Hi, Everybody!
As we do:
Mondays!
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Kickstarters:
There's all sorts of neat little limited add-ons. I'd tell you what they are, but they'll probably be gone before you get there. (And then the guy who put them all in his pledge basket will pull them all out at the last minute. DON'T BE THAT GUY! Only take what you can actually afford. Be a better Cerebite...)
Friend to the Blog, Steve Peters' latest Comicverse book, as Steve himself says:
For Cerebus readers, "Cerberus," our 3-headed, 31st century version of Cerebus, returns and figures prominently in one of our stories; we also have the 2 "Sparkybus" micro-prints that Matt Dow masterminded and Dave Sim signed, plus 3 different variants of "Tails of Sparkybus" that Dave drew stuff for and signed on a tipped-in plate. These are very limited editions and quantities of some are running low, so this could be the last chance to get them.
It's a Kickstarter-Palooza! (It's amazing you have any money left in this economy (amIright?)
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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". And unless I'm being punished for my sins, Cerebus@50 WON'T get added as an option...
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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Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt! How you doing?
Matt: Alright!
Dave: Good. [pause] Okay, that takes care of that. I gotta run along now. [laughs] Are we recording?
Matt: We are recording.
Dave: Okay, “Dave! It's the 6th of June, okay, it's the 5th as I type this, but it's the 6th as you read this aloud. And it's the 8th as Cerebus-dom assembled watches this on the YouTube (and maybe the 7th as they listen to the audio portion on Spotify if-n I get the audio up in a timely fashion).” Uh, you do just an audio thing on Spotify? How long has that been going on?
Matt: Um, pretty much since the beginning of using the podcasting app. It'll be just audio, and then I'll go back and spend all day Friday making the videos. Cause the audio thing, it used to be we'd record it, it gets uploaded, and it takes maybe 20 minutes to process it, and then put it on the internet. And every time I'll take the link and put it on the Cerebus Facebook group and say AMoC Gold VIP Members get early access, and two or three people have messaged me going, “How do I become a Gold VIP AMoC Member?” And it's like, you click the link. It's not that hard.
Dave: [laughs] Oh, that's in the Groucho Marx, “I wouldn't be a member of any club who would accept me” thing. It's, we let anybody in! You're all platinum members. All you got to do is click on links. “And 2024, and it's time? What time? Howdy Doody time? [sings] It's Howdy Doody time! No? Time to do the time warp again? [sings] Let's do the time warp again! No? ‘Time Enough at Last’? Heck no! It's time to answer questions you forgot the answers to 30 years ago.” [laughs] Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. “Or as we affectionately call it, ‘let's stump Grampaw again’. I mean, Please Hold for Dave Sim.” You could do that to Time Warp. [sings] Let's stump Grampaw again! It's just a jump to the left… “Anyway, we begin as always by remembering Jeff Seiler. I remember Jeff! Yes, Grampaw, I'm sure you do, but I'm pretty sure it's my turn since I found my Jeff postcards.” Take it away, Matthew.
Matt: So, as I'm sure longtime listeners will remember, because we discussed postcards he gave you and Gerhard, Jeff had this habit or, I don't know if habit is the right word, but Jeff would go on road trips and bring you the postcard he would have mailed you from the trip if he didn't see you.
Dave: Right. Quirk. What about calling it a quirk?
Matt: Yeah, I guess, yeah it's kind of a quirk. So, he would buy postcards, fill them out, and instead of slapping a stamp on him, he would just hand them to you. And I thought I had cards from later on, but apparently I just have cards from 2005 at S.P.A.C.E., which the video listeners and viewers will see right now, and the audio people will just have to imagine what these are. So he gave one to me, and one to my wife Paula, who at the time was still just my girlfriend. We were, let's see, 8 months away from getting married?
Dave: Right.
Matt: So mine, it's a card of Dallas, and it's the Dallas Skyline, and then it says, “To Matt, thanks for the great crossover - very funny. Hope to see great things from you. Fun times at SPACE 2005, eh? See you on the group, Jeff Seiler.” And he's referring to the, well, I can't say infamous, mostly forgotten. He's referring to the mostly forgotten “Cerebus Vs Iguana Vs Beer” crossover that I thought up, it was a great idea, the execution was… I want to say, being charitable, the execution was terrible.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Cause I photocopied one panel from The Last Day, or from issue 300, and photocopied it a number of times, and then drew my characters, cut them out, and taped them on, and made photocopies. And you can do that, but you really have to know what you're doing, and you really have to take your time, and I very much didn't.
Dave: Well, it wouldn't have been a Matt Dow 2005 creative work if you knew what you were doing.
Matt: Well, it would have been amazing if I had, again, taken the time to do it a little better. I can't say take the time to do it right, because it's 2024 and I want to remaster it, and even now I'm going I don't know that I can do this “right”. I can do it, it's just going to be a lot of work, and a lot of time, and probably emailing Sean Robinson going, hey, could you help? And him emailing back, “No, Matt, very much no, I'm busy.”
Dave: Right. Right. “Don't take this personally, just go away.”
Matt: [laughs] I met Neil Gaiman once. He was in Madison for a convention, along with Harlan Ellison, and Peter David, and they were billed as the Three High Verbals. And because it was in my bag of stuff that I packed to get signed, I had him sign a “Hello my name is” label, and I had him sign it, “Hello my name is Neil Gaiman. Go away kid, you're bothering me!” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: So it'd be very much that it'd be, “Go away, Matt, you're bothering me.” But then the other card is for Paula, and it says Texas, and has a field of Indian Paintbrush and bluebonnets, and it says, “Paula, you are a true guys gal. Thanks for tolerating us true guys so patiently and with such forbearance. See you next year, Jeff.” Which, I believe 2005 is the year that there was, no, it had to have been 2006. 2005, I had a table at S.P.A.C.E. but I was in the back room, and was pretty much all by my lonesome. The Yahoos would come and find me, but then they would disappear to go see you and Gerhard, and 2006 is the year that there's a photo of me, Paula, and Jeff. And Bob Corby or whoever was putting it on the S.P.A.C.E. website labeled it as ”Jeff and Paula Seiler and Matt Dow.”
Dave: Oh! Right! Right, right. I forgot that one. [laughs]
Matt: The year that he stole my wife, and the beginning of the long running “I let Matt live with my wife” joke, that if you didn't know about the photo, and you didn't know the three of us, you'd be like, “These guys are really freaking weird.”
Dave: Yes, this is Depraved, and I mean with a capital D. Yeah, he's also, I think we're all true guys, but we’re all guys that know that every once in a while hydrogen is sort of obligated to apologize to helium, because helium is helium and hydrogen is hydrogen. In the same way that if you were the only hydrogen molecule hanging out with a bunch of helium beings, you're kind of obligated to apologize too. Like, “Hope this isn't completely melting your brain, what we're sitting and enjoying talking about, because we're helium. This is this stuff we enjoy talking about.”
Matt: Right. That reminds me of the time I was hanging out at the comic book store with three of the girls that, one girl worked there, and two girls hung out there, and it was just the four of us, and they started having girl talk. And I wisely just shut up and listened, and like, it was one of them eye opening things of, this is what girls are like when guys aren't there and when girls aren't having to pretend that guys aren't there.
Dave: Right.
Matt: They completely forgot I existed and were just talking about girl stuff, and as a writer you're going, this is the stuff you need to pay attention to, because if you don't, someday you'll try to write girls, and it's going to sound like guys in dresses.
Dave: Right. Right. So, did they eventually clue in that, wait a minute, one of these is not like the other?
Matt: No. No, it was about two hours of just I mean they were…
Dave: Oh! You got a good education, then!
Matt: Yeah, it was two hours of of girls doing bonding time. Part of the problem is, one of the girls was one of those girls that's an expert in everything. Like, if the topic was your testicles, she knows more about them than you do.
Dave: [laughs] Right. Okay, yeah.
Matt: And so, when the one girl was talking about her Mom who died of cancer, it was, “Oh, I had cancer.” And, oh really? “Oh yeah, and I had surgery to remove it.” And it's, really, where's your scar? “Oh no no, I went to this special clinic where they didn't leave a scar.” And it's like, that doesn't exist, but okay. [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, yeah, we'll go along with that.
Matt: Yeah, it was a lot of the other two girls nodding their heads going, “Oh okay, yeah” and then after were telling me, “Yeah, she's completely full of crap.” And I'm going, good to know. Good to know!
Dave: There you go. And you say in the next part here, that the postcards, “They were in a box literally a foot and a half from where I thought they were. A location I checked a dozen times.”
Matt: I had this file cabinet down in the AMoC cave, and I had loose paper in there. One drawer is files, one drawer was loose paper, and I checked the loose paper drawer over and over going, I know they're here. I know they're here. And it turned out there was, I had a box of paperwork that was a foot and a half away, and when I was cleaning out the AMoC cave, I found this box, and I'm going through, I'm like, oh here are the postcards I've been driving myself crazy trying to find for 6 months!
Dave: It's a satisfying feeling when that happens. I mean, when you get to the end of it you go, oh here they are. And it's like, okay, I did remember where they were, I was just off by a foot and a half.
Matt: Well, as my Dad says, you always find things in the last place you look.
Dave: Right. Right. Okay, and then “next up to stump Grampaw is Al Nickerson, who speaking of Jeff Seiler, gives us a phoned in question.” So you're going to insert the digital file of of Al's phone message to me in this spot here, right?
Matt: Correct.
Dave: Okay, here we go folks.
Al Nickerson: Hi Dave, this is Al Nickerson. I just got the Rebecca Stern drawing that you did, which is absolutely fantastic. That was very kind of you. I really do appreciate it. It's gorgeous and thanks so much. I am so happy to receive this. I'm so happy that you did the drawing. So I'm guessing you got the second “Sword of Eden” graphic novel. So, yeah, thank you so much. Also, Rolly had sent me an email with the Santos Sisters drawing, which is also very gorgeous looking. I was wondering, because that looks like you use some brush on that. I know you like using a Hunt 102 nib, so I don't know if you're using a brush, especially with the hair, I mean that was just really gorgeous, and the faces are great too. So yeah, thank you so much, Dave, and thank you for everything that you do. I am thinking about maybe using the Rebecca Stern drawing as a variant cover for a new printing of the “Sword of Eden: Shinobi” if that's okay with you. So let me know if that's fine with you or not. I assume it is. But yeah, thanks for everything, man. I appreciate it and God bless you, and thanks so much. Bye!
