many you have to buy. And he was like, “Yeah I figured that out as soon as I sent you the email.” I’m like, okay, well, ya know...
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: We're pretty low tech, and as I said to him, it sounds dumb, but it totally works.
Dave: That’s the thing. And we're not really about the sickle around here, we're about the stave. It’s, if it works, let's stick with what works, and let's not get fancy here. Just plug in the quantity on the five, and Bob's your Uncle.
Matt: So, I'm circling, you sent me all the T8 promo stuff that got returned, and you specifically said, “Use it as prizes!” And I'm going, okay, that means a contest. Contest means work. So now it’s, do what Dave says versus, that sounds like work!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And so, I'm still circling exactly how I'm gonna phrase it and how I'm gonna pitch it, but the pre-pitch is I'm gonna sell it and whatever I make I'm gonna donate it up to the SDoAR fund, but the hitch is, so lik, the T8 postcards, I'm gonna sell them for $10 a piece, but if you don't want me to mess with them, it's an extra $5.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Cause, you know, there's a part of me that's like, I got the Hell-oh Spawnee stamp. There's 20 Beguiling ones, and I have this insane idea. It's completely and totally bat shit of finding a Mort Drucker Clint Eastwood drawing, printing it out, tracing it onto the card, and inking it myself because it's gonna look horrible, I know it is. But I just like the idea of, this is the Beguiling card #3 with Clint Eastwood from “The Beguiling”, poorly rendered by Matt.
Dave: [laughs] [as Clint Eastwood] It’s your call, Sunshine! You want your card in un-Matt Dowed condition, or do you want your card Matt Dowed? I’m just sitting right here, I can play it either way.
Matt: Well, and I'm thinking about it, I’m like, I know I'm gonna say it and like Margaret's gonna go, “Yes mess with the card, that'll be funny.” And I know other people will be like, “I'll give you 20. Send me two cards and don't even look at them.”
Dave: [laughs] Don't Matt Dow my cards, buddy!
Matt: And then there's the original art cards, and I'm thinking, I can sell those, and because the postcards I got an idea, because Spatula bought a couple of them off of eBay. I'm like, what'd you pay? And he told me and I'm going, okay, so you know about $10 would be a fair market price for a postcard signed by Dave. But the original art cards? I mean, some of those were going on the Kickstarter for hundreds of dollars, and some of them were going for less than hundreds of dollars, depending on what was on the card. And you know it's a seller's market. “This card is really cool, so we want a lot of money. This card, ehh, this was the eighth one Dave did that day, so ehh, we'll give you a deal.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And there's apart of me going, I can do the same thing with those, where, hey, for $70 you can get an original art card and for a hundred I won't color in Cerebus.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Well, he's gray! He's supposed to be gray. I got a gray marker! This will totally… and I'm going, I can see the fan base going, “You're the evilest interim editor we've ever had” and I'll be like, I'm the only interim editor you’ve had!
Dave: [laughs] Really. Really. It's like, [mobster voice] “Don't call it the Matt Dow shakedown racket. That's a very unpleasant expression. It's accurate, but it's very very unpleasant.” Okay, well, that gets me psyched for one of the few things that is in the basement. When I cleaned out everything in the basement in the the weirdly optimistic idea that I was going to be able to get the basement floor lowered, and get the basement finished. One of the things that I went, I just have no idea what to do with these, is a small box of envelopes that I mailed to comic book stores. Same deal, mailed it to comic book stores that turned out to no longer exist, and they got returned, and they're the comic store dividers, the back issue bin dividers, slightly taller than a comic book, and what it says on it is, “As Seen on CerebusTV.” So the idea was anything that I promoted on CerebusTV, the stores would watch CerebusTV, and go, “Oh, I've got some of those. I will take my As Seen on CerebusTV header card and put it behind that!” Which would then promote the thing I was promoting on CerebusTV, and CerebusTV. So that's another complete rarity. I would be guessing how many of those there are downstairs, I think it was 500 cards per store? And nobody has these. [laughs] I would guess. Margaret's probably sitting there going, “Huh? What? Why don't I have one of those?” And it's like, yeah, you could run the Matt Down shakedown racket on that one really well.
Matt: I'm just thinking, I mean, my racket's pretty small change, but are they white backing boards, or white dividers?
Dave: Oh, they're like colour. It's the CerebusTV colour logo at the top, and then enough space at the bottom so that you would put it in behind a comic book, either on the shelf or as a divider, and it was like a major red flag. A real red, light blue, CerebusTV logo. I will at least dig out one to whet everyone's appetite, and I'll leave it out back at Camp David for Rolly and say, can you scan one of these and send it to Matt Dow? I'll get him to take a picture of me holding one of them up.
Matt: Well, I'm just thinking, if they're remarque-able you could do Remarques on them, and you know try to make some money that way of… the moderately priced, or high moderate, as the case may be, $50? $60? This one didn't turn out so good, $45?
Dave: [laughs] I never know that! I never know that. I'm consistently surprised by which things Cerebus fans go, “Oh, this is a good one. Your’s isn't too bad either.” [laughs] I wish I had Cerebus fan taste because I would probably be able to make a lot more money at my own racket.
