Heritage has many Dave Sim/Cerebus/Strange Death of Alex Raymond items. So I ask again:
Who's Got Money?
Oh no you @#%&ING don't. Kevin Eastman's ORIGINAL cover Painting to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #8. Current bid: $26,000!
Well, since you don't have the price of a new car laying around...
Who's Got Money? 2
Cerebus #26 page 1. Pretty iconic. First page of the second volume of Cerebus. Current bid: $2,200!
That's almost attainable.
Who's Got Money? 3
Cerebus #27 page 8. Cerebus leaves the McGrew brothers to deliver his ransom message. Signed by Dave "to Glen". Current bid: $410. That's reasonable.
Who's Got Money? 4
Cerebus #16 page 3. I'm winning this one until one of you moneybag bastards reads this and decides to shit in my cornflakes. Current bid: $40 (but that's gonna change before I type the next "Who's Got Money?"...) It's even signed by Dave...to "Glen". It even ties into something Dave sent me the week:
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... And now on Mometu.
The date was Thursday, December 16, 1976. I had prevailed in my badgering of Harry Kremer and had the first (and only) REAL job I would ever have — sales clerk of the downstairs half of Now & Then Books. I didn’t recognize her as the brunette from the convention at my high school (that realization would come some weeks or months later). No, I was not Harry — could I help her in some way?
She and some friends were putting together a magazine like Dark Shadows, she said. Would Now & Then Books be interested in advertising in it or carrying copies for sale? Thinking she was referring to a cult horror/parody TV series of the time, I asked what sort of content she intended. ‘Like Dark Shadows,’ she insisted. Insight dawned.
‘Do you mean Dark Fantasy?’
‘Oh, right. Dark Fantasy.’ She never missed a beat — a trait I would come to know well over the next few years. I kept her talking for a while, trying to get some picture of her level of expertise. It was pretty clear that she was a novice in the publishing world. I offered my own services in assisting her. After all, I (ahem) had been published in Dark Fantasy. That got her interest (a genuine first for me — interest from a female). She left me her name, address and phone number. I wrote down my own. Kind of exciting really, since I had had my own one-room apartment for all of sixteen days. I had sold all of my comic books for approximately two thousand dollars and took the job running the downstairs at Now & Then Books for seventy-five dollars a month and rented the apartment for $120 a month — it was ‘freelance artist/writer sink-or-swim’ time.
She recognized my name from Dark Fantasy.
She came by the store the next night around the same time to invite me over for dinner (she admitted later that she walked home thinking, ‘What am I? Mary Tyler Moore? I don’t cook dinner for people’). After dinner she pulled out a file with various stories and poems spilling from it. The ‘friends’ turned out to be her brother Michael and her sister Karen. A family friend, Eric Hope, was the only artist in the writing group. To my delight, I found out he had little or no artistic ability. With the methodical efficiency of a would-be suitor seeing his expertise (however limited) as a trump card in the game of romance, I began taking control of the magazine as a means of ingratiating myself to Denise Loubert de Neuilly (the ‘de Neuilly’ was an affectation of sorts; Michael had done some research on the origins of the family name and had determined that it had originated in Neuilly, France).
It was an unexpected switch for me to go from being a marginal presence at Dark Fantasy, a largely unpublished ‘wannabe’, and to find myself a kind of final authority on creative, production and business matters on Cerebus. That was the name of Denise Loubert’s proposed magazine: Cerebus.
Early in 1977, I designed a logo and did an illustration for the front cover. The logo appeared on the first fifty issues of this comic book you’re reading now. When I was done, there was something missing. I told Deni that she needed a name for the publishing imprint. Dark Fantasy was the name of Gene Day’s publication, but it also had the imprint name and logo of his publishing company: House of Shadows. She thought about it for a while and decided to solicit Michael and Karen’s input.
Michael’s suggestion was ‘Vanaheim Press’. I think he made the name up. It had the Nordic ring of Valhalla or Midheim or whatever else. I always took it to be synonymous with Valhalla — a mythological place where good and dutiful warriors go.
Karen’s suggestion was ‘Aardvark Press’. There was that damned quadruped again. It seemed that in her circle of friends a passing fancy had consisted of resting finger and thumb tips on surface and then raising the middle- finger from the surface: four legs and an elongated snout — aardvark.
Having aspiration to become part of the family in the not too-distant future (don’t laugh — it had taken me twenty years to find a girlfriend and I wasn’t about to risk having to wait another twenty years for the next one), I wasn’t going to play favourites and suggested combining the two names: Aardvark-Vanaheim Press.
I have no memory of drawing the first picture of the aardvark mascot. I was doing so much freelance work (both commissioned and on spec) that the work I did for my girlfriend’s magazine was more of a hobby, an afterthought to the day’s work. I only did the one version (‘A Boy and His Aardvark’ was still fresh in my mind, so I don’t think I even referred to the little picture in the dictionary): a cartoon barbarian aardvark (in keeping with the fantasy theme intended for the magazine). I probably knocked it out in about twenty minutes with an extra thirty seconds for the tone.
the original drawing of the aardvark mascot.
As the first issue started to come together, it was Deni who realized that the fanzine’s title, Cerebus, was misspelled. The three-headed dog who guarded Hides in Greek mythology was Cerberus. ‘Not to worry,’ I said, somewhat less than eager to reletter the logo and figure out how to squeeze in an extra letter and transpose two others, We’ll just say that Cerebus is the name of the cartoon aardvark mascot.’
The fanzine was never published. The originals and a cheque for (I believe) $175 were sent to an address in California of a Deep Discount quick printer. The magazine and the money vanished without a trace.
Of course, when something like that happens, it doesn’t happen right away. I recall the optimism and anticipation of the arrival of the first issue gradually giving way to anxiety, then anger and finally resignation. Subsequent issues were left half-finished. The awareness that a magazine like Dark Fantasy operated in the red, financed by Gene’s freelance paychecks, and that Cerebus would be lucky to break even in some distant future — that in fact it would be lucky to lose only a few thousand dollars over the first few years – such awareness, coupled with the loss of the cheque and the originals, dashed the original dream on the rocks of hard truth.
