Hi, Everybody!
As we do:
I had somebody ask about some of the earlier Monday Reports. I actually have a PDF of all of them. If you're interested in a copy, lemme know at momentofcerebus@gmail.com...
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As you all should know by now, 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".
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.
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[guitar music]
Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt! How you doing?
Matt: Uh, well… alright.
Dave: Good!
Matt: Paula's got a patient that's going in the nursing home because he can't live by himself anymore. He keeps having falls, and he's got two cats, and because she goes there frequently, the cats know her and like her, and we talked about it, and decided, okay, we'll bring two more cats into our lives. So now I have three cats!
Dave: Lucky you. [laughs]
Matt: They stopped constantly hissing at each other, so that's an upshot!
Dave: That's good! That's good. Yeah, I was gonna say, if you don't really want all three of them, you're more than welcome to mail one of them to me.
Matt: [laughs] If you really want a cat, I have a cat that I could mail to you.
Dave: No, that's fine. I'm trying to cut down.
Matt: As my Dad says, “I love cats, but I can't eat a whole one.”
Dave: [laughs] Your Dad is a caution, I must say. Are we recording?
Matt: We are recording..
Dave: We are recording. Okay! “Just realized it's time to write the Please Hold for Dave Sim fax, and here it is.” I'm reading it even as we speak. “Somebody's got to remember Jeff Seiler. Me? You? Where's Steve Peters when I need him?” I'm gonna take a turn, because I am very very pleased with myself because, I was prepared when my laptop died because it was definitely ailing. It was not in particularly good shape, and I was going, okay, when it happens, what is it that I'm going to do when I don't have a laptop, particularly if I'm working on something where I need a laptop? Which, in this case, that's exactly what happened, because I was working on Strange Death of Alex Raymond page 596, and I was doing the reverse lettering, The white on black lettering, which was a function that Sandeep Atwal put on the computer for me when it was brand new, which is going back to like 2008, 2009. And when I'm using that on Strange Death of Alex Raymond, that's where I'm writing the captions. I map out the page, paste up the the elements, saying “this is going here, this is going here, this is going here,” and then, if there's reverse lettering on it, then I type up the captions that get reversed, and paste those up just to say, okay, this is how large the captions need to be, which is a matter of just putting black rectangles on the page in the right spot and then blacking them in, which I do on the light box by just saying, okay, here's the caption, here's roughly the outline of it. Outline that on the other side of the page, then put it on the light box and trace it on very carefully with the with blue pencil, then black it in, then I'm I'm off to actually doing the penciling and the inking on the figures and the backgrounds and everything else. But the interum step is, okay, I have something more to say here. I could live with this, as this is the number of black and white captions with white lettering that are going to be on this page, how much room do I have left over? And in this case, it was about 2 inches, an inch and 3/4 somewhere around there where I could do probably one more large vertical caption or two smaller captions. And it was definitely method acting Ward Greene the morning after Margaret Mitchell had been hit by the car. So, yeah I definitely want to write more on this, and I now know I have probably room for another 8, 9, 10, 11 lines, somewhere around there, and now I have to write those, and do a second draft on the text on that page. And that was the point where the laptop died. So it was, okay, here I am, I've been thinking about this, this moment will be coming up ahead. A year, two years from now, three years from now. I've been thinking about it for a while, when it happens, what am I going to do? And the answer was the Cerebus Archive. I've got all of the individual photographs in the Cerebus Archive that are all basically 4x5, little bit larger, a little bit smaller. And as soon as that laptop dies, because I'm not going to be able to get another laptop right away, and I still don't have one one and this is two weeks later, I'm going pedal to the medal on finishing the Cerebus Archive after 20 years. Getting everything in Stayflats, everything put in chronological order. So that's where we're getting to the, “Dave is very pleased with himself” because instead of having a large Canada Post mailing box full of individual photographs stacked against each other in two rows, and individual photographs here, individual photographs there, and going, I'm the only person on the planet that knows what's in these photographs. So, if I don't get these annotated, written on the back, like, you got bunch of them so far. Not in the last while, but I got in the habit of doing like maybe like 10 or 15 photographs and writing descriptions on the back of them, and then Rolly would email them to you. Right?
Matt: Right.
Dave: Okay, what you have so far is probably about, ballpark, I'm saying maybe a fifth of the photographs. But now they're all ready to be scanned, front and back, and I thought it was good that you and Rolly worked out that if he just scans the photographs on the one side and then flips them over, so that the captions are all that's visible, you know exactly how that works, so you can go this caption with this photograph, this caption with that photograph, that kind of thing. Right?
Matt: Right.
Dave: That's great. That was one of those things where I went, I don't know when I'm going to get to this, but when I do get to this, we are in a very good place to get this wrapped up. And all of those photographs are now done, and are in envelopes in chronological order. Including the ones that you've gotten already, which were just sitting in their own box out back at Camp David saying, these have already been scanned, these already have captions on them, don't confuse them with the others. And I didn't, so I got all of those put in chronological order. Each envelope, this is the year that these photographs are from, and I've had the pile of 300 issues of “Cerebus” pulled apart so that I go, alright, I think I know roughly where this is from. I'm pretty sure it was in Aardvark Comment. Where was it specifically? Because now I'm writing the captions on the back. And it was, like I say, it was about two weeks of 12 hour days, getting that done, covering every surface in the Rectangle Office, covering every surface in the Archive Room, and then gradually getting put in envelopes with dates on them. And here I am! I actually finished that today. I actually got the Cerebus Archive finished. It still boggles my mind that I can say to myself, “Dave, you don't have to worry about it. That Canada Post box full of photographs doesn't exist anymore. They're all actually broken down by year, you've researched all of them that you can, found out where it's from, annotated it on the back, and they're all just sitting in five little stacks on the front stairs, so that Rolly can take them out back at his convenience and make sure that they get scanned in order. And consequently, I found a couple of Jeff Seiler things. So, I took them out back for Rolly. He's not doing anything besides Kickstarter, we just got all of the “Akimbo” comics in today. And they look really good, they're absolutely gorgeous. And particularly David Birdsong, If you're listening, you take a gold star out of petty cash. Take a couple of gold stars out of petty cash, they're small. The Janet Catherine Jones covers are gorgeous. I know that you were very very ambivalent about them, and there was absolutely no reason to be ambivalent about them. They're just great. If I knew how to do that, I would be very very pleased with myself to have done the colour that you did on those covers. But, getting back to Jeff Seiler…
Matt: To interject real quick, he sent an email to the Brain Trust going, “This is the coloring job I did on one of the covers and I don't like it. I think it'll be better in black and white.” And I'm going, well, if you tweak it like this, and like this, and everybody responded with, “No no, yeah, Matt nailed it on that. Just tweak it just like that and it'll be perfect.” And he sent out the next version and went, “Yeah, actually, no, that does look good!” And he was actually proud of himself for once, and I'm going, see, just don't overthink this, David! [laughs]
Dave: And every once in a while, ask Matt Dow, and Matt will be right.
Matt: I'm not right often, but what I am right, that's when I point at the bleachers and the ball goes where I pointed, and everybody goes, “How did he do that?” Well, it's a million to one shot, guys.
Dave: That's it. That's it. Okay, well, you take a couple of gold stars out of petty cash yourself there, Manly Matt.
Matt: Oh, see now, Margaret's gonna be going, “Where's my gold stars?” And I'm going be like, well, we have a point system, and when you get enough points you get a gold star. [laughs]
Dave: That's right, and it's completely arbitrary. I'm the one who decides. It's a benevolent dictatorship and I am your benevolent dictator. So, what you will be getting emailed from Rolly is a postcard, and it's a postcard with three deer with antlers on the front of it, and it's from Pennsylvania. Says “Pennsylvania” right on it, and on the other side it says, “Dear Gerhard, I don't know why but you always seem to strike me as looking like a deer in the headlights. No offense. I hope we can talk more in the upcoming post-’Cerebus’ years, as I enjoy your company a great deal. Cordially, Jeff.” And that was one of those that I could only ballpark. Obviously, Jeff wrote that to Gerhard before “Cerebus” came to end, but not much before “Cerebus” came to an end, and in this case it was, okay, I really don't. I can't narrow the year down more than that. So this one gets its own envelope, and I wrote on the envelope, “Jeff Seiler postcard to Gerhard. Evidently given to him just before issue 300. Only Jeff could to try to strike up a friendship with someone by describing him as ‘a deer in the headlights’ and then write ‘ no offense’.”
Matt: [laughs] Pennsylvania, that's… I'm trying to think of what years… I mean, I can't imagine it's from after Olean, but that it could also be from then when Jeff drove up to Olean or Oh-lee-on, Jason Trimmer is going to comment that I'm mispronouncing it, cause he always does.
Dave: Well, yes it's oh-le-on. I wasn't gonna say anything because you're Manly Matt Dow, this is your show.
