Hi, Everybody!
Friday (June 12th): $49 sale:
Mondays!
Go nuts! (It's not gonna be $25CAD until near the end of the month...)
________________
________________
As we do:
Mondays!
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...)
Speaking of Please Hold...
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 3/2026 4/2026(?) 5/2026(?) 6/2026(?)
[guitar music]
[jingle bells]
Matt: Live from Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, and Two Rivers Wisconsin USA, it's the 2023 Please Hold for Dave Sim Christmas Spectacular! Featuring the late great Jeff Seiler, Lank Stephens, Michael De Santis, Rob Snell, Chris Woerner, Aaron Wood, Joe Gabbard, star of multiple “Steve Peters weeks” Steve Peters, John Bau, Mike Sewall, Travis, Michael Grabowski, Michiel, Michael R of Easton Pennsylvania! Special appearances by Margaret Liss, Eddie Khanna, James Banderas-Smith and featuring performances by the Bay City Rollers, Blondie, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir featuring Ace Freely of Kiss, Hall and Oates, Whitney Houston, Rod Torkulson’s Armada featuring Herman Menderchuk, Devo, Electric Mayhem, and Up With People! And now. here's your hosts, Manly Matt Dow and Dave Sim!
Dave: Yay! [laughs]
Matt: Hi Dave!
Dave: Hi Christmas Spectacular Manly Matt Dow! [laughs]
Matt: I thought of that the other day and went, I won't have time to do this if Dave calls right away, and then I'm like looking at the times like, you know, I might have time to write all this before Dave calls.
Dave: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah it's that strange time of year when the last prayer is like 6:12 at night, and no, you weren't wrong. The sunset prayer is at 4:46, so right around right around Christmas is when I feel like I'm praying every five minutes.
Matt: So Paula had a question about that, since it's a sunset prayer and then a final prayer, what happens to Muslims in Alaska where the sun doesn't set for six months?
Dave: Uh, I don't think there are any Muslims in Alaska.
Matt: That was my answer, but I said I would ask.
Dave: [laughs] We could ask them! You could maybe just Google search “Muslims Alaska” and probably just get a lot of freaked out faces. Anyway, okay, where are we here? Um, it's the, oh, your line first, I guess. Are you gonna read your…?
Matt: Uh, I didn't actually print it out this month.
Dave: Okay, “It's the first Wednesday of the month and that means it's time to start rounding up the questions for the next Please Hold for Dave Sim! The December one, which is the last… oh no you don't Dow! We're not doing that ‘last one’ crap again! Just get on with it!” I forgot that, that was last year where you said it was the the last Please Hold for Dave Sim and didn't put on the 2022, and then me being the scallywag that I am, I played along with that, and, you know, yeah this is the last Please Hold for Dave Sim! And everybody, especially Michael R got quite upset about that. So yes, we're not going to play around with that anymore. “Before we get to the pressing questions that got posted last month after I sent the fax, haven't these people suffered enough? (No). It's your turn to remember the late great Jeff Seiler.” Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And this one takes an odd turn. The notes that I wrote down was, you remember that this is all starting to interweave with Neil Gaiman as the master of dreams, as Joseph, as Yousuf, the 12th Surah in the Quran, and also tied in with how did this karaoke bar reopen in the middle of COVID-19 since the health authorities everywhere that was a definite big no no because that was spraying droplets all over the place. Any place that you were singing and doing it publicly in an enclosed environment, you might as well be up on charges of genocide. So, again, I'm not gonna be able to wrap this up, because now it's starting to squirt all over the place in other directions. I think the the the karaoke DJ was the key to it, because she was, I reading between the lines, I got the sense that she was a very very attractive young lady, and also a very very good karaoke DJ. And from what I gathered from Seiler, the Minneapolis environment was pretty corrupt to begin with, like from the police force on up and from the mayor's office on down, and my best guess would be that somebody who could make that call override or just sort of short circuit the COVID-19 rules in Minneapolis for a specific environment was probably a member of this lady's fan club. Which I gather was pretty extensive. We'll get to that in next time that it's my turn. But definitely, at the time, even when Jeff was telling me about this and I was starting to get the idea that a lot of this was centered on the karaoke DJ, whatever her name was. Rule of thumb #1, if you go to her workplace to see her, you aren't her friend, and you don't have a relationship with her. You're a customer and that's a good rule of thumb for a lot of guys who probably spend too much money and too much time in places that they shouldn't be because she works there and if you're not gonna have a relationship that's an actual relationship, that seems like a really good one, but it's a really bad one. And it particularly when it's in a bar, and I speak from experience on that. Which brings us to rule of thumb #2, alcohol never improves anything, it only makes things worse. It feels like it improves things while you're getting drunk, but it's really just making things worse. The old, [drunk voice] ”I thought I’d never cheer up!” You know, it’s like [laughs] you didn't cheer up, you got drunk. And #3, a good customer in a bar is an alcoholic making his alcoholism worse, and nobody is going to call you on it because everybody who works there, in this case the karaoke DJ, the bartendress, the waitresses, as long as you stay within limits, they're very happy to service your alcoholism, and nobody who's a fellow customer is gonna be at all concerned if you're drinking yourself to death. “That's your lookout! You're a grownup, I didn't come here to try and save anybody from themselves, and that includes you.” I got that far and then sudden weird Neil Gaiman insight, which might be an insight and might be a complete hallucination on my part. Neil's book, the “Anansi Boys.” Do you remember “Anansi Boys”? did you buy that one?
Matt: I did not buy that one, but I do know that book.
Dave: Okay, alright. I didn't buy it and Neil didn't send me a copy, but Neil did send me the manuscript while he was working on it, which was something that he used to do. I don't know if he still does that or who he does that with, but he had a short list of people that he would send books to and essentially invite their comments. The publisher would send it to you with, you know, “compliments of the author” little card on top of it. And anytime in that situation, [laughs] it doesn't happen now that I've been made to not exist, but anytime that that happened in a situation, I always did the same thing. Read the book whether it was in manuscript form or printed form, if you see any typos mark them and fold down the corner, and then say okay, here's the typos that I found, which, if you're somebody who has a good eye for typos, which I tend to be, this is something that authors are appreciative of and publishers are appreciative of. “Those are typos that we won't have to find ourselves, and thank you” sort of thing. But I think there's, at least in the version that I read, there was a karaoke scene. And I'm going, am I actually remembering that or am I imprinting that because I'm now so immersed in this? So, we will leave it as a challenge for the Please Hold viewership, anybody that's got the “Anansi Boys” or wants to search it online, the Coles Notes things that they've got now where you if you don't want to read the “Anansi Boys,” here's the whole story, episode by episode, and see if there's a karaoke bar scene in there. And if there is, can you photocopy it and email/fax it to me, so that I can read it, because I seem to remember reading a karaoke scene where I'm going, is this supposed to be me or am I am I projecting myself onto this? Which would be certainly very interesting the way this whole thing worked out that Jeff seems to have mixed himself up real good in a series of Neil Gaiman enactments. So there's my Jeff Seiler story, partial Jeff Seiler story. You want to talk about a cliffhanger, and there you go.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: [laughs] And moving on from there, “Then you got to do that Lank Stephens thing you do, Dave” and this is Lank Stephens who is working on a graphic novel. I don't know how far along he is on it now, at the time that he wrote to me he was getting ready to work on it. And this is going to be a a general rule for anybody uh who's creating comics, if you're creating indie comics, or you're trying to get a job at Marvel or DC, or you're doing your dream graphic novel or whatever else. And I'll address this part to Lank, whatever you're doing as the creator/initiator, because that's what Lank was on this project, he was going to do it and he has a very clear picture of what he's going to do on it from what I recall, that the backgrounds, writing, and the lettering. And he's gonna get somebody else to actually draw the characters. Which I think would be a really interesting way do a graphic novel, just, you know, here's the model sheets for your characters. Just leave character shapes open, put the backgrounds in, put the lettering in, and find somebody who just wants to draw characters. Be as productive as you can be and keep track of how productive you are, and the best way that I found to do that, again, speaking from experience, is when you start page one of whatever it is, write down on the back of the page or on the front of the page if it doesn't bother you that it would be on the margin, when you started it. Whatever the day is. Day and the hour if you want to get really fine-tuned about it . And then when you finish that page, write the complete day on it. “This is the day that I completed it. This is the hour that I completed it.” And then over the stretch of, in Lank's case, starting with page one and just bombing ahead and going, “Here's my story.I'm writing it, I'm lettering it, I'm breaking down all of the pages. I'm put putting in the backgrounds. I'm just looking for a character guy.” At that point start checking, “Okay, how am I doing?” It's like, if it took you two days to do the first page, and then nine days to do the second page, and then four and a half weeks to do the third page, which I got to tell you is not unusual, okay, well, that tells you you're not gonna be doing this for a living, and you should probably reconsider doing it as a 200 page graphic novel. Try and figure out how to distill it down to 20 pages, because at that rate, if you're getting slower and slower as you go along, something's got to give. And to maximize the possibility of getting the thing done, you have to adjust the mental length of what you're doing to what you're demonstrably able to do. And here I'll cite myself as the example, I didn't write down the start day on the first section of Strange Death of Alex Raymond that I've actually drawn, when I went okay, I'm gonna give a try at actually drawing these pages, which I started doing with the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell section. And so I went, and those pages, the first pages are on the coffee table, and check the back of the first one, and lo and behold, I finished the first page December 7th 2022, so it's been exactly a year. Who would have guessed that?
Matt: You know, I'm becoming a convert to the Comic Art Metaphysics of Dave Sim of, yeah, it may be close, but you know what, close in Comic Art Metaphysics is as long as it's close, you know, I'm not going to quibble with a, oh well, a year! Exactly a year. And I mean, doing the math in my head, 10 days shy and 19 years after finishing “Cerebus.”
Dave: Right! Right. Yeah, I forgot that part. It's definitely a wheels within wheels within wheels kinds of thing. It's, as I say, describing as God's Clockwork Mechanism. But getting back to this as a guideline for other creators, I then checked and went, okay, I finished the first page December 7th 2022. Where was I six months later? Where was I beginning of June? And I checked that, and it took me from December 7th 2022 to June, I think it was June 5th, to finish 9 pages. Which means between June and December 7th 2023, I got 22 pages done. Which is good! That's the thing that I always talk about saying, first you get good, then you get fast, then you get good and fast. But there's also a, Harrison Ford, “Great shooting kid, don't get cocky” thing about it. It's like I could be talking to you December 7th 2024 and going, well, I don't know what happened in 2024, but I only got 10 pages done all year. Because you don't know! But definitely, what you want to do is, work as steadily as possible and just count on the fact that for the first six months you're just getting adjusted to how you do this. Like, in my case, relearning which of my brushes are favourite brushes. This one works really good. How often you have to change your ink. I don't really keep track of that specifically, but it seems like about every 3 weeks I'm saying to Rolly, pick me up two more little bottles of the India Ink because the fresh bottle goes on really really smoothly, in terms of the pen. In terms of the brush, it's kind of washed out. So that's why I move the ink over, and it's like, what used to be my pen ink that I want sort of very light and going on very smoothly and not clogging up the pen, is now moved over into the brush category. And the last time I did that, it's like, okay, these are the two new bottles of ink. Take the second new bottle, open it, and pour it into to the first bottle so that it's right up to the rim, so that you're not having to go, is the pen actually dipping in the ink? If it's like right up to the rim, then it's definitely doing that. And then, putting the bottle of ink down that I just dumped into it and going, okay, put a piece of masking tape on top of that bottle of ink, because you got [laughs] you know, 16 little bottles of ink sitting on the table next to you at this point, because I just can't throw them away. But it's like, uh no, you're gonna have to do that, but at least mark them as, here's the two newest ones, here's the two older ones, this is for the brush, this is for the pen. And that's something that you're spending hours working on when you're just getting back to it. And particularly if it's been a month since you even picked up the page, it's like, throw the ink away, start fresh. Everybody everybody does the same thing, goes, “I don't know why my brush isn't cooperating. I don't know why they're making lousy brushes these days. I don't know why my pens are getting clogged up.” It's because you're using old ink. Because you're not spending enough time at the drawing board, and you're not doing it regularly. So there's a guideline for you, the best way to keep track of that is by writing down when you started the page, when you finished the page, and don't lie to yourself. Don't say, “Oh well, I'll do better now. I went through that, you know, I had COVID-19, and my wife's sister got sick, and we had to go, and and the kids all were, and they went to school.” Like no, that’s cover stories. Like, don't lie to yourself. You didn't write and draw, you did other stuff. Face who you are. If the best you can ever do is a page every three or four weeks, then you're every time you sit down to do a page, you're gonna have to buy new ink. You're gonna have to clean all of your brushes, and you're gonna have to start over again from square one. [laughs] Not the happiest information in the world, but there you go. I will be elaborating on that, I think, the next time when I address you directly, Mr Lank Stephens.
Matt: I mean, it's not good news, but at the same time it's the kind of news that's good to get!
Dave: Yes.
Matt: You know, I'm thinking back to Eddie Campbell's “How To Be An Artist,” and at the very end it's Alec as an adult with Alec as a kid, and Alec as a kid going, “Yeah, I just want to know what kind of brush to use.”
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right. And it's like, no, that's just where it starts. I'm now at the point where I know all of the materials and what I have to do with them, and what brush to use or what not to use, when to use the wide flat brush, the medium flat brush, the thin flat brush, and I can really get rocking and rolling on a good part of the page. And that wasn't the case for the first six months of getting back to it. Which is why I got nine pages done the first six months, and 22 pages the second six months. The other thing I'm doing now, I'm gonna make up a little piece of paper that says “I'm working on Strange Death of Alex Raymond page, I will get back to you.” And I'm gonna fax that to people. Anytime they fax me something, unless it's an absolute dire emergency, no interrupting Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages. Other cartooning? Yes. I can interrupt those.
Okay, moving on to “Then these things, Michael De Santis” Hello Michael De Santis, “asks, I would like to know how Dave did his part on the original TMNT 8, and if he did separate lettering, Cerebus art, etc.” And Matt says, “James Banderas-Smith (He changed it because somebody was showing Barry Windsor-Smith some of his Faceybook comments, and wants to avoid confusion)” which I can certainly understand. It's like, there probably should only be one Windsor-Smith in comics. “Answered with images from the preview.” So I assume that that's what people will be looking at right now, that you've got, you know which ones he went for, right?
Matt: Yes.