Original cover to Cerebus digest-zine #1
And it was not just Deni Loubert’s dream of making a living from a digest-zine ‘like Dark Shadows’ which had been dealt a blow. Gene Day had started getting more freelance work from Marvel Comics as an inker on Star Wars, Marvel Two-in-One and other titles. Dark Fantasy took a back seat to this job, which would pay his not-inconsiderable mortgage on his new house on First St. in Gananoque. Hellhound, his long-planned magazine-format comics anthology, was dead in the water. Pigeons from Hell, a Robert E. Howard short story for which he had purchased the rights from the Howard estate to do as a comics adaptation, languished as well. His logic was irrefutable. Every hour spent at the drawing board inking Marvel super-hero comics solidified his reputation as a reliable finisher — which garnered him still more work. Every hour spent on Dark Fantasy, or Hellhound, brought him closer to the day when he would have to pay a printing bill, pay the contributors and trust to the unlikely possibility that there would be a profit left over. His experience as a publisher told him that the profit would be insufficient to pay for the printing of the next issue. As a hobby, in Gene’s mind, the satisfaction had to be weighed in the balance against the money and time it consumed. As a livelihood, it was a treadmill to oblivion.
My perception of Gene began to change. I had imitated his ‘hell-bent for leather’ approach to freelancing — swimming like a shark in search of new markets, inundating editors and publishers of all shapes and sizes with work produced on spec, taking my acceptance by publishers A and B and using it as a crowbar to pry an assignment out of publisher C. I had pursued the ‘small press’ opportunity presented to me by Deni Loubert and her magazine Cerebus to mirror Gene’s efforts with Dark Fantasy. As a freelancer I was experiencing far greater success than I could have imagined. In talking to Gene, I recognized that Cerebus was not going to be a moneymaker — either for its publisher or her boyfriend-layout- paste-up-design-illustration guy. The question became one of ‘where to from here?’ If I was to continue following in Gene’s footsteps, I had to build my freelance career with smaller publishers and attempt to interest someone at Marvel or DC in using me as a writer (my greatest ‘strength’, as perceived by editors and publishers), layout artist (my second greatest strong suit), penciller (unlikely) or inker (impossible). In visiting Gene, the first rush of seeing actual Marvel Comics penciled pages in my friend and mentor’s studio gave way to the disheartening awareness of the crippling workload, Gene’s new status as a small cog in the Big Machine. Even more disheartening was seeing the full-size photocopies of the finished pages and comparing them to their published incarnation — most of Gene’s brushwork and attention to detail languishing beneath pools of magenta, crimson, navy and orange — each page a riot of chromatic inconsistencies.
For my part, my most lucrative jobs in 1977 were Revolt: 2000 — a quartet of super-hero stories I had written and drawn as a commissioned work from the long- departed and never-lamented lrjax Enterprises — and Phantaca’s first issue, drawn from a full script by Jim McPherson. As much as I thought that Gene had taken a wrong turn with his Marvel freelancing, I was left contemplating my own situation — doing second-rate imitations of the (even then) formulaic Marvel style at a fraction of the Big Two’s page rates and for publishers who could only muster a fraction of Marvel’s or DC’s circulation.
In the first weeks after creating the aardvark mascot, I had done a single comic-book panel — just to see what he would look like from a different angle. Some months later, after the loss of the originals and printing bill for Cerebus No. 1, the digest-zine, I drew a sample page, incorporating the original logo. It sat on a shelf in my studio in Deni’s and my first apartment — 48 Weber Street East — through the spring and summer of 1977, as I completed Phantaca No 1 (including a two-week period where I was confined to bed with a virus resembling mononucleosis).
And a new Cerebus figure added to the line-up of Cerebus in Hell? (starting in 2023) Who will it be? Old Cerebus? Fat Cerebus? The fuzzy black shirt Cerebus?
The second episode of Living The Line is now up on YouTube. Sean and I put Yoshiharu Tsuge's The Swamp under the microscope. It is a great book and we had a killer discussion about it. Keep an eye out on Wednesday for a supplementary video to this one in which we try our hands at recreating a panel from this book, a practice which will be a regular feature of the channel! (GENIUS idea, Sean!)
The Final Countdown of this campaign is on! We are so close to 600 pledges. Who is going to help us cross that line?! Pledge with the ferocity of two Labrador Retrievers scarfing down Starbucks Pup Cups.
We appreciate every single one of you for helping who have helped us bring this product to the market and cannot wait to get this book into your hands!
AND:
I have heard that the reason many people wait to pledge until the final day is that they are looking to back winners. Well, here is some winner news!
Sean and I have signed foreign translation deals with TWO different publishers.
Passenger Press, whose translation of Kris Kool by Phillipe Caza blew my mind with the quality of production will be producing an Italian language version of the Strange Death of Alex Raymond! Passenger Press is a small, one-man operation run by Christian Mara. Christian has an amazing passion for producing the highest quality book objects and I am so happy he will be handling SDOAR.
Christian will be running a pre-sale on his website sometime this summer.
Here is a look at his translation of Kris Kool.
For the Spanish language translation we have signed a deal with one of the largest distributors of comics in that market, Planeta de Libros, whose comics division has a large presence in both Spain and Latin/South America! They handle many amazing properties and do amazing work. The reach their distribution will provide is truly humbling. We are so grateful they are bringing Dave's work to the Spanish speaking world!
Bucha and Cammie are pretty excited about this, and are in the car hoping to do a signing tour in South America.
Sorry, girls. I might take you back to Starbucks, though.
And AND:
One more update as we enter the final four hours.
The Preliminary Strange Death will be printed in color, so if you waiting on confirmation of that before ordering, order away!
We have decided to increase the size of the signed and numbered Rip Cerebus print to 11.5 inches wide. I have not run the math on the height yet but the image will print at 10.5 inches, and the print will have .5 inch borders on the top and sides with a 1.5 in dropped bottom.
Also. All backers who ordered a physical copy of the book will now be getting a free digital download of Strange Death!!!
Thank you all again for making this campaign a WILD success!!!!