Matt: No no no no! Every time I say it wrong, Jason comes by to correct cause he doesn't care but he knows the people from there do, and I just keep thinking, as a guy that lives next to Manitowoc and it's one of those I think it’s spelled that way but kind of isn't? You know, that point of pride of “I'm from the town and he keeps saying it wrong.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: Cause Jeff had a tendency on road trips, he would buy postcards, and instead of mailing him to you, he'd get to where he was going and see you, and hand you the card so there wouldn't be a stamp on it.
Dave: That's possible, except that was Ye Bookes of Cerebus, right?
Matt: Yeah, the first one.
Dave: See, Ye Bookes of Cerebus, that was after “Cerebus” was done.
Matt: I know, but it's Jeff. Jeff could have been, you know… jeffing it.
Dave: [laughs] Well, yeah, and it was one of those things that when I saw that in the photo archive, I went, well, you can really tell that Gerhard treasured this and has been keeping it as a keepsake in his hope chest all these years. [chuckles] It's like, yeah, an overture from Jeff Seiler to be friendly has got to have a cheap shot somewhere in the middle, and there it was. I thought maybe it was one of the S.P.A.C.E. because we were going to S.P.A.C.E. before “Cerebus” was done, right? Wasn't 2004 the first S.P.A.C.E. we went to?
Matt: I don't believe so. I know it's the first one I went to.
Dave: Yeah, that's where you gave me the gold watch.
Matt: And then that was the start of the, “Hey, let's all go bug Dave in Ohio.”
Dave: [laughs] Which I deeply appreciated. The other thing that I had in the Archive was a picture of Pud, Jeff's, I think, Russian Blue cat, the one that he had before Yousef, with his bloody eyeball. And on the back of that, from the Minneapolis Veterinary Hospital, “Dear Jeff, our records indicate that Pood will soon be due for important health services. Please call our office at 612- 746-0300 to schedule an appointment because regular visits are an essential part of Pood's health care. We can't wait to see Pood! Regards, Minneapolis Veterinary Hospital.” And it's like, [laughs] yeah sure they were. And that was the problem that Jeff got into with, the cat's name was actually Pud, which was short for Puddy Cat. But if you wrote Pud, P-U-D, everybody would pronounce it pud, which wasn't what Jeff was trying to say, but Jeff wasn't trying to say Pood either. And I forget how much money he spent on that cat, but astronomical amounts of money. And I'm telling you this, like you don't know what cats cost.
Matt: Well, I vaguely remember talking to him at one point, and he was saying that the cat was getting sick and I was going, you know, it's a cat, right? And he's going, “Yeah, but…” and I'm like, there comes a point where it's cheaper to go to the Humane Society with a picture of the cat saying “give me one of these” than it is to try to save the life of, ya know, a cat.
Dave: Right. I agree with you, but we're getting in a dangerous territory here.
Matt: I've also lived with, oh gee, I got to adjust the number in my head now.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So I'm up to eight cats that I've lived with in my life…
Dave: Augh!
Matt: And it's very much a, you know, the first set of cats when I was a kid, Mom and Dad got tired of dealing with having the cats, and we had a friend that was a farmer that needed mousers. So we took the cats out to the farm, and let them out into the corn field so they could eat mice, and we went out to visit a couple times to see the cats. And the big problem was, there were two males that became the bulls that were in charge of all the other cats on the farm, which would have been okay except they were both neutered, so the farmer wasn't getting new cats to replace the cats that disappeared.
Dave: Oh man! I never thought of that as a problem. And now we're getting into the human rights of cats.
Matt: Well, and he was like, “Thank you for the cats” cause they were great mousers apparently, but they took over and became the the alphas. And my Mom told me years later that, yeah, he was kind of waiting for them to die so that he could strike up getting more cats. Cause I mean, on the farm the deal was you can eat all the mice you want, but we want more cats to replace you when you die, because farm cats have a tendency to just disappear.
Dave: This is true. This is true. And farmers do share our viewpoint on cats, which again, gets into intruding on the human rights of cats. For the vast vast part of our 2024 population who definitely think that cats are human beings and have the same rights that all of us do. It's like, to them it's definitely a massive human rights violation that cats aren't allowed to vote.
Matt: [guffaws] Well to the people that believe that cats are more important than I feel they are, all I have to say is you've never gotten woken up to your wife going to work and screaming that there's cat puke in her shoe.
Dave: [laughs] Oh, that's not funny. [laughs]
Matt: Oh no, that's hilarious, because the cat will puke in shoes and he has yet, never ever puked in one of my shoes, but he's puked in both girls and Paula.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I figured it out that, the anthropomorphic qualities to the cat is that he must like me, and I'm going, no, I think it's more of a, he knows if I find puke in my shoe there's a good chance that that's the last thing he's going to do in this world.
Dave: That's right. That's right. He might get made into a very nice cat hat that I will be wearing this winter. I could do that myself and enjoy it!
Matt: As I said my father says, that he loves cats, he just can't eat a whole one. [laughs]
Dave: Right. Okay! Well, there you go. That's my Jeff Seiler [laughs] contribution for March 2024. And, so, moving on. Where are we here? “Then, unless there's something in the ‘Matt doesn't know about this file’ we move on to Dodger. MJ ‘Mike’ Sewall.” Hello, Mike! And, uh, February 4th… 23?!
Matt: I may have put the wrong date.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I saved the questions as 23 and went, oh yeah, I should fix that, and then, nah, I know where they are.
Dave: Right, right. “Hey there! In the last month, we have lost 90% of our restaurant staff. Nothing nefarious, just good employees moving on to other jobs all at the same time. Argh! This comes just before our busiest 45 days of the year, Lent. Double argh! I own an English style fish & chips / seafood restaurant. Argh times three! Lent is a big thing for us.” I can certainly see that one. Argh times four. “Anyhoo, in all that busy mess, I formulated a brilliant, pithy, and very modest question, then forgot to send it. Also thanks again for the original art, I have collected most of the ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ comics.” He's referring to the Cerebus tarred and feathered piece of artwork that I sent him. “But have not read all of them yet. Thus, me missing the Batvark tarred and feathered reference. Still, I love the art, and we'll catch up with ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ soon. As soon as I train what feels like 67 brand new employees mere weeks before my busiest time of the year.” I had no idea about this, about Mike Sewall, that that's what he does. Did you know what he did for a living?
Matt: Uh yeah, we became Facebook friends, and he kept share posts from this fish & ship shop, and I'm going, oh, he must really like it. And then one day he posted a picture where it showed him there, I'm going, oh, now it's making sense!
Dave: Okay, yeah, that's a tough racket to be in these days. COVID and post-COVID, and particularly the generation that just tends not to stick with a job. Quite sensibly, because really the only way to try and keep up with living expenses in 2024 is to never take a job for longer than, like, two or three months and move on, so that you can make exponentially more money that will barely keep you from falling completely behind the inflation rate. I had no idea we would ever be here as a society, but this seems to be a general condition across all the G7 countries, and it's definitely the restaurant guys that are taking it in the neck where you don't have entry-level employees who go, “Uh, this is okay. I like both working for Mike. I get the hours that I need, the tips are good, and, well, what do you know? It's eight years later and I'm still here.” I don't know if that's ever going to happen again, but we're certainly not in a society-wide financial situation where it's going to happen now. “But enough about me. Question originally almost sent January 14th, 2024. Hello mostly frozen Manly Matt, and the brilliant and mostly humble Dave Sim.” Are you frozen? How is winter there?
Matt: Oh, it was pretty mild. Back in January when he was writing the question, it probably was cold. But…
Dave: We're almost like California here. I don't want to jinx it, but I pay roughly $1,500 a season for snow removal at the Off-White House, and there's only been one time that the guy had to come and clear the snow, and even then, that was just a light dusting. It's one of those, this is definitely my kind of winter. I would take these just absolutely every winter without fail, if anybody wants to open up the possibility and ask Dave Sim, “What do you want?” That's what I would be picking. So, uh, now, where have I got you, Mike? [papers rustle] Mike? Hello? He wasn't the one asking about Strange Death of Alex Raymond?
Matt: No. It's before that.
Dave: Yeah. But where is it? Where did it go? [papers rustle] What was he asking about?
Matt: Uh, I forget.
