Cerebus Archive Report #6
August 2005
________________________________________________________________________________________
Policy Talk
July 13th to August 28
> 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.
[....]
I wonder how he came to this conclusion. The consensus on _Melmoth_ is that
it's useless garbage? That doesn't sound right. Is this supported by sales on
the respective volumes? What other evidence is there that volumes 6 through 16
suck?
[....]
Dan Parker
________________________________________________________________
-------- I think Dave is speaking *exclusively* about sales here. Compared to everything before, and including
Jaka's Story, I would also be inclined to agree with that, judging by sales in
comic stores I've been in, or at least which volumes are kept in stock. Oddly,
I just looked at the Amazon sales rankings. Anybody know how these work?
Doesn't Dave have a huge problem with Amazon? Do the ranks mean anything?
Because if so, this theory is out of whack (although, you will notice Reads is
next to last).
-Jeff
The Last Day #108,486 in Books
Latter Days #109,493 in Books
Going Home #109,570 in Books
Form & Void #110,647 in Books
High Society #146,929 in Books
Jaka's Story #153,052 in Books
Cerebus #175,624
Melmoth #186,729 in Books
Church & State 2 #242,999 in Books
Guys #288,269 in Books
Flight #327,847 in Books
Church & State 1 #343,467 in Books
Women #351,372 in Books
Minds #423,969 in Books
Reads #427,732 in Books
Rick's Story #489,414 in Books
________________________________________________________________
I'd expect the low position of
"Reads" and "Rick's Story" has less to do with politics and
more to do with the number of text-only pages.
- Larry Hart
________________________________________________________________
I don't have a source handy, but I
think Aardvark Vanaheim was selling the trades directly to Amazon and found it
was more trouble than it was worth. I think Amazon now gets the trades from a
distributor -- probably Diamond.
Dan Parker
I'm thinking that the release date
is also particularly relevant. i.e.
online buying has only become more popular in the last 5 years or so. So many
people would shift from buying their phonebooks directly from Dave to buying
them on Amazon at a discounted price. These people already had their earlier
phonebooks, hence the lower sales.
e
L nny
________________________________________________________________
------ Hmm. Makes sense. I guess
Dave would know what the *real* sales figures are.
-Jeff
********* Dave:
Actually, to me, I’m just trying to be as realistic as possible and think the
consensus has shaped up that Cerebus was really good and really funny and then
it got really serious and really boring and/or evil. I don’t think that’s the case and I don’t think the Cerebus
readership shares that view but I do think that’s the Family Feud/Lowest Common Denominator on Cerebus. My analogy would be
Woody Allen. “The early, funnier ones”
makes a great line in Stardust Memories because it’s so true in the
general sense. That doesn’t mean that
Woody Allen wasn’t at the time making—and hasn’t since made—good movies and it
doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a devoted core audience and a certain amount
of market cachet. He always manages to
find someone to give him a sufficient number of millions of dollars to make his
next movie and that puts him on a very short list of people of whom that can be
said—particularly over the long term.
But, at the same time, I think he recognizes that it would just be
foolish for him to be acting as if he was widely perceived to be in the same
category as Steven Spielberg or Orson Welles.
You have a better chance of making your way successfully through life if
you have an accurate grasp of how you are perceived and deal with that rather
than having an inflated self-opinion of you and your work that keeps bumping
its head on the fact that the ceiling is actually a good deal lower than
that. In terms of actual sales, the
books have all sold pretty steadily—to the extent that Ger has been reasonably
successful at predicting even eight months ahead of time when we are going to
run out of a title. Which means we
aren’t about to break any box office records—our sales surges are virtually
non-existent—but at least so far (God willing) we have been able to maintain a
minimum level of sales. Even through
rough stretches in the market in general that usually just means that the
inventory lasts longer as a result.
Instead of having to bring a book back into print in December, we have
to bring it back into print in April, or whatever. The Cerebus and High Society volumes tend to sell a lot faster
than the others. Even when we upped the
print run to 6,000 on Cerebus when we were printing 4,000 of the others during
the last slump, it still sold out before Ger had predicted that it would.
********* Dave: The
Amazon numbers, I have no idea where they get those. We haven’t sold to Amazon in several years and when we did we
were lucky to get an order for a single copy of High Society once every two weeks.
A big Amazon order was five copies of something and that would be once
in a blue moon—and they didn’t order all of the books. The most common orders from Amazon—again,
one copy and rarely as many as five—would be on High Society or Church &
State I and very often they would cancel the order before it had even been
processed and then reorder the same book the following week. I would be suspicious of the fact that Church
and State volume 2 is 111,000 places higher Church and State volume
1. I realize that it is as dangerous
in our world to suggest that Amazon just makes up its numbers as it is to
suggest that the CBC is a Marxist government propaganda vehicle, but that would
be my best assessment. If they
accompanied the list with the number of copies sold, then we could tell you
more accurately if the numbers were accurate or if they were just making them
up. Which is why I’m sure they just do
it by ranking without hard numbers attached.
That way the information is purely internal and there’s no way to
disagree with it.
********* Dave: It’s
very possible that reality is changing since the comic-book field is widening
so dramatically—in terms of the accelerated history: things just don’t stay the
same for any length of time anymore companies and books come and go at a
phenomenal rate—that most people don’t subscribe to the on-going mythologies
because they just aren’t aware of them.
For a teenager who’s been reading comics for four years it would be all
they could do to keep track of who is and who isn’t in the X-men without having to figure out if Dave Sim is evil and his book
garbage or if Dave Sim is great and his book wonderful. The comic book field has been an on-going
war of attrition for a number of years and the casualty figures among stores
are very, very high and so far as I know going higher all the time. For all I know, our orders—just by remaining
steady—are astronomically high relative to how the market in general is
doing.
********* Dave: I’m sure
that reality will change any number of times over the coming years relative to
Cerebus. I derive what reassurance I
can from the fact that the Comics Cadaver Derby cover featured on Comics Journal No.98 has proven fatal for all of the publishers
depicted except Aardvark Vanaheim and Fantagraphics. But a lot of the reason we’ve managed to stay in the game is that
I’ve never allowed myself to see the book as being any bigger than it is. If I’m erring on the side of caution (and I
might very well be) I think that’s more beneficial in the long run than erring
in the other direction.