The Rip Cerebus strip will be printed on a tan, card stock paper at 8" x 3", will be signed by both myself and Dave and numbered as a run of however many are ordered. This is now an add-on (oh...lordy... do we really want to put people through THAT again?) to the campaign that you can nab for $15. ................................................ To reiterate how to manage Add Ons in the abysmal hell of Kickstarter's User Interface... design? Can we call it design? Okay... really poor design.
How this process is SUPPOSED to work:
1. Login into KS (I would STRONGLY recommend using a desktop or laptop computer! Most of the complaints we've had about this not working are from people using Kickstarter on their phones or tablets)
2. click MANAGE YOUR PLEDGE
3. click CHANGE YOUR PLEDGE
4. then click ADD ONS
If this process isn't working for you — Add-ons grayed out or unclickable, or just not visible — then I would suggest trying a different browser. I.e. try it on Firefox or Edge or Chrome instead of what you're currently using. And as I said, most problems seem to be related to using Kickstarter on a phone or tablet.
If you're using the desktop version, you can also try this procedure instead (thanks Philip!) ""If you are on a computer and you go to your list of backed projects (your icon in the upper right), click on the "+" next to the campaign and your pledge will pop up. It should clearly show any add-ons right there. Unfortunately on the mobile app, you cannot do this. You'd need to go through the entire "change my pledge" process to see what you currently have added on. ""
If you try all of that and it still does not work, increase the amount of your pledge by the cost of whatever add-ons you would like, the shipping for them, and let us know about it in the end of campaign survey. This should be an absolute last-ditch effort, because it is going to make fulfillment way trickier, so the less of it the better. ........................... Hope to see some of you later today! Carson
Tell your fans! Remind them that everything will be up to 35% off -- that means $13 tees, $20 phone cases, $30 hoodies, and way more!
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Ya know what's NEVER been on AMOC before (that I can find)?
memoir
WHY AN AARDVARK?
Our story begins with me winning a call-in trivia question on Kitchener radio station CHYM (back when it was still 1490 on the AM dial — I would do a series of Doonesbury-style newspaper strip ads for them years later when they made the switch to 570). I forget what the question was, but I’m pretty sure it was comics-related. Anyway, what I won was a copy of Kensington Market’s first (maybe ONLY) album, Aardvark. I never listened to the album (to this day my interest in any music is severely limited and my interest in exploring the ‘cutting edge’ of music nil), but I kept it around for quite a while because, hey, I WON it, right? The cover was a colour photograph of a model stage, the curtains opened. There in the center of the stage was a very strange-looking quadruped. The year would have to have been 1969 or 1970 (maybe some enterprising Kensington Market devotee could narrow it down for us). Anyway, this was the first connection between Dave Sim and Aardvarks.
The next connection was T. Casey Brennan. Now, Casey is another story entirely and one which more than merits a separate and extensive piece, which I’ve resolved to get to — this resolution going stronger with each ‘History of Vampirella’ piece I read that neglects to even mention Casey as Vampirella’s primary and most prolific scripter way back when. In a larger sense this is the reason that I stopped answering the ‘Why an Aardvark’ question some time ago. Each thread of the actual, fully interwoven answer is deserving of lengthy explication. Taking it down to ‘sound byte’ level makes me uncomfortable and reduces many large contributions and contributors to bit players — Gene Day and T. Casey Brennan foremost on that list.
I first became aware of T. Casey back in 1971 when Don and Maggie Thompson, in their mimeo-zine, Newfangles (I was a subscriber from early ‘71 until it merged with Alan Light’s Buyer’s Guide a couple of years later), listed the results of balloting for the ACBA Awards (The Academy of Comic Book Arts — short-lived but influential) for that year. I recognized the names and works of everyone (I believe Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Conan by O’Neil/Adams and Thomas/Smith dominated the awards that year) except the names of the creators of one of the runner-up ‘Best Short Story’ awards — this one for ‘On the Wings of a Bird’ by T. Casey Brennan and Jerry Grandenetti, published in Creepy 36. This was well past the Archie Goodwin – Al Williamson-Roy Krenkel-Steve Ditko-Frank Frazetta heyday of the Warren magazines, at least insofar as quality was concerned. They were still profitable; they just weren’t very good for the most part — certainly a world away from being an odds-on favourite for a ACBA Award in the ‘Best Short Story’ category.
Casey lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and evidently got word of the SOPAF(Southern Ontario Panel Art Festival) that was held at Now & Then Books in June of 1972 (the same weekend of Watergate and the same weekend Wendy and Richard Pini got married — told you this was complicated and interwoven, didn’t I?). He just showed up. Phoned to make sure that there was something going on and came all the way from Michigan, f’cryin’ out loud. Riding the wave of his success with ‘On the Wings of Bird’, Casey soon got a reputation for showing up anywhere there was a comic-book convention going on (he had a speech impediment which caused him to pronounce his r’s as w’s, and doing a Casey impression — ‘Faw out! Faw out! Whewe can I cwath tonight? Can I cwash at youw place?’ — guaranteed an easy laugh in the Detroit-Toronto corridor in 1972-73. No one laughed at the joke as much as Casey did himself). I was an interview maniac at the time, having edited the first issue of the Now & Then Times in 1972 and working with John Balge on CANAR (Comic Art News & Reviews). Casey not only agreed to do an interview, he agreed to come back to Kitchener to do it. He even agreed to stay at my parents’ place! It was a weird, weird break-point or a sixteen- year-old comic-book fan to have a real-life professional comic-book writer just hanging out in the half of the basement where I kept my comic books. I had dug up as many of his Warren stories as I could in anticipation of doing the interview and found that they were awfully good and awfully different. There was almost nothing of rhetorical Warren-style horror to them. Instead they were allegories, archetypal dark fables with titles like the aforementioned ‘On the Wings of a Bird’, ‘Carrier of the Serpent’, ‘The Cut-Throat Cat Blues’, “Climbers of the Tower’. The stories and Casey’s approach to them were a revelation to me. There was the surface of the story and then there was your own interpretation — or various interpretations — to be had in the aftermath. Casey fundamentally changed my view of what constituted a good comic-book story. After reading his work, I found most comic books terribly two-dimensional in their approach. The surface was all that was there — nothing was going on besides the ostensible. I wrote and drew the first page of a parody of ‘On the Wings of a Bird’ called ‘On the Back of a Pro’ and sent it to Casey, asking if he would write the rest of it. He phoned and told me it was great and asked, ‘Why, when you’ve written something this brilliant, why in God’s name would you want ME to write it?’ It was pretty close to the first time I was ever praised for my creativity, so I finished it — and John published it in CANAR. I THINK I even got paid (yeah, I did — John Balge was the first person who paid me for my work. How could I have forgotten that? Sorry, John.).
