Rick's Exit "explained"

Hi, Everybody!

Mondays!

Hey, since Dave was on the Fax...

Huh...I wonder how that squares with Dave's OTHER answer to what Rick was doing:

Q4a. In Rick's exit scene (p. 178) he tells Cerebus "WE'LL see each other only once more after today" - goodbye. Cerebus says: "take good care of yourself." Rick tells Cerebus what he told Joanne: "Go to hell." Note that Rick say's "we'll" see each other - so Cerebus' vision of Rick in Going Home would NOT appear to satisfy this prophecy, or was Cerebus' vision interactive and Rick was seeing him too?

DAVE: Yes, it was interactive-they both saw each other.

Q4b: Was the statement "Go to hell" tantamount to a secondary curse, reminiscent of Astoria's final words for The Lion (i98), and Cerebus' final words for Weisshaupt (i76)?

DAVE: Yep. Those were the Big Three.

Q4c: The Lion of Serrea agreed he would go to Hell, and Weishaupt replied "I shall" - but Cerebus does not respond. Why would he be angry with Cerebus? Because he now saw Cerebus as a Godless heathen? Is it a reference back to his holding Cerebus responsible for his advice? Has Cerebus somehow died symbolically here to mirror the deaths of Weisshaupt and the Lion?

DAVE: This gets really complicated, but you DID ask, so here goes. He was angry with Cerebus because Cerebus "lied" about Jaka by saying that he was once married to her. Rick is pretty much in full prophet mode at this point, but Jaka is still really the only Achilles Heel that he has. He's still the only one that Jaka was ever married to and that perception of himself-as Jaka's only husband-is so central to his nature that he seriously snaps when Joanne tells him that Cerebus claimed to have been married to Jaka as well. Rick has developed this pristine "stained-glass-window" view of himself by this point that isn't accurate. It will be accurate but at this point it isn't. The appropriate God-fearing reaction to Joanne telling him about Cerebus and Jaka being married would've been "Cerebus wasn't married to the harlot" followed by "I am a follower of God, harlots don't concern me anymore." Instead the reaction was to see this as an intrinsically evil attack upon him and upon the core reality he still clung to (unbeknownst to himself) by Joanne and Cerebus. Which it wasn't. Not an intentional or conscious attack, anyway. To Joanne, Jaka was just a name. Joanne was just making conversation. Cerebus had no idea that Rick was going to turn up and that he would have to account for his treating the alternate reality I put him into as this reality. On the one hand Cerebus had experienced being married to Jaka, but no he had never actually married Jaka. But having this core attribute that his entire personality was hunched around-I was Jaka's only husband-wrenched away so casually hurtles Rick over to the "other side" and he comes up with this magic spell (which is clearly not "of God") that has suddenly thrust up from his unconscious awareness (his on-going proximity to Cerebus' magnifier nature and his own focus on larger doings having thrust him into the larger context that Cerebus' magnifier occupies). His impulse to lash out at and to hurt Cerebus as badly as he can for the way he thinks Cerebus has hurt him is the trigger and the Adversary, of course, is pleased to take advantage of it. Picture St. Francis of Assisi suddenly getting really steamed as a wounded boyfriend and inwardly calling for assistance from anyone to help him inflict a reciprocal wound. Presumably the Adversary would be tickled to death to oblige the request. This will be a "a good one" on God. And of course the God-fearing part of Rick would just shut down and submerge at the prospect of what the God-fearing nature knew he was about to do-"All that progress and now he's going to make use of a magic spell to hurt someone? Oy. Excuse me, I think I have to lie down until this is over."-even while his God-fearing nature would be looking at the long term likelihoods and the bright side that is probably going to result: Rick leaving the tavern from his God-fearing nature's point of view is a very, very good idea. Telling the harlot and Cerebus to go to hell is a very good idea. Assuming he can just cut and run and get away from Joanne and Cerebus, his God-fearing nature can "hatch out" unimpeded by them and their ungodly natures. Of course, Rick going over to the sinestram side that abruptly, it gets complicated, which I think happens to the Adversary a lot in those cases. You use Joanne and Cerebus against Rick and then suddenly Rick turns Aleister Crowley on you. As George says in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf "By God, you need a pig to show you where the truffles are." Who is on whose side?

At the core moment of the invocation: "Branch breaks branch/the one branch is now two/One branch is me/One branch is..." Well, obviously the word-Adversarially inspired-is intended to be "you". But Rick is supposed to be punishing Cerebus, wounding him. How does he accomplish that by making the two of them co-equal branches? The Adversary has over-played his/her/its hand and Rick's God-fearing nature asserts itself and breaks free of his unconscious choice which had been to call on the Adversary to help him hurt Cerebus and to break free of the Adversary's attempt to use that base desire to make Cerebus and Rick into one divided prophet, a broken branch. The God-fearing part of Rick, when he hesitates and sees the actual "you" he almost invoked surrenders control to God and God then moves the spell from infernal-two co-equal branches-to godly, the three (the Adversary) and the One (God) "For the three at the table/and the one at the door." Of course when the revised spell hatches out, the one at the door will end up being Jaka (the three at the table Marty, Bear and Harrison) so the Adversary, looking that far ahead, sees the trade-off God is offering him/her/it through Rick. Let Rick go and you can use Jaka to get Cerebus.