Dave: Okay. Alright. “I have to say I think that's way too cold for [announcer voice] the new individual for 2024 fan-focused Aardvark-Vanaheim!”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: “As a matter of fact for the 2024 Please Hold for Dave Sim earmarked Cerebus FFF, Fan Freak Freebie! More finely attuned than a microaggression indictment from Human Resources! [makes an obnoxious all “E” tune] More intrusive than a Facebook privacy setting! [makes a morse code sound] GPS compatible! Futureproof! Able to strike within a gnat’s bicuspid of where you live and breathe as a Cerebus fan!” So what you should be getting, is I did I did Michael De Santis a Cerebus drawing on the front of one of the sketch cover “Remastered Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” #8 and I left it out back for Rolly. He was supposed to scan it and email it to you, but I don't know if he came back in today. He actually had a pretty late day once he got rocking and rolling on stuff. And what I'm gonna do, if he didn't come back in and scan it and email it to you, I'll fax it to you so you can put it up as an illustration. And if Rolly doesn't have your address, Michael De Santis, if you can let Manly Matt Dow know what's your address is, and he'll relay it to me, and we'll make sure that that goes out to you in the mail.
Matt: I did get scans for today and tomorrow, and I just quick looked at them. It might be in there. I will fax you tonight when we're done, I'll double check and if it's not there, I'll let you know.
Dave: You certainly got a lot of email images scans, Rolly was going, he's out back again! [laughs] It's like, usually I'm not going back out to Camp David that often, but that was just how this one works out. Okay, moving on from there, and I think maybe that James Bandera-Smith should also get a [announcer voice] “2024 Please Hold for Dave Sim earmark Cerebus FFF Fan Freak Freebie himself!” because he's the one that explained this. So I'll put together another Cerebus on a T8, and we definitely know where to find James. So we'll get one of those done and get that out to him next Thursday, as well.
Rob Snell asks, “Is there any plan to publish the Notebooks? I'd rather have that than any remastered variant cover anything, but I may be the minority.” And Matt says, “This has come up a few times. I guess I should ask Margaret how many pages there are, and how many she's already posted to AMoC. But Dave, any plans on publishing things that might not make money?” Well, this brings us again to [announcer voice] ”the 2024 Please Hold for Dave Sim earmark Cerebus FFF Fan Freak Freebie! More finely attuned than a microaggression indictment from Human Resources! [obnxious noise] More intrusive than a Facebook privacy setting! [telegram noise] GPS compatible! Futureproof! Able to strike within a paramecium’s ingrown toenail of where you live and breathe as a Cerebus fan!” What I did, when I saw this here, it's like I'm going, okay, well you know, I can go through chapter and verse of how this works. And then I went, no, no, this is the new age. The new individual fan-focused Aardvark-Vanaheim. So what I did was, I came upstairs and I went through the Notebooks and I found Albatross #1, and I took it out back. [laughs] This was, again, one of my trips out back where Rolly's going, “I just saw you five minutes ago.” And I handed the Albatross #1 to Rolly and I said, can you scan this whole thing and take it and the scans to Studiocomix Press, and have them do up a facsimile of it. It's a, what do you call it, spiral ring notebook. What do you call those spiral things on the spine? Spiral spine notebook? You know what I'm talking about.
Matt: Just a spiral notebook, as far as I know.
Dave: Spiral notebook, okay. It's like, it's no high-tech thing. You know, just, we’ll tell Alfonso to bind it that way, but basically print it in colour, because it's got a green cover and it's got some watercolouring inside. I don't know if the ink started out as black, some of the early ink is definitely a bluish colour. And just as close as possible do a facsimile of Albatross #1, and Rob Snell, that's going out to you.
Matt: Okay. Before she dies, cause she already has the scans…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: But I know Margaret will be like, “Can I get one of those too?” Have Alfonso give you the quote for much it cost to print one of them, fax it to me, and I will send the money up to pay for a facsimile to send to Margaret.
Dave: M’kay. You're getting way ahead of me here. This is the facsimile. This was, instead of explaining, okay, this is how this could get complicated, and I'm really not looking for complications in my life. It's like, oh okay, let's stop it where it isn't complicated, which is a facsimile edition. We're gonna send it to Rob, and since this is Rob's idea, he's the one who has actually stood up and said, “This is what I want. I don't want the stuff that you're selling. This is what I'm interested in.” And it's like, oh okay, I'm not gonna do it with all of the Notebooks and send them to you, but we'll start off with one. Then I think we'll also do a version of Albatross One that isn't with the the coil binding, it's just squarebound. And same deal. It's, get Studiocomix Press to do one of them, it's a 200 page book, I don't know if it's exactly 200 pages. Margaret counted all of the pages on them and said, you know, like, “Notebook #4 says 140 pages on the front and there's only 136 pages on it.” Well, I tore a page out doing a note for something or whatever, because it was the closest piece of paper that I had. Then we'll send it to Rob, and Rob, you're gonna be charged with looking at it and going, “Mhmm, it's too light.” Like, it's a lined notebook. It's got blue lines and a margin probably in red, I think. So if there's a balance point in printing it where it's, you could maybe get the the ink to look more like the ink actually does on the page, but you could lose the blue lines. Whereas if you capture all the blue lines, the ink is probably going to go a little too dark. It's all goldilocks spot with digital printing, but Rob Snell, you are designated Goldilocks.
Matt: Uh, make a note of that…
Dave: Now the next stage would be, okay, how many of the Albatross One pages has Margaret commented on? I bet even Margaret doesn't know the answer to that one.
Matt: Margaret does know the answer to that one, she keeps a file of what gets posted.
Dave: I sincerely apologize, Margaret. [laughs] I keep forgetting that OCD is not an exaggeration in this case.
Matt: Once a year on her, cause she posts a Notebook, pretty much every week there's a Notebook post. Sometimes, like when I go on vacation, she'll post weird stuff cause, “Hey, the boss is away,” her words, not mine.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: But once a year, she'll do a round-up of, this is everything that's been posted, here's a link to all the postings in, you know, by Notebook of when they were posted. Cause, she'll skip around and so that way it'll be, here's the first Notebook, here's what's been posted from it, in the order of pages. Cause, I know page one of each Notebook, I think, she was posting for a while, cause I asked her. I'm like, what's the first page of the first Notebook look like? And so then she was going through Notebooks and doing, okay, here's the first page of each one sequentially. But yes, she does keep track because also it's the case of, if she doesn't keep track, she's going to keep posting the same really neat page again and again and again, because it's really neat!
Dave: Right. Right. And people's attention spans are, well, they're not as great as they used to be, and also it's like, well, I'm just looking at this because I find it entertaining. I'm not studying for an exam six months from now. So, it is Albatross One covers “Cerebus” 20 to 27. It says right on the front there. So, at that point it's, okay, then we could do a version that has all of Margaret's notes in the front.
Matt: ‘kay.
Dave: Or we could say, [whiny voice] “Margaret! Can you write notes on all of the pages in Albatross One please?” and it's like, at that point we're really pushing it, because we have to remember Margaret has two full-time jobs. The one that pays her pretty good bucks, and the Boston Bruins, which costs her pretty good bucks. And I don't think she's looking for a third full-time job, which is what this would turn into to if she is going to be serving the the purposes of Rob “Goldilocks” Snell.
Matt: There's a part of me that thinks that she'd be like, “Oh yeah, I'll do that”, and then a week later going, “What did I agree to?!” And I'll be like, hey, I've been there, lady!
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. And it's also like that's the war between Margaret Liss middle-aged, we'll say middle-aged, she's not going to argue with that, time-limited person, and Margaret Liss OCD Cerebus fan. It's like, the OCD Cerebus fan would go, “Yes! Yes, I have to sit down and start doing that right now and write comments on all of the pages in Albatross One and try and get them done by the end of this weekend.” It's like, it's not gonna happen, and you're just gonna torture yourself. So you have to be very careful with that, Rob “Goldilocks” Snell, that we don't want to be saying to Margaret Liss, “Schnell, you vermin. Schnell, schnell!”
Matt: Well, the other thing I'm thinking is, knowing Margaret, she's gonna pivot to Albatross One for her Notebook posts because it fills the need of posting on the blog, and it's, you know, “Okay we're just gonna go through these files!” The big one is, she constantly is mentioning that she scanned everything and all it was scan, save, scan, save, scan, save. She wasn't looking at anything, really. She was just, cause it was, these are historical documents that need to get taken back to Dave as soon as possible, and that's where the Notebook posts come in is it's, now she's going back going, “Oh wow, neat. Oh wow, neat.” And “oh hey look at that!” And, you know, little kid in the candy store. So like I said, it would not surprise me if 2024 every Thursday is the year of the Albatross.
Dave: It could be. Albatross One. Albatross One. Yeah, that also gets into, I don't know what kind of scanner Margaret had, or has, and if you're just, throw it on, scan, throw it on, scan, throw it on, scan. There are also, as we know with Sean Robinson, there's a million things you can do to enhance the reproduction, which gets into another area of, okay, “Dave actually penciled and inked and coloured the Roach, Captain Cockroach on this page in the Notebook. What does this actually look like in the Notebook, and how much clearer can we get it with our technological capabilities?” Which then gets into, why don't we do a Notebook #1 hardcover on glossy paper and get Sean Robinson to manipulate everything, page after page, at $50 an hour? [laughs] And it's like, well, okay, again, it's, I will do the the most basic thing, which is what I did today. It's like, Rolly, you scan the whole thing, you give it to Alfonso, and it's like, Rolly, right away, takes Albratross One and gets out one of the Stayflats and is figuring out how much it's gonna cost to ship. Like, there's a good thought! If you're doing an actual facsimile, it's going to weigh just about the same that the original did, and by putting it in the Stayflat very very carefully, you could get it in, and keep it under 500 grams, which put it at, I think, $14 Canadian, which would be roughly $8 US. So we already know how much it's gonna cost to ship to people. We're getting good at this! [laughs]
Matt: Literally I'm having flashbacks to both Janis and Natasha when they were about two, and it was every day that you would see the incremental advancement in their intelligence of, the kids, you know, you can watch your child learn, and I'm like, we're learning. We figured this out. Like this is gonna be a giant headache in six months, or we can figure it out in five minutes today.
Dave: Right. Right. Or something in between there, but can we all just get a grip and say, we want to go closer to five minutes than using up everybody's life for the next two years to make sure that we have a Library of Congress-worthy Albatross One facsimile with complete notes. You know, you could also, like once Rob's got his copy, he can start debating with Margaret online and going, “Uh, I'm not sure that that page actually says that. I've got my magnifying glass out” And then, okay Rolly, it's up to you to scan it at 1500 lines per inch, instead of 300 lines per inch, or whatever it is.
Matt: I just…
Dave: So there you go! Okay, that's as much as we're gonna spend on that one. Merry Christmas, Rob “Goldilocks” Snell. Watch your mailbox!
Also related, “Eddie sent me the list of what Diamond has in stock, and volumes 1, 7, and 11 are out of stock.” That’s your “Cerebus”, and your “Flight”, I believe, and “Guys” are out of stock. “Does this mean that they're out of print, or does AV have some in the off-site storage unit?” And no, they're out of print. Anything that's in the storage unit is made available to Diamond. “And if they're out, given ‘The Last Day’ situation is AV going to bring any of these back to print? With Waverly Press hardcovers for those who want them? And come on, Matt, you can beat the seven question threshold on this. Uh, damn. Guess I can’t.” You just ran out of questions. So there's a distinction between out of print and can be printed, in this case. I'm pretty sure that “Cerebus”, “Flight”, and “Guys” have been remastered. I'm not 100% certain of that, but if they have been remastered, then they're at Studiocomix Press, and it would be possible if anybody wants one of those volumes in this interregnum period between “available through Diamond” and “we're not really sure what we're doing with these and when we're doing it”, if you really want one of the books, Alfonso and Paul are get really good at what they're doing over there at Studiocomix Press, it's not the sheetbed press at Marquis, but for your average consumer… it's not exactly how Sean Robinson wants it to look, but you know, Sean takes a different view of what Alfonso prints, and Alfonso takes a different view of what Sean prints, and both of them are excellent. They're just a little different. This is again all all Goldilocks spot stuff. So, 1, 7, and 11, in the interregnum period, if you go, “I'm not paying the prices that they're charging online and I'd rather Dave gets the money.” As far as I know, I can just get Alfonso to print you a copy. It'll probably, there'll be a base cost of, [exhales] I'm probably, I'm guessing on “Cerebus”, it's, if you're just printing one of them, $35 Canadian, $40 Canadian, probably about $20, $25 US, and then there has to be an amount of money on top of that for Aardvark-Vanaheim. So that, I'm not gonna work that out until somebody actually leaves a phone message or relays word, “Yah I'd like all three of those books and you know I've donated however much it is at CerebusDownloads.” You know, I'm willing to go 50 bucks US on each of them, and I'll be happy to personalize it to you and put a Cerebus head sketch on it and get it out to you, pretty close to the following week.
Longterm, I'm pretty sure Rolly and Alfonso and I want to do the “Cerebus” volume one remastered hardcover slipcased so that it looks exactly like the slipcased “High Society” that Waverly Press did. Basically, I don't think people that are collecting these want different formats on each of the books. So “Cerebus” volume one might be the only one that we do. Here we experimented with it, no, it cost way too much money. No, it was a complete headache. No, I'm not doing any more hardcovers slipcased or otherwise, and it's definitely not on my 2024 list of things to do. It's just not. So there you go on Dave Sim with hardcovers, and I haven't seen anything in my own thinking or in Dagon's thinking that would make future Waverly Press hardcovers possible or plausible. It takes way too long to do. A lot of money comes in, but most of the money goes to the printer, and Waverly Press has to take a hit, and Aardvark-Vanaheim ends up not making very much money. Or as in the case with “The Last Day”, between the 15,000 US that I paid Waverly Press for the softcovers, and the 9000 that Gerhard got because this was a “I kept my hands off of it so that Gerhard would get 25% of the revenues”, that's a book that cost Aardvark-Vanaheim 24,000 US. I can guarantee you that's not happening again. So that's the situation on those. Is there anything that I didn't cover in…?
Matt: Well, I got one of them Matt stupid ideas about volume one, and it's the idea, it keeps coming back to me, and I'm like, yeah, I should throw it out and see if it sticks, but I got a feeling it's gonna go down like a lead balloon. But considering most of the miscellaneous stories like the, specifically the “Swords” stories take place during volume one, would it be feasible to remaster those stories, slot them in where they belong in volume one, and split volume one in half as two smaller volumes, and multiply your sorrows?
Dave: Uh, that's certainly a theory. I've done that too. I've gone all the way back as far as well, let's start over with “Swords of Cerebus.” We've got the first four issues remastered, do that in a squarebound format, which you know, back in 1979 cost $5 and God alone knows what it would cost now. That does get into, okay, we could Kickstarter it, but I would have to find some way to Kickstarter it and offer it to Diamond at the same tim. And that's a real ballbuster of a problem, to go, okay, this is how far up ahead Diamond needs to know that this book is coming out, and then after they get all the orders, then they can say, “Okay, that's how many we want” and we'll take this many more on top of them. Interim situation, I had Eddie pitch to Diamond, saying, “If you'll take 3000 of ‘Cerebus’ volume one at 60% off, and we'll assume that the cover price is gonna be like $40 or something like that, then you will have the exclusive distribution on that printing. So that leaves open, once that printing is gone, then if another distributor comes up and goes, “Well I can beat that deal. How about this instead?” Then I can say yes to that. Diamond's answer is, “We don't have enough orders right now to justify financing a 3K copy printing, but having discussed it internally, like at at a meeting where everybody threw in their two cents, we're more than happy to revisit the question in three months.” So it would be in March 2024, how are the orders doing? Like, the orders are building up. They are at the point where, okay we definitely got people that want “Cerebus” volume one, we don't have enough for us to finance printing 3000 copies. Okay, well, presumably we will get to that point. It might take all 2024, but I'm not doing anything, and this way I don't have to keep the price of a car in the bank so that I can print 3000 copies of the “Cerebus” volume, and just sell Diamond 300. That's not happening either.