Now, at this point you must be thinking to yourself that I’ve succumbed to the temptation to actually write my ‘T. Casey Brennan Appreciation Piece’. Not so — believe it or not, this is STILL the Reader’s Digest version of ‘Why an Aardvark?’ The rich history of T. Casey Brennan, Figure of Mystery, has yet to be told.
Starting in the early summer of 1973, Casey began planning his own title, to feature his stories drawn by various artists. Vince Marchesano was in on it and various other people. Much to my surprise, I got a script in the mail. Casey wanted ME to do one as well, called ‘Picture This’. I penciled, inked and lettered it, and my penciling, inking and lettering sucked BIG TIME. I sent it in and he accepted it and then sent me another script. This one was called ‘A Boy and His Aardvark’. As diplomatically as possible he asked me just to pencil. it — someone else would do the inking and the lettering (perhaps saving it in the process). I really regretted that I had gotten rid of the Kensington Market album since I now had to work from a tiny picture in my dictionary. The story itself which eventually appeared in Power Comics 1 perplexed me, being concerned with a young boy and his pet aardvark. The splash panel in particular, where the two of them traverse a gauntlet of people wondering aloud why he doesn’t kill the aardvark, etc., etc., seemed over the top. [In later years, as Cerebus passed issue 100 and kept going and (I believe) R. Fiore did his review of Jaka’s Story in which he concluded that I was tired of Cerebus as a character and that his best advice was to ‘lose the aardvark’ — and when that triggered a wave of ‘fan’ mail starting ‘...now that you’re tired of Catches as a character...’ I was struck (not for the first or last time) - by Casey’s remarkable prescience in working with his allegories.] I finished the pencils and sent them off. At that point Casey and the whole project seemed to vanish off the face of the earth. He resurfaced a year or two later (indirectly) when a local fanzine publisher told me he had bought a Casey script called ‘Doorway to the Gods’ and wanted me to draw it. I think I got paid two or three dollars a page (the fanzine publisher was a high-school kid). I did see it as an opportunity to FINALLY do a decent job of drawing a Casey script, so I put a lot more time and effort into it than the page rate warranted.
The next time I saw Casey was in the fall of 1976. Someone (I forget who) was putting on a comic-book convention at my old high school — Forest Heights Collegiate — and Casey was one of the invited guests, as was Gene Day. Here, again, I cringe at having to do a literary encapsulation of someone’s importance in my life. Another large ‘memoir’ is required. ‘In the fullness of time.’ as the saying goes.
Gene and I had hooked up in 1974 and were ‘thick as thieves’ by 1976. I regularly did work for his Dark Fantasy digest zine as well as his other House of Shadows projects like the digest anthology Out of the Depths. He was starting to get work with Skywald — the Warren wannabe. He lived in Gananoque, Ontario (Gateway to the Thousand Islands, as it’s known) upstairs from Augustine Funnell who was sort of Skywald editor Al Hewetson’s fair-haired boy, as far as up-and-coming scripters were concerned.- John Balge and I had done an interview with Al Hewetson (although Skywald’s publishing offices were Manhattan, Archaic Al edited Psycho and Nightmare from his home in St. Catharines, Ontario) that appeared in CANAR. At the time, he had suggested we do an interview with Gus, and Gus Gus had told Gene he should talk tome about doing some illustrations for DF (as Dark Fantasy known). Coincidentally, Archaic Al had published only one T. Casey Brennan story and had not been very happy about it (it was part of the inventory he had inherited from the previous editor). Coincidently, be would publish only one story of mine — ‘Cry of the White Wolf’ — in the last issue of Psycho. It was my first published comic-book story in a newsstand publication.
So, there we were — Gene Day, T. Casey Brennan and myself — on a panel in my old high school in the room where I used to take — History? Biology? I forget, but I guess that either one would be appropriate. It was one of those humiliatingly sparsely attended events (the panel AND the convention). Here are the three of us on the panel — and all of FOUR people in the ‘audience’. One of those four people was an attractive brunette with long straight hair. She had a notebook open and as Casey waxed eloquent, she would jot a line or two. I talked for a little while and then Casey and I had a back-and-forth exchange or two. Of this she recorded not a word. As soon as Gene Day opened his mouth she wrote furiously, evidently trying to record his every word verbatim. I interjected a few pithy observations and was more than a little annoyed that she stopped writing whenever I said anything but started writing energetically as soon as Gene started talking again.
After the panel was over I went back to the dealer’s room in the lobby and joined Harry Kramer in mid-conversation with someone. Harry had just arranged to rent the downstairs of 103 Queen South in addition to the upstairs premises Now & Then Books had occupied since l971. A light bulb went on over my head. “I’ll work the downstairs, Harry. How about it?’ Harry was doubtful. He planned just have his mother run it. He didn’t have the money to — you know — HIRE somebody. ‘I’ll do it for...seventy-five dollars a month.’ He said he would think about it.
I passed the attractive brunette in the halls a couple of times but couldn’t catch her eye. It would be another two months before I found out her name.
Denise Loubert.
Next: Part Two of ‘Why an Aardvark?’: ‘Hi, Are You Harry?’
Originally published in the back of Cerebus #200.
Taken from Margaret "Cerebus Fan Girl" Liss' website. (Although, what kind of Cerebus Fan Girl DOESN'T copyedit her stuff? "archetypal dark fables with tits like the aforementioned ‘On the Wings of a Bird’"? Seriously Mags? And you wonder why you don't get paid vacation days... I HOPE I fixed all her errors...)
