If it seems, to the gossip-starved reader, that I have scrupulously avoided “juicy human details” in the first three parts of this memoir, let me hasten to assert that that was very much my intention. It would be self-indulgent to an unconscionable degree for me to roast my ex-wife on a literary spit month after month with “my side of the story.” For those eager to devour a carefully crafted “she said, I said” autobiographical fiction (as I have asserted elsewhere, I believe all autobiography is fiction), I can dispense with the human side of the Dave-and-Deni Story —or my side of it, a least — in a paragraph or two:
While I had made great progress in formulating the structure and direction of my career by the time I was twenty, of women, of relationships, I knew nothing. I was a complete and utter babe in the woods. I hadn’t the slightest inkling that serious damage effected through acts of bad faith could not be undone. Damage to the foundation of a relationship is permanent, and one soldiers on with raw wounds which heal improperly and continue to fester beneath the pink of psychic or emotional scar tissue. By the time the nearly seven years of our relationship had run their course, the tissue of our marriage was composed almost exclusively of our accumulated scars. What sense of loss there was at the end (and there was a sense of loss) was overshadowed by the bright potential of starting clean on a new page. The dissolution of the marriage, like the end of the professional relationship (which limped on for a number of months after the personal separation), was without acrimony, regret, or bitterness.
(I will add, parenthetically, before moving onto the larger points I wish to make, that it came as another great surprise, in my education about women, relationships, and their respective natures, that there is no such thing as “starting clean on a new page.” I had eleven years of hard lessons on this very subject before I was able to begin a new page with a nature more or less cleansed of the psychic grime I had carried with me to that point.)
It is important to remember that Dave and Deni’s relationship began as a professional one. Through the immediate origin of Dave as Publishing Expert and Cerebus the Fanzine Consultant/Deni as Aspiring Publisher, through the period of Dave, Commercial Artist/Deni, Commercial Artist’s Agent occurring simultaneously with Dave, Cerebus Artist and Writer/Deni, Cerebus Publisher, and the beginning of the end with Dave, Cerebus Artist and Writer/Deni, Comics Publisher, the balance of power. in the professional relationship shifted with each new incarnation. In discussing boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, one inches cautiously onto the thin ice of using phrases like “balance of power” — one reason that this piece required a three-part preamble.
Let’s return to the John-and-Yoko, Barry-and-Linda, Dave-and-Deni declension introduced in the last installment. At the point when Linda was correcting my misapprehension that her relationship with Barry at the time of Gorblimey Press was one of neatly separated responsibilities — Barry the creative half, Linda the business half — what was at issue was very much the balance of power involved. What other reason would there be for Linda to make so much of an issue of my erroneous impression? While there is much that is romantic, much that would be a source of pride in being She Who Takes Care of the Big Bad World While the Creative Titan Labours at His Easel — and to the unpracticed eye and the unthinking mind only a difference in shading between that and She Who Takes Care of the Details While the Creative Titan Both Labours at His Easel and Plots the Course and Shape and Content of the Business Implications of His Creativity — Linda recognized that the two occupied opposing ends of a spectrum: as different as white and black, red and blue. In carelessly amplifying her role in the Gorblimey Press experiment, I was diminishing Barry’s. The note struck resonated loudly, for to be honest— particularly at the time of the conversation — Aardvark-Vanaheim more or less mirrored the actuality of Gorblimey Press. I was troubled by the disparity between the reality of Aardvark-Vanaheim and my portrayal of it, and I remember fumbling for any sort of lucid reply. I might even have said something along the lines of: “Oh, sure. That’s the way we do it, too. Deni’s more of a helper than a partner.”