Dave: And then, nyuk nyuk nyuk, “To refresh your ever dwindling memory”, boy you got that right, “Al wanted to know if you used a brush on your Santos Sisters piece.” Yes, I did yes I did. Yes I did, as a matter of fact. Rolly will be emailing you a photo of the brush that I used on the Santos Sisters pinup. It's my non-Strange Death of Alex Raymond brush. It's a really good brush, and I don't even really know where I got it. As I say, I had Rolly take a picture of me holding it up today. And it's from the Princeton Art & Brush Company, and it's a number four round. And it's one of those, people ask you all the time, “What pens do you use? What brushes do you use?” And this is one of those, I have no idea where I picked up the brush, but I did pick it up in person, and I just looked at it, went, well, that's interesting. I'm buying art supplies. When I would buy them in person, I would go and check the brushes and just see if anything caught my eye as, that looks like it could hold a point, and you know, might last a while. It was $6.79, so it was a real deal considering how much time I've gotten out of it, and how it's still working to this day. I will add the caveat that a lot of times it happens that you go, oh okay, I'll make note of that brush. Then you go and and find the same brush, and you find out, okay, it was just a happy accident. Now that brush isn't generally that good, or it was that good 15 years ago but they've been making them different now, and it's going to cost you a lot more than $6.79 and don't expect to still be using it like Dave is using his 14 years later. And I say that because, Al Nickerson was an inker at Archie, that was one of the jobs that he had in mainstream comics, and I've always wanted to pick his brain on what the thinking is that he does on it. Did he do his Archie inking with a brush, or did he use the pen, and what brushes did he use, and what pens did he use? I have to say, I'm not sure if I'm forgetting other Archie riff works that I've done. I did the back cover of “Free Speeches” from the Comic Book Legal Defense fund. The front cover was by Frank Miller, which was sort of the evil people at the comic book store, and the back cover with all the good people. A policeman, a dating couple, a minister, and definitely looking to take a bite out of the people on the front cover. And I went okay, I'll do a Archie riff couple, cause I've never done Archie, and I've always been attracted to Dan DeCarlo, who was, as far as I was concerned, the gold standard of Archie penciling and inking, particularly at his peak. That was one of the things that I looked forward to going up to Gananoque to stay with Gene Day was being able to pull out his “Betty and Veronica” digests, and were just chock-a-block full of of Dan DeCarlo, and looking at them and going, that looks like a really fun drawing style. I got to try that sometime. Either I got to do a “Betty and Veronica” story and send it to Archie and hope that they use it, or at least critique I. Or do a a knockof of it. And when I sat down to do it, it's like, mhmm, this is one of those, [laughs] it's exactly like Alex Raymond, exactly like Al Williamson, “Oh this looks like fun!” It's like, oh it looks like fun, but it's excruciating. That's the whole point of their phenomenal ability to make something that's excruciating look like it's fun.
So, that was part of my motivation in doing that. I really do like the “Santos Sisters” book, and it seemed to be a potential meeting place thing, because Al Nickerson does have this Archie work experience that he had, and he is definitely a loud and proud Christian cartoonist, and evidently Greg Petre, who draws as Greg & Fake, is also a devout Christian. Which I say because he had the INRI on the front of his first issue, which is the Latin for Jesus of Nazarene, King of Israel. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if Greg turns out to be like a trust fund baby, [laughs] and has millions and millions of dollars and is always avidly keeping his eye open for people who can do the Archie riff, and “Oh hey, Al Nickerson! Hey, you want to work on some ‘Santos Sisters’ stuff? I'll pay you whatever you want to ink five page stories. You just name your price.” We know that's not going to happen, but I would like to see Christian Greg and Christian Al possibly get together. So, that's one of the things that I was hoping might come out of that. My inking, when I when I was doing it and going, okay, once more into the breach, let's try and do Dan DeCarlo. And I think I did a better job this time, but it's still Dan DeCarlo is just miles and worlds above my best Archie abilities. And I tended to ink it with a pen, and this was, again, when I get a Strange Death of Alex Raymond page done, I like to then just do something cartoony. And one of the big pluses with that is that I've got my carefully maintained Hunt 102 pen nibs, which are, this one's brand new, ultra sharp, ultra fine. This one's got a couple of miles on it, but not a lot of miles that I know exactly the density of line that's going to come out of it. And now that I'm done with that and it's okay, now I'm doing cartooning, then it's just okay, how thick a line can I get out of this? Actually a reasonably thick line. And how hard do I press down to get a line like this? It's like well, it's almost a brand new pen nib, relative to cartooning. It's, like I say, got a few miles on it for doing a photorealism style, trying to do Al Williamson, or trying to do Neal Adams, or Alex Raymond. So it's, well, just wail on it. Just hit the pencil line as close as you can get to it. And so the reason I'm going on at length about this is, because I was thinking the whole time that I was working on this was, what did Al do? What materials did Al use when he was inking actual Archie stories for Archie? And did they have a recommendation on that? Or was it just, “Here's samples of my work” and they went, “Uh, okay you look like you could handle Archie stuff. Here's, you know, Stan Goldberg pencils.” That was the other question, how who did you ink at Archie, and how did you find them for inking? Was everything there, or did you have to do a lot of fixing on your own? So that that sort of covers that one, I think. I'm hoping that Al is either going to tune into this, because he left me a phone message, never heard back to me. Maybe you could email him and say, “Al, you really may want to check out this Please Hold for Dave Sim” and then hopefully just fill up the comment section with, “Okay, I'm going to do this, but I never have to do it again. Here's everything I have to say about the experience of inking Archie Comics, and the do’s and the don'ts that I learned. Materials I used, etc etc.” And then Matt, I'll prevail upon you to fax that to me, so I can go, well, okay, that's what I was wondering about the whole time I was drawing those very attractive Santos Sisters.
Matt: So this is another one of those, “Dave doesn't know what Matt's talking about” things, but when I do the blog post on Saturday whenever I do a blog post, I then take the link and I put it on the Cerebus Facebook group, and if somebody like Al is involved, I will tag them. And then Al will get a notification of “hey you were tagged in this thing”, and then he can find, “Oh okay.” Like the Rebecca Stern piece, when I posted about that, and there was a fax for Al, so I posted that. So you know he get definitely got it because it was one of those, I tagged him. So I will tag him again when I post this on Saturday.
Dave: Okay. So when you say tag, you're not taking a can of spray paint and writing something on him?
Matt: So the internet on most social media sites, if you type somebody's name or user handle in, it automatically will highlight it. And then when somebody comes across it, they can click on it and it'll take them to their page. But it's also it's a networking thing where like if I tag Margaret, Margaret gets the notification so she knows that I'm asking a question about “what was the issue of Reads where Viktor Davis said that Cerebus was going to end at issue 200, not issue 300?” [laughs] Which I did last weekend, and Margaret responded going, “It's issue 183. I got up from a nap for ths?” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Okay, all right. That's as much of the internet as Grampaw wants to know about. No offence!
Matt: Well, that's like I said, it's one of those, it's anybody that uses it goes, yeah, it's fairly simple, but when you explain it to somebody that doesn't use it, it kind of sounds like, “Okay, wait, so why do we have to light this tree on fire?” “Well it's part of the process, but trust us. It's going to work.”
Dave: [laughs] Okay! Alright. And the other question was, am I okay with him “using your Rebecca Stern image as a variant cover”? Yeah, no problem. I hope it sells a few extra copies of his excellent book. I mean, it's one of those... Rebecca Stern, what's her other hande? I'm drawing a blank here.
Matt: i know this, but I don't know this.
Dave: Yeah it's, uh what was it? Oh, Crusader Girl! Crusader Girl. And it's like, [laughs] there's a real Christian thing, where you have a Jewish born character named Rebecca Stern, who sees the light and realizes that Jesus is the Messiah, and then becomes Crusader girl. and it's like, mm-okay! I'm not quite that page with you, but I can certainly understand why as a Christian you would do that. Which is one of the reasons that I decided to do it, like win, lose, or draw, Rebecca Stern is still Jewish. Which is why I also added the subtitle Rebecca Stern, Daughter of Zion, because Zion has obviously become a much bigger deal in our society since last October 7th when a lot of people would go, “I don't even know what you're talking about when you're talking about Zion.” It's, there are Daughters of Zion, which just means, okay, they were born in Israel, they are Jewish, and then there are Zionist Daughters of Zion who believe that it is and should always be the Jewish homeland. But it's also a reference in John's Gospel, which I'll be getting to in the Monday Report probably years from now, where, “Do not fear, Daughter of Zion. Here's the king of you coming to you on cold of ass” which was the prediction in Isaiah. And definitely is referring to a specific individual, and I'm the only person that thinks it's referring to a specific individual, but definitely referred to as “Daughter of Zion” in the book of Isaiah, and in John's Gospel. So I thought, well okay, here's a meeting point for a monotheist who gives equal weight to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and a 100% Christian who definitely sees Daughter of Zion in a completely different light. We're both looking at the same character, but we're looking at her very differently.
“And with the Preamble stuff off the deck, we turn to the audience at home, who are trying to stump Grampaw with, from down under, where it may be aye-del-adda[??], indigenous people day, or next week Tuesday, time zones are weird, man.” Good point. “Dion Turner has the stumper of all stumpers.” Uh, okay. “I picked up a few issues on eBay noted to be water damaged, but cheap, and I figured I'd give them a good home. Weird thing was I noted a distinct change in size between issue 20”, he's written 10 here, or you written 10, but it is supposed to be 20.
Matt: No, no. He got a bunch of back issues and he got 10 and 21 in in this set that he got.
Dave: Ohh! Okay, all right. Grampaw’s okay. Grampaw’s fine. “In the set that arrived. It was a good 6 to 7 millimeters, or a quarter of an inch for those that live in one of those backwards heathen [coughs] USA [coughs] non-metric realms. So enough to be distinct. I initially wondered if it was more crazy counterfeits, but checking against my existing books, they matched up month to month with a change in size between issues 20 and 21.” And I read that and I went, get out of here! And went to the reference set that I've always had, in the Off-White House library, and dug all the way down and pulled out 20 and 21, and damn if he isn't right. Did you look at your copies?
Matt: My copies are in storage in my Mom's attic, but he sent me pictures that I faxed up. And the fax,s I'm sure the pictures are just nice brown black muddy goopy mess, but the picture, there is a noticeable difference between his 20 and 21. The 10 and 21 picture he sent he kind of has them at an angle so they don't look like they're at the same level. But yes, it's on my list of, do I have 21? I know I have 24, I think?
Dave: Right.
Matt: Now that I'm saying this, I'm thinking, wait, there's that box of comics that's underneath my computer desk that I've completely ignored since I set them there that has all the extra issues from my set, you know, all my duplicates that I'm going to give away to people as soon as I make a list of what's in there.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: I could go look at that right now if I needed to!
Dave: Okay. Yeah, that's a really really weird thing. And one of the reasons that it's a really weird thing is that issue 21, 20/21, we were still printing at Fairway Press. If it had been between 22 and 23, where we stopped printing at Fairway Press with #22 and then printed at Southern Dutchess Press in 23, which was in Wappingers Falls, New York, which, we went with that printer because that was the ”Elfquest” printer. And we were having trouble with Fairway Press, and I think the price that Southern Dutchess Press was charging, when we got a quote was actually better than the price that we were getting, and it's like, well okay, why are we are we printing in Kitchener? And there wasn't any really good reason for that. They can print them, ship us our copies, and ship the distributors their copies from Wappingers Falls a lot more easily actually than you could ship them from Kitchener. One of the situations is that there's no specific size in printing for a comic book, which is one of the reasons that issue #1 had that weird… it was designed to be comic book size, and with Fairway Press, printed at magazine size. Because when they looked at at the specs, they went, “Oh okay, it's a magazine.” Not having printed any comic books since “Oktoberfest Comics”, it's just not a specific printing format. So consequently if you want to print a comic book you pretty much got to give them a comic book and say, “Okay, this is what it's supposed to look like. It's much taller and narrower proportionately than magazine size.” And when they look at it, like, yeah it definitely is. Which means, depending on the comic book that you show them, if you showed them a modern comic book from 1977, I'm pretty sure I'm correct on this, it would be one size. Whereas if you showed them a Silver Age comic book, 1950s, early 60s, mid 60s, it would be about 6 or 7 millimeters wider. Which is just something that happened in the comic book field, which is why you have three different size of comic book bags. Where you have Modern Age, Silver Age, and I forget what the other one is…
Matt: Golden Age.