********* Dave: It’s very
possible that Larry Hart’s viewpoint is pretty typical of the market in
general. It begins with the view that
the volumes with “too much text” are no good and proceeds from there. Depending on how you define “too much text”
that eventually whittles the story back to Cerebus, High Society and the two
Church & States. Even Dan Parker’s
observation would seem to imply that it only extends from Jaka’s Story to
Melmoth.
********* Dave: Of
course there has also always been a war of attrition over the quality of the
storyline in general. Everyone hated
High Society when that was coming out and Church & State’s ending was met
with deafening silence, as was each of the books after that. It could be that only Cerebus, High Society
and the two Church & States will ever be accepted or it could be that it
will take ten to fifteen years for each successive book to gain
acceptance.
********* Dave: One way
or the other, Cerebus has remained a very marginalised title throughout its
existence, far more widely denigrated than approved of and only grudgingly
approved of rather than celebrated. An uphill struggle all the way. I was more just trying to warn those
participating in these Policy discussions that the universal “damning with
faint praise”—both inside and outside the Cerebus readership—has made the
future of the balance of the storyline precarious at best and that I am far
more concerned with the entirety of the storyline being preserved than I am in
whether or not future generations get to read all 104 of the Beavers strips or
Revolt 3000. People want very, very
desperately to avoid what Cerebus as a creative work is saying and I would hate
to see the people who are going to be in charge of preserving Cerebus as a
creative work assisting in the process of distracting people away from
Cerebus. Part of that is going to
involve forcing yourselves to say something nice about something besides the
first five volumes as difficult as I understand that is for you to do. ________________________________________________________________
Miscellaney Volume Database: Just
got around to taking a closer look at all this (and Dave's comments). Awesome
job Jeff – truly excellent.
Story Order: BTW, is there a pattern in the order in which they're listed in
the database? Or was that just the order in which you got around to entering
it? The sort function on the database is very nice though. This raises an
interesting question with respect to the MV itself, will Dave include the
material in the order that it was created? Or in the order in which it fits
into the series
chronologically. I can see reasonable arguments both ways. I guess I might lean
towards story chronological order myself (it would certainly make it easier to
skip back and forth on subsequent
rereads). The other 16 volumes are, of course in BOTH story chronological and
creation chronological order. Also, would you divide the book into 2 separate
sections, Canon/Iconic, and then order within each section? I'd lean in favour
of doing it that way.
********* Dave: Well,
I’m very interested in getting as many opinions as possible. My brain really isn’t over in this
particular direction at the moment because I am finally coming to the end of
the 8½ x 11 and smaller chronological Archive, 1972 to 2005—six large filing
cabinet drawers full—so at this particular juncture in history my brain seizes
up when I hear the term chronological.
We have to actually get past the Collected Letters Ground Zero in order
to assess where we are and what we’re doing.
We only printed 3,000 and sold 1,000.
If it takes a year for those 1,000 to sell through in the stores and the
remaining 2,000 prove to be a three year supply, then we will be in a situation
where we can start thinking about the Miscellaneous
Volume in terms of actual scheduling a year from now or so. If Collected Letters has substantial
reorders and we’re running out of them a year from now and we really can’t look
the retailers in the eye and tell them no they can’t have anymore then I think
we have to postpone the MV and bring Collected Letters back into print. Of course both of those volumes take second
place to the volumes 1-16, the storyline proper. Ger and I have already agreed that if any of the 16 volumes need
to be reprinted that takes priority over Collected Letters for obvious reasons.
Color: So Dave's response seems to imply that he's definitely thinking a color
volume will occur. He seemed extremely doubtful about that when we talked to
him at SPACE 2004 - the prohibitive
factor being cost. I wonder if he's changed his mind on the matter/took a
closer look at the economics involved, or if he's just projecting ahead on the
off chance he can make it work?
Animated Portfolio: While it might be nice to see Dave do a reconstructed
portfolio, leaning towards historical purity, I'd prefer the 2nd rate (since
1st rate isn't available) reproduction of the
original portfolios. Either as a page per plate, or, as Dave suggested, 3 rows
of 2 per page (although I didn't quite understand his alternative comment of
"or do we stick with the original format and just reduce it a lot?" -
if you printed at 3 x 2 , wouldn't that be shrinking it A LOT more than if you
stuck to the original format of one cell per page??)
(as an aside, I finally had one of the stories - His First Sword (complete with
Dave's autograph to me on the last plate) - framed and it looks AWESOME. I did
make the hard choice of selecting 12 of the 17 plates for this project, and
then I lined them up in 3 rows of 4. I'll
upload some pics to the site - I actually created a folder in the picture
section of the site, but had trouble uploading it - but since I finally dumped
my dialup in favor of a cable modem a few weeks ago, I'll revisit that upload
soon. Also, I think I posted here that I was originally quoted a price of about
$400 for the project (which lead to my delaying do it), I ultimately found a
decent place to do the whole
job for about $135!).
********* Dave: My reference there was to the actual format of the
portfolio where the image size was square but it was on a rectangular
background with the name of the story and the plate number printed off to one
side. It seems more sensible to me to
print the image as close to actual size as possible and just drop the original
format OR to reduce the image to get two or three or four of them on one page
********* Dave: [which
is one of the reasons that I’m soliciting input on this a little more urgently
than I was a while ago. I knew that the
Collected Letters experiment needed to have some space cleared around it and
that the MV would be next (whenever “next” turned out to be—anywhere from 2006
to 2010) from our standpoint with the colour volume as a distant hypothetical
concept for somewhere at least two or three years out (depending on how
Collected Letters and the MV did). The
fact that Erik Larsen is willing to do the heavy lifting on it with Bob Chapman
(and as far as possible I want to do the negotiation publicly as part of the
Bill of Rights discussion at Al Nickerson’s website) means that it doesn’t have
to be considered in the context of the Aardvark-Vanaheim pecking order of
priorities—and might actually be on its way to press while we are still
assembling and assessing the data on the Collected Letters experiment. Erik told me that he when the films for the American Flagg book came in they were a mess and he devoted a lot of
his working time to fixing them with Photoshop and the other techniques that he
has. Knowing that Jeff Tundis and other
Cerebus readers are inclined in those directions as well—using the technology
to recover or recreate rather than “improve” the original material (which
“improvement” usually means everyone ends up looking like the back end of an
airbrushed Buick) as they did with “Passage” means that all discussions of the
colour volume are now moving from the hypothetical to the specific very
quickly—a matter of “speak now or forever hold your peace”. To cite one example, Bob Chapman has all of
the Epic stories in negative form except for “A Friendly Reminder”. So, at this point, I think what’s required
is an APB on the 3 original pages for that story and probably at least the
initial stages of reconstruction—trying to determine what would need to be done
and what could be done with scanned printed pages if any one of or all
three of the pages fail to turn up in time. If you have a specific idea in mind of what should be in the
colour volume and how it should be put together, Erik and Bob Chapman are, I’m
sure, open to input. Since I’ve got
printed copies of all the material, I’m less interested I think than the
average core Cerebus reader is going to be who—like Erik himself—really wants
one book that has all the Cerebus colour material in it. I will approve the final package but if I’m
the one who actually defines the contents, the odds are pretty good that I’ll
leave something out or deemphasize something.
