Hi, Everybody!
As we do:
Mondays!
__________________
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. 10 days left.
__________________
As you all should know by now, Dave's says he finished his 1982 Tour Book notes, and the ball is now in MY court to assemble a proof of what he wants. (I feel like that's gonna involve a "super"-cut of the audio to all his notes to try and distill everything into a coherent form. I probably also need to ask him to go through and list what pages are definitely "in" from the prototype without question (his tour diary, all Deni's photos. I mean, if he wants any of that cut out, then it's NOT the 1982 Tour Book now is it?) Expect lots and lots and lots of profanity directed "north"...)
Anyway, the buttons to buy Dave's time are still there, so IN THEORY, you can donate and dictate what he works on when I Faux. '82 Tour Book discussion, or Please Hold For Dave Sim. (Will Cerebus@50 end up getting a button? I dunno...)
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.
1/2025 2/2025 3/2025 4/2025 5/2025 6/2025 7/2025 8/2025 9/2025 10/2025 11/2025 12/2025
1/2026 2/2026 3/2026 4/2026 5/2026 6/2026 7/2026 8/2026 9/2026 10/2026
Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt! How are you doing?
Matt: I am doing great.
Dave: Good. Let's just leave it at that. We'll do this another time.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: How many times is somebody feeling great and actually says it out loud?
Matt: Oh, whenever I feel great I say I feel great, and then the universe comes and goes, “Are you sure?”
Dave: [laughs] “Cause we got a surprise for you!”
Matt: I mean, that's when my life starts turning into an old Bugs Bunny cartoon and I'm like, okay, next time when I'm feeling great, just be really quiet about it.
Dave: That's right. That's right. Okay, we'll begin with “Hi how are you?” “Hi how are you well?” We already went through that. We'll move on to me remembering Jeff Seiler. So, one time Jeff and I were sailing a raft down the Mississippi River. Uh wait! That was Huck Finn, and that leads to the n-word, so we'll just steer clear of that. So what's your Jeff Seiler story this time?
Matt: So, in the move, there's stuff in the house that I stumbled across as I'm cleaning and and moving, and I had a key rack in the back hall that we were hanging keys up . Lke, I had the key to my mom's house, I had the key I think to my old apartment which was one of those I think that's what this key is but I'm not sure. I had keys to my Dad's apartment. And I had a key to Jeff's apartment that I had labeled “Door to Jeff's old place.” Cause when he first moved in to Wisconsin, I found him a place, and at one point he needed me to feed the cat, so he gave me a copy of the key. But the apartment building, there was a door key to get into the building and then a door key to get into the apartment, and I couldn't remember which key it was. And I was like, you know, I don't need this key. It's a memory of Jeff, I'll send it to Dave! And I mentioned this to Paula. Well, Paula sees a patient at that apartment complex and went, “Wait, you have a door key? Can I get it? Cause it's a real pain in the butt to get into this place.” And I'm like, yeah, sure! So I…
Dave: Wait a second, you can't do that! [laughs]
Matt: Well… let me finish…
Dave: Okay. Alright.
Matt: So, I dig through this pile of keys that I have, and it's got a tag on it, and I'm going to send a picture to you and people watching the video portion right now will see, this is what the key looks like and and the key ring I had it on. And I gave it to her and like okay, I'm pretty sure this is the outside door, but it might be the inside door, but here you go, try it. And she came back and went, “Yeah, Jeff strikes again. It's the key for the apartment, it's not the key for the building.”
Dave: Ta-da!
Matt: So from beyond the grave, Jeff's still helping out, but not really.
Dave: Do you remember feeding the cat?
Matt: Oh, I remember feeding the cat. I've told that story before that, Jeff went away for a weekend and he said all I had to do was feed the cat and play with it, I didn't have to touch the litter box, I didn't have to do anything. And the second day I came in to feed the cat, the cat had crapped an X in the middle of the living room floor.
Dave: Oh, that's right! That's right. I knew there was a story attached to that one, and that's another only that could happen in proximity to Jeff Seiler.
Matt: I still don't understand how the cat could have done that.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. But if any cat was going to do it, it would be Jeff Seiler's cat.
Okay, “Then we'll move on to the ever increasing and expanding pile of questions from the usual suspects! First into the Please Hold Shoot ‘em Up Barrel is,” uh where's your fax? “Daniel F, who asked about the total coincidence of TMNT having a crossover with Naruto around the ‘possibly’ same time as ‘Narutobus’ was hitting the stands. Dave's thoughts/comments?” And Daniel wrote, “Hello Dave, you may all be aware of this. IDW Publishing announced that they will be collaborating with Viz Media to do a TMNT 4 issue comic run with another none other than Naruto! The first issue will release November 13th. Interesting how another certain independent black and white comic will also be releasing a Naruto crossover later this year. Coincidence? Entirely possible.” Well, it's not actually a Naruto crossover. It's a Naruto parody. And we definitely have to draw a distinction between a crossover authorized and signed off on by good corporate folks who own Naruto, and some wacky Canadian just making fun of it. “Coincidence? Entirely possible.” I think maybe that's. yeah it's a coincidence, but it's also I think probably part of God's Clockwork Mechanism in terms of, just about the same time that I was going, Well okay, ‘Akimbo’ was fun and I definitely heard of “Akira”. This time I'm going to go to Looking For Heroes and ask the guys down there, what's my next manga parody? Sort of like, gesturing at their partial wall full of manga, and which would you pick as the most popular book to do a parody of? And “Naruto” was definitely, if it wasn't at the top of their list, it was in the top two. So being completely manga ignorant myself, it was very interesting holding a book in my hand and going okay, so in terms of this massive massive massive industry, this is at the, John Lennon's phrase, “The topper most of the topper most” and very interesting to go well, I've never heard of it but I'll take your word for it. “The article I included mentions previous Naruto and TMNT collaborations through the Box Lunch retail chain for some form of merchandise. That's interesting. I suppose people love those ninjas working together. Would love to see Cerebus beat the Turtles to the comic book shelf before the end of the year.” Stranger things have happened. It was looking as if the “Ninja High School” Cerebus crossover wasn't going to happen, and then looked like it was going to happen, and then looked like it wasn't going to happen again. At one point, I was saying to to Ben Dunn, your Cerebus is not really familiar to as my Cerebus, and your Red Sophia isn't familiar to me as my Red Sophia. Why don't you just do your own Cerebus and Red Sophia crossover, and do your versions? It's like, I've never sued anybody for using my characters, and I certainly wouldn't start with you. And it was like, “You mean you don't want to do a crossover?” [laughs] It's like, uh, okay. Let's not keep going around this circle. Send me an outline and I'll take a look at it. And then it's like, I looked at the outline and I went okay, I can't really visualize this. Can you thumbnail it? And then he thumbnailed it, and I went okay, I got to go find the script so I can see where it applies to the thumbnails. And I'm going, mhmm, I'm not really sure that I see this the way he sees this, but I think maybe I can turn this into something that we both will be able to see one page at a time. And now I'm working, I just finished page 13, and he's sent me a partial page 24. He's working on 7 through 12. I've already done my side of 1 through 6, and if you had told me even like three months ago, four months ago , “This is where you're going to be the 1st of August,” I would said you're crazy. You're dreaming with your eyes open. And it's like, “And you'll be further along with this in terms of making progress than you're going to be with ‘Narutobus’”, and it's like, you're crazy. “Narutobus” is done. So it's the old story, “Know how to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.” “Just out of curiosity, have you received any threat of legal action for parody since Wolveroach? I don't want to give anyone any ideas, but I wonder if a similar independent black and white comic doing a parody of the same manga character around the same time as a major crossover like this would be noticed by the Viz Media legal team. Not bloody likely, I say.” And yeah, I'll go along with that. I think the bottom line on this one is that I think the First Amendment, the United States Constitution, and all Supreme Court decisions on its limits, which, if you want a bottom line on that one, is there are virtually none. You better have a very good reason for encroaching or even creeping up next to anyone else's First Amendment rights, is becoming a globally acknowledged “We hold these truths to be self-evident” reality after 200 years. [pants] Took 200 years to get here, but I think we are here. So, good for us, and particularly good for the United States of America founding fathers for understanding, “Okay, if you're ordering a society and you're trying to keep it from hitting the same rocks and shores all other societies have hit over the course of human history. This is not only important, this is the first amendment. You have to start with this, and nothing else is going to work until you get it through your thick skull that this has to work as a universal concept.” And that was a major selling job in the United States of America for, you know, decades if not a century, if not more than a century. Wolveroach and “Cerebus in Hell?” have both pushed the limits of parody as protected speech, which conforms. I think, to God's intention with free will, that this is what He wants. He wants free will to express itself, and everything that human beings can do to make sure that free will is not encroached upon, but is allowed everybody within limits, but within very very narrow limits. Probably the best way to put it is, parody has great power, and as Stan Lee pointed out, “With great power comes great responsibility,” but everyone has to decide for themselves what that responsibility is, knowing that they have to face the consequences on Judgment Day as to whether they were right as to “this is a responsible way to do this.”
Which segues, coincidentally enough, Mike Sewall’s question, which, it says here, he had this ready to go July 15th.
Matt: Yeah, he gets them in early.
Dave: He does. He does. Thank you, Mike. I think that must be very reassuring for you, Matt, that you go, “Alright, at least we'll have one question, because here's Mike.” “Hello recently-moved Manly Matt, and the infrequently-moved Dave Sim. Wait, that didn't come out right. Actually that did come out right.” And I recommend dried fruit. Dried apricots, actually. And I got that from Prophet Muhammad, who said that his best advice after fasting is don't wolf down a bunch of different kinds of food that you've been looking forward to. Start with dried fruit. And it's really true, the more dried fruit that you eat, [laughs] the more… well, to paraphrase Mike, the more frequently moved you are, and wait, that did come out right. “You may have heard that people have differing opinions on the internet.” No! “One interesting debate is the difference between stealing, aping, copying, homage, influence, and spoof, otherwise known as pastiche to you fancy sometimes French Canadians.” Le Canadien français. Oui. “There was a popular little book called ‘Steal Like an Artist’ which puts forth the idea that all art is stealing otherwise known as, ‘taking all that you see and experience and working it through your own artistic filter’. Some artists like Bill Sienkiewicz have been accused of aping the style of other artists. In Bill's case, Neal Adams early in his career. As one example, fun fact, lots of people on the internet are idiots and can't separate these concepts. Since you have been known to spoof a thing or two, and have homaged many artists in ‘Cerebus’, here finally is the question for Dave. How do you view these concepts, and what do you think about them being interpreted as stealing?” Uh, okay. Trying to organize that mentally, I made some notes about different artists and where they fall on the spectrum. And invariably I have to start all the way over at one end of the spectrum with Steve Ditko, who was, and was throughout his career I would say, I can't think of any exception to this, 100% original. He never copied anything. He never did a pastiche, he never did an homage. Whatever he sat down and did, whatever he had as the core of his creative mind and of his personal morality, it was, if it's something that you saw somebody else do, you can't do it, because that’s stealing. So whatever you're going to do, sit down and start working on whatever it is. And if you come up with an idea that seems to you like a good idea , do a quick mental scan on “have I seen this somewhere else and am I copying someone else's thing, or is this really something that I came up with?” It's like just go down the list of examples, just taking a handful, Doctor Strange's costume, what Doctor Strange looked like. There had never been anything like that as a character in the comic book field, or if you wanted to even extend it in terms of movies, or any other kind of entertainment, novels, Big Little Books. When Steve Ditko came up with Doctor Strange, in collaboration with Stan Lee, it was a 100% original thing. Even when they gave him something and said, “Here, can you change this?” And here I would cite the example of Iron Man, where Iron Man existed in the big clunky grey armour and then big clunky yellow armour, and then they went, “Cn you do something with this?” When Steve Ditko sat down and went, “Okay, what does my Iron Man look like? it's not going to look anything like this that they already have, and it's also not going to look like anything else. It's going to be my Iron Man that they are paying me to come up with.” And if you think about it, once he came up with the Steve Ditko Iron Man armour, you can't get away from that! You can try redesigning Iron Man, but it's like, no, anything that you change from what Steve Ditko gave you, it's not Iron Man anymore. And that's an Original with a capital O, capital A Artist. Same thing with his Spider-Man design, where it's like, “Okay, we got this Spider-Man that Jack Kirby did, and you know, it's a cover and five pages of pencils, and not really happy with this. What can you do in the way of of giving the Spider-Man?” Well okay, he sat down and designed Spider-Man. And that's another one, like apart from putting him in an all-black costume, you can't get away from Steve Ditko's Spider-Man costume, because every step you take away from that costume, it ceases being Spider-Man. And that only happens with somebody who's a 100% original. You can go down your whole list that you've cited here, and nothing on that list resonates with “this is how Steve Ditko did things.” Everything was completely original, same thing with The Creeper. Obviously, he went to DC and went, “Obviously they want something like Spider-Man in terms of that's why they're hiring Steve Ditko, but because of my personal morality, it has to be something far enough away from Spider-Man that there's absolutely no connective tissue there.” There's no way that you would look at the Creeper and go, “Oh, it's Spider-Man.” No, it's defintely the Creeper. It wasn't as successful as Spider-Man, but it was again, once he designed the Creeper, anytime somebody took a fancy to the Creeper, Craig Hamilton comes to mind, who was a huge Creeper fan. it's like, you're not going to get too far away from what Steve Ditko did in terms of designing the character, and the costume, and the way he poses, and the way he goes into action, etc etc. Because further away you get from the Original Artist, you just lose everything that's there. Spider-Man was the only astronomical success that Steve Ditko had with that Original Artist creativity, but everything else, definitely it's got Steve Ditko's imprint on it. That's what Marvel was paying him to do Doctor Strange and Spider-Man, and that's what DC was paying him to do the Creeper and Hawk & Dove, but whatever they might have reminded you of, they were 100% free of any legal points of similarity. Which Steve Ditko understood, and understood, “This is what I'm being paid for. I have to make sure that I'm giving them something 100% original. Maybe not the wisest thing to do, but a trade is a trade.” And he was very strict in his morals on that.
