[guitar music]
Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt. This is a little later than you thought it was gonna be.
Matt: Yeah. I was looking at my phone and at one point my phone's like, “You have no service.” I'm like oh, don't tell me Dave's calling and I can't answer!
Dave: Okay. I set the alarm to do the sunset prayer, and I thought I was setting it for PM, and I was setting it for AM.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Just too many 20 hour days for Grampaw last week or so. And that was it. I closed my eyes at, whatever, 3:30? And the next thing it was 7:30.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay, are we recording? Grampa’s gonna grab some Diet Coke here.
Matt: Okay, we are recording, but go ahead.
Dave: Oh man. Okay. I must sound a little rougher than I usually do.
Matt: Ah, no, you sound about the same. I probably sound funny because I'm just getting over a cold.
Dave: Oh, are you? Okay. It's nice that we call them colds again. That it's not like you're a genocidal COVID casualty.
Matt: Uh, I find that if I have any symptoms that are flu, cold, COVID, anything it's a cold until I find out otherwise and I'm just not gonna check unless I'm really thinking this feels really weird.
Dave: Yep. Yeah. And that’s… go ahead.
Matt: The new one is RSV, which is a respiratory something virus, and a woman at work came to me cause I'm married to a nurse so I know everything about the medical field.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: She was like, “RSV?” and I'm like yeah? Like, “Should my son get the vaccine?” I'm like, well, it's, they give the vaccine to real young kids and really old people, cause that's the two groups that are most susceptible. And I'm like, I mean, he's seven, so he should be fine. She's like, “Okay, cause my mom's got it.” I'm going, how old is she? “71.” Yeah, she probably wants the vaccine. “Oh she was supposed to get it tomorrow but because Insurance wouldn't pay for it till this year and, and now she tested positive” and this woman at work is freaking out cause her mom's got a heart condition and she's got COPD, I think or, no, she uses a CPAP machine for sleep apnea. I'm like, yeah, no, it sounds like your mom should probably call her doctor and be like, “Should I go to the hospital?” I mean. And and she's like, “Well yeah, that's what we're freaking out about right now” and I'm going, okay, well you know, not my headache, sorry.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. “That's the best advice I can give you right there.” Okay, “here it is, 2024! The year the film version of ‘A Boy and His Dog’ takes place.” I did not know that!
Matt: I actually, I looked it up. The story, the actual book by Harlan Ellison also takes place in 2024.
Dave: Does it, really? Okay. Yeah, there's a whole list of those. What was “Back to the Future?”
Matt: Uh, 2015.
Dave: 2015? So we're catching up on all of these, and uh, yeah, yes, it is dystopia, but it's not your father's dystopia. “Mickey and Minnie Mouse are in the public domain.” Yes. “As is ‘Lady Chatterly's Lover.’ And we're still doing the Please Hold for Dave Sim thing. It is my turn to remember Jeff Seiler.” Yes, it is. So, why don't you do that one right now?
Matt: Well, I pulled a visual remembrance from a ringer, kicker of a new Kickstarter Steve Peters, who says, “Going through my archive of convention sketches looking for stuff for a future publication. Found these that I did for Seiler at S.P.A.C.E. in 2018, the last time I ever saw him.” And the visual viewers will get to see a Cerebus that looks suspiciously like the “Cerebus in Hell?” passive figure, and Jeff as one of Steve's alien, I believe I'm pronouncing this right, Lekru. And the audio listeners get to hear me say, hey, look, there's pictures, and I’d describe them for you but I don't have enough time.
Dave: That's an amazing likeness of Seiler.
Matt: I wonder who posed for it.
Dave: I mean, apart from the alien thing. It's like, I drew Jeff once, but that was tracing a photograph, and even when I was doing it, I was going, man, if you look in the dictionary under nondescript, there's a little picture of Jeff Seiler there and it's, I would not have wanted to try doing what Steve's done here. Congratulations, Mr Peters.
Matt: It is an amazing likeness. I'm willing to bet Jeff sat next to him for an hour at the convention while Steve was drawing this, and dealing with running a table.
Dave: Right. We could maybe ask Steve to flesh that out for us. Did he have Seiler sitting right next to him, and and did he say, “Okay, don't move?”
Matt:Cause I know Jeff had a, especially towards the end, had a tendency of, at a convention if there was an empty chair, “Oh well, I'll sit down!”
Dave: Right. Right. He had been such a such a S.P.A.C.E. veteran, “Who could deny me sitting space? Any place?” Anyway, that's great. Yeah, so, Steve Peters has got a new Kickstarter going.
Matt: Yeah, it’s “Ghosts of Rabbit Hell” and it's gonna have a photo cover because apparently he has four figures of the four main characters that were made for him. And they're rewards on the Kickstarter, and it's little sewn figures with magnets in the feet so you can stick them to metal.
Dave: Really?
Matt: And he's shown some of the artwork, and it looks very much like it's probably gonna be more “Rabbit Hell” than “Comicverse”, but he's also working on a new “Comicverse” strip where he's taken suggestions from the audience for favorite sci-fi fantasy panels or images that he can incorporate into each panel. And he's doing a panel a day for all of January.
Dave: Again, congratulations to Steve. I actually, I'm getting ahead of things here now. That's on page two, and I've got the Lank Stephens segment to do at this point. And this one's gonna be a general observation for any creator who is, as Lank was doing when he contacted me and I hope he's still doing, launching a new comics title and laying the groundwork for it. All of my recommendations have been on the literal creative side so far. That, here's the parameters that Lank gave me, okay, if it was my project and those were my parameters, this is what I would be working on. This gets into the more general thing of, it's 2024, so if you're launching or planning to launch a series, and you started working on the groundwork and started doing the creativity, one of the things that you should be doing at the early stage, because of the way that the internet has completely transformed how all of us do things, including self-publishing comics. Promote what it is you're doing. If you've got the visual concept and you got the title, and you've got the format that you're doing it in, now you just have to start moving ahead and being productive. How are you going to sell it? And there you get into the most confounding thing, and at the same time the most advantageous thing about the internet, things do go viral on the internet. Just, name one thing off the top of your head that's going virual right today, January 4th, 2024.
Matt: Ah, I honestly don't know.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: I'm just connected enough to have a hand in the game, but not connected enough to be, okay what's threatening the most? Type thing.
Dave: Okay. But we're both in agreement that something is doing that right now, that is just epitomizing January 4th, 2024. And pre-internet the title ”Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” was in that category. If you're doing your title, and you're doing your concept, definitely invest a lot of mental time going, “Do I have something like that, or can I come up with something like that?” That is, everybody that heard “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” they laugh and go, “Oh that's funny. That's funny. That's an actual comic book?” Yes, that's an actual comic book. “I got to go find one of them. That's really really funny.” It's almost impossible to do, which is why when somebody does it, it's usually accidental, and they have no idea that they have just invented something that is now going to have billion dollar commercial potential. Siegel and Shuster didn't know that when they went,” Uh, Superman! Uh yeah, let's do Superman. Everybody's talking about Superman, you know, Nietzsche, and Adolf Hitler, and storming around Europe, and everybody's talking about the Superman. We'll do our Superman, and we'll do it like Flash Gordon.” Having no idea that this was a one-in-a-billion chance transformative thing. You never know that either when you're a comics creator that this thing that you're working on that you hope, “Maybe it'll sell enough copies so I can quit my job” as Kevin had boiling lobsters in Maine. Yeah, you will be able to quit your job, and you have no idea exactly what sort of scale there is, apart from that. It's not gonna be quite the Beatles, it's not gonna be quite Elvis, but in terms of the comic book field, it's gonna be pretty much the biggest thing since Spider-Man and the biggest thing since Superman. So, if you do find it and you do manage to get it down to a single image, a title, a tagline, something that people go, “Oh I got to share that with everybody on my Facebook” and everybody that looks at it goes, “Oh I've got to share that.” Everybody that they share it with goes, “I have to share that.” It's worth investing the time going, “I can't make lightning strike, but I can at least wet my myself down and go running around out on the golf course, which is going to maximize the potential of lightning striking.” A very strange metaphor. So, that's my advice for this time. It's almost impossible to do, but it's well worth keeping it in your consciousness as somebody who hasn't created a book yet, that is in the process of creating a book. Maximize the chance of it going viral.