********* Dave: As the
target consumer for the product in question, how much are you willing to
spend? If we included the best
reproduction of each of the 300 covers, would you be willing to pay a premium
price for that or would you prefer the conventional package where the better
covers are highlighted and the others are presented in blocks of ten or so?
I’ve already told Erik that I’m willing to write introductions for each of the
sections but I really think the colour volume needs to emphasize the visual
over the literary.
NS Canon Category: Good move. It seemed to me that this was needed from when I
heard Dave's original categories - i.e. just b/c we can't pinpoint the exact
time the story takes place shouldn't mean it's less canonical when it seems to
have "really" occurred to Cerebus as much as the time-pegged stuff
(as opposed to the high iconic stuff which is just out there). Although, to be
honest, I'm not sure if I now know the difference between NS Canon and non-high
Iconic. In fact, it
seems like regular Iconic has now been wiped out except for "Breaking Up
Is Hard to Do" - why isn't that NS Canon too? I suggest that perhaps the
High Iconic category be turned into just plain Iconic given the existence of NS
Canon.
********* Dave: I’m certainly flexible when it comes to being talked into
or out of the various categories that have been proposed and that I’ve proposed
myself. Likewise with the
timelines. Just to expand a bit on what
I said earlier, I’ve been working full time on the Archive for the last few
weeks. I just want it done because a)
it’s a lot easier to do research for Following Cerebus when I know where
everything is and b) I can’t really think of doing anything else until it’s
done. I’m writing this on the Friday of
the Labour Day weekend and plan to spend Saturday and Monday on a major push to
get everything besides the Publications Archive and the Photographs Archive
done. The problem is that this has
moved me into what I would describe as a Higher Iconic category—completely
absorbed in keeping track of the sequence of actual historical events so I can
file undated documents accurately. All
of my memory is taken up with touchstone points in the Archive like Kevin and
Peter’s printed invitation to the premiere of the Turtles movie in Northampton
in March of 1990. I know that one by now because it is printed on bright,
bright magenta paper so wherever it has moved in the drawer when I’m shifting
things forward or backward, that tells me roughly where the 1990s start. If the document I’m trying to file is from
1988 then it is somewhere forward of the movie premiere invitation. But that’s at the exact opposite of the
spectrum from Cerebus’ fictional universe.
I read the five Yahoo questions for August before answering them and
thought, “I really have no idea what they’re talking about.” Basically as if I had spent the last two
weeks studying for the wrong exam. I
had to go and look up the sequences in question. Right away, I knew the answer, but just not off the top of my
head. I have no idea if that is a
temporary or a permanent condition now that I am coming to the fixed end on
Cerebus—the completion of the Archive.
********* Dave: So as
much as possible, I’d like to off-load responsibility for this on those of you
who are reading “Policy 3” and who are fully absorbed in the
mythos—particularly those who are re-reading or have recently re-read or who
intend in the near future to re-read the entire story, because I have no idea
when I’m going to be able to make it back from the Higher Iconic end of Cerebus
reality. Or (perhaps even more
sobering) if I’m going to make it back.
I am definitely beginning to experience the loss of conscious Cerebus
memory that I’ve warned everyone about now that I don’t need to keep track of
it for the sake of the continuity and that, for me, Cerebus is actually coming
to an end now that Collected Letters is out and the Archive is about 75%
done. This is my personal March, 2004.
********* Dave: It’s all well and good to
warn you about this, but I’m also more aware than ever of my personal
responsibility to see that the colour volume and the MV take shape in such a
way that makes sense to a reader who is immersed in the mythos and that will
keep those volumes compatible with the 16 Trade paperbacks.
Alexx Dating: Dave suggests that Alexx's timeline is sort of the default
"official" timeline, in the absence of other suggestions on time
placement. I haven't looked at Alexx's timeline in a while, but IIRC, there
were points here and there that I didn't agree with. Has Dave studied it in
detail?
********* Dave: I
haven’t studied the timeline in detail
except for when Alexx first sent it to me and when he gave me an updated
version at the Words and Pictures Museum (a decade ago? GAH!) I did find it in Cerebus
Companion when I unearthed the Archive copies and skimmed through it, but,
there again, that was a good example of the conflict I’m talking about. I can’t do an effective job on the Archive
if I stop and read everything that looks interesting and I can’t to an
effective job if I keep getting distracted by the Cerebus continuity. I have to stay focused on “What year was the
Cerebus Companion published and where does that go relative to all of these
publications?” The only content that
registers right now is the real-world timeline, Aardvark-Vanaheim’s chronology
rather than Cerebus’ chronology and if the colour volume takes shape in the
environment, that is going to figure prominently in how the volume gets
done. That is, all the pieces will be
described in terms of Aardvark-Vanaheim’s chronology, rather than
Cerebus’.
Has
he spoken with Alexx?
********* Dave: No, as
far as I know the last time I spoke with Alexx was at the Words and Pictures
Museum in the downstairs lobby back in ’96 or ’97. As I recall, he wasn’t able to stay for whatever event it was and
just wanted to give me the latest update of the timeline which I thanked him
for as profusely as you can thank someone who clearly has to be somewhere else
at that exact minute.