Bill Sienkiewicz, now, okay, moving down the spectrum of guys that don't spring full blown from the head of Zeus, Bill Sienkiewicz was aping Neal’s style, but Neal was aping Stan Drake’s style. Improving on parts of it, there's no question about that. Particularly because Neal was enamored of superheroes. Definitely, from the time he was done doing “Ben Casey” and was doing commercial work but looking to get in at DC, it was, “Okay, I don't know how I'm going to do this, and it's going to be a real maze that I'm going to have to run through. I already know that but I want to be authorized to do Batman and to do Superman, so that this is stuff that DC doesn't let people do, they're going to let me do it, because I'm going to figure out how to make it attractive for them.” So one of the things was, well okay, if you're going to do superheroes, you can get a certain amount from Stan Drake style, but Stan Drake was mostly his commercial work and “Heart of Juliet Jones”, which isn't going to tell you how to do something that's going to persuade DC Comics to let you do their marquee character that you're interested in ultimately, which was Batman. So Neal was interesting in that, at the time, it was, “Well okay, I want to draw superheroes, and I want to use Stan Drake style, which means I have to take a photorealistic approach to this. Where can I find photorealistic superhero physiques?” And what he ended up doing was buying wrestling magazines, because that was as close as you could get to, “Okay, when the arm is up at this angle and the tricep is tilted this way, and the elbow is here, and the wrist is doing this. This is what it looks like.” So that, doing basically the same thing that Stan Drake did with girls’ faces, which got him “Heart of Juliet Jones.” What makes a beautiful girl a beautiful girl? Well, Stan Drake is going to trace and copy fashion magazine photos weeks and months at a time until he goes, “Okay, now I know what makes that up. This is what makes up the beautiful female face. This is what a beautiful female hair looks like.” And as I say, Neal took that and said, “Okay, I have to apply that to this. This isn't what an actual human physique looks like, but this is the closest to a superhero physique in those pre- steroid days,” where there wasn't the steroid cases that we've got now. The only place that you could find super developed bodies like that doing the stuff that superheroes do is in wrestling magazines. But, I jump in at that point and go okay, in neither case is Bill Sienkiewicz an capital O capital A Original Artist and neither is Neal Adams an Original Artist, but come on! The degree of difficulty of what Neal was doing, what Neal invented in terms of “here's Stan Drake, here's superheroes, here's what I need to learn in between these two so that I can do this so that Julie Schwartz will eventually, eventually get worn down and go, ‘yeah okay, you can do Batman’.” And in terms of select company, I would really say that there's only the four on that list of the guys who did that style, Neal inventing it, Stan Drake inventing it, and Bill Sienkiewicz doing it very very effectively. I would include Dick Giordano in there. And anytime you've got something that influential and that important, that moves beyond stealing, that moves beyond homage, that moves beyond pastiche. and that becomes, these are the only four guys who made it to the top of that particular Mount Olympus. I'll be happy to have the discussion with you about anybody else you think that should be on that list, but no, Bill, Stan Drake, Neal, and and Dick Giordano. Then you've got people like Barry Windsor-Smith, and Barry Windsor-Smith, “Red Nails”, done in 1973 is, in terms of capital O capital A Original Artist influential, is in an entirely unique circumstance. No one can do that stuff. [laughs] Not even Barry Windsor-Smith a year before, or a year after. The one brief shining moment, when he produced the two-part “Red Nails” story in black and white, and I can vouch for the fact that that's in the same category as what Stan Drake came up, with what Neal Adams modified, what Bill Sienkiewicz figured out how to do, and Dick Giordano figured out how to do. There's only one of these, and when you're somebody who prides himself on being a magpie, “That looks like fun. I'm going to try doing that. I'll do my own version of that.” And when you get immersed in it, and you go, “I can see it, but I can't do it” and that's really really frustrating, and that’s what suggests to me that I'm looking at a level of genius.
Moving further along the scale from there, there's two examples way over here where, yeah, I wish I was in either of those categories and I'm not, it's very true imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And I've been imitated by people, where you go, oh, he's doing Cerebus. Like, he's doing a different character, he's doing a different story, but these are Dave Sim's riffs. So that really depends on what your reaction to flattery is. I have zero response to flattery and insults, since both are enemies of accurate self-perception. And I think that's something that every artist needs to have when you're developing your style, and particularly when you do get to a situation where you go, “Wow, I'm actually influencing people the way I was influenced. I never thought I would ever get to this situation, but here I am.” It's, well, don't believe the flattery and don't believe the insults. Try to perceive yourself and your work accurately. So now that we're down at the end of the spectrum where where I inhabit, literal copying, which is, it's definitely part of what I'm doing on Strange Death of Alex Raymond. I had to learn to copy Alex Raymond, and Alex Raymond's “Rip Kirby” style, because all the reproduction of “Rip Kirby” is atrocious [laughs] relative to what's there. I mean, particularly when I was coming along in the comic book field, you would occasionally see a well reproduced “Rip Kirby” Alex Raymond strip and you'd go, whoa! That's mindboggling. Exactly what he's doing there, the longer I look at it, the more I go, I know already looking at this, I'm not going to be able to do this. Even copying and just going line by line, because that's the level of genius to it. But in the same time, doing Strange Death of Alex Raymond and going, okay, as it started was an appreciation of photorealism in comics and the photorealists, I can't explain Alex Raymond's importance beyond Alex Raymond's importance, Alex Raymond's centrality to comic art, unless I show you what he did. Which requires me to do a kind of cheesy knockoff of Alex Raymond because I'm just not in that category. The larger I work, the closer I can get , so expect to see a number of giant Alex Raymond panels in Strange Death of Alex Raymond for exactly the reason that the closer that I work to his size or even bigger if I can, the more I hope people will have the reaction going, “Oh okay, I think I'm starting to understand why this guy is important and having seen a bunch of ‘Rip Kirby’ over the years, I never picked up on the level of importance, but I think Dave Sim is making the case here.” Ideally somewhere way up ahead, some Strange Death of Alex Raymond fan will swap out my copies on the pages for crystal clear scans of Alex Raymond's originals, and I hope at that point Alex Raymond will finally, finally be recognized as the architect of comics photorealism that he was. This is the guy who came up with it, and it wasn't what everybody else turned it into. It was, it's a thing on its own. And the more pages that I can do that are making that point, the more I have the sense that I'm doing Alex Raymond justice. I hope I'm doing Alex Raymond justice. I would say, Mike, in terms of my deepest sympathy that you're up to your eyeballs in today's internet, different people have different perceptions of these concepts, which makes them neither idiots nor heniuses, it just makes them different.
Matt: So, when you said on one end it was Steve Ditko, in my head I'm going, the other end is going to be Wally Wood.
Dave: Ahh, Wally Wood is kind of in a different category in terms of, it's mindboggling that he could always, it didn't matter who he was getting his assistants to swipe. “Go find me a pretty girl's face in ‘The Heart of Juliet Jones’ and the expression can be like this,” and one of the guys would go and find it, and sure enough, once it had been lightboxed, he's going to turn it into Wally Wood. Which is, that's a whole different thing. I can agree with you in terms of, yeah, that's at the other end of the spectrum, but it's also in its own category. Nobody else that I can think of could do that, could copy or homage or trace somebody else's work, and presto chango, it looks like the guy who's copying it, and Wally Wood could do that.
Matt: Well, then, while you were talking I'm like, wait, I wonder if, Wally Wood and Steve Ditko were sort of contemporaries. I wonder if they ever did a story together? And I searched it real quick, and “Cannon” was a 12-page story that Wally Wood self-published that's got pencils by Ditko, and I'm going okay, now I got to see what this looks like!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: So, I Googled it, found the first page and went, I kind of see a little Ditko, but I kind of see a lot of Wally Wood. [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, oh yeah. [laughs] From Wally Wood's perspective, it's “Anything that keeps me from having to start with a blank page, hey, I'm in.” But yeah, he had absolutely no scruple whatsoever about going, “Well come on, Steve Ditko penciled this, let's be a little faithful to Steve Ditko.” It's like, “No, everything I do, I turn into Wally Wood.” Part of me would like to be different from that, but part of me goes, uh no, the more Wally Wood in the world, the better the world is going to be. Okay! So, there you go, Mike. I hope that that covers all the bases, or at least a few of the bases that you were looking for.
And then we have, where are we here? I'm getting lost. Next one is Michael R in Easton, Pennsylvania, isn't it?
Matt: Uhh, I think so?
Dave: Page four. Oh okay, I got these out of order because… what did I do wrong here? You will please edit out all of this, [hums please; nothing is edited out]. Okay, well, it's the cover of Women, and it's, uhh…
Matt: Yeah, that's Michael R.
Dave: Yeah. I think the problem is that it intersects with another page with another question. So… here we are. Yay! Third from the home office in Easton, Pennsylvania, Michael R asks, “Hi Matt, I hope you're enjoying your summer. Here's my question for Dave. Hi Dave, I was preparing my reread of Women and had my copy on the kitchen counter. I was staring at the cover, particularly zooming in at the ankh cross. The cross is made up of all women. The circle in the middle is a hole. Is the hole in the middle subconsciously supposed to represent the Female Void?” Uh, okay, and to keep from going, this is one of those questions where if I just try to improvise this, I'm going to be swerving all over the road, and they just gave me my license back. So I really don't want to do that. So, I actually wrote this down, and this is as distilled as I could get it, Michael. Now that you called my attention to it, and I'm going, uh well, I probably haven't looked closely at the Women cover since I did my part of it, which is decades ago now. What was I doing here? And it's, okay, is the hole representive of the Female Void? Yes, and it's also vaginal and anal. One of the core things we're trying not to tell ourselves is that helium femaleness is the result of the fusing of two hydrogen maleness atoms, and the resulting dual dualities constitute a fractal existence/nonexistence reality/unreality spectrum. That is, women exist between the two hemispheres of their brains, and their dual vagina and anus aspects. Which is to say, in the four ventricles of their hearts. Which is to say, they live where they emotionally feel; heart. Between where they think; brain. And where they physically feel; clitorus. Women perceive gender as an idiosyncratic individual location on the brain/heart/clitorus spectrum. Where you perceive yourself to be is who and what you are to women. Wave thinking/feeling. Men perceive women as female particle counterparts to male particles. Women perceive men as brain/heart/penis spectrum beings overemphasizing brain/penis extremes over the centrality of the heart. Further to the cover, as an Aardvark, CIrin has a mouth on either side of her face. On the cover of the Women trade paperback, there's a giant hole where her mouth ought to be. The helium dictator is literally a big mouth, and a big empty mouth. Cutting into the Female Void is Mrs Thatcher's head, I.E. brain, which like the real Mrs Thatcher is what she privileges above her vagina and her heart. Astoria's vaginal right ear also cuts into the Female Void. She listens, but mostly doesn't hear. So there!