Okay! “And then to the pile of questions from our ever loyal and wonderful listeners.” So that brings us to Steve Peters again, Kickstarter of “Ghosts of Rabbit Hell”, asks, “Is it too late for a Please Hold question?” And you interject, “For you, Steve? Never.” Was it late?
Matt: No, actually I just started writing the fax when I saw on Facebook, because he sent it through Facebook Messenger, I had a message, and I clicked on it, it was Steve. And I'm going, normally Steve is good for the fax gets sent up and it's “hey is it too late for?” and yeah yeah yeah. I just sent it but I'll see if I can work it in. And this time, I was kind of waiting for it, cause I figured he was going to say something.
Dave: How about that? Maybe that's a good omen for Steve on something, that hasn't happened before. So maybe “Ghosts of Rabbit Hell”, he's wet himself down and he's running around out on the golf course. Good for you, Steve. “Anyway, I was curious to know if Dave had any thoughts about Mickey Mouse entering the public domain and its implications. So, Dave, thoughts on Micky's freedom?” And here we're looking at the “Dreaming in Dragon!” splash panel, which has the newly liberated Mickey walking through, and Steve, it's January 1st 2024, not 2023 that you got written on here. Don't like to be critical, but uh…
Matt: He actually, if you look slightly above where it says 23 and to the right of Mickey, he put one 1-1-2024 into the panel itself.
Dave: Okay. Grampaw's eyesight isn't that good anymore. I apologize, Steve.
Matt: Oh no, he said that this happens every year when he starts one of these on the first of the year he puts the wrong year, like he's done it multiple times.
Dave: Okay! I'm getting better at that. I used to do it on my first three or four cheques, and I haven't done it in a couple of years, so sometimes Grampaw's getting better, not often, but sometimes. Coincidentally, The National Post ran The Washington Post article “Mickey's latest adventure, the world's most famous mouse is finally in the public domain, but it doesn't mean there aren't rules.” And I take issue with a lot of the stuff in the article, not surprisingly, on the public domain thing. There's some interesting quotes in the article, one of them is the, where's uh, I've got his quote highlighted here… oh, a Cartoon historian and the Emmy winning host of PBS's “Cartoon Academy” is one of their one of their experts in the article, calls it “An ironic twist for Disney which built their empire on public domain fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, and at the same time they have the reputation for its intense intense legal vigilance when it comes to protecting its properties, calls that dynamic the ‘love triangle’ among Disney, its Mickey protection efforts, and its savviness with adapting nonprotected works.” Yeah, I mean, that's one of those, if Disney was doing “Cinderella” or Disney was doing whatever intellectual property was in the public domain as an animated film, they were protected by the amount of money that they were investing in it. If Disney's doing “Sleeping Beauty” and you're an animation company, they're going to outspend you doing their adaptation and the amount of time and energy that they put into it, and the amount of man hours they had to invest. So there's no point in going, “Well, okay, if Disney's doing Sleeping Beauty, I'll do Sleeping Beauty. Our studio will do Sleeping Beauty.” It's, mhmm, you really don't want to do that. But that doesn't mean that it was established legally that you can't do that, it's, no, it's outspending. And there is a quote in the article from… [laughs] I'm looking for the name of the representative of the Walt Disney Company and it just says “the Walt Disney Company told the Washington Post.” [laughs] And it’s like, yeah, see, up at that level, it's “ignore the man behind the curtain. We are Oz the Great and Terrible Walt Disney Company and we are Oz the Great and Terrible Washington Post, and we're going to pretend that this is just a factual conversation.” And it's not, it's “We are the rulers of the universe and we dictate terms.” So, the quote is, “’Ever since Mickey Mouse's first appearance in the 1928 short film
‘Steamboat Willie’, people have associated the character with Disney's stories, experiences, and authentic products. That will not change when the copyright in the ‘Steamboat Willie’ film expires’, the Walt Disney Company told the Washington Post in a statement. ‘The more ’modern’ versions of Mickey will remain unaffected by the expiration of the ‘Steamboat Willlie’ copyright, and Mickey will continue to play a leading role as a global ambassador for the Walt Disney Company and our storytelling, theme park attractions, and merchandise.’ Disney notes that it won't stand down completely, ‘We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse, and other works that remain subject to copyright, and we will work to safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters’.” And it's like, uh, no, it's very nice for you that you can say things like that, but the idea that there is even such a thing as consumer confusion is, no, that's a hallucination on your part that you think you can control, and that's just financial intimidation. It's like, “If we send you a cease and desist order, you better cease and desist because we can crush you in the court just by outspending you with our massive legal team.” Okay, but that doesn't establish that you actually have a legal precedent for what you're talking about. The example I'm going to use is, well okay, we've got “Steamboat Willie” in the public domain. Let's put him in a Spawn costume and call him Mickey Spawn. Which, you know, would be being funny and being entertaining, but also saying, well okay, we do have a legal precedent that doesn't make a whole lot of sense in Medieval Spawn, where, okay, a jury did say that Neil Gaiman owns Medieval Spawn. And it's like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. You change Spawn into a different kind of Spawn and now you own a Spawn? It's a legal precedent, but it's like, are you going to take that into the legal arena with the Disney Company? And it's like, let's face the fact that it's not going to happen. If some had the chops, somebody who had the level of chops that I had doing Barry Windsor-Smith in 1977, and Kevin and Peter had in 1984 doing Frank Miller's “Ronin” and “Daredevil” riffs, and they go, “Let's do Mickey Spawn.” And they do a comic book, they're really speedy guys, and they manage to get a 24-page comic book done in the next couple of months, and it's Mickey Spawn, and it's hilarious! It's making fun of Disney, it's making fun of Todd, it's making fun of all the different versions of Spawn, and it goes into the comic book stores. People are seeing it in the comic book store and they're going, “Ah, that's funny. That's funny. I got to get me one of those.” And the whole Turtles thing lightning strike happens, that's got nothing to do with Disney. That's got nothing to do with Todd, that's got nothing to do with anybody. Legally, as soon as you mash it up with something else, it's a new intellectual property.
Matt: Well, some of the articles I've seen that, I can't not believe it, I guess, is the best way to put it. Cause it's, you know, “Steamboat Willie” and “Plane Crazy” are in the public domain, so those versions of Mickey anybody can do and and Disney can't say boo, but if you try to do “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” that's still under copyright and you'll get sued. But there was an article where a guy found a promotional poster for “Steamboat Willie” where Mickey's in color wearing the red shorts and the yellow shoes, so now, because it's a “Steamboat Willie” thing, the red shorts and the yellow shoes are in the public domain, but the white gloves aren't. So if you do Mickey and he's wearing white gloves, they can sue you, but if he's not wearing white… and I'm going, you're splitting hairs. At a certain point, Disney can come after you for anything.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: You, as a creator, can hopefully lobby public support for, “Hey wait a minute Mickey's in the public domain.” The other one is Erik Larsen from “The Savage Dragon” has was been talking about it online, and he said, “Yeah Mickey's in the public domain, but the trademark name Mickey Mouse is still a trademark, so if you use Mickey, you can use Mickey and you call him Mickey, but on the cover you can't say Mickey because then they can sue you.” And I'm going… it's a fine line, but at the same time, it's one of those, they once sued a daycare for having an unlicensed Mickey on the wall. Their legal department is not known as the sharks they are because they're really nice guys, it's because they'll sue you and they have billions and billions of dollars to throw at you if they want to crush you.
