Yeah, I'll take my fair share of the credit and/or blame as the case may be. "The Complete..." whatever. I think that's the winning side if you take into account the preferences of the readers, collectors, historians and completists. You can argue that the writer of a given work is obligated to "cull" it for the best material -- basically edit it after the fact so what you're getting is a completely polished distillation for the ages...

...but you're going to run face first into the core devotees when you do so. I'd rather read the complete works of F. Scott Fitzgerald in sequence as he wrote them (or as Zelda wrote some of them with his final edit/polish) than in the short story packages like TAPS AT REVEILLE that he put together himself. Even to the extent of having them interposed chronologically in his novels. The more interested you get, the more you want to read it that way.

Of course, then, you get into the problem of tailoring everything to the core audience and becoming "inaccessible" to new readers. My solution? Make the core audience a big part of your operation and let them deal with the new readers. I could never do as good a job of chronicling Cerebus as cerebusfangirl does. If I said something about some aspect of CEREBUS, Margaret knows where to find it because she's got it all filed away mentally and in her computer. If you're doing a continuity-heavy work, NEVER undervalue that. That's really your only hope to get your work from here to posterity.

From Here to Posterity. Hmm. Sounds like a good movie title.

Hi, Jeff. Sorry I missed this one. I should have this message board thing figured out just when glamourpuss Promotion Campaign comes to an end fifteen days from now.

The only other DEFINITE project I have right now is Secret Project One which will be announced February 29 on Glamourpuss Bulletins, the spot where the Blog & Mail used to be -- the website address will be announced there -- and all of the artwork will be on display at S.P.A.C.E. in Columbus Ohio March 1 and 2 [see http://www.backporchcomics.com]. The retailers will be getting an Advance Preview Copy in Diamond Dateline in mid-March. Diamond has picked it as a Featured Item in the March PREVIEWS so I'm "reet chuffed" as they say in England: FI projects back to back.

Yes glamourpuss is planned as an on-going bi-monthly -- my guess would be 500 pages in total -- at least until I figure out how tough it's going to be to hit that schedule. It took me five weeks to do issue one. HOPEFULLY I'll start going faster as I get back into the groove of full-time writing and drawing. I'm getting a lot of invitations to conventions and signings that I'm having to turn down until I actually have a nice long stretch of working time to assess my abilities here in my early fifties.

If I'm fortunate enough to get a good circulation out of the gate, I'm more inclined to use the "wiggle room" that gives me to put in more full time at the board rather than virtual and/or in person promotion. But, right now, with fifteen days to go in the gp Promotion Campaign I'm just working on going flat-out to the finish line on 27 Feb. In March I might decide that exclusively writing and drawing is a bad idea and I have to give a percentage of my time to hyping the book when it arrives in stores in April and/or trying to keep the issue one numbers up with issue two coming out or doing a secondary push between issues two and three.

Thanks to you and Linda and the other IMWAN Mods for having me. What does IMWAN stand for (by the way)?

But, I've seen too many hockey players psyche themselves out of scoring a goal because they're thinking four steps ahead to how it's going to look on the highlight reel. Execution of the basics is always Job One in the here and now. Bear down on what you have to do right now and you make your job easier next week, next month, next year and so on.

Hi Dave ---

Just wanted to say "thanks" for a sketch you did for me at the 1986 Dallas Fantasy Fair. I wasn't familiar with CEREBUS at the time, but I'd heard you had a character named "Lord Julius" modelled after Groucho Marx. You were doing quick sketches in exchange for liquor from the hotel bar. Is that still your policy at cons?

Thanks for the response, Dave. IMWAN most of the time stands for Iron Man With A Nose, and was chosen specifically for how silly that sounds. As per Lindas description:

Thanks Evan. Actually all of those offers on the Blog and Mail ended up being more trouble than they were worth as far as Gerhard was concerned (since he had to monitor the blog for them and follow through on them). I thought of it as his half of the experiment: I'll see what works onthe Internet and that's what we'll do a lot of. Unfortunately that meant Ger having to do a lot of keeping track of things and packaging things and mailing things for (relatively speaking) very small amounts of money. I saw that pretty quickly, I thought and stopped doing it but not before he was getting sincerely irritated I don't think.

It's really hard to tell if the Internet actually works as a promotion tool or how it works. I'm not sure if there's any way of determining that even theoretically without lots of labour going into the equation. Right now I get by with the volunteer help from the Yahoos -- most particuarly Jeff Tundis. 90% of the time I end up going, "Okay, now that I know THAT what do I know?" And not really getting an answer.

Phoning retailers directly and putting a preview copy in their hands seems to have the best promotional result so far with the 100 hours here onthe Internet as a good follow-up, the latter reinforcing the former. How I do that "going forward" is another question. i.e. If I decide this Works rather than "works" then doesn't it make sense to incorporate 20 hours (say) of Internet promotion and two weeks of retailer phone calls into each bi-monthly period (as opposed to, say, going monthly). Your guess is as good as mine right now.