Matt: I mean, I'm just, I'm thinking there's a couple different angles on, okay, the deal is, it's a Cerebus head sketch. It only takes Dave five minutes to do a decent one, 10 minutes it's a really decent one, 20 minutes and it's turning into Jeff Seiler's Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing where there's little extra bits that, ehh, they're there because they're there. So how much is it worth to someone for 20 minutes of Dave's time? A dollar a minute? $5 a minute? If they’re that Yenta with more money than brains, $100 a minute.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And this is why I'm just the suggestion guy, I'm not the “hey why don't you go do that” guy. You can film yourself doing them and turn them into Weekly Updates.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: I'm all about that cross-promotional synergy stuff that I heard about on the TV that one time.
Dave: That one time there. Yeah. Yeah, that's, unless they're missing something here, I'm the guy that controls the supply. I mean, I'm the CerebusTV full colour header card drug cartel that you hear about in Mexico, where you just don't want to mess with this guy. If I say, [tough guy voice] there is only going to be one of them this month. There's only gonna be one of them this year. If you don't get this year’s,you gotta wait until next year until there's another one of those.
Matt: Well, I'm also thinking of it the other way of, okay, you grab 20 of them, and it's okay, we auction off, you're gonna get one, we don't know what it looks like yet because until you pay Dave doesn't start. It's one of those, the timer starts and when the money runs out, the sketch stops, so he might not have both eyes.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: If you wanna pay $50, you get $50 worth, but we're charging by the minute or whatever. $10 you go for five minutes, whatever. I'm thinking that would be a pretty decent racket if we can get these suckers-- I mean, your adoring and adorable fans… [laughs] to go along with it.
Dave: Right. Which you can with a percentage of them. I mean, we're already getting off the reservation here, with all of the money to Margaret Liss has spent on Cerebus stuff over the years, a good chunk of which I've gotten, Aardvark-Vanaheim has gotten, and then I’ve gotten from Aardvark-Vanaheim. “Dave, just give Rolly one of the damn damn backing board dividers, full colour CerebusTV and send it to Margaret.” But then I get into, well, okay, I got a lot of people in that category that I could send stuff to. That's the theory behind the Remarque auction catalog is, okay, I'm printing these up, I can say that they're $25 Canadian each. And I get to decide who gets one for free. Same thing with the Remarque Editions. It's like, okay, let's try this, where the Brain Trust gets a free one. And it's like, that's a sensible thing to do. Doesn't make money on that specific one, particularly since you have to mail 10 of them. But that gets into short term / long term. If this promotes the Cerebus Remarque Editions, and I sell a bunch of them, and it's worth doing. And it's like, the question always becomes, okay, what's a bunch? And a bunch can vary quite quite quite quite widely around here. I'm more talking about, again, in terms of Cerebus taste of Christon, who got the “into the light” Cerebus #1 Remarque Edition, and sent me the cheque, and said, ”This would be good. Do more of these with other parts of Cerebus' history.” And suggested, “What about a baby-throwing Remarque?” And it's like, why can't I come up with that?! I'm the guy that created this damn thing, I'm the one who wrote the baby-throwing page, why isn't it the first thing that comes to mind? And I'm thinking it would be particularly good with the “into the light” Remarque, because it's Cerebus at the absolute end of his life where he's going into the light, and it would make a very sensible image of Cerebus reacting to looking into the light, having just come out of his life flashing before his eyes, and he's looking at the baby-throwing panael, and getting that uh-oh look on his face.
Matt: [laughs] I'm not gonna lie…
Dave: You see? There you go. It's like, why can't I come up with stuff like that? I sit around and think about it and go, okay, just think like a Cerebus fan. I wish I could, but I'm the Cerebus creator and librarian, but somehow I didn't get issued Cerebus fan chops.
Matt: Well, I'm not gonna lie, I was gonna suggest a baby-throwing Cerebus Remarque. I also was going to suggest, because you said once you put the base layer on the cover, it's real smooth for inking of, you can always do a practice for a SDoAR page on a Remarque and then auction that off, like, you know, here's Margaret Mitchell. If you know Dave and you know the history of the work, it's, uh, yeah, this has nothing to do with the book you're about to read, but then again, most people are probably gonna buy it and you know this is the looking at copy, not the reading copy.
Dave: Right.
Matt: The other thing I'm going to suggest is, I would flip through the life flashing before his eyes, and I'd say 90% of those panels would make good Remarques.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I mean, it's one of those, you know, seriously, it was probably two days ago at work, I’m going, yeah, baby-throwing Cerebus would be a really neat idea! I gotta remember to tell that to Dave. Great minds think alike!
Dave: Yeah. [laughs] Yes, and fools seldom differ. Okay, much food for thought there. Much food for thought.
“And Zipper sent in, ‘Hi Matt, I have a question and one answer for to Dave’”. Matt says, “Remember when I said maybe some month you people can send us answers and we can give questions, Jeopardy style? I'll take potpourri for a thousand, Alex.” Uhh… have I missed a page here? No, no, I didn't. Mike does. “Hi Dave, now that Jen G has started successful SDoAR 2023 GoFundMe, and two issues of a giant-sized ashcan ready to be printed, do you believe that there will be a Sean Robinson digitally remastered version of your mock-ups printed into a complete big @$$ omnibus phone book? Would you be somewhat satisfied to have your story of Alex Raymond, photorealism, Margaret Mitchell, etc, out there in a complete book ,even though it'll be in a version that wouldn't have stylized drawn versions of the ink strokes of Alex Raymond, Al Williamson, etc?” And [coughs] then Michael gives his answer, “My answer for this month is LoneStar Comics.” And Matt says, “Have you got this in front of you? Can you do your own gag?”