Dave: Oh! Oh here we are. Sorry, Mike, you went to the bottom of the pile. Nothing personal. He writes, “I am not cheating on you, but I also listen to other comic book history related podcasts. Rob Liefeld has a dizzyingly energetic twice weekly show where he discusses some insightful comics history. Hanging out with Jack Kirby, impact of Image Comics, creators rights, and much more. It reminded me of the persistent rumor that you have an open invitation to join Image Comics as a partner. Question for Dave, is this true?” Uh, no. “Was it ever true?” Uh, no. I think the situation with Image, and I'm not 100% certain on these things, I think in terms of the partnership, the original partners were the only ones who were allowed to be partners. You could join Image, but you would join Image Central, where they did all of the editorial and prepress and stuff like that, from the central location, and that was administrated separately. And you could join that by, I'm hoping I'm not misremembering this, I think it was a a popular vote of, the partners would vote whether you could become the next Image Central book, or you could be published by one of the partners. As an example, Colleen Doran with “A Distant Soil” was published by Erik Larsen through his own imprint, and it was Erik who decided that he wanted to publish “A Distant Soil” and that never got to “Are the are the partners going to vote on this going to be an Image Central book?” No on both of those questions. It's, Erik and Colleen arrived at the decision, and as far as I know, that was ongoing. So that I don't think the partner thing was ever on the table. The only exception to that one, and again, I think one of the problems is that all of us know Fleetwood Mac style “Rumours” about Image, and any of us know facts about Image, that Robert Kirkman I think became one of the Image partners because of the ridiculous level of success, and I mean that in the nicest possible way, with the capital R Ridiculous level of success that he had with “The Walking Dead” that moved him definitely to the head table. Whether he was ever officially declared a partner, I don't know, but it was, in terms of sales alone, and the only Image book that the mass population has heard about. “The Walking Dead” as cultural icon, that moved him to the head table on that one. I'm going to leave it at that, I got to go and do a prayer time now, and then when I get back, “Was it ever true?” I'll try and address that one and then the bonus question that he's got, “What did you think of Image from the creator's rights standpoint? When the famous Image infighting began, was there some vindication about going it alone, meaning no partners beyond Gerhard?” So, we will get to that one after Grampaw's prayer time. Stay tuned.
Matt: Okay! Talk to you then, Dave.
Dave: Talk to you in a few minutes. Buh-bye.
Matt: Hello again, Dave!
Dave: Hello again, Matt! Okay, now I'm gonna get on to the, is this true, was it ever true that I had an open invitation to join Image Comics as a partner? Definitely Image as it got rolling as a partnership, they were definitely looking for books to publish, and the more successful the book, the more interested that they were. But that was a very very different approach to what was going on at the time. All the guys that became Image announced that they were leaving Marvel January 1992. Coincidentally, just when I was starting the very very expensive 24 city ’92 US Tour, in association with the Great Eastern Conventions and that was pretty much it. That was all anybody wanted to talk about, and that's all anybody was thinking about. And consequently, Gerhard and I could put as much effort and money into trying to get some momentum going on “Cerebus”, and now it was, the only thing of interest from the time that I did the first appearance at a Diamond Warehouse in San Francisco at the beginning of the ‘92 Tour, and it was, “Did you hear that a bunch of guys are leaving Marvel and starting their own company?” It was, that's a great idea, and certainly something that I think is going to benefit Dave Sim and the way that Dave Sim thinks in the long term, but also that's a horrible thing from the perspective of what Dave Sim is trying to do here, and is just at the beginning of trying to make this happen. So, in order to completely answer the question, “What do you think of Image from the creator's rights standpoint ?” Let me call attention to that right there, as prior to the seven Image partners getting together and forming a company, the biggest event that had occurred was the Cerebus/Turtles crossover. But at no point during that whole process of putting together a crossover did it ever occur to me that, hey, maybe I should sell “Cerebus” and Aardvark-Vanaheim to Kevin and Peter? And it never occurred to Kevin and Peter to say, “Hey, maybe we should buy Dave Sim, or we should buy ‘Cerebus’. Or we should buy ‘Cerebus’ and Dave Sim.” So, when I talk about enactments, when I talk about God's Clockwork Mechanism, definitely that was something that was happening at that time. The Turtles crossover was in 1986, the Creators Bill of Rights Summits were in 1988, and that was really where I had my first meaningful contact with Larry Marder, the creator of “Beanworld”, at the Northampton Summit. And was definitely, yeah, this is a guy that I want to stay in contact with, and stay aware of, because he definitely had a real world perspective on things.
The reason I can answer this pretty thoroughly at the moment is because I've just finished the photo archive and I've got the envelope here, 1992, “Chicago US Tour, Great Eastern Convention, Hyatt Regency, with headline guest Larry Marder April 26th.” I wouldn't have tried answering as thoroughly as I am without having access to this information. April 26 puts it pretty early, and that Larry Marder at the time that I had some exchanges with him at the Northampton Summit, was really just to me a really nice guy. “Beanworld” was a really charming book that I really really enjoyed, and his wife Cory is wonderful. I always love Cory. But writing down on the back of the photograph, that was used on the back cover of “Cerebus” #167, “Larry Marder: the nexus of all comic book realities, Chicago Great Eastern convention, Hyatt Regency, 4/26/92. Larry Marder the nexus of all comic book realities. He had a lot of experience in ad agency-level advertising and got hired by Gary Colabuono to promote Gary's chain of ‘Chicagoland’ stores, Moondog’s. So a national comic book tour”, which I was embarked upon and trying to figure out, okay, how do I make this bigger and bigger, you know, more bang for the buck. A national comic book tour that Gerhard and I were doing with “Cerebus”, “was a good ‘fit’” with what Moondog’s was doing. Ya know, “We'll get in on this Great Eastern Conventions tour that Dave Sim is doing and pump it up at two of our Moondog’s locations.” And of course, since we were all starting this at the pretty much at the beginning, “They were fine with me ‘pirating’ Lekas & Levine,” the PR firm in Chicago that they used to promote stuff. “That's fine, you want to hire Lekas & Levine to do the publicity for 1992 Tour? That's great, we'll use them when we use them, you use them when you use them.” So that was the Dave Sim approach. I wasn't looking to sell “Cerebus” and Aardvark-Vanaheim to Moondog’s, I don't think Moondog’s was interested in acquiring “Cerebus” and Aardvark-Vanaheim, but we were all going, whatever we think would help each other, we’ll help each other. But we have to roll this back to, “Once all the major store-chain owners formed the ‘DLG’ the direct line group,” and that was something that Larry had a major role in. Where he's got this full-time job with the Moondog’s chain, Gary Colabuono is not really a hands-on owner, once you get to the point where you've got a chain of comic book stores, you hire good managers who can run the stores, and then basically you've got a lot of disposable time to try and figure out, “Okay, where am I going from here?” The chain stores were going, “Okay, how big a chain can you do? Is one of the chains,” at the time like Jim Hanley's Universe, Moondog’s, Lone Star Comics in Texas, Chuck Rozanski’s Mile High Comics, “is one of these guys going to win the lottery and become the,” as we would have thought of it at that time, “the Blockbuster video of comic book stores? You know, every comic book store in North America is now a Lone Star comic books store because Buddy Saunders got the jump on everybody else, everybody else sold out to Buddy Saunders, and now he's conquered the universe.” And Larry being a nexus of comic book realities, it was, yeah, this makes sense that you would meet with the other chain store owners and the larger retailers. Guys like Rory Root, who did land office business in Oakland with Comic Relief, that you guys should meet. You should be definitely in touch with each other. What happened was, that these guys meeting… it always reminds me of Napoleon's axiom, which was you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. By the time you're at the bayonet stage, and you've got all of your bayonets mobilized, you got to have them pointing in some direction, and directed at some other military force. And you can tweak it, but you got to just go full speed ahead, you can't just alarm your opponent by going, “Mhm, this Napoleon guy has got a lot of bayonets. Maybe we should probably do something about it, you and me and whoever else.” And this is what happened with the Direct Line Group. They would go to San Diego trade show, or they would go to the Diamond trade show, and then they'd all go out for dinner together. And it's like, this threw a scare first into Marvel Comics, where Marvel went, “Uh, wait a minute. This is a substantial part of our business, going through these guys’ stores, these seven guys, or eight guys, or however many guys there were. They're definitely a threat if they get together and go, ‘As the Direct Line Group, we're making this demand. As the Direct Line Group, we're making this other demand. And if you don't like it, we can do your part of the business.’” Which was the point where Marvel Comics bought Heroes World, one of the smaller distributors, and decided, “Nyah nyah, you can't do anything to us. We're Marvel Comics. We're going to distribute all of our comic books to Heroes World and not distribute those through anybody else.” And it's like [laughs], you can't scale that up, and they didn't know that at the time. There's never been anything like the direct market in terms of this massive cash and carry business. Nobody was carrying massive amounts of debt, everybody had to pay their distributor if they wanted to get next month's comics. The distributors had to pay the publishers if they wanted to get next month's comics. And it was just giant piles of cash, which most Industries aren't like that.