Is Jaka Cerebus' God? It's a bit of a stretch, but the Adversary has worked with less auspicious material. Rick has broken free of the idolatry and paganism inherent in the branch itself and, inadvertently, has thereby broken free of Jaka as well. She will be the one at the door, but he won't be there if the Adversary takes the bait God's offering. Rick is basically (through divine inspiration) giving Jaka to Cerebus, something he wouldn't consciously be able to do if he knew that that was what he was doing. God is making use of the fact that Rick is leaving and has severed his connection with Cerebus and Joanne and to make Jaka Cerebus' problem instead of Rick's. The trade-off for the Adversary is that he/she/it gets Cerebus potentially while losing Rick. Since the prophecies in the Book of Rick are about Cerebus, that seems like a fair trade. Let Rick go, and count on the fact that Jaka will lead Cerebus so far astray from a God-fearing life that the prophecies will never come true. What the Adversary forgets is that Rick has captured Cerebus or has captured the Adversary part within Cerebus-the Adversarial/pagan/Tarim-worshipping/he/she/it inside Rick's book. If the Adversary lets Rick go, the Adversary lets Rick's book go which means, if you're the Adversary, part of you is going with Rick one way or the other trapped inside his book by the spell, even while you have traded to stay with Cerebus. Essentially you have to allow yourself to be torn in half or one third/two thirds or one quarter three quarters. Which is God's joke on the Adversary knowing that he/she/it will forget that part in his/her/its eagerness to "get" Cerebus.

At the critical moment of separation-Cerebus inhabited by the Adversary is staying, Rick's book with the Adversary trapped inside it is leaving and Cerebus is enacting Bear's parting line of dialogue from Guys-"You take good care of yourself"-but a substantial part of what Cerebus considers to be him is already trapped in Rick's book and is pulling more of him out of him as the book is going away. The Adversary realizes this too late so when Cerebus starts to say "Take good care of yourself" he gets as far as "Take..." and the Adversary tries to change it into "Take Cerebus/Usss With You" as a means of avoiding getting divided. And as the futility of that becomes apparent it changes into "Take good care of Usss". Which is kind of funny if you have a really bizarre sense of humour that delights in so-esoteric-it's-verging-on-opaque-for-everyone-except-me things like this (which, obviously, I do). Rick will definitely take care of the Adversary but not the way the Adversary intends it. And of course, subsequently, Cerebus is severely diminished as we can see by his severe state of disorientation, the reduced size of his medallions and his inability to figure out if he should leave or stay. It becomes an opportune time for me to show up. This is the best he's ever going to be. He's missing a substantial evil part of himself which means at least potentially he can be filled with something good. If I can't get through to him this last time, Jaka is going to show up and he's going to have to go through that whole nightmare of a roller-coaster. Which, of course, is the choice he makes.

Well, there ya go...

The MarvelManVark Kickstarter

_____________________________

James Windsor-Smith's Papa Balloon & Cactus #3 Kickstarter has been FULLY Funded, so if you pledged for the Dave Sim related items, you'll get them. (And if you were waiting to see if James made it before hitching onto his rising star, ya got 'til Wednesday. Same day the MarvelManVark KS ends.)

__________________________

The AMOC TeePublic Shoppe

On sale:

October 15 and October 26-29.

__________________________________

The Strange Death of Alex Raymond Go Fund Me.

__________________________________

The Help Out Bill Messner-Loebs Go Fund Me, or buy Rodney Schroeter's book with proceeds going to Bill.

________________________________________

Larry Shell could use a hand. (I still haven't heard about where/when Dave's donation is getting sold.

________________________________________

The Last Day Without nothing.

   "      "     "        "  Dave's signature.

   "      "     "        "  an Old Cerebus Remarque

   "      "     "     Auction catalog for the Panoramic Remarques. 

________________________________________

Oliver's Cerebus movie: The Absurd, Surreal, Metaphysical, and Fractured Destiny of Cerebus the Aardvark it's currently available on "Plex", "Xumo", "Vimeo On Demand", "Tubi". If you're in Brazil..., "Mometu", "Nuclear Home Video". 

_____________________________

Next Time: 

Uh...old pic, and I'll be back Saturday. You SHOULDN'T notice an interruption of service...as long as the plane doesn't crash...

More Squinteye! More Squinteye, I say!

Hi, Everybody!

ATTRACTIVE COUSINS #1 IS NOW AVAILABLE TO ORDER FROM DIAMOND! (I think it's still a possibility.)

ALSO VARK WARS: WALT'S EMPIRE STRIKES BACK #1 IS STILL AVAILABLE TO ORDER! (maybe.)

High Society: Red State ORDER CODE MAR201420 , Blue State ORDER CODE MAR201419, Cerebus ORDER CODE MAR201421, None ORDER CODE MAR201418

And there are still Red State buttons for sale. (I apologize to David Birdsong and are Red State readers for not pimping this more, I'm not being political about this, just lazy...)

Hey look, Dave Sim art for sale.

And here's yer free CiH? More soon?
________________________________________

So yesterday we did Squinteye the Sailor. I forgot to link to Tim's Squinteye post from back in the day.

And now: MORE SQUINTEYE! (This is pretty much all the rest of Squinteye there is...) (In case you're tired of him...)

From Guys:

 (Timely Time-line Matt, reporting for Temporal Control. According to Harrison Starkey/Richard George, the signing isn't for another four months. which means issue 203 takes place four months after issue 201. Dave has said he kept the timeline fluid so that nobody would ever really know how old Cerebus is, but here is the start of trying to nail Jello to the wall and figure out how long Cerebus was in the tavern. (I've been meaning to start digging into this mess for a few years now, sorry?))

 And then there's the return (and last appearance and incarnation of) The Roach:

 And then the signing itself:

 And then: The Guys Party pack:

I'm only including this, because it's the last of the three behind the scenes pages, and where else would I put it?

And from the long lost Yahoo Group 5 questions:

3. In "Squinteye The Sailor" the Popeye parody is obviously intended to be Squinteye, yet in the Guys Party Pack your illustrations in the notes section indicate you switched things around and now the Bluto parody is referred to as Squinteye. Why did you decide to do that? Does this reversal represent some new type of two-in-one-echo where roles are reversed? 

Dave: I had no idea what you were talking about and had to go and look it up. 

