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Cerebus
Archive Report #5 July 2005 (The entire text - comment and response - is
included. Dave's words are in bold italics.) ________________________________________________________ << June 4th, 2005 >> Just to update: Dan Parker is working on the software to do the actual
archiving "keyword" inputting, I've return the first two notebooks to
Dave and I've gotten the third and fourth notebooks (Albatross Encore). Okay, DAVE: “Arnold the Isshurian” is in black and white plus (what else is there?) My
point being that a minimum of 61 pages would
make for a nice thick volume as opposed to a slim one. Depending on the price, why not go all out? --------- That's not the problem. The problem is, in order for the reproduction to be as good as possible, Dave
would need to reconstruct some of the
work. Simply photgraphing the plates as
printed, and then re-printing them might have undesirable results. Grainy, incorrect colors, etc. --------- Indeed. And seeing as how it's apparently going to be
done by Erik Larson and Image Comics,
the quality should be good indeed! DAVE: Haven’t heard a word from Erik Larsen since he agreed to do
discuss creator’s rights in a dialogue format.
He posted what he had to say, I posted what I had to say and that was
the end of the dialogue. I also haven’t
heard from Bob Chapman at Graphitti Designs.
I don’t mean to be offensive, but this happens a lot with me. People say that they’re going to do
something and then they don’t. A
“disconnect” point is arrived at, I suspect, when they realize what the
consequences to their reputations are in actually dealing with Dave Sim. I’m certainly open to any other
interpretations that people would like to suggest and I realize that actual
liberals think I’m being paranoid, but as far a I can see it’s an unwillingness
on the part of actual liberals (that is people who are open-minded enough to
understand that it’s not intellectually valid to shun people with whom you
disagree politically) to understand that people they see as being like them are
not actually like them at all. That is
liberals think that Marxist-feminists are liberals. They aren’t. They’re
Marxist-feminists. If you don’t toe the
party line, you get shunned and part of the party line of Marxist-feminism in
the comic-book field is Thou shalt have no contact with Dave Sim. I think
liberals get the message pretty quickly once they try to have contact with me
and realize that it’s an either/or proposition: either shun Dave Sim or be shunned like Dave Sim. Most of them toe the party line pretty
quickly after that. ________________________________________________________ -------- L nny should be posting the new poll for Minds soon, but there's been no Policy discussion lately,
so... does anyone have any thoughts
they'd like to share? -Jeff I thought it was when Dave and Ger both passed on and Cerebus was left
in the public domain. -Margaret DAVE: Yes, strictly after Dave and Ger pass. We have the sole publication rights as long as we’re both alive
to the entirety of Cerebus.
________________________________________________________
That does sound nice. -Margaret ________________________________________________________
-Jeff I thought Dave had talked about this in an interview somewhere - one of
the longish interviews, say the TCJ, Feature, etc. I don't have time to look it
up now (gotta go to work, gah!) but if I recalled correctly Dave said he didn't
want them translated into other languages purely because he would not be able
to know if the translation was correct, that something would be lost in
translating the story from English, and that it should be read in English only
- so nothing is lost. Maybe someone else recalls this interview and can get a
quote from it. Dave acknkowleges that since he doesn't know Greek or Hebrew, he has to
read Scripture in his native tongue, but doesn't that apply to Cerebus as well?
Ideally, it should be read in English only so nothing is lost (just as the
Bible should be read in Hebrew and the Koran *spoken* in Arabic), but when such
is not possible, is a translation worse than nothing at all. Is a German-only
speaker better off not reading Cerebus than reading a flawed translation? ________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________ I actually agree with Dave here, even though I would be without any real
knowledge of some of my favorite authors if they felt the same way. But think
about the one thing even Dave's most serious detractors agree is a strength:
his lettering. Sure, you can translate the words, but then what -- are you
going to reletter? Steve Bolhafner ________________________________________________________
-Jeff I'm sorry, but I think that's just absurd. Sure, you can do that for the
"normal" lettering, but the many, many, many examples such as the one
I gave just flat out won't work that way. Thatcher's speeches in
"Guys," for instance. I could go on and on. Dave's lettering isn't
just carrying the verbal information, it is part of the picture, an integral
part of the picture that could NOT be re-MOTE-ly duplicated, in many, many
instances, by a computer font that resembled the way Dave usually makes letters
(which varies more than you notice, if you begin examining them closely). Steve Bolhafner ________________________________________________________ ---------- Yeah, I was flipping through some pages, and you're right.