At the time, I rationalized to myself that, while it was true that I was the one setting the overall course for Aardvark-Vanaheim as the business vehicle for the Cerebus comic book, this was already changing. Having set in motion a “showcase” section in the back of the book called “Unique Stories,” an attempt was being made to restore the initial balance which existed in the professional relationship — Dave the Creator and Deni the Publisher. There was, after all, a world of difference between doing the business chores on your husband’s comic book and being a publisher. Now that my course was set—I had my own comic book to write and draw for twenty-six years — no larger fulfillment was imaginable in my case. Deni and I would, together, turn - back the calendar five years and work to achieve Deni’s seminal dream. Any lucid examination of the situation would have revealed the inherent flaw. Deni had originally intended to publish a forum for her own and others’ creativity in prose and pictures, with fantasy and science fiction as theme. We were “through the looking-glass” and into the uncharted waters of the comic-book direct market, where the balance of power still favoured me and not her. I was the one who sifted through the potential “other books” for Aardvark-Vanaheim to publish and set them in motion. In the case of Bill Loebs and Bob Burden, I was fulfilling my fannish desire (in Bill’s case fired by my enthusiasm for his story “Abortion” in Nucleus and in Bob’s by the Flaming Carrot’s Visions appearances) to provide a secure “nest” for their creativity. I made almost all of the decisions (I did make all the major decisions) and left Deni to implement them. We were very much in a no-man’s- land between Barry-and-Linda and John-and-Yoko. What potential lost! Had we shared a clear-eyed assessment of our situation, had Deni said, “Look, I want to do the digest magazine that started this whole thing. I want you to go back to the original arrangement — design, a few illustrations, and a bit of advice here and there. But I want to be the one in charge. I want to call it Cerebus because I came up with the name. We can afford to pay fanzine rates for the contributors, the printing bill, and not have to worry if it turns a profit right away or loses money for a year or two,” that would have been very Barry-and-Linda. Instead, like Charles Foster Kane building Susan her opera house, I was determined to be an Earth-Pygmalion and to mold and shape and sell to the world My Fair Deni as the Publisher of the World’s Greatest Cartoonists (with apologies to Fantagraphics). If this seems overly dramatic, it must be remembered that my perception of my life and career at the time — was grandiose to a very nearly pathological extent I never doubted for a moment that the comic-book field was the place to be in the late seventies and early eighties. My view of comic books as a medium of limitless potential and my determination to be a significant presence in the field as it began to fulfill that potential were central to my thinking.
Crack!
The ice gets very thin at this point in the description as it did then in our professional relationship. For here we swerve over into John-and-Yoko territory. I was very much a child of my time and had the unshakable faith that what was going on in the comic-book field in the late 1970s was at least as significant, at least as incendiary, as what was going on in rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s. In retrospect, my choice to take what was significant, what was incendiary (self-publishing), and to transmogrify it into something pedestrian and commonplace (just -another comic-book company publishing creator-owned titles) can be attributed almost entirely to the John-and-Yoko Syndrome. As can be seen in my first Comics Journal interview (more pernicious still — Dave and Deni’s Comics Journal interview), I took great pains to disseminate the view that we were equal partners of equal importance. It wasn’t enough that you liked John Lennon’s comic book, you had to see Yoko through his eyes, share his admiration of her. The parallels are obvious. The resources upon which we drew were the Cerebus profits (read: Beatle money); the 1982 U.S. Tour wasn’t the Cerebus tour or the Dave Sim Tour — it was the Dave & Deni Tour. The very foundation of self-publishing that made it so revolutionary — that the comic-book creator was the dominant, significant, and irreplaceable element and that comic-book business people were secondary, insignificant, and interchangeable — was undone at every turn in the interests of being the comic-book John and Yoko. The balance of power in the professional relationship shifted dramatically in Deni’s direction. Where once the fulcrum had slid delicately (and sometimes not so delicately) between us along the straight line which connected Point Deni and Point Dave, it was now replaced by a wheel-like configuration. Deni the Publisher was the hub, and Dave and Cerebus became one of many spokes. That configuration — a natural perception in a capitalist society — was in turn at odds with the actual wheel: the Cerebus profits at the hub and all spokes issuing from it. The tug of war between perception-as-reality and the reality-not-readily perceived put us at odds. Like a complete novice I had stepped into a trap. Aardvark-Vanaheim was now indistinguishable from Eclipse Publishing, for all intents and purposes. A comic-book company was a comic book company was a comic book company.