So it threw the major scare into Marvel, which when they started distributing through Heroes World, that threw a major scare into Steve Geppi at Diamond Comics going, “I'm now missing a giant chunk of my business.” As Marvel usually is 50% of of his business, or you know 40% or somewhere around there, but definitely you don't want, at that scale, losing a giant chunk of your livelihood. So, “Steve Geppi countered the twin threats from the Direct Line Group,” who hadn't even decided what they were going to do or if they were going to do anything, “and Marvel self-distributing, by launching the ‘exclusives’ war.” Which,”Okay, Marvel's gone exclusive with Heroes World, now I need to get everybody else, besides Marvel. Starting with DC, and then Image, and then Dark Horse, and pitching them on going with Diamond instead of Capital City,” because comic distribution was a duopoly between Diamond and Capital City. And that killed Capital City, because everybody went, “If I'm going to pick between Capital City and Diamond, I’m picking Diamond.” In which case, the only publisher I think that went through Capital City, decided to go exclusive with them, was Denis Kitchen with Kitchen Sink. And it's like, I went, no, I was already exclusive with Phil Sueling. I have no interest in getting into an exclusive situation with any distributor. I sell to any distributor who wants to buy from me. But that effectively, sin of omission, killed Capital City. It's like, you know, me and Denis Kitchen can try and shore you up, but if you've got me and Denis Kitchen, and Diamond has got DC, Image, and Dark Horse, you're not going to last very long, because you don't have enough volume to support all your warehouses and all of your infrastructure and everything else. I met with John Davis and Milton, and went, okay, you'd have to tell me what you're going to do for me if I go exclusive with you. Are you going to turn Capital City into to the “Cerebus” distributor? That “this is our self-identification, this is what we do, we promote ‘Cerebus’ exclusively because it's the only thing that actually comes out monthly and we're going to have to make ‘Cerebus’ 10 times the size that it is on the off hand chance that ‘Cerebus’ can save us.” And it's like, you know, they're just sort of staring at me going, “What are you talking about?” And it's like, I'm talking about reality. You've lost all of these other companies. I'm not even the size of Dark Horse, I'm certainly not the size of Image, but I'm also bigger than everybody else, every other company that's on the table. What can you do for me? And it's like, that was it. It sort of came to an end. I went as far as doing the “Internal Correspondence” ‘it's not over ‘til we say it's over’ Cerebus smashing the giant Superman statue. And that came out, and I think Capital City was able to keep going for maybe two months after that. And it's like, “Okay, it's not over ‘til we say it's over. Uh, we're still not saying it's over, but it's over.”
So then moving on to the next photograph here in the Cerebus Archive… where are we? Here we are. This is a photo of, and I got Rolly to scan all of these photos so you can have these as a backdrop while I'm describing this, “Larry landed on his feet as the Image consigliere. It was impossible to tell which Larry you were talking to because he wore so many hats both simultaneously and sequentially. What was good for Image Larry wasn't necessarily good for ‘Beanworld’ self-publishing Larry, and vice versa.” And this was one of those situations where I was far more interested in talking to Larry Marder Moondog’s Guru, or whatever you would call it. Where it was like it was just up to him to come up with ideas that he thought could help make Moondog’s bigger. “Okay, it works for Moondog’s, it will work for other chains. Larry, let's keep talking.” And failing that, Gary Colabuono then sold the Moondog's chain and phoned me and went, “Come on, we can do stuff now! I'm flush. I've got all of this money!” And it's like, the money isn't going to do any good. You don't have your chain of comic book stores anymore. Chain of comic book stores was where you had your influence. I don't think we really have anything to talk about anymore. And of course, Larry didn't have a job as Gary Colabuono’s second in command, which is where I say Larry landed on his feet as the Image consigliere. Image was basically, if you picture the seven largest retail chains as the Direct Line Group, “here we are, we're part of the group,” Image was a microcosm of that. It's like, yeah you know comics is about comic book store chains, and comic book store chains are about making comic books more popular. But the most popular comic books are the comic books being done by these seven guys who have just left Marvel. It's this really weird Clockwork Mechanism that's turning. Image, the seven creators in microcosm, the Direct Line Group in macrocosm from a business sense, and everybody's going,”Holy hell, WTF with exclamation marks after each one of them! Everything was going along so smoothly. What in the hell has happened?”
And that's when I get to, a “good example.” Larry, as Image consigliere, former Moondog guy, Bill of Rights Creator, self-publisher, “he would just talk to Jeff Smith about what was going on,” you know, Jeff Smith's only been in business for six months, eight months? And all of a sudden all of this stuff is going on that everybody's freaking out about. And Larry, very matter of factly and very levelheadedly, would talk to Jeff about what was going on, “with the exclusives wars.” And where all of this came from, and what the Direct Line Group was, and everything else. But Jeff was just, the only Larry Marder that Jeff Smith knew was the Image consigliere, so the more Larry talked, the less Jeff understood about what was going on, and all of us were just trying to figure it out on the fly. “Jeff would decide to take ‘Bone’ to Image.” And it's like,“Larry is the Image consigliere, but he “had in no way intended that would happen, but it would happen. In a sense, we were all living inside the Larry Marder law of the unintended comic book consequences through the 1990s” in exactly that sense. It was, I was always a self-publisher first. That was the important thing, that I had the creative autonomy, because I had the business autonomy to do whatever I wanted to do creatively, and that was not something that was on the market. That wasn't something that I would trade anything for because I'd be trading my cow for some magic beans. But that tbecame a schism in in the creative community. I remember Colleen Doran going on a sojourn with some other cartoonists to Mort Walker's mansion, wherever Mort Walker had his mansion. Mort Walker was “Hi and Lois”, “Beetle Bailey”, you know, the whole chain of these newspaper comic strips. And there was a cartoonist there from… I forget where it was, Mexico or Venezuela or something, and he's looking around at Mort Walker's mansion and going, “They give me a house like this, they can take all the rights that they want.” And it's like, that's just a different attitude. It's like, a big house is the same as, to me, Gary Colabuono's giant pile of money. It was far more important for you to have the Moondog’s chain and see that true, than to go, “Look at me, I've got a giant pile of money.” So consequently, what I'm saying is that, in retrospect, in terms of what would be the best decision that I could make in 1992 when Image was getting rolling, would be, okay, I'm gonna do the 300 issues. I'm going to do it for 26 years, three months, and get it done, but the most sensible thing I can do right now is to do a three month, four month, six month miniseries for Image while Image Comics are selling each of them a million copies. Every time a new Image Comic came out, it sold a million copies. And take that money, and use that as basically permanent insulation. But in terms of, again, what I was doing, I'm Dave Sim. I self-publish as Aardvark-Vanaheim. My book is “Cerebus”. I'm doing 300 issues for 26 years and three months. Changing that for the sake of money, that would completely undermine why I was doing what I was doing. And that's part, again, of God's Clockwork Mechanism, is the adversary saying, “Uh no, Dave Sim puts his pants on one leg at a time, same as everybody else. He can be tempted by giant piles of money.” And God saying, “Well okay, this Image thing is happening. According to your thesis, he should either sell ‘Cerebus’ to Image, or stop doing ‘Cerebus’ and do something for Image, because he knows there's all these giant piles of money on the table.” And it's like, mhm, Dave Sim didn't do that. Which essentially put Dave Sim at complete odds with the comic book field and with the creative community. And the comic book field and the creative community and the comic book stores, comic book conventions, and the distributors all essentially moved 20 steps away from Dave Sim and then went, “Oh look, Crazy Dave Sim has been left out of what is going on.” You know, John Lennon's, “you no longer run the ball.” And it's like, well okay, if that's what happens. I don't have the influence and I don't have the cache that I used to have, but I'm doing it for the sake of what I consider integrity, then I'll just live with that. Same thing as I don't think feminism is what you think it is, so I will make this a big part of the 6,000 page graphic novel and that pushes and pushes me further and further away from the comic book field, but it's… I'm kind of on a quest for truth here, and falling for what I would consider a scam like feminism, that's, why would I do that when I won't fall for these other scams?