There's a lot that would have to be done by hand (or at least warping text to
fit the balloon, which would be time consuming). But more could be done than
you suggest, I think. It could be done, and in lieu of doing it all by hand,
this to me is better than the "footnote" option. Like I said, this
was the "easy way out" and far from perfect. All conjecture of
course, if Dave doesn't want to do it:) -Jeff Steve Bolhafner ________________________________________________________ ---------- Less of an impact than shrinking the whole page, and having
to look elsewhere on the page for a translation, IMO! -Jeff And there are "fonts" that Dave uses esentially once -- how
are you going to "imitate" them? Steve Bolhafner ________________________________________________________ ---------- I would have to go through every book, but the unique fonts
are a very small percentage of what would need to be translated. Not that big a
deal when you look at the size of the
*whole* project. And some of the later fonts are, I believe, actually
fonts (some of the "Biblical looking" stuff). -Jeff Steve Bolhafner ________________________________________________________ ----------- As I stated above, I think this method is *far* more
disturbing to the flow of the page, not to mention the added cost of production
and distribution for such a large volume. -Jeff ________________________________________________________ ----------- On that, I totally agree!
Steve Bolhafner ________________________________________________________ --------- Agreed. But with the computer font, the word balloons would be
untouched. Onlly the letters themselves. And with enough examples, everything
could be imitated. -Jeff
________________________________________________________ A more-expensive way of doing it would be to include the translations as
a... what's the term, lay-over? Those
plastic sheets put over the original art, often how lettering is done anyway,
with the translations overlapping the English word-balloons. -Chris W ________________________________________________________ --------- Agreed. Sub-text or footnoting would just take up too much
space on the page. -Jeff You're thinking 20th Century. ;) ________________________________________________________ ---------- Actually, that's very do-able. It could be as simple as a
Flash menu interface. Roll the mouse pointer over a word balloon, and a
seperate text box appears with the translation in plain text. -Jeff DAVE: On the subject of translations, this came up a while ago in
correspondence with a reader who was eager to do a translation. As with everything else in my life the
overwhelming sense I get is that I am making everyone’s life miserable by being
completely uncooperative with what they want.
I don’t know why I don’t just actually have the “screw you”
mentality that everyone attributes to me, but I don’t. I always try to figure out how I can make
people’s lives less miserable by finding some measure of cooperation. The best that I could come up with was that
any individual who wanted to could start their own website of Cerebus in, say,
German. And they could just start with
the first page of the first volume and start translating into pure German text
and keep going. If you only spoke
German and you wanted to read Cerebus, all you would have to do is get
the first volume, click on the guy’s website and read along. Where I saw the website as having an
advantage would be because you could refine the translation as more people
became aware of it. Other bilingual
people would be able to say, “I think a more accurate translation for panel 4
on page 87 would be…” and then fill in the blank with what they think would be
a preferable translation. I suspect that you would
get into unresolvable arguments for the same reason that if I suggest a
different way of phrasing a sentence in Neil Gaiman’s new book, Anansi Boys (which I
did as a matter of fact) there is no way of determining whether my version or
Neil’s version of that sentence is the better one. In that case Neil decides because it’s Neil’s book (and a really
good one, I recommend that all of you pick it up if inclined to do so). In this case you would have to establish at
the outset that the guy running the website did not have pre-eminent authority
just because it was his (or her) website.
How awkward does it get to have two or three different translations for
a given panel? The impression that I get from the translation biz is that you
actually create a different story more attuned to the language and consequently
each translator becomes a new author creating something grounded in the
original material but drastically modified to resonate with the new language
and that this verges on psychosis with romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian)
just because that’s the way those people are.
I don’t think, as an example, that Woody Allen was actually as much a
fan of Fellini as he was a fan of Italian theatrics and mongrelized English
subtitles and dubbing. He liked the
exotic quality that you only get from bad translations. So, the problem as I see it
is that as far as I’m concerned I’m not really giving anything away by saying
it’s fine by me if someone wants to do a website translating Cerebus into German
(or Spanish or French or whatever), if their actual motivation is to do the
best possible translation. If it’s a
website with a discussion group attached and everyone gets to hash out what the
best choices are, I think that would be great. As I say, gradually refining the
translation and getting it as close to the original as possible. But I think you have to take it as a given
that if Freud X starts such a website, in a short space of time Jung Y is going
to decide that Freud X has completely missed the point of Cerebus and will feel
compelled to start his own website with the way Cerebus would actually sound in
German. Unlike these policy discussions I can’t adjudicate because I don’t
speak German so I have no way of determining whether Freud X or Jung Y is
closer to my way of expressing things.