Matt: Okay. It’s the endless circle of okay, we got to figure out how to do this without going bankrupt. As somebody I work with says, describing the company I work for, they'll step over dollars to pick up dimes.
Dave: Right. Right, you don't want to be doing that. You don't want to be doing that. This could very well be a Second Administration thing, where after I die, like whenever that happens, and Eddie Khanna takes over, the insurance on my life pays out at about $900,000 and then, the line of credit that I was that I was living on, off of the life insurance trying to finish Strange Death of Alex Raymond that way, and that really didn't work. That has to be paid back, but that still is going to leave about, $700,000 Canadian, something like that. At that point Eddie's got a war chest, and if he wants to print all of the trade paperbacks and go, “I don't care what it costs, I just want to make sure that all the trade paperbacks are back in print, and here's where they're going to be stored,” and presumably Rolly would still be able to do the fulfillment from here. But I'm just not in that category. I don't have that kind of money, so that isn't a decision that's on the table. I could probably do that by selling the original cover to #1 and going, okay, now I've got a war chest. Now I can print all of these books. But it's like, ehh, there's like 16 different printings, or 20 different printings, of the “Cerebus” volume already. It's like, they're out there, it's just supply and demand is going to mean they're going to start costing more. Like “Form & Void” got to that point because it had been out of print for so long.
Matt: Wel,l the other further down the list of Matt's stupid ideas is reprinting each individual issue for the first 25, soliciting it through Diamond, and then hopefully selling enough to make enough money to do a collection. And then, but that the problem with that is, A, it's throwing good money after bad, and B, the big problem with that one is you're pinning all your hopes and dreams on somebody going into a store going, “Oh look, it's ‘Cerebus’ #7! I need that!”
Dave: Right. Right. We have solicited for a facsimile of #1, that's going to be the 20th anniversary of “Cerebus” coming to an end. It's just the factsimile of #1, no additional material, it just says “2024 Edition” on the front of it. I'm thinking of adding to the back cover two inset enlargements of Pink Floyd from the front cover that says, “Here's what a real Pink Floyd looks like, here's what a counterfeit Pink Floyd looks like” which would be the only other addition to that book. I don't want to try and figure out how to make it more attractive to people. It is, okay, here's a #1, however many I sell of that, if we then solicited for #2, it would be at best half of that, and then #3 would be half of that, #4 would be half of that. And it's like, Homey don't play that no more! No, forget about it . We're gonna do “Cerebus” #1, “Turtles” 8 , probably one of the new covers, “Spawn” 10, just a one shot here. How many of these can we sell? And it's like, if we get orders for 28,000? Wow! Great. We're back in business here. But it's not gonna be 28,000. It'll be like 300, 150, 75. It's something that we want to try out and see how it goes, but that's all we're doing. And then it can re-enter the lineup. If it sold enough to make a few bucks and didn't lose any money, we printed them at Studiocomix Press, Rolly wrapped them up, took them over to Packaging Too, they shipped them to Diamond, they sold through? Okay, well, six months from now, here's another. It's the same package, but it's just being released again, and how many do you want this time? And if it's like, instead of 180, it's 60, well, okay, we won't offer this again. Thanks very much.
Matt: I do suggest that you shrink down the Gene Day Star Wars portfolio ad on the inside back cover. Have it there but make it like, I don't know, an eighth of the page, and then have the rest be an ad for CerebusDownloads of, “If you like this, the rest of the story, 99 bucks! Best deal in comics.”
Dave: Yeah… um.
Matt: Yeah that sounds like work, doesn't it? [laughs]
Dave: Well, it is work, and it's also, CerebusDownloads is 100% predictable. We sell three complete sets a month, and that's it. But we always sell three, and then we sell a couple of other books, and that's with the ad on the inside back cover of every “Cerebus in Hell?” for the last seven years. So it's like, okay, that's just something that doesn't work. I don't know why it doesn't work, but it's not my job to figure out why it doesn't work, it's my job to go, okay, let's try something that we haven't tried and see if that works. This is just, we'll see what happens just with the facsimile. It's very possible, yeah, we could add an eight page ad section at the back and say, okay, I don't think this is going to work, but let's give this a try, and then go, well I was right. It didn't work.
Chris W AKA Chris Woerner, who I really should mention here, as I always do when when he presents himself, is the most prolific author in the Cerebus Archive. So if we could have at least his latest book to have people looking at, and where they can order it, and now this is more work for you, but a list of all of Chris Woerner's books, which I think are are still available online. He does get them print to order and haven't had one in a little while, he keeps saying, “I think that might be it” and then in comes two more books, and then he goes, “Ah I think that might be it” and then in comes two more books. Chris asks, “How much did he really have planned for ‘High Society’ and ‘Church & State?’ We know he intended a 25 issue storyline when Cerebus arrives in Iest and ran out of pages as the ending approached. But was he intending Cerebus to be Prime Minister?” I would focus in that question on
”ran out of pages.” The only part of the 6000 Pages where I would say that that's an accurate description was the African sequence in “Form & Void,” where this is how much space I have for it, and I'm running out of pages, so I'm gonna have to figure out something here. Which was go to microscopic Chris Ware-sized panels, which I was very pleased with how that turned out. But “was he intending Cerebus to be Prime Minister?” Yes, definitely. The idea of “High Society” was that Cerebus would get swept up into the upper echelons of Iest and then run for office. At the bottom you go, “I feel like the answer is in the Notebooks Rob wants” and it's like, the specific sequence would definitely be in the Notebooks. Not in Albatross One, but probably in Albatross Two, because at some point I did have to say, okay, I know the structure of “High Society” I know him running for office, where do these fit in the 25 issues? And it was, okay, he's gonna become Prime Minister and it's gonna be a parody of Richard Nixon's “My Six Crises” with each issue a crisis. So I'm going to need six issues there. And then becoming Prime Minister, working backward from there, I'm gonna need ”The Deciding Vote” because I wanted to make it a complete 50/50 election where only one electoral vote is up in the air, the Farmer in the “Wuffa Wuffa Wuffa” issue. I need an election night issue, where the tension builds up to the point where it's a tie, leading into the deciding vote, and then I need an election campaign series. How many issues do I have? And that was when I went, okay, worst case scenario. If “My Six Crises” goes from issue 45 to 50, deciding vote is 44, election night's 43, how many issues can I do a campaign in? And I was thinking, that would make, you know, it'd be good to do that for like six months, going around and around and around as you do on an election campaig. And when you get down to, as you have in the United States, swing vote states, then everybody's sticking to those, “we're going to Michigan”, “we're going to Pennsylvania,” “we're going to Florida,” and the last week that's all we're doing is flying back and forth across these. That would be very very funny. But it's like, mhmm, no. It's already back to issue 43, I'm already working on, and this is where I don't know where I started actually writing this out. I'm on issue, let's say 31, 32, 33, 34, maybe even later than that. I would have to start doing the election campaign. I haven't even gotten to “The Night Before” and you know Cerebus getting drawn into the the whole running for Prime Minister thing. The most I'm going to be able to do an election campaign, sad to say, is three issues, and even that's pushing it. Which is what it ended up being, 40, 41, and 42. 39, I think there was there was some of that, but the real hardcore campaign stuff was 40, 41, and 42. So that's the answer on that part, Chris.
And then the followup, “We know he had intended to do some single issue stories but got pulled back to Iest because he'd been putting so much thought into the church part of the state, but was he intending Cerebus to become Pope and then be replaced, and then travel to the Moon?” And, yes, is the answer on all of those. And that was why I didn't fix it at, here's the 25 issue political story, now I'm doing the 25 issue “High Society”-- it's like, I'm gonna have to get far enough along on this, so that I can go, okay, how long is this going to take? And hoping I could do it in 50 issues, instead of the 25 that I did “High Society” and then it spilled over from the 50 issues, the further along that I got, the more it it bumped back issue 100, which would have been ideally the place to have “Church & State” end. “High Society” ends in issue 50, “Church & State” ends in issue 100, but in terms of cramping the storyline, if one thing has to give, or the other, I can't be giving up the content that I have in my mind. The same as I had to completely truncate the campaign in “High Society” because I just didn't have the room for it, at that point.
Matt: Well, and plus, with “Church & State” eventually you had Gerhard, and it's like, well that changes the plotting just a bit, cause now you got the background guy, and it's really good looking backgrounds!
Dave: Right. Right. I mean, you don't want to be going, okay, everything's going to be the size of a postage stamp, and no, we can't do this spectacular pan across the hotel, with the giant hole in it, and blowing away the Thrunk, all that sort of stuff. It's like, no, you've got this brilliant background guy. Let him shine, but still have to be going, well, I could cheerfully devote a whole issue to that. The same as if you have Eric Clapton in your band, you know, everybody grab a bag of chips and a beer and just sit down and let's listen to Eric Clapton do a solo for the next hour and a half. No, the band's still called Cream, you're still expected to pull your side of the thing. And when you're the the leader of the band, which I was, you're the one who has to decide, okay, we both get to shine, but I'm starting to figure out that page is getting eaten up much faster than I think that they do. Which wasn't the case after “Church & State” as much, but still came up occasionally.
Okay! “Aaron Wood (cartoonist), as opposed to Aaron Wood (botanist).” Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck. [laughs] Aaron Wood (cartoonist), says, “I'm working on the next Please Hold. I've got one I bet he hasn't got in a while, but I'm trying to make the scope of my interest as concise as possible. Not easy for me LOL.” And Matt interjects at that point, “We will return to him, but that's all the four week old questions. I did say that the cut-off was when I sent the fax. Nobody listens to me.” Ohh! No, it's true. It's true. If you say, “this is the cut-off,” you're just guaranteed about that whatever the cut-off was… have you gotten any anything since the cut-off?
Matt: I didn't look today. Yesterday I didn't, I was kind of-- but I went back and looked at the original post, and I swear it said the cut-off is, and I looked at it and went, no, no, I didn't say that at all. I just like, if you got a question put it here, and you would think that by the, what, fifth year of doing this, I'd figure out that hey, maybe I should tell people there's a deadline?
Dave: [laughs] If you give them a date, maybe they'll get it in on time. Or maybe they won’t. I mean, none of these things are guaranteed. Now to the stuff that's not from November, Joe Gabbard asked, “Is it okay if I announce my book I pitched, and will be working on for the foreseeable future? Due to my health, I want to get the word out about it.” Yeah, Joe's just out of the hospital. When I phoned him to say, okay, here's what I can do on this. It's like, “This is really good timing. I'm in the hospital” and it's like, how long you been in? It's like he’d been in since Wednesday, I think I phoned him on a Friday, and he was still in until on Monday. So I'm hoping that Joe's all squared away. Then you write, “I told him you sent me stuff, and I ended up announcing something on AMoC. So here's another one that answered itself! Yay!” Yeah, we're very fond of that. Was there any any reaction to it? Did you post all of the stuff that I sent you?
Matt: Yeah, everything you had sent me, I ended up posting and I asked Joe, okay, is there anything you want to add to this? He's like, “No that's good” and I'm going, ‘kay. You know, what I have from Dave is, this is what the project is, but it doesn't really give the scope or anything of that. But now, every Sunday on Facebook, he's planning on posting something of, not everything he got done in the previous week, but just “here's a tease of where I'm at and what I'm working on.”
Dave: Good!
Matt: He sent me, I think, his original page one and said, “For your eyes only.” I'm like, okay, well, I won't run it, but you know, I get to see it. So you know, that's one of them, what do you call them, perks!
Dave: [laughs] That's right. That's what we call a job perk around here. It was definitely a situation where he left the phone message, and I did call him back and asked him, okay, can you give me a little more information on this? Because I didn't know what “Grand Design” was. I guess Jim Rugg and the Kayfabe guys did a “Grand Design” of “Spider-Man” or something?
Matt: Ed Piskor did “X-Men” and it was a two issue series. Anyway, two issues came out and it was kind of nebulous if they were gonna do more, or if it was, he was just doing the two. And basically, cause I read it, it was an oversized Treasury Edition-sized, which was a great format for the concept, and it's kind of a look back from “X-Men” 1 up through the new X-Men. I think he gets, the second issue I think he gets into the Death of Phoenix, like he goes that far.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then Jim Rugg did a “Hulk” one that was two issues that was regular comic size. And I believe there might be more going? You know, basically it's summarizing a 100 or 200 issues of a series in, I'd say 48 pages maybe?
Dave: Right.
Matt: Maybe it was 48 pages an issue. So it's twice that. And my buddy, who bought the X-Men one and lent it to me, we both agreed it was pretty good. He didn't like the Hulk one. I'm like, but it's the Hulk. How can you not like the Hulk? And he's like, “Just trust me.” And I was reading I'm going, ah, I see. Towards the end of the second issue he gets into the Peter David/Todd McFarland stuff and it just kind of peters out to you know, he got as far as he wanted to summarize and, “okay, I'm done now.”
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right.
Matt: And you, the reader, are going, but like there's a whole bunch that happened! I mean, there's a lot going on. Are you sure you want to stop here? And you kind of feel like, is it he ran out of room? Did editorial say, “Hey the first one didn't sell really good, we're not gonna do a third one”? Cause it's Marvel, you know that there's a bean counter in there somewhere going, “Why are we publishing this?”
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: Cause Joe put stuff on Facebook, people have commented on Facebook about “Cerebus: Grand Design” of, “you should do this or that.” I said you know, really, it should be Cerebus interviewing Cerebus about the Roach.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Because I mean, you know, having seen the materials, I’m going, there's a lot of humor to be had in Cerebus interviewing Cerebus, but then talking about stuff that isn't Cerebus, and everybody kind of looks around like, uh okay, where's this going?