Next Time: Hobbs and "Why An Aardvark...in Hell?"...
The ol' AMOC Mailbag gets some pretty interesting "submissions", like:
Paul Slade writes:
Dear AMOC,
On August 19, 2014, I decided to try a little experiment. I addressed the envelope above exactly as you see it here and sealed a brief message inside asking Dave to let me know if the letter ever reached him. Then I stuck an airmail stamp for £1.28 on it (the correct sum) and dropped it in the postbox.
My hope was that, even with such minimal information to work from, the Post Office in Kitchener would be determined enough to figure out the puzzle and deliver my letter correctly. Royal Mail lore, after all, is full of stories relating similar triumphs.
Five years on, with still no word from Dave, I guess it’s time to admit the experiment failed. I’m disappointed in you, postmen of Kitchener, I truly am.
Paul Slade London, UK.
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Steve Swenson writes:
Hiya Matt -
So, this one caught my eye - simply because that's an outrageously high bid for a mid-grade counterfeit.
People's done gone crazy!
Steve
COMIC LINK AUCTIONS!!! Where you can get: a Platinum edition of Birthday card #1 signed by NEAL ADAMS, and DAVE SIM, with a NEAL ADAMS Superman stamp. OR, a Gold edition of Birthday card #1 signed by NEAL ADAMS and DAVE SIM with NO STAMP. Or, OR, a print of the Cover to GREEN DANTE/GREEN VIRGIL #1 (Pretend you're Seiler. Impress your friends. Pester your enemies.) there are three of them, but one of them shall be mine! (Ya know, as long as none of you guys got more money than me...) Four hours and change left...
Wanna give Team Cerebus In Hell? the monies, but don't wanna deal with the hassle of going to a comicbook store and tracking down a copy of the latest Cerebus in Hell? One-Shot (Fornicators Inc. is coming out at the end of the month...)? Well, we've got you covered They're even having a sale right now...
If you're in the market to dress like Dave Sim, you can buy a "Matt D's A Moment of Cerebus" t-shirt right here. Or, if you're one of those nostalgia buffs who likes the earlier funnier A Moment Of Cerebus posts, the Tim W. Logo is available too.
Send pics of your @#$%ING Flimsy postcards From Hell? to momentofcerebus@gmail.com. Most bent to @#$% postcard wins a valuable prize from Dave Sim! (I might have the winner...)
Speaking of Postcards from Hell?, the next Kickstarter is up and running.
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It's Ol' AMOC Mailbag time!
Which means T. Casey Brennan must have checked in:
If you wanna see T. Casey (and some titties, it's "NO RECOMENDADA para menores de 18 anos" 'cause there's a naked chick with a Vampirella "outfit" painted on her.) Here ya go.
Extra titties for those of you who don't "do" links...
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And then I got a submission in the beat to @#$% Postcard contest (mentioned above.):
Hi Matt,
I'm sending you my submission for best beat to hell post card.
While it was "pre-beat to hell" I made the special effort of singling out my card in the video (it's the only one with the tell-tale white horizontal scuff) and through the wonder of technology was able to capture the exact disgusting moment the spit hit the card. For posterity you know, sure to increase it's value ten-fold. (What's ten times zero? Must be alot.)
Keep up the mediocre job of running the favorite blogsite of the usual gang of idiots. Life wouldn't be the same without you.
I dunno Gary, I mean you PAID to have it beat to @#$%, it wan't like a vindictive ex of Dave (who happens to work for CanadaPost) decided to work through her "issues" on your card, ya paid Dave to work out some of *his* issues on your card.
I mean I didn't pay for THIS:
to get beat to @#$%, It just came that way...
Alright, I throw it out to "the usual gang of idiots*" to see what you guys think?
I know nobody's reading this, you're all looking at the titties in T. Casey's video...
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Next Time: Something more substantial?
*Gary's words, not mine...
If you're in the market to dress like Dave Sim, you can buy a "Matt D's A Moment of Cerebus" t-shirt right here. Or, if you're one of those nostalgia buffs who likes the earlier funnier A Moment Of Cerebus posts, the Tim W. Logo is available too.
If you want this:
Bidding's at Thirteen bucks, thanks to Jeff Seiler!
If you got a couple of extra bucks and want to do a fellow Cerebus fan a solid, Friend of the Blog Mike Battaglia has a go fund me here.
All the Postcard from Hell? #2 surveys are in, and the cards are at the printers.
The Cerebus In Hell? "Approval Is An Authoritarian Construct" T-Shirt is available in the US and UK.
Scream #4, which has a letter from Dave in it. You could buy it, and find out how that whole "Cannibal Werewolf" thing works. (Of course, you'd have to crack open the case...)
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And:
No reason, I was just looking at pictures of "Fat Cerebus", and this part struck me as really funny.
Okay, that's three "Moments"...
Next Time: Something exclusive from Dave for my birthday.
The remastered Volume 1 is available digitally for $9.99. The Auction for the Green Dante/Green Virgil cover is still at $1277.00 US Dollars from: 高伯乐 (Gao BoLe). If you want in on this action, just comment on this post, or e-mail momentofcerebus@gmail.com
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Speaking of momentofcerebus@gmail.com our ol' buddy T. Casey Brennan sent in the following and asked me to run it:
T. Casey's face is on the shirt...
HOW I MOVED TO ANN ARBOR IN 1970! Copyright 2019 by T. Casey Brennan Within, there lurked the memory. But this was 1970. This was T. Casey Brennan at age22, on a bus bound for Ann Arbor, fledgling comic book writer for the Warren Publishing Company titles, CREEPY, EERIE, and VAMPIRELLA, hell-bent on making his presence known to Ann Arbor's now infamous campus left. This was 1970: it would be a Tetragrammatonic 26 years before I would write the legend of CONJURELLA, posted on the Internet initially by Anathema Research of Austin, Texas in 1996, then picked up repeatedly and posted and reposted, with and without authorization, by a wide variety of Netizens, intent on linking it to their own respective interests and causes. Twenty-six years before CONJURELLA would link our family to the JFK assassination as our alleged cousin, Howard Leslie Brennan, with his testimony before the Warren Commission, never could. This was 1970: I hated the Vietnam war, hated the draft, loved the peace movement, loved the peace demonstrators and the love-ins, loved the beads and the beards and the flower children. But I feared the psychedelic drugs, and I feared the Communists; maybe, just maybe, I even feared the "Communist conspiracy" I had been told so much about, since boyhood. This was 1970: it had been a scant three years since I had resigned, after a little over a year, from the Port Huron, Michigan chapter of the John Birch Society (I had a membership card; was it Chapter 308?—I don't remember anymore), headed by local right-wing dentist, E. James Shay. I had joined in late 1965, at the invitation of Thaddeus B. Vance, who, like my late father, sat on the St. Clair County Board of Education. My parents were William James Brennan and paperback book author Alice Brennan, both Michigan school board officials and tax opponents. My late mother had begun this process when, in the early 1950s, she took the position of Secretary (and CEO) of the Swamp School District, Kenockee Township School District #4, one of the last K-8, kindergarten through eighth grade, school districts in the state. Soon, my late father had a similar position of authority on the St. Clair County Board of Education, and the two of them set off hand in hand to keep property taxes down, and the one-room little red schoolhouses open for as long as the voters would put up with it. Inevitably, they attracted the attention of the 1950s ultra-right in that regard, and soon we were all deluged with pamphlets from prolific McCarthyites coast to coast. I had begun school in kindergarten at Swamp School in September of 1953, at age 5. But, I suppose, partly because I could already read and write, and partly because my mother was her boss, my teacher, Miss Nolan, advanced me at once to the first grade, still at the age of 5. Hence, I entered high school at the tender age of 13. The Swamp School was a one-room building on a gravel road, technically in Emmett, Michigan. Traditionally, our high-school students, after graduating from the eighth grade, attended school in neighboring Yale, Michigan. But by the time 1961 had rolled around, and I had graduated grade school, the Yale high school district was demanding that we annex before they would take our high school students. For that, the Swamp School would be closed, taxes would go sky high, and our children would henceforth attend grade school in Yale. My parents would have none of it, and clearly, they were in a political position to make deals. So, deals they made. It was arranged that a local farm couple, Jim and Mary O'Neill, would drive the handful of high-school students that the Swamp School produced each year, north on M-19, through Yale, to Peck High School in Sanilac County, later to become infamous as the home of convicted Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh. Before long, the 13 year old high schooler version of T. Casey Brennan was developing his own independent personality and interests, sort of, and those interests included comic book collecting, and disseminating right-wing propaganda for the host of ultraconservative groups which had expressed support for my parents positions as property tax foes. So my pile of special things included pamphlets from the John Birch Society (as headed by Robert Welch), the Cinema Educational Guild (by Myron Fagan, who claimed credit for providing the Dies Committee with the names of Hollywood Communists, though popular history would later, inaccurately, assign this role to Senator Joe McCarthy, who only investigated alleged Communists in government, not Hollywood), the Conservative Society of America (from Kent and Phoebe Courtney), the Christian Crusade (from Billy James Hargis, smeared in the 1980s as a homosexual lover to some of his followers, though inexplicably, I am told he has no recollection that these charges were ever made against him), the 20th Century Reformation Hour (from Carl McIntyre, who, much to my chagrin, became an establishment-sanctioned spokesman for the pro-Vietnam hawks during the Nixon Administration), and the Christian Anticommunism Crusade (from Dr. Fred G. Schwartz, whose New Orleans office shared a building with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee)...with early prototypes of comic book fanzines such as ALTER-EGO, THE COMIC READER, THE KOMIX, and THE ROCKET'S BLAST-COMICOLLECTOR. Still, I had resisted actual membership in these right-wing groups until my graduation from Peck High School in 1965. Then, in the fall of that year, at the invitation of St. Clair County Board of Education member Thaddeus B. Vance, I attended an introductory meeting of the Birchers at something called The Round Building, on Pine Grove Avenue, in Port Huron, Michigan. A man named Robert Lowry, who held the office of Coordinator with the John Birch Society, briefed us on our responsibilities as Birchers-to-be. I joined, and stayed until 1967. And it was with this background, I proceeded, at the invitation of Larry B., of 30 Hayden Hall, East Quad Residential College, to meet with him, his cronies, and the now semi-famous Naomi Schechter, Ph.d, now, in the year 2000, with the activist group, PSYCHOLOGISTS FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY. In thirty years, I would set down the plans for an unauthorized article on Naomi. But not yet. This was 1970. I had met Larry B. in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, shortly after my twenty-second birthday, at a campground, with my parents. Actually, my dad had met him first. My dad had attended school at the University of Michigan in the 1920s, but never graduated. Though he had no sympathy for the campus left, he had, I suppose, a sense of nostalgia about Ann Arbor, as most ex-Ann Arborites do. Larry B. had introduced himself to my dad as an Ann Arborite, and that, to my dad, had been sufficient to offset the stigma of the campus activism which Larry advocated. Larry told stories of Baba Ram Das, the White Panther Party, the Students for a Democratic Society, and one of his teachers, Naomi Schechter, closely associated, he said, with the campus left, and then working on her Ph.d thesis. And he invited me to come to Ann Arbor, to stay in East Quad. So this was 1970: this was T. Casey Brennan, now on a bus bound for Ann Arbor, intent on imposing his invited, but