Matt: It's one of those, he sent the email with the cover, and I read the question, looked at the cover, and went, yeah, I kind of can see it. And then I went, this is going to be one of them questions where Dave's going to have an answer and it's going to leave me a little going, okay, now, let's go look at the cover everybody. Take a minute and just stare at it.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And then it's the “what do you see?”
Dave: Right.
Matt: Almost a Rorschach test.
Dave: Oh, definitely. Oh, definitely. The same thing with the whole structure of the Women trade paperback. It's really structurally a series of anecdotes of, okay, what do you see when you look at this? When I did the Oprah Winfrey parody, [laughs] it's like, we're still not in a society that can understand or grasp an Oprah Winfrey parody. “Why would you make fun of Oprah Winfrey? Oprah Winfrey is perfect exactly the way she is! I don't understand this. I don't understand how you would think that this is funny.” [laughs] And it's like, are you kidding? When I was working on it, and going well, okay, if I'm going to do Oprah Winfrey, I gotta watch Oprah Winfrey. I was in stitches going, these people think that they're actually talking about something, and they're just emoting. It's just, what can we all feel good about and applaud and just glow in our little little happy Oprah Winfrey beehive. There that's good. Okay, now complete dead silence or just one person clapping, obviously what was said was very very bad. So let's get away from that and get back to something good. That's what we have Oprah Winfrey for, to point us towards happiness. And [laughs] it's like, oh man. I'm going, this can't last. And it's like, oh Dave, you have no idea. This is still, given their druthers, why won't Oprah Winfrey run for president? Because she would be perfect. Because we're all in agreement that Oprah Winfrey is perfect. Okay, you enjoy your Rorschach tests there, folks. Grab your copy of Women and see what you see, now that I've done my best condensing what I see when I look at the cover.
Fourth, Daniel F. Wait a minute! This is Daniel F again. Well, we'll pretend it's a different Daniel F. Maybe this is, he's not in Wasilla, Alaska, maybe in Nome. Or maybe he's a gnome in Alaska. “Now that the Cerebus Humble Bundle has wrapped up, have you gotten confirmation on how much Aardvark-Vanaheim will be receiving from the sales?” Uh, no, I haven't. And I was being patient because I was assuming that this was one of God's patience tests, because I didn't hear from Dallas as to how the Humble Bundle went, and I was speculating internally, okay, does that mean we didn't come anywhere close to what he was projecting? Which was, 160,000, where Aardvark-Vanaheim would get 80,000, and then out of that the Food Bank of Waterloo Region would get their share, and Gerhard would get his share, and Aardvark-Vanaheim would end up with around 44,000. I went, mhmm, better to be be patient, because I already went through this last year with the “Turtles 8” Kickstarter, and picturing that this was going to be a giant payday, and it was a substantial payday, but it wasn't a giant payday. So, prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and we'll see when we get there. “Their website says that 5,478 bundles were sold and 15,800 was raised for charity.” If I'm not mistaken, the charity component was 10% of revenues. Do you remember if that was the case?
Matt: I don't, but now that you say that I'm like, wait a minute, I have a copy of the initial contract. Could go back, figure out what the breakdown was, and we could do the back of the envelope “well this should be what the total raised was.”
Dave: Right. Yeah.
Matt: Make a note, Matt.
Dave: Alright. But it does suggest to me that if it was 10%, then boy, we came pretty close to the 160,000 that he was projecting, that's maybe like $200 less. So I did ask Dallas how often are you right about this, and he didn't really answer the question. But I got a feeling from him that, “We've been doing this long enough and we've been doing it with enough people that when I ballpark it, it's probably going to be somewhere between first and second base. It's not going to be, ‘well it could be way up in the bleachers or it could be in the dugout’.” “Hopefully it's enough to get a decent number of Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages made.” Yes, Daniel, that's exactly what I'm hoping for, which is, once I was assured that okay, this is going be happening, and Dallas did tell me that the actual payout, the actual cheque will be mailed out at the end of August. August 28th, I think it was. So it'll be arriving sometime in the first week of September. And I went, well, I still got a good chunk of the Turtles money, and I still got a good chunk of the CAN 10 “Akimbo” money, so now it's definitely pedal to the metal. How fast and efficient can I get at doing Strange Death of Alex Raymond so that I get the maximum number of really really good pages done that I'm really really happy with for an indefinite length of time? No amount of money is going to last forever, but when you're making every nickel scream before you let go of it, as I've been doing for for years now, it's going to be a while. So it will be a while before I have to go, okay, now I have to worry about money again. And we are going to keep doing Kickstarters, but we'll do them just as, okay, when this project is done, and I'm not grinding my own molars to make it happen as quickly as possible, and I'm not leaning on Rolly, it's like here's the next thing. We're going to do the first five pages of “Ninja High School” and we're going to do the “Spawn” 10 script and that will be a Kickstarter. But if we don't have anything moving forward this week, ehh, it's always next Thursday, or the Thursday after that. There isn't the pressure that there was after “Turtles” 8 came in at, you know, 15,000, 20,000, or whatever, it's like, I'm going to have to figure out other things to make money at, because that's not going to last very long, and in terms of not being paranoid about money to live on, I'm already paranoid. And that was, I think, pretty much last year at this time um. So, definitely, and this seems to be the idea behind the “Ninja High School” crossover, where I am doing actual pages. I am doing actual parts of comic pages, but doing them as smoothly and efficiently as possible, so that it's cartooning, it's not photorealism, it's cartooning. This ties in with a later question, so I'll sort of leave it off on that. But keep listening, Daniel, and you'll hear where the Humble Bundle money, and the money that I do have on hand from previous two Kickstarters, and not having to produce more trade paperbacks because there's really no market for those right now. No business model that works.
Fifth, MJ Sewall. Hey, wait a minute! [laughs] It's Mike Sewall again, am I crazy or did we just answer Mike Sewall?
Matt: Well, he kind of explains what's going on.
Dave: Okay, alright. I'm getting ahead of things. Yeah, and it's also July 29th, which is a full two weeks after the other question. “Second question for Dave. Manly Matt Dow Essler put out the word for more questions.” Ah, see, that'll do it. “And being a ‘go-getting’ Sim fan, here you go. Question for Dave, have you ever thought of collecting all the early fanzine interviews you did with comic book legends?” No, I haven't. And I haven't because all of those interviews were for Comic Art News and Reviews, which was John Balge's magazine. And the last time that I talked to John Balge before his passing, which I would guess was maybe a year or a year and a half. I actually invited him over to the the Off-White House and said, I kind of have to bring this up, because it doesn't come up all the time but it comes up every once in a while. I have to bring this up in terms of, people ask about Comic Art News and Reviews. Are you interested in reprinting Comic Art News and Reviews. And saying, it would be a real basic, just sort of scanning all the black and white pages, and then formatting them as a book, and we put it up. And, no. He definitely was not interested. Leave it exactly the way it is. Didn't want it solicited through Diamond, wasn't crazy about companies the size of Diamond or companies the size of anything. He was definitely an extreme leftist, arguably a hardcore communist. And he didn't do Comic Art News and Reviews to make money, and the idea that somebody else would use Comic Art News and Reviews to make money? Mhmm, that just wasn't going to wash with him. So that's always what comes to mind first any time somebody says, “Have you ever thought of collecting all the early fanzine interviews you did with comic book legends?” I did them for Comic Art News and Reviews, and I did them for John Balge. He definitely financed the whole thing, and I'm assuming that that was his intention at the time, and that was still his intention a good, geez, we're talking like 25 years after we did Comic Art News and Reviews. So, there's the situation.
“Are there any memorable ones that are dying to see the light of day?” Uh, yeah! [laughs] I mean, anytime that I have an occasion to pull out the Off-White House collection of Comic Art News and Reviews, which is complete and has been in my possession. You know, these are the original copies that I had from John Balge. And I look at them, I go, yeah, that's a good review! Or that's a good interview. Particularly for the time. I was a big fan of the Playboy interview, which obviously, we didn't have that kind of space in Comic Art News and Reviews, but reading those interviews and going, there are good questions and there are bad questions. “How did you get into the comic book field?” That's a bad question. It can definitely be improved on. If you're interviewing Howard Chaykin, you should have different questions than if you're interviewing Mike Kaluta. And I would definitely try to do that, and I always took great pride since I was in my teens through the whole Comic Art News and Reviews experience. Started when I was 16 in 1972, and I think the last issue was 1975, 1976? So I would have been just turned 20 when it came to an end, if that. The fact that we would hear back from interview subjects and they would say, “Hey, you ask really good questions.” That was always a point of pride for me, because it's like, well that's what I'm trying to do. I don't want to just have a, I want to stick a microphone in your face and okay, now you tell me really important things. It's like, mhmm, no, you're the one interviewing. You dig and see if you can find an interesting vein and I did find some interesting veins. I think one of the situations, one of the reactions that did definitely, okay this is a gold star in my own notebook as far as I'm concerned, was when I interviewed Harvey Kurtzman. And it was at York University in Toronto, and it was part of a student gig, where he was talking to an arts group or an arts class, and you were allowed to come in and listen to Harvey Kurtzman’s talk, and I asked, when the talk is done can I do an interview with you? And he said, “Yeah, I'll be over here, and I'm already doing an interview with the student newspaper. I'll try and fit you in.” And it's like, okay, well, that's all I can ask. You're Harvey Kurtzman and I'm not. So, going there and it's like I arrived, and here's this very pretty young girl interviewing Harvey Kurtzman for the local student newspaper. And it's like, Harvey gave her a lot of time and a lot of attention, and I'm sitting there going, okay, I'm getting sloppy seconds here whenever it comes my turn. I'll just hope for the best. I hope she's not using up all the time that I'm hoping to have because she's asking student type questions. She's not a comics fan, she knows absolutely nothing about Harvey Kurtzman, that's obvious. But obviously Harvey's enjoying talking to this pretty young lady. So I started interviewing Harvey, and I had my list of questions, and I asked him the first question, and he answered that question very very succinctly. And I attempted to do a followup and he actually leaned over and pointed at the list of questions going, “No, go down your list of questions. Don't try and do followups, because I already told you, I'm doing the student newspaper, now it's your turn. You're just doing doing a fanzine, so you'll get what I give you.” So when the interview was done, and I also wrote about Harvey Kurtzman, and I had the mailing address and sent it to Kurtzman, and then got a postcard or a letter back from him going, “Where has CANaR been all my life?” [laughs] And it's like, okay, well, there's no way that I could tell you because you had all this experience with guys doing fanzines, it's like, “I really don't want to put too much time and energy into this because it's just going to be a stapled something or other, and black and white, and I'll have forgotten what I actually read in it after I read it.” And it's like no, he saw what we were doing, and he saw, I'm sure we sent him the previous couple of back issues before that one, and I think he probably went, “Mhmm, should have given this guy a little more time. Should have let him do follow-ups.”
“Any interviews you remember fondly?” I remember them all fondly. [laughs] So it's, I don't think there's any interview that I did where I can't picture where I was set up, and who the guy was, and what he looked like, and remembering his voice, his mannerisms. Because when you're transcribing an interview it's like, you can only play like five words, 10 words, and then you've got to transcribe it, and you have to go back and check. So, all of them are very very vivid. And okay, there's your three additional questions, and thank you, Matt, for prompting MJ “Dodger” Sewall on that one.
Matt: You're welcome.
Dave: [laughs] Now don't say I never done nothing for you!