Dave: Yeah. I mean, while I was doing the stuff that I was doing on it, I was definitely thinking this would be fun. Like I could picture doing this or doing parts of this, but you know, I'm doing Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and I'm 67 years old. But the difference between Dave Sim and Marvel and DC, or Marvel in this case is, because somebody else wants to do it. If you see what Joe is doing, and you go, that's interesting, but that's not what I would do. I would do something like this. You can go ahead and do it. It's like, I haven't sued anybody, and you know, I'm not going to start with you, whoever you are, on something like that. I asked him how long he pictured it being, and he said probably not much more than a 100 pages. In which case I went, okay, well, depending on how long it takes you to do it, it is possible that it could be done as a “Cerebus in Hell?” four issues or whatever. Every time you get one done, it gets slotted into the lineup. Which is what we're doing now, we're not on the monthly schedule anymore. It's just, soon as an issue is done, you're the next guy that's going to Kickstarter this and do variant covers and solicit it through Diamond, and there'll be another guy after you. So he was certainly willing to entertain that. And it's like, now that we're in the situation that we're in, if we Kickstarter it and it only sells 20 copies or something like that, that's fine. We can get Alfonso to print 20 copies and this is how much each one costs, and Joe can sign them, I can sign them, and we send them out to everybody and you know, Joe's got his own copies of his “Cerebus: Grand Design.” It's like, everybody's gonna have a different take on it. Any “Grand Design” on any character would be inherently interesting, but definitely not something that, as you say, the bean counters would be too fond of. No, we don't want 15 different guys each doing a “Hulk: Grand Design” and we keep throwing it at the wall to see if any of these are gonna stick. Although, the odds are pretty good that maybe like the fifth or sixth one you would come up with a classic that you just wouldn't be able to print them fast enough.
Matt: Well, I think “Roach: Grand Design” would be the one that would be, oh yeah, that'll be great, but of course it comes down to, it has to be completely different concept than “The Tonight Show” because it wouldn't necessarily work.
Dave: Yeah, and it's, if you want to do that, [laughs] knock yourself out, Matt!
Matt: No, no no, Dave, I've even given up using the phrase my “haha” free time, at this point I have one project that I someone gave me money for that, it's on the board of, okay, you're gonna have to buckle down, find the time and buckle down, and get this done. And then there's another project that's been, I haven't been dating it because if I dated it it's just gonna make me cry, but that's my next, okay you need to get this done.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then I keep telling myself, you are not allowed to start anything of, oh yeah, I'll add this to the pile. No no no, the pile needs to either get knocked down or you need to admit defeat and, I'm sorry but you're never gonna get whatever it was I promised you.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: Of course, the next day at work my brain goes, you know, it'd be kind of interesting to do a comic book series about a superheroine who gets pregnant and like it's a real world pregnancy type thing of a, yes, she's a superhero, but you can't go out and fight Dr Doom when you're pregnant!
Dave: Oh, I think a lot of women would disagree with you on that. [laughs]
Matt: Well, see I'm married to a nurse that worked in labor and delivery, and I heard enough horror stories to know that, no, like Paula's cousin got pregnant and got put on bed rest for five months?
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: Cause she was at high risk and they said, you can sit in bed, you can get up and go pee, but then you have to go back to bed. And she was going insane, cause, and you know she's calling Paula, “What do I do? What do I do?” And it's like, “Uh, you lay in bed. That's all you do. Read a book, watch TV, have your meals delivered by the father.” And I'm going, you know, I mean, it's an interesting concept and my brain keeps turning it over and it's like, yeah, but that's like the eighth superhero series that I've thought of that I went, that's an interesting concept. I want to do it! It's like, maybe when I retire in 20 years?
Dave: Right. Right. Maybe you could get Paula to write it ? No, it was, the same experience with writing “Spider-Vark,” because I did have the point where Cerebus was going to out-feminist the feminist and by having an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the ins and outs of pregnancy, and things that can go wrong, and researching that online, it's, yii! Just, it's like a bottomless list and each one of them subdivides into other subdivisions with compound names. And it's, this is in the 21st century. I would say they've gone past the point of scratching the surface, but they definitely haven't hit bottom on it. And I'm sure Paula would back me up on that, since she has the lived experience, day after day.
Matt: Yeah, I mean like I said, it popped in there of, in my mind, it's an analog of She-Hulk because you want the big strong tough woman who ends up pregnant, and it's A, does she want to keep it? B, can she keep it? And my brain's going, oh yeah and I'm coming up with analoges of other heroes and mashing stuff together. I'm like, oh this will be great, and I'm like, yeah, I can see it'll be 10 maybe 12 issues. It'll be a nice little graphic novel. And then I go, hey, you're at work. You actually stopped moving for 3 minutes thinking about this. You need to get back to work, Buddy.
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: You’re not gonna get to go play dime store Stan Lee now, you can think about that later.
Dave: And you have to learn to just let those things go, and as you say, pick your spots and say, “This is what I'm actually working on. If that stray thought comes into my head, uh, no.” Or, as I did with Joe, I went, I read the 11 pages that he sent me a good four or five times and then just started analyzing it, just started going, okay, where do I break ranks with this, and where do I go okay, if this is my project, this is what I would do with it. And just get it down to one day's work and go, Joe, here you go. This is more than I had when started “Cerebus”. So, you know, John Lennon's “Revolution 9”, [British voice] “take this, brother, may it serve you well.”
“Aaron Wood (cartoonist), as opposed to Aaron Wood (sociologist).” Nyuck nyuck nyuck. You really do crack me up with those things, ”asks, Hope this isn't a bother and if there's a better way in the future, let me know. Thanks in advance to Dave for his time, and for the folks” I marked that one, it's plural, “at AMoC for putting this together.” There's no folks. [laughs] It's all Manly Matt Dow.
Matt: Well, no, no, cause it's me, but it's also Jen, and Ben Hobbs, and Margaret. I mean the three of them come in and pinch hit during the week when I don't want to do it.
Dave: That's true. That's true.
Matt: I'm the only guy doing the Please Hold thing, but then again, I'm the only guy dumb enough to say, oh yeah, let's do this every month!
Dave: [laughs] Yes, and let's add pictures! Let's not just have it as a podcast. No no no no no no no no. We need to have visuals, and we need to have them right there while Dave Sim is talking about them. Better you than me. “On reading ‘Dave Sim Conversations’ I noticed on the timeline of Dave's career to that point indicated he had a brief project doing public readings of biblical texts. After some spelunking on YouTube, I found one, count them, one clip of Dave reading from the Book of Judges. Now the YouTube channel posted this clip many years ago, and it's only the one segment, no other Dave Sim or Cerebus content at all. But it did have the following description, “4,915 views. April 17 2007. Another major project from Dave Sim, following the 300 issues of the legendary Cerebus comic, Dave has embarked on a scripture reading series to benefit the food bank of his hometown Kitchener. Begun in June of 2006, this nondenominational program will see English translations of all of God's scriptures. Judaism's Torah, Christianity's Gospels, and Islam's Quran, read aloud in chronological order. Filmed simply on Mini DV, these readings are then archived on brand name DVD-Rs, playable on virtually any DVD player.” And of course, there are no DVD players anymore. If you've got a DVD player, you've got an antique. Am I off base with that?
Matt: Um, yeah? Yeah, pretty much. I mean they do release things on DVD, but it's kind of like when DVD started they were still releasing things on VHS.
Dave: Right.
Matt: You know, the technology is moving to Blu-ray, Blu-ray is being replaced by 4K Ultra Blu-ray, which will someday be replaced by something. My friend is a bit of a, he likes the new shinies, so he upgraded to a 4K Ultra TV and 4K Ultra Blu-ray player, and he's starting to buy his movies in 4K Ultra, cause there is a difference. And I'm going, yeah, but if you already own “Back to the Future” twice why are you buying it a third time?
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: Of course, I'm also the guy who owns Cerebus phonebook volume one, and Cerebus phonebook volume one Remastered, and “Swords of Cerebus” one through five, I think, and a whole bunch of the individual issues. I mean, you know, it is pot and kettle time at this point, but still.
Dave: But still. But still. Okay, “Now I'll say this for those listening to Please Hold, as Dave is well aware, the Book of Judges is in the Hebrew Bible. Not the same thing as the Christian Old Testament, but one might be forgiven for conflating the two. But it's not in the Torah itself.” So, first of all… where are we here? “First of all, eight, a shout out to anyone who might be able to point us in the direction of more of these recordings. And I have to take a moment to admire how fluent of a reader Dave is. His reading was impeccable.” Thank you. “If he had not pursued comics and cartooning, he'd have had a solid career in radio and voiceovers. But obviously we're all glad he chose the former. So questions for Dave on this theme.” Before we get to that, I am gonna back up to reinforce what he's saying about the Book of Judges not being in the Torah. I tend to err on the side of describing the Judaic scriptures as the Torah, but the Torah is literally the law, which means it's the Pentateuch. It's the same thing as the Pentateuch, it's the first five books, which aren't actually called Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus. They're called first book of Moshe, second book of Moshe, third book of Moshe, fourth book of Moshe, fifth book of Moshe. Which, I try to err on the side of that, because that's what it's actually called. The also-called Genesis, also-called Exodus, also-called Leviticus, that's a Christian “innovation.” It's like, no, whatever the book is called, that's what the book should be called, in my opinion. And I tend to do that, I tend to call the Law and the Prophets, which the Prophets is Joshua through to Malachi. I tend to call the Law and the Prophets the Torah, because there's a real inclination on people's part to call all of those books the Old Testament, and it's like, that really does rankle my Judaic observance side, where I usually say to Christians, if you call it the Old Testament, then I'm going to call the Gospels “the old Quran.” And and some of them get it, and the ones that get it go, “Uh, right. Okay. I didn't know that that was the situation.” Yeah, do you want your sacred books called “The Old Quran?” No, it's insulting to have the New Testament and the Old Testament, and I really don't back off on that one. So, but there is also a lot of discussion about whether Joshua belongs in the Pentateuch, with the first five books, the fifth book. There are definitely elements of the law in the prophets, and there's definitely elements of the prophets in the Hagiographa, which are the other writings which are not considered scriptural. And that wasn't decided until 90 AD. Could have a very long discussion about that, but, yes, I definitely appreciate the fact that, no, judges is not in the Torah.
“So questions for Dave on this theme. Could Dave share his recollection of how this project came about, and how he went about selecting the passages for the reading.” It was chronological. The decision resulted from my experience of going to church at the end of the 20th century. I went to St John's Evangelical Church in downtown Kitchener, corner of Duke and Francis, I believe? And it was interesting, but it was already reading scripture as part of my religious observance, and then reading scripture aloud in my apartment, and watching religious programming, and going to the church, and watching the religious programming, it's like there's not enough scripture here for me. It's interesting all of these opinions, and as I say, you know, there's opinions about just about everything, and very very fine-tuned nuanced opinions. In Judaism's case, dating back thousands of years of, this could be this or this could be that depends on how you chart this word back to its primary root, and really real fine-tuning stuff. And then there's also overview stuff. But that's all interesting to me. If that's what I went to church and listened to, then I would go to church and and listen to it. But, you know, folksy stories from the Minister about, “Me and my family were at McDonald's last week and my daughter said, blah blah blah blah blah.” It's like, mhmm, that's fine. It's a very funny little charming story and it does, you can definitely say it's got a meaning behind it. But you're just a human being. Like, I'm here not for human beings, I'm here for God. I'm here for the word of God. Which is why I draw a sharp demarcation between reading scripture aloud, which I find to be the best that you can do in in terms of religious observance. I could be wrong about that, I'll find out on Judgment Day, same as everybody else will. But that the more you read scripture aloud, the better and the more efficacious it is for you. I mean, the scripture, you're seeing it on the printed page, you're reading it aloud, so it's in your eyes, it's in your mouth. You're hearing yourself reading it, it's in your ears, it's in your mind, it's in your brain. I assume it's in your soul. And to me, it doesn't get any better than that. To me, if everybody did that, reading John's Gospel aloud, we'd have a much better world. Me sitting and having a discussion with somebody about John's Gospel, “Well I think this, this, and this” and they're saying, “I don't see that at all. I see it as this, this, and this.” That doesn't go anywhere. That's just two people, two human beings, disagreeing with each other when they both have access to the word of God. Which is why I spend five hours a week reading John's Gospel aloud, and half an hour doing the typing out the Monday Report. I always know what the next thing is that I have to say, but that seems the sensible proportion to me. Five hours of reading John's Gospel aloud, beginning to end without interruption and half an hour of, okay, here's what I think's going on at the beginning of chapter six. So this was my first like, after I stopped going to church and going, no, in terms of how much time it takes me to get ready, and the hour that I'm sitting there, and the half hour takes to get home, and then actually reading scripture when I get home, I don't think it's a good investment of my time. And you know, nothing against the assembly at St John's Church, nothing against the ministers, this is my preference, and what I think is preferable in the eyes of God, and what I would recommend to others.
So I'm reading it at home and I'm going, like, well, okay, maybe there's another angle on this, where I'm essentially writing off anything outside of my apartment. Maybe God wants me to read scripture aloud, and maybe I could do it at a theater, because it's like okay, this is my quarrel is I don't think preaching is a good idea. I don't think it's a good idea to preach to anybody. I think scripture is efficacious. You listen to this scripture for, what it turned out to be was about an hour and a half at a time, and you decide what it is that you're listening to. But if you're coming to listen to me reading scripture, it was advertised as no preaching, just the scripture, just the word of God. And it would take about an hour and a half for me to read the first 25 chapters of the first book of Moshe, Genesis. And it's like, well okay, there, to me, is a healthy meal for you to chew on and if you want to come and listen to me reading this, that's fine. I went to the Registry Theater, and went to the office and said, what does it cost to rent the theater? And it's like, a little back and forth on that, and it's like, “You know, well we can probably give you a good deal on Sunday afternoon. It's not a real hot commodity for any theater. What are you thinking of doing?” And it's like, well, this is what I'm thinking of doing. And it's like,”Oh okay, well.” I think they sort of said $100 a week, or something like that, if I would agree to, I think I agreed to do it for three months or four months or something. We'll try this out on on both sides. So then I went and got a rocking chair and an area rug, and just at a used furniture place and brought those and left them at the theater. This would be my set, would be this rocking chair and the throw rug. And [laughs] they're probably still there. I left them after I stopped doing this.
Anyway, Trevor who was a friend of Sandeep Atwell and a friend of Dave Fisher, they were like a trio that, they all hung around together when they all went to the University of Waterloo. Trevor had the capability of recording [coughs] excuse me, which I didn't have at the time. So okay, can I persuade you to come up every Sunday and record this? I think was how it went. And Fisher would produce them as the DVDs and put them in those snap cases that DVDs go in. And we'll sell those online, and anybody who comes to the reading, it said on the flyer “Suggested donation of $10 to the Food Bank of Waterloo Region” and then contacted the Food Bank of Waterloo Region, and said, can you send somebody over on Sunday and at the intermission, and I'm halfway through, I go backstage, and you'll just take donations from people for the Food Bank of Waterloo Region. I come back and finish doing the reading. And I'm surprised that we got as far as Judges. I didn't remember that. So it means that, using the Christian names, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges exist. And [laughs] [announcer voice] ”time for the 2024 Please Hold for Dave Sim earmark Cerebus FFF Fan Freak Freebie! More finally atuned than a microaggression inditement from Human Resources! [eee!] More intrusive than a Facebook privacy setting! [deet deet deet] GPS compatible! Future proof! Able to strike within a microbes’ fallen arch of where you live and breathe as a Cerebus fan!” I called Dave Fisher and I said, the Bible readings from the Registry Theater. Do you have all of those? And he's going, “I think I've got them. I'd have to look.” I said, no big rush on it, just can you check, and if you don't have them, do you know if Trevor has them? And he said he would contact Trevor and find out if he has them. I said, whatever you guys have once you've done a search and scan for all of the recordings, can you put all of them on a thumb drive, and as soon as we have them all on a thumb drive, it's going out to you, Aaron Wood (cartoonist), not Aaron Wood the sociologist, you'll have to go and get your own freebie someplace else, this is for Aaron Wood the cartoonist.