Yes, if you look closely at the dialogue of the Popeye character, he refers to himself as Pluto. What I was toying with was the idea that Cerebus' misspent life, culminating in his little sojourn on Pluto (which he keeps misidentifying as Juno) changed any number of things in the context of the world he left as compared to the world he came back to: one of them would be that his boyhood idol, Squinteye (the good guy), is no longer Squinteye, now Bluto (the bad guy) is Squinteye and Squinteye is Pluto which sounds like Bluto. It seemed to express a lot of what I was trying to get across about cumulative effects and the way that the lives of others can metaphorically seem to reflect our own and tell us valuable lessons. And also the fact that I think reality changes in minor ways that can leave you with the inescapable impression that you have been transported to another world entirely. Reading "Cerebus's" in Jo Duffy's introduction to "His First Fifth" in Epic magazine and thinking "Well, that's functionally illiterate. It's supposed to be `Cerebus'' no ifs ands or buts" and then realizing that I was the only one on the planet who still remembered when it was that way. So I wanted Cerebus to experience that but even more dramatically, with Squinteye (remember Cerebus' eye surgery on the way out?) having suddenly become Pluto and Pluto having suddenly become Squinteye. But in the cold literal-minded light of day all I saw that all I was letting myself in for was another lifetime full of "Is the Oscar of Jaka's Story the same Oscar as the Oscar of Melmoth?" style questions. So, I put them off-panel and no one needed to know that it was Bluto doing the Squinteye dialogue and Squinteye doing the Bluto dialogue. If I'm the only one who would get it (and I assumed I was the only one who would get it) then no one else needed to know.

A very sincere tip of the shiny metal helmet and thank you to Jeff Tundis for finding this when I absolutely couldn't.

Next Time: "HOBBS! WHERE ARE THOSE PICTURES OF SPIDER-MAN!!!" M. Monah Doweson

Cerebus' Second Marriage

Hi, Everybody!

House of Cerebus.

So, continuing from yesterday's post, where Jeff commented:

Okay. "She was asking for it." is no defense.
But.
Astoria was the grand manipulator of Cerebus, to advance her ... career?
No, her cause. Her agenda against Cirin.
She had next to no interest in Cerebus, sexually, except for how he could advance her Kevillist cause. Seducing him, trying to get him to impregnant her with an aardvark baby would, most definitely advance her cause.
Also the scene with Astoria stripping her panty down to her foot and her artfully placing it on Cerebus' head, while giving him a look at his "acquired taste", was a callback to his first encounter with Jaka, IIRC. Except for the up-close look/taste. Jaka, sad to say, was waaay classier than was Astoria. I mean, just look at the source material for Astoria.
Layers upon layers, upon layers.
Induced, purposefully designed seduction. It was not a rape. In my humble and psychologically-trained opinion. Have at me, Feminists.
I would say, "Have fun," but we all know that that goes without saying. Don't we, girls?

And:

Okay, Feminist Dave may have said and *may* have tried to draw and have written about Astoria being "raped."
But, that doesn't change the fact that she was manipulating Cerebus.
Unless, you know, she was just a "party" girl.
I think that Dave once wrote about writing and drawing her retiring to a sanctvary in order to make it up to the character for his having made her such a bad person.
Not that Cerebus didn't deserve it.

Eddie then said:

Dave talked about it in-depth a few years ago here. Not sure if answers your questions Jeff

Thanks, Eddie! (Everybody should have an Eddie...)

From the blog post Eddie shared, Dave says:

I've got my own controversial rape scene -- Cerebus raping Astoria in CHURCH & STATE. There I think I was making a more substantial point that probably didn't come through either a) at the time b) since or c) with most readers. And I tried not to explain because -- as an on-going work -- if you have to explain what you're doing it means you failed in your intention. Hope they -- or some of them -- "get it" later on. A quarter of a century later seems a different thing. READER'S DIGEST version:

I saw it as Astoria definitely having a High Level Debate with Cerebus as his prisoner: essentially saying "You're trying to make this into something that it isn't. You aren't really the Pope. You are technically, but you don't understand that that has to mean something larger than "technically". You're actually just another vile male and I'll prove it to you. And it will cost you because technically you are the Church and you are in my way and I want you out of my way. I think I can trip you up and bring you -- and therefore the Church -- down by several hundred notches on the Big Scoreboard." Which, to me, she did. She aroused him sexually. She didn't provoke him into raping her (although he would have seen it that way). Even as -- blunt-minded -- as Cerebus was and always had been, he couldn't just rape her which is a dead giveaway that he's transgressing and knows he's transgressing. Instead he blindfolds her, performs a "marriage" ceremony between them and then (in his mind) has marital relations.

At some level he must know exactly how bad that is.

But he's incontinent in the larger sense of the term (ie not just physically): if she's blindfolded it isn't really rape. If he marries them, as the Pope, it isn't really rape. And then, of course, he falls asleep right after. Which is part and parcel of trying to evade, mentally, that which can't be evaded in any way. If he falls asleep it didn't happen. He was asleep.

I had to address Astoria's nature as Lord Julius' ex-wife who was taking that stature -- and her link to Cirin -- and striking off on her own. Basically becoming the first feminist in Estarcion as distinct from the Cirinists (who were a matriarchy). I was doing the first substantial building blocks on the Cirin / Serna "How The Matriarchy Came To Be" which would take up a big chunk of "Minds" in MOTHERS & DAUGHTERS. Daughter political thinking actively opposed to Mother political thinking.

Rape, it seemed to me, would have to be factored in as an unavoidable part of Astoria's program.

The same way that rape, particularly gang-rape, is used to intimidate and "police" women in rural, tribal India today and in virtually all Muslim countries.

