Showing posts with label Ernest Hemingway. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ernest Hemingway. Show all posts

Saturday, 10 January 2026

Please Hold For Dave Sim 1/2026

Hi, Everybody!

It's that damn time again:

Audio for the people who DON'T think Spotify is fuckin' garbage (you poor bastards...):
#FuckSpotify

Video for the people who understand how this thing is supposed to work:

Part 0: I "cut 'em off at the pass", and Dave gets indelicate...

Part 1: Dave discusses the latest Tales From the Wedding Present annual he got from Lee Thacker
Part 2: Will Gray wanted Dave's thoughts on a Ernest Hemingway photo and the caption posted with it

Part 3: Dave got a Christmas card from David L. Russell

Part 4: Dave discusses Christoph McNeill's 2010 Bill Sienkiewicz commission of Cerebus

Part 5: MJ Sewall has a question about Dave and...rulers?

Part 6: Larry Wooten has a question about a con sketch he acquired
Part 7: MJ Sewall has a question about Denis Kitchen's involvement in Susan Alston's Dave Sim's Last Girlfriend. And I remind Everybody about my "relationship" with Denis Kitchen
Part 8: April Cooper (AKA Creative Fey) has questions


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Like the logo? I stole it...








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Friend to the Blog, James Bing-Bong-Shama-Lama-Ding-Dong Smith has a new Papa Balloon and Cactus Comic on the Kickstarter.

And, coming in February, The 1982 Tour Book (click the link to be notified on launch).
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The Help Out Bill Messner-Loebs Go Fund Me, or buy Rodney Schroeter's book with proceeds going to Bill. OR(!) you could buy Bill's book with the Dave backcover. I have discovered links:
Wanderland (Paperback)
Wanderland (Hardcover for the guys who get "hard" for hardcovers...)
Wanderland (Paperback but slightly more expensive...I dunno why...)
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
Hardcover
Paperback
And if you wanna see how the book looks in Real Time...

Over on the Facebookees, Mike Jones shared that Dave has a five SEVEN page Strange Death of Alex Raymond story in YEET Presents #68. Mike Jones still has 30 copies of the second printing available, ya gotta back them on Patreon to get it.
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Larry Shell could use a hand to keep his house.
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Dave also wanted me to post this:

Lots of little words, click for bigger.
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Up to 35% off January 11-18 and January 28-February 1.*
*Sale dates are not final and therefore subject to change.

Speaking of Merch, if you want a strange near-antique, shoot an email to momentofcerebus@gmail.com, and I'll tell ya where to send the $20USD I want for these. No shipping charge in the States or Canada. Everybody else add $10USD for shipping. I'll send 'em anywhere the postman is willing to go...
Back and front.
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You can get all 16 volumes of Cerebus, many of them Remastered for $99CANADIAN at CerebusDownloads.com (More if you want the Remastered Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing...)
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Heritage has:
  • The original art to Cerebus: the Six Deadly Sins Cover, Avarice, and Gluttony? Why doesn't Dave have this? (Coming soon)
  • Cerebus #81 page 11 (coming soon)
  • Cerebus #81 page 12 (coming soon)
And ComicLink (remember ComicLink? Seiler brought us ComicLink. R.I.P Jeff.) has:
Thanks to Steve for sending the links. 
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Oliver' Simonsen'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".
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Next Time: I might dip into the AV Family Photo Album...
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Sunday, 6 October 2024

Please Hold For Dave Sim 10/2024

Hi, Everybody!



Audio:

Video:

I decided to make the videos just a single feature length one.

This may have been a mistake. (It took just as long to make as the shorts do. But without the little "exportation breaks" I get. (Didn't help I had to haul the kids all over creation for their extracurriculars and birthday parties.) I might go back and break it up and reupload the constituent parts...if I get the time.)