Dave: Right, and I don't think they do that anymore. Like, they're starting to understand that's dimly looked upon by the hoi polloi in 2024 and has been for at least the last couple of decades. Crushing people like insects in order to retain your happy time place in Los Angeles and Florida? That's not washing with everybody these days to the extent that you're trying to pretend it is. That's why, again, this article was interesting to me there because there was also a guy who is an intellectual property guy, “Do exactly what copyright expiration allows you to do and make something awesome with public domain Mickey and Minnie just don't do it in a way that confuses consumers.” And it's like, no [laughs] consumers are not going, “Look the only Mickey that I want to consume is Mickey that is approved of by the Walt Disney Corporation.” It's like, no, if they see a t-shirt and they go, “That's a really great Mickey Mouse t-shirt. That's the one that I want.” They're not confused, and they don't really care if the Walt Disney Corporation owns that t-shirt and gets 85 cents of the $20 that somebody spent on it. It’s, how does this guy figure… “And don't do it in a way that uses later copyrightable elements of copyrighted iterations of the characters. Stay the zone of what trademark and copyright law allow you to do.” And it's like, none of that is settled! It's like, you giant corporations, you are full of crapola on trying to intimidate everybody on this going, “This is what copyright and trademark allows you.” And this isn't the same as the talking about the Walt Disney Corporation has been using “Steamboat Willie” on its letterhead. They were doing that to try and establish that this is a trademark, and it's like, that hasn't been established. Which is why it's the same as the “Superman” comics,right under the logo would say “US patent pending” and it's like patent pending because the patent office is going, “This isn't a patent! This is an intellectual property. This is a cartoon character.” It's like, “Okay well, here's a picture of Superman bursting chains with his chest, drawn by Joe Shuster, and that's our trademark, and that's our patent!” And it's like, okay, well you know, as long as you want to spend the amount of money to hold your place in line at the patent office, and with the trademark office, we'll reserve judgment on this. But they've reserved judgment for almost a hundred years now. Because it's like no, a trademark is like the Coca Cola logo, the Tesla logo. It is, “this is a fixed image and I own this.” Elon Musk, “I own the Tesla logo and you can't use the Tesla logo without my permission.” And it's like, “Well yeah, but if we change the font marginally then it falls through the cracks, and I can call it Telsa and there's nothing that you can do about that.” You can waste your own time and your own money saying, “Okay, I have, as you know, as DC did, as Marvel did, as Disney did, we have five floors of overpriced lawyers and all they do all day is look for people to crush like insects.” Which is, you know, it's certainly arguable. And copyright lawyers would argue, “No, that's due diligence. We spend all of our time investigating people contravening our copyright, our trademark, and we crush them like insects.” Well, that's a pre-internet thing again as well, where it's, “Okay, each of the 50 lawyers we've got on five different floors in this office building all have their assistant staff, and all have the billable hours people, and the law clerks reading every newspaper that came out today and going, ‘There's something that looks remotely like Spider-Man. There's something that looks remotely like the Superman logo.’ Okay, send them a cease and desist order and open up a file on them, and if they won't cease and desist, then we'll just have to gradually run them through the machinery until they do cease and desist.” It's like no, the internet changed that as well. It's like, if you take an algorithm and say, “Okay, here's the Superman logo. Find me things on the internet that look like this.” And it's like, okay, there's 975 billion matches. And it's like, okay, your five floors of lawyer now have to go through each of those individually and make sure each of those people has been contacted, because you can't pick and choose on due diligence. And it's like, “Well okay, checkmate! Internet matches that a highspeed computer can find.” It's like, you're now wasting your time for that five floors of lawyers, because if they started right this minute, and their children, and their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren all went into the legal profession, and all examined all of these matches, they still wouldn't make a dent in the matches that you attained to on the first day. And it's like, why is it that people just won't acknowledge that this is the situation? The same as, we've done Mickey in “Cerebus in Hell?” multiple times. And it's like, I understood that you guys were freaking out, but it's like you were freaking out in a 1970s, 1980sm 1990s way that has just gone away. However the Disney Corporation wants to portray this, it's like, anybody can use Mickey Mouse for whatever they want and there's absolutely nothing that the Disney Corporation can do about it because, I think I've gotten the closest to it where I go, if it's a raw material in another creative work, and not even defining what another creative work is, anything that I've done, any other creator is completely at liberty to use. If you do come up with something that makes a billion dollars, I'm still a guy at the level of trying to figure out how I'm gonna pay my phone bill next month. It would be really nice if you cut me a cheque, but there are people who would be in that category and there were people that wouldn't be in that category.
Matt: My Uncle contacted me because he's been doing Big Brother/Little Brother with needy kids for decades now, and he's got a former little who wants to do my Grandma's books as a one woman show.
Dave: Great!
Matt: And when my Grandma died, after the funeral and we were splitting up, cleaning out her apartment, and stuff, I asked my Aunt, who was the executive of the will, who's getting the literary rights to all her books? And she went, “What do you mean?” I'm like, well, the copyright is life of the author plus 95 years, so the family has 95 years to do whatever we want. And she went, “Oh, well, you can have them cause nobody else is interested.” And I'm like, okay!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Cause, I know a little about copyright. I mean, I'm not saying I'm a lawyer but I know a little bit, and ever since like one of my other Uncles has been, “Well, I want to rewrite one of the books.” I'm like, that's not how this works. If you want to write your version of the book, go ahead, I'm not gonna stop you, but if you're gonna take her book and quote unquote “fix it”, know that Matt's not playing that. So my Uncle contacted me going, “This guy wants to do a play. What does he got to do to get the rights?” And I'm going, well, I'm gonna have to come up with a contract and it's gonna have to be simple enough that I can deal with it, but complex enough that if this guy goes to an entertainment lawyer, the lawyer goes, “You shouldn't have signed that cause this schmuck in Wisconsin really shouldn't have been writing a contract.” And one of the things that I'm putting in there is, cause I'm still working on it, is okay, you know, first off these are nonexclusive. These are, you're getting the rights but they're non-transitory. You do not get to sell my rights that I'm lending to you to somebody else. If you write a one act play and Andrew Lloyd Webber comes and goes, “This is my next Broadway show” I'm getting a phone call cause Andy and I are gonna have a conversation.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And the other one is that I'm going to put in there is, I don't want any money for this until you make $1,000. Once you make $1,000, I want 10% of every dollar you make, and when he goes, “But but but”, I'm splitting the little bit I get with all my Aunts and Uncles because it's their childhood memories that their mother exploited for these books. So you know they should get a little something. So I'm not asking for the moon, I'm just saying, hey, once you start making money, don't forget my name.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And in my head, I keep going, if this were Dave, how would he word the contract? And I keep coming back with, approval is an authoritarian construct. And I'm going, yeah okay, a little more strict than that!
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, but it's all gray area in terms of, that gets into you can't encumber the property.