I had to fudge it quite a lot but what I decided was that Astoria would just become detached from it. In a context where rape would be unavoidable -- moving around a Medieval / verging on Renaissance environment mostly alone -- attempting to effect political change, empower women, etc. -- she figured out that the best that she could do was to just be an inert lump, completely detached. Which you'll notice was what she did with Cerebus. And then, as she did with Cerebus, gob in their ear. "That's basically what you just did to me -- injected your slime into an orifice of mine where it was completely unwanted". And I've always been proud of her line in answer to Cerebus' "What was that for?" "Little wedding present." Her fundamental belief in the fact that women getting the right to vote was the larger good was weighed against the sacrifice and she made the sacrifice. If becoming inured to rape was what it took, that's what she'd do.

I was still fudging it. Rapists are sadistic by nature. It's an act completely shorn of empathy. A woman -- particularly an attractive woman -- travelling alone in that historical context would be drawing a straight line between two very evil male points. Astoria would have gotten scarred at some point or several points and probably maimed. By not having that happen to her, it seemed dishonest at a fundamental level. But to actually show her physically maimed seemed a bridge too far to me. Over in the direction of splatter porn (again, I apologize for the dinosaur term).

If I was doing it now, I would probably go that extra step because there would be the real world precedent of girls getting acid thrown in their faces and getting their noses cut off in Muslim countries. Which we now know was happening at the time, and is a recurring motif in tribal societies (it just wasn't talked about in the news because it was pre-9/11). And, thematically, it's the same thing. The girls who that happened -- and happen -- to tend to just become more resolute which is what I was trying to convey with Astoria. The end -- women getting the right to vote -- justified any means for her. You would, presumably, flash on the mental image from the news you can erase from your head instead of asking "Where is this coming from? is this guy 'getting off' on showing Astoria with her nose cut off?"

That was my "backstory" for Astoria that I didn't want to just drop like a turd of exposition somewhere. Who would she discuss forcing herself to become inured to rape with? I get the sense that did not come across AT. ALL. for most readers. So I'm suggesting that could be the case with THE KILLING JOKE. Alan was saying what he says he was saying but that it just didn't make it off the page, through the readers' eyeballs and into their conscious minds.

 And then there's Trina Robbins: The Rape of Astoria.

And: Even The Pope Isn't Infallible, wherein Dave says:

I believe Cerebus raped Astoria. A number of Cerebus fans don't think so, venturing the opinion "she was asking for it". Are they wrong? It depends on your point of view. I don’t think there is such a thing as "asking for it" (unless she literally "asks for it" verbally). Cerebus changed the terms under which she was offering her "favour" (one of which was a gag to preclude any dissension). That is rape (to me). As I say a number of readers disagree. Kind of scary.

So: Cerebus. Raped. Astoria. End of discussion.

(But since I spent two hours formatting pages from various phonebooks, let's continue anyway...)

Jeff asserts "But, that doesn't change the fact that she was manipulating Cerebus."

Let us remember how Cerebus and Astoria ended up in that cell together:

So Cerebus uses his strange Aardvarkian powers...

And she kills the Lion of Serrea, and is almost immediately captured.

Which is how she ends up in the cell:

At her trial she explains what happened from her point of view:

None of which, in my view, is her "manipulating Cerebus."

Next Time: "Geez Matt, you're not done with this YET?!?" Nope. There's another dozen pages I haven't even gotten to yet...

It's not stealing if you say, "Yoink!"...

Hi, Everybody!

Okay, once more. With FEELING:

Comiclink auctions.

The remastered Volume 1, digitally for $9.99.

For anyone who missed the birthday card Kickstarter, there's a Indiegogo live

So, scanning through Jeff Tundis's www.cerebustheaardvark.com (again,) I found the "F.A.Q." tab, which has all of the Yahoo Group "5 Questions" that Dave answered back in the day (again,). And in the Cerebus Volume 1 section, there was this one, which I think is germane to something I posted recently:

Q5: We just noticed that the 11th printing of Cerebus includes, for the first time, the Silverspoon story (which, technically, would make the "11th printing" the "1st printing of the 2nd Edition" of that book). Why did you choose to include this story now? Have you changed your view of what constitutes the technical "complete Cerebus Novel?" Do you view that as being (a) the 300 issues; (b) the 16 phonebook volumes; (c) either of those PLUS some/all of the miscellaneous material (Swords stories/issues 51, 112/113, Likealooks, ElfGuest/Epic stories/Cerebus 3D/Cerebus Jam/the letters pages & notes from the President) or Cerebus cameos in other creators' books); and/or (d) some other combination of these or other materials?

DAVE: Um, actually, that came about because of a completely unrelated re-reading of Cerebus: this one having been initiated by Joe Matt who suggested that he and Chester Brown should re-read all of Cerebus because I was coming down to visit reasonably often and, basically, Joe's just like that. Pull out a chessboard at lunch. "Let's play chess." Uh, I'd really rather just talk, Joe. "No, let's play chess. C'mon. I'll let you be white." Most of the time you just give in because it's easier than discussing it for an hour or something. So, they both re-read Cerebus. And one of the things Chet wanted to know about was "Why aren't the Silverspoon strips reprinted in the Cerebus volume?" And I said, they are. And he said, mm, not in my copy. Really? And I went home and checked and sure enough, he was right. They weren't in there. One of those "I must've dreamed that last part" moments (apologies to Fat Freddy's Cat).

So, I made a note to put them into the next reprinting, having wrestled with whether or not to promote it as such, since that would seem like I was conniving to find a way to get everyone to buy another copy even though I was aware that a certain number of people would buy another copy. The Silverspoon strips I tend to see as being in a different category because without them Lord Julius just suddenly appears in the story with no explanation.