I would be supportive as long as anyone starting such a thing or
developing such a thing understood that they didn’t own anything out of the
deal. That a big part of the deal is
that anyone can take the existing translation and tweak a bunch of phrases and
then start their own website and let the best website win. To me? That’s completely kosher, yes, for that I
definitely give permission. I think if
nothing else, over the period of twenty years or thirty years it would probably
actively demonstrate just how nebulous and ultimately futile a field
translation is. And I imagine you would eliminate the people with the wrong
motivation—the ones who want to corner the Cerebus market for themselves
or be known as THE authorized translator of Cerebus into German. At least I hope you would. But in terms of the material actually being
re-lettered, it’s an arduous task for someone who doesn’t speak the language
and I think the intonation comes a lot from the look of the letters. Peanuts wouldn’t read the same
lettered by Ben Oda, even though Ben Oda was a brilliant letterer. Way before that could be considered as a
separate discipline, I think it would have to be debated at the websites. I mean, then you’re not just talking about
what specific German words should be used, but what Germanic dialect, what
Germanic inflections and what Germanic slang should be used and where the
emphases fall in that Germanic dialect—first syllable, first two
syllables. Since no one has even
attempted it yet, I would say let’s wait and see if you can get a consensus on
the words—I’m betting you can’t just because of the nature of translation—and
then move on to different dialects. I
suspect that the words alone are going to be more than a full-time occupation for
a sufficient number of decades for any number of participants and that dialect,
inflection and slang will get left by the wayside by anyone but trained
linguists. This is apt to be taken the wrong way, but what the heck, as long as
we’re discussing it openly—I think most people who have an aptitude for
languages are largely humourless individuals and that you need a sense of
humour to translate Cerebus. Writing
comedy isn’t just a matter of finding the right words, but the right
combination of words and the right sounds.
There are phrases that are funny and there are phrases that aren’t
funny. If the translator has no sense
of humour he or she isn’t likely to know the difference. They’ll be laughing at the joke in English
and then murdering it in German. Again, this is why I think it would have to be
a communal effort with a lot of give and take.
I suspect one translation will become four translations, will become
eight translations with a lot of acrimony and back-stabbing and then one of
them will just gain wider acceptance and the others will become marginalized
possibly on the basis of merit but more likely on the basis of societal
shunning and acrimony unrelated to the actual work. That’s just how people are, now.
The advantage of the Internet is that it lends itself to the emergence
of a preferred translation structurally.
The website that gets the traffic wins.
It’s not a matter of who has the biggest printing presses or who
controls all the newsstands in Berlin (Today the newsstands, tomorrow the
comic-book shops!). German-speaking
people would vote with their feet or their mice or their mouses or whatever you
call it when you choose something on the Internet. Anyway, I never heard back from the reader in question so I assume that
his interest was in becoming King of the Cerebus Mountain in German or making
some money on the deal which, as you can see from my torturous description,
isn’t the direction I lean in when I try to come up with a workable compromise. But, for what it’s worth (presumably very little), the offer is out
there. ________________________________________________________ But what about all of Dave's non-Cerebus art? Matt ________________________________________________________ ------- Ahem! Wha? Who. Wha?! -Jeff wanted to do an Art Of Dave Sim collection of all of Dave's non-Cerebus
art, could ________________________________________________________ ------- Good question. Dave's pretty disgusted with some of that early
work, so don't hold your breath;P But, Dave's value of the work aside, there is still the possiblity of
someone *koff, koff* wanting to do it. And it'd be nice to know what Dave's
stance is NOW, so we know for LATER. (And I'm only talking about the work that Dave claims ownership of, any
colaboration that he gave up the rights too doesn't count.) ________________________________________________________ ---------- Sure, fair enough. DAVE: Well, the mind fairly boggles.