  • I remember Jeff Seiler
  • The Continuity of TMNT #8 and Spawn #10 
  • Steve Peters and his ⁠Sparky: Cosmic Delinquent Kickstarter⁠ 
    • Dave has an idea to help "goose" the campaign over the finish line, but we won't find out until the almost last minute.
    • Steve has "decided to add new original art rewards. I don't know if it'll help, but we'll give it the old college try. All art rewards have the same conditions: I'll draw whatever scene you want, but with either Sparky or Comicverse characters (or, if anybody wants to get really obscure, Rabbit Hell characters). I have several 4" X 9" pieces, which will be used as single panels in a future Comicverse story, or blank Comicverse sketch covers."
Like this one I got in the past:
Click for bigger
  • Who used the Lectratone, and when? 
  • Dave's favorite Cerebus covers 
  • What are the beliefs one has to hold to be a Marxist? 
  • A correction regarding last month's discussion of Chester Brown's Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus 
  • Why the earliest Cerebus Trade collections are "spineless" 
  • Does Dave do commissions? 
    • Answer: Yes. A the more you pay the better they'll be...
  • A discussion of Monotheism 
  • A discussion of Jim Valentino 
  • Dave's thoughts on Manga 
  • The amazing price a slabbed Cerebus #1 went for 
  • The two different covers of Swords of Cerebus #1 
  • The 1982 Tour book
Plus, the usual chitchat.

It's two hours and eighteen minutes. Heck, that's almost as long as a GOOD Marvel Movie. Make a bucket of popcorn. Get a large drink. Take an edible (if their legal where you live.) Kick back. Relax. And watch the colors man...

Rigamarole:
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Dave/Cerebus adjacent Kickstarters:
Steve Peters he's not even 50% funded, but he's offering New Art Rewards:
With one week to go, we have a very steep climb to the finish line! I've decided to add new original art rewards. I don't know if it'll help, but we'll give it the old college try. All art rewards have the same conditions: I'll draw whatever scene you want, but with either Sparky or Comicverse characters (or, if anybody wants to get really obscure, Rabbit Hell characters). I have several 4" X 9" pieces, which will be used as single panels in a future Comicverse story, or blank Comicverse sketch covers.
I've gotten a few of the sketch covers, and Steve ALWAYS knocks it out of the park. Can't recommend that option enough... Six days to go.
James Habaneros Rancheros Windsor Catherine-Jones-Starky he's made it, but you  still have 53 hours to get in on the fun!
Shannon Wheeler, totally funded. I'ma getting a copy because I bought the last collection, and remastered goodness is always cool.
Robert T. Jeschonek, launching soon.
John and Scott Palochik, 19 days to go. Dave liked issue #1.
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October 8-13, and 23-28.*
*Sale dates are not final and therefore subject to change.
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The Cerebus Humble Bundle is over, you can STILL get all 16 volumes for $99CANADIAN at CerebusDownloads.com (More if you want the Remastered Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing...)
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Heritage has the original Art to Sparkybus.
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The Help Out Bill Messner-Loebs Go Fund Me, or buy Rodney Schroeter's book with proceeds going to Bill. 
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The Last Day Without nothing.
   "      "     "        "  Dave's signature.
   "      "     "        "  an Old Cerebus Remarque
   "      "     "     Auction catalog for the Panoramic Remarques. 
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Oliver' Simonsen'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".
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Next Time: If I'm not too busy, more later. Otherwise, Mondays...
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Sunday, 4 September 2016

Ernest Hemingway in Cerebus

Cerebus Vol 14: Form & Void (2001)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard
THE COMICS JOURNAL:
(from A History of Ernest Hemingway in Comics: Part 2 by Robert Elder, 2 September 2016)

Cerebus #251–265 (2000-2001)
Other literary luminaries, or their doppelgangers, have appeared in Dave Sim's 300-issue run of Cerebus, including Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.

The title character -- a humanoid aardvark who starts as a barbarian and becomes a prime minister, a pope, and finally, an outcast -- is the vehicle for Sim's exploration of philosophy, religion and gender politics.

In this story, "Form & Void", Cerebus treks home with his love, Jaka, and they encounter his idol, author "Ham Ernestway". This Hemingway avatar depicts the author at the end of his life, nearly subverbal as he fights a losing battle with depression. His icy wife Mary, always at his side, works to protect his legacy.

This spare story arc near the end of Cerebus' 300-issue run is part comic book, part obsessive notebook of Sim's Hemingway-related citations and tangents published at the back of each issue. The research Sim conducted for this arc is staggering, and he goes to great lengths to prove that Mary Hemingway kept a handwritten journal from her 1953 safari in Africa that’s since been lost or destroyed in favor of her typed and edited manuscript.

Sim's references rely heavily on Hemingway’s posthumously published The Garden of Eden and its depiction of gender ambiguity. On one page in Cerebus, an older Hemingway begins to disrobe, revealing women's lingerie.