“Does Dave recall what translation of the Bible he is reading from?” Yes, it's the King James version, which I have always used since I purchased it December 12th, 1996, and a facsimile of the 1611 translation. I have to say that I appreciate your “my reading being impeccable” because the 1611 King James version is very very difficult to read accurately, because of the fact that it was translated by the English under King James command to basically fix the Law and the Prophets, and then add in the Gospels. So essentially what they do is paraphrase a lot of the Hebrew, but they do put in the margins, and there's an interesting thing where it's in the margin, and there's two different kind of asterixis indicating where it goes in the text, and one of them says “Hebr.” before the marginal annotation, and then there are others that are just an alternative translation. So I tend to err on the side of the ones that are specifically Hebrew. “This is what it says in Hebrew.” [laughs] And I gotta tell you again, my Judaic observant side is like, “Oy, the Goyim!” It's like, if it says that in Hebrew, that's what it says. Changing it into another phrase because you think this is more how you would put it in English, the same thing with “these words are missing, we'll put these words in italics, but these are missing from the text.” They're not missing from the text, they're not in the text. You're extrapolating a word into scripture. This is the word of God, you don't extrapolate as a human being and say, “This should be in here.” And it's not just the Christians that do that, the Muslims do that with the Quran as well. It's like “this stuff is in italics because it's not in the text” and it's like, well, if it's not in the text just leave it out. If it makes it very very difficult to read or you go, “Well, I don't understand what that means” at least you know that you're reading scripture. So it's very very difficult when you're reading it a loud because you have to be reading ahead and going, okay, Hebrew alert! Hebrew alert! There's a phrase coming up ahead that it doesn't say that, what it says in the King James version, it actually says this over here, so I have to plug this in. And sometimes it's the asterisk isn't where it's supposed to be, so it's like, again oy vey, now I have to say, okay, where should the asterisk have been, and where is it that goes in the text so that I can read that where it goes in there? And certainly Judges is rife with that. So if you were reading along Aaron in your own text and you're saying that I'm impeccable, you're looking at a reading out loud Judaic highwire act that gave me flop sweats while I was doing that.
“Given the pronunciation of the biblical names it seems to be a literal translation. Again, for the benefit of those listening, there is no J in Hebrew, so what we usually pronounce as Joshua would be Yeshua, and so on.” And yes, that's a very good point, in terms of pronunciation and translating names that a lot of Judaic names, Jehojada is a good example. In the King James version, Jehojada are done as “I” so it would be pronounced Judaicly “yeh oh yada” but it's like, we do have a J in English, so I pronounce it Jehojada, but for the longest time I pronounced the second one as an “I” because it's like, well, if you're gonna do that, you're gonna put J’s in where they don't exist in Hebrew, put the J’s in consistently. So again, oy vet. “I have several Bibles in my personal library, and I have a near match to his reading within Exogesis’ parallel literal translation and transliteration that's a joy to read and near to what Dave had at the time.” My recommendation, and I think he's covered… he's still talking about this in his next point. Yeah, “Finally we abide by the rule, three questions after all. What translations of the Torah, Bible, and Quran would Dave most admire for intellectual curiosity and spiritual exploration, two very different but not mutually exclusive reasons to read the text? As I've got several Bibles, I'm embarrassed to say that I lack the other collections of sacred scripture, and I'd be delighted to learn more from someone else's perspective. Thanks again for indulging this. Under normal circumstances, I would be loath to be so inquisitive about someone's spiritual views unless we were better acquainted personally, but as Dave has been pretty conversational on this topic over interviews and his work, some of my hesitancy is relaxed. Obviously I'm no scholar, just very interested in the subject. Looking forward to the response, and perhaps a followup next time.” [laughs] Matt says at the bottom, “It's my job.”
My best recommendation would be a website called biblehub.com, and biblehub.com essentially has all of the Torah, the Law and the Prophets, and also all of the Christian Gospels, all of the books. But it also has multiple translations and I think the translations are proliferating all the time. So I found that very helpful when I was still going online at City Hall, because you can read all of the different translations of any given verse. You can just say, you know, Matthew 3:16, and it says, “Okay, here's all of the different ways that that's been translated” and you can read them in sequence and say, “Oh okay, well, that's giving me at least a ballpark of what the different terms mean” because different translations translate different terms, emphasize different terms. And it's why I recommend the Interlinear for John's Gospel and for all the Christians Gospel because it's a word for word translation, so you do get nuances that you don't get from later translations, where, as you can see from the Monday Reports that I do, if there's a specific term that occurs here, like “loose you the divine habitation this, and in three days I shall raise up in.” The term is definitely “loose”, and there are a number of different ways of interpreting the term “loose”, or “loosen” as a verb that don't mean “destroy”, which is what the Christians seems to have landed on as “destroy this temple” or “destroy this divine habitation, in three days I will raise up in.” Because then John comments and says he was talking about his body when he said that. Well, that's certainly the later interpretation of what he was saying, but I don't think that was what he was saying. That's my personal opinion. And the term “loose” occurs multiple times in John's Gospel, so it's like, I want to be able to say, okay, remember when he said “loose the divine habitation this” when he raises Lazarus, and he says “loose him of the wrappings that he's in and let him be going under.” There's an analogy between those two that you don't get if you translate that term, that coin Greek term, two different ways. So that's why I recommend the Interlinear, but definitely in terms of a personal preference, it's well worth, if you have a particularly pertinent part of either the Law and the Prophets, or the Christian Gospels, and you say, “Okay, if I had to say I'm gonna be stranded on a desert island, and I can only have one chapter of one of these books with me, what chapter would it be?” And everybody's gonna have a different one personally, because it just has more meaning for you. It's like, when you get to that part when you're reading the Bible, or when you're reading the Torah, or when you're reading the Prophets you go… Martin Luther King’s you know “Every valley will be exalted and every mountain will be brought low.” Isaiah 40 is definitely a very very moving chapter and obviously loomed large in his legend. Go online and say, okay, that chapter, if you want to narrow it down to that verse that Martin Luther King read on the march on Washington. What is the content of that? Let's break this down, word by word, and there's 25 different translations here, how do they differ from each other? It's like, Martin Luther King was using the the King James version, but he was definitely using the English, he wasn't dubbing in the Hebrew. Which, when I get there it's like, when I'm reading 10 chapters a week and I get to Isaiah 40, it's like, well, [laughs] I want to read this like Martin Luther King, but it's like, “Well, Dave, that's not what it says. The Hebrew’s right here. Plug in the the Hebrew where it belongs.” So that's my recommendation in terms of what translations. You're gonna have, I would say, I would bounce it back to you, Aaron, to, what are your favourite chapters? What are your favourite verses? And you go to biblehub.com and just search this chapter, this verse, and just look at all of the different translations, and then expand your search from there. You can go Google search a verse and just say, “Okay, what's been written about this? What have different philosophers said about this? Where did Winston Churchill use it?” It's very very rich history. “What does it mean in French? Why is this a big deal in French and not in English?” Or “Why are the Belgians and the Germans really really focused on this chapter, and it just doesn't have the same legs in the King James version?”
In terms of the Quran, any translation that you're gonna buy of the Quran is commentary. The Quran is definitely a verbal work, unless you're listening to the Quran, unless you're listening to an Imam who is trained in the Arabic or in the Farsi or whatever language it's translated into, and has the credentials for reading the Quran aloud at Friday prayers, you're basically reading a Quran fanzine. So go to any bookstore that carries the Quran, an English translation, and pick up one or two of them, and if you just want to know, okay what does this say? Okay, this is what it says. But in terms of scripture, the thing to do would be to download the Quran read by an Imam, which I've got the Law and the Gospels read in Hebrew, and the Christian John's Gospel and Revelation, which are the only two that I read, being read in Aramaic, and then the Quran in Arabic, and that's all I've got on iTunes! It's, I just hit play it starts… oh that's another story. I can go into that some other time. But it plays in sequence, Surah 1 from the Quran, and then Genesis in Hebrew, and then Surah #2, the cow, in Arabic, and then Exodus, and then Surah 3, the family of Imran. So, I think it's more valuable for me, reading the Law and the Gospels as an English translation, and then I do have Interlinear volumes of the later books that Hebrew is very difficult to read in the Interlinear. Like you can take John's Gospel, the Interlinear version, and it's a different construction and a little bit awkward, but it's still completely understandable. The syntax in Hebrew is completely different, where the noun goes and where the subordinate clauses go. So that you can't just read it aloud, but if you do come up on a difficult passage and you go, okay, what does this actually say in Hebrew? Like, now I have to read it in Hebrew, then I can pull out one of my Interlinear volumes and go, okay, here's the English word for word, and where it occurs and then read, word for word, from Strong's Concordance. Here's what the each actual Hebrew word means. And then chart those back to their primary roots, and that's the best way to understand an English translation of Hebrew. The Quran, it's “this is roughly what it says .” Some of them are more lyrical than others. I've got two, one from about 1993, and another one that's the Penguin Books version. But the only time that I'm actually experiencing the Quran is when I'm hearing it in Arabic. So don't know if you're into that, don't know if you want to download the Quran, and just it's always playing while I'm sleeping. All three, a lot of the Gospels in Hebrew, and John's Gospel in Revelation in Aramaic, and the Quran in Arabic are always playing while I'm sleeping. So I wake up and you know, I'm listening to scripture. And sometimes I know what it is. Like I don't know the language, but I know Surah 55 because I know the repetitive context. I know parts of Revelation that are different from John's Gospel, even thoug… if I'm hearing Miriam and Martha, then I know it's John 11, or if I'm hearing Miriam it's John 12 or it's John 20. But I definitely recommend it. I think if you have a prejudice against Muslims, or you have a prejudice against Islam, which I can certainly understand. Particularly for a lot of Americans after 9/11, that was their introduction to Islam. “Thank you, that's all I need to know about Islam and the prophet Muhammad and the Quran.” But if you're not like that, I think it's definitely efficacious to have the Quran playing while you're sleeping, because you're definitely experiencing the third of the three monotheistic faiths in its purest form. And then if you want to be reading your English translation while it's playing, uh, you could do that too. I tend to not do that, although it is interesting the number of times that okay, I'm reading my English translation aloud, and, oh son of a gun, I woke up in the middle of the night, and that's the same Surah playing that I was reading last night. You talk about your Comic Art Metaphysics. But there you go. That's my most exhaustive, [laughs] and for many of you exhausting answer, that I can give to that question.
Matt: Whenever this comes up the thing I come back to is, my friend who became a Lutheran pastor and like went to the Seminary. And it was one of these, you know, he went away and I wasn't talking to him anymore because he lived in in Ohio. But like once a year I talk to him, type thing. And one time I asked him, so how's it going? Because he had just started and he's going, “I'm learning Hebrew.” I'm like, ‘kay, why? He’s like, “cause I have to translate the Torah into English” and I'm going ‘kay. So like their basement foundational thing is you're gonna learn Hebrew, you're gonna translate it and tell us that we're wrong. And then he had to learn Greek so he could translate the Gospels. That's it was like, ‘kay! [laughs]
Dave: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt: I'm proud of him that he that he stuck with it, you know, he is a pastor, but it's like, cause he's Lutheran and it's, “Okay, step one is, you need to know that what we're telling you is actually what we're telling you. Like, not that we're just making stuff up, and you're gonna take it on faith, you're actually gonna know what we're talking about.” And I keep coming back to, it's kind of neat as far as If ever I have a question on scripture, I could just call up, be like, hey, this is what it says, is this what it actually says? And he'll say yes or no. I mean, it hasn't happened because I haven't had a question where I'm like, okay, I need to know the answer now. But it's one of those, I'll say oh yeah, I got a pastor, and people are like, “You go to church?” And it’s like, no, but I have a pastor.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, different versions of “have” in that case. And yeah, and you're still gonna get into a discussion. I mean it's still, it's not as cut and dried a question as that, because “is this what this actually says?” What I find is, are you asking my Christian side, or are you asking my my Jewish side, or are you asking my Muslim side as to what I think that says? Because each of the three of those has a very different opinion. Which is why I think God did it that way was, “Look, all I want you to do is admit that you don't know. All of it is opinion.” Some of it is definitely far more scholarly opinion, a far more well-read opinion, but your pastor friend if he was going to go to shul with three or four Orthodox Rabbis and say, “Okay, well this says this, right?” It's like, ah, they're gonna have a very different opinion on it. Practically anything that is in that category, it would be, “I can give you a qualified yes” or “I can give you a possibly ambiguous no” on the same question. And then like, “Why are you asking? Why do you want to know specifically about this?” The one time that I did get a chance to talk to an Orthodox Rabbi, when I was coming back from Syracuse University, researching Stan Drake, and there was an Orthodox Rabbi on the bus coming back, like just completely out in the full rig, you can't mistake this guy for anybody else. And I went, this is my only chance to actually ask a question of an Orthodox Rabbi, who is probably not altogether inclined to suffer the goyim gladly. And I basically did it through his son. I said, that's your dad, I have a question about scripture. And I showed him my King James Bible which I had with me, obviously. And he said, “Well, let me ask him” and he said, “Yeah, he said give him a few minutes. He's doing something else.” And I had the seat next to me. And [laughs] this Orthodox Rabbi comes up and sits down in the seat next to me and goes, “Yeah?” [laughs] And I went, the question that I had was, Genesis 49 when Jacob is talking to his sons on his deathbed and there's the passages, “Simeon and Levi brethren instruments of cruelty in their habitations, o my soul come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united; for in their anger they slew a man, and in their selfwill they digged down a wall.” Now that's pretty mysterious stuff. You could certainly discuss that at incredible length as to what it was that Jacob was saying, the last thing that he had to say to Simeon and Levi. But what the question that I had for him was, it says “digged down a wall” and then the annotation in the margin is “houghed oxen.” And I went, those are two very very different things. to dig down a wall and hough, which is to hamstring an oxen. And I was going, what is the word that says that? And he explained that there is multiple levels of meaning to it that, I believe it was, Joseph, his nickname was ox or oxen, and that it was Simeon and Levi, what they did to Joseph, it’s finding a more esoteric way to say it, and that's also how they would have digged down a wall, because Joseph was a wall. And it's like, oh. I thanked him, you know, sorry to have bothered you but that was just, if there was one question that I was gonna ask to have answered, that was the question that I wanted to have answered. And he looked at how well-worn my Bible was and said, “Well, that's really good. You're at least, obviously pretty dedicated to this.” And that was back 2011, my King James version has seen better days, even back then. So it's fascinating, it's interesting. I do think that reading it as narrative, and I'm going to out David Birdsong here and say that he's the, as far as I know the only person that's given it a try, and reads John's Gospel aloud, was reading the King James version or whatever version that he had and had read the Interlinear version and was just, “Mhmm, no. This is just a little too strange. So I'm gonna go back to this.” But I think he is reading the Interlinear now and definitely agrees with me that this needs to be read aloud, and there is nothing like reading it aloud, beginning to end, without interruption in terms of, David does it every Sunday. I do 10 chapters on Sunday. I read it aloud every Monday and Wednesday, 3:00 am to 6:00 am, and yeah, to me that's what it's there for. If you want to just study it or if you just want to analyze it or if you just want to translate it accurately, we'll find out on Judgment Day what was the best choice. But to me, the best choice is reading it aloud, reading it without interruption, and reading it straight through.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Okay! Now we're… where are we? Where are we? Oh here we are. We're up to, that was page three. There's the Bible, page four. And it's Steve Peters Week! Multiple Steve Peters Week Steve Peters. Always happy to hear from Steve Peters. “Hey Matt, I don't have a question for Please Hold, but when you talk to him can you ask him how many copies of ‘Tales of Sparky’ #4 and how many copies of the ‘Sparkybus’ variant cover he would like me to send him?” And I would have to say, in terms of how things are structured here, all of your work definitely goes into the box with my own work in it. So it's in Cerebus Archive comic book-size comic books. So if you can write on three of them, Cerebus Archive #1 out of 3, and then signed Steve Peters on both of them, “Tales of Sparky” #1 and “Sparkybus” that would be the absolute coolest. I couldn't ask for better than that. And thank you for inquiring, Steve. And Steve, if you could leave a phone message with your current phone number. The one that I've got in my phone book, I tried dialing it, and “this phone number is not in service.” Recording didn't laug,h which most of the time the recording does when it's me because it's like, “Grandpaw, this hasn't been a phone number since the late 1970s! Cross it out and stop bothering us!”