Six. “Here we are at Pismo Beach with all the clams we can eat. Wait, we must have taken a wrong turn at Alba-coiki. Not only at Alba-coiki, at Alba-coiki Steve! And here he is now.” “Gentlemen, for this month's excursion to Please Hold land, I propose one. Did the gold logo edition of High Society use the available remastered art, and so is it essentially the same as the ’titled’ Remastered Edition? I ask since there's no ‘Remastered’ designation on the gold logo edition.” I'm kind of fuzzy on how that actually happened, but I'm pretty sure, and you could maybe get Sean to to comment in the comment section on this one. I think, anytime there's a new printing, and I think the situation with the Gold Edition was you got the gold printing if you pre-ordered through Diamond, and Diamond ordered a few more Gold Editions, but then Diamond also gave us an order on the non-Gold Edition, the Titled Edition, and I think those were both the same. And both were remastered to that point. This is all of the original art pages in the Cerebus Archive. These are all the, we didn't have the negatives, the negatives burned up on that one, but these are all Sean Robinson's carefully restored scans from the printed issues. So I'm gonna say that that's my answer on that one. If somebody, do you have a recollection of what happened here?
Matt: Well, I'm checking my copies right now. I thought that one was the 12th Printing and one was the 11th, but the Remastered one is the 11th, and the gold one I think is also the 11th.
Dave: Right. See, I think that…
Matt: No, I’m wrong, the gold is the 10th!
Dave: The gold is the 10th? Okay. So the gold did come before the non-gold anyway. Because we wouldn't have designated it 10th and 11th if there wasn't a sequence there. So I'm pretty sure that, yes. I think it was still Marquis at that point, was doing the… Or Lebonfon, was doing the printing. Does it say whether it's Lebonfon or Marquis?
Matt: Let me grab it off the shelf here.
Dave: [laughs] No wonder your place is a mess. You're always pulling things off the shelf. Stop doing that!
Matt: Well, but I have one shelf that's all Cerebus trades.
Dave: That's true.
Matt: Uh, the 10th printing is by Preney Print & Litho according to this. Oh wait! Wait wait wait, no, okay. Okay, the Gold Edition is the 11th printing, printed by Bang Printing in Valencia, California.
Dave: Holy smokes, I've completely forgotten that one.
Matt: And… see that there's the list of all the printings, and then it has the ISBN number, and then there's the next printing. So the 12th printing, the Remastered Edition, was printed by Marquis.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: And so, it's got the first printing through 11th printing and the months and years, and then it's got the ISBN number, and then it says “Printed in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, by Preney Print & Litho Incorporated from 1986 to 2005.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And the 12th printing was 2020. The 11th printing was 2015.
Dave: Boy, you talk about taking a wrong turn at Alba-coiki Steve!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay, any anybody whose memories are better than mine, which is really not a credential at this point, who wants to chime in, in the comment section. This would probably be the place to do it. Valencia, California. That has got to be an experiment of, was that, I'm trying to remember, if that was, we did that so that Sean could go up there and look at it being printed, and approve the remastering? Which he wouldn't be able to do with Marquis. No way he was going to fly from San Diego to Val-d’Or just to check the printing. I might be making that up at a whole clothe, but it seems to me that that might have been part of the thing was knowing, okay, if if I'm gonna pay Sean Robinson to do the extensive remastering that he does, there's no point dropping the ball just short of the goal line. He's got to see the the printed copy. The same thing with the William Messner-Loebs cover that he just did, where he's saying, “You know, if you're happy with it, I'm happy with it.” It's like, Sean, I can't see the way that you see, at your age and with your complete self-training on this. So no, it's if you're happy with it, I'm happy with it, and I think I was already doing that at the time that he was starting to remaster.
Matt: Well, looking again at the the Gold Edition, it was the CAN 1 contributors Kickstarter. So if I remember right, and again this is it's starting to get fuzzy, but there was the printing that initially started the remastering was, they did the printing and it had the hundred and some pages with moire. And that's when okay, we got to scan the negatives. And there was the fire. And then it was okay, what can we do? And I believe the Gold Edition was, Sean got it as far as he could, as best he could with the materials on hand. Cause that was when he was doing the From Print to Pixels to Print Again series of essays about the Remastering, before I took over and he said, “Okay, I'm getting out while the getting's good.”
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right.
Matt: And so that was the 2015 printing, and then after that was some new scans of pages came in through the Art Dragnet, and I think Sean went back and just looked at the printing again. Cause the 2015 printing sold out, and Diamond ordered the 2020 printing, cause that was also when you did the campaign stickers with Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Cerebus, and there were technically three different versions of the book because it was the three different bookplates that were signed.
Dave: Right, because that was the 2020 election.
Matt: And that's when the 2020 said Remastered Edition, and I think that might have been a Diamond request of, “We need something on the book so that people understand this is a different version of the book than the previous version, which was a different version of the book than what we had before that.”
Dave: Right. Right. And it was one of those, everything looks good on paper. Hey, this is the first time that we're doing a printing of High Society during a US election year. Let's really milk this for all it's worth, and it's like, uh, it's not in that category. It would be nice if it was, and that was one of those times where I'm going, okay, I need to get completely disabused of this notion that the comic book field from Diamond Comic Distributors on down has any remote interest in Cerbeus whatsoever. And I have gradually gotten that through my thick skull.
Matt: Well, and I believe that was the printing where I think it was Eddie that went, “Dave wants to send you copies for all the work you've been doing. How many do you want?” I'm like, I don't know, and at the time I'm “Cerebus in Hell?” junior assistant so when he goes, “How many copies do you want?” I always say five, and I did the same thing, and all of a sudden this box from Marquis shows up and I'm like, okay, and I open up like, oh yeah! These are phonebooks. These aren't 20 page comics! You really ought to think this thing through, Matt. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Yeah. We're used to that around here. Trade paperbacks are in a completely different category. We just discovered that one again, we got an order from Diamond, they finally reordered Melmoth, to get Melmoth back in in stock, and Form & Void, and one other trade paperback. And Rolly went and picked them up at the storage unit, and then had to fill the CAN portfolios order which has to go to Studio Comixpress first. “Can you do eight CAN 8s, seven CAN 9s” that kind of thing. [laughs] And it's like, uh, these are boxes and boxes of trade paperbacks, and boy is Camp David getting a little crowded out the last couple of days. And I said to him today, I'm signing the adhesive labels for the front of the CAN portfolios and I said, so this does it. Now we've got the whole Diamond order here, now you just have to take them over to…? And it's like, uh no, I forgot to get a couple of labels printed. So we got to hang on until those two labels get printed, which Rolly will pick up next Thursday, and then finally those boxes, their Camp David holiday is over. The boxes really like getting out of the storage unit, coming over to Camp David, but it's like, no, we don't want you sticking around here. This is supposed to be more like a bus station. Okay, anybody can help with that, that's the best we can do on this end.
And “wrong turn at Alba-coiki” Steve's second question, “Dave, are you already receiving the Canadian pension and old age security payments? Hopefully they will provide you with some monthly financial cushion.“ And no, actually I don't. This is one of those idiosyncratic Dave Sim things. When I contemplated, okay, I'm going to turn 65 in a few years, I'm going to turn 65 in a couple of years, am I going to apply for old age security and Canada pension? No, my gut instinct is that if you take money from a feminist entity, and there's no question in my mind, I read a lot of newspapers, the government of Canada, liberal or conservative, is a feminist entity. They infer that that implies you're agreeing with feminism, which I don't. So, it's like, this is a way of saying, I think we can accommodate each other to the point of, I'm over here, you're over there. I'm not messing with your stuff, please don't mess with my stuff. And please don't send me money that I'm not interested in getting from you, because I don't agree with you, and I don't agree with taking money from entities that I don't agree with. [laughs] Can we just leave it at that? And it's like, it didn't help to have the Freedom Convoy thing where the Trudeau government started seizing people's bank accounts because they were donating to the Freedom Convoy, and arresting people and holding them incommunicado. It's like, I understand that that's what feminism is. I understand that that's what feminism does. I understand that feminism doesn't perceive itself that way. So again, can I very very politely say, can you stay over there, and I'll stay over here? Duly noted, you can seize my bank account at any point that you decide Dave Sim is a danger to “feminist democracy”. Duly noted. Like Teddy Kennedy, I'll drive off that bridge when I come to it, but for the moment , please, if you can, just you stay over there, I'll stay in the Off-White House, and we should be able to just live and let live. And, mhmm, so far so good with, every once in a while something like the treatment of the Freedom Convoy, just a warning shot over the bow. “Just kidding, Dave! That's not directed at you. Don't worry about it. We're good friends. You sure you don't want your old age pension?” No, that's fine. I'm here, I'll provide for myself as best. I can you stay over there, exactly where you are. I'll stay over here, exactly where I am. I won't get in your face, please don't you get in my face, and as I say, so far so good.
Seventh. Christon Hunwardson. Hello, Christon! “Thank you again for the Usagi Yojimbo commission.” That was a good one. That came in, in a timely way, where there had been definitely a dry stretch with no cheques to speak of coming in. So always welcome and enjoyed drawing it, the cartooning break. “Greetings to the both of you and I hope that you're enjoying your summer.” So, I'm doing good. You're doing good, you said so.
Matt: I'm doing great! I'm doing great.
Dave: Great! That's right, that's right. So great, great Matt, great Wisconsin, great summer. “So I realize that your goal and true focus is to complete The Strange Death of Alex Raymond, or to come as close to it as possible.”
Matt: Which I'm going to interrupt real quickly, what page ya on, Dave?!
Dave: I just finished page 612? Yes, I'm working on the facing page, 613.
Matt: Okay, I always forget to ask these things and I think about it after I'm like, ah, I should have asked.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, considering the first new drawn page was like 555, I'm reet chuffed with my pile o’pages. They are officially now getting to be a pile, in addition to the ones on the wall. Getting back to Christon, “But I'm also recognizing all the time and effort put into the latest ‘Akimbo’ and ‘Narutobus’ projects, which seem to centralize around a Cerebus-type character. It was my impression that you don't get much satisfaction from drawing and working on the character of Cerebus anymore. That said, simply ON MONETARY reasons alone would you ever consider putting that effort into an original short story, or series of short stories, showcasing possible Cerebus prequel tales? Such as, when did he come into possession of his helmet, medallions, sword, etc, as an example? Just a dreamer's thought. Have a fantastic August. Christon Hunwardson.” Eighth, Christon? Wait a gosh darn minute! No no, see, we're both getting too excited here. He's got in parenthesis, “Additional comment to my previous email that I forgot to attach.” He says, “My potential suggestion is to print these original short Cerebus stories within upcoming ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ issues. I already enjoy ‘Cerebus in Hell?’” Well, thank you. “But just the idea of true Cerebus content within them? Well, that's beyond exciting!!! Thanks again, Christon Hunwardson.” The closest I'm coming to that is the “Ninja High School”/Cerebus crossover, which, from Cerebus' perspective takes… ahh, if you don't like spoilers, now's the time to turn the sound down and just go, la la la la la la la. Okay, everybody that's spoilerphobic, we're getting ready to keep going on that. The closest I'm coming to that is the “Ninja High School”/Cerebus cross over, which, from Cerebus' perspective, takes place during panels one, two, and three of page 18 of “Cerebus” #1, which everybody who's got a “Cerebus” #1 or reproduction of it, which is a bunch of you, can go and check that out. It isn't really about satisfaction. Cartooning is cartooning and photorealism is photorealism. It's about loosening up for Strange Death of Alex Raymond.