Matt: Ooh, ooh! I know this one! I know this one! That's one of the stores Seiler used to shop at! Oh wait, I didn't say in the form of a question. I don't win.
Dave: [laughs] That’s right! That’s right. We’re very strict around here, particularly with our answers in search of questions. Anyway, Michael, getting back to your question, ideally, and this is as far as I'm concerned asking for the sun, and the moon, and the stars, which I don't tend to do, I think the mock-ups are going to be a completely separate category, starting with the giant-sized ashcan. And Philip Frey is doing the digital work on those, which is one of those, boy, if you want to have a trial by ordeal as somebody remastering visual material for the first time, Dave Sim’s mock-ups from whatever it was, page 203 of Strange Death of Alex Raymond through to, quite literally, page 554. There's 350 pages. Short term, this is gonna be… this looks like a job for Jennifer! And also a job for Philip Frey. How long does it take them to get through all of those, and definitely I will be looking at those, the giant-sized ashcans, when they're done, and going, is this Sean Robinson level of quality? Which definitely I'm hoping for, which means looking at a lot of it under the magnifier lamp, and also jeweler’s loupe. I'm really really looking forward to that. [sneezes] Excuse me. Because I think what it's going to end up being is serialized, and at some point collected into a 354 page book, where this is Dave Sim’s mock-ups. And I will write an introduction for it, describing the whole process, and explaining this is another thing that sets Strange Death of Alex Raymond apart from the crowd, that I don't think we will ever again have a graphic novel where the first 203 pages were done by the creator, and then the next 354 pages were mocked up by the creator, and then the creator went back to actually writing and drawing physical pages at page 555/554. And then how far did he get after that? Did he get all the way to the end of Strange Death of Alex Raymond, or where did he, as cartoonists are wont to do, die in harness, just pitched over, and game over at what page. Getting back to the sun, the moon, and the stars, ideally I get all the way through the end of Strange Death of Alex Raymond drawing the pages, hopefully doing a page a week, maybe occasionally better than that? But it takes about a week with all of the other work that I have to do, to get a Strange Death of Alex Raymond page that I go, I'm really happy with that. The one that I'm working on right now, 562 is , don't screw it up, don't screw it up, it's exactly what I wanted it to look like. I can all of the ball, all of the inking is very sharp. Get all the way through to the end, and then double back to page 203 where I stopped drawing Strange Death of Alex Raymond and Carson started drawing the pages from my mock-ups, and do Dave's version of Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and get all the way through to the end of the 350 pages in the middle there. So then the mockups and the mock-up book exists as a curiosity item, but yes, at some point there's the Strange Death of Alex Raymond. I don't think I could get it all into into one cover, it's already 560 pages, and trying to guess, okay, how long is Strange Death of Alex Raymond, doing exactly the way that I think it needs to be done? I'm hoping that I could get the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell, which is what I'm working on now. I've got eight pages done, that I can get that done in 50 pages, but that will be a year's worth of work. And then, boy, I'm probably lying to myself in saying, I think I know exactly what I'm doing then and there's a lot less work from that point of Ward Greene has caused the death of Margaret Mitchell, knows that he's caused the death of Margaret Mitchell, and he's going, “There's going to be severe consequences for me out of this” and is writing Rip Kirby to try and write himself out of the situation that he put himself into. I'm picturing that as maybe 100 pages, so maybe like two years on that? And then all of the spin-off repercussions after Ward Greene dies in January 1956, and Alex Raymond dies in September of 1956, where everything went with Stan Drake from that point forward, and the other photorealists, and all the post resonances where the car accident keeps recurring and recurring recurring in comic books. Maybe another 100 pages on that? So it's still the sun, the moon, and the stars. What’s a 65, 67 year old man going, okay, ideally, if that takes me five years, six years to do that, then I'm 73, and then I double back and start doing the mockups. And how many of those can I get done? Am I going to do them sequentially, or am I going to go, all right, I got to the end of Strange Death of Alex Raymond so now going back and doing the mockups, I'm going to flip through the giant pile of mockups and go, ooh ooh! This one, I want to do this one. [laughs] This one's really cool. As soon as I got eight of them done, I'll do a CAN style portfolio and it'll be eight “ooh ooh, this is really cool” pages that the SDoAR sponsors will be able to purchase and own and glom onto, with all the tiny little lines at full size.
And I want to thank Michael R, I got Rolly to fax through his whole story of going to the local comic book convention, and getting me a a Walt Simonson Batman head on one of the Turtles art cards. And the part that I was really jazzed about was getting a “Cerebus Archive” comic book #2, I think it's issue two, with the photo and memo from from Louise Simonson, when she was Louise Jones, and was my editor. The person who discovered Dave Sim in the professional comic book field, with “Shadow of the Axe” from “Creepy” #79, and then he showed it to her. He showed it to her, and she actually signed the page that had her picture on it, and the references. And that's major closure for me. That was a very very good moment that you've done there, Michael R, because I always wondered, what does Louise Simonson think of me? Having been called everything but “white man” in the comic book field, and people having to have the “right” opinion of Dave Sim, which was a 100% opinion of Dave Sim. Was Louise in in that category? Did Louise not not get the memo? Or is Louise one of those people who's just kind of tired of all of this cancel culture stuff? So very very pleased to have that. Thank you, Michael. And I hope that makes a great photo essay on A Moment of Cerebus. Did you get that yet? I don't think you would have gotten that yet, I think Rolly just scanned it today and was sending it to you.