So, Mike, when you're saying, “What did you think of Image from the creator's rights standpoint?,” the most important thing about Image, and this was something that Larry Marder said to me, was, because Larry was a self-publisher, “Beanworld” was near and dear to his heart., and was always at the forefront of his thoughts. As, “Is this going to benefit ‘Beanworld’ or not?” So, we were kind of on the same page that way, but he did say, “No, this Image thing isn't going to happen very often. This is like seven simultaneous lightning strikes all happening at the same time in the same spot as a collective. I have to put ‘Beanworld’ on hold to make sure that I do everything possible to make Image function properly so that they don't stumble over any obvious pitfalls that damages them in the comic book field or damages them in real world business.” And the persuasive argument was, one of the things that Image had was you can bring your book to Image, and publish through them, and then you can leave. If you go, “Well okay, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. I want to do something else.” Which is why that was important that Jeff Smith did that. Jeff basically took “Bone” to Image just long enough to not have to face the exclusives question, “Who is Jeff Smith going with? Capital City or Diamond?” and go, “Well, I'm going wherever Image is going,” and Image went with Diamond. But then, as soon as all of that blew over, and Françoise Mouly was hooking Jeff and Vijaya up with Scholastic Books, then it was, “Well, okay, Scholastic Books with Harry Potter makes Image Comics look like a Mom and Pop corner store, and naturally I'll go with Scholastic Books rather than staying with Image.” And could do that because you didn't sign a contract with Image saying Image owns your intellectual property. So, that was valuable. I think it's one of the reasons that Image still has the cache that it does. The more that they focus on “these are the creators that we publish, these are the intellectual properties that these creators do. We'll try and keep them as happy as we can with our structure, and we will try to build our structure in every way that we can think of to benefit creators and intellectual properties. And if it doesn't work with you, that's fine. You're welcome to split, and no hard feelings. We'll still be happy to say hi to you at conventions and stuff like that.” So I was persuaded by that argument, but at the same time, it was, no, I'm trying to promote self-publishing of a far purer form, because Image was already going schizophrenic on creator’s rights. It was, yes, if you publish through Image, and you bring your book and you don't like how things are going, you could leave, but at the same time everybody working on “Spawn” who wasn't named Todd McFarland, they didn't own their work. Todd owned everything. [laughs] And it's like, well, wait a minute! Don't try and convince me that that's self-publishing as you understand it, and as I understand it, Larry. And it's like, no, no it isn't. But again, it was important that we not damage this thing. And particularly, one of Larry's biggest jobs was to keep Todd McFarland from making obvious mistakes publicity wise. I remember one instance where Todd was getting ready to publish a editorial or something in “Spawn” talking about Robert Crumb, and
”What's so great about Robert Crumb?” [laughs] And it's like, Larry Marder went, “You can't do that. You are Todd McFarland and that's a given thing. ‘Spawn’ is a given thing. Robert Crumb is on a completely other creative level orders of magnitude above you.” And Todd understood, talking to Larry, when Larry was telling him something that he didn't know that is not a matter of opinion. It's not, “Well, okay, Todd. I don't think you should be running this in ‘Spawn.’” It was, “You can't do this. You could take yourself and ‘Spawn’ and Image down if this spins out of control, as it possibly could.”
So there you go. Very very long winded, but that's really, my attitude toward Image was all of those things. It's like, they were fudging too many things for me to go, “Yeah, Image and Aardvark-Vanaheim were the same thing.” But at the same time, they were definitely doing a bunch of things that weren't Marvel & DC. And all of that was in flux, and that's, again, to me, from my perspective as a monotheist, that's God's Clockwork Mechanism. Image was a ladder, not a snake, in the sense that Marvel and DC were both self-evidently snakes. They looked like ladders, but no, they were snakes. And that's the reason that they would pay you the amount of money that they would pay you, is you aren't going to be happy with the result and you won't be able to change it.
Matt: Well, the initial question of , “Did you have an offer to be a partner?” And, you know, the legend goes that, yes, you had an offer to be a partner, and and it's an open-ended offer type thing. And Rich Johnston from Bleeding Cool is the one that, “You know, at one time Dave was offered to be a partner” and I'm going, every time I read, I'm like, it doesn't sound… I mean, yeah, maybe when they first were starting up they're like, “Hey Dave, do you want to come in and run our company?” And you were like, “Uh no. You guys need to run your own companies!”
Dave: No, it never got anywhere close to that. But go ahead.
Matt: Agh! It struck bells in the back of my head that I vaguely remember something about this, and during the break I went and grabbed my copy of, “I Have to Live With This Guy!” by Blake Bell, because in the Deni interview, which I know you've never read, at one point it's Deni's biggest mistake is turning down an offer from a group of young upstart artists looking to break away from “the man” and then, quoting Deni, “Jim Valentino came to me and said, ‘I'm talking to Liefeld and these guys to do basically what you did with Renegade. We want to form a Consortium,’ which is what Reneg grade was. It was co-op. He said, ‘These guys sell big numbers. You want to come run it?’ I went, I don't want to run another comic book company for as long as I live.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: She continues, “It was the wrong answer, laughs Deni. I turned down running Image Comics because I had just closed Renegade and emotionally was not in a place to do it.” I remembered this and I'm like, it's Deni, and there's history there of, you know, yeah, but… It's one of those, it sounds like, because “Normalman” ended up going through Renegade, didn't it?
Dave: Right! Right.
Matt: So, that I mean, I believe the Valentino probably did call her of, “Hey, you used to run a consortium publishing. We're starting this up, you want to do it?” And I can very much see Deni looking around going, “Do I want to walk back into the burning building? No, no, I don't want to walk back into the burning building.”[laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. It was also like, Valentino was, I remember it might have been Larry Marder telling me that one, or might have been Todd McFarland when I had dinner at his place, saying, when they first got together to theorize on doing Image, Jim Valentino was there. [laughs] It's like, Todd pointed at each of the guys. He points to Rob and goes, “I know why he's here” [laughs] and he points to Erik Larsen, he goes, “I know why he's here,” and he points at each the other guys, and he points to Jim Valentino, he goes, “I don't know why you're here.” And Jim was, I think, able to bluff himself through that, and definitely he became an Image partner. He's not a stupid guy, and I'm sure he probably had a lot to contribute to the conversation on a side that none of those guys knew, which was independent publishing. From the perspective of a guy who was published by various publishers, he was published by Dave Sim, he was published by Deni Loubert, he was published by Cat Yronwode, he was published by various underground publishers. And he could say, you know, “I can tell you what what these people do. I can tell you what happens at that scale.” Whereas the rest of the Image guys just knew, “Here's how you deal with your editor at Marvel, here's how you finesse deadlines, here's where you cut corners on this, cut corners on that, and here's how you do really cool superheroes with big splash pages.” So I think that was a lot of what kept Jim in the ball game. And I can picture Jim saying, “I can talk to Deni Loubert if you would like. She did run Renegade Press, and did publish a number of titles.” And it's like, “Okay, well, at the very least, yeah, find out what she has to say.” And Deni, of course, had absolutely no experience with Marvel Comics or DC, all she knew was independent publishing, starting with me. And definitely psychotic business autonomy, psychotic creative autonomy, as the central consideration, and this was what she was pitching to other creators. Yeah, she probably should of at least met with them. If Jim was willing to introduce her to the Image partners, who were all just trying to piece it together. “We've decided we're going to do this, we just don't know how it's going to function because we've never built anything like this.” She could probably have talked them and talked herself into, “Okay, well, I guess I am going back into the burning building, because at least this [laughs] burning building has got millions and millions of dollars attached to it.”
Matt: Well, the other thing about Image that I know because I knew a guy that was publishing through Image, was that the Image deal… I don't know how it started, but I know that eventually it got to all Image owns is the little “I” that they put on the cover, and you pay a licensing fee for that, but then after that you're on your own. If you want to buy Super Bowl ads for your comic book, that's fine, but we're not paying a dime for that. That's all on you. And if you had a fan base that you could actually bring to sell in your book, yeah okay, it works. But if you're a little self-publishing guy that slides over to Image because you're going to triple or quadruple your monthly sales guaranteed just because it's got the little “I” on the cover, yeah that works for about three issues, and then if you don't have the goods, sales are going to drop, and eventually you're not going to make the minimum threshold where Image goes, “Hey, we're not publishing it anymore.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And that was, a friend of one of my friends was, they self-published the first issue. I want to say they were in line to go through some other small company and that company went out of business, and they ended up, like, “Okay, we'll try Image.” And it was, “Okay when's the book coming out?” Like, “Well, that's what we're working on!” [laughs]
Dave: Right.Right.
Matt: And eventually they ended up going to Dark Horse because Dark Horse offered a better deal where, “We'll throw a little money at the marketing so that you don't have to do everything.” Because Image was essentially your’re self-publishing, just hoping that being in the front of the catalog is going to get you the sales you need.
Dave: Right. Right. And the cache was like unbelievable at the beginning. That “I” on the cover because, you know, we are the nation of Marvel Zombies, where “I buy comic books that say ‘Marvel Comics’ on the front of them because that's just what I do. Those are the best comic books, because it's the biggest company.” That extended to Image. It was, ”This is how I buy my comics. I will collect every Image Comic. And as a matter of fact, local comics retailer, I'll take a hundred of each Image Comic that comes out, sight unseen.” That couldn't end happily, but there was definitely millions and millions and millions of dollars on the table for a good six or or seven months there.
Matt: Which is…
Dave: Okay! I've got another prayer time coming up.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Hold that thought and we'll pick up with you commenting on what I just said when I come back.
Matt: Okay!
Dave: See ya in a while.
Matt: Alright! Bye.
Matt: And hello again, Dave!
Dave: Hello again, Matt. So, what were you about to say?
Matt: I was just gonna say that you know the Image “I” was a guarantee of, “Okay, I'll take a hundred of them sight unseen” and the local store that I go to just had a big sale where you could get 50 of those issues for $5.
Dave: [laughs] Well, you never know. You never know, it's the Tulip situation all over again. It's deja vu all over again.
Matt: Did I ever tell you the Neal Adams story? I may have.
Dave: What’s that?
Matt: There's a book that came out called “The Hundred Most Unfortunate Superheroes” and it's from the Golden Age to now, and it's just superhero ideas that probably weren't the best, and one of them is “Skate Man” from Continuity…
Dave: Oh! Oh yeah.