Perhaps we or Dave can
take a more in-depth look at it in an effort to elevate it to "official"
status?
********* Dave: Yes,
ideally, as I’ve said I think this is a job for those who are most immersed in
the mythos at the present moment. Let
me give what I think is a good example.
At the time that I was doing my Fitzgerald research, and immediately
after I had finished, I would have been very useful in critiquing a Fitzgerald
chronology. The whole thing was vivid
in my mind—not just Fitzgerald but all of his books and characters. Five years later, I wouldn’t be of much use
at all because I’m not currently absorbed in it. That end of Policy—what structure best suits the format and
contents of the colour and MV volumes—is best served by that level of immersion. Dan Parker has just finished reading not all
16 volumes but all 300 issues in their entirety so, for the time being, he
would be in that category. I think it
only makes sense to defer to that level of immersion when it comes to figuring
out structure or making sure that the people who are the most immersed in the
subject are the ones at the core of the debate. Put another way, at this moment you’re going to get a better
application of Alexx’s timeline to the colour and MV volumes out of Dan than
you would get out of me. He’d be
looking at it from the standpoint of what is missing from his Cerebus
collection which he has just familiarized himself at many different levels and
so would be able to describe more accurately the two missing pieces. The same as someone who’s been working on a
jigsaw puzzle for a week. If there is
one piece missing from an otherwise completed area, he or she is going to have
a clearer mental image of what that piece looks like than someone who just sits
down and is seeing the puzzle for the first time.
OTOH, Dave has sort of evinced a
lack of concern over such a fanboyish degree of concern over the "official
facts" of Cerebus plot minutiae - so that might be of little interest to
him (which could imply that he'd lean toward just ordering the MV in creation
chronological order (a point on which there can be no dispute - i.e. we know
what was published before what) (unless you want to
start splitting hairs and order it by when Dave created it, rather than when it
was published - would that change things?).
********* Dave: I didn’t
so much express a lack of concern as I expressed a level of disbelief that
someone could be that absorbed in something they weren’t making a living off
of. I mean, it was a big part of my job
description to keep everything internally consistent in the book but it
sort of threw me for a loop when, as an example, Alexx went to the time and
trouble to assemble a complete timeline.
It was like finding out that all of these little intricacies I’d been
weaving out of moonbeams and pixie dust were actually an exam and someone was
going to grade me on the internal consistencies and inconsistencies. I was just grateful that I had been as
needlessly (as I thought of it then) compulsive about being consistent as I had
been and passed Alexx’s tests.
Page Count: So what is the projected page count of the MV? Page count might be
a nice additional column to be added to the database table (if Jeff had some
spare time to kill! lol). Just wondering though – is it a few hundred? A quick
eyeball at the chart, assuming most short
stories are 5 pages, gets me to about 265 pages. Is that close? Has anyone done
the math? And the Color Volume? What's the total page count of the 4 Epic
Stories plus Spawn 10 (looks like that's all of it, except for the portfoli,
right?)? I'd guess that's about 32 pages, plus another 50 for the portfolio (at
a plate per page) or 9 (at about 6 plates per page), yielding an approximate
total of 41 or 82.
********* Dave: This is
very valuable. This is along the lines of what I think is required at this
point is to get as accurate a picture of what the two volumes will look like
physically. My inclination is to just
get everything in one spot. It’s either
colour or it’s black and white. It’s
either in one book or the other. If you
don’t leave anything out—if every appearance of Cerebus outside of the 16
volumes is included, what do those two books look like? Let me see if I can supply another useful
question. The colour volume isn’t going
to look like the 16 trade paperbacks.
If you’re going to do colour, it only makes sense to do a coffee table
book, slightly oversized and on coated stock for the sake of the
reproduction. So you picture it next to
the 16 trade paperbacks and Collected Letters and it will be bigger and
different looking. Now. Picture the
MV. Should the MV match the 16 volumes
or the colour volume? That is, do you
do an oversized black and white book on glossy paper for the sake of things
like the Six Deadly Sins Portfolio so the images can be reproduced closer to the
original printed size or do you reduce everything to trade paperback size so it
looks like a more natural volume 17?
So has Dave ever mentioned a time frame in which the MV will come out?
********* Dave: It seems
clear at this point that the MV will be after the colour volume. I think we’d just be asking for trouble
trying to do both at the same time, both in terms of doing a good job on the
production and in terms of promoting them and bringing them both to market at
the same time. Erik Larsen and Bob
Chapman are both very busy guys and there’s no way for me to know how
interested either of them is in the project, nor is there any way to know what
is going to come along to distract them from the project. My last communication on the subject from
Bob Chapman was in December of 1994 before Erik revived the whole thing. It’s not completely outside of the realm of
possibility that we will still just be talking about this in 2015.
Is the Collected Letters being numbered as 17 in the phonebook sequence (due
pretty soon, right?)? Or would this volume be 17?
e
L nny
********* Dave: No. Gerhard asked that question and my gut
instinct was to say that Collected Letters
wasn’t volume 17 although I didn’t know why that was my gut instinct. The more I thought about it, the more I
realized several things that told me my gut instinct had been right.
********* Dave: One,
that the Aardvark-Vanaheim formal backlist has to consist of the 16 volumes—the
story proper. All of our energies are
devoted to keeping those books in print at all times which is a daunting task
as it is. If we run out of Collected Letters’ first printing at the same time that we need to
print Melmoth and after we’ve brought Melmoth back into print we
find out we need to do another printing of High Society right away,
well, that’s the way that it needs to go even if it means we’re out of Collected
Letters for six months or a year or two years. It’s in the same category as the Guide to Self-Publishing which
is currently out of print because I intend to do major revisions to it before
we reprint it this time. I’ll take as
long as I think I need to take in order to do a version of GSP that
won’t need to be revised in another year.
That may take a year or two to accomplish in itself. By contrast, when we finally included the
“Silverspoon” strips in the Cerebus volume, that was in complete “hurry
up” mode. The Cerebus volume
needed to be printed now.