I think you do need to look other people's work on an on-going basis. If you just look at your own stuff, there's a certain inbred sterility that can creep in and take over so that you become a caricature of yourself. "Here's my classic tropes and artistic ticks used everywhere so that instead of being how I do my art, they've become the sum of my art." Always look at what you consider the best and shoot for that. Even when you fall short (and you will fall short) you're going to get better results because of the aspiration.

I didn't know that about Leonard Starr. I was WAY too old for THUNDERCATS when it came out, but now I'll have totake a look.

Yes, the really interesting thing about THE HEART OF JULIET JONES is, to me, the dialogue with Raymond that it represents about the Raymond School. WHY brush inking? WHY does it all have to be brush when you're already using pen for cross-hatching? Drake is like the rebellious son of Raymond, using Raymond's own choices against him. "Why the detective? The most interesting aspect of the strip is Honey Dorian so why not do a strip about Honey Dorian and "cut to the chase"? Eve Jones, Juliet's younger sister is Honey Dorian moved front and center.

Williamson is like Raymond's dutiful son. He sees what Drake is saying and all he can do is shrug and say "Because Dad says, Stan. You can use a pen for cross-hatching or for really light blonde hair (although even here if you're using your absolute finest brush and you have Dad's deft touch, the blonde hair you can do with a brush will BURY what you can do with a Gillott 290), but if you want to follow in Dad's footsteps you can only do it with a brush."

And Drake goes, "But WHY? Look. Look at the pen line I can get for the curve of Juliet's cheek. What's so magical about a brush for that."

Williamson shrugs. "Because Dad says." and so on.

Okay, now you don't have to buy glamourpuss until issue 7 at the earliest

"I didn't know that about Leonard Starr. I was WAY too old for THUNDERCATS when it came out, but now I'll have totake a look."

He wrote something like 22 episodes. They are not The Crucible, but they are very good. It's funny, what you wrote about Mary Perkins could apply to his work on Thundercats as well. Given the limitations of the format and the intended audience, he creates some surprisingly good stories, both in terms of structure and dialogue.

(I actually first learned about Mary Perkins when I did a google search for "Leonard Starr" because I was so impressed with his Thundercats episodes after re-watching them on DVD a few years back.)

See, I could read many, many issues of a comic that explores all of this.

Apparently http://leonardstarr.com is under construction again, but a short time ago it had an entire THUNDERCATS section, including an interview with Starr talking about the production of the series. Really neat stuff.

Starr also took over the LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE newspaper strip for some years.

Yes, as far as I know Chris holds the record for same writer on a monthly comic -- 185 issues if I'm not mistaken which, considering the trouble I got into on issue 186 I should have quit while I was behind.

Yes, it was good-natured friendly name-dropping for its own sake. On my part it was having a bit of fun with Chris' "Is there any reason this character can't be a woman?" axiom which was one of his guiding principles through the 1970s and 80s. I remember John Byrne saying something like, "Well, no, Chris unless you want a little thing like the fact that the character has been a man for the last sixty years get in your way." So, in "The Beguiling" the old woman running the girl's school turns out to be Charles X. Claremont. "Is there any reason this female character couldn't turn out to be Chris Claremont?"

Neil Gaiman quoted Chris years later, "I'm not really bothered by parodies. I've been done by Dave Sim." The one that got Neil was Swoon (the Sandman Roach) turning Elrod into Snuff, his younger sister, I've always found the bigger the name, the more they have a sense of humour about themselves and their work. Chris was always -- and I'm sure still is -- one of the most cultured and erudite people in the field. When Deni was going to the New York Con in 1979 by herself, I gave her a list of people/cheat sheet so you wouldn't embarrass herself as a non-comics person. I described Chris as "the writerish looking chap in the tweed jacket". She spotted him right away.

When Deni left me in 1983, Chris was one of the people I phoned. Basically, "So what happens now?" As it turned out he was sharing his apartment with his ex-wife (ex-girlfriend?) and her new boyfriend.

It was the eighties. Job One was Being Adults About This no matter the psychic and spiritual toll. Count yourself lucky if you didn't have to go through it.

I think I'm safe in saying you won't be disappointed. The strip starts at an amazingly high level and improves from there. You fall in love with Mary Perkins -- there's no helping it -- and I can't think of higher praise than that.

Great anecdote, Dave! (For what it's worth, Claremont actually managed to do 185 and a half. He stopped writing halfway through the 186th and called it a day on Uncanny. Maybe 186 is just a cursed number for comic book writers!)

I realize you might not get to this question before you have to leave for today, but did you have any reaction to the "S'ym" character in Uncanny?

Thanks for answering these questions! This has been so cool for me. I'll definitely be collecting Glamourpuss. (No that I wouldn't have in any case!)