I mean, that's my motivation when I'm not doing Strange Death of Alex Ramymond, but I'm doing cartooning, is, that's what I'm doing. So, that's really not what you're talking about, so basically I'm qualifying it right up ahead and saying, I can't change my motivation because my motivation is my motivation, relative to, [laughs] how do I keep doing this at at age 68 and hopefully actually getting through it and hopefully actually getting better at it? An insight I've just gotten in the last day or so, literally it’s that new, is that I'm too reverent about the work by comic art heroes. They have a high percentage of jaw-dropper panels, yes, but they also have their share of dud faces, figures, panel designs, etc. And I realized that yesterday when I'm recreating a panel from August 17th 1949, which is the day after Margaret Mitchell has died, and it's of a police dog breaking in through a door, and the reproduction, unfortunately in the IDW books, is atrocious on it. So I'm going, okay, what do I have that's like that, that I could look at to go, how did Alex Raymond render this? What thinking went into dog fur? And I’ve got, okay, dog fur at the top in with my Heritage Auction scans printed out. I'm going, it's actually not one of the Heritage Auction scans, it's Jim Keefe, who was one of the last guys to draw “Flash Gordon”, sent me a very very clear crisp photocopy of a “Rip Kirby” strip that he owns. And I went, I'm pretty sure this was in the story that introduced Rip Kirby's dog, which is a St Bernard. And I'm going, I'm pretty sure the dog is in that strip. I may be misremembering, but it's from the storyline that introduces that. So I had to go through all of my Stan Drake, Al Williamson, Alex Raymond, and John Prentice printouts of printed strips and go, okay, Dave, time to finally get organized on these. Let's put them into different piles. Let's put Stan Drake upstairs with the the other Stan Drake print outs from Syracuse University. Let's put Alex Raymond just with Alex Raymond, a large size Alex Raymond and small size Alex Raymond. And let's pull out the the Al Williamson. This was the first time since 2006 when Yorum[??] was here with his collection of Al Williamson “Secret Agent X9” strips and had brought them. I had specifically asked them, can you bring them over and I'll shoot full-size photocopies of them? And it's like, “Sure! No problem”. So they were very wide, so I had to shoot two photocopies of each one, and they're very very clean, very very clear, because obviously I had the photocopier right up the snuff, because Al Williamson comic strips are coming to visit. And it was very interesting because it's, they were strips that Yorum could afford, buying them from Al Williamson’s, I think she was Widow at that time, Cori. And some of them, you have to sort of like decide on the spot, “I'll be happy to sell you some ‘Agent Corrigan’ originals. You come over and look at them. These are this much, these are this much, these are this much.” And you have to go, well okay, which ones do I want, and why do I want them? And they had been picked over pretty good by that point. He had very good taste and he picked out a number of of very good strips, but it was also hit and miss in terms of almost all of them are three panels, and you could see, okay, this is the panel that Yorum wanted, because this is like absolute Primo Al Williamson, but these other two, it's not Primo Williamson, it's definitely Williamson, but he's having to produce six strips a week, and at a specific point you got to just do them. It's the Nike “Just Do It” because, “Time is wasting and I got to get this week’s strips done and get them to King Freatures,” by mail no less! And it was a very resting moment going, well okay, stop beating yourself up that you're not doing Primo Al Williamson, because it is a hit and miss process. It is, you can see that he's just wailing on the page, and sometimes he's wailing with the brush, and it's a thick brush, and that's just brilliant. That's just the way he did it. It's so quick and spontaneous, and yet it's absolutely perfect and meshes perfectly with the pen work on that panel. And it's like yeah, but the one next to it that didn't happen. He obviously tried to do the same thing and it's like, mhmm, no, sometimes you get the perfect 10, and sometimes you get a seven, and sometimes you get a six.
So my goal is photorealistic self-improvement, and taking a cartooning break between Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages helps with that. Because I'm more comfortable doing that as a cartoonist. I'm doing my “Cerebus” #1 style, but I'm trying to do a better version of it, but I'm also, okay, I know how to do this, so just wail on it a bit. Just, here's where the brush strokes go, fill in the solid blacks, learning how to do that again, learning how to say… And this is advice for any artist listening to this, there's always something on the page that you know how to do. Always something. So always be doing something. Don't sit and stare at something where you go, “Uh, I really don't know how to do that. I mean, yeah it's supposed to be hair or it's supposed to be fur, but I don't know how to do that.” Well okay, here's an area of solid black up here, you know how to do that. Fill in the solid black. Okay, here's the screen on the door that the dog’s bursting through, you know how to do that. That’s this brush, clean, and then just balance the metal on the brush against your metal ruler, and just lay in the very very wide crosshatching that makes up the screen door. Get that done. And it's like okay, well, it doesn't look as good as Alex Raymond. Well, it's still done, and you knew how to do it, now start tackling the things that you don't know how to do. So you know, go and get a couple of carrots, and eat your carrots, and stare at this photocopy of… I'm trying to think of the name of the dog. This is really going to bother me. I'm thinking Winston, but it's not Winston. Anyway, the dog in “Rip Kirby”, and yes, it is here's Alex Raymond crystal clear January of 1949, not August of 1949, doing dog fur. And not doing a German Shepherd, doing a St Bernard, but it's still dog fur and it's still, this is the way he's thinking. This is his mix of of lines and and brush work, and just look at it and understand it, but also dive back in and start doing all of the things that you know. Here's the solid black, here's some hatching that you can see what it reproduced like, here’s hatching from not the same strip but from the same storyline. This is what it actually looks like, where the engraver had to really darken it up because it's so light and so tiny because it's Alex Raymond. This is what it looks like. Just fill the space that that takes up, so there's always things that you know how to do. So that's, Christon, in terms of answering your question, this is what I'm thinking of, this is my motivation anytime I'm writing or drawing now. And that's just not in the category of, you know what I got to do? Is sit down and come up with a really funny origin story for Cerebus’ medallions. It's like, mhmm, that's not going to just happen on its own, and that's Strange Death of Alex Raymond time or Strange Death of Alex Raymond prep cartooning time that I'm not using for that. And that's definitely not what I'm doing. The same thing as anything that Rolly can do, get Rolly to do, because Rolly can't write and draw Strange Death of Alex Raymond. You have to get to the point where everything that's being done is pretty much automated, so that I don't have to instruct anybody, I can just do little coded things. Here, this is what this means. No, I'm not going to phone you, no, I'm not going to fax you. Rolly's going to scan this, it comes to you. This is what it means. Please just do it. Then in Sean's case, you're going to do this, then you're going to get a printed copy. When you get the printed copy, you say, “This is it. This is as perfect as it's going to get” then it's all done. Doesn't have to come back to me because I'm working on Strange Death of Alex Raymond. Let's everybody get our minds on the same page in the hymnal.
But just continuing to answer your question, in your frames of reference, I do understand you're asking as a Cerebus fan, and you're asking as a Cerebus fan who wants canonical Cerebus stories or a story that fit in with the Cerebus storyline. Cerebus, in my mind, as its author, so now we're in a completely different part of Dave Sim's life and Dave Sim's reign, as its author, in the pre-sequel literary tradition, and by that I mean everybody in this day and age, anybody who writes, their editor and definitely their publisher, if they have even a semi-successful book, is going to go, “Can you do a sequel?” And most authors are going to say, “I need to do a sequel. I hope that this book is successful because if this one's successful then I know what I'm doing for my next book, and it'll have a leg up towards success because it'll be a sequel to this successful book.” How I think of “Cerebus” as an author, is from before that time period, where you didn't think about sequels, and you didn't think about revisiting a novel. You did the novel to the best of your abilities going, this is my only chance. Once this is done, and once this has gone through the editing stage, and once all of the gallies have been approved, and it's gone to the printer, this is the last time that I will have anything to do with this. So, “Cerebus”, in my mind, is a finite 16 volumes, 6,000 pages. It's done! [laughs]
Matt: You can't say it that way. Like it's just 16 volumes and it's just 6,000 pages. I mean, you did it for 26 years, at a certain point you never want to see the little gray bastard again. [laughs]
Dave: Right. Right. And I assumed it was, well, if Arthur Conan Doyle had done this with Sherlock Holmes, you would have had no problem, just tell him 26 years ahead of time. It's like, [laughs] mhmm, it works, but it's definitely not perfect. I understand what you're saying, Christon, but I experience it as, “Instead of treating ‘Cerebus’ as a finite finished literary work, why don't you consider Cerebus like McDonaldLand and do new commercials featuring the Hamburglar and McCheese.” To me, that's the same broad classification in which I see Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Matrix, Jurassic Park, go down the whole list. Those are all to me not in the same category as a literary work, they're variations on McDonaldLand, Ronald McDonald, Hamburglar, and Mayor McCheese. “Cerebus” never was in that category, in my mind, and I'd have no more of an idea how to do that, than I would know how to write a “Batman” script. Because it's just, I don't connect with my creativity that way. I definitely take the graphic novel concept seriously, and I take graphic novel as a, again, something from the pre-sequel time period. You have your one shot at this, and you know, okay if it didn't work it didn't work. So again, trying to go over to your side of the perception chessboard, every reader of any book or any series of books, decides for themselves if a story is missing something. But if you try to put everything every reader thinks is missing into “Cerebus”, it would never be done, and it would be way too large to ever actually be printed. [laughs] It's like, Matt's already got this whole shelf devoted to Cerebus. If I tried doing something that was audience-oriented to the point that you're talking about, at that point Matt would have to get a new apartment, and probably have to get rid of Paula and Bullwinkle and Janis Pearl because, “I'm sorry, I'm going to need the room for this ‘Cerebus’ that is just never done.”
Further thought, this was a note that I wrote down way at the very end, I mean the only place that I can meet you head on this one, Christon, is I definitely owe a lifelong debt to Frank Thorne for the fact that when I had done the first issue of “Cerebus” and sent it to him, he responded with a complimentary letter, with a drawing of Red Sonja with Cerebus that I ran in “Cerebus” #2. And it's like, psychologically, I just couldn't explain how important that was to me and what a difference that made in, here's something, this probably doesn't work, isn’t going to work because nothing I do works, but I got to give this a try. And okay, I've now done one of these and nothing's really happening with it in, you know, a capital H Happening way. And now I'm having to do the second one and I hope that the second one is going to be at least a small h happening, and it's like, Frank Thorne just transformed that. It's like “Cerebus” is now Happening, Frank Thorne did a drawing of Red Sonja, who was hot hot hot hot hot in 1977, 1978. Frank Thorne’s Red Sonja particularly, so consequently you will get covers that I do for cartoonists that I see being in that situation. You know, I look at this and and I like it and I hope you guys are able to keep going on this, and unfortunately I know that I can't just have that as a kind of philosophical, well I hope this works out for. It's, if you can devote the cartooning time, it's not Strange Death of Alex Raymond time, it’s not photorealism time. Most of this is just cartooning, all you got to do is a cartoon for this person, or a variant cover. All in proportion to okay, how much have they done on their side? When I get a book from somebody and it's like, seven issues. It may have taken them five years to do seven issues, but it is seven issues. So at that point it's like, okay, they do need the encouragement. They've done more on their side than I had done on “Cerebus” when Frank Thorne responded the way he did, and particularly when Frank Thorne did the cover to #7, it's like, I asked him and it's like, how could you possibly ask him to do that? He's a professional cartoonist riding a wave with Red Sonja, and he just get went ahead and did it. Here's the first seven pages of issue #7, can you do a cover of this? And bada-bing bada-boom, it's here. So I'm capable of doing that. I'm probably getting too old to do that. The “Ninja High School” is one of those, okay, here's a guy's been doing this since 1987. He's two years older than I am. Dave Sim and Ben Dunn have a combined age of 138, if you can believe it. [laughs] And, okay, this is one of those well, you've got to acknowledge that. Guy wants to do a crossover, it's 45 pages. I'm not going to be working on all of the pages, but I'm going to be working on a bunch of them. You kind of have to do it. How many guys are there like this? And show of hands, how many guys are going to approach me about it?
So Christon, you will get stuff like that as long as I'm capable of doing it, but I think with Strange Death of Alex Raymond, there is going to come a point where I'm going to have to say, okay, and I think it might be at the end of the “Ninja High School” crossover where I go, okay, I've learned what I can about getting back to [laughs] not… Todd McFarlane made a joke about it because Todd McFarlane is Todd McFarlane. Remember back in the early 1990s, Todd McFarlane, [Todd impression] “I figured out this new way of drawing comics that's really really efficient. It's called hack!” [laughs] It's like, oh Todd, it's not hack. You're Todd McFarlane. It's fast and efficient, and it's like, but certainly compared to somebody searching his inner soul and waiting until his inner soul bubbles up to the surface before he touches a brush to a canvas, good way to put it, Todd. [repeats Todd quote in Todd impression] And it's learning to do it smoothly, efficiently, you turn out the pages, you get them done. It's not easy, it's not effortless, but you're not exactly trying to run the three minute mile or anything like that either. It is just writing and drawing comics. I'm hoping that back and forth between “Ninja High School”, Strange Death of Alex Raymond through until page 45, or there's probably going to be more pages than that, because I'm going, alright, give it room to breathe. I love Ben Dunn's layout here. I can smoosh it up into the corner of of page 14, or I can let it take up 90% of page 14. It’ll look better that way, but it means if I'm going to get the rest of Ben's story in here, and what I'm doing with this story, I'm probably gonna have to add a page or two in. So we're probably talking a year of a “Ninja High School” crossover page a week. Hopefully getting to the point where I go, okay, now Grampaw's 69. Grampaw's going on 70. Grampaw's just doing Strange Death of Alex Raymond and not walking away from it for any length of time so that I lose those chops. So it's called hack. I know how to sit down and do a Strange Death of Alex Raymond page, and it doesn't take me all week. It takes me like three or four days, because it's just I'm organized mentally and I know how to do this. But, having said all that, and that is the end of my answer to you on that one, Christon, is… uh now I forgot my train of thought. How was I going to finish that up? Um, yeah. I'm going to be hitting 70 years old, and it's like there's no way Strange Death of Alex Raymond is going to be done by the time I'm 70 years old. So in terms of me trying to plan how this is going to go, that's how I'm planning, but as I said earlier and boy I've got more experience than I care with that. Know how to make God laugh? Tell Him your plans. So, there you go. Thank you, Christon, and thank you particularly for the level of interest that you have in my work. It's very very flattering.