"Magiking" I figure can be left out because there isn't that big a leap from i12 to i13 without it. Cerebus is on a river and wakes up washed up on a bank, with only one caption indicating you might've missed something. Likewise "What Happened Between Issues 20 and 21". It's more of curiosity item if you're one of those really intense Cerebus fans. i51 and i's112/113 I still don't see sitting comfortably on the end of High Society, or the beginning and end of Church & State OR the beginning of Jaka's Story. "ElfGuest" I tend to leave out because Wendy and Richard just aren't "that way". Like just about everything else about me, they consider it an insult. I'm sure they considered it an insult when I congratulated them on their DC deal in my comp space in Diamond Previews and I'm sure they would have considered it an insult if I neglected to mention them. They seem to me to epitomize the comic-book field in that way.

Now THIS is the 1st appearance of the vest...

All of the material that you mentioned, apart from "ElfGuest" for the reasons outlined, I picture doing in a single supplementary volume at some point. That's somewhere up ahead, as in late 2005 or early 2006. Since it will be the last "new" Cerebus volume, we obviously would like it to make its own splash if possible and not to bunch it up with The Last Day. And if the books keep selling at their usual predictable rate we're going to have to be doing a number of reprintings back-to-back through 2004 and 2005, so we'll try and schedule the book for when we catch up. Apart from that, there are a few semi-published stories, including "Passage" which only the near-fossilized Cerebus readers (I won't embarrass Steve Bolhafner by identifying anyone by name) would remember from the Cerebus Fan Club Newsletter days. Actually that was probably before Steve's time, so that makes me the only pre-crustaceous life-form that knows it was an unpublished Cerebus short story done between issues 3 and 4 and originally intended for Dave Cothrane's Faerie Star groundlevel comic (as we pre-crustaceans used to call them back in the late 70s). It only exists in the form of really, really grey photocopies (I tried "blacking in" the grey areas and gave up partway through the first page). Anyway, it's the official first appearance of Cerebus' black vest as well as not being very good. And then there's "Anatole's Solecism" (seriously, "Anatole's Solecism") which I did for Magic Eggrollian Funnies (seriously, Magic Eggrollian Funnies) which survives only in script and rough outline form. These Craig Miller will be publishing in Following Cerebus as curiosity items but they'll almost definitely not be in the Miscellaneous Cerebus volume.

I bolded the relevant bits. You're welcome. -Matt

I'd have to say that my personal view is that the 16-volume story stands alone now that the Silverspoon strips have been incorporated. The other pieces are either historical curiosity items or "untold stories" from between the principle graphic novels. It will be a while before all of these pieces are in print. As an example, we had tentatively planned to do a colour volume with Bob Chapman of Graphitti Designs years ago that would contain the colour stories from Epic magazine, the Animated Cerebus portfolio, various unpublished colour pieces as well as a variety of covers without the logos and typesetting and issue numbers on them. There are a couple of problems. Bob has all of the negatives for the Epic stories except, I believe, for "A Friendly Reminder". The negatives for the Animated Cerebus Portfolio were accidentally totalled at Preney which would have meant that we would have had to shoot from a printed copy. Until recently, that is, when I unearthed the original overlays and backgrounds, so it would be possible to reconstruct it probably a lot more cheaply in today's age of computer scans (the original negs were all hand-cut and stripped in by hand, unbelievably expensive and difficult). Of course the backgrounds are kind of rough, which then raises the possibility of getting Gerhard to do new backgrounds. But, then, if Ger's going to do new backgrounds, why don't I redraw my part of the portfolio as well? And then you have people who would want the new version but also the original version, so you have to ask yourself, well, what is it that we're doing here? Reproducing an artefact or using it as a blueprint for a new piece?

A lot of the motivation in doing the Animated Cerebus was to get the animation bug out of my system. Which worked. No more bug. Given that it's out of my system, why stick to an animation format? Why not redraw them as comic strips with all the extra detail and contour you can get in there? And that's fine until you run up against the fact that it's like pulling teeth to get Gerhard and I to do one Following Cerebus cover every three months. And then there's all the covers that we have in their original form. Well, as soon as you print an assortment people are going to want all of them. You can do all of them, but what's that going to cost? And (the more important question from my standpoint) how much are you competing against yourself? If it's a hundred-dollar colour volume, a store that orders one is probably going to cut their trade paperback order by five or ten books and, to be honest, I'd much rather have the chance that ten new people were giving the story a try than that one long-time reader was oohing and aahing over the covers, the Epic stories and The Animated Cerebus. Not the most diplomatic thing to say on a website made up of long-time readers, but I'm afraid it's the way I look at it. These are the sort of circles that I go round and round on a good bit of the time.

There are so many angles and permutations that its really difficult to arrive at a conclusion. The fact that the first priority is keeping the trade paperbacks in print 1-16, I think that shows what I consider, personally, to be The Definitive Cerebus. Collected Letters 2004 is running at about 500 pages at this point, in the same format as High Society. I think Cerebus readers will "get it". At least I hope they will. It seems to fit the bill in the same way that Aardvark Comment used to close out the total monthly Cerebus package. The sixteen volumes needed something like Aardvark Comment to finish off. My own first experience with a collected letters volume was Oscar Wilde's. It seemed very strange, at first, because you're only getting the one side of the story, but, to me, it's certainly the best way of familiarizing yourself with a writer. When I did my Hemingway research, the first thing I did was to read Selected Letters, which wasn't nearly as good because of the motive in selecting the letters (Mary Hemingway wanted to discredit all versions of Papa except her own), but it was still a very good introduction to Hemingway. I actually happened on the idea of doing it myself accidentally. It seemed to me that the easiest way to answer the letters was to put them all in one "save as" computer file and just print them out one at a time as they were completed. At that point, I thought, you know if I just delete each person's address as I go and center their name over their letter in 20 pt. Type, badda-bing-badda-boom instant Collected Letters format. So, I thought, It will make for a nice little one-off volume, a quick eighty- or a hundred-page snapshot of what was going on a month after I finished, as I answered the three-year backlog of mail, leading up to Cerebus 300 coming out and then on through what response there was to issue 300.