Yes, well worth going in and taking a look at. The cross-hatching on these is the only penwork. Everything else is done with a brush. I quote Neal Adams inthe first issue, "The brush is a lazy instrument". What he means is that if you have a narrow brush that has a certain length of bristles and a certain heft, you can load it up with ink and go in and do the thickest brush lines first. Just as if you were a champion ice-skater or something. Okay, bottom side of the pants -- SWOOP. Now there's less ink on the brush so I need to find a line to ink that's thinner than that. Here's one -- SWOOP. Even less ink. Okay, time to put the folds in the clothing (swoop swoop swoop). Getting down to minimal ink so it's time to do some thick to thin curves (the half circular motion "twines" the bristles so that the brush basically "sharpens" itself. Now you can do some fine lines, swirling in the highlights on the hair, going thinner and thinner). Now the brush is as sharp as it's going to get so you can things like the eyelashes, the underside of the lip, tiny wisps of hair, the curve of the cheek.

Out of ink. Dip it again and "Okay, where's a nice long thick line that needs some ink?" Oh, here's one. SWWOOOP.

Neal Adams snickers: "Get a job, Alex."

Oh, you're welcome. Actually I haven't had a drink since January of 2003 but I'll do a Cerebus sketch with Groucho eyebrows and mustache for spinach pie if you got some. Best spinach pie -- spanakopita -- here in town is at the Acropolis Bakery on Ontario St N (the other side of King from Lookin For Heroes -- where New Comics Day has once again been delayed til Thursday). Do yourself a favour and go in and get one -- or eight.

You know I've been sitting here for five minutes trying to come up with a funnier rejoinder than "Iron Man With a Nose" and I'm big enough a man to admit that I'm flummoxed.

"Iron Man With a Nose." Accept no substitutes.

And I forgot to add to the last Dave Sim auditory delusion, when Neal Adams says, "Get a job, Alex."

Al Williamson says, "Neal. Show some respect for Dad."

You know? I think there might be a good comic book in there somewheres.

Okay, sunset prayer time and then I'll be back for the last hour or so. Lookin For Heroes closes at 7 tonight.

Dave -

Hope you had a good time visiting. Come back soon, man.

Dave,

To the best of my knowledge, this round of PR is your first direct interaction with the Internet fan community. How has the experience been thus far? Given your history of engaging your readers in lengthy correspondence, I suspect this message board thing would be a natural fit for you.

Thanks for dropping by IMWAN. We're not a strictly comics-related board like many of the others, but the medium is a common thread here. Glad to see you made this one of your stops.

Dave, any plans for more lengthy comics journalism pieces along the lines of the Neal Adams interview from FOLLOWING CEREBUS?

It doesn't surprise me. One of my creative choices on CEREBUS was to treat it as a stage play with all of the restrictions and perspectives that implies. The stuff that couldn't be done as a stage play was done with a different perspective that was more cinematic but that was definitely external to my viewpoint. Leonard Starr makes the same creative choice but naturally it resonates a lot better with a strip about an actress trying to make it on Broadway. But he also has to make other creative choices when Mary ends up (of course!) going out to Hollywood and in all the situations where the mise en scene opens up.

But he's definitely bringing the values of an adult to the work, not 'writing down' because it's comics.

I haven't read his LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE but I'm looking forward to it. That was kind of sad at the end of the newspaper strip hey-day when you had Starr doing Annie and (REALLY sad) Stan Drake doing BLONDIE just because they were down to a handful of strips that had big subscribing lists of newspapers so it made more sense to grab one of those than to keep going with your own strip you'd done for decades because it just wasn't viable any more. There was nowhere for Al Williamson to go after the STAR WARS strip folded. Just inking for Marvel and things like that. And now the comic BOOK field, by default, has become the custodians of all that material. All those years of the NCS guys looking down on the comic-book field and if it wasn't for us, they'd have no representation in North America.

Chester Brown of course is a Harold Gray uber alles kind of guy. I remember the blank look on his face when I told him my primary association with LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE is "The Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow" from the Broadway show, because it was a huge hit the first time I was in New York in '79. Phil Seuling used to belt it out in his Brooklyn accent: "The SUN'LL COME OUT Ta-MARROW!" I bought the sound track pretty must as soon as I got back.

"And that's what you think of when you think of Little Orphan Annie," Chet said. A statement not a question. Yup.

Okay, thanks to everybody for showing up and participating (or lurking as the case may be). Tomorrow I'm at MillarWorld Forums http://forums.millarworld.tv/index.php?showforum=61. I might be back here on the last day, 27 Feb (two weeks from today) at least for a short visit.

Thanks again...and please go into your local store and ask to see glamourpuss No.1!

Thanks for visiting us today, Dave. Good luck with glamourpuss!

That was cool. I wish I could have been here, but I'm glad to see it was a lively and entertaining discussion here.