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Is another one of my cardinal things in terms of intellectual property. When Blair Kitchen died, and I talked to Mike Kitchen about the situation, and it's, well okay, he's got three kids. He's got Jacob, Nate, Avery, and presumably that's who you'd want to have the intellectual property rights to “The Possum.” Each of those technically has the ability to go, “Here is what I think Dad would want to have happen with The Possum” and not necessarily going to get agreement with the other two. In which case, it becomes, okay you can do what you want to do with your Possum, but you can't encumber the property and say, “Avery Kitchen, this is my Possum and, yeah, Andrew Lloyd Webber wants to do a play featuring the Possum, and I think it's a great idea and I'm signing off on it.” It's like, well no, you can't encumber Nate's Possum and Jacob’s Possum. The intellectual property is still the intellectual property, and which is why particularly when it comes to comics, I say stick with comics. If you try to get into licensing with these giant corporations, you're going to have one real chance which is, it goes ahead and gets done and becomes a massive success, or looks as if it's going to be a massive success. In which case then you're in the Neal Adams scenario with Siegel and Shuster of, okay, you're investing what was at that time a lot of money in this “Superman” movie and you're expecting it to be this year's “Jaws” which it did turn out to be, do you really want the original creators sniping from the sidelines and going, “This is what this completely soulless malicious corporation did to us for all of these decades. We don't necessarily have to do that, but if you're going to continue to ignore us, I'm Neal Adams. I'm pretty savvy about these things. And I think I could make five phone calls to five different editors that I know at newspapers and radio stations, TV stations, and go, ‘Do you want to run with this? Here's your lede, you know, Siegel and Shuster crushed like insects by DC Comics.’ Do you really want to go and see this malignant corporation’s movie?” And that does work, but it's got to be there in the sweet spot.
Matt: Well getting back to Mickey, Steve put him in the first panel and was talking about doing a Steamboat Sparky, because he thinks that'd be funny.
Dave: [laughs] That’s a good-- I like it!
Matt: And I responded of, I sent him a message saying, when he said that I'm toying with doing a story where Beer's new girlfriend is Minnie Mouse.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And he came back with, “That's funny” and I'm keep thinking about I'm like the problem is I know I can't draw Mickey or Minnie good enough that they look on-model for “Steamboat Willie”-era Minnie and Mickey. And the other one is that it's a funny joke but I'd only be able to do it once.
Dave: Right. Right. That comes down to, you protect your own copyright and your own trademark by being the best at it. That was the situation that Disney found themselves in with the “Air Pirates.” It's like. it's the reason that that I'm not really concerned about protecting Cerebus as an intellectual property. It's like, I did 6000 Pages, you know, I did 16 volumes with Cerebus progressively getting older. If you think you've got the chops to go, “I think Elvis died when he went in the Army, John Lennon died when he met Yoko Ono, Cerebus died when Dave Sim fumbled the ball in ‘Church & State’ and here I'm gonna show you. I'm going to do ‘Church & State’ the way it should have been done.” [laughs] Okay, I'll be happy to have a front row seat for that one. You show me how “Church & State” should have been done. And again, and that was the problem that Disney had with the “Air Pirates” was, in terms of a comic book intellectual property, “We're doing riffs on Floyd Gotfredson's Mickey, which the Disney Corporation hasn't done anything interesting with Mickey Mouse since ‘Fantasia.’” Which is why everybody says “Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Yeah, because all of the other Mickey Mouse intellectual property material is crap, from top to bottom. It's like [Mickey voice] “Uh, hello Pluto!” It's [laughs] there you go! That's what Mickey Mouse is as an intellectual property. Have you got anything else that the public in general knows about Mickey Mouse apart from that it's this is, to mix the metaphor, a cash cow for for the Disney Corporation? And that's why they got and are still completely paranoid about what can be done with Mickey, because they never did anything interesting with Mickey. The same as Donald Duck is a piece of crap. Daffy Duck is an amazing intellectual property, because there was, if you wanted to make even a short list of the best Daffy Duck cartoons, it's like, oh this is funny. This is something that people just gravitate to. But, Donald Duck is just Walt Disney's obsession with bum jokes,and that's all. There isn't a single memorable Donald Duck cartoon, or not memorable in the sense of, “This is something that you could use to launch a billion dollar franchise.” It’s, no, here's racist Donald Duck in World War II, taking a strip off of the Germans and off of the Japanese. And it's like, “Mhmm, we don't even talk about that anymore.” It's like, yeah, but it's the only interesting thing that you've got! Everything else is crap. The stuff at Disney that isn't crap is all stuff that was done by really really brilliant animators.
Matt: And Carl Barks.
Dave: [laughs] And Carl Barks! Exactly. Good point, good point.
Matt: As you were talking about Donald, I was thinking, while they did do in the late 80s, early 90s, they did a “DuckTales” which was, it was mostly Scrooge and Huey, Dewey, and Louie, but Donald occasionally appeared. And I'm [mumbles] no wait, that was basically an animated version of the Carl Barks stuff. Like, that's 90% of it is straight from the Carl Barks comics because that was the only time that anyone made the character interesting.
Dave: Right. Right. And the only reason that that happened is because they left Carl Barks alone, because it was, “Okay, all we need is somebody who can draw the duck characters and write nambi pambi stories” and it's like, you don't even know when you're looking at something brilliant. That's how completely empty-headed and malignant your corporation is, from top to bottom. That they didn't even know who Carl Barks is, and they didn't even know that there was a good duck artist and he's in your employee, it's because you left him alone. Because “he was so low in the food chain we don't even acknowledge that this is a human being. This is just someone that we pay him to do this stuff and we get him to sign all of these malignant contracts and he agrees to do it. Okay, he's a solved problem.” Until he starts painting them! [laughs] And you know, selling the paintings for hundreds of dollars, and it's like, mhmm, Carl knew, “I gotta contact Disney about this because they're not gonna have a have a sense of humor about this.” And it's like, ”Okay, now we've got a problem of, we only have a default setting of crush the person like an insect,” and it's like, mhmm, that's not going to work with Carl Barks. You're at least in that in that troglodyte corporate brain of yours, going, [dumb voice] “I don't think this is going to work the same.” [laughs] No, it's not. It's not. Hold that thought, and try sitting and having a meeting about how people are as human beings. Stop talking to your lawyers. Your lawyers are the source of the malignancy.
Matt: Right. Well I think we've covered Mickey pretty well.
Dave: [laughs] Not the way the Washington Post did, you know, that's another one of those things. It's like, Jeff Bezos, the Oz the Great and Powerful behind the Washington Post, and it's like, “Yes, we are just talking about this as an intellectual subject.” It's like, no you're not, you're a malignant corporation. You don't even know what anybody in your organization is doing, and whatever residue of the Woodward and Bernstein Washington Post ever existed, it's gone, and you're now the Nixon Administration on steroids.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, let's leave that alone. I think we've had our say from down here in the trenches, and if any of those people now go, “Okay, who is this Dave Sim guy? It's time to crush him like an insect”, it's like, ehh, no, it's 2024. Get with the program, you malignancy.
Matt: Well, to be fair, if they're gonna crush you, it'd be for the “Kurtz Vs. Kurtz” Steamboat Cerebus video that I made where I'm ripping off Dave Sim’s “Kurtz vs. Kurtz”, David Birdsong’s “Kurtz vs. Kurtz”, the Doors, and Emerson Lake and Palmer cause I used some piano riffs as the intro and the outro. So if those four people want to come after me, go ahead! I have like eight bucks and I will split it amongst you.
Dave: [laughs] Right! And that becomes the news story. That's the problem for, the larger these malignant corporations get, and the more malignant that they get, uh no, this is really bad PR. This is going viral, and this is not going viral in a good way for us.