Matt: So, years ago the lottery was at one of those astronomical figures where if you were the single person that won, the phrase ”some yenta with more money than brains” would be the only way to describe you.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I bought my ticket, and you know you buy the ticket on Tuesday, the drawing's not till Wednesday, so you got 24 hours of “if I hit the prize and I get all the money, what am I going to do?” I went, you know, if I had the money, which that phrase always is immediately followed by the thought of “you're never gonna have that kind of money, Matt, but go ahead! Dream.” I got the idea in my head of, if I could pay George Perez to do a story, I would love for him to do one of those medieval battle stories. Kind of like “The Lord of the Rings” movies where there's the encampment in the city, and there's a sieging army, and you know, it's George Perez, so you know every single inch of page is going to be covered in little squiggles that look gorgeous. And I'm like, I would love to get George Perez to do a fantasy story of an epic battle story, and after thinking about it for while, I'm like you know it'd be great to have a little itty bitty aardvark in there.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And you know, get George Perez to do a Cerebus, one of those pre-”Cerebus” #1 stories that we never got of Cerebus in some epic medieval battle. And I'm like, it could be the story of how he got the sword! Like he's in this fight he loses his weapon and then he grabs the sword and there's a bright flash in the background fades away, as he's got the medallions and the helmet and the sword, and then it goes back to being the rest of the battle. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, if I win a hundred billion in in the lottery, I could afford to pay George Perez, because at the time, it's early 2000s, George Perez, I'm not going to say he was slowing down, but he was very much at the “if you threw enough money at him, he'd do it. But if you weren't going to throw money at him, ehh, he doesn't need to do this if he doesn't want to.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And it's that story that I kept coming, and ya know, George got older, George finally died, and I'm going, well, you know, there goes that dream. And then I thought about it and I'm like, well, wait, you know what? If I went to, and you start to think who could do the same kind of level of work. And it's like again, you'd have to win the lottery and not spend any money on anything but this. And there's a good chance that any artist you approach would be like, “Give me the check and I'll send you the pages as soon as they're done” and you'd never see them again.
Dave: [laughs] I was just going to say that. It's one of those, when you're talking about real life transforming amounts of money, you've got to be careful, because it's, people don't know how their lives are going to transform out of something like that. It would be an interesting none-of-our-business story to ask Bill Sienkiewicz, assuming that the rumours are true that Kevin Eastman did buy all of his artwork to that point for a million dollars, what happened to your life at that point? Do you even remember what it was like to suddenly have like, I'm sure he paid taxes on it, so it wasn't a million dollars, and but you went from having all of this artwork and doing okay. I mean you were getting a top rate at Marvel, no question about that, and getting royalties, but compared to “Oh okay, here's the steamroller” dream amount of money, what did that do and what would you do differently now knowing what that did? I'm kind of fortunate that it really is just Strange Death of Alex Raymond. There's absolutely nothing in my life that comes anywhere close to measuring up to doing a really really good Alex Raymond page, where I go, I would not be ashamed to show this panel to Al Williamson or Neal Adams or Stan Drake, and just going, I think I'm hitting that level every once in a while. Okay, would you agree that I did on this panel? Because I kind of think that I am, and it's like, there's just nothing better than that. Consequently, any amount of money is just, okay, now I don't have to do other things because I got this giant chunk of money. I mean the Humble Bundle money, that's a giant chunk of money to me. That's not even a drop in a bucket to most people in 2024, but it's, I don't spend money on anything else. This is 100% my entertainment and my pleasure. At the same time, the downside is, a page that was coming along and was going to be absolutely amazing, and then it went from being a 10 to a seven because I did something here that I didn't think over and I just went, well, here this will work. And it's like, no I just killed this effect here, and this effect here, and this effect here, just with that one brush stroke. And well, that's what makes horse races. That's why this is as fine-tuned as it is. That's why the jaw-dropper Al Williamson panels that I've got in full-size photocopy form, and seen them for the first time in 18 years, and it's, yeah, when Al Williamson got that figure done and that face done and that background, it would have been, ”This is a good day. It doesn't matter what else happens today, this is a good day. I could cheerfully have showed this Corrigan strip to Alex Raymond and have gone, ‘This is me trying to measure up to you, sir, and I think I did. I'm real hard on myself, but I think I did.’” But certainly in that category, it would be, okay, that's over in the direction of the Turtles crossover. If you could have gotten George, if you had won that amount of money and you had gotten George Perez to draw George Perez pages, and all he has to do is leave space for my aardvark, and he's willing to do that for like 20, 25 pages, and we can sell it as a George Perez project,I I could picture myself being being tempted to do that. Even though I would know better, it would be, mhmm, no, you're probably better doing Strange Death of Alex Raymond and doing “Ninja High School” where you got to carry a little more of your own weight, and learn how to hack! Learn how to just get that page done, just grind those pages out.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: So there you go. And I believe we're coming up on the last one.
Matt: Yes. The can of worms!
Dave: Oh, the can of worms, yes. And a can of worms it is. And this is Chris Woerner, right?
Matt: Correct.
Dave: Also in New Mexico, if I'm not mistaken, and “Has Dave heard about the recent problems Neil Gaiman is facing?” Matt says, “If you have, I won't waste the time telling you. But if you haven't, the short version…” I circled “heard” and wrote a note above it, good rule of thumb, unless Matt faxes it to me, no, I have zero contact with anyone and haven't had contact with anyone in years. If I get a letter from the guys that I've been working with, Steve Peters or somebody like that, they're talking about whatever they want to talk about with me relative to Dave Sim, and relative to their own work. I can't picture Steve Peters going, “Oh by the way did you hear that blah blah blah blah blah?” Because it's just not something that would happen. I know it's very difficult for people to picture, because I get the impression that because this is a Neil Gaiman thing, this has been going around like wildfire? Like, have you been keeping up on it?
Matt: So the reason why I phrased it the way I did, is because I didn't know if maybe it made the newspaper.
Dave: Oh okay. No, no, there hasn't been any, so far anyway, any mention in any of the newspapers that I read. Let me finish your distillation here first, and then we can…
Matt: The distillation is essentially, cause this is how weird this whole situation is. There was a website that everything I sent you is basically the first however many paragraphs of their article about it . The same website also did a four-part podcast where they interviewed the women about their allegations.
Dave: Oh, okay.
Matt: And I'm like, okay, this seems like it would be kind of the one of them stories that would have legs of, okay, this’d gets picked up. And like every now and then I do a search for Neil Gaiman and hit the news tab on my phone to see what came up, and it's this story. A week later it's this story, two weeks later it's this story, and now it's a month later, it's this story. And then a number of articles referencing the initial story with Neil's response, but like that's it. Neil apparently has disappeared from social media. And now it's turning into a, “Have you heard about Neil?” and it's quote unquote “’the mainstream media’ is avoiding this story” and I'm like, well is there a story? I mean, the allegations came out, Neil put out his statement, and then he disappeared and isn't talking to anybody. And it sounds like, it's not like there's a stampede of people coming forward going, “Oh yeah, I knew about this.” So there it's all sizzle, there's no steak.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So, but please continue, because this is the part, this is going to be the juicy one where all of a sudden we're going to get enough people listening that we can make money at this!
Dave: [laughs] Well, that's shabby, but yeah, it's definitely, the criteria I've always had with Please Hold for Dave Sim is, is anybody's more than welcome to ask a question about anything. That's the only time and way that I found out about Ed Piskor was that somebody asked relative to Please Hold for Dave Sim. Again, it's like people just really can't believe, “You really haven't heard anything about this?” It's like, no, I don't have any contact with anybody in the comic book field in that kind of sense. So, okay, you've written the short version. “Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual assault by two women with whom he was in consensual relationships, and is the subject of a police complaint in New Zealand. Gaiman's position is that he strongly denies any allegations of non-consensual sex with the women, and adds New Zealand Police did not take up his offer of assistance over one woman's complaint in 2022, which he says reflects its lack of substance. However New Zealand Police said it made a ‘number of attempts to speak to key people as part of this investigation and those efforts remain ongoing.’ Adding that ‘there are a number of factors to take into consideration with this case, including the location of all parties.’ The allegations span two decades and concern young women who came into contact with Gaiman, the 63 year old bestselling author of The Sandman, Good Omens, and American Gods, as a nanny to his child and as a fan of his writing.” Okay, then you say, “And with that, we wrap up I'm’a guess over three hours Please Holding. Thanks, Chris!”
Okay. Another good rule of thumb is, like I say, unless Matt, you fax me, you know “I just heard that Michael Zulli died, so I thought I should let you know.” It's like, that's how the only way I would know Michael Zulli had died. This is the only way I would know about the Neil Gaiman story. This is the only way that I would know about the Ed Piskor story. It's not one of those things where I'm going, gee, what if there's things that Matt's not telling me that I should know? Most things on the internet are in that gossipy category of, uhh, I don't want to know about that. I don't listen to gossip, and if somebody actually tells me gossip of some kind, I usually forget it immediately, because it's just that's how my brain works. This is information, this is news, this is theory, this is politics, this is gossip. Gossip just goes straight in the waist basket, because there's no use for it. It's detrimental. But in terms of, okay, here's what you sent to me, I would say everything in quotes in the article that you sent me doesn't explain what's going on, Like “a number of attempts to speak to key people as part of this investigation and those efforts remain ongoing.” Does that mean that they haven't spoken to Neil? Does that mean that they haven't spoken to the women? Does that mean that they haven't spoken to one of the women? Does that mean that they haven't spoken to somebody who witnessed this or whatever it was? Or, if it’s said, “You can ask so and so, she'll tell you, ‘yes, this is what happened’ and she was there and she saw it.” Unless I know who the key people are, it's like, well the police are the arbiters in a situation like this. So unless I know what “key people” means and how that relates to it, then that's not saying anything. Same thing with ”a number of factors to take into consideration with this case including location of all parties”. [laughs] Uh, okay. Well, that doesn't tell me anything either, is this saying where did this take place? You know, Neil saying, “Well I wasn't in Auckland then so that couldn't have happened in Auckland” or they're both saying that this happened in Auckland, so that's my first response. Let me qualify this, if anyone, Chris or anyone else who is interested in these things and wants to ask, you're more than welcome to ask at Please Hold for Dave Sim, that's why I do this once a month. I don't rule anything out of, uh no, I don't talk about that. If you want to ask about it, I'll talk about it.
Matt: So Chris asked the question on the Cerebus Facebook group, and then he commented with a link to a YouTube video where Chris says it gives a pretty good summation of what's happening. I'm going, that's great, but it's not like I can send Dave a YouTube video. That's where the “Dave doesn't do the internet thing” comes in of, an article, I can fax an article! And I kind of did that, and I started watching the video, and even Chris said that, you know, the first two minutes and 20 seconds is self-promotion stuff for the guy that did this video, cause he's got a video podcast thing and he apparently is running a Kickstarter. And I'm going, okay, in my head I'm starting to get the red flags of, it doesn't matter what he says after the 2 minute 20 second mark. The fact that he's posting this video but the preamble to it is, “Here's how you can help me make money, now let me talk about this topic that's a hot button issue or whatever” and I'm going, like I said, my personal red flag went up of, ehh, this is going to get skeevy real quick, isn't it? And so, that's when I went back to the initial article and went, okay, this is the what I keep finding when I'm trying to find out, well, what the hell going on? And it's like, again, if Chris had sent a link to an article that I could have, okay copy, paste, put it into a fax, send it up to Dave. But even then, I'm sure it's going to be a lot of “this isn't journalism as much as this is tabloidism”.