My impression is that we are all of us hanging on by our fingernails
with a one-in-ten million shot of Cerebus lasting five years after
Ger and I are dead against the relentless onslaught of Marxist feminism and its
ability to revise out of existence those things which don’t kowtow to it and
you want to know if The (for crying out loud) Beavers go into the
public domain. Actually the mind
doesn’t boggle at all. I appreciate your loyalty and unwillingness to recognize
the situation in which we find ourselves.
I would assume that they
already are because I’ve made no effort to sustain the trademark and copyright
over the last nearly three decades. I
mean, The Beavers seems to me an interesting story in itself. Because the pre-Cerebus part of the Archive
was the first part that I did, I was able to follow along on all the
documentation and I thought, “You know you could get a nice little book out of
this” reprinting all the Quack material and the 104 strips as well as
Mike Friedrich’s correspondence and all the rejections from the various
Canadian newspapers. I was thinking of
calling it The Beavers: Portrait of A Canadian Failure. I think the time to discuss that would be
up ahead after Margaret has finished scanning however many notebooks there are
and can actually start in on the Archive itself and less prejudicial eyes than
my own can look at the material and see if it warrants anything besides
oblivion. I would assume that
everything that I did would be in the public domain and fodder for the Jeff’s
and the Brian Coppolas who are actually interested in the pre-Cerebus material
and willing to do hardcovers with a print run of two—one for each of them. But, I do think a reality check is called
for here. The consensus among
retailers, the comics press and the comic-buying public on Cerebus at
this point is that everything after Jaka’s Story is useless
garbage. My own impression is that that
view is becoming more rather than less firmly entrenched as each day goes by,
so I would really recommend that you prepare yourselves to pile sandbags around
volumes 6 through 16 in the event of Ger and I both dying and let The Beavers
fend for themselves. The
Marxist-Feminists are capable of making people believe that a giant red
rectangle with a yellow slash through it is art, so they should have no
difficulty in supplanting Cerebus volumes 6 through 16 with The
Beavers particularly if they have inside help from Cerebus Legacy. So a word
of warning on that score. Whatever you
don’t actively protect, they will actively destroy and they will attempt to
enlist your support in doing so. As with everything else,
Ger has control over it if he outlives me.
It could be one of those Mordecai Richler trips where as long as the guy
is dead and can’t say anything that upsets people anymore everyone could
suddenly decide that I was A-OK (which was the case with all the
Marxist-feminist hypocrites who actively shunned Mordecai Richler for the last
two decades of his life, scrupulously asking, “Are you SURE he’s 100% dead?”
before they, you know, go out on a limb and then deciding to create a Mordecai
Richler renaissance once he wasn’t there to correct their misapprehensions) and
Gerhard could suddenly be sitting on a goldmine of Dave Sim material. But, personally? I think you should save the sandbags for
volumes 6 through 16 and the one in ten million shot that they can be saved
from the Marxist-feminists.
I can't remember my last update so here is what I've done so far:
Scanned in notebooks one and two, I've received notebooks 3 & 4, and I'm
halfway thru #3. I'm scanning them in now as colored png files at 600 dpi
resolution. We are only scanning at this point, as Dan is working on the
software for the database. ________________________________________________________ Subject: Policy: Miscellany database addition Category: Iconic, High DAVE: Yes, I would agree. High iconic.
I think Steve Peters did the silhouette but I might be mistaken. Hey, ________________________________________________________ An interesting question. I would say no, Dave doesn't expect people to
pay Bob Burden and Rick Veitch if they reprint the parts of Cerebus with their
work in it. Public domain is public domain, after all. ________________________________________________________ Depends on the nature of the contract (assuming they had one). What does
the copyright info say in the relevant volumes? If it's just copyright Dave Sim
and Gerhard (i.e. if Burden and Veitch bascally did work for hire in Cerebus),
then it's theirs to control. If Burden and/or Veitch are indicated as copyright
holders for their portions of the work, that's a different story. I've wondered about that. Other than ownership of Cerebus the character,
Dave by his own stance has no right to that BWS "Cerebus Dreams"
story. Chris W ________________________________________________________ That sounds right. If Burden/Vietch assigned the copyright to Dave (who
just refuses to make money off it w/o including a share to them), then Dave
could turn it over to the public domain. But if it's not his to give away, he
can't. ________________________________________________________ There's no way Dave would do work-for-hire, and he's not a contract << July 12th, 2005 >> DAVE:
Well, this gets into legal vs. ethical areas which—if you’ve been following the
debate on the Bill of rights—is really the core of the whole thing. Legally, if I was to sue Bob Burden for the
right to reprint the Carrot crossover, the fact that he has a history of
cashing the cheques would mean that I was on solid ground in claiming ownership
of the material. Territorially, it’s
called “easement” which Chet and I
discussed in the “Getting Riel” dialogue. If you
conduct your business in a certain way for a period of years, you can’t legally
suddenly change your mind. As
you’ve seen in the Bill of rights debates, the problem that I have with it is
that I am picking an arbitrary figure out of a hat and sending Bob a cheque and
sending Rick Veitch a cheque. Why $800
and $100? Why not $900 and $50? It’s one of the reasons that I would like to
see some guidelines evolve along the lines of what you owe someone on a 20-page
collaboration in a 600-page book with a cover price of $35 and a print run of
4,000 copies rather than just “Hey, whatever you want. You’re the publisher.