Okay, next we have Lee Thacker. Hello, Lee. “Thanks again to Dave for those very kind words about my artwork and for plugging the book.” And the book that we're talking about is… it's down here, “My Nervous Breakdown”, The Anxiety Society Publishing Proprietary, written by Stuart Lloyd Gould and illustrated by Lee Thacker. “Brian West is correct, the book should be available in February when the Kickstarter campaign is launched. The author of the book is in charge of that side of things and the Kickstarter was supposed to run in September 2023, which is why I worked my ass off to get the 82 pages,” 82 pages! “Completed between January and June 2023, six months, not two years as Dave assumes,” and I apologize for assuming on that one. “And why I sent Dave a mockup copy. I'm hoping the Kickstarter does actually get launched in February 2024 and is successful so I can actually get paid for the work I put into the book. We’ll see.” And I don't know how many of the images Lee would be willing to let you have to show while we're talking about this, but it is an amazing tour de force for the “One for Sorrow” guy, just showing how much that Lee has learned over the years working on the “Tales of the Wedding Present” stuff for David Gedge. I'm hoping that this isn't a spoiler thing, but the 82 pages are very interestingly configured in terms of, I'm not really understanding… like I'm going through and going, they're very very interesting compositions, each one an individual page of the author. It's really an autobiographical thing about his nervous breakdown, and done in rhyming form, so pretty much every page has a picture of him, and all from different angles and different backgrounds. It's not until you get to the last page of the book that you realize that Lee was ripping on “Cerebus” #20, the “Mind Game” issue where all of the pages formed a giant image of Cerebus, which was me riffing on Neal Adam's hidden head trick, which he did on the Ben Casey newspaper strip, where all of the panels formed a giant image of Vince Edwards, who played Ben Casey on the television show, and that he also later did on “Deadman” where there was all of the panels on the page that made up an image of Deadman. And I gotta say, if you've ever seen the giant image of Cerebus, it's pretty crude. It doesn't all fit together perfectly, and it's not the best best individual image of Cerebus ever done. And I don't apologize for that it's like, mhmm, no, the point for me was the idea and just putting the thing together, making it an immaculate piece of work wasn't in my priorities doing “Cerebus” #20. But the page that Lee put together of all of the pages put together, which is a giant head of Stuart Lloyd Gould, is just bloody amazing! It's a really really nice picture of him, and I'm just looking at it, I'm going, if it's not flawless, it's as close to flawless as you can possibly get of doing the the giant head and the giant picture trick. And I was doing it with 20 pages at the time, making one giant image. This is 82 pages! So, see if you can get Lee's permission to show the second last page which is the image of the author, and then the last page, which is the 82 pages put together. Even if as a reader you have zero interest in a book called “My Nervous Breakdown,” and I'm not really a conventional nervous breakdown afficianado myself. If you want to see somebody doing an absolutely phenomenal piece of work, you really do want to own a copy of the book and go, “Okay, yeah, I can go back through this book with all of these images that I'm seeing making up this head and go, yep, that's that one. Yep, that's that one.” And just absolutely amazing. A standing ovulation for for Lee Thacker on his giant head page, and maybe I can come up with a quote for that. The most amazing hidden head ever done, and they're welcome to use that on their Kickstarter if it's up and running. And if you want to see an illustrator in peak form going, okay, here's a challenge. Boy, it's beyond a challenge, and just absolutely, absolutely amazing. Did you get any of the images from from Lee on that one or…?
Matt: I have not. He hasn't sent me anything. But I will send him an email and ask, because I'm sure he won't say no.
Dave: Uh, yeah, I don't know about that, because then you're talking about the intellectual property thing of, “I just did the pictures and it's like I'm not doing the Kickstarter and I'm not the author of this” and Stuart Lloyd Gould does have to be as the engine driving “My Nervous Breakdown”. He's got to be the guy that makes those calls, and he might be one of those people that says, “Mhmm. No. You did those illustrations for my book and no, I don't want the last page or a bunch of these images just being shown by somebody.” I hope that he wouldn't be like that. I hope he would go, “No, anybody's going to bring more eyeballs to the Kickstarter, if this will help, this will help.” And not a lot of people listen to me but, [laughs] people on Please Hold for Dave Sim, I think when they hear me getting this excited about something, it's, “Uh okay, this is not ordinarily something that I would buy, but it's however many quids they're gonna be charging for it internationally, and I got to see what Dave Sim is enthusing about.”
Matt: I mean, like I said, I'll ask, if I get a no I get a no.
Dave: That's right. That's right. And if you get a maybe, you get a maybe.
“We next get visited by Mike Sewall, who seems to send in questions a second he's done listening to the answers to his last question.” Yeah, you got a gold star in your notebook on that one, Mike. We're all very impressed here at the mighty Please Hold for Dave Sim empire. Uh yeah. question was December 11, 23. “Hello there ruggedly Manly Matt and famously infamous Dave Sim, my renewed Cerebus obsession has led me many places, recently to,” I'm gonna pronounce this wrong. Do you know how to pronounce…? Like, everybody else who's just a scummy white person, I pronounce it ooo-soggy yo-Jimbo, but it's not ooo-soggy yo-Jimbo, right?
Matt: I believe it is!
Dave: No! There's a particular way that you're supposed to pronounce that in the Japanese that I I've heard and went, I'll never remember that. It's Usagi Yojimbo. So sincere apologies for the fact that I'm pronouncing that wrong. “And Stan Sakai’s work. Again, where have I been since 1984?” Well, you're definitely getting caught up, Mike. And I'm sure everybody that are indirect links in the Dave Sim Cerebus chain are grateful for the fact that you've got your eyes open on this one. “Not as brilliant as Cerebus.” I appreciate that. That's a matter of opinion. “But fantastic all the same.” That I definitely agree with. “Many parallels, black and white, animal-lead character, creator owned,” beyond creator owned, creator controlled. I assume that absolutely nothing is done with Usagi Yojimbo that isn't Stan Sakai called. Maybe with a qualification on that one, because I know that there is an animation streaming. Have you have you seen the “Usagi Yojimbo” animation yourself?
Matt: I tried to watch it, but apparently it is not the comic as a cartoon, it is very much a ”we took the character and a couple of the other characters and put them in a completely different setting” and the little bit that I've read of “Usagi Yojimbo” I'm going, you know, it's very Japanese, it's very of a certain time and place, and the cartoon is very much not that time or that place.
Dave: Hmm. Okay. But presumably that's was a call on Stan Sakai's part.
Matt: As far as I know, he was involved, and it sounded like it was, he knew that they were going to kill his darling, so he may as well say, “Okay do this. You get a cartoon, I get a check, and my intellectual property is still my intellectual property.”
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: Not one of those “Howard the Duck” movie concepts where the movie didn't go over well and pretty much killed the comic book character for 15 years.