Matt: Done by Neal Adams. And I got the book, and then I found the issue in the back issue bins, and I bought it, and then he was at the store for a signing, so I had him sign it. But I was having him sign one of the Cerebus birthday cards for one of the kids, and cause it was one item for free then you got to pay, so I was doing three free items, cause I had me, Paula, and one of the kids. And so I had Paula to sign it, and when she hands him, she goes, “’Skate Man’? What the hell is this?!”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And he kind of blanched and went, “Well we sold 80,000 copies of it” and I'm going, honey, just hand him the comic, say thank you, let's move on!
Dave: [laughs] “Love you!” [laughs] Okay. Alright.
Matt: I just sent through a fax, but we don't need to go through the whole thing, but it's one page that, during the break I got the scans from Rolly email and I looked at him and the card from Jeff to Gerhard has no postmark, which means he handed it to Ger personally.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I went okay, okay! And I did a search through my email of Jeff's email address with the word “postcard” and it popped up. He gave that card to Gerhard in Ole-on, 2005.
Dave: Olean.
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Sorry, I’m torturing you. [laughs]
Matt: I know! But that's, yeah that's…
Dave: I know, I saw the fax before I called you back and I thought, we're getting pretty good at this.
Matt: Well, so then I decided to send the whole email of this is Jeff's story so that way you can put it with the card in the Archive and if anybody wants to know in the future generations going back of what's this envelope with a single postcard, and well, here's the story of how the postcard got there.
Dave: That's good. That's good. And I've got a place to put it now. That's a permanent Archive item.
Matt: Well, the other weird part was the email was dated October 5th 2005 and that was Paula's 20th birthday.
Dave: How about that?
Matt: So, moving on!
Dave: Moving on, “MJ Mike ‘Dodger’ Sewall, the dithering and desperate Californian.Then we turn to Mike Sewall, who titled this, ‘horror filled comment and question cannot wait!’ 2/19/24. ‘I now listen to audio books. I'm revisiting some great fiction and just listened to Michael Moorcock’s Elric books. To my horror, I discovered Melniboné is pronounced ‘Mel-nib-an-ay’ and, not I,” he's got it as I. The French, I don't remember if that's the l’accent grave or the l’accante grue. There are, depending on which way the little apostrophe over the E is tilted, it's either l’accent grave or l’accante grue. It’s definitely A, which I could pronounce that A, I. “Dumb me,” he says, “only having ever read the word, thought it was Mel-ni-bone. Okay, the accent mark should have been a clue, but still. Question for Dave, have I been horrifyingly wrong all this time? Is it pronounced Elrod of Mel-vin-bo-nay?” No, that was what I was making fun of. Was that, [laughs] I saw it in print, and you know, living in Canada where you may not know the difference between l’accent grave and l’accante grue, but you know what they do to the sound of that letter. I thought, you know, on a percentage basis everybody who has read Michael Moorcock's Elric books, skewing towards the largest audience, which is the American audience probably pronounces it “Melnibone” and consequently I can make fun of that by just turning it into Elrod of Melvinbone. Which, Melvin was definitely one of those “Mad” Comic Book, “Mad Magazine” names, so yeah, that was my inside joke, was just guessing. If you had on a percentage basis the number of people who were huge huge Elric fans who pronounced it “Melnibone” as opposed to “Mel-nib-an-ay”, I'd guess it skewed probably 80/20, maybe 90/10? This is the kind of sense of humour that I had, even back when I was 22 years old.
Matt: I always thought it was Melvinbone because Melvinbone is just a funny name!
Dave: Right! Right. Well, Melnibone's a funny name too. If you do that, I mean, that's one of those, Michael Moorcock lived across the channel from France his entire life, so I think he's probably in the same situation that I was, and thought, “Well, you know, as long as I put the accent on there, everybody will know how to pronounce that.” And it's like, mhmm, it's going to be an uphill struggle in the United States. I can pretty much guarantee you.
Okay, moving on. “’A Fake Name’ asked on one of Jen's SDoAR posts,” which are still appearing every Tuesday, are they not?
Matt: They are!
Dave: And she's really, really busy these days. So it's like, we will count ourselves fortunate that… there hasn't been a single skip week?
Matt: Well, so somebody else sent me an email saying, “Hey, Jen's having a tough time of it right now, and she might have to back out” and I went, okay, so I sent her an email saying, “Hey, if life's getting too tough and you got to drop it, that's fine. Just let me know, because I can take over. Because right now, what she's doing is she's putting up the big board part of the post, where it's, you know, this is how much money raised, this is how close we are to the next unlocked page. A brief update of where she's at with the ashcans, and then she's doing six pages from the book in order, with a link to “Okay, start here. Here's all the posts so far.”
Dave: Oh, okay.
Matt: Because I am still doing High Society five years later, because I've been doing it six pages at a time, and it's not regular. It's pretty much a “Ehh, I just don't want to do anything else, here's some High Society” and you know if things are getting weird in Cerebus Land and there's lots of faxes or lots of updates, it's when I think of it, I do it, type thing. And I did it, it had been over a month since the last time I had put any High Society pages, so I did them. And Jen went, “Oh, that's a great idea” and so she started doing, from the beginning, page one, this is the Strange Death of Alex Raymond. And so I said, hey, if you need to back out, I'll keep posting pages, just you can send me the big board of where we're at for unlocking stuff.” And she came back with, “No, actually, doing the the blog post once a week is actually helping me keep my sanity. And it might be late on a Tuesday, like, you know, 10 o'clock at night, but I will get one done every Tuesday.” I'm like, oh hey, if it's helping you process everything else that's going on, I'm not going to stop you.
Dave: Right. Right. It's disconcerting I think for both you and I to be in the category of the sanest part of somebody's life. How could either of us be the sanest part of somebody's life?
Matt: Well, and that's, I mean, AMoC as therapy is one of those things of, I'm not going to knock it because apparently it's working for her, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody!
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, you could get in trouble with the health department doing that. Anyway, A Fake Name writes, “I've been meaning to post this for a while, and I guess today is the day.” And the day was March 6th. “I want to make sure I understand what's going on with Strange Death of Alex Raymond. One, at some point during ‘glamourpuss’, Dave began telling the story of Strange Death, the last issue ending with the car in mid-accident.” Uh, not 100% accurate. It ended with the Corvette heading for the tree. and we had the point of view of Alex Raymond's hands, the dashboard of the Corvette, Stan Drake’s hands, and we can see the tree coming up ahead. And that's where it got left off. So it's not really mid-accident, mid-accident is the whole whole other can of worms entirely. And it's going to be fun when I get there. Just flat out going, “Okay, and then this accounts says this, and then this account says this, and then this this account says this.” These are all taking place probably in the span of about a second and a half, to two seconds. “Two, some point after this he collaborates with Carson on bridging material, You Don't Know Jack, and then a hybrid Strange Death where Carson takes over from Dave’s last page of art(?) and offers his own thoughts and conclusions on the material.” I'm not going to comment on that, we're going to get all the way through this, and then we're going to get to Jen's reply, and then I will do whatever tweaking I can do to try and help the perceptions here. “Three, further after that, Dave's wrist heals, and he is able to resume drawing and is currently working on Strange Death once more.” Yes. “Four, is this version Dave is working on going to pick up from where his work ended and Carson's began in the Living The Line Edition, or is it picking up after the Dave/Carson book, or some other variation? Five, Dave's goal is to eventually finish Strange Death, which encompasses his Comic Art Metaphysics theory.” I'll interrupt that to go, it doesn't really encompass it, it's a manifestation of it. The Comic Art Metaphysics theory is the overarching concern, and Strange Death is something enacted within it. “And is a very involved project with no projected end goal in sight. So he continues working on it, and you, Jen, do your best to promote it so Dave has the financial cushion to work on it. Art auctions, Cerebus spinoffs, promotions, etc are all to keep the bills paid and Dave able to work on Strange Death. Right? Am I missing anything? Is this it? Where is the version you've been sharing pages from start? From where Carson took over to finish the Living The Line Edition or at some other point? A Fake Name.” To which Jen replied, “Too long; didn't read version. Yes, yes, yes, some other variation, yes, no, yes, page 253.” And then points out, “I actually cover all of this in excruciating detail in the Notes From The Interim Head of SDoAR Division that will be in the giant size ashcan. After ‘glamourpuss’ ended, Dave decided to publish the Strange Death of Alex Raymond comic book with IDW. The first several issues which are found, complete with covers, within the Living The Line Edition. At some point later, IDW believed that a hardcover of Dave’s work would be more appropriate, which is why the individual issues style faded away and the Living The Line version continued with more of a straight up narrative broken down by increasingly lengthy parts. Then Dave's wrist gave out, and he tried out several artists to continue the artwork. Carson won the sweepstakes.” [laughs] You want to put “won” in quotation marks. “But when the California test fundraising addition failed to generate much in the way of sales, Dave decided the whole venture was doomed to failure. Carson convinced Dave to allow him to publish, by a Living The Line. And after several mishaps, the hardcover was released to critical acclaim, but so-so sales, from Dave's perspective. After receiving funds from several patrons, Dave continued with his work to pick up after the pages that Carson had printed in blue ink. Therefore, giant size ashcan #0 will reprint the 21 blue pages using Dave's mockups, Dave's original mockups, and effectively pick up the story from page 253 of the hardcover. Giant size ashcan #1 will begin the process of printing the new pages Dave has mocked up or drawn, and pick up directly after those 21 pages. And yes, at some point, Dave’s wrist and modified drawing motion allowed him to continue drawing, hence the shift from mockups to drawing pages. What the end product is, beyond the ashcans, is TBD, to be decided. Quote Dave, ‘As Ted Kennedy might say, we’ll drive off that bridge when we come to it.’ Makes sense?”, she concludes with a question mark.