********* Dave: Two, to
make Collected Letters into volume 17
would be to take unfair advantage of those little numbers on the spine, forcing
someone who was only interested in Cerebus to buy Dave Sim’s Collected Letters
so there wasn’t a jump from volume 16 to volume 18. If we reach a consensus that the black and white MV (BWMV) should
look like the first 16 volumes, then it will be volume 17. If we decide that it should look like the
colour volume then there won’t be a volume 17, just the 16 trades, a BWMV and a
CMV.
********* Dave: Part of
the Collected Letters experiment is
that—if we find out that 1,000 copies is all that we can sell or that we can’t
even sell 1,000 copies (that is, every store that ordered four still has two
left a year from now), then we have to reconfigure Collected Letters,
perhaps as a print-to-order book. Right
now, I have enough letters stored in the computer to do three books the size of
the volume that just shipped. If all we
can sell are 500, then we would probably go the “print to order” route and make
all three volumes available that way at whatever horrible price that would work
out to (probably $75 to $100 a book if the print-to-order quotes Ger got off
the Internet are typical). If, on the
other hand, we’re able to sell the 3,000-copy first printing over the course of
two years or so then we would have to reconfigure in a different
direction. At this moment—if that turns
out to be the sales pattern—I would lean in the direction of letting the first
volume go out of print and releasing a second volume on the assumption that the
only audience is the core audience, they’ve had two years to buy their copy and
it makes more sense to offer the core readership the next 600 pages of letters
rather than bringing the first volume back into print in an attempt to find
another 3,000 core readers or spreading our resources too thin by trying to
keep seventeen and then eighteen and then nineteen books in print.
________________________________________________________________
--------- Yes. Shrink it by 20% for
regular format, maybe (?) 60% for multiple panels.
---------- The color thing began to
look plausible when Erik Larsen got involved. But, Dave hasn't heard from Erik
since the first handshake, so he doubts Erik will come through at this point.
********* Dave: Yes, I
was surprised. Those interested in
following the CMV negotiations and participating where and when they see an
opportunity can click on cerebusart.com and then click on the discussion space
for the Creator’s Bill of Rights. It’s
going to go very slowly. Erik Larsen is
just finding out how big your plate becomes and how full it gets when you
become a publisher. He’s actually
getting back to me a lot more frequently than I thought he was going to which
would seem to suggest that he’s genuinely interested in the book getting
done. Which is why I have to relay a
sense of urgency to all of you to come up with the running order and contents
of the ideal colour volume even though it might not end up getting done for
another five years. It might, on the
other hand, be on Image’s publishing schedule for next year.
-------- Too funny. I hadn't noticed
that. Yeah, “Breaking Up” should be Canon NS. Then all High Iconic could become
Iconic.
********* Dave: Again, I
don’t have any fundamental objections to this but I think you’ll get a much
better assessment from someone in full immersion mode if they are able to
review all of the material for the CMV and the BWMV. Some stuff will fit and some won’t. The largest open question there is, will two people in full
immersion mode agree on what fits in which category or can one of them persuade
the other in a free-ranging discussion?
I don’t think anyone would want to live in FI mode. Dan’s 300-issue Reread went from December 26
to July 22 so I’d imagine he would qualify as FI for the next couple of months
or so at least.
There is one more story that is
still "undecided." The Turtles story.
********* Dave:
Yes. When the time comes, I will try
contacting Pete indirectly and Todd indirectly to find out if it’s possible to
include the two major crossovers in the CMV.
Indirectly so they don’t have to feel any pressure to agree. They can just tell the respective
intermediaries, no and that will be the end of it if that’s either of their
answer.
--------- The first priority is
Dave, whether printed in a book or here online.
********* Dave: Mm. Not
necessarily. This is a benevolent
dictatorship and I am your benevolent dictator but in these situations I prefer
to be the court of last resort as opposed to the first priority. I would defer to someone who was in Full
Immersion mode or I would be willing to adjudicate a disagreement between two
or more people in Full Immersion mode anywhere they had reached a serious
impasse about something that needed to be decided yea or nay. In terms of
setting an overall course, I would suggest as complete as possible since I’ll
be the one who gets the blame if it isn’t complete and a big part of the reason
for doing the volume in the first place is to get people to stop asking about
it. At the moment it’s just another way
for everyone to be distracted from the storyline itself. I’m hoping that the DVD with all of the
back-of-the-book material is making progress, because that will be the next
thing. No one is likely to say, “wow,
great colour volume”. What they’ll say
is “where’s the black and white volume” and if we get that out, then they’ll
say “where’s the Aardvark Comment volume?” I’ve finally had to admit that each
of these distractions has to be eliminated one at a time if we are going to
have any kind of focus on the storyline itself. I’m hoping the storyline will be the center of the discussions
again by 2009, although I think 2015 or 2017 is more likely given the way these
things tend to go..
After that, Alexx's timeline. I read
through everything I could concerning the Miscellany stories, and Alexx seems
to have covered all the bases. I doubt
*anyone* will do a more thorough job.
********* Dave: Yes, I
would tend to agree and would, actually, put Alexx’s timeline in the position
of the first priority. It’s a perfect
example of the practical application of Full Immersion. For all we know, Alexx hasn’t given a second
thought to Cerebus since the turn of the millennium, but we still have the
product of his best work while he was in Full Immersion mode. The same thing that my annotations of Going
Home would represent my best thinking on Fitzgerald while in Full Immersion
mode for any Fitzgerald scholar interested in making use of them. A lot of this didn’t occur to me until Dan
was most of the way through his Re-read or I think I might’ve suggested to him
that he give some thought to what he might accomplish while he was “in there”
given that even the world’s biggest psycho-fan is not likely to spend seven
months immersed in Cerebus too many times in his (or Margaret’s) lifetime. At the very least, anyone considering doing
the same thing, I would suggest having Alexx’s timeline handy while re-reading
the complete story since Alexx is still the guy to beat at this point when it
comes to Cerebus cred. Cerebus readers
will modify Alexx, I think, but they will never supplant Alexx at this point.
--------- 18 (b&w) and 19
(color). I would guess it's too late to go back and change the number on the
Collected Letters volume. But even if there is time, would Dave pull a
"Toddster" and release Volume 19, followed by 17 and 18?
-Jeff
********* Dave: See
above.