The text quotes Hemingway: "Mary is a sort of prince of devils... She always wanted to be a boy and thinks as a boy without ever losing any femininity... She loves me to be her girl, which I love to be – not being absolutely stupid, and also loving to be her girl since I have other jobs in the daytime."
Sim goes farther than most scholars and biographers in claiming that Hemingway was bisexual.

"If all of the Garden of Eden manuscript pages were ever published, I'm sure Hemingway would become a de facto bi-sexuality poster boy," Sim says.

Below, a longer Q&A with Sim about Hemingway and Cerebus.

Q: What inspired you to put Hemingway in Cerebus?

A: I took Norman Mailer's word for it that Hemingway was the Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the Literary World and decided that I would "do" him as the "capo di tutti capi" ["boss of all bosses"] literary presence in Cerebus -- all without having read of word of his fiction. If he's good enough for Mailer, he's good enough for me.

Q: Did Hemingway's writing have any impact on your work?

A: I'm a huge fan of the very early Hemingway, but ultimately decided that most of his work was "The Emperor's New Clothes". Not much "there" there. The lower-case in our time I would rate the highest [in our time was Hemingway's short story 1924 collection printed in Paris. His 1925 expanded edition, printed in New York, was upper-cased as In Our Time -- ed.]. Some parts of Men Without Women. I'd rate Fitzgerald and Mailer higher than I do Hemingway.

Q:  Even though you weren't a fan of Hemingway's work, what was your understanding of the author's popularity during his lifetime? What was his appeal?

A: The adventurer! All the frontiers would be explored in the course of Hemingway's lifetime and he was one of the last to travel to exotic locations and write about them and his choices were very astute: he made Kilimanjaro, bullfighting, the running of the bulls at Pamplona and the Spanish Civil War, among others, his own.

It must've been both a great joy and a great burden to be Hemingway, probably both simultaneously, and in a way that mixed very badly with atheism and alcohol. His "black ass" was largely self-inflicted, I think.

Q:  Scholars have linked Hemingway's "black ass" moods, as Hemingway himself put it, to his family's generational struggle with clinical depression and a legacy of suicide. Since you wrote the "Form & Void" story arc, how have your views on mental illness changed?

A: They haven't. We all go through periods of "black ass" in our lives and it's up to us to pull ourselves out of it. Hemingway didn't, which was a failure on his part. Period.

Q: In the end note for "Form & Void" and in "Tangent", you wrote that Mary Hemingway murdered her husband, and should be brought up on "first degree murder" charges. It's been some time since you wrote that -- was this hyperbole, or do you believe it to be true? Is the failure to prevent the last of several suicide attempts the same as murder?

A: The fact that she left the keys to the gun chest in plain sight suggests to me that she knew what she was doing and she knew what the result would be. So, it seems to me definitely premeditated. That having been said, it was Hemingway who unlocked the gun chest, loaded the weapon and pulled the trigger(s).

Q:  In 2012, you told the Comics Journal: "I think Hemingway was completely bi-sexual…" which is a bolder statement than his biographers have made. What you led to the conclusion that Hemingway was bi-sexual?

A: Two things: first, Mary Hemingway's Africa diary where it was clear that he was fantasizing that she was a young boy -- his "kitten brother"... Second, The Garden of Eden book which he wildly "over-wrote" to the tune of hundreds of pages trying to explain his sexuality in such a way as not to sound gay. He couldn't do it and gave up trying. If all of The Garden of Eden manuscript pages were ever published, I'm sure Hemingway would become a de facto bi-sexuality poster boy.

He wanted to be all man and all woman and he wanted his wives to be all man and all woman. Mary documented that in her journal, he snooped and read it and had to add his own entry after doing so, knowing that Mary's journal would be read, in order to "clarify" things for posterity. I think he thought that everyone was like that: all man and all woman and that he was the only one who was honest about it.

Robert Elder is the co-author of Hidden Hemingway.
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Sunday, 18 January 2015

Short Stories In Six Words

CHAD V:
It is claimed Ernest Hemingway once wrote a six-word short story that could make people cry for a bet. The wager was ten dollars, which Hemingway won with the following: "For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn." However, there's no hard evidence that this ever happened...
...Here’s how Mr. Hemingway described the author’s role in his Nobel Prize winning speech in 1954: "Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed."

I'm sure Dave is well aware of this anecdote. I'm just wondering what were/are thoughts on the story itself, the question of its validity, AND the quote discussing authors lives. Could you forward this to him?