I've just finished file No.17 of 50 pages each, so the modest little volume idea has gone by the wayside. It might turn out to be a strange enough book that it could end up becoming the Cerebus introductory volume. Here, read this. If this interests you, Cerebus will probably interest you. And for long-time readers, here's everything that was going on in my life from January 23, 2004 on. As I'm doing here, I tried (and am trying) to answer everything as exhaustively and as honestly as I could (and can), in no small part because somewhere up ahead (with sufficient cross-referencing) I may end up having answered virtually every question anyone can throw at me. This was the idea behind The Guide to Self-Publishing and it seems to me that that's worked for about seven years now: if you make sure that you answer everything in print, rather than in conversation, you can just hand someone the whole package.

A number of these letters are ten and fifteen pages long, so when I say that I'm trying to answer the questions exhaustively I mean to the metaphorical point of utter collapse in a lot of cases. As it stands I'm still answering mail close to ten or twelve hours a day so, obviously, even if there wasn't the "permissions" problem, I would never have time to input all of the mail that I'm answering, but I will certainly be encouraging those Cerebus readers who are interested to post their side of the correspondence to the Newsgroup if they're so inclined cross-referenced to the relevant page numbers. I detect an ill-concealed lack of interest whenever I mention Collected Letters 2004. I mean, I do understand that people are hoping that I'm going to do more comics, but I have to say that the odds are not very good for a variety of reasons, foremost among them the fact that feminism is still a universal condition in the comic-book field. It would be like asking me to do an astronomy textbook for a world that still universally believes in a "flat earth". Mentally, this is always what I run up against when I consider doing a new comic-book story. I don't believe the earth is flat and, while acknowledging that belief in a flat earth is a fully protected free will choice and honestly meaning no offence, I really don't have anything to communicate to people who do believe in a flat earth beyond what I've already said. When I look at the Diamond Previews catalogue, all I see is super-heroes, soft-core pornography, paganism and Marxist-feminist propaganda, all perfectly valid free will and First Amendment protected choices but of zero interest to me.

If that changes, even incrementally, I think I'll know. But the pendulum has been swinging at top speed away from me for at least the last fifteen years and it shows no signs of stopping or even slowing down. I'm very appreciative, more than I could ever express, that the store owners whose customers genuinely prefer super-heroes, soft-core pornography, paganism and Marxist-feminist propaganda are also willing to carry some or all of the Cerebus trades. I consider that a very open-minded thing to do for someone whose only claim to fame is that he's lost the Best Letterer award every time he's been up for it. I still have high hopes that Cerebus might be a top-selling line of trade paperbacks someday. As it stands right now it seems more polite to just to stay out of the way and let the Marxist-feminists bring the comic-book field to dizzying new heights now that Dave Sim and Cerebus aren't in the way, irritating everyone and being evil. I mean, for me, this is a very comfortable situation. I don't owe anyone anything that I'm aware of, so I'm able to correspond with people who are genuinely interested in ideas. I don't have to worry about any of them. They read the book. They know who I am and they know what I think and they're actually interested in an exchange of viewpoints.

Likewise with Following Cerebus. Craig and John are big boys. They read the book and they're actually willing to attach their names to a magazine devoted to it. Not something I would have recommended personally, but, as I say, they're big boys and able to make their own decisions. And then there's the Newsgroup, the only place in the world right now which is willing to discuss my work or myself as having any sort of merit. And even that is mostly a dozen or two dozen people with 500 people listening. Can you imagine how many of those 500 people would be flat-out humiliated if anyone even suspected how often they sneak over here when no one's watching them because they feel compelled to check and see what everyone's saying on that weird website where freedom of expression actually means something besides using the word cunt nine times in the same sentence or gratuitously insulting people because you're hiding behind a pseudonym?

And personally, I think that's great.

Genuine freedom is an irresistible concept so, to me, anyone in the comic-book field who sneaks over to see what the Cerebus Yahoos are talking about, well, to me that means that there's always hope. Even so far off in the future that you can't even pretend to see it from here, hope is still hope.

As I recently wrote to Stephen Holland of Page 45, the Yahoo newsgroup is something I never would've come up with on my own or have seen a need for. Fortunately, his business partner Mark Simpson did see a need and went ahead and filled it. And here we are on the narrow swaying rope bridge between issue 300 and Following Cerebus No.1. And, having set the whole thing in motion, Stephen and Mark don't even participate anymore. You can't beat that with a stick.

Well, THEN. NOW, it's just a couple of hobos fighting over a near-empty bottle of cheap rotgut, and occasionally wondering who that kid in the bunny suit is. ALL the trendy, good-looking Cerebus fans are on the Facebook grou...I mean HERE. Here. The creme-de-la-creme frequent A Moment of Cerebus.

And I thank you kindly! (I'm SO fired...)

Next Time: While I start checking to see if the guy who runs the Power Pachyderms Blog is looking for a replacement, Hobbs!

File under: "Hey, I forgot about that!"

Hi, Everybody!

Ahem, say it with me now:

Comiclink auctions.

The remastered Volume 1, digitally for $9.99.

For anyone who missed the birthday card Kickstarter, there's a Indiegogo live

So, scanning through Jeff Tundis's www.cerebustheaardvark.com I found the "F.A.Q." tab, which has all of the Yahoo Group "5 Questions" that Dave answered back in the day. And in the Cerebus Volume 1 section, there was this one:

Q3: Jaka's self-exile from Palnu: From her letter at the end of i16, it would seem that if she doesn't actually visit on occasion, she carries on a friendly correspondence with Julius. Later, in i24, Katrina relates the story from A Night at the Masque with Lord Julius as the hero, as told by her sister/Julius' niece, obviously Jaka, who must have again been talking to Julius, at least through the posts. She doesn't sound like the missing person who was the object of a 12 year search. Is this just an unintended inconsistency in the book? Was the 12-year search a ruse put on by Julius to cover up that he was, whether rapist or mere humiliator, the cause of her flight? (And if he was, why is she so chummy?)