Crack! Crack!
At this point the ice is too thin to venture across in the current political climate, so my route, of necessity, becomes circuitous. In our case, the resolution — dissolution — became inevitable. Deni rankled at her dependence on me and Cerebus. I rankled at the mushrooming size of the operation, which depended on an ever-expanding line of books to stay ahead of the cash-flow problem.
The real crunch time came when I heard — indirectly from an unimpeachable source — that Deni had begun to form her own publishing imprint and was making overtures to several cartoonists to be published by her. The publishing imprint was to be her ace in the hole if we were unable to agree on any additional title she was interested in publishing. Already we had been offered two projects within a few weeks of each other — one of which she wanted Aardvark-Vanaheim to publish (normalman) and the other that I thought we should publish (Megaton Man).
The writing was very much on the wall. Something had to give.
Next: Final Chapter
Margaret adds on her site: (CFG notes: I'm searching for the issue this is in, as it isn't in Guys where the rest of these where. If you know what issue, please let me know so I can scan it in. Thanks!)
In examining my first draught of ”Mr. and Mrs. Aardvark Vanaheim” (the more avid reader will recall that I said that the original piece had “gone off in too many directions at once”), it sees clear that I was labouring under the same schism which existed in my life at the time — the war between my “comic-book life” and my “real life.” It is significant that the former has always been more real to me than the latter. Viewed accurately, my comic-book life predates my real life by many years. My encyclopedic knowledge of comic-book history (in its seminal aspect concerned with the first appearances of various characters, later with the careers, styles, and development of writers and artists I admired) occupied a disproportionately large percentage of my memory and thought processes. These elements which make up a “real life” (as in “get a life”) —job, girlfriend, friendships — existed in the outer fringes of the theoretical. At the age of twenty — getting my first apartment, meeting Deni, holding down a part-time job at Now & Then Books, moving into a new apartment with Deni, entertaining her brother and sister and friends on a regular basis — real life became an accompaniment to my comic- book existence (albeit a minor key in the larger musical work). Comic books still dominated. My first apartment was all drawing board and art supplies, promotional brochures for my studio which I had christened COMlCgraphics, tear sheets and news clippings filling the corkboard wall which separated the single living room/bedroom from the kitchenette, the limited drawer and cupboard space occupied by comic books and reference books; clothes I had owned since high school were an afterthought jammed into leftover corners and secondary spaces.
In a short space of time Deni was pressed into service as an agent for my commercial art skills, her brother collaborated with me on a handful of comic-book stories, our apartment was the studio and Aardvark-Vanaheim fanzine-publishing office. In retrospect it was the stuff of situation comedies — relatively normal French-Canadian family runs afoul of obsessive comic-book person, his-world divided into That Which Will Advance the Career and Everything Else. The square peg met the round hole and began chiseling right angles into the curvilinear symmetry in the name of the Higher Calling.
It is recognized that those human elements — the situation-comedy episodes which tended to degenerate into minor tragedies mid arguments, numbing in their relentless. . . relentlessness? — are doubtless of interest to the general readership: First Love Gone Awry, Portrait of the Artist as Young Suitor, etc., etc. It is one of the false directions referred to in the admission of the first failure. It was a story, but it was not the story which concerned me.
The reader had been left with the dawning of my insight that Gene Day’s career (my primary template at the time) had jumped the rails of real progress in my view) and left casting about for my own natural “next step.” Gene’s rationale for his career course — his obligations as husband and homeowner informing the largest part of his motivation — fueled the first insight that “real life” and “comic-book life” might exist in diametric opposition to each other. The Big House on First Street with its Big Mortgage took center stage in my mentor’s life. Divided into two dwellings -- one for his studio and residence, the other rented out — his goal was to unite the two. The many rooms would reflect his varied interests — a Second World War diorama, a studio to practice guitar, a library to house his enormous comic-book, magazine, and sci-fi collection, a House of Shadows publishing office, his studio. The steady paycheck from Marvel became the means to achieve the end — keep Marvel happy and the cash flow could be maintained; a maintained cash flow made the Castle Day a genuine possibility.