Dave: No no no, Golden Age, there's another one around the Modern Age size that is current. Oh! Current bags, Modern Age, and then Silver Age, and they get slightly wider. Which I would think that Richard Pini probably wasn't buying a lot of comic books by 1977 when they were doing “Elfquest”, starting “Elfquest”, and then starting to plan to actually publish “Elfquest” themselves, would have said, “Well a comic book is a comic book is a comic book. Here, Southern Dutchess Press. This is the the size that we want it printed at.” But they were printing magazine size. They did go to comic book size eventually, but after a period of time. So, what's inexplicable is, why would Fairway Press who had been printing “Cerebus” from #1, the guts, covers were being printed elsewhere, and then Fairway Press was printing the covers as well. Why would they suddenly add s6 or 7 millimeters between issue 20 and 21? It's like, that really doesn't make sense. You've been doing this this way for two years, three years, and now all of a sudden you just use different specs. And it's like, there's no way that I could picture the printer would do that. So the only explanation possible for that is otherworldly. And I know, “Uh okay, here goes Grampaw again on why this has has an otherworldly explanation to it.” Because, it's, whatever it was that Richard and Wendy Pini were, and Deni and Dave Sim were, that was part of God's Clockwork Mechanism, which was, “Okay, these people are this way, these people are this way. Let's see how they do relative to each other.” And certainly “Elfquest” was wildly, wildly more successful than “Cerebus” was in any conventional measure. So I think it was a combination of, I was the 20/21 guy. [laughs] I'll try and explain 20/21 because that's a whole can of worms right there, as well. And it anticipated, okay, things are about to change. These people are in Kitchener, these people are in Poughkeepsie, New York, never the twain shall meet.” And everything is going along on these parallel but distant tracks. And then all of a sudden, Dave decides, “Okay, we're going to print the same place that they print ‘Elfquest’.” And it's like, oh boy! That doesn't cause conventional trouble, but it does cause very very esoteric trouble. So I think this was anticipating , okay, because this is going to happen at issue 23, and nobody knows that this is going to happen, this is going to anticipate something. This is going to drag us a little bit over in the “Elfquest” direction, and one of the things is going to be, in terms of the size. We had the whole comic book thing down, having reduced “Cerebus” from the mistaken magazine size to comic book size. “Elfquest” went the other way. Their first issue, “Fantasy Quarterly”, was comic book size, and then they went to magazine size. That's part of the inter-relationship of the two things. And it's like, mhmm, okay, this is up ahead. 20 and 21, I had no idea about at the time, but obviously that's a big feature of the first part of the storyline, the Cerebus volume. Where you I actually have “The Swords of Cerebus” story that I did with Gene Day, “What Happened Between Issues Twenty & Twenty-One?” And for me, it was just a plot point at the time. It's like, okay, I've said as much as I want to say about all of this part over here through to issue 20, and now the whole concentration shifts to uh to Lower Felda, and the easiest way to do that is just have Cerebus knocked unconscious and he wakes up in Lower Felda. And he has no idea why he's waking up in Lower Felda. Lower Felda or Upper Felda?
Matt: Uh, Lower. Upper Felda was the Cirinists.
Dave: Right. Right. Okay, so, but I didn't know. It was just a a plot device to me, but I didn't know about the relationship between 20 and 21, which is that's when the digit turns over, the first digit hasn't turned over since it was a zero in the year 1000. And I'm the the bright light that was going to go, “Yeah, I'm going to start doing ‘Cerebus’. I'm going to keep doing it until 2004.” Oh okay, well, you don't know it, but that makes you the 20/21 gu. You're actually going to bridge from 20 to 21. Because what's interesting about 20 to 21 is, it's the 20th century, but it's the 1900s. The same as we're now in the 2000s, but it's the 21st century. So really the first digit turns over, but the second digit also turns over, but in two different ways. And that makes for a very esoteric transition point at January 1st, 2000. Because January 1st, 2000, is actually still the 20th century, and doesn't become the 21st century until January 1st, 2001. You probably remember all of this vaguely from the time period, but it is one of those, mhmm, this causes very interesting things to happen to reality that most people aren't going to pick up on. I did pick up on it and was a conduit for it. So it's like, well okay, this completely unexplained “how did get Cerebus get from way over here to way over here between 20 and 21”, it's like, that's actually a very good way of putting it. [laughs] Because that's what everybody's going to do. They're going to actually go from way over here to way over here, but they're going to think that they're still in the same spot. Let me give you another illustration of it, since there is a zero, like as soon as you start numbering the years and you say “okay this is 1977”, you're saying, okay 1.977 years after… we don't know. The birth of Christ theoretically, but when you start crunching those numbers, mhmm, no, even giving as many Mulligans as possible, and dealing with Johannine Jesus separate from the Synoptic Jesus, we don't really have something that happens at zero. But something obviously happened at zero, because we all agree that this is where we are. You know, it's, the calendar turns over and it's now 1,977, whereas five minutes ago was 1,976. This is very very close. Now if you take that in microcosm and macrocosm, and you say, okay, well, we got to January 1st, 2000, we have now accomplished the 2,000 years. We don't know where it started numbering or why it started numbering there, but it's it's 2,000 years. Okay, so if you say, alright, each 100 years from zero, if that 100 years is represented by one year, okay, and we're starting over. Let's say that we're starting over, it's January 1st, 2000, and then a year from now it'll be January 1st, 2001, and that will that year between 2000 and 2001 represents the first 100 years, but in microcosm. It's one 100ths.
[laughs] I am getting somewhere with this, but it takes a while to explain, and I always went, I'll never be able to explain that to anybody, but okay. Dion you asked, so here we go, all the way down the rabbit hole. So okay, each year represents 100 year, which means when we get to January 1st 2020, we're now in microcosm where we were when we hit January 1st 2000. But we've already gone another 20 years, so consequently we have another fifth of a 100 Years, or another another fifth of a year now representing a year. And I actually sat down and calculated the whole thing up, going, okay, all the way to 2000. Now when we get to January 1st, 2020, where we actually hit “here we are again in microcosm” microcosm? And it's like, well okay, this is time I'll never get back in my life. This is math, and I really hate math, but I'm going to sit down and work this whole thing out and figure out, okay, where do we catch up to ourselves again as the microcosm of 2000 to 2020. And coincidentally enough, the point that we caught up to ourselves was the middle of March 2020, which was when COVID-19 hit. Ya get it?
Matt: [laughs] I knew this was coming. I knew this was coming! That's the fun part, I'm like okay, yeah, no, doing back of the envelope math in my head. Yeah, you know, it's going to be COVID.
Dave: Yeah, it was, and they called it COVID-19, because it was in 2019, but it's also part of that 19/20/21, which one are we? We're in the 1900s, we're not the 19th century. We're in the 2000s but we're not in the 20th century. We're in the 21st century, but we're not at 2100 yet. That's where everything goes wonky. So it was one of those, I don't know how I would even explain this to anybody at the time, but I'm going, well okay, I don't think anything will actually happen, but maybe it will. [laughs] And it's like, oh! Okay. Maybe this is a much bigger deal than I thought it was. And it's one of those, well okay, only Dave Sim thinks this way, and then I was the only person going, well okay, maybe this is a bigger deal than I thought. So I think that's all mixed in together. What happened between 20 and 21, I'm the 20 and 21 guy, Southern Duchess Press, we were only there at Southern Dutchess Press for three issues. Issues 23, 24, and 25, and then that went wonky. And I don't remember how or why that went wonky. But Wendy and Richard Pini decided to switch printers and went with a printer called William B Collins, I think it was. I looked it up in #25. And we went there, and that was when they did the disastrous job of colour on the cover of 25, where it's supposed to be a closeup of Woman Thing’s eyeball, and Woman Thing, colour of green, and when they printed it, it was like completely bleached out. And I went, mhmm, no. No. We gotta find another printer again. Let's come back to Canada, send out a copy of “Cerebus” to as many printers as we can. And I told that before where I think Deni sent out 50 packages, 100 packages, to printers in Southern Ontario, and the only ones that responded were Preny Print & Litho. So it's one of those, lots of little weird things there between the Cerebus and Elfquest thing, it was two very very esoteric kinds of paganism, that [laughs] the only one that knew was God that, “Yeah looks like two different flavours of paganism now and it will for a long time, but if you're all just patient enough Dave's going to turn into a monotheist. No, seriously, Dave's going to turn into a monotheist!” Wendy & Richard Pini's company called Warp Graphics is, Wendy and Richard Pini. WaRP. And if you go, gee, what would the analog of that be? Deni and Dave Sim is DaDS, and my Dad's name was Ken, and Deni's Dad's name was Ned, which gives you KenNed. And if you go, “Why KenNed?”, and put why on the end of it, you get KenNedY. Make of that what you will!
Matt: Ah well, I just... while you were talking about…
Dave: [laughs] I'm leaving you flat footed! I'm hoping that Dion is listening to this and going, okay well, you know, he thought this was strange enough and couldn't find an explanation for it. That's the best I can do to help in the way of explanation. Go ahead, what what comes to your mind as we're doing this?
Matt: When you first started mentioning “Elfquest”, and I was going, there's a bunch of weird parallels between Warp Graphics and Aardvark-Vanaheim, and in the back of my head I'm going, didn't they end up going to DC at one point? And I quick looked on the internet, and yeah, at one point “Elfquest” got printed by Marvel, and then later by DC, and now they're with Dark Horse. And I'm just thinking, you know, Dave got offered to go to DC and went, “Ehh, I don't think I want to do that” and everybody thought you were nuts, and then High Society came out, and you made more money than you would have made on the DC deal. The whole, there is no hypothetical here where there's a different version of “Cerebus” where Dave did go to DC, but I'm thinking, the probability would have been, it would have been the same “Elfquest” path of, oh yeah, you sell “Cerebus” to DC and then 5 years later you’re mortgaging the house to buy it back so you can take it to somebody else.