Matt: I'd have to look on my phone to see. Uh, what does it say? It doesn't say I got it, but that doesn't mean anything because I'm not looking really close.
Dave: Right. Right. You could run all of Michael R's letter and all of his selfies that he took with people. He's now at the point of taking selfies of himself with people holding up the selfies that he took with them at the last convention.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] You see where I’m going with this? At next year’s convention, he’s gonna have them holding up the selfies of the selfies of him taking a selfie of them holding up the selfies from two years ago. And boy, Michael R, for a guy your age, you're definitely in tune with the 2023 internet of things.
Matt: I’m trying to think what issue of “Batman” it is that has the infinity cover.
Dave: Which issue of “Batman” with the infinity cover?
Matt: Yeah…
Dave: The early one, you mean? #8, I think.
Matt: I’d have to… I just know that they're auctioning one through Heritage and it was one of those, I went, “Oh okay, yeah, that's neat.” But then it's, I've seen it in like three different emails from them of, “We're auctioning off this ‘Batman’ infinity cover’ and I'm going, ‘kay. It's real neat. I can't afford anything you guys have, and at this point I've given up trying, but, you know…
Dave: [laughs] Yeah! “I'm not gonna sell the house and the cars so’s I could buy a ‘Batman’ #8 infinity cover.” As attractive as it is, that's not to cast aspersions on “Batman” #8 infinity cover.
Matt: I think…
Dave: It might be #9! It might be #9.
Matt: I think it might be in my “50 Years of Batman” book where it was a black and white book, but then they had reproduction color inserts, high glossy reproductions of covers. It might be in there. Cause that's the book that I'm like, I really need to scan some of these covers and and mock up some “Cerebus in Hell?” covers based off of some of these classic “Batman” covers. And I always, yeah except the book’s from 1988. It's been well read, the spine's starting to crack, it's starting to lose pages and I kinda gotta be careful with it because it was a gift for my birthday from my Dad. And I'm like, yeah, but I really should scan those! And I was like, or I could use the internet to just find copies of the covers. And my brain goes, that's no fun!
Dave: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. You’re getting to that age where you don’t belong in 2023, and 2023 really tends to rub it in, that, “No, this is how we do things now” and it's like, but I don't want to do it that way. There's no fun to that!
Matt: I just saw a thing, it was a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, he was getting interviewed by somebody, apparently in the most recent book that the interviewer had read, there was a bit where Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope and she's like, “You're rich. Why don't you just go on the internet, order a bunch of envelopes, and keep them in the closet and then you have them.” And he's like, “And I couldn't explain to her that I wasn't just going to buy an envelope, I was going out and having an adventure.” Like he went out, and he saw a bunch of cute babes, he talked to a woman about her dog, a fire truck drove past and he gave him a thumbs up. It wasn't just going to buy an envelope, it was farting around, and he's like, “That's the purpose of our lives, is to fart around. And the computer people don't understand that! The computers are gonna replace everything and then you're not gonna be able to fart around.” And I'm like, he's kind of got a point! Like doing AMoC nuts has no purpose at all, but it was a lot of fun for the five hours I goofed around doing it.
Dave: Right and it's your five hours. I think that's why when you see the pictures of the aliens, they always have giant black eyes. It's like, that's what that leads to. If you really really want to live inside your television, somewhere up ahead somebody's gonna go, “We could replace your eyes with giant black widescreen television. You won't have eyes anymore, but you will have effectively have become a computer and everything on your television and your computer will be in your giant black eyeballs.” And those are the ones who went, “Oh cool!” And they were also the ones who went, “Hey let's go to starship and go looking for other civilizations.” It's like, they're crazy people. That's really the only way to get rid of them, is just let them do exactly what they want to do, and that's how they end up.
