Thursday November 23 –  

The Mystery of STAROO Revealed!

  STAROO is something that I have a lot of pride in: the fact that of the seventeen volumes Aardvark Vanaheim has on the Diamond Star System, eight of them start with the "Double Zero" designation, STAR 00, because they were early additions to the Star System when Diamond was starting it up in the early 90s (the lowest number is the Cerebus TPb which is designated STAR0070!)

Every once in a while, I'm just going to run all of the Diamond order codes for the Cerebus Trades for an entire week. 

If you're a retailer, I hope you'll take it as a friendly reminder during  "Listing Week" to take a few minutes to go and check your shelves and see if any of the trades are missing and order them from DIAMOND while you're still thinking about it.  The Trades sell a lot better when you have them all in stock than they do when there's just volumes 2, 4, 7, 10, 11 and 16 sitting there.

If you're a potential customer I hope you'll use Listing Week to call the Comic Shop Locator Service

888-COMIC-BOOK

OR CLICK ON

comicshoplocator.com

and find out where the comic book stores are in your area

and if they don't have a volume you want in stock, you can give them the Star System order code right over the phone!

VOL.1 CEREBUS…………………….STAR0070

VOL.2 HIGH SOCIETY……………..STAR0071

 VOL.3 CHURCH & STATE I……...STAR00271

VOL.4 CHURCH & STATE II.........STAR00322

VOL.5 JAKAS STORY………….....STAR00359

VOL.6 MELMOTH…........................STAR00431

VOL.7 FLIGHT……………………..STAR00543

VOL.8 WOMEN…………………….STAR00849

VOL.9 READS………………………STAR01063

VOL.10 MINDS……………………..STAR01916

VOL.11 GUYS………………………STAR06972

VOL.12 RICKS STORY……………STAR08468

VOL.13 GOING HOME……………STAR10981

VOL.14 FORM & VOID…………..STAR13500

VOL.15 LATTER DAYS………….AUGO31920

VOL.16 THE LAST DAY………….APRO42189

                    COLLECTED LETTERS 2004…….FEBO52434

      A review of Steve Ditko's 160 Page Package.  I have to admit that I completely bypassed this one when it came out and I doubt I ever would have picked it up if Sandeep Atwal hadn't brought it over.  Best known for his work on Spider-man (the first 38 issues) and Dr. Strange, I first knew his work at DC on The Creeper and The Hawk & Dove both of which I bought off the newsstand back in the late 1960s (Hawk & Dove are probably overdue for a revival since the US victory and/or defeat—depending on your perspective—in Iraq). His Moral Absolutist themed work, Mr. A and The Question tended to leave me cold because of my liberalism back in the day when I was a liberal.  Beautifully drawn but just too severe in (repeatedly) hitting that shrill high note of Moral Absolutism. I really think a definitive Mr.A volume is called for at some point but I have no idea what Mr. Ditko would think of the idea.  I hope he's in good health and I hope he still has strong connections with Robin Snyder (who published this book) and others who either share his philosophy or whom he trusts with his legacy and that there exists filing cabinets or at least A filing cabinet with correspondence and notes on his various creations and so on. And, of course, I sincerely hope that he isn't a Franz Kafka type who wants everything destroyed when he dies or that Robin Snyder (or whoever would be charged with the task) would just ignore the instruction if that was the case, as Kafka's executor did.

      Mr. Ditko and I tend to get lumped together in The Comics Journal's context and we were the first two candidates to be subjected to their murderous roundtable (the multiplicity of reviewers allowing for a dramatically magnified version of the standard Comics Journal ratio of nine parts literary homicide to one part grudging admiration—Alan Moore just went through it with Lost Girls) but, personally, I've always felt more a kinship in the sense of "to thine own self be true".  There are any number of roads that Steve Ditko might have taken from the decision to quit Spider-man just as it was going through its first wave of near-phenomenon stature.  You can fault his decisions if you want (and many do—they want their Ditko Spider-man) but the fact that he ended up doing what he thought was right—both on the printed page and in his personal life—and suffered the career and income consequences of that—in my eyes marks him out for Greatness.  Between the time he left Spider-man and when he (finally!) got the big payday with the release of the first Spider-man film you would be hard-pressed to see any point where he compromised with his personal sense of right and wrong.  It would be nice if that on-going process could be documented someday.  He's also one of comic books' greatest mystery men (Ghastly Graham Ingels was a distant second).  The extent of that mystery can be conveyed by the fact that it wouldn't surprise me if he possesses every scrap of paper related to his career back to the 1940s and it wouldn't surprise me if he regularly purges his own past and has one neat folder that contains only twelve sheets of paper that have survived those purges.  Obviously in either case, whatever he has on hand would be of profound interest, particularly to comic-book fans of the Baby Boom generation who were weaned on Marvel Comics.  I just loaned Sandeep Ken Viola's Masters of Comic Book Art videotape which both Mr. Ditko and I are on

Sandeep: He's actually got him on tape?!

Me: Just the audio, he wouldn't allow Ken to film him.

    There's a good example.  Who else would draw that distinction between audio and visual recording?  As I recall it took a lot of negotiating.  Ken had known Mr. Ditko for years and was one of the (handful? dozens? Hundreds?) who regularly visited (visits?) him or attempted (attempts?) to visit him.  That he would even allow Ken to record his voice was a signal honour for those of us familiar with the Ditko Legend.  There was trust there, at least of a kind. Did that trust survive the recording or survive Mr. Ditko's first viewing of Ken's film?  All interesting questions, circling warily around the central mystery of Steve Ditko.

There's MORE FOR YOU

In TODAY'S

BLOG &….MAAAAILLL

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This may also be viewed at http://davesim.blogspot.com/

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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

http://spectrummagazines.bizland.com/cerebusgn.chtml

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

http://www.marsimport.com/display_series.php?ID=142

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.