________________________________________________________________
Personally, I was a little dubious
of Dave's rationale that any mention of the storyline proper automatically
converts an iconic story to canon. Like the TMNT story is canon simply b/c it
references a date consistent with the Cerebus timeline? hmmm.
********* Dave: Again,
not necessarily, but not unnecessarily either.
My answers are coming from someone who isn’t in Full Immersion
mode. I don’t think we want to partake
of the “creator’s as definitive viewpoint” being carved in stone when the
creator is being quite frank about the fact that his own knowledge is nowhere
near as encyclopaedic as Alexx’s paper trail at this point. Alexx’s timeline is what needs to be built
upon and added to. I’ll be happy to
adjudicate as best I can, if presented with the most persuasive arguments on
any and all sides.
I
agree as a whole, but to the extent flaws exist here and there -
i.e. illogicities, is Alexx open to discussing them and revising the
timelines?
********* Dave: I don’t
think it’s really a matter of Alexx revising his timelines as it is of Alexx
having his timelines questioned and annotated.
If Dan had had Alexx’s timeline next to him while he reread the whole
works, he might’ve taken significant issue with some of Alexx’s conclusions, in
which case it would make sense to have a dissension attached to the
timeline. Not replacing that part of
Alexx’s timeline, but presenting a countervailing argument as to why it might
follow that the day or year of Astoria’s birth is in the wrong place, as an
example based on internal evidence within the storyline.
Is Dave in dialogue with Alexx?
********* Dave: As I
said, before, no.
Is Alexx still around? (has he ever shown up here?).
********* Dave: Two very
good but—it seems to me—entirely separate questions. Is Alexx still alive is one question, is Alexx still around and
in Full Immersion mode is another question.
Is Alexx still around but completely disinterested in Cerebus at this
point. Depending on the answers that
would point us in different directions.
If he’s still around but largely disinterested in Cerebus, then I think
it would nice to give him one big THANK YOU, ALEXX as the undisputed Cerebus
Scholar champion if he stops by to see why his cybernetic ears are
burning. If he’s interested in Cerebus
and is considering his own Re-read, I think it would be very useful to see if
he was willing to time it so other people could do the re-read with him. Since his own scholarship exceeds everyone
else’s—including, on paper, my own—it’s reasonable to assume that he would be
our own best critic of his earlier timeline(s) explaining why he changed his
mind about various dates and their placement so that doubtful areas could be
more clearly marked with a list of specific OTOH’s rather than just
parenthetical question marks.
hah! OK..so then it is, officially,
Book 17? Drats! To be honest, I'm not sure I want to buy this one, but I
definitely want the MV & CV - whatever will I do???
********* Dave:
Relax. It doesn’t say Book 17 anywhere
on it so if you don’t want it to be so, there isn’t a scrap of evidence to make
you capitulate to the Collected Letters Faction.
BTW, is it currently his intention to include EVERYTHING in the Miscellany
database (at least the B&W stuff) in the Miscellaney volume? Or at least
everything he has the right to publish? In terms
of what he needs to secure permission for, I guess that would be: TMNT 8, Miami Mice 4, Bacchus 1, Normalman
10, and Awakening Comics 2? Or not all of these? Or more than this? I assume he
can reprint the Jam stuff w/o permission - or is that wrong?
********* Dave: Depends on who you’re asking. My own political viewpoint is that if you worked on something,
you have the right to reprint it. The
fact that the volumes will be done by another publisher means that that could get
tested. I doubt Erik is going to take
the chance of printing something that might get him sued. I’m going to
recommend that he send out letters to everyone, notifying them that their work
is going to be reprinted and giving them a deadline to contact him with any
objection they might have. And some
kind of royalty will have to be worked out for everyone whose work is included.
********* Dave: My own view is that you have
to include everything to the extent that that’s possible, using the various
indexes of all of Cerebus’ appearances and then my own culling of the
Publications Archive for obscure pieces that may have only appeared in a
convention program booklet. First you
make the pile, then you see how big it is and then you decide what to leave out
if the pile is too big or if the material itself doesn’t seem to be worth
printing. However, knowing the core
Cerebus readership, I would say that you will be better served with a complete
book. You are never going to get credit
for what you include, you’re only going to get criticized for what you leave
out. One of the things that set the
Cerebus collections apart from most indy material was that the whole story was
reprinted in sequence so that’s become a core element of Cerebus. If you can fit everything besides the actual
storyline into two books, that’s what Cerebus fans will be expecting. In the same way that if we were to do an
Aardvark Comment Volume, it would have to be the Complete Aardvark Comment, not
The Best of Aardvark Comment.
********* Dave: I think
it’s also worth pointing out in terms of rights that we would just be
reprinting the pages with Cerebus on them where he only made a guest appearance
on a single page or in a single panel.
It would be hoped that the individual copyright holders would understand
the motivation and realize that in a Complete Miscellaneous Volume it’s the
fact of Cerebus’ appearance that is of interest, not their own creative work
per se.
One
other point - Dave mentions putting footnotes in subsequent printings of the
phonebooks to refer to the MV. I hope he does it the other way too - i.e. the
MV has a note before each story telling the reader where it fits in for the
story proper in books 1-16. I'd love it, in fact, if he put a Swords of Cerebus
type intro in before each story giving some context to its creation. In fact,
as far as I can see, there are no plans to reprint the Swords Intros at all -
is that right? That would be an excellent thing to include in the MV too.
********* Dave: Again, I
have no fundamental objection to it.
It’s not something that would occur to me because I’m not in Full
Immersion mode but this would definitely tie in with what I just outlined. If I leave out the Swords introductions the
week after the book comes out, the core audience would be saying, “I noted that
the Swords introductions weren’t included, which seems a shame to me because
they were such a vital part of the package for me when it was coming out”. The parameters of the Big Pile have to come
from the core readership for that exact reason. If you can think of anything that exists that you think should be
in there, now is the time to say something while the actual planning is going
on.