John Bau beat Dodger in with, “Hello, I've spoken to Dave on the phone a few times. He was great, friendly, and a pleasure to talk with. Anyway, he asked me to submit a question. Dave did an in-store appearance at my local comic shop The Incredible Pulp in Baldwin, New York. My friend Larry Mirando was the owner and he encouraged a young me to try to venture out and read comics other than superhero titles. He was successful. How did you like your trip to Long Island? Did you enjoy the experience? Do you have any juicy gossip you would like to share? Thank you. John. You can find me on John's Longbox on YouTube, a channel where I host conversations with comic creators.” This started with John leaving a phone message asking would I be interested in doing John's Longbox podcast with him, or on YouTube. And I explained that this is the only Q&A that I'm doing is Please Hold for Dave Sim, two and a half to three hours once a month. That covers it for me. But I don't want to rule anybody out, so anybody who does have a podcast and they're interested in asking a question, if you go with this format, I will answer your questions, and then you will have them for your podcast. So I'm hoping that you have an email address for John, and you'll be able to email him his segment of Please Hold. Can I ask that favor of you?
Matt: I'm just thinking. This was a email, not a Facebook thing, right? Yeah yeah, this was an email. So yes, I should be able to just cut the segment, either attach it or send them a link to it, whichever, you know, the internet sometimes says, “Hey, this is too big. I don't want to do this.”
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: And that's when it goes in my Google Drive, which, it's in the cloud, and then I have to send somebody a link, and then they send me an email going, “It wants you to approve me to have access” and I'm like, that was the purpose of the original email. I don't understand why I have to do this twice, but I do it twice because I don't argue with the internet anymore. Every time I try arguing with the internet I get a headache.
Dave: Right. I'm not sure if this is another solution, but what Dave Fisher figured out to do was just download the thing onto YouTube and it dumbs it down to email size on its own.
Matt: Yeah, I can do that too. I mean, I have options and I have resources and sometimes I forget they exist.
Dave: [laughs] Which is understandable! I have no experience with any of this, so my heart goes out to you.
Matt: Well, back when “Kurtz vs. Kurtz” came out, I made a video where it's Steamboat Cerebus at the wheel, you know, dancing up and down, because there was the the two pages--
Dave: Oh yeah! That was great. That was great.
Matt: Yeah, so I made the video and I used The Doors, because that was the gag. And when I put it on YouTube, YouTube said “this is a copyright violation. You cannot share this publicly. It's still posted and you can share it a link privately but not publicly.” I'm like, okay, so I put it as an embedded video on the blog, and you know, it's got the link, and anybody can watch it. It had like I think a 100 views, but you can't publicly post this, and I'm going, okay sure! [laughs]
Dave: Whatever! You're the internet. We live but to serve. So, getting back to John, I did, when when I called him back to explain what the situation was, I said, in the Cerebus Archive photo archive, I know there are photos of The Incredible Pulp signing in there, but I don't know if they've already been scanned at out back at Camp David, or if they haven't been scanned and I have to go through the box of photos that haven't been scanned and pull them up. And that's what I did today was, okay, I check first here and then I'll go back and look in the box that Rolly’s got of the ones that he scanned and emailed to you, and see if they're in there, and they were in the the Off-White House box, not the Camp David box. And Rolly scanned all of them and has emailed them to you, so everybody should be able to see all of those photos of The Incredible Pulp signing, which were sent to me by somebody at The Incredible Pulp, because it's the prints have like rounded corners and the only photos in the Cerebus Archive that have rounded corners, and their photos are smaller, so it's like essentially… what we're gonna do with this is, while everybody's looking at these photos, “how did you like your trip to Long Island?” It was great. I do remember The Incredible Pulp as a great store, a great store owner, Larry Mirando, and a great customer group. Absolutely no obnoxious fans, all very polite, and all very educated. All very intelligent, and it's like, mhmm, this doesn't happen all the time. So I'm just going to enjoy this as as best I can. And I have to say that I think of all the store signings that I've done, I've had more people, like apart from Now and Then Books, I've had more people say to me, “I saw you at Incredible Pulp” or “Didn't you do a signing at Incredible Pulp?” because it was one of those legendary stores. I'm sure it's not the biggest store on Long Island, but it was, everybody felt like a part of that store. And everybody will get a good laugh out of it because it's, Dave Sim with the mullet haircut. Short on top, long down the back, and what were we thinking of? The girls liked it at the time. It was the the Billy Ray Cyrus time period, I think, or it was before that. And then they went, “Mhmm, no. There's just too many ugly mullets for us. The ones that are nice, are nice, but the ones that are ugly are just ugly.” The biggest experience that I remember from Incredible Pulp was, that was when I was still collecting pre-Pearl Harbor DC superhero comics, which, you know, very very expensive tastes even at the time. And Larry had I think three books that I wanted? Three or four books in his display case, two of them I'm not even sure what they were, and they were in like not terrible shape. Readable shape, but not wonderful shape. But what I do remember was he had an absolute showpiece copy of “Detective Comics” #32, which is like the sixth appearance of Batman, and it's the second last non-Batman cover after “Detective” 27, and it's also the only storyline where Batman kills the Monk, who first appeared as we all know in “Detective Comics” #31. That's him coming up the hill with Batman looming in the background on that Batman cover. Tthis was the second part of that storyline, and Batman shoots to death the Monk, and Dala, his daughter or his girl assistant, my memory is fuzzy these days. Anyway, it was a gorgeous copy of the book, and it's like, this was one of the rare times where I was able to do what I wanted to do, which was trading Cerebus artwork for the comics. So Larry let me take the comics, and then I was faced with the question of, well okay, I looked up the “Overstreet” value of the books, and then I'm going, okay, how many pages is that and which pages are those? Because Larry was, “That's fine. You want the books. They're not something that I specialize in. I'd really like the artwork. I'll take whatever you want to send me.” And I don't know how long it took. In my mind it was years. It's like, it wasn't years, Dave, it was maybe like months or something. But I didn't call Larry and I didn't send him the artwork because I'm going, what artwork am I gonna send him? And how many pages am I gonna send him? And it's like, at that time, I would guess that grading is obviously very much much stricter now than it was back then, but even in my mind's eye what I would have considered at the time like a 9.8 is probably an 8.0, at least, or at least between a 6.0 and an 8.0. And it's like, I'm going, well okay, my most recent copy of the “Overstreet Guide” is the 2019/2020, let's look this book up and how much is that worth now? Let's say low ball six point, highball eight point. Low ball $5,000 , highball $12,000. And it's like I'm going, what pages did I end up sending Larry Mirando? And I'm going, does Larry remember what pages I sent him? Does Larry still have the pages? Did Larry sell the pages and what did Larry sell the pages for? Because they were probably “Church & State” and probably pretty darn good “Church & State” pages. What would they be going for now? Was it, it's a $6,000 book and I traded him three $2000 pages? At the time they were probably about $400 pages and it was maybe all comic books together were 1200. But that's what I remember most vividly from Larry Mirando's Incredible Pulp.
So, thinking, let's, we might as well try and get some cross-pollination thing going here. Why don't, John, you post this as one of your John’s Longbox episodes, and then say, Dave has some questions of his own at the end, and it would be, can you… he said Larry Mirando still just lives around the corner from or not that far away. He doesn't see him all the time, but he sees him reasonably often. Can you have Larry on as a guest and say, here's what I remember of the Dave Sim signing, and look at all of the photos and go, do you recognize any of these customers? Like, you know, some of them would be people that were just there for the signing, but some of them you're gonna go, “Oh, that's who that is” and John, you might be in there. There are definitely some definite kids in the crowd, and you said you were pretty much just a kid at the time, and we'll bounce this back and forth. I would definitely be interested for the photo archive, if you can number the photos and say, “Okay, in photo #4, this person and this person and this person are this person, and this person and this person. The rest of the photos, I don't know wo any anybody is in them.” And that can then become part of the Cerebus Archive. Not only do I have photos from The Incredible Pulp signing that people still refer to, but here in 2023, however long, 30, 40 years after the fact, here's who X number of people are in the photos.
Matt: I'm just wondering if you got photos from the Graham Crackers signing.
Dave: Uhh… I have somewhere, yes. Again, trying to place whether that's out back at Camp David or in the Off-White House. There's not a lot of them. There's not a lot of them.
Matt: Well, that's just the first signing I ever went to.
Dave: Was it?
Matt: Yeah because you were in Chicago and I live in Wisconsin. I'm like, they're gonna be three hours away. I could totally do this! So I took the day off of work and went down.
Dave: [laughs] “I could walk there! I could walk there!”
Matt: Well, not quite walk, but I it was close enough that it's a, I can make a day of this. I can go down, go to the signing, come home, and it'll work out. And of course, I don't know Chicago very well, and I was on, I don't even remember what the name of the street is. It's the main bisection of downtown Chicago where everything to the one side is East and the other side is West, and I get down to the road that Graham Crackers is on, and it's a oneway, so you have to turn right, and I go down the block, get to the end of the road, and then it goes back onto the Interstate or whatever. And I'm like, there's no comic store. What the hell am I doing wrong? And finally I found a parking space and walked into a bank and said, can you tell me where this address is? And the guy went, “Well it's real simple. The road you're on cuts everything in half. You want East, you're on West.” And I'm going, ohh!
Dave: Tah-dah!
Matt: That would make sense! And walk down two blocks, there it is, and I'm going, I feel like a moron. That was also the signing where I asked what happened to Cerebus' sword, cause it wasn't in, when he's leaving the bar at the end of “Rick’s Story”, you know, when he's trying to leave, he thinks about he's leaving without the vest of medallions and there's a thought balloon of the vest of medallions, but where's the sword? And you're like, he doesn't have it anymore. I’m like, no, yeah, he does! And I was confusing the scene in “Minds” where you're explaining what the medallions are. There's the helmet, medallions, and sword floating onto him and then turned to gold. But you had somebody hand you a copy of “Reads” and flip to the page where the sword goes bye-bye, and I kind of stood there like a, yeah, let's not do this anymore! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] I remember that! I remember vividly going, “Dick!”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: No, I’m just… okay, so yeah, leaving off, John, I hope we can get together John's Longbox and Please Hold for Dave Sim, Larry Mirando and Dave Sim this many years later on, and this could be going on all the way through 2024.
Then Dodger gets in, on Alan Moore's birthday, no less! [sings] Happy birthday to you.. no, we're not gonna do that. “Hello to Manly Matt, the now-permanent A Moment of Cerebus dude.” Whoa whoa, wait a minute, permanent?
Matt: Well, you know…
Dave: “And the staggeringly-influential Dave Sim.” Oh, he's being funny in both cases. “I've read the famous stories of the Marvel/Wolveroach affair and know that Groucho Marx probably didn't notice ‘Cerebus’ since he was, you know, dead. But of all the likenesses of real people in ‘Cerebus’ did anyone get upset with you for portraying them? Margaret Thatcher, Alan Moore, Archie Goodwin, Marty Feldman, etc. Was anyone tickled and delighted at their likeness being used? Bonus and controversial question, was that Jim Shooter as Thrunk? The monster started off looking like the Thing but by page 619 of ‘Church & State’ 2, I can't not see Jim Shooter. Is that just my awkward Freudian projection? Thanks for all that you do. MJ Sewall ‘Dodger.’” And okay, answering them in order uh Paul Powers took a copy of “Cerebus” 134, I think it is, yes, the one with Margaret Thatcher on the front with Jaka, to a signing that Margaret Thatcher was doing in Chester, England, where Paul Powers lives for “The Downing Street Years.” And everybody was ushered in and told, “She is only signing ‘The Downing Street Years’ and you have to buy a copy of ‘The Downing Street Years’ to get her to sign. And don't ask her to sign anything else.” And Paul wanted her to sign the “Cerebus” 134, so Paul being Paul Powers and going, “Uh well, you know, I'm not gonna let this throw me off.” He got into line with, everybody got their numbers, and he got his number and started talking to this elderly couple ahead of him in his line and chatting them up and being very charming and whatnot, and making it look as if he was with them. And they had bought a copy of “The Downing Street Years.” And they finally got up to the front of the line with Margaret Thatcher and put the copy of “The Downing Street Years” down and she signed “to whoever it was, Margaret Thatcher” and then Paul, just as she was finishing, put the “Jaka’s Story” in front of her. And it's like, security is there, but security is not like right on top of Margaret Thatcher, they're a little bit at a remove, and they see what he's doing. And it's like, she looks at the copy of the comic book, and she lifts it up, she looks at the front cover, and she turns it over. When she turns it over, it's got the quote on the back from Ralph Bunche, “There are no warlike people, only warlike leaders.” [laughs] And she made a little face that, and then looks at Paul Powers and she goes, “Should I sign this?” And he said, “Oh yes, please.” And she takes her pen and she writes in the bottom right corner, very very neatly and impeccably, “Margaret Thatcher.” And he says thank you, and picks it up, and sort of leaves with the couple ahead of him pretending that he's still with them. And one of the security guys goes, “You really got something there.” [laughs] And he said, “Oh yeah?” And he said, oh yeah, he said, “The agreement was she wasn't signing anything besides ‘The Downing Street Years,’ but we'll let you get away with it. You could probably sell that for a lot of money because she doesn't autograph a lot of stuff.” And certainly the only time you're gonna find her autograph is on official papers or a book that she wrote. So that's that one. Alan Moore? Never heard from him about his appearance in “Cerebus.” Archie Goodwin? Never heard from him. Marty Feldman? No, obviously I don't know Marty Feldman. The Jim Shooter thing, that's not an awkward Freudian projection, that was Gerhard's fault.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: That was Gerhard said, when I was doing the giant stone Thrunk and there was a little guy at the bottom who was repeating everything the giant stone Thrunk was saying, and you know like, going, “I'll be his senior minister or whatever” and Gerhard said, “Make him Archie Goodwin.” And it's like, Gerhard never came up with ideas like that. Like, never said, “You should do this in the story” in terms of content. Like, he’d talk to me about backgrounds or whatever or something like that or effects or you know what I'm picturing here. But the only time he said, “Make him Archie Goodwin” and it's like, oh okay. I did it and I went, oh everybody's gonna think the giant stone Thrunk is Jim Shooter now. And it's like, that one went way past me. I'm not sure that Gerhard meant that one intentionally. But no, Dodger, you're not alone in thinking that giant stone Thrunk was Jim Shooter. And don't look at me, look at Gerhard, it's Gerhard’s idea. I drew it, but I didn't come up with the idea. “Tickled and delighted at their likeness being used?” Chris Claremont said, and I quote, “You can't scare me. I've been parodied by Dave Sim.” And I do have a fax from Neil Gaiman that he sent me back when he had fax capability, which is way way way long ago. Something along the lines of, [Gaiman impression] “No one should ever laugh that hard and that uncontrollably in a room by themselves.” And that was his reference to the last page of the Swoon story where Elrod was Snuff, where Elrod was Death. That tickled Neil Gaiman's fancy.