Dave: Right, right. Yeah, I mean it's all gut instinct calls. I was lucky. I didn't know I was lucky at the time that I wasn't really successful enough, which I think was all part of God's Clockwork Mechanism, so that I didn't get the kind of offers and the kind of opportunities that Wendy and Richard Pini got. Which, if it had happened to me, I'd probably have made worse mistakes. If we're going to say that they made mistakes, or they definitely did deals that they wanted to get out of, they had the same situation with Nelvana Animation in Toronto where they were going to do the Elfquest movie, and then they ended up having to get the rights back because it's like, this is just not working out with these people. My life is full of ”There but for the Grace of God go I.” The same thing with Kevin Eastman. I always wanted to be a multi-millionaire, and be able to transform the comic book field. The same as we all knew that Apple Records turned out to be a really bad idea for the Beatles, and Kevin basically went right ahead and did the comic book equivalent of Apple Records with Tundra, I would have done the same thing. I think I probably would have married a Penthouse Pet of the Year, [laughs] Playmate of the Year, if I had that kind of money. And then have gone, “Uh oh okay, she's leaving now, and she's taking half of my peak earnings from, oh wait a minute, 1981 to 1989? Even just doing a ballpark figure in my head, and she gets half of that! I don't even have a quarter of that, I don't have a fifth of that. Can I do that one over?” No, no, walked into to that one and and got a custard pie in your face, there but for the Grace of God go I.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Okay…
Matt: Wait a minute, I'm looking at my copy of the fax and I got, Dion posted the Note from the Publisher from “Cerebus” 23. I'm guessing one of the reasons you guys left Southern Dutchess News is cause the book was called “Cerebus the Aardvard”? There's a misprint in the fine print.
Dave: Oh, I didn't see that! I didn't see that. Yes, yes. Yeah we didn't take it personally. I did notice that we were printing “Printed in Canada by Southern Duchess Press”, I'm going like, [laughs] why didn't we change that, and and why didn't anybody not notice that at the proof reading stage? Southern Dutchess Press is in Wappingers Falls, New York. Wappingers Falls, New York, I don't even have to pull out my atlas, it's not in Canada. Anyway, so there you go! Alright. If you're talking about esoteric answers, and if Dion was paying by the word on that one, I think he definitely got his money's worth on that one. So yeah, Ron Essler, “Please Hold question for Dave Sim about the change in size between 20 and 21, did it have anything to do with the imminent change in printers, or is it just my issues and I'm crazy? I mean I am crazy, but this being a more specific delusion. And now, has Dion stumped Grampaw?” And it's like, I will leave it up to all of the listeners of Please Hold for Dave Sim June 2024 to go, was I stumped or have I now stumped everybody else in perpetuity, including myself? Because it's like, I can tell you a lot of weird stuff attached to this, but if you want to say “is that an explanation?” Meh, it's definitely, I would call it, Comic Art Metaphysics TMI.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: “And our next hopeful stumper is MJ ‘Mike’ ‘Dodger’ ‘Shirley’ Shirley?! Sewall, who asked,” how did Shirley get in there?
Matt: I just added it to see if he’d notice. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Surely you jest! “5/20/24, to the ruggedly Wisconsinite Matt Dow and the recently birthday’d Dave Sim.” Thank you. [sings] Happy Birthday to me, happy birthday to me. That's enough of that. “Over the years, you have told the story of all the extra Cerebus fun. The fun and goofy issue 51 interlude, the Silverspoon strips, What Happened Between Issues Twenty and Twenty-One?, etc.” And we got a bonus round for you coming up on that one, Mike, as you're listening today. “Question for Dave, why did you not include issues 112/113 in the phonebook collection? Seems like an integral part of the story. You had also written that issue 112/113 was a very difficult one for you and Gerhard to get done, but I can't remember the details of what was going on at the time. Would you mind reliving that moment in time, or if you do mind, [coughs] would you please do it anyway? Thanks, as always, MJ ‘Mike’ ‘Dodger’ Sewall.” As I mentioned, he's written this on May 20 ‘24, and longtime listeners will probably remember that he he did notify us when he was asking a question for Please Hold for Dave Sim the May edition, that May was going to be a nightmare for him. So, I hope, Mike, you're safely in June, through May and whatever it is that was going to be a nightmare month for you, is now firmly in the rear view mirror. And the Manly one, Matt D, responded, “Church & State 2 is the thickest phone book. Add 40 more pages, would challenge the ability to bind the book. Paraphrase from ‘Cerebus’ #0 intro.” And MJMDS? Sewall responded, “Well, that explains that. Thanks! Cheers, Mike.” Which, then, in good dutiful Manly Matt Dow fashion, you then interject, “But since he's a paying customer, let's give him his nickle’s worth. So, Grampaw, what do you remember about issue 112/113 that you can articulate succinctly without having flashbacks to 1980-whenever? Or did MJ Mike Dodger Shirley (?) Sewall stump Grampaw and win Please Hold for Dave Sim 6/2024? Or is he going home with a copy of the home game?” If you got a spare copy of the home game, go ahead with that. I would say, looking at 112/113, and certainly the thing that's most prominent in my mind when Gerhard and I were working on it, was the theory was if we do a double issue, that's one less cover that we have to do. You just have the front cover and then do 40 pages. You're going to do 40 pages anyway. And you don't have to do a cover for the second 20 pages, which is a bit of a holiday. I think what happened there was, if you do an all-silent issue, which is the distinctive quality of about 112/113 is that there are no captions and no dialogue up until the actual end of the double issue. That's going to be particularly difficult because you're filling up the space differently. What I didn't realize at the time, and what I realize now is, in retrospect looking back that far and going, okay, these are the moving pieces on 112/113 and this is why the moving pieces ended up putting both of us on our asses, is the captions and word balloons on a comic book take less time, and fill up x amount of space on a given page. As soon as I go, okay, I'll start roughing in Cerebus here. Cerebus will be about this size in this panel, this panel will be this shape, and he's going to be saying these 15 words. Word balloon with one word, word balloon with one word, word balloon with one word, next word balloon has eight words, these are the different size of word balloons. That's all taken care of at the design stage in two minutes, three minutes? If I know what he's going to say, and I know the effect that I want the image to have, and the attitude that I want it to have. That's all established, and from then on it's, okay, where are you putting your time in? And it's like, well, wherever I'm putting my time in, I'm not having to put in my time in the space occupied by those word balloons and those words. And when I finish those word balloons and those words, that's going to take maybe 15 minutes, maybe half an hour at the time, closer to 15 minutes depending on the size of the caption, how many words are in the caption. If the point of it is dense pack, Cerebus isgoing berserk in his head, and it all has to be lettered. Obviously that's going to take a lot more time, but the average series of word balloons and the average caption, it's a lot of white space. It's basic lettering, and it's pretty fast and easy to do. Once I've got Cerebus penciled and inked in all of the panels, and I've got the lettering on there, there's x amount of carpet that Gerhard doesn't have to worry about. Doesn't have to concern himself in any way shape or form, he just has to go, “Okay, how do I make it look? This is the environment that he's supposed to be in. What does the environment look like? Where's the horizon line? Where's the vanishing point? Here's the perspective. Now start roughing in, here's the floorboards, here's a picture on the wall, whatever it is that that panel requires.” And then doing that on tracing paper, and then transferring it. There's a lot of detailed work that he's already done on the background that he's not going to have to worry about, again, because it's where the caption is, and where the word balloon is. And the same thing with me, it's like each of the panels is the same size. It's a very very picket fence composition to 112/113 So each panel, if it doesn't have word balloons, if it doesn't have captions in it, it's going to fill up. All of that space has to be filled up with either character and background and absolutely no area of it is already taken care of. So consequently, you multiply that by six panels per page, and 40 pages, and it's, okay, if it had had conventional words and captions in the story, being a just conservative estimate, out the 240 panels, you didn't have to actually draw the equivalent of let's say 80 panels? So let's say a third of the square footage didn't have to be penciled and inked, it just had to be lettered, and so consequently you're doing two comic books that are at least 50% more drawing than you're used to. And it's like, mhmm, if you sit down and think about it, Dave, you would have seen that and then go, well okay, let's try and figure out something where, we can still do a silent issue, but let's cover up, or only fill up roughly what I would guess is the same amount of space in the average 40 pages that we're doing. But that's one of those, no, I definitely want a specific effect to the epilogue to this mammoth Church & State, and this is what I think it needs to be. I think it needs to have this metronome quality, it has to be completely silent, and it has to be all drawing and just whatever skill I can bring and whatever skill Gerhard can bring, which was considerable at that point, to convey what Cerebus is going through at the end of this 1100 page story. So it's I suspect, even if I would have figured out what I was doing to myself and what I was doing to Gerhard, I would have gone, well okay, it's only this once. [laughs] We definitely didn't do any more double-sized silent storylines, you’ll notice.
Matt: Well, in thinking back on it, the end of Church & State 2, he goes to the moon, and once he gets to the Moon, Cerebus doesn't talk. I mean the Judge reads his mind, and and you know, says what he's thinking, type thing, but it very much, I mean, he is silent for however many of the issues that was when he was on the Moon. So you were kind of keeping that same motif And I mean, as Heidi McDonald so aptly put it, the ending of Church & State is just too darn cosmic. And it was kind of a mindblower of “this is the origin of everything, take one.” And it works really well as a, you know, he came back from from this monumental cosmic event, and yeah, it's not like he ran into Lord Julius and they started cracking jokes, it was, no, he's very much quiet.
Dave: Right. Right. And going back, that effect of, okay there were other people here. The last time that the Cerebus was here, he wasn't here by himself. And that is a very very esoteric and specific experience that I think everybody has, but as you were talking about earlier, there're things that you you experience as a writer and go, okay, I have to remember this contextual experience and textual experience. This experience has a texture to it that I don't think I could describe in words, but pedal to the metal, I think I could probably draw this. And particularly having a Gerhard there. Where it's like, well okay, when Cerebus is feeling this isolation, then it's like well okay, X number of these panels is just really really tiny, and the whole foreground is empty hotel, empty hotel, empty hotel, empty hotel. Multi, multi, level. And just from the other perspective than Cerebus' own perspective. And being able to pace. I'm sure it's the same reason that Mel Brooks finally had to do “Silent Movie.” It's like, “A silent movie is a different thing from doing a regular movie. I've done regular movies but I just can't let go of the fact of, what would an actual silent movie be like? A completely different creative experience. Different pacing, different challenges, here's all of the stuff that you're not going to have on your painter’s pallette, but here's all of this stuff that you will only have on your on your painter’s palette this time around.” And I did reread 112/113, I can't remember why, a little while ago, and you know, in quotation marks “reading it”, but viewing it and I went, yeah, this is really pretty good. This is, it's got different pacing, even though each panel is the same size pretty much, the same shape. Parts of this go really really quickly, and parts of this go really really slowly. So that's what I remember of 112/113. As well as it hanging on the wall at 47 King West, where we were still at 47 King West, and it's like, this is a lot of pages! And it's all drawing, and I'm pretty pleased with it, in terms of, it's a major challenge as a creative person, as a comic artist, and as a comic writer. If you're working on an 1100 page graphic novel, nobody else has ever done an 1100 page graphic novel, the biggest question is going to be, “Okay, what's your ending? You better have an ending on this.” And it's like, mhmm, okay, in terms of crunching all the numbers and going, what's going to give me my best bet of getting out of this in one piece in terms of readers’ reaction? I think this does the job. I think this does exactly what I wanted it to do. [laughs] Not realizing that I was in the middle year of 26 years and three months. “It's not feminist marxist propaganda, and consequently it's not going to exist. So really, don't worry about it.” And it's like, okay, well for posterity. Somewhere up ahead that's not going to be the criteria that we have in our society that the only value any creative work has is the value that it has to feminism. If it doesn't have value for feminism, then it doesn't exist and doesn't deserve to exist.