“And speaking of Jen DiGiacomo, on her post for this week, ‘Anonymous’ commented.” Uh-oh. Warning flags go off. Anonymous, “Don't normally comment but Steve's attitude on SDOAR is likely common enough that I'll share my opinion, which is that I've always wanted to be interested in the project but haven't been until now, because the crowdfunding of Dave's version and the possibility of it eventually coexisting alongside Carson's has made me more interested in both the project itself and in the minutiae of this bit of comic history. I'm glad Dave can still do his thing; he spent decades stubbornly doing his thing his way, and if he values this thing enough to devote his aging body and spirit to seeing it through even after Carson's (by all reports, stunning) completion of it, then I still probably won't pick up a physical copy, but I do think it's about time I threw him a fiver. Cheers, Dave, and may you go to your grave with fully functional wrists. PS: Have you ever tried to draw with your non-dominant hand? What were the results? Ever do it just for the novelty/practice?” Uh, no, definitely not. I'm so focused on trying to make my one hand with aptitude for that do what it is that I want to do much deeper into the page then I'm naturally inclined to do, and I might be wrong, but this week seems like, I think I'm actually getting there where under the magnification of the magnifier lamp and in deep space it's, this is really sharpening up. This is as sharp as I always wanted my work to be all the way along and why I'm so hypnotized by the photorealists, particularly primo Stan Drake, primo Al Williamson, primo Neal Adams. It's just so sharp! I've got to be able to force my hand to do that, I just have to figure out how it is that you get that sharp. And it's, I've been there before, but because I wasn't doing it constantly I have to relearn it each time. And sometimes I relearn it, and sometimes it's like, no, it's just too fuzzy. It's really good Dave Sim, but it's not top of Mount Everest, photorealist chops, which is my whole purpose with this. So I'm being cautiously optimistic that, I will I will improve, and it's just a matter of, well, as you say, does the body hold up? Does the spirit hold up? Do the eyes hold up sufficiently to be able to do this? I would suggest that, at the very least in terms of, as you say, “the possibility of it eventually coexisting alongside Carson's has made me more interested in both the project itself and in the minutiae of this bit of comic history.” I think that you're in the right spot if you're watching Jen's SDoAR 2023, because that's what you will be seeing. I think it's actually a big plus the way she set it up where you unlock the page, everybody putting their oar in the water and pulling in the same direction. “Okay, we've unlocked another page.” and particularly at the point that it's at now, around page 310, 311, 312, there's a bunch of hairpin turns there that havn't been part of Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and was central to how I'm going to explain what I'm trying to explain here. Basically the nature of reality and how reality works. If you've read Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and you've read through the end of Carson's version, and you're reading all of the pages on Strange Death of Alex Raymond 2023 GoFundMe, you got a lot of really really interesting experiences. And I'm not going to spoil anything, but when I go through the mockups which are all sitting on my coffee table because I go, okay, I have to look something up here. And when was it that I was talking about the Leo Frank case? What page was that on, because I want to refer to that in the part that I'm working on now. I have to force myself back out of going, oh yeah yeah, I forgot that part. Oh yeah yeah, I forgot this part. And suddenly it's like, okay, it's five pages later. No, you found what you were looking for Grandpa, get back to actually working on the book. You've got to go back to page 562, page 270, page 311, isn't doing anything for forward momentum and getting this book done. So, thanks for the good wishes. And yes, anytime you want to throw me a fiver, I'm sitting right here. We got no shortage of places where you can make sure that Aardvark-Vanaheim gets a fiver to keep this whole thing rolling merrily along.
Matt: Right. Right.
Dave: “And then, Manly Matt Dow,” I know that guy, “wants to know, whatwas the deal with Lord Rodney in ‘High Society’? The character is obviously Rodney Dangerfield, but the caricature hardly looks like him. Why not? Was it an artistic decision, or was that level of Mort Drucker style beyond ‘High Society’ era Dave?” It was hardly beyond the capacity of pre-internet of things, Google image. I mean, now I could just type in “Rodney Dangerfield” or get Jennifer to type in “Rodney Dangerfield” and print out a bunch of thumbnails. Here's the pictures, and go, okay, this is the one that I'm looking for. And then either trace it and do a photorealistic Rodney Dangerfield, or do a mix between cartoon realism and photorealism Rodney Dangerfield, or as you suggest, do a Mort Drucker caricature of Rodney Dangerfield. One of the problems with it was, when I sat down to picture Rodney Dangerfield, okay, this is what he looks like. So if I'm gonna do Lord Rodney, that's the picture that I have to have in my mind. When Deni and I were on the 1982 tour, while we were in New York City, that was one of the places I wanted to go was his comedy club, Dangerfield’s, which was literally just straight down the street from the Beekman Towers where we were staying. And [laughs] to a not-as-nice area of town than the Beekman Towers, but still walkable area. And [coughs] a caricaturist had done a picture of Rodney Dangerfield that they used on everything. It was on the napkins, it was on the menus, I think it was on the billboard. And I definitely grabbed one of the napkins as a souvenir, I still have it somewhere in with the photos of the 82 tour. And it’s the worst caricature I've ever seen of anybody. And it's like, I don't know why they did that. Was that intentional? Because obviously, Rodney Dangerfield approved it. You know, “this is what we're going to be using on everything.” Was he just disinterested in the thing as a cartoon, and went, [Rodney impression] “Yeah okay, whatever. We'll use that one.” When I tried to picture Rodney Dangerfield, all I could picture was this terrible napkin. And not having a library that had an encyclopedia of famous stand-up comedians, or a “Caddyshack” photobook, I just didn't have the resources. So unless I could picture him and try to do what I pictured in my head, it wasn't gonna come out as as Rodney Dangerfield. And I had this napkin in my way. So what I decided to do was, what if I did a Rodney Dangerfield that got literally [Rodney voice] no respect at all! Because if you look at it, you go, “Wow. Anytime Dave does a caricature of somebody, you could really see him sweating bullets to get it as accurate as possible”, and I just didn't do that with Rodney Dangerfield. Literally, Lord Rodney [Rodney voice] got no respect at all, from Dave Sim, because I just went, okay, here's a sort of approximation of Rodney Dangerfield that's about as good as the napkin that I got at Dangerfield’s. I'll see if I can dig that up, and get Rolly to scan that and send it to you, and we'll see if it's just me or if people go, “You know, that's the worst caricature I've ever seen of anybody.”
Matt: I just wrote a note to Google that and see if I can find the logo cause I'm sure it's out there. But yeah that's, the only reason I asked was that I just… posting six pages at a time from “High Society” still, cause I'm lazy. I got to the Lord Rodney bit, and I'm going, you know it just seems off that it's not a little more on model, but now that you explain it, it totally makes sense. It actually is a little funnier.