********* Dave: And
further along those lines, I think the best prospect for making progress on
that basis is for the person with the most complete line-up for both books to
just put their list together and post it here and then have any additions made
from there. I’m not sure if we’re set
up for that but I think a master list that gets added to makes more sense than
a first draft list followed by a bunch of e-mails that end up getting buried or
ignored. Hopefully inside of a month or
two months we would have something to show Erik. Here, this is what the book is going to look like and here’s the
order that everything is going in. From
there we move into Annotation City—what needs to be described in order to
clarify any natural questions the core reader would have? That could be marked with either an asterisk
“We’d like some notes on this one” or with excerpts from published interviews
and other sources.
********* Dave: This is
an area where we are being a little premature since the “keyword” function
which will (God willing) one day be attached to the finished Archive allowing
for all relevant passages to be found just by typing in, say, “Terry
Austin”. There you go: three pages of
comments on the “Squinteye” strip, pick which ones you want to run with the
strip in the Black and White Miscellaneous Volume.
********* Dave: That
brings us to SFI—Serious Full Immersion—guys who would be able to tell you
where a story had been discussed and be able to pull up the quote from Comics Feature or The Comics Journal or the letters page in
issues 32, 78, 117, 189, 205 and 238, The Yahoo Questions. My point being that you can’t just put an
asterisk next to everything in the BWMV and the CMV and say, “Tell us a story,
Dave”. A big part of the motivation
behind the Cerebus Archive is to organize the material that exists because I
think I’m safe in saying that in addition to writing the longest sustained
narrative, I have written and discussed more about that sustained
narrative than most authors would ever dream of writing about their own
work. I’m willing to continue doing
that, but I am also trying to taper off at this point and would prefer to
supplement what I’ve already said rather than to always have to keep saying
something new and trusting in my memory which is just not being engaged by the
material the way that it used to be. If
I’ve already written three pages or the equivalent in interviews on a specific
subject then I would rather that those recollections be attached to the
material permanently. If I’ve only
written a paragraph, I’ll be happy to add another paragraph or clarify the one
that I already wrote but I do think that the comics material should carry the
two books. 300 pages of comics and 800
pages of commentary—even if that commentary already exists—is, I’m sure, going
to run contrary to the intention behind the two books: The Complete Cerebus,
not the Complete Dave Sim View of Cerebus.
Alternatively, perhaps another
volume would be "Dave on Cerebus" and collect EVERY interview Dave
has done, and all writing he's done on Cerebus, including his Q&A here. I'd
certainly buy such a volume in a second.
e
L nny
********* Dave: You
might, however, Lenny, get a major hernia carrying it out of the store. I can’t believe the number of interviews
that I did over the years both published and unpublished. Likewise the pile of Dave Sim writings
which, apart from the Notebooks and specific subjects and correspondence, is
darn near a foot high. No doubt some of
it would be of interest to Cerebus’ core readers (like outtakes from Reads and the notebooks full of Torah commentaries, 82 Tour diary,
vacation diary), but I really have no interest in typing it all up and it sure
wouldn’t fit into Following Cerebus and I don’t think it’s particularly
suited to the two-volume capper to The Complete Cerebus. I think deciding what needs to be
reprinted and what doesn’t need to be reprinted vis-à-vis Dave Sim
Collected Writings is a future problem when the Archive has actually been
scanned in by Margaret & Co. and everyone can see just how much %$#@
material there is and then begin the discussions of what would be worth
publishing in a book or books.
EVERYTHING, well, to me that’s the Archive itself either on the Internet
or on disks. Here’s EVERYTHING. If EVERYTHING is what you want, you’d
probably serve the material better by simply transcribing it and preserving
it. Over there you can see all of the
actual notebook pages, handwritten.
Over here, you can read our best guess as to what that hen-scratch says.
To me, Lenny, as an EVERYTHING guy, that will likely be your game preserve,
working your way through EVERYTHING in one form or another. Several steps to your right are the “What
should we put in a book?” folks.
There’s no point in you going over to them or them coming over to you to
pose the question, because your answer is always going to be the same:
********* Dave:
EVERYTHING.
********* Dave: And God
bless you for that. You are the sort of
guy upon whom guys like me build their careers. ________________________________________________________________
Indeed. To me, it was a great disappointment
when I found that the Swords-style introductions no longer featured in the
phone books. Admittedly, two or three pages on each individual issue of High
Society, etc. would have been way too
much, but I loved those Swords intros and really wished the phone books had something similar--say one ten or fifteen
page intro per volume. In fact, I don't own that many of the phone books, because I have all the original
comics, and a lot of the phone books really don't add anything to those originals. The later phone books, with
the appendices, are great, but something similar for the ones that originally
had minimal or no intros or afterwords would be nice.
Dom
********* Dave: I tended
not to do that with the trade paperbacks because I really, really wanted them
to stand on their own as books, as graphic novels. For Fitzgerald and Hemingway, it seemed to make sense to explain
what it was that I was trying to do because so much research went into each of
the characters and it was a chance to discuss my current enthusiasm which is
always more interesting on paper than it is in conversation. And by that time I was pretty confident that
people were treating the books as graphic novels so they wouldn’t just see them as
an excuse to read more Dave commentaries and would see the commentaries as a
supplement to the work and not preferable to or a replacement for the work
itself.
********* Dave: To
reiterate what I said above, I have no problem with including whatever amount
of commentary the core readership thinks is appropriate to the books but I
would prefer to use existing commentaries rather than writing new ones. I mean there’s a sort of Rubicon of Lunacy
that I would be crossing, in my view, in writing a new introduction to my
Swords introductions if those end up being included—which I suspect everyone
will prefer that they are.
________________________________________________________________
========== A few people on the group
mentioned different presentation formats. Dave must still be mulling it over.
********* Dave: Yes, and
so’s Erik and so’s Bob at this point.
If you’ve got a clear picture in your mind of the format that you
envision and you want to pitch in on the discussion, you’re more than welcome. We’re all just throwing out ideas and in my
experience, the clearest and sharpest vision most accurately conveyed usually
prevails in those situations. The first
Complete Running Order posted here will probably be the one that ends up—with
some modification—being used.
========== Me too. But Dave flatly
shot the single volume idea down. Not possible to bind the different formats
and paper stock together.
********* Dave: Mm. I
don’t really shoot ideas down. It may
seem that that’s what I’m doing but I’m always more than amenable to having my
mind changed on any given subject. If
the BWMV and the CMV are both coffee-table-edition-sized, you can certainly
look at incorporating them under one cover.