“Then next to put you in the hot seat is Daniel F.” “Hello Dave,” Hello, Daniel F. “I was recently going through some A Moment of Cerebus posts from 2017 about the plans for ‘Following Cerebus’ after Craig Miller's unfortunate passing. Following the back issue liquidation through eBay, there were plans to create and sell a collection of the 12 issues in one volume from scans with the goal of all revenue going to Jennifer Miller's trust fund. Did that simply get put on the backburner and never got revisited, or were there other problems that prevented it from happening?” What's the next one? “Was there any resistance from involved parties, such as the other half of Win-Mill Productions? PS happy belated birthday! Thank you, Daniel F.” The situation was my contact was with Craig Miller's Dad, and all I could really do was attempt to participate from that vantage point, that's where I was on geographical map, this is as close as I can get to what we all knew was Craig's primary concern, which was Jennifer. And I think, very definitely, Craig's Dad put in a good five years of his life figuring out all of the stuff that Craig had, finding out how to sell it for the best price, finding out how to put it in a trust fund for Jennifer. “Following Cerebus” was kind of a complete sideshow thing, relative to that. We all knew that that was the situation, but I did convey that to Craig's Dad, that that was the intention. The biggest problem was, the digital files were locked inside one of Craig's computers, or a couple of Craig's computers, and nobody knew the password, and I don't think every anybody ever did find out the password. And I think that happens a lot in this modern age. So consequently, the big plus is “Following Cerebus” was printed on pretty clean, glossy paper, and pretty reasonably high resolution. So it's not as if Sean Robinson had scans of all 12 issues, and you know, we all pulled in to pay him to remaster “Following Cerebus” from the printed copies and it'd be a pretty nice looking book. The problem was it was definitely a contentious divorce that Craig had gone through with his ex and definitely looking at custody of Jennifer. And his ex was definitely one of those, “I woman hear me roar. This is my kid and I don't care what you want to do, you're not going to have anything to do with my kid. You are getting yourself out of my and my kid’s life, period.” And she was definitely a real fireball on that in terms of, they had the the investigation that Craig Miller is molesting his daughter, and she wants him charged, and absolutely no custody, no access. And it's like, they investigated that over the course of a couple of years or whatever, and went, “Okay, there's nothing here.” It's one of those situations where shortest distance between two points is a straight line. “You are getting out of me and my daughter's life, and no, if’s, and’s, or buts. If this is what it takes, this is what it takes. This is what we'll do.” And the same thing where, when there was a court order. “No, this is shared custody. We can negotiate some of the ins and outs of it, but it's definitely a shared custody thing.” And okay, that got appealed to the next court up, had got appealed to the next court up from that, and they went, “No, no, definitely. We checked all the math, we looked at all of the agreed statement of facts. Blah blah blah. And no, this is going to be a shared custody situation.” At which point, her mother took Jennifer and took her back to Ohio from Texas, and there they stayed. And it was, at a specific point, all of the money that Craig was spending on lawyers, and trying just to work his way through the family courts, which, I've never gone through that. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, particularly with a fireball who is going, “You are getting out of my daughter's life, and my life, and that's the end of it, and that's it. It's just no if’s, ands, or butts.” So consequently, Craig's Dad was going to do what he needed to do, and was spending a lot of time and money on lawyers knowing who the ex was, where she was, where Jennifer was, and saying, “Okay, I have to cross all the tees and dot all the eyes to make sure that when Jennifer is of age, that's when she gets this money that has been raised and her mother doesn't get any of it under any circumstances.” So as you say, we're either there or we're somewhere close to that at this point, and we don't know uh. A lot hinges on, you hope that Jennifer hasn't completely forgotten her father. You hope that Jennifer hasn't been completely poisoned against her father. And I think, at least in terms of the trust fund existing, and Craig's Dad, I don't even know if Craig's Dad is still alive, he was pretty advanced in years and was burning the candle at both ends trying to do a proper job of this. She couldn't completely have forgotten Craig, but in terms of does she remember “Following Cerebus”? Does she remember Cerebus? Does she remember Dave Sim? Mhmm. Does she remember Win-Mill Productions? Does she remember “Wrapped in Plastic”? And if she does remember, does she have any level of interest in it? Whoever she has grown into in her context in wherever she is in Ohio, the odds that she would be the apple that doesn't fall far from the tree is really really unlikely. And even trying to remain as optimistic as possible.
So all we can say is, I think it's pretty much in the same category as Comic Art News and Reviews. John Balge didn't want Comic Art News and Reviews republished. It was his, so I have to respect that. Gave all of the scans of Comic Art News and Reviews to the family. If I ever hear another word about this, I will be the most surprised guy in the room, because you know, no offence, families are family. Which is why Cerebus is not being left to my family. Cerebus is being left to Eddie Khanna, who is a huge Dave Sim Cerebus fan, and consequently he will do right by Dave Sim and Cerebus. Most people don't think that way. I understand that most people don't think that way. It's like, “Well, what about the family?” It's like, if the families were good custodians, I would say okay, you always have to factor the family in. Families are the worst custodians, not because there's anything wrong with families, just the apple usually falls reasonably far from the tree, particularly if you're talking about something like Cerebus, or if you're talking about Comic Art News and Reviews. It's, this is a really esoteric thing that's very very important to these people over here and of zero interest to the family. So the situation exists that, if this does become a one in a million shot, and at some point Jennifer is in her 20s or 30s or something and goes, “What about that Win-Mill Productions? I want to know about Win-Mill Productions.” And okay, here's the situation with Win-Mill Productions, it's yours. Whatever you want to do with it. We're already over in you know lottery odds, but as long as we’re over here in lottery odds, we might as well keep telling you about it. If at that point, either she goes, “Yeah, I'm actually interested in this.” The name of Craig's partner slips my mind.
Matt: John…
Dave: John, yes.
Matt: I want to say it's like Stone?
Dave: Anyway, you know who I'm talking about.
Matt: Right.
Dave: So that if she manages to find John and he can fill her in on Win-Mill Productions and say, “Here's digital files of all the stuff”, and she looks at it and goes, “Yeah, I'm actually interested in this. You know, I'm doing well in my career, and I could see putting in time of this as a hobby and to honor Dad's memory. And yeah, I'm interested.” Or, she goes, “I'm really not interested in this, but I do want to honor Dad's memory, and I know it was really important to him, so I'm gonna go shopping to find the best person to develop this. And if I make some money off of it, that's fine. But if I have to just kick in some money so a complete ‘Following Cerebus’ book can be published, yeah, I would like to do that.” And consequently it would be her call to decide where and how that would be done. And it's like, Dave Sim’s hiding in plain sight. Everybody tries, just because I don't have email it's like, “Wow, are you a difficult guy to track down.” It's like all the phonebooks have the same phone number from 40 years ago. So for 40 years, if you just go, “Gee, I'll try this phone number and see what I get.” Not the primary, not the the lead phone number in the ad, but the second phone number is the same phone number that I still got. It's like, no, I'm not hard to find, but you would have to be intentionally looking for me. I do get messages from people along those lines of, “Hope this is okay. I found your phone number online, and just leaving a message.” Guy I went to high school with Mark Norsery[??] did that, and it's, no, that's great. That's one of the reasons that I don't make the phone number a secret is, if somebody has a good reason to phone Dave Sim, well, not like it's not like it's something that you couldn't possibly find if you devoted a month of your life to it. It's like, Dave Sim, Google search, eventually it'll take you to A Moment of Cerebus. They'll tell you where to find me.
Matt: Well, I know that there was something that came up a couple months ago, “Wrapped in Plastic” was available again, like John was, I don't know if he's doing physical issues or if he was doing a Kickstarter for a collection, that part I forget. But I know that it got brought up cause somebody went, “Well, does this mean that there could be a chance for ‘Following Cerebus’?” and it's like well, on the one hand yeah, on the other hand who knows? Cause, remember John, it was it's a Win-Mill Production, but it was more Craig's thing than John's thing.
Dave: Right. Aand for the people listening who are probably wondering, “’Wrapped in Plastic’? The hell is ‘Wrapped in Plastic’?”, it's “Twin Peaks”. Oone of Craig's other obsessions was David Lynch's “Twin Peaks”, and he did probably 60 issues of “Wrapped in Plastic”, which covered all aspects of “Twin Peaks” and also all aspects of David Lynch. Did you get a sense that this was new material or this was “Wrapped in Plastic” being reprinted?
Matt: If I remember right, it was being reprinted but it sounded like that it was, phase one is getting stuff back in print, phase two is new stuff.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: I literally will have to go back and look, because it came in as it was brought up somewhere and I was going, okay, well, that's interesting. Cause back in 2020 when we were all staying home and had nothing to do, I started scanning all my copies of “Following Cerebus” so I had them.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then being me it was, oh not only should I scan these, I should put them through a A.I. video program thing where it'll translate it into a text file and that way you can reformat it to reprint it type thing if you needed to. And of course this was early AI that was really not good at the concept of you, I think I didn't have the scanner set to the highest resolution. So it was, I'm trying to remember, it was all sorts of transcription errors where like Aardvark-Vanaheim turned into the weirdest things.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: You know, blocks of… you'd have to go back and fix all the text anyway, and at a certain point I went okay, let's stop doing that and just keep scanning it and we'll come back to the… once we get the scans, they're there, once I get them all. And I did, I want to say, two or three issues, maybe five issues, because there's there's 12 issues of “Following Cerebus” and the two issues of “Cerebus Companion”. And I did maybe half of them and then I hit the wall of issue 9 and went, this is going to take some work.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And then, I let people on the Facebook group know that I was doing this and Margaret went, “Well I have a spare copy of issue 9 that I was going to scan, but I kind of hit the wall of I don't want to rip this apart and do this.” So she sent me her copy, and it was sitting on top of my computer desk of a okay, when you have time, start pulling this apart and scanning it. And then the world started up again it's like, ha yeah, time? What's time?
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right. Yeah, that's one of those, Plan B might be two or three decades up ahead.
Matt: Well, it's on my list of, you know, when I have a weekend where I'm not doing anything. Because that's how it started was, I have all this free time during the day because I'm staying home with the kids, and okay, all you got to do is put the page on the scanner, scan it, save it, flip the page, scan it, save it. And I was doing that, it was fine for the first couple issues, but then like I said, I hit 9 and it's like, this is squarebound. It's not going to lay flat. You're going to have to get Sean involved cleaning up the files and I'm going, oh I don't want to do that.
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: And then Margaret sent me the copy. It’s like, well, I can rip this apart and I can do a Jeff Seiler Collected Letters where I can just rip the pages out as I need them and when I'm done, put them in a baggie, and then mail it to somebody who doesn't have the issue of, here's a copy you can read, don't read it outside, and make sure the window's not open.