DAVE: I've just noticed that you guys often manage to ask three questions while only using one number. Well, I apologize that this one gets pretty complicated in a hurry, but here goes:

The situation between Jaka and Lord Julius was the same as the relationship between Lord Julius and anyone. Julius stayed ahead of the game by staying ahead of everyone playing it and being the only one who knew how the whole thing fit together (that is, that it doesn't fit together, but as long as you can keep your forward momentum and treat everyone in your life as a straight man, it all works out in the end. This was my insight at the time that, at essence, conducting an effective and successful leftist government is really no different from how Groucho handles the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera).

The difficulty that this posed for Lord Julius' family and romantic relationships is obvious,it's essentially playing the female trick back onto them. Lord Julius' government, life and relationships consists entirely of curves that go nowhere. He's a fun house mirror and a roller coaster. I would assume that he had a certain affection for Jaka that was probably half genuine familial love and part Groucho "Memoirs of a Mangy Lover". Let me put it this way, if Harpo had had a gorgeous willowy blonde daughter, could you actually picture Groucho keeping his eyebrows in one place when she hit the age of majority? To kick it up a notch, in the context of political power that we're discussing it is, after all, very difficult to differentiate "uncle" and "mangy lover" if you have someone's fate in your hands as would be the case with Lord Julius and his entire family. As can be seen with the Caesars, once you start trafficking at or near the levels of absolute dominion, incest is never very far down on the list of executive privileges you're going to be tempted to allow yourself if only because you're allowed everything else. What is illicit to other people is commonplace for you and consequently not exciting, so you gradually find yourself contemplating larger and larger societal taboos. The situations are not entirely comparable, Lord Julius relative to Palnu was more comparable to Caesar Augustus than, say, Nero or Caligula relative to Rome.

As with the Caesars, proximity is all and the greatest female proximity to the apex consists in legitimized sexuality (marriage), family ties or illegitimate sexuality (the mistress). When absolute power devolves upon an individual man, the latter two categories of women are quite apt to aspire to the primary one, proximity always seeks greater proximity. Given that in any hierarchy a wife outranks a sister, a sister will be tempted to become a wife if it's on offer. This is part of the conundrum that Jaka poses. You can certainly understand a young girl being humiliated as she was on her birthday, being "mistaken" for Astoria, but presumably this didn't come out of thin air.

In one sense a practical joke, but in another sense, Lord Julius was very directly addressing a specific speculation (in a Caesar-like context) which would result from Jaka reaching a marriageable age. All part of the "keep 'em guessing" Lord Julius travelling circus. And what's her reaction? She flees to another city and becomes a tavern dancer. So, to me, at one level she's asserting her basic decency which has been offended at even the surface level of meaning and, at the same time, she's playing right along in the same way that any "woman scorned" usually does when you hit those kinds of hot buttons, she usually goes out and does something slutty (or many slutty things).

On another level she could be indicating, yes, this is what I am and then biding her time until she comes back and takes her place as "Lady Julius". I would assume that she reacted to any overt contact from anyone from Palnu by moving along to another tavern and would only respond to actual letters from Lord Julius, himself, (in her case, sent to various "general delivery" outlets). To which she would respond in what she would see as a comparable fashion to his own as possible. She is a pretty decent and guileless individual on a strictly human level, so she would only be able to address the practical joke at a certain number of levels. (given that she's a largely humourless and intrinsically easily offended individual,that is, that she is irretrievably female,this mostly consisted in being contrary and indulging in contrary behaviours: to punish Lord Julius for not being who she pictured him to be, she would repay unreliability with unreliability: promising, as an example, that she would come for a visit,repeatedly,and then not showing up when she says she is going to, as in i16. There. That'll show him. Which of course it wouldn't.

To her it's about as withering as her later "Ha-ha on you Gertrude Cirinist Poopiehead." In any tit-for-tat exchange she's largely unarmed. The larger consideration that she misses, it seems to me, is that she was implicitly inside of Lord Julius' context to a far greater extent than he was inside of hers. That is, given his greater importance in the larger Estarcion scheme of things, she was Lord Julius's niece to a far greater extent than he was Jaka's uncle. But, these are just the sort of things which feminism,actually their more refined dichotomies, Cirinism and Kevillism,causes to be seen through a glass darkly. If you are sufficiently perverse, that is, at essence so intrinsically composed of funhouse mirrors and roller coasters, it is possible,as was the case from 1981 onward, to see the former Lady Diana Spencer as larger than the British crown, of greater significance than God's Anointed on earth that the bearer of that Crown is held to be and, as happened with Diana Spencer, feministic "All you need is love" perversions take on a life of their own and, in my view, compelled what would otherwise have been a very nice, pretty nursery school teacher elevated to Princess of the Realm to feel obligated, as part of the feminist zeitgeist in which she unhappily found herself, to contend against the British Crown in the way that a three-year-old rebels against parental authority (because women are incapable of seeing anything as being larger than themselves if they are raised in the feminist manner). The only things that have any importance in the feminist context are a) to be strong, which is to say wilful ("My way or the highway.") and b) to be independent, which is to say contentious and contrary.