unwanted, presence on Ann Arbor's campus left. The day before I left, I had watched the movie WOODSTOCK, at Port Huron's Family Theater on Military Street. I was prepared. These campus left guys were great, I decided. I had taken the bus from Port Huron to Detroit, and changed buses in Detroit for Ann Arbor. I have a beard now, anathema in my ancestral home of Avoca, Michigan, and I am glad to be in Detroit, where I won't be hassled for having it. From the bus, I flash the peace sign to a black cab driver. He returns it. I'm part of the movement, man. Larry B. has advised me to disembark at the Michigan Union, a scheduled stop of the Greyhound on which I ride. Had I seen the Greyhound Station on Huron Street first, with it's standard clientele of drunks and beggars, I may have received a different impression of Ann Arbor. I was later to work at the Huron Street Greyhound station, from November 1973 till March 1974, when I moved here, as had been my intent, even then. The Greyhound Station had been managed, in those days, by Red Simpson. He had two sons, John and George. George, they said, had disappeared for about a year, and returned, with a sex change operation, as "Gail" Simpson. The bus drivers had been mortified, always referring to Gail as "He...she...it" in the course of a conversation. But this is 1970: I am not to see the Greyhound station yet, nor will I actually move to Ann Arbor for another three years. Just before the Michigan Union bus stop, I see Larry B. walking on the street. I wave to him, but he does not see me. So I proceed, on his direction, through Ann Arbor's tumultuous diag of 1970, bound for East Quad. The "Tent City" protest, in which protesters pitched pup tents on the diag, is in full swing. Soon, police will sweep it away, on the advice that a hepatitis carrier has spread disease throughout the community. I arrive at 30 Hayden Hall, East Quadrangle Residential College, but Larry is not there. Soon he arrives, beaming. He is, he says, delighted that I have accepted his invitation. His letters have told me much about the now semi-famous Naomi Schechter. A Jewish girl whose parents, he said, were both registered Communists; an activist, a psychology teacher, highly intelligent, but with severe acne. Some years later, she will undergo facial surgery to correct the problem. He had made it clear in his letters that she wanted to meet me. I had envisioned a romance. Boys will be boys. I had envisioned myself, T. Casey Brennan, fledgling comic book writer for CREEPY and EERIE, with my own Joan Baez, whose parents were both registered Communists, leading the campus leftists to victory over the supporters of the Vietnam war, and my very recent, former friends, the John Birch Society. But that was not to be. Some time between August of 1970, when Larry B. had invited me to East Quad at the Upper Peninsula campground, and October 1970, when I actually made the journey, Larry had relayed the bad news: Naomi had taken on a live-in lover at her home on Ellsworth Road in Ypsilanti, where I was to stay, briefly, intermittently, with my stays at 30 Hayden Hall, East Quad. Larry described him as "a silk-screener named Joe". Joe had an Italian surname; I don't remember it. He was, as I recall, one of the early directors of Ozone House, a still existing Ann Arbor group which supplies teen-age runaways with food, clothing, and anti-drug pamphlets. Joe alleged that his uncle had been murdered by the Mafia. Larry alleged that Joe was one of the biggest drug dealers in Washtenaw County, but, he said, just marijuana and hashish. Despite all that, Larry B., and his room-mate, Dave, determined that my stay at East Quad should include my first experience with that staple diet of campus demonstrators, marijuana. So, that night at East Quad, I smoked marijuana for the first time. I smoke some that night, and the following morning, then wander around the campus area of South University, determined that I have now incurred permanent brain damage from it. In addition to my comic scripts for CREEPY and EERIE, I have also written some short stories for a magazine called LISTEN, edited by Francis A. Soper and Twyla Schlotthauer. My checks say Narcotics Education, Inc., but it is really a vehicle of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Washington, D.C. They are anti-drug, anti-cigarettes, anti-meat-eating, anti-everything. Later, in the mid-1970s, when I am living at Xanadu Co-op on 1811 Washtenaw, marijuana salesmen will call them and tell them that I have been "caught" smoking marijuana (which they have sold me), as part of an on-going attempt by the campus left to sabotage my career. Undaunted, I write a pro-vegetarian story called "I Love Meat", a satire more derived from my VAMPIRELLA stories than anything else (see Warren Publishing's VAMPIRELLA magazines #s 5, 17-21, and 109, and Harris Comics VAMPIRELLA OF DRAKULON #1-3, reprinted in 1996, and the trade paperback, VAMPIRELLA: TRANSCENDING TIME & SPACE, co-authored with Steve Englehart). It's about a literal meat-vampire, a meat-addict: Soper rejects it, but it ends up published in 1977 issues of VEGETARIAN TIMES and a short-lived HIGH TIMES imitator called FLASH (no relation to the DC comic of the same name), in the latter case, accompanied by an illustration from legendary underground comic artist, Robert Williams. A quote from the story, beginning "Poor animals..." has now been picked up by vegetarian activists on the Internet world-wide...astute Net-searchers will find it posted widely on the Net and Usenet, listing me with the greatest philosophers of history. What's more, Soper later forgave me for being "caught" by the Xanadu marijuana peddlers, and published my publicity stunt essays about being an award winning comic book writer wanting to take smoking out of comic books in his early 1980s companion to LISTEN, a newsletter called SMOKE SIGNALS: the result being that the articles were entered into CONGRESSIONAL RECORD - SENATE, Sept. 28, 1982, Vol. 128, No. 131, page S12435, and commented upon in the U.N. World Health Organization magazine from Geneva, WORLD HEALTH, October 1983, page 30, and January-February 1986, page 9, issues; and THAT culminating in a Proclamation, dated December 22, 1989, carrying the Great Seal of the State of Arkansas, and the signatures of then-Governor Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State, designating January 1990 as T. CASEY BRENNAN MONTH in the State of Arkansas. All because of my association with Francis A. Soper, whom I then believed. So I sit with a girl I just met, by a campus building in Ann Arbor, the second day of my trip, and tell her she must never smoke marijuana. It causes permanent brain damage, I tell her. Amusedly, she agrees, and promises. I go on to say, I may contact LISTEN magazine, and see if they can arrange some kind of speaking tour. Or, maybe, I'm thinking, the John Birchers, but I don't tell her that. That part is secret, must be, cannot be told in my quest to woo the campus left of Ann Arbor. Soon, we meet Naomi and Joe. I am to stay there for a few days, as per our agreement. The house is on Ellsworth Road, Ypsilanti. Joe produces two forms of hashish, Pakistani and Nepalese, he says. Naomi says they are afraid to smoke the Nepalese hashish: "It's too intense," she says. Later, Joe takes me to his