Dave: Right. Right. Yeah, if you got an exacto knife and just cut the pages out, that's probably the fastest you could go in terms of scanning, but yeah, you wouldn't want to try and hold it down flat on a scanner. I think maybe there's a little cause for optimism then, because I couldn't picture John going ahead and doing something with “Wrapped in Plastic” without notifying Jennifer's mother, this is because that is if you're talking about Craig’s estate, and Craig's estate is basically held in trust for Jennifer, and his part of “Wrapped in Plastic” would be part of that estate. But as one of those, you don't know all of the drama that might be taking place over on that side of things. You would have to say that it's probably unlikely that “Following Cerebus” would come up in conversation, because it's not as big a deal as “Twin Peaks”, even though, “Twin Peaks” is not exactly at its peak of popularity. They've had like revivals and stuff like that, right? And sequels and prequels and whatever else?
Matt: Yeah, they came back and did the third season 25 years later, and it kind of blew up again, and it was, “Oh, if you're a ‘Twin Peaks’ fan this is a great time” type thing. And everybody went, “So is there going to be a season 4” and David Lynch is kind of like, “Probably not.” And I'm going, well, come on, I mean, they're going to throw money at you. But it sounds like it's a, “No no no, we went back to the classic ‘Twin Peaks’, we're going to resolve everything!” It's, yeah, yeah no you're not. You're going to resolve three things and create six more new questions. And the fandom's going to continue to go, “Okay, what about, what about, what about?” and you know you're never going to get everything tied up into a little bow because it was designed to never be tied up into a little bow.
Dave: Right. Right. But it is, yeah, it's on its own roller coaster in terms of, like you say, it blew up again, and there is a core audience not only for “Twin Peaks” but for David Lynch's material. A real cult of personality that, I would imagine, will just keep happening. And consequently, every time that does happen becomes more interesting from our perspective, depending on how old Jennifer is at the time, cause… I'm trying to think she was like, what, seven? Eight? Let me check Craig's plaque over here in the Rectangle Office. Yeah, he died 2012, so Jennifer, I think, was seven at time? So, yeah, she's going to be 19 or 20. That would mean whenever the next “Twin Peaks” expanding universe hits, she will definitely be at not only at the age of majority, but at the age where you do go, “Well okay, what do I want to do about this? What is my stake in this? And what do I think is the right thing to do about it? Because I'm hearing from John…” John Thorne? No. Yes?
Matt: That's possible.
Dave: Anyway.
Matt: It's one of those, if I had a copy of “Following Cerebus” right in front of me, I'd go okay, yeah, here's the answer. But it's, I packed that stuff up. [laughs]
Dave: Okay, you said that and I went, I've got a copy of “Following Cerebus” right over here! Uh, where are we? I'm not going to be able to see it because my eyesight isn't good enough. So I would have to go and get my magnifying glass.
Matt: Well, and knowing our luck, you grabbed issue 10, which is all backwards and weird and and not printed correctly because it's the dream issue.
Dave: No, it's #12.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: [laughs] But that would have been funny. You got right. So, okay, I think I probably am going to go and get the magnifying glass, and you'll just edit this part out.
Matt: Okay!
Dave: [silence for a period, Matt edited nothing out] I was right, John Thorne! I win the Samsonite luggage. Are you still there?
Matt: You got up to get the magnifying glass, I got up to get, I have a spare copy of #4 and I'm like, oh wait, I'll quick grab that.
Dave: Yeah, it's John Thorne, which is really strange, because I'm just writing Frank Thorne into a comic book today and going, well, this is a little weird. This is another one of those Cerebus and Elfquest things. So, let's see if we can manage to get out of this particular vortex.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: “Then from the home office in Easton, Pennsylvania, Michael ‘Zipper’ R asks a whopper of a stumper!” “Hi Matt, I hope you survived your move, and find all your belongings intact.” I always like to follow up on those when Michael asks that. How did you survive your move, or are you still in the middle of it?
Matt: We're out of the house, the house is mostly empty. We got to go back and get like the last few things that, every time I go it's, there's some empty cardboard boxes that we're saving, cause Paula has a patient that's going to move and needs boxes. It's like, okay, well here's the boxes. Let's get them out of the house. My drawing table that I haven't touched, haven't used as a drawing table in seven years, eight years?
Dave: [laughs] Okay.
Matt: Like, we moved into the house, I put it down in the basement in the corner, and then kind of sort of went, okay, well I can draw on the dining room table. I can draw on the computer. When I need to draw, I can find a flat surface, cause it's not actually a drawing table, it's… [laughs] and you're going to laugh, and I know you're going to laugh, which is making me laugh. I bought it used from the lumberyard, it's a carpet display. It's a metal…
Dave: It’s a what?!
Matt: It's a metal rack with a curved top, but it's a gentle curve and it kind of looks like a drawing table, but it's again, it's got a curve to it so when you lay the piece of paper down it kind of naturally folds back a little. But it's the size of a drawing table, and it was one of these, like it was in the lumberyard's clearance department for like five bucks, and I'm like, I can use this! This will work. And I bought it and put it in my first apartment, and I used it all the time. The problem is, it's got this curve to it so anything you put on it rolls off. There's a tray to it, well, there isn't a tray, because it's designed for carpet samples, it's got a stopper on the bottom of it to stop the carpet samples from falling off that screws on. And I adjusted the height to be exactly the width of a yard stick, and bought a couple yard sticks and braced it so that my pencils and stuff wouldn't roll off onto the floor constantly. It's metal, so I can put magnets on to hold paper and stuff. So that you know, okay, you know I'm doing this…
Dave: A-ha! Aha.
Matt: And it was, for five bucks it was amazing! But again, I haven't touched it, other than using it as a really inconvenient table where I set something on it and if it's not balanced right it's going to fall off, in seven, eight years. So I got to get that out of the basement, and I'm putting it on the curb, and there's a guy in the neighborhood that collects scrap metal, and he's going to come by and pick it up and take it away, because that's he does. Like last Thursday, we put one of the kids’ bikes that they grew out of on the curb, and he's like, “Got any more scrap metal?” And I'm like, I do! Just not ready to go. And he's like, “Oh okay”, and very much had the look on his face of “well let me know when you're putting it out cause I'll come and get it.” And it's like, yeah, okay okay, come back next week, it'll be on the curb.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: I have two 6 foot tables that we got that are from the library that we bought in an auction and we used them for rumage sales and stuff, but they're really sturdy, really heavy, really solid tables. I took one down into the basement, and and I brought it back up when we had a rummage sale, and then I took it back down, and I very much said, that's never leaving the basement again until I'm dead. And Paula went, “Okay”. And then I took the second table down there, because I needed more table space, because I'm a hoarder and I have a lot of crap, and said, okay, again, I'm not bringing these out unless we absolutely need them. [laughs] So those got to come out. Like, all the important stuff is gone, is out of the house, and it's either in our storage unit or in the apartment. Like, I have I forget how many bookcases I had, but I had a bookcase that I got from my brother that I was letting my friend use to store stuff at the house. And when I'm moving, my brother said, “Okay I want it back” and then he's like, “Oh no, you can have it” and it's so I have this 9 foot wide… ahh, maybe almost 9 foot tall metal bookcase that all the shelves are adjustable. And I'm like, oh this is great, and I set it up and took a picture of it and I'm like, this is great! Aand then I put all my Cerebus stuff on it, and I took a picture, and put it on the Facebook group going, as long as I don't buy any more phonebooks, they'll all fit on one shelf, cause each shelf is 3 feet wide.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I have, between the original phonebooks, the remastered phonebooks, the “Swords of Cerebus in Hell?” soft covers, the “Swords of Cerebus in Hell?” hardcovers, “Swords of Cerebus”, and a few other odds and ends, it's exactly 3 feet, or just a hair shy. So I can get the stuff in and out. I'm like, I put the picture up and somebody immediately commented, “Well yeah, until Dave announces he's doing volume 17.” And I'm like, funny you should mention that, because we've been talking about it! It's not going to happen, but we've been talking about it.
Dave: Right. Right. Well, I'm doing my part then to make sure that my life's work fits on Matt Dow's metal bookcase. I think that's going to be my story from now on, I would like to produce more work, but I just can't do it to Matt. It barely fits his bookshelf as it is. Getting back to Michael R, where are we here? Oh! “I just purchased Al Nickerson’s ‘The Sword of Eden’ volume 2. Any kind words about the book?” And it's like, many many kind words about the book. I have to say that, thank you Michael for asking that, because it gave me the excuse to reread it as part of my Please Hold for Dave Sim research for June 2024. I mean, it's a really interesting book. Both “The Sword of Eden” books are are very very, very very accomplished pieces of work, in the, how we call it, the Frank Miller “Ronin” end of things. There are people who know how to do the Frank Miller “Ronin” riffs, Kevin and Peter definitely did. There are a lot of people that think they know how to do it, and they really don't know how to do it. Or they're enthusiastic, but they bring something else to the table. What interests me about Al Nickerson's take is the fact that it is definitely a Christian approach to ninjas. As I said before about Al Nickerson's approach with Rebecca Stern is of an apostate Jew who converts to Christianity. Which is, for a Christian, it's a happy ending. The same thing as ninjas, samurai, martial arts, all those kinds of things, they're definitely of another culture. And in terms of a humanist approach of saying, this is another culture. “We're in the west, we're in North America, we're humanists, and these are Japanese people. They come from a different background. Vive la différence”, kind of thing. Whereas it's, uh no, these are ninjas, and it does have magic influence and sorcery as plot elements, in Al Nickerson's work, in “The Sword of Eden”, both volumes. But it’s, no, he's documenting Christian good versus evil, which is, you know, we're comic book fans. We've grown up with good versus evil, but good versus evil is always “this person is evil because they're trying to conquer the world and enslave everybody or destroy the environment or whatever it is. Just check the synopsis on any Marvel movie. And we're the good people that want to stop them.” No, for a Christian, good people are people who believe in God, and not only believe in God, but believe that Jesus Christ is their personal savior. Which is, you get references to that through Al's work. It's not beating you over the head with it, but Rebecca Stern says, “No, the only route to God is through Jesus Christ.” Full stop. That's it. She's made up her mind about that. She's a very determined young lady, born Jewish, Daughter of Zion, but definitely a person who believes Jesus Christ is the Messiah, and you either believe in Jesus Christ as your route in the afterlife, or you're going to Hell.
