'82 Tour Book notes (round 3)

Hi, Everybody!

As you all should know by now (if you check A Moment of Cerebus more than once a month "to see if it's gotten good again..." (SPOLIER WARNING: it hasn't.).), Dave's CONTINUING the Please PAY For Dave Sim format. If you want more '82 Tour Book discussion, go HERE, and pay for "Dave Sim 82 Tour Book". But if you'd rather hear more stereotypical Please Hold (*shudder*) "content", go HERE and pay for "Please Hold For Dave Sim". Either way, I have to amuse myself in the Editing Suite assembling these things... (wanna find out how many of these I already own? Then you're gonna wanna pay for more '82...)

I presume I'm getting audio soon-ish, but until then:

Dave Sim's continuing Notes on the 1982 Tour Book. (Part, the third)

’82 TOUR BOOK III

Okay, if you want an example of being able to change the nature of reality single-handedly, “N” donated $80 at the last minute and ’82 TOUR BOOK WINS again! One man CAN make a difference.

Matt sez: Actually, "N"  paid at the beginning of May, and Eddie "lost" the payment in his records. But, whatever. '82 it is!

Giving me whiplash because I had Matt’s Faux telling me that PLEASE HOLD was 50-to-1 ahead, so I was already reading Matt’s cover letter prepping for PLEASE HOLD JUNE. Which is handy because I can explain that “No, I don’t need more PLEASE HOLD questions: I still have PLEASE HOLD questions from April The Month.”

Matt sez: Yeah, but more questions came in, including two "where the hell are my answers?" from long time Please Holders. And one that IF Dave ever gets to it will possibly be awesome (if he knows the answer...). Of course, that presumes that one of these days the schmuck with more money than brains who keeps throwing money at '82 Tour Book will lose to Please Hold. Dave (and I) did WAY TOO MANY months for free, we spoiled you kids, and now you're not ready for the Real World... 

So I took the new questions and put them on the coffee table pile that holds both the ’82 TOUR BOOK PROTOTYPE and PLEASE HOLD so I always know where both of them are when the print-out from Eddie comes in shortly after the 1st.

Got as far as Matt requesting — again — page 700 of SDOAR. This is the first chance I’ve had to say “No, unfortunately page 700 doesn’t make a lot of sense in and of itself: it’s the capstone (and a very odd graphic capstone) to the pages 692 to 700.

Matt sez: le sigh... The point was that irregardless of what's on page 700, page 700 is enough of a milestone that sharing it is reward for the long suffering (and long paying) Strange Death of Alex Raymond patreons/gofunders, and if it's intriguing enough, might even be used to help the fundraising. Ah, but what do I know, I'm just the volunteer hype-man... 

So, ’82 TOUR BOOK and this time we’re doubling back to the page-by-page method I always use and this ties in with

a) the X-MEN MOVIES movie posters and intel you sent along

b) my HOWARD THE DUCK frontispiece from way back when

a) I. HAD. NO. IDEA. there were that many X-MEN movies.

I’m a complete civilian when it comes to Marvel Movies which is why this is turning into such a great Category 3 — civilian — thing. The Average Person registers the latest Marvel Movie. At this point, just “Did it make a billion dollars or how far short of a billion dollars has it made?” It’s a Monday entertainment sidebar in the newspapers. This is how it did on its opening weekend. But (speaking for myself as a Marvel Movie civilian) there’s no institutional memory. Knowing how many X-MEN movies there are is Inside Baseball to the max. If I had had to guess? Two X-MEN movies? Maybe three?

Matt sez:  Fourteen. There are fourteen X-Men (and X-Men related) movies. (If you include the three Deadpool ones (which I do).) I wonder if Dave understands there are fifteen Spider-Man (and related character) movies? And thirty-seven movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? I wonder who's gonna tell 'im, because it won't be me (I'ma NOT "multiply my sorrows", and add to the list of duties assigned me...) (more on that in a bit...)

So I just keep flipping through the intel with my mouth hanging open.

Point of intersection A: I still opt for the NEW MUTANTS movie poster with the girl’s face in the foreground. Now we have a revenue total to put next to it: $49,169,594. August 2020, it was a Lockdown Casualty wasn’t it? People going to theatres but sitting six feet apart? This will contrast well with the X-MEN PER SE revenue totals. Which are mind-boggling.

Matt sez: A combination of COVID and Disney buying Fox. That's what cost New Mutants revenue.

Point of intersection B: the picture of Chris Claremont with his arms wrapped around Deni needs to be much much bigger. Full page full bleed and then “micro-publishing $1 a page” how many pages do we devote to the inset X-MEN movie posters with their worldwide gross $$$?…

Suggested phrasing: “Comic-book movies were a pipe dream in 1982.  SUPERMAN in 1978, SUPERMAN II in ???? but there was only one SUPERMAN.  Chris Claremont’s X-MEN comics made Indy comics viable for the average comic-book store. We had no idea what was up ahead.” Dave Sim 2026

Matt sez: Superman II? 1980. 

[digression:  is the “domestic gross/worldwide gross” split-level revenues a necessity?  We can make the type larger if there’s a single total GROSS REVENUES.  Obviously the U.S. is our target market so if that would just pose a needless question mark for American Category 3 buyers — “why isn’t there a domestic/worldwide split?” — then we don’t want to be pulling the average reader out of the content with a question the average reader is just going to find irritating]

Matt sez:  I included Domestic, International, and Total grosses. It's Dave's book, he can use whatever numbers he wants. I just gave him options.