Dave: Right. Right. Yeah, that's one of those, there you get into the dicey area of, “I don't want you knowing my business.” Like a creator saying, “What I do with my creation, and what contract I sign, and what decisions I make, and what I base my decisions on, those are my decisions. That shouldn't be discussed.” And my problem with that is, secrecy only really helps the corporation. And we don't know if this is “Stan himself is a private person who just isn't interested in being that public about his business,” or if it was, “We're only going ahead with this if you sign a non-disclosure agreement” and you sign the non-disclosure agreement and I think they've even got NDAs now where you can't say that you signed an NDA because they know how bad that looks. And there are very very few good reasons for a non-disclosure agreement, and most of them are really really bad, and most of them are malignant lawyer choices and decisions. Anyway, “the question for Dave, have you ever discussed your separate creations with Stan?” Not as far as I know. And I will qualify that in that, I don't know where “Usagi Yojimbo” would have been in its existence. If I met Stan Sakai at a convention , it's very possible that I might have met him at a convention where I'd be sort of hanging around with Sergio Aragones, not really hanging around with Sergio Aragones, but any convention that Sergio was at Sergio was the center of the convention because he's the most charming, brilliant, entertaining, incandescent figure in public terms as far as cartoonists go. So consequently, if I had been at a convention and Stan Sakai was there because Sergio was there, because Stan was, and as far as I know is, the letterer on “Groo the Wanderer.” I could have even had a conversation with Stan and not have known because Sergio Aragones was in the vicinity and was entertaining everybody. You wouldn't call it holding court, it was just, there's only one Sergio Aragones and it’s, if only all cartoonists were this entertaining, we'd be doing a lot better. Because, I'm looking at one of the latest Heritage auctions cataloges, and they've got an “Albedo” #2, which is the first appearance of Usagi Yojimbo, and it's in 9.8, and it says that the publisher was Thoughts & Images 1984. So Usagi Yojimbo really goes back to the same year as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I'll just read, “This first appearance of a Usagi Yojimbo and this exquisite pop of CGC census example is tied for CGC’S highest grade. It includes letters from Peter Laird and Don Thompson. Creator Stan Sakai drew the cover and art, Steve Gallacci added art as well. An animated series based on the character and co-produced by Sakai is now streaming. This is currently the #4 book on ‘Overstreet’'s top 25 copper age comics list. Consequently, high-grade copies are garnering considerable attention and some pretty staggering prices at auction. We certainly expect no less here.” And then they mention that the “Overstreet” listing 2023 for a near mint 9.2 value copy is $8,200. So that's a 9.2, this is one of two 9.8. Is this the January auction? Yeah it is. This is January 11th. Which session is it? Yeah, Thursday January 11th, session two, item 9289 is the “Albedo” #2 and at $8,000 for a 9.2, God only knows what one of the two 9.8s is going to be going for. So I'll be watching for that. But that to me is a credential. That's Stan Sakai's very very hard work that he's put in over the course of, well you know, 40th anniversary is this year, and the fact that the first issue in 9.2 is going for $8,000, if anything is gonna scream good custodian, that's gonna scream good custodian.
Matt: Right. Definitely.
Dave: Okay! And then Mike ends off, “Also I have recently listened to all the Please Holds again from the very beginning.” And then says, “Even I'm beginning to worry about myself.” [laughs] I would! I would be going, man oh man. It's, how much listening is that?! I wouldn't even want to do the math. If you want to do the math, you can do it independently. And then he goes, “Swordfish! Swordfish! Does this still get me any cool stuff? Your obsessive Californian fan lunatic, MJ Mike ‘Dodger’ Sewall.” And at that point you interject with..
Matt: Well Dodger, you win two, count them two, handfuls from the old AMoC prize box, including at least one piece of genuine Dave Sim junk mail, saved in a place of honor in the AMoC cave since arriving with my copies of “Vark Wars” all them years ago. And a bunch of Dane Sim address labels. Plus some other junk I haven't looked that too closely. Yes, friends, it pays to be just crazy enough to care, but still sane enough to elude capture by the mental health authorities.
Dave: [laughs] Well said!. Well said, Manly Matt Dow. I should interject on, I didn't know what I did with those labels. That was the MS Society in Canada, and I got on their mailing list, and I send them occasional donations, and one of their rewards that you get for a donation is that you get mailing labels. So, I've been getting mailing labels, but they have a typo in them, instead of Dave Sim, it's Dane Sim. And I was cleaning up at some point and it's like, okay, here's my latest batch of Dane Sim labels. I think they finally got it straighted out, I think I finally got a request for a donation from them that was addressed to Dave Sim, but it took a while. And I think I went, okay, instead of just throwing these away, I'll send them to Matt Dow. It'll be the rare Dane Sim mailing labels.
Matt: You did sign them and you did write something about that on them, cause when they showed up I'm like, okay, they're Dave Sim mailing labels whatever, and then I got a scan from Rolly of them and I'm like, wait, what? And I look back, I'm like, oh! Okay, that's what these are.
Dave: There you are. So is Dodger the first one to get Dane Sim on a mailing label?
Matt: Yeah! Yeah.
Dave: He is.
Matt: It was one of those, I didn't know what to do with them yet, and I'm going, well I'll just put them in the prize box and when the time comes it… it's funny that you should mention that they had a typo. 40 some years ago my Mom signed up for the Reader’s Digest. And knowing that the Reader’s Digest sells your name and address to various mail order things where they'll send you credit card applications and crap in the mail that you don't want. You know, it's a junk mail list. My Mom put down her name as Mortimer Dow.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And to this day Mortimer still gets mail, and cause my Uncle's living with my Mom, he'll get the mail he's like, “Who the hell's Mortimer?” and she's like, “It's junk, just throw it away.” And he's like, “Well don't you want to double check?” “No, anything that comes to Mortimer I know is junk. Anything that comes to Mortimer for the past 40 years has been junk.”
Dave: Man oh man. Does your while family have aliases? Because it's… what’s that?
Matt: Uh, technically, yeah, now that I think about it. Maybe not my brother.
Dave: [laughs] One of these days that's going to cross somebody's desk at the FBI and they're going, “Can we look into these people? They've all got an also known as on their file.”
Matt: At one point, about 20 years ago both my parents had… my Dad was an electrician and he worked for a contractor. Well, he fell down a flight of stairs while carrying some stuff and they basically said you can't work anymore. It was, you can't be an electrician anymore because of this fall. So he had to try to get another job, and he got a job at a call center doing credit card point reward redemption, and because it's a telephone thing they encourage you to use a pseudonym. So my father Dave started going by Bob. At the same time, my Mom got a new job and her given name is Elizabeth, but she's gone by Betsy for decades. Well she had to put down her legal name on her application, so she put down Elizabeth and they started calling her Liz. And she decided that she didn't know if she wanted to know these people outside of work, so she just went with it and so they started calling her Liz. So my parents Dave and Betsy became Bob and Liz, and I'm like, what happened?!
Dave: [laughs] Oh man. Well you couldn't make that up. You could try, but the human imagination doesn't have that kind of scope.
Matt: That is true.
Dave: So, okay, I can't let you go one up on me, MJ “Mike” “Dodger” Sewall is my fan, so we're gonna add to his gift package. I'll even do [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! [eeee] More intrusive than a Facebook privacy setting! [deet deet deet] GPS compatible! Future proof! Able to strike within a gnat’s parimecium of where you live and breathe as a Cerebus fan.” Well, we'll see if we're hitting the target with MJ Mike Sewall. You're getting Cerebus stickers. These just came in from Waverly Press. There's a yellow sticker that's the running Cerebus figure, which was the first first drawing of Cerebus I did that's on the back cover of “Cerebus” #1, that's a gold coloured one. We've got one, two, three, four, five of those, then we've got the magenta one which is Cerebus from “Cerebus” #2 down in the bowels of the Earth. So this one's in magenta and there's [counts to eleven] 11 of those and then there's one image of Cerebus holding up his sword where a skeleton’s trying to hit him with a sword, close up, and that's sort of a brownish red. So you're getting all of those stickers. But wait, there's more! You also get a personalized copy with your CAN number of the “Visions of Cerebus 8” guest starring Cerebus, which has all, as far as I know, of the variant covers… or no, these aren't the varant, were these the variant covers in in the “Visions of Turtles 8”?
Matt: No the “Visions” was the the images they didn't use as covers, I believe.
Dave: Okay. Alright.