So consequently, the the evil beings in the book, and there's a lot of borderline beings where we we haven't really been told specifically that this is an evil being, but they're evil because they don't believe in Jesus Christ. So consequently, a lot of them are well-meaning, but well-meaning doesn't cut the cheese for a Christian. It's you either believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and your first loyalty to him and to Christianity, or you're going to Hell. And so consequently, you get into interesting discussions, interesting plot points. One of the ones that I was drawn to that's on the back cover as part of the synopsis, and is a sort of throwaway plot point in “Sword of Eden Shinobi” is the idea of dying is scary to some folks. And it's like, that's a very very different thing for a Christian and for a monotheist like myself, than it is for a humanist. A humanist is going to look at that and go, “Well yeah, everybody's scared of dying. Nobody wants to die.” And it's like, mhmm, no, if you definitely settled in your own mind that you're a Christian and you have accepted Christ as your personal Savio,r and this is what you believe is the difference between going to Heaven or going to Hell, you're not afraid of dying. What would you be afraid of? And it's, I don't have the specificity. I do give equal weight to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But definitely I had the experience when I was in the hospital in 2015 and going in for bowel surgery and going, like, this isn't even remotely concerning to me. As opposed to the last time I was in the hospital, when I was an atheist and it's like, what if I die? Horrible thought that I'm going to die. To me it's like, well I'm with God while I'm physically incarnated to whatever extent I'm able to be with God, and if my physical body dies because something happens in the operation, I'll still be with God, but I'll actually be on the other side. I'll be in the spirit world, not the physical world. And this makes for a very different good versus evil experience in reading “Sword of Eden” where the bad guys are the bad guys, but they're getting more and more immersed in witchcraft and demoniac pursuits and whatnot. And that's specifically attributed by one of the heroes to being afraid to die. If you're that afraid to die, and you do have aptitudes in the realm of spirit, but you don't want to be with God, you don't want to get on God's side, consequently, yes, you just get in further and further up to your eyeballs, and get more and more afraid of dying. The bad guys want to be immortal and want to have control over as many people as they can, and that's as a result of being disconnected from God. So it's very difficult for the heroes to try and explain to them, “You wouldn't be going through this experience if you were just thinking right. If you were accepting reality that God is the center of the universe.” And for a Christian, Jesus Christ is His son, is His offspring, is His emissary on Earth, and is, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one is coming under the Father except through me.” That's, beginning, middle, and end, that's what you believe. If you would just do that, you wouldn't be afraid of dying anymore. And you wouldn't be doing all of this self-destructive stuff trying to keep from dying.
And it makes for a very, to me, satisfying read because it's like, right, this is what good versus evil is about, as far as I know, and as far as I'm concerned. And if you're drawn to good versus evil, you're drawn to Superheroes versus super ninjas, and when it comes to that [laughs] it's, Al Nickerson's laying it on with a trowel. I mean, you got Nemish-Man, Crusader Girl, Super Dead, and Ninja Spider, and that's the current team of heroes in this current volume, and what unites them is the belief in God. And “We're not going around trying to destroy demoniacal presences and demoniacal leaders, and cults of personality because we're opposed to them uh being that way. It's that you're doing other stuff to other people in the name of what you are doing and we can't abide that. We're live and let live people, but you've got to live and let live. ‘Let live’ is a big part of it.” If you start getting immersed in this, “No, I have to do this stuff to you because I'm afraid of dying” it's like well, okay. [laughs] “I didn't want to have to do this to you, but now you’ve made it a kill or be killed thing.” And, like I say, it's just adding Good in its larger capital G sense back into the mix, that has been eliminated from our society. Was Superman a Christian? Was Batman a Jew? Was Spider-Man a presbyterian? It's like, “Well, we don't want to get into that.” And it's like, [laughs] well, what are you doing documenting good versus evil? I mean, pick a side, or you're just part of the esoteric people going, “There's more here than meets the eye.” Well, if you're ignoring self-evident reality, yes there is. It's Goya, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”, the brilliant print that he did. It certainly, in terms of his way of thinking, as one of the the the bright lights of the art world, he's definitely in the the upper echelon. Not many higher than than Goya. “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” We were in a time period where reason led to God. It was, well where do you think everything came from? Where do you think wars come from? Where do you think our sense of good and evil comes from, and our compelling need to define good and evil for ourselves, and to listen to other opinions? And not to say, “Well, I now have to eradicate you because of your opinion” but, “Okay, where do I disagree with this person, and why do I disagree with this person, and should I be persuaded by this person?” Most of our reality was that way, what reason was for, that was what the Age of Reason was about. “We can reason our way through this as as God-fearing men. This is our role. This is what we were put here on the Earth to be, is God's viceroys. And part of the hierarchy that for a Christian rises to the apex of the Messiah. And from there is the conduit to God, full stop.
So I really can't recommend Al Nickerson's work, and “Shinobi” picks right up where the first “Sword of Eden” left off. And if you are a humanist, if you're one of those, “Uh, I really don't want to read a Christian superhero.” Like I say, he doesn't hit you over the head with it. It's just from a Christian perspective, and where he sees evil, and what the whole discussion with evil is about. And why we have things like D-Day, which we're recording this on the the 80th anniversary of D-Day. It's like, mhmm, there you go. That wasn't just an esoteric, “Hey, let's do this for six years!” It was, no, this is, as part of the turnover of God's Clockwork Mechanism, you do get a spanner in the works, which is definitely what Adolf Hitler was, and you do end up with monumental good versus evil. And then, decades and decades of trying to piece together, okay, what do we think of this? A lot of Christians are just, “No, we can't countenance war in any form for any reason.” And it's like, well, you can try and hold to that position, but you are going to end up in situations where, no, you do have to deal with this. This is being forced upon you, and nobody expects that to happen when it does happen. And it's very interesting, and very gratifying to me that Al Nickerson is taking the trouble to apply that to the tropes that we're all familiar with. It's like, okay, here's what you've been reading for the last number of decades of your life. And it's, at one level, yeah, I know exactly what it is. It's like, yes, it's Jack Kirby, and it's Frank Miller, and it's ninjas, and it's space vehicles and ray beams, and all of those kinds of things, but here it is just within a Christian template. “I'm not going to hit you over the head with it, it's just, I'm riffIng on this stuff, and I’m not comfortable as a creator riffing on this without having Christianity as part of its overall template.” So, there you go. Do I have kind words about the book? Michael R! Ah-ah-ah! I have nothing but kind words about the book.
“And finally, yeah, let’s stump, err, groovy. Our long suffering,” oh how he suffers, “transcriptionist Jesse Lee Herndon says,“ Yes, thank you, Jesse Lee Herndon. I can't think of any person who wouldn't have given up on the transcript thing long ago and many many transcripts ago. “Matt, here's what I got thus far from my recent wave of transcription vis a vis updates. Hi Dave, I resumed plugging away at transcribing the backlog of Please Holds.” Can you imagine transcribing this? Yii. Matt says, “And I continue to feel, boldfaced italic underlined all caps, REAL BAD about not posting them more regular.” Yeah it's a guiltl trip for you, buddy. “At this point, I'm less than a year behind now, and aim to be caught up by this Summer. Look for my work in Waverly Press' ‘Pieces of Turtles 8.3’, featuring the transcript of the serialized ‘Please Hold for Kevin Eastman.’ I should send a copy of it in to the Cerebus Archive autographed, but I only have two (not including a galley proof), and they only printed like 30 of them. They aren't even on the Waverly site! Here's a few bit of updates on some things mentioned on Please Hold last year. In February 2023’s Please Hold for Dave Sim, you wonder why Clay Geerdes' Comix World was deleted from your freebie list. I Google the heck out of every name you say so as to make sure they're as accurate as possible for the transcript. In this case? I discovered this exact Clay Geerdes, of Comix World fame, who dropped off the freebie list on Nov 4 1997, died on July 8 1997 in San Francisco from liver cancer. RIP to him, all these years later.” Yeah that was one of those things that, if there was a place that I would find out that somebody died, it was in Clay Geerdes' Comix World, which was a two-sided, dense packed newsletter that he sent out, and I was on the freebie list. And if if there was a cartoonist that was ill, or a cartoonist that had just died, or just had had a kid or whatever, it was Clay Geerdes was right on top of it. And what's sad in that situation is when Clay Geerdes went there was nobody to do that for him. Nobody in whose context I was. I used to think the same thing about Mark Evanier, that back when I was reading the Comics Buyers Guide, Mark Evanier was always the the obit guy. A cartoonist would die, and sure enough, Mark Evanier's next column would be a a neatly distilled bio of of the individual involved. And I always wonder, what's going to happen with Mark Evanier goes. I hope there's somebody that can do just justice for him.
“Bill Morse was a tough nut to crack, as most of his info on the web was very sparse. I did find references to him in a few interviews via TwoMorrows books and mags, and it seems he was a very early comic book store owner (started in Staten Island in the 60s), at an eventual chain called ‘Adventure Bound.’ No clue if that jogs your memory any.” And it's like no. No. I don't even remember what the occasion would have been that I would have referred to Bill Morse. That is one of those Grampaw things where the number of names that are right there, or should be right there… there’s the one that we just had, John Thorne. How could I forget the last name of the other half of Win-Mill Productions? It's like, well, you know that's going to happen Grampaw, your memory isn't going to improve as you go along. And we've all had the experience, particularly the people that I admired. Will Eisner, people like that, and seeing them go through that. Where Will Eisner would be telling me a story at dinner somewhere and then go, “And I can't remember his name. Why can't I remember that guy's name? That's terrible!” And it's like, mhmm, I wish I could help you, Will, but that's your memory that's not mine. I do think that the comic book field does do itself proud in trying to preserve people's histories. I mean you're doing yeoman service. Craig Miller and John Thorne did, Margaret Liss definitely has, Jennifer DiGiacomo definitely has. “We're preserving this. Whatever Dave may be forgetting, that's fine, if he ever mentioned it somewhere, we will find it and we will preserve it for future Dave Sim and Cerebus fans who will be interested.” Very much appreciated.
“Stan Bobrof co-owned ‘Monkey's Retreat’, located near the University of Ohio, and was later a hangout of a young Jeff Smith (is this a Comic Art Metaphysics moment?)” [laughs] I'm not going to go too far down that rabbit hole, but yes, definitely in terms of, just the name Monkeys Retreat. Eddie Khanna and I did a lot of research on Jeff Smith and “Bone”, basically because of a reference in “Rip Kirby.” The storyline that I just finished, “The Pagan's Cheerful Summer” and it's definitely got a number of, “Ah, if these aren't Jeff Smith references, I don't know what they are.” And this was definitely at the, still at the research, “no stone left unturned” time, where, okay, I was missing issues of “Bone”. Go out and get missing issues of “Bone”. Eddie Khanna downloading Jeff Smith's Wikipedia and biographical stuff about Jeff Smith, and reading all of it, and that was definitely an interesting experience. Because as near as we were able to put together, Thorn, which is what “Bone” was originally called when it was a comic strip in the Lantern at Ohio State University, the student newspaper. There was actually again, as far as we've been able to piece together, there was two Thorns. There was whoever Thorn was originally based on, was a devout Christian and sort of was such a devout Christian and Jeff was definitely head over heels in love with her, but just couldn't get his head wrapped around this Christian thing. That happens with different people. I became a monotheist, Robert Crumb drew the whole Book of Genesis and still ended up an atheist. So, it does happen, but it was interesting that Jeff Smith created Thorn as an homage to this devout Christian, and then basically broke up with her, and then found love of his life, who was Vijaya. And if there's till death us do part, it's Jeff and Vijaya. But now Thorn was an homage to, and here, none of my business, is Vijaya an atheist, or is Vijaya a Hindu? I think she comes from a Hindu background. So it's one of those, on the evolutionary scale, and particularly when you're talking about religions where, again, Christ is at the apex for a Christian. So the original Thorn, Christ was at the apex of her life, and definitely Jeff was expected to see the light on this. In terms of scale, yeah, you wouldn't compare yourself to a prophet, you wouldn't compare yourself to saint, you wouldn't compare yourself to God, so consequently on a scale of values, you could say that we’re all monkeys, relatively speaking. And consequently, the fact that Jeff would end up at a Monkey's Retreat, having retreated from Christianity. And it's one of those esoteric things where, as I say, this is one of the reasons I'm doing Strange Death of Alex Raymond is to go, I want to try and show people… I'm not trying to convince you to believe in God. You don't believe in God? That's fine, don't believe in God. But all of these things are enacted, all of these things are resonant in the same way that they are in a really good novel, like on the scale of a Dostoevsky or a Tolstoy, and we're all just players in it.