Dave: Yeah, and it's, I think it's the modern internet version of that, which is clickbait.
Matt: Yeah, I mean and it's, you know, Neil's accused and until something happens other than Neil was accused, well Neil was accused. I mean at a certain point, like the rest of the article that I sent you that I didn't send, I printed out and I just counted, it's seven more paragraphs. And it gets into some of the details, and I keep going back to what you said about the Woody Allen thing in the notes to the Latter Days of when you got to the part about the nanny wrote a book. You went, “Okay, this is a little more skeevy than anybody needs to be involved in.”
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. I would stick with that too. It's one of those, I think it's feminist justice uh like and we want to we want to just dive in here what we're basically doing is waiting to find out if Neil Gaiman is about to go Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby, and that's really what it is. Here's either the first two of however many it takes to say, “Okay, we don't care about justice, we don't care about courts of law. We don't care about the rule of law. We're feminists, we believe the women. Here's eight of them, destroy this person. Neil Gaiman has to be fired by Netflix, Neil Gaiman has to have this done to him, Neil Gaiman has to have this done to him, Neil Gaiman has to have this done to him because we say!” And it's like, we can try and pretend that it's anything besides that, but all we're doing is pretending. So let me pick up from, if somebody wants me to comment on something like this, okay you send me what you consider the information, which you've done here. If this isn't all the information that's available, then I'm certainly more than willing to take a look at howevermuch additional information there is. But I'd have to read the full transcript of any police interviews with the complaintants. It would have to be police interviews. It wouldn't be, you know, here's the women talking on a podcast. It's, no, thise is a serious criminal charge theoretically, so consequently all that matters is the police interview and the complaints. They're complaining to the police, and the police are at least saying, “Okay well, we haven't closed the case, we haven't said no, there's nothing here, and we're not we're not pursuing this any further, we've closed this. It's, no, it's still open at least in that sense.” I can pretty much guarantee that, even if you could get the police interview with the complainants, that would just lead to my coming up with a list of unanswered questions I would need answers to before I could offer an intelligent opinion.
The same thing, if this leads to charges being filed and the police referring one or both cases to the Crown Attorney in the New Zealand jurisdiction, whatever the New Zealand jurisdiction is, I don't know. Is it Auckland City Center? Is it this, is it that, or the other? One of the things where they're talking about location of all the parties, that sounds like it could be different jurisdictions. In which case, it's, well okay, if this happened here and this happened here, this would be investigated by these police, and this would be investigated by these police, and we're not clear on this, so we don't know. This is why we're still leaving it open is, whose jurisdiction is this in? This is how official stuff works, is jurisdiction, chain of command, who's in charge, who's making the decisions, and what are they making the decisions on the basis of? And in a democracy like New Zealand, it's the rule of law. We don't close this investigation until all of these boxes have been ticked, but that doesn't mean that where there's smoke, there's fire. Right now, we've just got smoke. So the jurisdiction thing, if the police refer it to the Crown Attorney in a jurisdiction or two jurisdictions or whatever, then I would need to read whatever the text is of the formal complaints, and do what I assume Neil’S solicitor would do, if it gets to that point, compare the police interview to the formal complaint for inconsistencies. Again, that's just how criminal justice works, in terms of, if there is enough smoke there, so you go, okay, could be a fire, could not be a fire. Then it's, you've already got the police interview that led to the charges being recommended to the Crown Attorney, and the Crown Attorney going, “Okay, please bring the complainant in and now we're going to have the formal complaint where this person is, now they've stopped being a complainant and now they're about to become a plaintive in a trial, in a legal proceeding.” That automatically moves us into reasonable doubt . Anything that suggests reasonable doubt, that's going to factor into the Crown Attorney saying, “Okay, yes, we are going to trial with this” or “no, we're not going to trial with this” and whatever is in the police interview, and whatever the formal statement is, that's usually what happens with these things. They go, “Okay, well, this detail, this detail, and this detail, they don't match up. It happened in Auckland in the police interview in 2013 and in this one it happened in 2014.” Which is why one of the central considerations in criminal justice, and particularly in these kinds of situations, is you really need to report this when it happens. If you're going to be as feminists training your daughters in how the world works, it's, you can't fume about this, and you can't leave it so that you're not giving fresh details to the police. It has to be, “This happened last night,” or “This happened the day before yesterday, and here's what I have to say about it.” And it's like, “It's unnerving, I feel like I'm being shaken to pieces sitting here in front of a police officer saying this, but that's why I have to say it now, because I'm talking about what actually happened and what my reaction is to it .” As soon as you have, this is where the gap comes in of, okay you report it to the police, and then there's the delay while it's investigated, and then the police have to decide, “Do we refer this to the Crown Attorney? You can't just throw stuff at the Crown Attorney, they're going to say, ‘okay, what have you got here?’ And it's like, well, this is what we think that we've got and this is why we're referring it to you.” Then if that's three months later before they do that, then it's, this is not an open and shut case, because the police do refer open and shut cases to the Crown Attorney immediately, because the police know the situation that they're in, which is, “We're going to get called to be asked about, ‘okay, when the plantiff said such and such, what did you say to that? This is what the transcript says.’” Well okay, this has got to be as close to as fresh in their mind as they can possibly get in order to make sure that the rule of law is being followed, but everyone has their day of court, and you have the presumption of innocence. There is no presumption of innocence on the internet. “We haven't gone ballistic yet, but any minute now we're ready to go ballistic, and we're the ones that decide what your future is going to be.” I mean, that's what happened to me! It's just, “Okay, we've all gone ballistic, so that's it, Dave Sim doesn't exist anymore.” And it's like, well, unfortunately that's the world that I live in. I would say 3/10ths the internet and 7/10ths feminism is just the way that that works. But I will say that I think anyone offering an opinion without the information that I'm talking about, unless you're talking about the statement to police and the full statement, “here's what went to the Crown Attorney, and here's the Crown Attorney's official statement is, that they're willing to go into court to charge the individual with the complaint.” If you're not looking at those, then it's just rubbernecking, and muck rake!
Okay, having said all that, this is again dragging Dave Sim out of reality and into feminist illusions, and the hallucinatory internet, and indignance, and blah blah blah blah blah, and emotionalism, and the whole roll coaster thing. Okay, I have to have my say on my side. I have to separate this into A, my own inferences, read how God's Clockwork Mechanism works. After his divorce from Mary, every sex act Neil Gaiman engaged in and engages in, is adulterous and adultery. And it's a progressively toxic meat grinder. I'm speaking from experience! It will chew you up. The only exception is a 100% faithful, lifelong, followup marriage. Evidence suggests, the evidence that I look at, this is what happened. I knew what Neil Gaiman's situation was in the late 1980s, and it's, definitely if anybody could be tempted by fornication and adultery, it's Neil Gaiman. Because he was surrounded by a much larger pool of willing candidates, and let's be honest about that. It's women who wouldn't have slept with me, or wouldn't have slept with any other comic writer, would have slept with Neil Gaiman because it's like he's a real catch. “If you get to be Neil Gaiman's wife #2, that's what the feminist professional leagues are all about. We're all competing.” As Colleen Doran said, she was at this meeting of librarians, and Neil Gaiman was there, and she's going, “They're treating him like a rockstar” and it's like, yes, and a rockstar is an incredibly vulgar thing! It's [laughs] rock stars are moon June spoon, plang plang plang, money for nothing and your chicks for free. And it's like, that's the most loathsome kind of adultery going. To be in that situation isn't enviable. Trying to find a way to explain this to people, is [laughs] arduous. And it's like, I came to the end of this. Okay, this is all that I've written in answer to what you're asking Chris, so this is all I have to say over in the delusional circus that you inhabit that you call reality, and let me be very very blunt about that. I'm not on the internet, so I haven't driven myself insane. You people are on the internet, you have driven yourselves insane. But also, there's basic morality, and I'm going, right! Like, this is what I'm explaining, I was adulterous from the time that I got separated from Deni, which was August 1983. And the last adulterous act that I committed was the relationship with Susan Alston, and the last time I had sex with Susan Alston was February 1998. So, as 15 years of adultery and now 26 years and three months out of adultery, no adultery, no visiting adultery, no possibility of adultery, adultery is off of the table. Adultery, there's a reason that it's in The Ten Commandments. It’s because adultery is the same thing as murder. That's why they're side by side in the Ten Commandments. It's not, “Oh well, it's another lifestyle choice.” “Oh you know, me and this married guy, we went out for drinks and we just hit it off, and before we know it, there we are back at his place tearing each other's clothes off, and blah blah blah blah blah.” And it's like, you're married and he's married. That's adultery, you’ve now committed the equivalent of murder. And I'm going [laughs] okay, how to explain this? How to explain the Coequivalence, where I think it's an authentic coequivalence, I'm not exaggerating this. It's like, we live in a society that has particularly since the birth control pill lowballed adultery as if, “It's, you know, just another thing. Well, you know, shit happens” and it's like, mhmm, no. That's like saying, “Oh well, somebody got murdered, shit happened.” You wouldn't say that. You wouldn't say that, that's completely inhuman to even suggest that. So when you put adultery in that category, you're doing that. And I'm speaking as somebody where I have to say, after 15 years of adultery, it was probably a good 10 years? I would say 10 years, maybe 12 years, before I went, oh, I am outside of that now. I'm back to being not a loathesome coequivalent of a murderer. I don't know if I have fully repented of it, even after 26 years, but at least I'm in the different category.
And then, as I say, I got all of this done. It was only five o'clock and I'm not calling Matt until 5:30, and I'm going [sighs] to try and understand this. Try and convey this to people who are, as the Judge said to Oscar Wilde, dead to all sense of shame. How do I convey this? And I thought, “Crime and Punishment”. Raskolnikov, the character who commits the murder, in Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”. I'm not going to tell you nice folks that you have to go and read “Crime and Punishment” now, it's a very very thick book, and I quite understand anybody's hesitancy to read it. But if you read, I'm sure it'd be very easy to find this on the internet, just say “Crime and Punishment”, Dostoevsky,after he's committed the murder, and that section of the book. So we'll say, read that section of the book. 50 pages let's say, or even 40 pages. And here's what that does to you. Here's what that does to a human being who thinks, “Oh, I got this all under control. I know what's going on here. I'm going into this with my eyes open”, which Raskolnikov definitely that's the way he perceives himself, is that he's intellectualizing about the murder, and then he actually commits the murder, and then goes, “Oh I didn't expect this. I didn't expect what's happening to me, and I don't really know how to deal with it.” And then the rest of the book is pretty much, “Here's how I have have been separated from reality into a completely separate thing. This is what damnation is like, and this is what damnation results from, going into something that you thought, “Okay, I'm going in with my eyes open” and then you do it and you go, “There's no way to have your eyes open to this.” And I went okay, where's my copy of “Crime and Punishment”? And I went and looked and I went, oh right, I don't have a copy of “Crime and Punishment” And I went, why is it that I don't have the copy of “Crime and Punishment”, because I've got a number of Dostoevsky's other books, and it's like, mhmm, move after move after move after move. I'm gonna have to get rid of some of these fat books. That one's the one that's going to have to go, I'm going to hang on to “The Idiot” because I prefer it as a literary work. Just personal preference. But I do have [laughs] this I did hang on to, was “Dostoevsky, His Life and Work” by Konstantin Mochulsky, translated by Michael A Minihan. And I went, right! I hung on to this because I went I think I got more out of Konstantin Mochulsky explaining Dostoevsky writing the book and then talking about parts of the book, and parts that his publisher went, “Oh no, we have to change it.” Massive chapter about him going to see Sonia, and Sonia reading the gospel to him. And it's, talk about blood, sweat, and tears poured onto the page. But in Russia at the time, it was unfashionable. It was, “No, nobody's gonna want to read this and if they do read it they're gonna go, ‘no, we don't think this way anymore.’” So it's, I enjoyed it at least as much and got as much out of it as I did out of Dostoevsky’s writing because it's, here's Dostoevsky going, “Here's how I think this goes, and here's what I'm trying to explain and I'm being asked to make it fashionable, and it's like, it's not fashionable.” And I think what Dostoevsky didn't understand was, he was talking about damnation, and they were already so far away from God, and so far away from the gospel in terms of intellect and philosophy superseding religious faith, that they went, “What are you doing talking about this stuff? This is not what we're interested in! Put more psychology in here.” And it's like, uh no, that's exactly what was wrong, that's what led to the Russian Revolution was, if you would have just left the chapter alone and have made it, “Here's Dostoevsky with the indwelling spirit of God telling him ‘here's what you want to write and here's what you want to convey, and you're going to damn near kill yourself pulling it out of yourself, but it is important what you're trying to say.” And then going, this is the problem, and this will be the problem, beginning in the 1860s, the 1850s, where you can only get so far away from God, and you can only rationalize violating the Ten Commandments temporarily, and then you're just selling yourself a bill of goods. And it's so, I would recommend if you can either find “Dostoevsky His Life and Work” by Mulchulsky online, or you can find “Crime and Punishment” itself, just find where the murder happens. It's like, this is Dostoevsky, this isn't spoiler warning stuff, this is, if you're only going to read 50 pages of Dostoevsky in your entire life, after the murder in “Crime and Punishment” and the experience of the character and what he's going through, this will tell you what adultery does to the human soul.