At which point, you interject, “But Dave, is Jen's response accurate? Is there something she missed? Is there an end in sight for the Strange Death of Alex Raymond? What was the last page you finished? How far are you on the page you're working on now? What's the wrist warm-up project you're working on on the off days? [laughs] What's the rosche limit on questions for this?” Okay! Uh, where's my notes here? Okay. If you got a copy of Strange Death of Alex Raymond at home, and you want to run and get it now, that might be a good idea, just put us on pause. [hums a quick tune] And come back and I will say, okay my last drawn page in the book, where I wrote all of the text, all of the copy, and did all of the drawing, was page 207. After that, the wrist went south, so I mocked up pages 208 to 251, where I wrote them and composed the pictures, but didn't draw the pictures, I just said, okay, here. This image from “Rip Kirby,” this face of Ward Greene, this face of Margaret Mitchell. This is the number of panels on this page. Here's where they go. So it was a road map for Carson. So that was 208 to 251, which Carson drew… you could put “drew” in quotation marks depending on how you describe drawing, where I believe that he printed out my mockup as blue lines, where everything that I had done was in non-repro blue. And I think he just did it on the printer that he owned, which I think was part of the idea of doing those pages in blue in his pages was, “Okay, this is how I do these pages.” And basically took it over the goal line. “Here's exactly what Dave wanted the pages to look like, and here's me doing my best Dave Sim, my best Alex Raymond, my best Al Williamson, my best photorealism style, turning these into comic pages. And at that point, yeah, definitely it was, this is…. Strange Death of Alex Raymond is, to me, a very very important, centrally important creative work, that I'm going to do my level best to finish. But as a “what is this in your life, as people understand lives? A way-too expensive and way-too time consuming hobby.” At which point, I basically told Carson that that was the situation. I couldn't see any percentage in continuing to mock up pages and sending them to Carson, and then Carson turning them into finished pages, because there was just no way that it was going to make money. It was an obscenely expensive, obscenely timeconsuming hobby that has completely consumed my life. But that's fine. This is trying to get better at photorealism and not having to do, you know, Batman, or Spider-Man, or The Flash, or something. This is all real people in real situations, it just doesn't get any better than this for me. But in terms of the amount of time that Carson was putting in on it, with a very very strong level of interest on his part, but not the “it doesn't matter how completely pointless this becomes in a conventional sense for me, I'm going to keep doing it.” But it I think it makes more sense at this point for me to just do mockups as I can get to them, and then just put them in a stack, and then somewhere 25 years, 50 years, 75 years after I'm dead, if a new photorealism person comes along who goes, “ I want to do this. I want to be the the new Carson Grubaugh.” It's like, fine! You know, go ahead. They're available in the Cerebus Archive. Eddie Khanna or Eddie Khanna's successor can provide them for you. You can print out your own blue lines and you can do your own inking on it, or you can do it on a computer. It's, this is as far as Dave Sim got, either all the way to the end, or to page 807 or 925 or whatever it was, and if you want to be the person, or one of the people that actually draws these, go ahead! And then make them available. Everybody knows what mockups look like, and they might go, “Mhm I’d take another career trajectory if I were you.” Or, “These aren't bad, but I wouldn't buy a book of your version of Strange Death of Alex Raymond.” Trying to keep it as open as possible.
That collided head-on with, Carson wanting his work published. If he put in this much time working on Strange Death of Alex Raymond, it wasn't enough for him to just have done it and go, “Okay, well, sorry that you didn't find out earlier that there's no way to make money at this. So, we'll just go our separate ways.” Carson wanted Strange Death of Alex Raymond to appear, and definitely is in the category of, “If I'm working on this book, and I think this book is as good as I think this book is, and I'm a co-creator on it, I want it to go into mainstream bookstores. Like, I'm not going to be happy until I can walk into Barnes & Noble, and go to their graphic novel section, and go, ‘there! That's me. That's my work participating on this.’” Which is, that has absolutely no resonance with me. It's like, um no, the only place that this could possibly sell even marginally is in the comic book field. It's like, I gave it the benefit of the doubt that no, this is interesting, this is the nature of how reality works, and here's all this inexplicable stuff that falls in the God's Clockwork Mechanism patterns. And I think, again, somewhere up ahead when people get over feminism and environmentalism and all that kind of stuff and go, “Oh wait a minute. This is a good point. This is actually how reality works. This is how it unfolds. This is the Clockwork Mechanism.” That has absolutely no resonance with Carson. So consequently, the only compromise situation was to say, well okay, Carson, as a participant on this book, a co-creator. You have a co-share in the book. You wrap it up as you see it as needing to be wrapped up, and then, Sean Robinson will publish it through Living The Line. You can do a mainstream bookstore deal, you can sell them through Diamond, and find out that it's just not going to work, and vanish without a trace. But I can understand that until that happens, until you actually see it happen, you're still going to hold out hope that this could have been a really big Harry Potter kind of thing. We just had to see it through. So consequently, Carson did in Strange Death of Alex Raymond in the hardcover and the softcover, pages 254 to 303. Those are Carson doing his, “This is how the Strange Death of Alex Raymond ends. It goes to page 250, 251 as Dave did it, and then I'm going to wrap the whole thing up in pages 254 to 303.” I kept doing mockups while that whole process was going on, and trying to explain to people, no, that's Carson's version. I'm working on my version, and I'm doing mockups of the pages. I can't draw the pages. And that was, and is, pages 254 to 554, mockups by me. And kind of an obscure Jeff Seiler reference, because that's 301 pages. So at that point, I went okay, I'm doing this right up to the point where the next section is the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell. And I could possibly completely fry my wrist it's not in the best possible shape, but I am at least going to start the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell. I might have to switch back to doing mockups, but until I do that, I'm going to try drawing Strange Death of Alex Raymond again. So, that was and is, pages 555 through to.. I should have checked this before I came upstairs, it’s sitting right there on the wall. I'm about seven pages, eight pages into the next section. So, very gratifying, mission accomplished. I actually did the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell section, writing, pasting up, penciling, and inking. And now I'm working on “Recoil, Recoil, Recoil” and the latest page that I'm working on is 596. [laughs] And as you remember from much earlier on Please Hold for Dave Sim, that's when my laptop died. So it's always something, as they say, that's the expression used to go. But if I can get all of the Archive done, and I'm very very close to getting all of the Archive done, everything is exactly where it's supposed to be, everything is labeled, everything's in Stayflats, at that point when I do start doing Strange Death of Alex Raymond again, and it will be the only thing that I work on, apart from cartoony stuff. Where when I'm working on Strange Death of Alex Raymond, both my shoulders and my neck all the way to the top of my scalp are clenched tight as a drum by the time I'm finished working that day, if I'm putting in a 12-hour day. And then if I do a “Cerebus” cover recreation, or I do a “Akimbo” cover for Steve Peters, or something like that, it's like, this is so unpainful. Like this is just cartooning. It really doesn't matter if that line is 100% where it's supposed to be, it's a cartoon. If you recognize the character, that's it. We're doing fine. Same thing with the “Akimbo” covers. It's like, I get to trace Frank Miller's “Dark Knight” cover and turn it into “Akimbo” and it only takes a couple of hours. And there's no tension in my shoulders, no tension in my neck. I am getting to the point where I can do Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages and go, “Chill! You know exactly what you're doing.” Just keep in mind all the different stages where, this is what you need to do with photorealism, because it's far more exacting than cartooning. But it's still just drawing comics. Nobody's asking me to do an oil painting of the current Prime Minister that's going to be on permanent exhibited in the Parliament building. It's like, there's difficult and then there's “difficult” in quotation marks. So the other note that I put here, my last drawn page when everything was mockups was page 207, which had a lot of give because it was Zelda Fitzgerald and there was a couple of little photorealism parts, but it was also doing versions of Zelda Fitzgerald's paintings which are very very avant-garde, so no one's going to go, “Uh, that arm is a little longer than Zelda Fitzgerald had it.” So that was the best I could do at the time, and then going, okay, if the wrist is like this when I get to the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell, which, as I say, that was page 207, and I didn't know what the page was, but it was going to be page 555 was where the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell started, I'm never going to get through it. I got this page done, when I get to that point I might get a page done, two pages, three pages. So, very very gratifying, I did get the whole section of Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell done. I hope that that explains exactly where the situation is.