“Wells News was a sub-distributor, and their personnel later formed some of Capital City Distribution. As for Gary O'Gorman of Detroit? I got nothing. I don't even know if I spelled his name right!” That's interesting that there are people in that category. Which is one of the things we're finding out is a pretty esoteric thing to be in 2024 with, once something's on the Internet it's there permanently. So the fact that there are people who don't leave a trail of any kind and okay, how did that happen? How did Gary O’Gorman of Detroit, where, okay, presumably Jesse, all his algorithms point in the direction of pop culture, and point in the direction of comic books, and point in the direction of all of the stuff where we live and breathe, and there's just no Gary O’Gorman of Detroit. How did that happen? Why did that happen? We don't know, but I think as we go further and further along with the internet, we are going to find out, oh, that's why that happened, or at least I've got a theory as to why that happened. This happens to specific people for this specific reason.
“Victoria Bowlarama is still around, as Victoria Bowling Lanes, est 1959.” That’s here in town in Kitchener. “Unless that existed simultaneously with the Bowlarama, it has to be the same one. I'd suggest a future Kickstarter reward ‘Bowl with Dave’, but your poor wrist can only take so much. Maybe instead, ‘Bowl-y with Rolly’?” Uh, I'll ask him, but [laughs] I don't think Rolly would be up for for Bowl-y with Rolly. And I gotta say, I've only been bowling, I think, three times in my life? Maybe four times, and it's just not my thing. At the time, I will do a commercial ad for bowling lanes if you pay the freight, but in terms of, hey I got to start hanging out at Bowlarama? Mhmm, not going to happen.
“I have a truly geeky question, which is very inside baseball, but I gotta ask: Is the actual title of any given ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ title prefaced ‘Cerebus in Hell? Presents’, retroactively back to the first one with ‘Batvark’? I ask because there's a website I use to track my collection called ‘League of Comic Geeks’, and they've started running them like ‘Cerebus in Hell Presents: Akimbo.’ I want to know if I should fix all the older ones, or just leave them as they are and go with the new title qualifier onward. Or if you only consider them sans the CiH? moniker.” Matt says, “’Cerebus in Hell?’ Presents’ is a Matt requested edition from an October 2021 email thread with the CiH? Team. Didn't somebody suggest adding ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ to the title at least for Diamond ordering, or putting ‘Cerebus in Hell? Presents’ on a banner at the top of the cover, if the original cover has a banner? I swear somebody suggested that. Me! I suggested that. I think ‘Cerebus in Hell? Presents’ will help with orders. I forgot when we started doing it, but it was my idea. You know, for the record.” And yes, thank you for coming up with that. In terms of answering your question, Jesse, I would say that if it didn't have the preface to it when it first came out, then it probably shouldn't have the preface. But in terms of, you might want to go into two directions on it. It’s like you want to align yourself with the League of Comic Geeks, because obviously you've gone, “Okay, these folks are on on the ball. I'm on the same page that they are. I want to do my comics this way.” So you should probably have your own link to yourself that has, “Okay, this is how League of Comic Geeks has it.“ I'm assuming that you transcribed this accurately, and you've got “Cerebus in Hell Presents: Akimbo” but it doesn't say “Cerebus in Hell?” which happens a lot I mean. No, the title isn't “Cerebus in Hell”, it's ”Cerebus in Hell?” So it should be “Cerebus in Hell? Presents”, but if they don't have that, then if you're doing a League of Comic Geeks listing for yourself, “Here's my personal uh documentation of this title”, then you want to leave the question mark off of it, because they leave the question mark off. The Overstreet Price Guide goes by the title. “Batvark” #1 appears in with the B-A-Ts. The other title, “Spider-Vark” is in with S-P-I, and is treated as, it's #1. There's only one issue, this is the date that they came out in, here's the value in the different conditions. If you align with that, then okay, they they need to be in alphabetical order even after the “Cerebus in Hell? Presents” was added on. And you could definitely say, “Okay, what do I choose personally? Do I think that that should be ‘Cerebus in Hell? Presents’?” Because, we did start numbering them. I think 37 was the first one where we numbered it as an issue of “Cerebus in Hell?”, but it was still “The Varking Dead” #1. So it's, if you want to have individual numbers for them, and you know, if I was doing this for myself, I would probably be inclined to do that. To sit down and say, okay, the first 36 didn't have numbers on them as which issue of “Cerebus in Hell?” this is, but I at least want a link on my computer that when I want to know, okay, which issue was “Sump Thing”? And which issue was “Iron Manticore”? Which issue number? I know we didn't have issue numbers then, but what issue number was it now that we're having issue numbers on it? And I think everybody is doing that is a, I'm not meaning this in offensive way, an anal retentive collector. Where, we're all anal retentive collectors at one level or another. It's yeah if if I'm thinking in terms of Overstreet, values, conditions, release dates, yeah this is how I want it annotated. If I want to know how early in the “Cerebus in Hell?” run was “Spider-Vark”? Then I want to know that number. So it's, I think “Cerebus in Hell?” is going to be one of those, if you want to make sure that you're able to just, at a keystroke, find out something about “Cerebus in Hell?” Something comes into your head, you want to look it up, you're probably going to need three or four formats, so that you go, well, this is what I'm looking for, I want the Overstreet. This is what I'm looking for, I want the early ones to be by title, and I want everything after whatever issue it was to have “Cerebus in Hell? Presents”… do you remember when we started doing that, since it was your idea?
Matt: I don't remember when it's started… I know that “Hell’o Dali” has that on the title, but that's an element of the cover.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: I believe it was shortly after that when it got added to the numbering on the spine. The other problem with this is, “Spore/ Batvark” is issue 80, but it's 380 cause we added in the 300 “Cerebus” issues, and it's only issue 80 if “Cerebus in Hell?” 0 is #1.
Dave: Right. Right. And yeah, go ahead.
Matt: And so, the team has kind of just embraced the okay, that's #1. Every issue after that's the next issue up. Blah blah blah. And it's like, but it's really confusing that 0 is #1, and 1 is #2. [laughs]
Dave: And 2 is #3, and 3 is #4, and 4 is #5. Right. Right.
Matt: And then after that, it's a little easier, because they're all #1, but they're in the various titles. My favorite was Bleeding Cool, Rich Johnston, did an article when “Spore/Batvark”came out going, “You know, it's issue 380, but only if you count all the issues of ‘Cerebus’, all the issues of ‘glamourpuss’, all the issues of ‘Following Cerebus’.” And Birdsong kind of bristled going, “No no no, we're only doing two series combined.” [laughs]
Dave: Right.
Matt: If we really wanted to do that and get the numbers even higher, it's like, yeah, yeah we could. But the whole point is that technically it's issue 380, so now we're beating “Spawn” cause that's the whole joke of the cover.
Matt: Right.Aand it is Cerebus. I mean it is , “Cerebus in Hell?” came about because you know people kept asking, “Well, what happened to Cerebus after he died? What happened to Cerebus after he died? What happened to Cerebus after he died? Can you tell me what happened to Cerebus after he died?” And it's like, [laughs] if you keep asking me, I'm gonna tell you, and I don't think you're gonna be very happy with the answer. And sure enough, that's what happened. Scott Berwanger, who does “Anubis”, I sent him $100, “Can you get me caught up on ‘Anubis’? I know you're not publishing it, but you use however much of this it would require for you to print however many after issue 32.” And as I sort of expected, the cheque came back today and it's like, “No, I'm not doing that. I'm not publishing. Part of me would really like you to see where ‘Anubis’ is now and be able to see how it's evolved since issue 33 which was the last one that I got.But I'm not doing that. I'm not a self-publisher. I'm not a publisher, I'm a cartoonist. I just want to write and draw my book and then will it to Ohio State University, the Billy Ireland Museum.” And it's like, okay, well, that's what you are. That's your choice. But he did say, the 16 volumes of Cerebus are treasured possessions of his, as well as “Cerebus” #0, and he will always have those. So my next step is going to be to send him Volume One of “Sword of Cerebus in Hell?” and go, well okay, Cerebus keeps going after issue 300! In my mind, it's like, you want to know where Cerebus went when he died? Here's where he went, into the Gustov Dore prints, and here's what happened. If you read the first one and you go, “I really really really don't like this.” And no harm. no foul. If you laugh a bunch of times in spite of yourself, just tell me and I will, in exchange for the first 32 issues of “Anubis” that you sent me at your expense way way way back when, as interest on that, I will at least send you the 12 volumes of “Swords of Cerebus in Hell?” and we will see what Scott Berwanger's answer to that is.
So it looks like that does it for Please Hold for Dave Sim. We're managing to keep them a smidgen under three hours, which is good of us, I think. When we were getting up over three hours, I was going, uhh, this is a lack of self-discipline, I think. And pointing the finger at myself!
Matt: Well, when I posted on on one of the blog posts where I said, hey, Thursday Dave and I are going to be talking. It was Monday and I'm like, it's getting down to the last chance to send your question in, but if you don't want to send it in, then maybe we can get this done in an hour and a half, and it won't take me all weekend to do the videos! [laughs]
Dave: And one of these times, nobody's going to ask a question, and I'm going to look forward to going, Matt, let's just talk about stuff! [laughs] You start talking and it won't be, well okay, that's far enough down that rabbit hole, we got another question here. It's like, no, we didn't get any questions this time at all. So it'll be Please Hold for Dave Sim, Matt versus Dave, the final confrontation.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Anyway, I'm going to run along, so thank you as always for this. And special hello for Bullwinkle, and Paula, and Janis Pearl, and Buddy and Bonnie and Clyde. How are Buddy and Bonnie and Clyde taking the move?
Matt: Because we had moved Bonnie and Clyde in the past six months, Clyde… [laughs] we got them in the apartment, put them in the bathroom where the litter box is, opened up the cages and said, okay you know this is… and Clyde just, “Okay, that's where I go to the bathroom.” And then it was, “Where's the food?” And so okay, we fed them. And every time we feed him now, he's right there. Sometimes for the first couple days, Bonnie wouldn't necessarily come out, and Buddy wouldn't necessarily come out, but Clyde was right there like, “Hey, if they're not going to eat, I'll eat their food for them. I don't care.”
Dave: [laughs] You snooze you lose!
Matt: Every morning when I go to work, I feed the cats, and every morning he licks his dish clean, Bonnie's finished eating, he licks her dish clean. Buddy finishes eating, he licks his dish clean, and then he goes to the dish of hard food and starts eating. I'm like, you just ate! You don't need to keep eating. You can stop now. And he just kind of looks at me like, “No no no no, this is the last time I'm getting fed ever in my life.” It's like he's part dog.
Dave: That's it. It sounds like it. No fussy kitty there. Anyway, you have a good night, Matt.
Matt: You too, Dave! Take care, and God willing, we'll do this again in July.
Dave: God willing. Have a good night. Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye!
Next Time: Alex Raymond had a Strange Death. Strange I tells ya!
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