Tuesday July 31 –

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1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

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Originally, this batch of Blog & Mails was going to get into the following subjects, all of which came up in the course of my last trip to Toronto and which I had typed out here in preparation:

Kirby Monster

Origin of Thoom

Staples

CBC Radio on comics Barenaked Ladies Todd McFarlane GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING

Peter Pan

Mark Commentaries

Promoting secret project

Bill Marks AFT Productions www.14daysinparadise.com

ELEPHANTMEN #009 AND #00P

Neil Gaiman Midnight Days

INVADERS FROM THE NORTH

New book by Douglas Wolk $27.50 Canadian

Of course, a few days later and they were all knocked "out of the pocket" by what I can only describe as a tremendous show of force by those forces opposed to my completion of the secret project. Which was interesting. By making it sound as if the project was just about ready to go, I was able to "feint" to check out the opposing position and see what sort of artillery they had.

Quite a lot as it turned out.

They've "turned" Jeff Seiler from what I can see. I mean, a lot of that is his own fault with making such an issue of "Avoyd Fornication" in Cerebus Readers in Crisis #1. He was always strangely competitive on the subject as if he was trying to beat my celibacy "record" (ten years in February) and that he weirdly viewed us as "fellow celibates" or some such. I told him flat out from various things he had mentioned in our correspondence that I didn't think he was so much celibate as "not getting laid". The fact that he made a point of mentioning to women that he was celibate, as an example, was, to me, a very bad sign of confused intent. That's waving a red flag in front of a bull. And I think these things are taken note of on the next level up. So it wasn't surprising that as soon as he had gone back to "the other side" and was fornicating on a regular basis (monogamously, to be sure, but still fornicating) I started getting weird phone calls from him. He wanted to do a 30th anniversary celebration book for Cerebus that would consist of retailer ads and tributes from retailers. Well, okay, I don't think that's going to fly. Everyone is afraid to say anything nice about Dave Sim or CEREBUS for fear of getting the feminist treatment that Dave Sim and CEREBUS get. But, fine, if he wants to look into it. I gave him the contact info for the two major retailer websites to pitch the idea. Well, he got two favourable responses: one from Calum Johnston of Strange Adventures in Halifax (who is my top Canadian pick for any kind of promotion) and one from Joe Field at Flying Colors. So, it wasn't a dead loss. Far from it. I had never guessed that Joe would still be a supporter and certainly not someone who would say so publicly. He had been the only retailer to come out to my "meet `n' greet" at Capital City's San Leandro warehouse back in '92 (well, besides Rory) (Hi, Rory!) (who actually LIVED at the San Leandro warehouse and only occasionally made it out to his store, Comic Relief to see how things were going) so that moved him from my own "forget about it, probably a resentful feminist" category into my "top priority consultant" category. He's a brilliant guy: the mastermind behind Free Comic Book Day AND ComicsPRO AND the first columnist I read in COMICS RETAILER.

But I did tell Jeff that I was pulling the plug on his idea. It amounted to damning with faint praise in print – here are the only two people in the retail community willing to go on record as celebrating CEREBUS' thirtieth anniversary. I'm sure word got around on the retailer websites and that did me absolutely no good, but Jeff wanted to try it so there you go, you tried. It didn't work.

Then he told me that there was something else he wanted to try. And at that point my YHWH sense is tingling but (my mistake) I really didn't say much of anything. But I had to wonder "What about two responses and how that doesn't exactly jibe with `celebration' is it that you don't understand?" And I made the mistake of not asking what the idea was.