The discerning reader will recognize a large measure of Viktor Davis’ genesis in the above — in this case the marital residence itself serving as a creative void to devour his energies and idealism. Unfortunate, because Gene’s marriage (on the Viktor Davis scale) was good one. Gale was always understanding and indulgent of the time and energy required for his artistic priorities. . .and contributed equally to their shared life.
As the young Dave Sim of twenty-odd (some very odd) summers surveyed his own circumstance, the Big House on First Street became a thing to avoid. He had no intention of becoming a slave to the large expenditure, making career choices on the basis of “real-world” givens and requirements. As he eyed his lifemate (measuring her against Gale’s contribution to Gene’s career), he could congratulate himself that he, too, had chosen wisely. He intended to conquer the world, to become indescribably wealthy and equally famous, and made no secret of that ambition with his wife-to-be. For her part, had it not been an article of faith with Deni from a very early age that she would someday (as she considered her future) be the Woman Behind the Great Man? How suited they were to each other! Two halves of an equation, each biding their time until the opposite number could be located and Real Life (as opposed to “real life”) could begin in earnest. If her premonition had fallen more along musical lines, if the “other half’ she anticipated was perceived to be more on the order of a George Harrison or a Stephen Stills, her flexibility in giving her ardent young comic-book suitor the benefit of the doubt (she asserted that he had “George Harrison's eyes” — fortuitous happenstance to be sure!) spoke to his belief that rock ‘n’ roll had had its day, and the wisest and most alert of the late-Twentieth-Century Muses and Significant Others were placing their bets on those Young Lions of Sequential Art as the brightest of the bright, young men.
Does my pen drip irony here? Not at all, not at all, dear reader I enunciate my misapprehension of the time. There is no difficulty in perceiving the flaw in retrospect, touching as it does on the hidden realities which constitute love and marriage at odds with creative ambition. Not for small reason did a significant part of my ex-wife’s interview in The Comics Journal on the subject of the notorious issue 186 center on my assertions regarding John Lennon. She opined that I had switched philosophies in midstream — denouncing the ex-Beatle icon for wasting much of the last years of his creative life holed up in the Dakota, smoking pot, compulsively channel-surfing, baking bread, and minding the kid.
We were all, you see, John and Yoko back then.
One of Lennon’s spiritual offspring had been inspired — as a likewise halfhearted inmate of an archetypal English art school of the time —to abandon the safety and insular security of his circumstance and (in answering the clarion call of his creativity) to set his course for North America and the selfsame metropolis where the Beatles had debarked a handful of years before. Though the Marvel offices of the day were a far cry from the Ed Sullivan theater and penciling assignments on moribund titles like X-Men. (deader than a doornail at the time) a more flaccid pass at the brass ring even than singing background vocals on a Tony Sheridan single, still the metaphor sustains itself. Barry Smith (pre-Windsor) constituted the whole of the 1960s comic-book British Invasion. Beatles, Stones, Animals, Dave Clark Five et al. rolled into one (as Stan Lee, christened him) Bashful Brit.
Meeting Barry Smith for the fist time in 1973 when he was riding the wave of success that his work on Conan had conferred upon him— no, more accurately, cresting upon the tsunami of his “Red Nails” adaptation which hurled him, in one go, from the ranks of the relentlessly progressing talent into the Pantheon of the Indisputably Great — I met his “Yoko” as well: colourist and Gorblimey Press business manager, Linda Lessman.
In my casting about for a more solid, more viable template for my efforts, this seemed ideal. For had Barry Smith not transcended the cul-de-sac of the career of the Marvel freelancer? Did he not represent the Next Best Step for the Gene Days of the comic-book world? If it was true that he was fully engaged in the making of pictures which became prints and so - outside of the comic-book field (except for the promised Robin Hood graphic novel inching, one supposed, towards completion), still the structure was sound. John and Yoko, Barry and Linda, Dave and Deni.