Dave: It does, it’s also bad animation. Like the scene where, [coughs], he goes like, [Rodney voice] “You mean a cabinet mission-- or a cabinet position.” And it's like, uh, you mean like uh whatever it was.
Matt: It's, “He wants to give you a cabinet post.” “You mean a chest of drawers with a log in it.”
Dave: [Rodney voice] “Yeah, chest of drawers with a log in it. No no no, a portfolio.” And it’s like, and he goes, “I’m an upbeat kind of guy.” When he looks away and then looks back, it's a Rodney Dangerfield gesture, but it's about a “South Park” level of animation, which I thought was funny. Giving Rodney Dangerfield no respect at all, and going, okay, I know exactly the gesture, but what the heck, I'm not even gonna put timing on the gesture, because it's, “I'm an upbeat kind of guy.” I love Rodney Dangerfield. I love his whole delivery . It must have been a great day when he landed on that voice and the “no respect at all” thing. “You know, my father used to tell me when crossing the street, look straight ahead. No respect at all! No respect at all.” And a very very New York thing, but something that is New York universal, and congratulations to him for coming up with that, and turning it into a career. If he wasn't one of the guys that appeared more often than anybody else on “The Ed Sullivan Show”, he was definitely on that list of guys, right up with Topo Gigio.
“Then that's it. That's the end of the questions. What?! I said, practically an avalanche-y, as in almost but not quite an avalanche-y.” And then you have the, “But this popped up, ‘Things You May Not Know About The Beatles’”. Is this actually a website called “Things You May Not Know About The Beatles”?
Matt: So, the deal with social media is that you're supposed to be, it's, you follow your friends or you follow the page of this TV show or you follow whatever. And that's what you're supposed to see, but they don't make money off that, so they just… like I go on Facebook and it's, hey, here's a post from my brother! Here's 44 posts from crap I don't care about.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Half of them are ads for things that I would buy, if I had more money than brains. I would totally buy the recreation of Indiana Jones's Dad's Grail diary from the third Indiana Jones movie, but I'm not spending..
Dave: Who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t? [laughs]
Matt: I'm not spending $40 on a replica of a book from a movie. I mean, as much as I wants this, oh! You know, I mean, my inner Gollum is going, [Gollum voice] my precious! I wants! I wants my pre-- you know, it's the responsible adult going, okay, you'd look through it once, put it on a shelf, die, the kids would go, “What the crap is this?” and throw it away.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: So, as I was looking on Facebook, checking the Cerebus group to see if there were any questions I may have missed, this random suggested for me popped up about little known facts about the Beatles. And I'm going, oh okay, you know, I got a second, I'll read this. And then I got to the bit that I got to, and I'm like, oh, well this is going up to Dave.
Dave: Yes. Have you told anybody about this, or can I just sort of read it cold here?
Matt: You can read it cold.
Dave: All right. “Things you may not know about the Beatles. The band had its first British performance under the name Beatles on December 17, 1960, at Liverpool's Casbah Coffee Club. [Paul voice] ‘After Hamburg it wasn’t too good,’ said Paul. ‘Everyone needed a rest. I expected everyone to be ringing me to discuss what we were doing, but it was all quiet on the Western front. None of us called each other, so I wasn’t so much dejected as puzzled, wondering whether it was going to carry on or if that was the last of it. I started working at a coil-winding factory called Massey and Coggins. My dad had told me to go out and get a job. I’d said, ‘I’ve got a job, I’m in a band.’ But after a couple of weeks of doing nothing with the band it was, ‘No, you have got to get a proper job.’ He virtually chucked me out of the house: ‘Get a job or don’t come back.’ So I went to the employment office and said, ‘Can I have a job? Just give me anything.’ I said, ‘I’ll have whatever is on the top of that little pile there.’ And the first job was sweeping the yard at Massey and Coggins. I took it. I went there and the personnel officer said, ‘We can’t have you sweeping the yard, you’re management material.’ And they started to train me from the shop floor up with that in mind. Of course, I wasn’t very good on the shop floor – I wasn’t a very good coilwinder. One day John and George showed up in the yard that I should have been sweeping and told me we had a gig at the Cavern. I said, ‘No. I’ve got a steady job here and it pays £7.14s a week. They are training me here. That’s pretty good, I can’t expect more. And I was quite serious about this. But then – and with my dad’s warning still in my mind – I thought, ‘Sod it. I can’t stick this lot.’ I bunked over the wall and was never seen again by Massey and Coggins. Pretty shrewd move really, as things turned out.’ The Beatles’ first show since Hamburg was at Mona Best’s Casbah Coffee Club, a venue they hadn’t played at since the Quarrymen days, in October 1959. Stuart Sutcliffe had remained in Hamburg with Astrid Kirchherr, so The Beatles recruited Chas Newby, formerly the rhythm guitarist with The Blackjacks, to play bass.” That’s interesting. Why wasn’t Paul playing bass? That was his instrument, wasn’t it? Anyway. “The Beatles borrowed equipment from the other act that was booked to play that night, Gene Day and the Jango Beats,” and that’s the one that you’ve got in bold face, enlarged, and underlined, with good reason. [laughs] “Gene Day”, exactly the way Gene Day spelled his name, “And the Jango Beats, who later renamed themselves Earl Preston and the TTs.” Which is interesting. “Posters declaring ‘The Beatles, Direct From Hamburg, Germany’ were placed around the Casbah, and the basement venue was crammed with people expecting to see a German band perform. Many were disappointed when John, Paul and George took the stage. Once they began playing, however, it was clear that a transformation had occurred during their time in Germany. The crowd went wild, The Beatles performed sensationally, and Beatlemania in Britain began to get underway.”