I think it would be pretty unwieldy.
That’s why it’s sort of necessary to find out how big the pile is first
and then determine if it’s too big for one volume. If you need two people to pick it up and both hands to flip to
the middle of the book, I think you’ll be better splitting it into two volumes.
You have to be realistic about it. If
you want EVERYTHING in there, it isn’t likely to be very sensible to try to do
it in one book. That’s why I think the two books need to be visualized. You can’t say I want EVERYTHING but I also
want it in a nice, slim 250-page book.
The two are incompatible.
========== Alexx? You can try
tracking him down. There's a link to his web page in the Links section. He's
probably registered here too, or Margaret
has his email address. In dialogue with Dave? No idea.
========== Any particular
illogicities you are referring to?
********* Dave: Yes,
that was the same question that I had.
Since Alexx is the king of the storyline scholarship mountain at this
point, I think we should really stick to specific criticisms. I have a mental impression of things that I
didn’t agree with in his first try, but as far as I know he fixed all of those
in the revised version he gave me at the Words and Pictures Museum. But, then, I haven’t really been in Full
Immersion mode since I saw the first one so there could very well be a few
inconsistencies.
========== Buy 'em all. After all
your bitching, you haven't dropped X-Men yet--- you're gonna' pass up a Cerebus
Volume?? Sheeyeah, right! :P
********* Dave: There’s
a very good reason to make sure we do this right. Too many members of the core audience are going to feel compelled
to buy the books, so we better get it right the first time or all we’re going
to hear is what a rip-off it was and all the stuff that was missing and so
on.
========== I'm assuming Dave retains
some kind of publishing rights. certain things probably have to be sorted out,
only Dave can do that. Other than Laird being a bitch with the TMNT story, I
can't see it being a problem.
-Jeff
********* Dave: Since
anything we say here is very apt to get back to the copyright holders, I think
it would probably be a good idea to avoid pejoratives like “bitch”. I can understand what Pete is doing a lot of
the time. For example, he Photo-shopped
all of Kevin’s duo-tone shades out of Turtles No.1 in a commemorative edition
that he did. On the one hand, you can
say that he mutilated Kevin’s artwork.
On the other hand, I think even Kevin would agree that the tones didn’t
work really well. He was trying to be
Richard Corben. When I used the same
duo-tone board on issue 12, I was trying to be Bernie Wrightson. We both fell well short of the mark. By buying Kevin’s share of the Turtles, Pete
bought the right to do things like that, to fix the things that he thinks needs
fixing. If I knew a way to get the duo-tone shades off of issue 12, I’d
probably do it, too, at this point.
********* Dave: I think
ideally what I would like to reproduce is the colour version of the Turtles
crossover that First Comics did which—except for trying to colour over the grey
Letratone on Cerebus (which never looks right) I thought came out really
good. I have no idea if those films
exist or how difficult it would be to Photoshop it out of a printed copy. That never works either although, as Bob
Chapman says, everyone is acting as if it works fine. I’m glad that Bob and Erik are both involved in this project
because they both have the same attitude—don’t pretend that it looks fine if it
looks like $%#@.
________________________________________________________________
None that come straight to mind.
However, next month's book Guys
present some real timeline problems - perhaps that's where it was.
I'm thinking one of my suggested Q's will be on that issue.
I was also thinking about what we'll do as a Group after Reread II
ends in January (actually, I took it on myself to suggest that Feb. be
a Miscellany month and Mar. be a Wildcard/General Discussion month,
and altered the schedule accordingly. (although I didn't include
Collected Letters - should I?). Perhaps we could devote a month to
discussing Cerebus timeline issues and do a "Reread" of Alexx's
timeline?
********* Dave: I think
that might be a good idea. We’re very
apt to get a clearer idea of what belongs where in the two MV’s if you all
agree to bear down on that side of things as close to simultaneously as
possible. Because I really don’t think anything takes the place of Full
Immersion. I know that sounds odd, and
it probably sounds odder still to have people step forward on that basis, but
as can be seen by your ambivalence about Alexx’s work at this point—with no
clear idea of whether any criticisms of it are valid or not—I think the
viewpoint is validated. Our best people
when it comes to decision-making are going to be the ones who are most fully
immersed at any given time, particularly if it’s the ones who still have a
complete set of the original issues.
That way, they not only have High Society straight in their minds, they
are also aware of everything else that was happening and being referred to in
context in the Notes from the Publisher, Note from the President, Aardvark
Comment and so on—at least until the full Archive is assembled and the
“keyword” function up and running.
OK...18 are done, 19 left. I think I
have all of them at home with reasonably easy access except Miami Mice,
Awakening & Cerebus Dreams (which I don't own), Arnold & Friendly
Reminder (which are in a hard to access place in my house), and perhaps Arghh
(which I think is in
an easy to access place, but am not sure). So if you can add those, that'd be
cool. Alternatively, if anyone knows the page counts on those, just let me know
and I'll add them to the database.
-L nny
________________________________________________________________
+++++++++++ Preaching to the choir,
my friend. I think it should be iconic as well. But it does work... hmmm. From
Alexx's timeline:
1406
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #8 (date on p.12). Could Cerebus' punitive
shape-shifts done by whoever he was working for have left him with the elongated nose that he had for
much of his mercenary period (but
notably *not* in his youth)? When his nose gets elongated again in Church and
State (CS2 p.632), it is in apparent connection with magic...
********* Dave: I
definitely incorporated the snout elongation in CS2 as a means of covering for
any timeline discrepancies (i.e. pre-long snout, post-long snout) where Cerebus
is shown having a short snout in a story that predates Cerebus No.1, so we
might as well make use of it where it’s needed.
Talking with Bear about Cirinists (Mel p.240-244). (Cerebus' nose is still a
bit on the long side.)
Jaka loses the ringing in her ears from her childhood injury (JS p.111).
+++++++++++
-Jeff
********* Dave: Good
example of how far from Full Immersion I am at this point. I didn’t remember
either of these.
________________________________________________________________
Well, that's it. If there's anything
you'd like us to focus on, feel free to suggest it.
I will be writing back to you soon,
I promise. It's been a rather complicated 2 weeks. I'll explain later....
-Jeff Tundis