Matt says, “I remember Mick and Keith were shown copies of theirs, if I recall right, one of them didn't get what it was, and the other wanted to know if they were getting paid for it. But I might be wrong.” It's very close. That was Ken Viola who was a huge Cerebus fan, did the comic book… what was his called?
Matt: “Comic Book Confidential?”
Dave: No no no, that was the other guy.
Matt: “Comic Book Masters.”
Dave: Anyway, he… “Comic Book Masters.” Yes, “Comic Book Masters” and said he was a roadie professionally and had been a roadie for the Rolling Stones, and it's like, can you show this to Mick and Keith? He said, “Well ,you know, the situation comes up where I can do it comfortably, yeah, I'll do it.” And he did show it to them individually. And Keith, yeah, just sort of looked at it, and Ken was definitely closer to Keith than he was to Mick, he was in the Keith camp, and just sort of said, “It's you!” From whatever year that he assumed that it looked most like Keith. And it's like, I guess he flipped through it, just sort of handed it back to him. Mick, when he showed it to him, what he said according to Ken was, “Does he make money at this?” The idea being that if he makes money at this, then we should get a cut on this, or we should sue him because we didn't authorize this. And it's like, that's as far as it got. But they did agree that, I said if I do a thing for charity, a picture, a big closeup of Keith, and then little pictures of Mick Jagger around him, and then another big picture of Mick with little pictures of Keith around him, will they agree to sign the illustration for the charity? I'll sign it and they'll sign it. And Ken asked Keith about that. I don't remember if he asked Mick. He asked Keith and Keith said, “Yeah, you do it.” And that was it, I couldn't finish the piece. It's still sort of like half inked with a little pencil Mick Jaggers around it and it's like, I can't do this! I can't do a caricature of Keith Richards that Keith Richards is actually gonna see and sign. And I don't know why that is, but if you ever want a living example of stagefright, there's Dave Sim's stagefright.
Okay! Travis asks, “If a hobbyist comic book artist self-publishes a comic based on a novel that is in the public domain is there a standard verbiage that should be used in the indicia to protect or assert ownership of the comic version of the story? Thanks for passing this along, Matt. Recording and publishing audio of beloved artists on the internet is a great thing to do. Thank you for the Please Holds.” And Matt says, “You're welcome! Wait, is this the Travis that still owes me money for the Remastered ‘Form & Void’? My wife keep asking if I got paid yet! I'm running low on excuses. Where's my money?!” Is it? Is it the same guy?
Matt: I don't know.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: That's why I'm asking now because I'm like, I'm not sure which Travis this is.
Dave: M’kay. You're thinking Travis Pelkie?
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: M’kay. Alright. Well ,we'll wait and see. My answer to the question would be, since not that's not something that I would do, because I'm an open ownership kind of guy. Like, if you want to take my indicia, which says, you know, if it's a raw material in another creative work, then you're welcome to use it. Then, that's not going to protect or assert your ownership as most people understand the terms “protect” or “assert,” but then I don't believe in “protect” or “assert.” So it would be one of those things, I would look for other things like, [exhales] uh let's say, Bill Sienkiewicz’s “Moby Dick” adaptation, and see what the Indicia looks like on that. Because whatever the indicia was on that, that was high price legal talent going, “Okay, we can't say that we own ‘Moby Dick’ but we can say that we own Bill Sienkiewicz's version of it, or we have a stake in Bill Sienkiewicz's version of it.” And just see what that looks like. If you're still skittish, go to an intellectual property lawyer near you geographically, and make an appointment and say, “Here's the whole backstory on this. Here's the possibly gray area that it enters into. What would you recommend as the phrasing on this, and how many billable hours do you think it's going to take you to arrive at that? And do you actually have to do it or can you get an intern to do it, and are they gonna charge me less? And thank you for my free coffee, which is never a free coffee at a lawyer.”
Matt: Well, just looking at my copy of “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, adapted by Will Eisner, all it says in there in this is “copyright 1998 Will Eisner” with the ISBN numbers and then the Library of Congress cataloging and publication data. Where it's Eisner, Will. Moby Dick/ by Herman Melville, adapted by Will Eisner.
Dave: Huh.
Matt: I mean considering I know how thick “Moby Dick” is and I know how thin this version of “Moby Dick” is, I would say that yeah, it's probably, all you got to say is that it's copyright you, and it's an adaptation of somebody else.
Dave: It's maybe one of those things that if you're really concerned about it, Travis and you really want a definitive answer, you could probably research it on your side at the comic store or online just by checking other adaptations. That's what Will chose to do. Who published that? Was that Kitchen Sink?
Matt: Uh, it's not Kitchen Sink. It's Nantier Beall Minoustchine, nbm.
Dave: M’kay. Oh, nbm? Alright. Yeah, they would have looked into it. But they're over in the indie direction. They're really not in the DC and Marvel kind of direction, which is another question that you have to ask for yourself. Like “how strict do I want to make this? And where's my particular loyalty?” Check adaptations and what the indicia says in books, that “I consider this an honorable publishing company.” Well, how do they express it? Or do they even express it?
Matt: I'm just trying to think, I know Marvel did a version of Classics Illustrated for a little while in the late 90s.
Dave: Yeah, that's something you could check. That's the best I can do in terms of a definitive answer, since I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a an intern, I'm not an assistant. It's, the more groundwork you can do before you go to the lawyer, the less the lawyer is gonna cost you. Although, it's still gonna cost you.
Mike Sewall-- hey, wait a minute! [laughs] It's like, yeah, here he comes again. “Desperate for book plates!” We have dealt with this at Mike Sewall's prompting. I had even forgotten about the book plates. They turned out to have been done in 2014 as part of a Kickstarter and that was before my wrist went South. So right now we're just trying to track down the Sean Robinson book plates, because they were much sharper. I think Studiocomix Press would still have them because they definitely printed them. As soon as we know, we can certainly print out a set of book plates for you and I'll be happy to hand letter on them your name. Probably not as detailed as I did back in 2014, but it'll still be, you'll look at it and go, “Yeah, that's Dave Sim lettering” which is really the idea behind having Cerebus book plates signed and your name bettered on them by Dave Sim. And Mike Sewall, MJ Sewall, it might be might be MJ Sewall because it's two letter shorter and it's the MJ might be the fancier lettering, and the Sewall less fancier lettering, just depending on how the wrist is doing that day. But 16 plates isn't really that difficult. Don't know what the demand is on them, or would be on them. Eddie Khanna was saying, “This is how much they went for on the Kickstarter in 2014.” I went oh, those are pretty good prices for hand lettering. So we might try it again with the Kickstarter in January, the CAN 10 Kickstarter, and CAN 10 and “Akimbo.” Definitely, it's as soon as we find out about it, it's like, uh no, you never have to worry about asking, “Can I get these?” It's like, we just have to figure out where they are, because something from 2014 is under 9 years of other stuff, either physically or conceptually or cybernetically or all three.
Matt: You know in 2014 when you guys first offered the first set of book plates, a young Matt Dow went, I can get 16 of these! And it's a fairly good price! And then it was, oh you can get them personalized. Like, I can't afford 16 personalized book plates. Not thinking that, hey, they might offer these again. So I think I have 15 of them left that are not personalized, cause when I gave a copy of “High Society” to the neighbor girl, I pulled one off and slapped it on there, and I hand lettered her name in it, and her mom thought that you had done it .And she's like, “How much did this cost you?” Like, no no no no, you don't understand. These have been sitting in an envelope for the past 6 years.
Dave: Well, [announcer voice] “the 2024 Please Hold for Dave Sim earmark Cerebus FFF Fan Freak Freebie!” I'm not gonna go through the whole again, but Matt, if you send them to me, I think I can letter “Matt Dow” on yours.
Matt: Well, I'll wait till the Kickstarter and I'll just throw some money, and then I'll have one that's personalized, and 15 that aren't, cause the 15 I have are the George version, which isn't as crisp as the Sean version. That was the other one, when the Sean version came out, I'm like, son of a bitch. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: You know, I'm never gonna be able to buy these again, get 16 of them now, and then six months later it's a, really didn't think that concept through, did you? [laughs]
Dave: There you go. Well, you did, you just didn't have enough information to…
Matt: It's the, walking into the store and there's an action figure that… or it was one time, I walked in and it was an action figure that was online exclusive but somehow got released to this discount store. And there were three of them. And I'm like, I'm gonna buy these cause I can sell them and make money! And I got home and looked online, and they're worthless! And I'm going, this was one of them “you really should have thought this through!”
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right.
Matt: They are in a box in the basement. One of these days I'm gonna go to the toy store and be like, alright, what can I get for this?
Dave: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay, that's the bottom line on that one. Dodger, keep your eyes open and I already talked to him about, if you're buying CAN 6 through 9, wait until January, and you can get 10 at the same time. That does lead into something that I think we're going to be able to do on the Kickstarter in January, which, because it is CAN 10 with comic books and other stuff, we should be able to do one shipping price. If you buy CAN 10 and you pay the shipping on that, all of the other add-ons on the Kickstarter, you just add it on. There's no postage charge to it at all. And in Dodger's case, I said, okay, we'll charge you postage for each of the the Cerebus Archive and essentially what I'll be saying is, okay, Rolly, he paid this much for postage. Definitely concentrate on his and tell me how much it cost to ship his with five of them, and subtract that amount from how much he paid, and we'll send him back a rebate cheque. And Dodger said, “Don't send me a check. Just send me cool stuff.” [laughs] And it's like, now we're starting to build a list, because everybody's saying basically the same thing. “I don't want a refund, I don't want a check, just send me stuff that you've got lying around at Camp David.” And Rolly's getting good at that, because Rolly knows where all the cool stuff is and he knows how to load up people with cool stuff. So, it's one of those things, the next time that you're doing your backer report, I think that'll be one of our questions. If we charge you too much for postage or we find out that you should have gotten something for less money, do you want a refund cheque or do you want cool stuff? And that'll be up to you. Some people are gonna want a rebate cheque, some are gonna want cool stuff.
Matt: I'm going to have to look on my desk. Margaret made her “Cerebus” #1 stamp and she sent me a card where it's the Cerebus is in gray, and the background is like pastels, yellows and pinks and really light blues. And the back on, I can't say the back, cause it's on the left hand side in the lower, which would be the back if you fold it in half as a card. It says where's Pink Floyd, well I scanned it and added Pink Floyd, and Iguana and Beer in Pink Floyd “The Wall” shirts and sunglasses that have the “Dark Side of the Moon” prism in it.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And all four of them are singing a Pink Floyd song. And I printed out two of them on a piece of cardboard and took it to the copy store and said, I want a 100 of these, or 75 of these. Yeah, it was 75, and they made my copies, and I didn't look really closely at them. But I got home and the pastels are light, like the some of the pink is gone, some of the yellow-- or no, the Pink's there, the yellow is mostly gone, and I'm like, well that kind of sucked. So the initial idea was 50 for me, 50 for Margaret, and 50 for you. And when I got home I'm like, well these kind of suck. But I sent Margaret her’s, I'm pretty sure, but I think the 50 for you are still sitting on my desk. So when I box up your Christmas present, which came in the mail yesterday. Spoilers! I ain't telling you. I'll throw the cards in and you can throw it in the cool stuff pile cause if anything you can just do a Cerebus head sketch somewhere on it and sign it and now it's a piece of paper that's been worked on by you, Margaret, and me, and it's kind of funny.
Dave: I can't wait. I think I might keep them all for myself. That's too cool stuff. That's too cool for a Fan Freak Freebie. No no no! I’m working on my contribution…
Matt: Well, the other part about it is because they are quote unquote “misprinted” and I'm like, what am I gonna do with all these, cause they're not what I want. I want the cool image. These are the sort of cool, so I made a deal at one point on AMoC of $5 gets you a stupid card, $10 gets you a stupid card and I let the seven-year-old scribble whatever she wants on it. So I have three or four of that I went, okay, Natasha, you got to work ahead here and have a couple of them. And I'm thinking, okay, she's gonna do her version of Cerebus or something. No, there's one that's got a star that's got like eyelashes, there's one I think has a rainbow, and I'm going, well I did say the kid's gonna do whatever she wants. [laughs]
Dave: That's right. That's right. I might get Rolly and I, just give him him a pink crayon and go, Rolly, go to town on these. Anytime you're gonna throw these in.