Matt: This is Josh Even's collection of Savage Turtles and Cerebus images.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And it's not even all of them because he keeps getting new ones. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] It's a bottomless pile at this point. So MJ Mike Sewall, I will be personalizing that for you, and when Rolly comes in next week, that'll be going in a package. But wait! There's more! You also get the proof copy of my pitch to Buddy Saunders, mycomicshop.com, where I was hoping to turn mycomicshop.com into a distributor for the “Cerebus in Hell” trade paperbacks by doing a test market gift pack in 2022. “This is Texas” which is basically the flag of Texas with an image from “Cerebus in Hell?” Cerebus and Virgil and Dante, Cerebus going, “This really really sucks” and Virgil going, “Well, that's kind of the point, isn't it?” and Dante going, “Duh!” And also, that's in the white part of the Texas flag, in the red part of the Texas flag “it's really not easy being Satan” and Satan thinking to himself, “Border wall? Open border. Open border? Border wall. Border wal? Open border. Open border.” And then some promotional stuff, and of course, pitched Buddy Saunders on this and he went, ”No, are you crazy? I don't want to become a distributor. I don't want to distribute anything, I'm a retailer” and pretty much in the category of best retailer on the planet, so I will be autographing one of these. There's now one proof in the Cerebus Archive, and MJ “Mike” “Dodger” Sewall has the only other copy. But wait, there's more! There's also, if you remember “The Amazing Batvark” issue, which is going back aways, it's back to early 2021, there was a running gag in there of Cerebus getting tarred and feathered. The placid Cerebus just staring out at us, but instead of the placid Cerebus, he's just covered in feathers with a few stray feathers flying around him. I found the original art for that, and I will be personalizing that to MJ “Mike” “Dodger” Sewall, and sending that to him. He will be the only guy that has a Dave Sim drawn tarred and feathered Cerebus. But wait, there's more! [rustling] There's also the tracing paper and you can hear, this is authentic tracing paper of the Jaka image before I put the clothes on her, for the “One for Sorrow” “Akimbo” cover. So you can show the “One for Sorrow” “Akimbo” cover, and MJ “Mike” “Dodger” Sewall will be getting the nude tracing paper in the mail. There you go! If you want to know what “Swordfish” gets you, that's what “Swordfish” gets you, never as a Cerebus fan and as a listener to Please Hold for Dave Sim, never never forget “swordfish.”
Matt: [laughs] Ahh! All I can think of is Matt the mercenary saying, well Margaret, I can get you his address, but it's gonna cost you.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Well, Jen DiGiacomo was in Chicago for a Doctor Who convention and she posted on Facebook that she was in Chicago and I'm like, I'm three hours North, I smell a heist!
Dave: [laughs] There you go. There you go. “And then we move from sunny California to the mean streets of Easton, Pennsylvania, where Zipper answers.” [laughs] “It was a bit, Zipper. We're not doing ‘Jeopardy’ Please Hold. For the love of Trebek, enough with the answers! I'm accounting them to the three question limit from now.” “Hi Matt, Happy New Year to you and your family, may we all be blessed with an even better 2024.” And I'll second that emotion. “My question and answer for Dave. Hi Dave. Happy New Year!” Happy New Year to you and Grace and the kids and the cats “My answer for this month is Chic S--” See, I don't think it's Chick Stone, but all comic fans say Chick Stone. If you're looking at that name, you would go Chick Stone, right?
Matt: That's what I always thought it was.
Dave: It's not, it's Sheek. Chick Stone would be C-H-I-C-K. I'm pretty much sure that the same thing was true with the creator of the Blondie comic strip, who was Chic Young, not Chick Young, because it was of that time period where it meant smart and fashionable. Actually, I think it's one of those things from the 1920s on the Jazz Age, where there was Chic and Sheik. There was Chic, as in fashionable Flappers, and Sheik, S-H-E-I-K, which was, you know, Rudolph Valentino [speaks with accent] “let me take you with me to the Casbah” kind of thing. And so the the answer for this month is Chick Stone or Chic Stone, and I'm not even gonna try and come up with a question for that, because I think that's as interesting as I can be on the subject of Chic Stone. “My question for this month is my three best guesses on who you might be collaborating with in 2024. In no particular order, are one, Martin Wagner, ‘Hepcats’.” Uh, no. “Erik Larsen, ‘Savage Dragon’.” Uh, no. “Matt Wagner, ‘Grendel.’” Uh, no. “Am I close? Michael R.” And you wrote, “Nope, Dave's collaborating with Chic Stone. Is Chic Stone dead? Okay, the ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ team is collaborating with Chic Stone via Ouija board hooked up to a Commodore 64 and an Etch-a-sketch. It's pretty radical if you've never seen the 1985 film ‘Weird Science’.” Is that actually in the 1985 film “Weird Science”?
Matt: In “Weird Science,” they hook up a supercomputer to… they hack into a supercomputer and use the memory processing to turn a Barbie doll into a woman and they they do that by hooking the Barbie doll up with alligator clips that's connected to a game of Operation.
Dave: [laughs] Okay, I never saw it.
Matt: Oh you missed out, Dave. You would have liked “Weird Science” cause if I remember right, the woman that plays, I forget the actress's name, but she was really hot, and when she first shows up she's wearing a cut off t-shirt and a pair of panties and that's it.
Dave: Mhmm. Okay.
Matt: 1985 Dave would have loved it.
Dave: That's the stuff that Ramadan Dave doesn't let him see anymore, except in very peculiar circumstances like Jeff Katherine Jones’ “Idyl” strips. I go, yeah, in one sense I really shouldn't be looking at these, and in another sense, it's Jeff Jones’ “Idyl!” I just never never could come up with that. But back to Michael R, you're not going to guess it. I don't think you're going to guess who it is. I would never have guessed! I did know the name, I knew the creator’s name and I knew the intellectual property’s name, but I had no idea that it went back that far. It's like, man oh man, just complete embarrassment on my part. So,and Rolly just left me a message that I heard from this from this individual, and in addition to the crossover, which I think is still happening, and the process to this point has been that… he sent me an outline for the story. Basically just typing out in short point form, “Here's where my intellectual property intersects with Cerebus between issues 2 and 3”, and because it was a Word document and he emailed it to Rolly, and I downloaded it into my laptop, and I just did the same typeface that he was doing but put it in bold face, and just interjected. Okay, here's plot points that I think you have to cover so that we can make this a canonical crossover with Cerebus. And Rolly emailed that back to him, and I got another colour image that he had done. So I now have two colour images from the crossover and I'm just waiting to go, at what point can I let Manly Matt Dow know about this and say, here's the images, post them. And he had sent an email going, am I interested in Cerebus figures? He's got his own connections for Cerebus figures. No harm no foul if I go, no, not interested. No harm no foul if I go, yeah, let's talk about this. So I'm definitely leaning more in the latter direction than the former direction. I'm not an action figures type, but I know at least all of the Please Hold for Dave Sim folks would go, “Uh yeah, I've been waiting for action figures for like 40 years. That'd be great.”
Matt: I mean, I'm not gonna say no…
Dave: Right!
Matt: Because I'm not that dumb!
Dave: [laughs] And what the heck, it would be found revenue. It would be something where I would just have to say, yeah I'll sign off on this, you go ahead and just send me the the royalty cheques on them. And that would because it wouldn't be active involvement on my part. That would qualify for a 25% royalty for Gerhard, so I think Gerhard would be on board for that.
“Then we get an answer! Michael Grabowski commented on last month's Please Hold Christmas Spectacular. Dear Dave and Matt, thank you for taking the time to address my question, and especially to Matt, for the time it took you to upload the audio/video just so I could find Dave's response quickly.” You really do go that extra mile, don't you?