So consequently, I don't know Neil Gaiman. I haven't had any contact back with Neil Gaiman for 19 years. It's like, Neil was definitely one of the “Gotta cut him loose, feminists don't like him. I can't really afford to have Dave Sim thrown in my face.” I have no idea how much adultery has Neil Gaiman committed. Is he still committing adultery? How many people is he committing adultery with? It's a bottomless pit of destroying your own soul and throwing yourself into Hell with both hands. That's my opinion! That's [laughs] if you come to Please Hold for Dave Sim, and you want to ask me about one of these “he said she said” online stories, it's like, okay, well, I can't talk about it over here in your frames of reference, because you live in a cesspool, and there's no point in trying to discuss a cesspool with inhabitants of a cesspool. I live over here where it isn't a cesspool. So, if you want to talk about this, that's fine. Over here is what I have to say, and I would say, if you're an adulterer, or you're considering adultery, or you're on your second marriage, your third marriage, or you're juggling a couple of girlfriends or whatever it is that you're doing. That you're thinking, “Well this is just the way I'm choosing to be. We're grown-ups. This is consensual. We're both going in with our eyes wide open.” If you'll just read Dostoevsky talking about someone violating one of the Ten Commandments, and what this does to you, that only someone with the Intellect, and capital I Intellect, of a Dostoevsky can convey this accurately, please, please read that and go, here. According to Dave Sim, could be completely wrong, always wish everybody the best on Judgment Day, this is what you're doing to yourself, and you have to either get out of this, and speaking from personal experience, you're going to be probably years closer to a decade out of it before you go, “Okay wow, I don't know if I'll ever be clean again, but at least I'm not cesspool dirty.”
Matt: I kind of was looking it up, because the details that are out about the whole thing, it's one of those, I just get that icky feeling when it's, like, I like Neil Gaiman's writing. I don't know him, I met him once at a convention, and the five minutes we interacted were very pleasant. But at the same time it's like, I don't know! I mean, mentally preparing for the phone call today, I was thinking about, there's George Carlin. He's got three books, and each of the books, he's got a section called “shortcuts” where it's just one or two sentence jokes. And it's just a quick joke, and the one I kept coming back to with the Neil thing was one of his short takes is, “I wonder what Stephen King thinks about when he masturbates.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Because it's a funny bit because Stephen King writes some really weird stuff, and you got to think, well you know, if he's doing that, what is he thinking about? And it's the same thing of, I don't know Neil as a person. I mean, his reputation, his works, that's it. What does he think about late at night when he's by himself? Nobody really knows. And at a certain point like, I don't need to know. I know “Good Omens”. I like “Good Omens,” it's a fun book. Aand if you’re a fan, let me put it in the internet cesspool terminology, if you were a fan of Neil's before you heard about this, and now you're not, and you're disappointed that you can't read the book, just think of it this way. All the good bits were written by Terry Pratchett,
Dave: [laughs] Oh come on, you’d have to prove that one.
Matt: Well, but that's the thing! You can just mentally convince yourself that all the good bits were Terry Pratchett and all the not-good bits are Neil, and that way you can read the book, and when you get to the not-good bits, you go like, “Ah, Neil, you brought the book down.” And if you were a fan of “American Gods” and now you're like, “Well, how can I ever read this again?” It's a book. I mean you know there… it's entirely possible that Dostoevsky was just brutally murdering chickens every chance he got, and he just absolutely hated chickens. I mean, it's possible. I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying it's possible. And if you like chickens and you think chickens are a noble creature, how could you read “Crime and Punishment”? Well, you know, I mean it's “Crime and Punishment” it's there. No one's putting a gun to anyone's head saying, “You have to read anything.” We'd like you to…
Dave: Okay, I have to bring this back, because this is Please Hold for Dave Sim, I have to bring it back in the direction of, see, I think one of the major problems with society is the idea that there's no harm in fantasy. You can fantasize about whatever you want, and whatever you get off on, well, there you go. “It's just me masturbating. So it doesn't matter.” I completely disagree. I completely disagree that if you go there mentally in order to arouse yourself, then it's you're already there. Quoting George Carlin again, on the Catholic faith, “If you're planning to go downtown and sin, save yourself a car fair, you already did!”
Matt: I mean, and that's I, the problem with…
Dave: Except I don't see that as a joke now. I see that as that's part of a disciplined mind, that's part of a disciplined soul, that's part of being a monotheist is, not going to places mentally. And if you find yourself straying to a place mentally that you already know, “No, I don't go there anymore and I don't even think about going there anymore”, you come back from there and you think about something else. And it's like the average person in 2024 is gonna go, “Oh come on!” And it's like, all I'm saying is, speaking as somebody who was in the cesspool I was never rockstar level of cesspool, but Lenny Henry, now Sir Lenny Henry definitely said, “But you're a rock star” and it's like, um, no I was never that. But it was, I was certainly further over into the cesspool than the average person goes, and because of fame. Because that was why you wanted to be famous, was, “If I become famous enough, then it'll be the Dire Straits thing, money for nothing and your chicks for free.”
Matt: Well, it goes back to Koshie in the Latter Days, “Bimbos Ala Mode!”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I mean, the problem with anytime something like this happens it's, okay, let's give it two months. Give it three months. You know, there's an allegation against somebody, okay well, can it be proven? And the internet loves to say, “Oh well, this guy's a scumbag. I'm no longer going to support this guy ever again.” It's like okay, what if this guy stops being a scumbag or whatever it is you think makes him a scumbag and donates the rest of his time and money towards charity and helping the less fortunate and being as close to a modern-day saint as you can be? Is he still a scumbag? I mean, you know, it's “Well, he's only doing that because…” What if he had a come to Jesus moment, and that's it. He's on the straight and narrow now, is there redemption anymore? And always, every time I start thinking about, “Well that guy's a prick” I go, wait a minute, is he? Yes, that guy did something bad once, but is that the end of of the story, or is there redemption? Can people come back from being dickheads? And my inner cynic goes, no, and then I go, well, but that's just you being cynical. Anybody can screw up, it's can you learn from your mistake and not repeat it and go out of your way to make sure you don't repeat it?
Dave: Let him who was without sin cast the first stone.
Matt: I mean, and that's, in the Internet, it's “Nuh-uh, we were promised the stoning. If we ain't getting that guy, you're on the docket.” And the internet's really good for, “Did you know that so and so did this thing?” Yeah, and? I mean, I always come back to, there was a tabloid headline one time that I saw and I literally spent a minute staring at the cover of it. Might have been The Sun, might have been The Globe, might have been the National Enquirer, reading this headline and I was working retail at the time, and I turned to one of my co-workers and went, did you see this? And they went no, and I showed it to them and they went… and the headline was “RFK says LBJ J killed JFK.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I showed it to them and they went, “Yeah, so? Like, everyone involved in this headline has been dead for over 30 years. Who cares?”
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: It's, everybody wants to be, “You want to know a secret?” and everybody loves the, “Oh, what's the secret?” Well, the secret is that somebody did something stupid one time and we can rub their nose in it or we can clean up the mess and move on with our lives. And as a guy who's had your nose rubbed in the mess on the carpet for, oh gee, how many years has it been, Dave?
Dave: Well, it's been a few. This is one of the things where I was going, this September will be the 30th anniversary of issue 186, and a part of me is is tempted to do the the 30th Anniversary reprinting of 186 and it's like, uh no, that's just waving a red flag in front of a bull. But I definitely think more about that than I think about this being the 20th anniversary of “Cerebus” coming to an end. I mean, “Cerebus” coming to an end was an anticlimax. It had already been decided that Dave Sim has come to an end, “We will perhaps hear about Dave Sim when he dies and it'll just be, ‘Oh, so sad’ but really Dave Sim died when issue 186 came out.” And it's, well, that's what happens, that's what happens. I can't complain because I've made all of my own calls. And certainly I wouldn't have learned as much as I've learned if I hadn't been the object of the online mob's wrath to that extent before cancelled was even called cancelled, before there was even a word for it. Like, “Well, we don't know what that was, but it just happened to Dave Sim, and I don't think anybody ever wants to have that happened to him again, so mission accomplished. Now we're all good.” So, there it is! Three hours.
Matt: [laughs] I was hoping that we could get away with it not being 3 hours, but I also knew, no, this is one of those, it's the third rail of the internet. If you touch it, it's going to hurt. You're going to touch it because somebody asked, but it's one of those, in a year is anyone going to remember?
Dave: Uh, it depends. This is the “Women Read Minds” things of, the helium centered nature and the beehive. That's all happening outside of what any of us as men perceive of as reality. So, those things are being decided on an ongoing basis. I think they're having less and less happy outcomes, and consequently, I think some women who would have described themselves as 100% feminists before the pandemic are now going, “Uh, no, I'm trying be a good feminist, I'm trying to be a good beehive member, and trying to hate all the people that I'm supposed to hate, and disagree with all the things I disagree with. And this is just getting a little too esoteric for me.” So that everybody is either getting down to their own one person silo, or they’re “this is me and the misses, and this is our silo, and maybe got the kids in here,” but I'm not looking to really have any kind of “community” outside of that. All “communities” are in quotation marks, because I would maintain exactly these things. “We have to draw the line, and we have to take a stand, and people have to say something, and you know, do you still support Neil Gaiman?” And it's like, well okay, that whole constituency has now been divided that Neil has scrupulously maintained “We all think the right way and we're all good people and we're all very very careful and that's going to save us.” It's the same thing that I said with the Ed Piskor situation, if you think that you're immune from this, if you think that thi can't happen to you, you're not paying attention. So all the best to Paula, and to Janis Pearl, and to Bullwinkle, and to Bonnie and Clyde, and whatever the other iguana's name is.
Matt: [laughs] Okay.
Dave: Have a good night, Matt.
Matt: You too, Dave! Have a good one. We will hopefully do this again next month, and hopefully the question will be a little less third rail-y and a lot more, “Hey Dave, what page are you on on SDoAR now?” [laughs]
Dave: Well, if you want third rail answers, ask third rail questions. I have no problem with that. Take care, buh-bye.
Matt: Bye!
4 comments:
glamourmonday
Monday Archive
The Strange Death of Monday
Monday In Hell?
Hey haven't a few people seen the 200 page version Matt? Why not just get people to vote on say their favourite 40 pages and then add that to the interviews? You could tweak it to make you sure you have all th3 X Men and wedding photo content Dave wants too
So what's the status on various (perhaps theoretical) print projects, Waverly or otherwise? Is there going to be a proper printed Tour Book? Are there any future hardcover volumes? Etc.
Definitely a printed tour book, but Matt and Margaret need to get a new fifty page version to Dave for him to sign off on it. I don't know if they are planning to say give Dave ten pages at a time or what have you to make the process easier.
Post a Comment