“Rounding back to the Cerebus phonebooks, I posted Eddie's Diamond list and Michael Grabowski said, it seems to me that paying for the printing of remastered phonebooks is exactly what Kickstarter is for. What's it cost to print 100 Remastered ‘Melmoths’ and ship them to 100 North Americans, plus pay Kickstarter, and Gerhard, and Sean, and Seiler's estate, etc. I'm assuming Seiler proofready it.” No, he didn't proof “Melmoth.” Never got as far as that one, but I take your meaning. “That's the Kickstarter donation price that get you a Remastered ‘Melmoth.’ If it doesn't meet the goal of paying for 100 Remastered ‘Melmoth,’ there's no Remastered ‘Melmoth’ for anyone, simple as that. If more than a 100 are sold at that price, the per unit cost for AV drops, it keep the gravy. Does he already know that the books would be un-Kickstartably expensive?” That's a very good, is that an adjective or an ad-- yeah, an adjective. “UnKickstartably.” No, I don't know. The problem I would see with that is, we're trying to schedule the Kickstarters closer together, and we have more guys doing Kickstarters. Like they're in the on-deck circle, it's just a very slow motion race as to who gets his “Cerebus in Hell?” done, it gets kickstarted. I'm hoping, and I'm not sure if this is a faint hope or a could happen hope, that I can do the Cerebus Archive portfolios more frequently. It's like, every two months would be a stretch. Can I do it every four months? Can I do it every five months? I want to see how long it takes me to do the text on CAN 10, “Minds”, which I'm working on now. I'm just approving the proof on that one. The problem that I would see with this is, that if I go okay, I have no idea if we can sell enough of these. Here's the price that I'll put them at where this will cover the printing, this will cover everybody making some money off of it, on a hundred of them getting done, and make that the goal. Then if you don't get to the goal, then you've used up however long the Kickstarter was, three weeks or whatever, or four weeks, and there's no money, and the project, you basically just used up three weeks of the calendar, and you’ve got nothing to show for it. It's like, we can maybe build up to trying something like that, but we have to see what we can do regularly. I mean, we were very lucky with the “MarvelManVark” Kickstarter, because somebody at Kickstarter themselves put a goal of 6,200 on it, and fortunately Eddie Khanna blanched visibly and went, “No. No, we don't do that. Dave always low balls, and you know, capital L Low balls the target.” And I just heard the same thing from Sean Robinson with one of his Living The Line books, he said, “I put a higher goal on it just to go, okay, what does this do?” And he said, “I think we're gonna get there, but we're only like halfway there, and we're past the halfway point” or whatever it was. And it's like, “I'm really starting to sweat. So don't do that. Always lowball the goals so whatever happens, the project does actually happen.” So, with the trade paperbacks, the fact that there's 15 copies at Diamond, we're still in the situation of, no, those are Diamond’s last 15 copies, and then there's however many copies Aardvark-Vanaheim has in inventory, and I'm going to encourage Eddie to do that, as well. Like, if we're talking about Diamond inventory, this is how many they've got. We should be talking about Aardvark-Vanaheim inventory, this is how much we've got. So we're all looking at the same chess board. We're definitely waiting until Diamond sells their 15, and then we're gonna sell Diamond the original copies of “Melmoth.” As long as we have copies, until we're sold out ,then there's no Remastered version of something that's going to be done. We have to be completely out of the books because otherwise the books just get stranded. Matt, as you point out, there’s 15 copies of “Melmoth” at Diamond. “Latter Days” only has eight. As long as we're on the same page with that, it would be talking about “Melmoth”? Diamond would have to sell all of theirs, we would have to sell all of ours, and then there would have to be a gap there where I went, okay, if Sean hasn't already been paid for remastering them, and if Sean hasn't remastered “Melmoth”, now we start on that end of it. We can maybe find other angles on it. Michael, if you're asking specifically about “Melmoth”, as Matt says, “I don't know why he picked that book” maybe he picked it because that's the one that he would really like to see a Remastered version of. We could have, I could picture an interregnum situation on that where, Diamond has sold their 15 copies, we've sold however many copies we have, there has been a break, it has been remastered by Sean, it's now ready to go, and we could print a remastered copy for you before the Remastered “Melmoth” is offered, and again, I could do a drawing or a sketch or something in it and you will get that one before anyone else gets it. This is all focusing on Please Hold for Dave Sim. This is the core of the core of the core group. The FFF Fan Freak Freebie, we will definitely accommodate you, if it's like, “I'm not going to rest easy until I have the Remastered ‘Memoth’ and a Remastered ‘Melmoth’ hardcover.” It's like, mhmm, well okay, that's not gonna be a top priority or a front of line thing just because “Melmoth” was never ever a popular book. But Michael Grabowski is definitely a very popular Cerebus fan around here, if I recognize your name, you're definitely one of the people keeping me alive. So if we have to move Heaven and Earth to get you a Remastered “Melmoth,” we will get you a Remastered “Melmoth.”
Matt: I think he picked that book at random, but like I said, it was weird that like there's three other books that are out of print, and then there's like other books that are lower stock, and I don't know. I’m willing to bet that AV from the warehouse giveaway there's probably enough copies of most of those issues that you could just bind them yourself if you really wanted a hardcover.
Dave: Yes.
Matt: I mean, what content is it that you're interested in? Are you interested in “Melmoth” in general? Are you interested in Remastered “Melmoth”? That's where the fractured fandom comes in of, you know, the guys, “We want hardcovers!” Well that's nice. You got money?
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, I mean the the original hardcovers, the Aardvark-Vanaheim hardcovers, which were here's all of the pages that we've got in the Cerebus Archive from that book, and if you're willing to pay to get those scanned and printed full size and Remastered by Sean, and then bound into books, and special drawing done for you in the front. We had a patron who bought the first two of those, I forget which two books he got done, and they were 10,000 US each. And it's like, well, it doesn't have to be 10,000. If you want to say, “Okay, I really want all of the ‘Guys’ pages done under those circumstances, and I want to buy them 10 at a time, and have them bound in hardcovers, and I'm willing to pay $1000 each.” Well okay, it's one of those things I'll go, $1,000 is $1,000. I'll see how doable that is. Anything that can just be done here, offsite storage of the artwork, bring it here, get it scanned, get it over to Studiocomix Press, get it printed, get the printing approved, sent to Michael Grabowski, and here's what he wants it to look like. Okay, this is what it looks like. You want it a little lighter, you want more of the staining? It's your book, you let us know. That can all be accommodated. But in terms of 100 people? 100 people, it makes more sense to do three variant covers of an issue of “Cerebus in Hell?” and make them incredibly rare, the rarest “Cerebus” comic books that there are, and turn that around. The turnaround time is a central element, where “MarvelManVark” from time the Kickstarter was done, October to mid-December when Rolly has them all out the door, all in the mail system. That's what we want to do. And that's well okay, this is what we're geared to do. I'm open to suggestions, but I also want to see my new work done, I want to see work by David Birdsong done, and work by Chad Lambert made available. So that has to be one of the priorities. But if there's somethat you want as an individual Cerebus fan and you can say, “Okay, I think this is what I can afford” and you know, maybe you can get five other Cerebus fans to go in on it? If you can go, “Okay, I talked to five other people who are saying, ‘yeah, that package that you described, that you would be willing to pay $500 for, I'd be willing to pay $500 for.’” Well okay, now you're talking 2500 for five of the same thing, just with a different title page with a drawing on it. I'm amenable to that, but always looking at me and saying, “I want you to do what I want and we'll just have to take the risk that there's hundred other people that want what I want.” It's like, mhmm, the turnaround time and using up the calendar, that's the flaw that I see in that one. But if you have a contrary argument, I'd be happy to hear your contrary argument on that, Michael.
Okay! Moving on to “and in a similar vein, Michiel” is that--?
Matt: That's how I'm pronouncing it
Dave: What's that?
Matt: That's how I'm pronouncing it.
Dave: Okay, Michiel or miceehiel, sorry about that. No offense intended. “Commented on Diamond having 28 copies of Collected Letters volume two. I was under the assumption Letters volume two went out of print a long time ago. Am I mistaken or did some stock unexpectedly turn up?” Eddie came back with, “They went off of the Diamond list for years, then all of a sudden appeared a couple of months back. So I assumed someone in the Diamond warehouse found them under the Ark of the Covenant or something.” [laughs] Yeah, I always get that mental picture myself. It's either that or they were under that sled with all the gunk on it. Matt says, “Good man that Khanna. With 100 more like him, we could conquer the Feld Valley. Nyuck nyuck nyuck.” Yeah, this is one of the things that I decided, okay, this is how we're gonna have to do this from now on. It's been an absolute adventure because I get the Diamond inventory Aardvark-Vanaheim inventory list every Sunday from Eddie, without fail. Without fail. And it's very very tiny, so I have the magnifying glass right next to the fax machine, and Sunday when the Sabbath is over at midnight, there's the list, and you never know what's going to be on it. And Eddie says, “Suddenly this appeared. Suddenly these two books are missing.” So now you can you can play along at home because Eddie will be posting the Diamond inventory, and you can say exactly those sort of things. “I thought Collected Letters volume two was sold out.” If something shows up on the list that hasn't been on the Diamond inventory list, I would really recommend getting your keister down to your local comic shop right away, because it has been known to happen that, okay, they haven't been on the list for a year and a half, there they are. Oh, now they're gone again!
Matt: “Form & Void”did that with the original printing. It was gone, then it came back, and then it was gone.
Dave: Right. Right. Yeah, it's a big place. I mean, let's cut Diamond some slack here. If you picture how many comic books they carry, and how many trade paperbacks they carry, and what the whole filing system must be like, it's, I'm surprised that it doesn't happen more often frankly. But it is a concern from this side when, “Okay these are really the books that we're more concerned about.”
“And Zipper has this.” Zipper, and we are coming down to the end? We are!
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: “Hi Matt! I hope you and your family had a pleasant Thanksgiving.” Did you have a pleasant Thanksgiving?
Matt: I worked, because it was double time and a half, so I worked 10 hours and then I went, got changed, went to the in-laws, where I mostly just sat there and either pet the cat or stared at my infant nephew and made him giggle.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: He kept giving me this nervous kind of worried look like, “Who the frick is this?” And then I would start to hum the “Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends” theme, and he would giggle. Light up, ear to ear, grin like, and I'm like, he has not seen this show, he just likes me going “bum-bum bum-bum!”
Dave: [laughs] Well, that's what 10 hours of work will do for you on a Thanksgiving. It sounds pretty pleasant. Sounds pretty pleasant.
Matt: It wasn't horrible.
Dave: “Here is here is my answer and question for Dave. Hi Dave! My answer for this month is Frank Springer.” Who was “National Lampoon”'s utility man at producing borderline cartoon realism, photorealism comic pages when BWS, Bernie Wrightson, or Neal Adams weren't available? And If you doubt that, then you just Google Image search “Frank Springer National Lampoon.” He did a lot of really high high quality work, and very very funny stuff. Very very balanced illustrative, one of the great utility mans. You're never going to get him at the top of the list of Heritage Auctions original pages, but if anybody came out with a collection of Frank Springer work from “National Lampoon,” I would be at the front of the line to get it. “My question is, with 2023 coming to a close, what big announcement do you have for everyone for 2024?” And I have an indie crossover with a 37-year indie veteran. The plot outline has been approved, this guy picked up his plot outline of the crossover with with his indie title, and I read through it and I went, this is pretty good. This is pretty good. So it was, he emailed it through Rolly, so I had it as a Word document. So he did it in regular type face, I just changed it to bold type face, and then did my insertions of, okay, here's your plot outline. Here's stuff that I would stick in here. Looks like it's going to, it will be a canonical crossover. It happens between “Cerebus” #2 and #3. And he's emailed me a colour piece of Cerebus with his crossover characters, plural, and another one of Cerebus with character singular. And that's as far as I'm going on that one. 37 year indie veteran! I'm sitting there going, I knew the title, but 37 years? Congratulations.
Matt: I'm pretty sure I know what this is.
Dave: Well, you keep it to yourself. Because…
Matt: We can't announce it because it's not 2024 yet!
Dave: That's right. And we still got a lot to talk about on it. I don't think there's gonna be any kind of deal breaker at this point, but we definitely are, nothing slowing it down, and nothing's stopping it, and wouldn't be terribly unhappy if anybody guessed, but there you go. That's as as close as I can get to a big capital B-I-G announcement. Another weird Comic Art Metaphysics, just before we were doing Please Hold for tonight, I had a phone message from Canada Revenue Agency. Which is not a happy thing. That's our equivalent of the IRS. So picture getting a phone message from someone at the IRS that they have to check some information with you. But the guy was very specific saying that, “I want to check the post code for your home address, because it's in the name of the corporation.” And it's like, mhmm, okay, yeah, I have no problem with that. So I phoned him and he was off by one digit, and I said, okay, that's good to know, and everything was copacetic. That's the least harmful encounter with the CRA I'm probably ever going to have, but I had an invoice from the indie creator who sent me a package of books in his first overture, and I went, I'm staring at it because it's right next to the phone, and he had the same mistake in the postal code that the CRA did.
Matt: [laughs] That is kind of weird!
Dave: That's a weird one. That's a weird one. Okay. Matt says, “I know this one! You're selling everything to DC and moving to Aruba. About dang time you start taking retirement seriously.” [laughs] Not Aruba, Orillia. Even if I sold everything to DC, there's no way I would be able to afford Aruba. Google search Orillia, o-r-I-l-l-I-a, and take a look on it on Google Maps, and then swoop down into it. There you go. That's [laughs] if I sold everything through Heritage Auctions and sold the Off-White House, I'd still only be in that category.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: And Matt adds, “But really, might as well drop the dime on the new ‘Cerebus’ #1 coming out in March 2024, the 20th anniversary of issue 300 coming out.” And we've already covered that! How about that.
Matt: Hours ago!
Dave: Hours ago! “And since we're recording this on the seventh, 10 days before the 20th anniversary of your finishing your share of the work on ‘Cerebus,’ one must assume you're going to celebrate by finishing the Strange Death of Alex Raymond. You know, symmetry. Get it? Sim-a-tree? Dang, I'm funny (you people don't get me).” That's right. “But seriously, any big plans? Re-retiring?” No, uh, absolutely no possibility right now of retiring. The best experience I've ever had in my life, and I could say this without a word of a lie, is working on Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and finishing a page that is coming out so good. How good is it? It's coming out so good that I put myself in my own mind up in the ranks with the top flight photorealists, and I've had a few of that experiences with “Narutobus” pages and with Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell pages. That's it. That's, however good that page is coming out, that's how good my life is. If the page is anything below that, the quality of my life sinks below that. Everything else is just everything else. It's what I do. I read scripture aloud. I fast. I pray.I work on comics. I only go out two days a week to pick up newspapers, Monday and Wednesday, pick up newspapers while I'm fully caffeinated, and picking up coffee. And that's really all I do, but this is exactly the life that I always wanted. Now it's just a matter of, how far do I get? Do I get to the end of Strange Death of Alex Raymond? And can I keep knocking out pages that are as good as I could ever have imagined myself drawing?
And there you go, at 10 minutes past 10:00, it's, that wasn't quite our first internet Please Hold sleepover, [laughs] it was pretty darn close.
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Say hi to Paula, say hi to Bullwinkle, say hi to Janis Pearl, from Dave Sim, and we'll do this again next month, Matthew.
Matt: Next year, Dave. Next year!
Dave: Next year! Next year.
Matt: Have a wonderful anniversary. I mean, it's a Sunday, so I know what you'll be doing. And have a Merry Christmas!
Dave: Thank you! You too. Have a good night.
Matt: You too. Bye.
____________________
Next Time: Jen better post or I'm giving Margaret her parking space...
No comments:
Post a Comment