So, “’Gene Day and the Jango Beats?’ Is this a factoid Dave Sim knew?” Uh, no. No, first I heard of it. “Did Gene Day know?” and it's like, uh, no. [laughs] “What does it all mean? Matt will refrain…” I don't think Matt should refrain from this, “will refrain from pointing out that in the Star Wars prequel films, the original film's mysterious badass Boba Fett's father is introduced, Jango Fett. Did George Lucas know this? What. Does. It. All. Mean?!? And how does it tie into The Strange Death of Alex Raymond? Because you know it does. Everything does eventually.”
I think there's got to be a link there, where Jango brought nothing to mind for me, so you know the Jango Beat, where did they get the name Jango? How does this tie in with Gene Day? Jango Fett is probably as good a guess as any. That's a whole whole stream of consciousness for you OCD Star Wars fans as anything else. It's like, if I was looking at it [coughs] I would break it up into the three parts.” Ja”, ya, which is “yes” in German. “N” which is “and”, and “Go Beats.” “Ya N Go”, which is exactly what happened. They've come from Hamburg, Germany. They passed all of their tests, and it's, “Ya, and go.” Gene Day, is one of those, that's an interesting name, because gene in the genetic sense. Like your genes, everybody has, their genetic material is made up of genes. So “gene day” is the dawning of a new genetic, whatever it is, which certainly arguably The Beatles were. It was, whatever part of the human genome and aspects of us genetically. Androgyny is definitely something in that category. Androgyny married with the BackBeat of Rock and Roll takes it to another level, so you do end up with capital G capital D Gene Day. Which makes, you know, Cerebus and Dave Sim a reply to that, because Gene Day was definitely the fulcrum of that. It's significant that, no, I never heard of this, I've never heard Gene Day mention this. I've never read this anywhere, you've never read this anywhere, and you read it in 2023, which is 49 years, 7, 7, 7 times 7, since I connected with Gene Day for the first time. Which is interesting because it means there was a real Gene Day in the Dave Sim Cerebus context. Gene Day was actually his name, whereas The Beatles’ Gene Day was a made-up name, there wasn't a Gene Day, or presumably there wasn't a Gene Day, because they later renamed themselves Earl Preston and the TTs. So I assumed that they were making up a lead name. Although we don't know that! Was there an actual Gene Day and the Jango Beats where the lead singer was Gene Day and he got replaced by Earl Preston. But it is interesting that there's a real Gene Day in the Dave Sim Cerebus context, and not as far as we can tell a real Gene Day in The Beatles context at this epicenter moment. And you know , we have to remember that anytime that The Beatles come up, the whole Cerebus thing happened and would not have happened if Dave Sam didn't have George Harrison’s eyes to Deni Loubert. Because if there's any expert on the planet of what George Harrison's eyes look like, it was Deni Loubert, for whom George Harrison was her favorite Beatle. So, the fact that I had George Harrison's eyes and Deni came into Now and Then Books because she was interested in doing a magazine like “Dark Shadows” and talked about this pretty extensively. And I'm going, “Dark Shadows?” No, that's the television show. But I asked her, do you mean “Dark Fantasy?” And she said yes, “Dark Fantasy,” and that was Gene Day’s fanzine. So it was definitely a fulcrum moment of George Harrison's eyes, Gene Day, and this is the meeting point that Cerebus came out of.
Matt: So, are you ready for the Comic Art Metaphysics?
Dave: It’s definitely in that category.
Matt: Oh no no, it's not in the category, this is one of them the pinball went right into the socket. So Gene Day and the Jango Beats, Gene Day did the Star Wars portfolio that was advertised in “Cerebus” #1 that led to the cease and desist letter from Lucasfilm, which means Lucasfilm at some level somebody knew the name Gene Day. But…
Dave: Ahh!
Matt: But! Wait, it gets even… I hope you're sitting down, Dave, cause I forgot about this until we started talking about it. Gene Day penciled two issues of the “Star Wars” comic book, issue 68 and 69. Issue 68 has Boba Fett on the cover, Boba Fett's dad is Jango Fett, and issue 68, the editor is Louise Jones!
Dave: [laughs] See, Matt, you couldn’t make that up.