The legions of perverse women which feminism had unleashed upon the world, observing these goings-on, nurtured the conflict: every daughter aligning with Diana against every mother, Queen Elizabeth. As long as it's just your mother-in-law, it had what it proved to have: wonderful soap opera potential of the beautiful stylish young girl against the miserable old bag. But this was one of God's Anointed on earth. That's a very different scrap. "Oh, pooh. No one believes that load of old bullocks anymore." Well, if that's what you choose to think, that's what you choose to think, but don't come crying to me if you find out that a good millennium worth of tradition proves to be a slightly larger counterweight to your "Oh, pooh" than you want it to be. No, of course Jaka couldn't evade detection any more than Princess Diana could (well, somewhat more given the absence of electronic media). But, you can, and both did, create the illusion of having your own life if you're willing to force yourself to be fundamentally ignorant of reality on an on-going basis. In Princess Diana's case you have to date a Muslim to even create the illusion that you're outside of the orbit of your estranged husband. The situations are analogous. How do you stop being Lord Julius' niece? Answer: you can't. Who can you be or aspire to be in 20th century Britain if you're Prince Charles' ex-wife? Answer: nobody. All options are well down in the pecking order. All you can do is to create either the illusion or the reality of building your own power base or just accept that you're a marginalised,instead of a central figure,in the cast of the play you were just performing in. Completely unacceptable from a feminist standpoint. So, that's essentially what happened with Jaka. Everyone kept watching her to see what sort of a power base she was going to build. Which was fine from the Cirinist and Kevillist standpoint as long as it was just her and Tom, Dick and Harry on the side of a mountain acting out all the parts she had written for them (well, except Dick,that is, Oscar). Once Cerebus moved in, it was a different situation. The self-exiled Princess of Palnu and the former Pope. It was distinctly analogous to Diana Spencer taking up with the son of an extravagantly wealthy arriviste Muslim (and it was certainly interesting keeping track of the many misadventures of Ms. Spencer even as I seemed to be pretty accurately fictionalizing them) where "what is up with that?" it seems to me, became no longer a merely soap-opera based inquiry, given that several ascending layers of reality were possibly and quite suddenly in jeopardy both from the Cirinist and Kevillist perspective (in our world, I mean) and from the vantage point of those institution(s) they were, as usual, attempting to undermine. I mean, feminism is the real-life version of TV's Survivor. The idea is to pay lip service to pluralism, freedom and inclusiveness while ruthlessly destroying anyone who might even potentially be competition. I don't believe in the conspiracy theories about Diana's death because there were too many layers of reality "in play" that I can see. A direct line attempt to threaten to "bring down" the Anointed of God (it is noteworthy, to me anyway, that so many of those vulgar baskets and balloons and signs outside Kensington Palace asserted that "Heaven has found her Queen" and so on. Diana of the Hunt and all that Alan Moore-like rubbish that was, I think, the actual underpinning of the Diana Spencer Story as she chose, however inadvertently and naively, and to her own decided detriment in the long term,to tell it). Meanwhile, back at my funnybook and speaking of inadvertently, it's a hallmark of Jaka's actual disingenuous nature that looking slutty was probably entirely inadvertent on her part. It was just "fancy dress" in the English sense. Putting on costumes and dancing. It took Mrs. Thatcher to get her, kicking and screaming all the way, to see what a tavern dancer actually is. On another level she could never actually detach herself from Palnu and Lord Julius. Ostensibly because she loves him, but, at a deeper level, because of the extent to which being the Princess of Palnu was central to what she was.

She certainly didn't forget her diplomatic immunity or fail to make use of her status in displacing bartenders from their premises all across Estarcion. She was always the Princess of Palnu who thoroughly enjoyed playing "Just call me Jaka." I should probably have made clearer in my earlier answer that Jaka was indeed molested as an infant but that the recollection was very deeply buried,only coming out in fever dreams, as an example. That is, my having conveyed that information, there is a part of Jaka you know more about than she does. It would actually be unlikely that Lord Julius would be the culprit. In the context of absolute political power there just wouldn't be any occasions when the Grandlord of Palnu would be left alone with his infant niece. What would even be the pretext? Of course at the Caesarian level you don't need a pretext, but it would be extremely unlikely for an Augustus,although I grant you it would be less unlikely for a Nero or a Caligula.

Click for bigger, ya know, if you're into that...

Which kinda plays into My "nutty" Fan Theory...

Next Time: Depends on how much more snow I get...

Insane Cerebus Fan Theories (#1) (part two. Don't worry, it's only a two parter.)

Hi, Everybody!

Comicslink is here!

The Kickstarter for the birthday card.

The Vark Wars continue. If you want in: thevarkwars@gmail.com, ya got til Friday...

                                                                                                                                           

Okay, continuing from yesterday:

So, having pitched my theory to Dave, he shot me down like I was Snoopy in a Sopwith Camel.

End of story right?

Well, it wouldn't be an 

Fan Theory if it did...

So Dave said:

After the Big Trauma, Lord Julius never again had any kind of influence over Jaka for obvious reasons.  She was certainly capable of portraying herself as the loving niece and completely ignoring the Big Trauma in her dealings with her uncle but always on her own terms.  I mean, picture the level of profound wilfulness that would allow a twelve-year-old princess to be dancing in taverns.  The sensible thing for Lord Julius to do was to send some people to get her, but the Big Trauma was pretty well incandescent to the point of emitting its own level of radiation capable of melting lead.  All you could do was to keep a few Iestan undercover guards nearby and let her dance in taverns and hope for the best. 

Now, it's a nice theory, but does the series actually support it?

Well, here's the "Big Trauma":

From Jaka's Story...

...courtesy CerebusDownloads.com...

...Thank You very much...

Yup, "Big Trauma"!

Except, the text bits of Jaka's Story are written by Oscar, and we know that Jaka refutes his accounts in Going Home:

So, wait, Jaka ran away at twelve, and never went back, BUT used up multiple dance cards at every dance and ball?

I'd say the Trauma couldn't have been THAT Big.

And then there's THIS bit from Jaka's Story:

Which plays off of this bit from High Society:

But I still say Lord Julius and Jaka were in cahoots somewhat, or else how do you explain this bit from the end of High Society?

So dang mysterious...

And that dang black shirt was the same one...

I mean look at it!!!

Next Time: HOBBS!!! YOU'RE UP!!!