 …and for our purposes, for each movie poster there’s an inset scan of a page of original artwork matching one of the scenes from the movie with its 1:23:01 time-stamp location.

Matt sez: I'm not really an X-Men comic guy. Whatever issues I owned were sold off years ago when I needed cash. So if anybody out there IS a big X-Men fan, and wants to try to find panels that match scenes from the movies for Dave and his book, that'd be awesome. (I doubt it, but I've been wrong before...)

I'm sure "it sounds like fun to SOMEBODY"...

A good subliminal I think will be that the size of the movie posters will vary depending on the gross revenues DAYS OF FUTURE PAST being the largest.
 
I’m counting 8 Chris Claremont movies, so a page per movie (outside extreme) you’re talking about $8 of the cover price.  Which is a lot (the difference between a $50 book and a $60 book but as I say — CATEGORY 1, 2 and 3 —  this, I think will attract attention. These stories were happening in comics in 1982. With literally billions $$ at stake 2 decades away. 
 
I don’t think we want to Deep Dive speculate.  What’s it like to BE Chris Claremont, to watch DAYS OF FUTURE PAST in the theatre, it’s all your ideas up on the screen, and then see that it grossed 3/4 of a BILLION dollars? 
 
That ties in WAY up ahead in the DAVE SECTION, where in a couple of the interviews in the PROTOTYPE I talk about the Marvel serpent-in-the-garden phone call (at that point two years past): was I interested in writing HOWARD THE DUCK?  my frontispiece see attached photo. The green wash that I used looks really good.  

Click for bigger...

What If? I had chosen to write Howard the Duck and whatever I came up with three decades later turned into a billion dollar movie?  Put another way, when Chris was writing DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, guaranteed he wasn’t thinking “Some day this story will make 3/4 of a billion dollars, but, oh well…”. Nor Steve Ditko when he was designing Spider-Man’s costume.  

 
Matt, you’re going to have to write the captions next to each movie poster being specific but not exhaustive. i.e. this is SPECIFICALLY what Chris Claremont came up with that was a raw material in THIS movie.  X-MEN #s ??? to ???.  Exhaustive you can save for the appendix. In the body of the book “CC was the source for — estimated — ??% of the content, including [scene] [scene] and [scene]”.  across CATEGORIES 2 and 3 I think it will attract attention. 

Matt sez:

"Cerebus needs YOU! Mainly because Matt's not gonna do this... IF you ARE an X-Men fan who can distill what scenes from what X-Men film are based on which issues Chris Claremont wrote, now's your chance. Fortune & Glory could be yours!"

“Yes, this guy, with his arms wrapped around DENI SIM our female lead” he created several billions of dollars worth of Marvel Movie content. 
 
It’s an arresting concept to distill and consolidate in a book and a Cultural Touchstone for which most civilians have no frame of reference although EVERYONE knows what a Marvel Movie is. EVERYONE knows the X-MEN. “I thought Stan Lee created the X-MEN.”  You know, the way Charles Schulz created PEANUTS. 
 
POTENTIAL PROBLEM:  How much dispute is there about what Chris came up with?  On a scale of 1 to 10, with the collaboration between Stan Lee and Steve Ditko being a Toxic 10, and me and Gerhard being say a 3 — I leave Gerhard alone and Gerhard leaves me alone — where are Chris Claremont and John Byrne?  There are disputes that aren’t toxic — Will Eisner and Jules Feiffer.  They had completely different memories of who came up with what, but it was collegial.  Of course, there was no billion-dollar movie in THE SPIRIT mix. 
 
[tooting my own horn: one of the things that I’m proud of on NINJA HIGH SCHOOL/CEREBUS is that we did the thing I had been touting since the early days of Kevin’s Tundra:  the entire collaboration took place on paper —actually word documents — no phone calls after the early going.  Phone call collaborations or in person collaborations unless you record and keep each phone call you’re never going to remember who came up with what. With the next Kickstarter, God willing, part of the promotion will be showing the entire sequence of how NHS/C “went down”]
 
It’s the legendary Marvel Method and a lot of Intellectual Property Things (and THINGS) get created by the penciller that compels the writer to say “I came up with that”.  No, you wrote that, but the penciller actually came up with it.  Which was fine under work-made-for-hire:  it didn’t matter who came up with that OR wrote that OR designed that. Marvel owned it all lock, stock and two smoking barrels. Once Marvel moved to a royalty system who came up with what became arguably more important.  And in the Indy World even more important.  Reciprocal ownership — i.e. TURTLES 8 and SPAWN 10 — is the easiest solution.  We both own it. I can do what I want with it without notifying you and you can do what you want with it without notifying me. 
 
Unfortunately a Snooze for virtually all CATEGORY 2 and 3. people which is why — at $1 a page — we’re just going to be leaving it aside. 
 
Everything in DENI AND DAVE SIM TOUR ’82 needs to be Grabby. 
 
Like Birdsong’s modified cover with the much larger photo of me and Deni with color restoration.  If the cover copy is about a Cute Couple you need to show the Cute Couple. 

Actually, it was my idea, but as long as Dave understands that it's a better Idea, credit goes to whomever he feels like giving it to...

Thank you “N” for the $80 which works out to about $20 an hour. 
 
And thank you Christon for the $50 USD.  PLEASE HOLD will “get ‘em next time”.

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Next Time: back to even earlier in the 1980s...