Matt: There were was a time, and I'm sure Dodger knows when exactly this was since you listened to it, where I would just go, okay, here's two hours of video as, you know, upload it to YouTube. And people said, “Well, could you break it up by topic? Cause it's easier to find what we're looking for” and, oh yeah, I can do that. It's real easy, it's just the putting the images into the video that gets to be a headache. Because I start getting all Francis Ford Coppola of, hey wait a minute, why don't I find this image of Jeff Jones and this image from “Idyl.” And then all of a sudden it's a, hey this should have took 28 minutes, and it's like literally a day and I'm still screwing around with part three.
Dave: Yes. Yes. That's a danger for people like us, people like you, your inner Francis Ford Coppola, that it's just not good enough for government work, this has got to be exactly the way I see it in my head.
Matt: Well, I've gotten smarter. I now have a folder labeled logos where I put images I use every month, and that folder gets moved to each Please Hold folder. So like, it's in the 12/23 folder, it's gonna get moved to the 1/24 folder when I start making the videos, so that I have all the Aardvark-Vanaheim logos, the AMoC logos, the Jeff Seiler memorial picture. There's also a folder that's got a bunch of, cause when you did the freebie list I downloaded a bunch of pictures of people, cause, as you said their name I showed a picture or an image related to them from Cerebus. And that's in a folder, and I know that “Idyl”'s in there because that was, “Idyl” comes up just enough that I have a couple “Idy” images that, oh okay, Dave's talking about “Idyl”. I'll slot that in so I don't have to look for it. I'm getting smarter! By the last one of these we ever do, it's gonna be so slick and professional and every body’s gonna be like, “Oh, so next month” but there ain't gonna be in next month. This is it, we're done.
Dave: [laughs] As Gerhard used to say, “We'll just figure out how to do this and issue 300 will be here.” And it's like, that's the way it works.
Matt: I forgot to send it up through Rolly, but last month when I did the whole Christmas Spectacular intro, I made that section of video and it's only like a minute and a half, and I cut it to just that so I could send it to Rolly so you could see it, and then I just got lazy and forgot to send it up. Because it's just an image of Cerebus, it's the Cerebus in Hell? Cerebus from a couple years ago where it's him in the Santa hat with the beard in the chimney, And at the time I made a 2 and a 1/2 hour video of him in the chimney with wind blowing sound effects and snow swirling around, because at the time, I'm like, I'm gonna make a movie that's the same length as the latest Spider-Man movie and put it on the internet and there's gonna be somebody that watches all 2 and 1/2 hours thinking that something else is gonna happen and no there isn't!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: But I had all the elements from that, so that's the intro, and and then because I figured out how to do this in the video program, I can overlay text images, so it's it's him in the chimney with the swirling snow, my audio, and as I say each name of everyone that had a question and all the special guests, it pops up on the screen just like an a mid 70s Christmas special, and I'm going, yeah I'm actually a little proud of this even though it took about an hour longer than it should have.
Dave: Right. Right. See, then you could do the director's cut, where you do a 4-hour version. It's still the same thing. Absolutely nothing happens, but, no, this is the director's cut and for the folks that 2 and a 1/2 hours of this just isn't enough, here you go.
Matt: I'm trying to remember, I did give Cerebus audio at the very end, like in the last 30 seconds he says something. I can't remember what it was. It something along the lines of, “Cerebus is stuck here, why are you watching this?”
Dave: [laughs] Okay, back to Michael Grabowski. “For the record, I was serious about a Remastered ‘Melmoth’ because that's the one that I most wished was remastered during my reread last year. Personally I just want to see, own, and read a standard paperback trade edition someday. I hear what Dave is saying about his Kickstarter timetable, as well as waiting on the remaining Diamond and AV supply to sell out. Makes sense. Thanks again.” Yeah, we could, trying to meet you halfway on this, Michael, because you're definitely a first tier Please Hold for Dave Sim inmate. So we do like to go the extra mile. Someday, “Melmoth” is going to need to be at least scanned and and remastered, but the scanning is the first process and then Rolly does that. It’s getting the “Melmoth” original artwork from offsite, and bringing it to the Off-White House temporarily so that Rolly can scan it in Camp David. There is a basic situation where at the very least I would be able to say, these are the “Melmoth” pages that are still in the Cerebus Archive. These are the scans that Rolly did. They haven't been remastered and they haven't even really been tweaked, but I will get Studiocomix Press to print them out full size, however many pages that there are, and just charge you whatever it is that Studiocomix Press charges us to print out a set. Probably not on the card stock that we do the CAN portfolios on, but on good slick paper that is going to show all of the detail. And then however much it costs to print out a set, and however much it costs Rolly to scan them, however much it cost to ship them to you, there you go. It's not the Remastered “Melmoth” that you're looking for, but that's so far off in the future that's definitely looking more like second administration. That's something that Eddie Khanna will be doing, or maybe even third administration, which would be whoever Eddie Khanna's successor turns out to be. Because [laughs] Oscar Wilde’s “Melmoth” is just not what you want to call a hot graphic novel commodity and probably never will be, but for somebody that that's their favourite or the one that they would really like to see the most detail on. That's as close as I can come to meeting you halfway on that. So, get back to us in time for the February Please Hold and we'll move this project along.
And “pseudo question made from real pseudo from Fernando H Ramirez! Was looking through my ‘John Byrne Marvel Classics Artifact Edition’ and noticed this on a page from ‘Avengers’ issue 181. The issue is inked by Gene Day, who was a great friend of Dave. Gene apparently snuck in Dave's last name and Deni's first name on a couple of books in the background, not to mention his brother too. Thought this was a deep Easter egg. And you're the guy that's going to turn it into a question, going did you know about this before today?” And no, I didn't. “And followup, what do you think about it?” And okay so, wrapping up Please Hold for Dave Sim, where's my print out of that? There we are. Yeah, it was something that Gene did reasonably often. Marvel was fine with it, and I think a lot of guys did that, if you got a bookcase in the background, just put some names on the spine. Here's an inside joke. The other name that's there is Erslavas, which was Joe Erslavas, and was the fellow who married Gene Day's widow, Gail Jack. And uh [laughs] it's one of those, if Gene Day found out that you were that interested in Gail, it would have been worth your life. And you know that, Joe. But, pretty much as soon as Gene was dead, Joe went a’courtin’ and ended up marrying Gail, and they actually had two boys. Two boys are probably about, [exhales] guessing, I would say 35 or 40 years old now. I never actually met the boys. So Gene didn't know that he was pretty much drawing a road map of the future here, because after Joe Erslavas and Gail started keeping company at the house, Dan was still there, still using the studio, so we didn't know it, Gene, but there you go. After you're dead, it will be Dan day and Joe Erslavas at the house on First Street. And the other thing I note is there is Deni in the middle on the book and on either side is Sim and the Bible. [laughs] So, uh okay. Gene Day didn't know that he was forecasting the future, but there you go. You never know, and sometimes it takes 40 years of retrospect before you go, wow, that's pretty amazing that that would happen.
So that'll do it for Please Hold this time around. Thank you Manly Matt Dow, and say hi to Paula, say hi to Bullwinkle, and say hi to Janis Pearl for me.
Matt: Thanks, Dave, as always this is a pleasure. I mean, I'm not gonna lie, when I was waiting for you to call, I'm like, oh don't let this be one of them Dave Sim/Will Eisner at the convention stories. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] I apologize for it looking that way!
Matt: No, no! It's one of those where, you know, if I haven't gotten a fax for a week, I start thinking, huh, it's been pretty quiet. And I think, nah, you're just being paranoid.
Dave: Right. Right. Well, we'll address that when we come to it, as well. But meantime, you have a good night.
Matt: You too, Dave!
Dave: Take care. Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye.