Life is nothing without its intrinsic ironies. On the only occasion when the paths of Barry-and-Linda and Dave-and-Deni crossed (a convention in Albany in 1980 or ’81), I remember being sought out by Linda, who had just finished a conversation with Deni in which the Aardvark-Vanaheim publisher and minority shareholder (49% to my 51%) had laid bare the entirety of her spouse’s cherished template – giving credit where it was due at the least, but more likely surrendering to excess and paying homage to Linda as the Spiritual Role Model of her professional existence.
The distortion was too great for someone of Linda’s intrinsic honesty to accommodate or dismiss offhandedly. So there I was, being read chapter and verse on the reality of the situation. She was not Barry’s business manager – “helper” struck closer to the mark. She did the bookkeeping, the banking, wrapped and mailed packages, kept track of invoices. I understood. It was impossible not to, since it was important to Linda that the truth be known. It would be clear in later years that I had been guilty of a fundamental distortion at a critical juncture. At the time, however, Mr. and Mrs. Aardvark-Vanaheim were embarked upon a course which compound the misapprehension – seeking out other talents whose work we would publish, or, more accurately – the amendment is critical to the point of my thesis – talents whose work Deni would publish. It is too oblique to assert that – as a spiritual grandson of John Lennon – I had decided that my Yoko would have less in common with Lennon’s first wife Cynthia than with Beatle manager and guru Brian Epstein?
Revelation awaited even as I – we – pursued a course doomed to failure. While we didn’t have the monetary resources necessary to attract the brighter lights of the comic-book field after the fashion of the failed Apple Corp. experiment (it would be left to Kevin Eastman and his Turtle Millions to reinforce the lesson with Tundra Publishing), still it had the excruciating lure of the logic of the next step.
The lessons I would learn would come hard and fast, fast and hard. Even as the Dakota Acolytes began leaking word of what had actually gone on — Lennon channel-surfing as Yoko, in Studio One, spent endless hours on the phone "making all her nowhere plans for nobody" — the irony was compounded and compounded again.
With the publication of Neil the Horse number one, the seeds of destruction had been sown, fertilized, and watered.
It is left to left to the next installment to describe how this particular garden grew.
Next: Business versus Creativity
______________________________
Sean Robinson is your Huckleberry:
Hello everyone,
Please allow Carson, Dave, and myself to thank you one more time for contributing to such a fantastic campaign. We're over the moon with the response to the book, and are quickly moving forward with the next steps.
In the meanwhile:
Digital Stretch Goal ... Almost?
We got so close to our digital stretch goal of $58,000, and even closer when we add up all the post-campaign emails asking for a few more items to add, so we're going to honor that goal. Which means everyone who pledged to the campaign will receive a digital download of the Preliminary Strange Death. In addition, everyone who pledged for a book tier will also receive a digital download of the finished book. We hope you enjoy!
Secondly, and most importantly from a time perspective: You should now have your rewards surveys in your email inbox! This is a quick questionnaire we put together to gather the data we need for campaign fulfillment. It's important you fill this out as soon as you can! Fortunately, about 2/3s of your have already taken care of it. If we can get 100 percent of responses by the end of the week, that would be tremendous. Among other things, this enables us to set our print runs for the supplementary books correctly, and not be short on any of the items you've ordered.
AND, Friend to the Blog: Steve Peters has a new Kickstarter. There's no real Cerebus/Dave Sim connection, But it's got Art by me. So back it. I insist.
Some select images from our "Viruses of Trek" and "Sin Kevitch" stories drawn by our mighty guest artists!
For "Sin Kevitch", Steve drew a number of versions and got friends to draw some as well. Guest participants in the challenge were James Windsor-Smith, Lee Thacker, David Branstetter, Michael Anthony Carroll, Anthony Casperite, Matt Dow, and Corey Bechelli. Steve did drawings in the styles of other artists like Michael Golden, Shannon Wheeler, Brian Payne, Dave Sim, Jim Woodring, and Moebius.
Well hump-a-duck, I guess there is a Dave Sim connection. Groovy. Buy two.
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!
_________________________
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?"...