silk screen shop, which he owns. I think it's called The Silk Screen Shop. He tells me that the form of printing called silk-screening produces, not just t-shirts with cartoons on them, but also the illustrations that graced 1970-style pin-ball machines. Naomi is then working on her Ph.d. thesis. She gives me a battery of tests, for practice, she says, including the standard Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test, as well as something she has invented, using the Rider deck of Tarot cards, as designed by Arthur Edward Waite, much preferred by hippies of that era. Interestingly, in a classic anachronism, the early 1970s television program KUNG FU, starring David Carradine as a pseudo-Chinese Shaolin priest, used the Rider deck in an episode set in the 1860s, wielded by his guest-star father, one-time Dracula portrayer, John Carradine, in spite of the fact that the Rider deck was not produced until the 1920s. I ask Naomi about the police, "the pligs, myan", as we called them then. "They don't come out here unless we call them," she says. I take Naomi's tests, then smoke the Nepalese hash that she has recommended against. I have a dream about a world covered with green foliage, with men with green helmets walking about in it, then go outside, thinking I am going to throw up. Joe comes out, offering sympathy, but in a moment, I am okay. I take a ride with Naomi in her jalopy. As we pull out of driveways, I watch, repeatedly, for oncoming traffic. Naomi spots me doing this, and curses me. "I thought men were supposed to help girls drive!" I say. "Well," Naomi says, "You've been improperly trained." I meet Naomi's friends. One is a man named Tom. He says he owns a health food something-or-other on Liberty Street. He has fluffy curly hair, but no mustache or beard. Joe has a mustache. One day, we wake up and Tom is annoyed by buzzing flies sticking to the fly paper in Naomi's living room. He applies his lit cigarette lighter. "Better that they die that way, than slowly," Tom says. Another is a traveller from England, a man with his long hair in a bun, like the old ladies I had known in my boyhood in Avoca, Michigan. He tries to be friendly, but I see him as one of those members of the Communist conspiracy the John Birchers have told me about. He tells me of his efforts to organize the cockneys in England, but, he says, he is thwarted. He says they admire the upper-class English accent. Naomi takes me aside later and says: "We don't know what he does. He may kill people." Another is a pretty girl who brings a box of slides, which she presents to me and Joe. She says, "There is a picture of me in there..." She giggles. "Well," she says, "I don't know..." Then she giggles some more. She leaves. Joe and I light joints, and set to work, examining the box of a thousand slides, one by one, looking for the implied nude picture of the girl who has just left. One by one, we examine each boring vacation slide, shake our heads, and move on. It just isn't there. We have been tricked. I meet Larry B.'s friends. Larry takes me to the Halfway Inn, in East Quad. He points out a student with a picture of a clenched fist on the back of his denim jacket. Larry B. says, "Casey, you see that guy? He was arrested at a demonstration for throwing a rock at a cop. And he didn't do it!" Larry also points out an East Quad drug dealer called Strike. "Strike's a prick," says Larry B., "Strike works directly under Joe." Later, Strike, a student with longish hair, a beard, and a furtive look, tells me in a hallway: "Everybody here is out to get me." And, through Strike, I have had my first glimpse of the apolitical vendettas of Ann Arbor's campus left, so intent on victimizing their own. Later, Naomi tells me she may not complete her Ph.d thesis. I embark on a campaign of persuasion, conceiving various approaches for talking her into it. It will be, she says, if she finishes it, a treatise on the Tarot cards and psychology. Following repeated phone calls along this line, I finally conceive of this: "Maybe girls shouldn't have Ph.d's," I say. "That does it," she says, "I'm going to do it." And she did. And now she is a semi-famous activist with Psychologists for Social Responsibility, following in the footsteps of her registered Communist parents; her friend Larry B. (and his hero, Baba Ram Das); her friend Tom, who sold health food and burned flies with his lighter; her friend with his hair in bun who may have killed people; and her boyfriend Joe, who ran a silk-screen shop and Ozone House, and whose uncle was killed by the Mafia. This was the memory that lurked within: Before Naomi, Joe, and Larry B. giving me marijuana and hashish in 1970, there had been J.H. Earnshaw giving me LSD in the late 1950s. We had met him through David Ferrie, who died during the Garrison investigation. Menacingly, Earnshaw had claimed association with the CIA's illegal MK-ULTRA experimentation program, begun in 1953, and investigated by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, before a Senate Committee, in 1977. My dad's interests had included not merely school taxes and right-wing politics, but also hypnosis, which was Earnshaw's specialty. Earnshaw, an Osteopathic physician in Port Hope, Michigan, reportedly died in 1984, though he continued to be listed in the American Osteopathic Association Yearbook long after that. On November 22, 1963, Earnshaw and David Ferrie kidnapped me from the Yale, Michigan airport, with the assistance of my late father, and forced me to initiate the firing from the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas. That was what I wrote about in "Conjurella". Lee was innocent. I was not. And this was the last memory of Naomi, not the LAST memory, but the memory that lingered, the way the memory of my single shot in Dallas, before I collapsed, before David Ferrie assumed command of the weapon and resumed firing, could not. Naomi shows me a crystal by her window, that creates flickering lights and colors. It hangs by the couch on which I sleep; I do not sleep with her, the presence of Joe has seen to that. But in the morning on that day, whatever day it was, Naomi comes to awaken me. She stands over me in the flickering light of the crystal, as the effect of the Nepalese hash lingers on in my unaccustomed brain. I watch as she tosses her head, leans from side to side, and strikes poses in the window light of morning. In my fear of Nepalese hashish and Communist conspirators, in my apprehension of the vendetta against Strike, and the man with his hair in a bun, and Joe whose uncle was killed by the Mafia, and her Communist parents, I have almost forgotten how pretty she is. But now, her long curly hair glistens in the morning light, in the light of the crystal, and she fans it out like a veil, as she weaves and tosses. "NAOMI!" I say, with awe. And I need say no more. She knows. "That will last a long time," she says. And it did. The End _______________________________________________________ I'm getting ready for the next Please Hold For Dave Sim, so if you got a question for Dave, SOUND OFF! _______________________________________________________ And finally, Steve asked the other day about the romance comic in the picture of my Postcard from Hell?, it's a postcard from my friend the Comic Book Man. He sends me a lot of postcards. A lot.