Matt: You know, I jokingly said, how does this tie into The Strange Death of Alex Raymond? Because you know, it's a joke, but at the same time it's one of those, you start pulling at that thread… [laughs]
Dave: Right, and the more that I thought about it, I mean, yeah, my jaw dropped open when I read your fax today, prepping for this and going, oh this is interesting. What's this all about? [laughs] And I hit “Gene Day and the Jango Beats.” One of the differences between The Beatles and Cerebus, apart from orders of magnitude and popularity for The Beatles compared to Cerebus, is that Cerebus is a much longer narrative. The Beatles was a 7, 7. 1956 to 1970. This is when it starts, this is when it comes to an end. It turns into other things, it's definitely remembered, but the actual, it starts here and finishes there, was 14 years. Cerebus is 26 years, and consequently you get things like this where the information obviously existed, Gene Day and the Jango Beats.When did Paul McCartney first mention this? I'm assuming that Paul McCartney was the source of this, where he and the other Beatles are probably the only guys who knew, you know, if you asked, who played bass at the Casbah, the first Beatles performance? And they would have gone, oh that was Chas Newby, former rhythm guitarist with The Blackjacks. The information existed, it was in their minds, it was part of their own legend. They probably told any number of people about it, and would have mentioned it in conversation with each other, but at the same time, it submerged and doesn't emerge until, like I say, 49 years, 7, 7, after my connection to the Gene Day got established. Which is, I mean, I'm gonna take this as, “Uh no, Dave, you're not done. You're on the right track. Just keep going, and more of these things are going to start cropping up.” And like you said, [laughs] I have no idea that or had no idea, that I wouldn't know Bobba(sic) Fett if he came up and bit me on the ass. And I certainly wouldn't have known that was who Gene Day penciled in issue 68 and 69 of “Star Wars.” And it was, like you say, it was edited by Louise Jones, who we're just talking about here, and when was the last time that Louise Jones came up as a topic of conversation? And that's connected through Michael R. That came in my mail yesterday. There's Louise Jones as she is today, and as she was four days before my birthday when Michael R got the copy of “Cerebus Archive” personalized to me. They're beyond coincidences. Trying to explain it as, “Oh it's just a coincidence, that just means two things coincided” and, uh no, this is how God's reality is built. It’s God’s Clockwork Mechanism and it's everywhere around us, and sometimes it just makes itself more apparent than others.
Matt: I'm gonna try to track down and see if I can… I'm sure some Beatles fan has a picture of the original poster that was posted at the club when they played, and I'm gonna track it down and verify the information cause it could be maybe the band wasn't called that, somebody just transcribed it wrong. But the fact that they transcribed it wrong, it suggested by the algorithm for me to see it. It’s definitely one of those, I mean, like I said, I saw it and went, well, that's interesting. 90% of them, ehh, I'll remember to tell Dave next time I have to fax something. But because I was in the middle of writing the fax, I'm like, well, okay, let's put it in now.
Dave: Definitely. Definitely. It's just one of those, just the fact that it existed all the way along, but there comes the time, this is a major element to me of God's Clockwork Mechanism is, “This will be a very interesting and gratifying and validating moment for you, Dave, but you're gonna have to put in 49 years to earn it.” And that to me is one of those things. That's why it's a matter of never give up. Why faith and endurance and perseverance are so important, because there's always something just up ahead, that if you just do everything right, you will coincide with it. But if you don't do everything right, it's like, your life is also full of missed opportunites, where it's just,” Oh the hell with it. This is all beyond me, and I'm giving up for today.” Well, if you haven't given up today, you had this major thing that's been rolling down towards you for the last 49 years waiting to intersect with you, but you're just ships passing in the night. Again, I think that's why this is all God's Comedia of… [laughs] and what they do to themselves. The blessings that they do accrue, compared to the blessings that they could accrue if they would just do the right thing. Do exactly what you think is the right thing. Persevere, have faith and endurance, and you're just gonna get buried in these.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Okay! We didn't bring it in at two hours, we brought it in at two and a half hours, but I think we did pretty good.
Matt: Well, we have had some shorter ones, so now we're giving the fans what they crave!
Dave: The people who crave Please Hold for Dave Sim, here's a whole bunch for you.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Thanks as always, Matt! Say hi to Paula, and Bullwinkle, and Janis Pearl for me. And we will do this again, God willing, at the beginning of July.
Matt: Correct. Have a good night, Dave.
Dave: You too! Take care.
Matt: Bye!
Dave: Buh-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.
And, coming in February, The 1982 Tour Book (click the link to be notified on launch). They've been sharing updates on the Instagram.
And speaking of Kickstarters, the Tyrant one is a'comin'.
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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:
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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.
____________
Larry Shell could use a hand to keep his house.
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Dave also wanted me to post this:
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Up to 35% off February 10-16, 25-March 1.*
*Sale dates are not final and therefore subject to change.
Speaking of Merch, if you want a strange near-antique, shoot an email to momentofcerebus@gmail.com, and I'll tell ya where to send the $20USD I want for these. No shipping charge in the States or Canada. Everybody else add $10USD for shipping. I'll send 'em anywhere the postman is willing to go...
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| Back and front. |
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You can get all 16 volumes of Cerebus, many of them Remastered for $99CANADIAN at CerebusDownloads.com (More if you want the Remastered Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing...)
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Heritage has:
- The original art to Cerebus: the Six Deadly Sins Cover, Avarice, and Gluttony? Why doesn't Dave have this? (Coming soon)
- Cerebus #81 page 11 (coming soon)
- Cerebus #81 page 12 (coming soon)
And ComicLink (remember ComicLink? Seiler brought us ComicLink. R.I.P Jeff.) has:
- Cerebus #39, page 8 (coming in February)
- And a list of ALL the issues they got
Thanks to Steve for sending the links.
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Oliver' Simonsen's Cerebus movie: The Absurd, Surreal, Metaphysical, and Fractured Destiny of Cerebus the Aardvark it's currently available on "Plex", "Xumo", "Vimeo On Demand", "Tubi". If you're in Brazil..., "Mometu", "Nuclear Home Video".
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