Cerebus #251 (February 2000)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard
EDDIE KHANNA:
Hey Tim. I remember hearing about that anecdote. Wired magazine got a lot of authors (including Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Stan Lee (insert joke about the 'Marvel Method') to do their own version (of the long list, I think I like Alan's the best)

Not sure what Dave would make of it, but my first instinct was to laugh, since I recalled Dave's notes in "To Ham and Ham Not" in the back of Form & Void where he said that Hemingway was trying to come up with a way to create more by doing less, and basically just type type typing. What better way to do that than to basically write classified ads (albeit very clever ones)?

I'm kind of surprised it moved Arthur C. Clarke to tears, but I guess that ties in with the old idea of "an infinite number of drunk typists type type typing away 6 word short stories as an expression of primitivism will sooner rather than later come up with something that will make the creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey and that scene with all the apes at the beginning cry."

Ahhh, I shouldn't be cruel; Hemingway DID write The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, which I thought was very good. It's just too bad they didn't know about fractal mathematical equations back then; otherwise he could have just used one of those as the world's shortest "choose your own adventure" story generator by having people plug in their own numbers.

Hemingway's speech about what it takes to be writer sounds like good advice to me; I'm just not enough of a Hemingway scholar to know for sure how much of it he actually followed it himself. My guess would be, probably not very much.

Hey maybe you could post that email as an Aardvark Comment, or with excerpts from the Wired article as an AMOC blog post? And if Dave has any inclination or time, he could respond to it if he wishes? 


WIRED:
(from Wired Magazine, November 2006)
We'll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves. Dozens of our favorite auteurs put their words to paper, and five master graphic designers took them to the drawing board. Sure, Arthur C. Clarke refused to trim his ("God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist."), but the rest are concise masterpieces.

Automobile warranty expires. So does engine.
- Stan Lee

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

With bloody hands, I say good-bye.
- Frank Miller

I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ?
- Neil Gaiman

“I couldn’t believe she’d shoot me.”
- Howard Chaykin

Broken heart, 45, WLTM disabled man.
- Mark Millar 
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Thursday, 5 December 2013

Ernest Hemingway In Cuba


Forma y Vac’o en Cuba.

As part of a recent trip to Cuba, I figured what the hey let's visit some Hemingway haunts and try and take some pictures  with a copy of Form & Void in them. I mean what's the worst that could happen?

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to see La Floridita, one of his more famous bar hang outs in Havana where he was said to have created his own version of the daiquiri (yes, I said daiquiri. He liked his daiquiri). But I did manage to see the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana, where he first stayed after moving to Cuba and began writing For Whom the Bell Tolls. They have quite the Hemingway shrine on the main floor, with pictures of him (and Mary) all over the walls.

(I apologize in advance for the roughness of some of these pictures. It's hard to take a picture with one hand while also holding a graphic novel in the other and checking over your shoulder for anyone coming up to you and asking, "Pardon, Amigo. But what exactly do you think you are doing?")


 I didn't find out until after I had left that the room where he stayed upstairs has been made into a mini museum and can be looked at (no one there told me this at the time).

The home (or mansion, if you prefer) that Hemingway later built and lived in for many years after moving out of the hotel was called Finca La Vigia, and has also been turned into a Hemingway Museum. Unfortunately it's off the beaten path from where I was (it's about 10 miles outside of Havana in a town called San Francisco de Paula), and I originally wasn't going to go. But then I thought to myself, no. I can't let the millions of Form & Void fans down. At the very least, I owe it to Dave and Ger for the hellish amount of work they put into it, especially the Africa sequence which sounds like it was about as much fun to work on as having bamboo splinters shoved under your fingernails.

I wasn't allowed into the actual house, which is where the actual museum with all the Hemingway memorabilia is, but you're allowed to wander around the outside the house and poke your head in through the windows and take some pictures. At one point one of the Museum guides kindly offered to take my camera and get some pictures from the inside.



Standing right outside the window to Hemingway's working office while he took some shots, I took my chance and pulled out my copy of Form & Void and asked if he wouldn't mind taking a picture of it in the office. "It's a Hemingway book" I told him. He put it on Hemingway's desk and took a picture. SCORE!


As he was handing it back he looked at it, and I could tell he was thinking, "Dave Sim and Gerhard? Qu?" I opened up the book and showed him a picture of Hemingway and he went, "Ahh! Si! Si!" and it was all good.

And for Ger, here are some pictures of Hemingway's boat, the Pilar.

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