Matt: So, we're not going to talk about the 310 pages of mockups that you were hoping to get back to, but we're not going to think about that cause it makes your wrist hurt just thinking about it.
Dave: Yeah, it's one of those, I don't know if the wrist will give out again, and I have to go back to mockups, but definitely, I know exactly where I am in the story. I always know the next thing that I have to do for the next five or six pages, and there's little surprises where the digression into “The Monkey’s Paw” then I fax Jen, can you find me this this and this on the internet, because I think this is a jigsaw puzzle piece? And son of a gun, it's definitely a a jigsaw puzzle piece. But then the part I'm on right now which is Ward Greene suffering because he knows he's responsible, or he has engineered, Margaret Mitchell's car accident that she's going to die from, and here's all of the things that he was doing in “Rip Kirby” leading up to that. And here's, like he's really anguishing because nobody's going to charge him with killing Margaret Mitchell because it's all been done metaphorically and metaphysically, and nobody has any awareness of that. But at the same time, he has to live as if he doesn't know that he just killed Margaret Mitchell, and now he has to figure out try to how to undo a lot of his sorcerer’s apprentice stuff, where he's already six weeks ahead on “Rip Kirby” so that Alex Raymond can draw it, and he has to go, “I got to change this, I've got to undo this, I've got to undo this other thing.” And he really had a little less than the biblical seven years. He gave it a game try, and it's going to be very interesting to document, but you can't undo something like that. That's Done with a capital D. Which is, a lot of what I'm trying to document. Look, this is how reality works. This occurs everywhere. This is what newspaper obituaries are about. This is what headlines are about. This is about what goes viral on the internet. It's all God's Clockwork Mechanism, and it's snakes and ladders. Whether it's you individually, or you as a municipal community, or a state community, or your country, or your political persuasion, whether you're on the left or you're the right, it's all just unfolding in snakes and ladders patterns everywhere. And I think when, if I can persuade people to look at things that way, and recognize that that's what it is, we’re going to be able to make progress. But we're still in this 6-7,000 year epoch cycle of going, “Why the hell did that happen?!” Why the hell did that happen?” Well, if you look at the pattern of it, who was engaged, where they were whether they were a snake person or a ladder person, that'll tell you why that happened, and why there's probably a better way to do all of these things.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Okay! Moving on to Easton, Pennsylvania and local man Michael R, who asks, “Hi Matt, I hope you and yours are doing well. Here's my question for Dave. Hi Dave, you still get comp comics from Marvel or DC Comics? If you do, any favorites?” [laughs] “Matt says, I'm sure the answer at Marvel and DC is, ‘Dave who?’ IE, no.” Uh, yes, that's 100% the situation. We're coming up on three hours here, [mumbles ‘duh-duh-dah, de-duh-duh-da’] and you write, “And that's all I got from the rabble. Lee Thacker’s ‘The Anxiety Society’ is being Kickstarted as ‘My Nervous Breakdown.’ Go Lee!” I'm gonna give a big thumbs up on that as well. Can you do me a favour and email Rolly a link to Lee Thacker’s Kickstarter? I'm going to want to buy something there, just to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. And as I said, I think it was last time on Please Hold for Dave Sim, it's a phenomenal piece of work that Lee did. And that's one of those, yeah, I've already got the preview copy that Lee sent me, and with a personal letter actually incorporated into the book, but gosh darnit, I got to donate to this. I got to make sure that Lee knows that one of the people that's going to be driving him crazy with mailing expenses and stuff like that is Dave Sim. “There he is, he's right there in in proxy form joining in on the ‘My Nervous Breakdown’ Kickstarter.”
Matt: Okay.
Dave: “James Banderas-Smith’s ‘Papa Balloon and Cactus’ #4 is also on the Kickstarter!” Can you do the same thing there? “I hate bug you, Matt, but is there a Dave Sim variant cover for that one?” Uh no, there isn't. [laughs] I don't know if he wants another Dave Sim variant cover. He's already had two of them. “But ‘Wandering Star’ by Teri S. Wood makes its return in ‘Papa Balloon and Cactus’ #4, so I definitely want to support that, and if I didn't want to support him for that, Captain Zap makes his second appearance in ‘Papa Balloon and Cactus” #4 drawn by series writer/artist Oliver Simonsen. And Oliver Simonsen, Teri Challender, and Richard Friend are all contributing to the latest issue of ‘Papa Balloon and Cactus’. So, you go, James!” And I'm on the same page with that. It's like, how could I not participate in this? I've got a complete set of “Wandering Star” by Teri S. Wood when I was helping her with self-publishing way back in the day. I've got all of Oliver's “Captain Zap” material. I got to get in on this. I got to get in on this. And I recommend that everybody else get in on this, because James is doing a hell of a job of making very very entertaining packages.
So we're going to have a cliffhanger here as well, and the cliffhanger is, uh where are we here? Yes, this was an email through Rolly from Michael R and another email from Michael R in his capacity as AV Correspondent Interim Division Head. And, I have to apologize because now Michael R is having to buy a new computer so that he can deal with Collected Letters, but it's all part of God's Clockwork Mechanism. And I'm going to put this right next to the phone, there's the two-page letter, and the three-page letter, and the cliffhanger is going to be, “Or”, he was he's talking about his ideal remaster deluxe package, and he goes, “Or, somehow included in the Dagon James 1982 Cerebus Tour Kickstarter. Hey, when is that coming out, by the way? There might be others who might want it as well. It might really decrease the price of something that a few might actually want.” That's the last thing that I've got to do on the photos archive, is, I've got a photo album with all of the 1982 photos in it. It did have all of the 1982 photos in it, and then I took out some of those photos when I did a typesetted version of my tour diary, and actually glued in the original photographs where they applied to the text. And that has all gone to Dagon James, but now I have to worry about making sure that I know where each of those photos belong, because there's, like I say, all of these gaps in the photo album and I don't want to make any mistakes on this. The other problem is, Dagon James, bless his heart, I sent him all of the weird disc negatives that we had with the camera in 1982, and he printed out all of the photographs, and on a percentage basis, there's maybe 6 or 7% usable photographs, which means the photos that we got developed back in 1982, 42 years ago, are the best quality copies of those photos. They're actually better than the negatives, if you can imagine that as a situation. Although I've hung on to all of the negatives, because you never know if that's going to change with technology. Where it stands with Dagon is, he said, “The Tour Book is almost done” and I said okay, send the digital file to Studiocomix Press of what you've got so far, and I will add to it, tweak it, do other additions. The only thing that I got done so far, because I still haven't got the Dagon James version of the 1982 Tour Book, is Deni and I, when we were in New York City, we went to Rodney Dangerfield’s comedy club, and at the comedy club we saw George Kirby, who had just gotten out of prison, and I sent a fax to Jen saying, can you send me the Wikipedia on the comedian George Kirby? So I've got that, and I've got the photos that we took in the club of George Kirby, and I've got an idea of how to use those as part of the 82 Tour Book. And I've got all of this information about George Kirby, where I can say, okay, here's his whole story, and here's where he was. New York City on the 82 Tour was very early on, so it would have been it was October, end of October. Here's George Kirby's life in October 1982. So there you go. There's the cliffhanger on that, and then we will also be talking about Michael R's ideal deluxe package, which literally no one will be able to afford but he's willing to make time payments on it.
Matt: [laughs] Okay. I will make a note for next month of where we left off on the cliffhanger.
Dave: [laughs] Okay. All right. You have a good night, Matt, and, say what are the three cats’ names?
Matt: Buddy was the cat we've had for seven years. In fact, I think today or tomorrow is his “birthday”.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then we just took in a brother and sister pair called Bonnie and Clyde.
Dave: Bonnie and Clyde, and Buddy. I'm now going to have have to write that down, so that now at the end of every Please Hold for Dave Sim, I have to say, say hi to Paula, Janis Pearl, Bullwinkle, Buddy, Bonnie, and Clyde.
Matt: Oh I don't have to say hi to the cats, they'll just come say hi to me.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I was almost late for work this… or actually, I was late for work this morning because as I was getting ready Bonnie popped out from underneath the laundry hamper and was, “I love you!” I'm like, that's great. I'm leaving!
Dave: [laughs] “That's why I love you!” Cats, unless they're in the way, they're just not being remotely catlike. So, congratulations of not getting any kitty vomit in in your footwear.
Matt: We'll see if that changes with the addition of new cats.
Dave: It could possibly do so. You have a good night, Matt!
Matt: You too, Dave! Take care.
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye
Next Time: Jen joined a cult. I'm pretty sure it's a cult. Would you like to see some literature?
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