When next I heard from Jeff it was that his new idea was taking off like crazy – there were twenty cartoonists interested in participating in a DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST to benefit the COMIC BOOK LEGAL DEFENCE FUND. And that was when I knew that Jeff had been "turned" all right. Of COURSE they want to participate in a DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST. The issue isn't and never was "are there enough people in the field who want to take a shot at Dave Sim and vilify him and make him look ridiculous to make this commercially viable?" I could have told him that. You'll have them lined up around the block. The question was "Is this something that is going to do any good for me?" And the answer, as far as I could see, was definitely not. As Craig Miller of FOLLOWING CEREBUS said, "Hasn't Dave Sim been roasted enough?" You roast a beloved figure as a contrast with all the nice things that people say about him: you don't roast someone that everyone hates. And of course it was scheduled to be solicited in the same issue of PREVIEWS as the secret project was tentatively scheduled for.

Oh, what an INTERESTING coincidence.

I basically announced that I regretted the use of the COMIC BOOK LEGAL DEFENCE FUND and the First Amendment to get me to endorse, by inference, a revival of the vilification and slander directed toward me that has been the status quo in the comic-book field since the mid-1990s, BUT I said I wouldn't block it from happening since I believe in the first amendment and that everyone has a perfect right to put together as many hundreds of pages of Dave Sim character assassination as they want and to use it to raise money for the CBLDF. I also announced that I've suspended work on all of my projects pending the resolution on this. My guess is that the mob mentality upon which the vast majority of the comic-book field is based will ultimately channel itself through an UNAUTHORIZED DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST and that (Oh, what an INTERESTING coincidence) that project will be scheduled for whenever (make that IF ever) I choose to schedule my secret project.

And then Jeff also got himself mixed up (you're going to swear I'm making this up) in an issue of National Security where an individual – who is under direct orders from his superior to have no further contact with me -- is being pressured through Jeff to pressure me to delete information from some archived Blog & Mails.

Well, that's structurally interesting as well because it puts me on the bottom of the heap, doesn't it? Making Jeff Seiler my superior, the individual in question Jeff's superior and the individual's superior King of the Mountain. Hard core YHWH stuff: make Dave admit that any American citizen can tell Dave Sim what to do and Dave Sim will do it. Ask how high on the way up. Well, I ignored the message hoping everyone would think better of it: I'm a foreign national who is not subject to American law and a supporter of the first amendment. Get a grip, people. Jeff called and left another message a week later. So, okay, the other team isn't going to leave it alone. Let the results – which I don't think are going to ultimately make them very happy in a strategic sense -- be on their heads. So I called and told Jeff to tell the individual to tell his superior that if he wants something taken out of the Blog & Mail Archives he'll have to tell me specifically what – in a fax on official letterhead -- and I'll take it under consideration. The less he wants taken out the more consideration I'll give it.

But it did give me a good idea of the extent to which Jeff (I'm sure very much against his own conscious wishes and awareness) was now playing – hard -- for the other team.

And it was a good example of the artillery being brought to bear even before I had announced the secret project having a release date and well worth the "feint" towards solicitation to find out about.

And I can understand the other team's point: Seiler's the one who made the point about fornication and went back on it. He wasn't so much "turned" as he used his free will and "turned" himself. All's fair in love and war. And this appeared, definitely, to be turning out to be war.

Tomorrow: How the war progressed

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

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http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=25ED8C60667D0A95

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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. Here are the Diamond Star System codes:

Cerebus #1-25 $30.00 STAR00070

High Society #26-50 $30.00 STAR00071

Church and State I #52-80 $35.00 STAR00271

Church and State II #81-111 $35.00 STAR00321

Jaka's Story #114-136 $30.00 STAR00359

Melmoth #139-150 $20.00 STAR00431

Flight #151-162 $20.00 STAR00543

Women #163-174 $20.00 STAR00849

Reads #175-186 $20.00 STAR01063

Minds #187-200 $20.00 STAR01916

Guys #201-219 $25.00 STAR06972

Rick's Story #220-231 $20.00 STAR08468

Going Home I #232-250 $30.00 STAR10981

Form and Void #251-265 $30.00 STAR13500

Latter Days #266 - 288 $35.00 AUG031920

The Last Day #289 - 300 $25.00 APR042189

Collected Letters - $30 FEB052434

Collected Letters 2 - $22 MAR073054