He’s just an artist” undercurrent which still dominates the comic-book field. I
would also specify that Bob and Rick would be allowed to reprint the issues in
question if they thought they could make money on them. It’s their work on there so, in my books,
they have the right to reprint it anytime they want and should be supplied with
a set of negatives at cost just by requesting them at any time. I’m
not real big on estates. If Bob’s alive
and Rick’s alive, yeah, send them a cheque to the nursing home so they can play
three bingo cards on Tuesday night and, you know, really live it up or go on a
bus trip to the local casino and blow it all on the slot machines or buy Good
‘n’ Plenty by the carton or whatever it is that they’re into at that age. In Rick’s case, I can see sending the cheque
to his son Kirby after he’s gone.
Rick’s a dad and most dads are like that. But, after Kirby’s played his
last game of shuffleboard? Mm. No. At
that point I think you’re really stretching a point and dragging people into
the game who have no business being there.
But that would be up to the individual publisher depending on what he or
she thought his or her ethical obligations were to Rick and Bob. Or, more
likely, it will be up to Canada’s Marxist-feminist social engineering Supreme
Court (let’s not forget THEM!). It’s
quite possible that they’ll just mandate that Cerebus gets carved up and given
to any female (or her relatives and descendants) who was in Dave Sim’s vicinity
for longer than two weeks. They’re
already changing the laws in Ontario so there’s no such thing as a closed
divorce agreement. Any ex-wife who
wants to re-open her divorce and claim more money even decades after the fact
and even contrary to prior legal judgements will soon be able to do so in the
People’s Republic of Canada. Spousal
support in Canada will be the only legal agreement in the Western world dating
back to 1066 that will be deemed to be unilaterally non-binding, presumably
superseding all laws governing prenuptial agreements as well. You’ll have to
pay whatever the Marxist-feminist courts tell you to pay but you’ll have no
legal recourse that would cap or end those payments. You GO, girl!! And that’s just what the sows are
snuffling at it in the trough right now.
God only knows where we’ll be in thirty or forty years. Actually, Ger and I are mulling over a
possible work-made-for-hire offer right now.
Bill Willingham has expressed an interest in having us do a story for an
upscale Fables
book that Vertigo is planning. The
big reason that I’m inclined to do it is that Bill Willingham was the only
person who contacted me when I was getting ripped to shreds by the
Marxist-feminists on the Internet after 186 came out. Now it wasn’t much, but he did phone to say, “Uh, Dave? Are you aware of how badly you are getting
ripped to shreds on the Internet right now?”
which he didn’t have to do and which certainly no one else did. Bill was
barely an acquaintance at the time albeit one whose company I had enjoyed in
several bars at several conventions back when he was still doing The
Elementals. That and Chester Brown’s
“He’s fun to jam with” comment were the only direct and indirect professional
support I got from anyone for a number of years, and both of them came right at
ground zero, so certainly Bill Willingham and Chester Brown get more than a
fair hearing from me where few others get the time of day. Of
course, again, Bill Willingham is a genuine liberal which I assume the people
at DC/Vertigo aren’t in which case he’ll find his suggestion of a collaboration
with Dave Sim and Gerhard conveniently overruled and forgotten—and possibly
used against him so he gets the idea. Either shun Dave Sim or be shunned like Dave Sim. |