Along with the latest issue of Cerebus Archive from ComiXpress and the latest issue of glamourpuss that came out last week (#11 for those keeping track), Dave has also done a few other side projects:

Ultimate Lost Kisses #11 from Silber Media, written by Brian John Mitchell with art by Dave Sim. This is a micro comic, pretty tiny as you can see:

Dave did a series of pictures, of which he used different pieces from for the comic:

The story itself is very engaging, a tale of loss and forgiveness. It leaves you feeling a bit queasy and angry. Pretty amazing for a comic that is almost as small as a quarter and has single panels and a line of text under it on every page. The micro-mini comic is only $1 from the above link.

Dave did the cover to Rob Imes’ Ditkomania #77:

Ditkomania is the fanzine about all things Steve Ditko.  This issue covers Steve’s independent creator owned work, so it is quite appropriate the Dave Sim did the cover for it. The issue is only $1.50 plus shipping from the link above.

So this year marks the 9th annual Cerebus Yahoo!Group’s get together at the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo (aka SPACE) in Columbus, Ohio this April 24th and 25th.  The first year it was just Tony P and myself and it grew and grew. Always a great time to get together with other Cerebus fans. We’ve been doing “Cerebus Live!” readings for the past couple of years. Dave Sim did it first at a TCAF (Toronto Comics Art Festival). So the next year at SPACE we did and have been doing it since. To me, when I hear Cerebus, I hear Jeff:

Remember that scene in Guys were Cerebus is talking to himselves? Jeff did an amazing job of it a year back or so, skip to the 9 minute 10 second mark:

You can go to Jeff’s YouTube page and find all of the Cerebus Live! performances the group members did. Dave Sim even a couple of them with us, performing as Lord Julius.  If you’re a fan of Cerebus, feel free to join up with us. We’ll have a table there  for Friends of Cerebus, so come check us out!

So a day or so ago I get an email from Brian, the owner of the blog “Cerebus the Original Aartvark“, which discusses everything Cerebus original art related, and he also has a Comic Art website that features a huge amount of Cerebus original art and other goodies. In this email he asks if I’d like to meet him in Boston as he’d be visiting. He says he’ll be bringing a bundle of Cerebus original art for me to scan in for the Cerebus Archive.

He didn’t have to ask twice – not only to I get to see some behind the scenes stuff, but meeting such a notable Cerebus fan is always a good time. We made arrangements to meet at the one comic shop in Boston I love: Comicopia. So after some comics shopping and a tasty breakfast at a little French bistro nearby, we took pictures:

Yes, a Boston Bruins hat and that is the cover to Cerebus #2 on my shirt. . .but I digress. I wish Brian had gone to the SPACE events that the Yahoo!Group held every year in Columbus – he made have an unnatural enjoyment of organic chemistry (demon possessed!), but it was a pleasure hanging out with him for the hour or two that we had together.

He had handed over the bundle of Cerebus art in Comicopia, but being how I am, I immediately tucked it away in my bag lest some harm befall it. So when I got home did I immediately rush and open it? Nope. It was 53° F out according to the themometer in my car. So I went for a motorcycle ride. After I got back from a crisp winter ride, then I opened it:

That is it in the mylar sleeve (sitting on my semi-new scanner). “Special Cerebus Flaming Carrot Adventure In Two Vols”.  What is contained therein are two stapled packets of tracing paper preliminary sketches. And a copy of a manuscript (I skimmed the front page, haven’t read it yet). I’m scanning in tracing paper prelims as I type this. Most of them appear to be panel by panel outlines of issue #104 of Cerebus – the Flaming Carrot guest star issue.

From a fax from Dave Sim to Rick, originally posted at the Cerebus Yahoo!Group:

Hi Rick: Nice to hear from you and thanks for the compliments.

I think the answer to the complaints is: go to cerebustv.com and watch some of
it. If you don’t like it, it’s probably not your thing but you should know that
inside of about two minutes or so.

If you do like it — if it is your thing – then keep watching for as long as
you can and come back whenever you have a few minutes.

Once you’re caught up – and I think there’s about nine hours of content there –
then just make a point of checking it between Friday at 10 pm and Sunday at 3 am
(ET) for the new episode.

See: I think you have to separate it into two groups. The casual, only vaguely
interested at best people. For them: Hey! Here’s nine hours of content on
different aspects of comics. Check in from time to time and watch a segment.
When the segment’s over, do something else. If you check once a week and watch
15 minutes, say, at the rate we’re adding new content you’ll never run out of
content and the odds will be in favour that every time you “tune in” you’ll see
something you haven’t seen before.

For those who get “hooked”: put aside a larger block of time. An hour or two
hours, as you would going to see a movie. You have to go when the movie starts
and stay until it’s done. And it costs you money. This doesn’t. If you don’t
want to watch some stuff you’ve already seen to get to what you haven’t seen,
well, then you’re not “hooked”. So go back to plan A.

But if you do watch one to two hour blocks, right now you can be caught up in
two or three days just watching in the evening.

I appreciate that internet people WANT content NOW and they WANT absolute
control over that content.

Right now I’m losing money on CEREBUS TV, so I’m not really concerned with what
people WANT. What I’m concerned about is making it function. I would say we’re
about 20% of the way there in making it function. Once we’re at 100%
functional, then I can start looking at how to make it work…that is, how to make
it commercially viable. That might be a month from now or it might be two years
from now. All of the problems we’ve had have resulted from setting arbitrary
deadlines for things we didn’t know how to do, yet. So, now we don’t have any
deadlines. I repeat: we’re working on making it function (and to keep everyone
from killing each other behind the scenes).

It would be nice if there were more donations. Even if you are an absolute
Internet Totalitarian about Free Content, I would hope you could maybe afford to
pay, say, $1.00. Or, if you really, really, really like what we’re doing, go
Completely Rogue and contribute $2.00. Use a pseudonym so no one knows it’s you
breaking ranks.

Feel free to circulate this. I have to get back to making my additions to THE
ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING.

– Dave Sim, January 14, 2010

Proposition 8 in California which made gay marriage illegal in that state by amending that state’s constitution, after 18,000 gay marriages were preformed when the state supreme court made it legal, is in federal court:

From this site:
http://www.equalrightsfoundation.org/our-work/perry-v-schwarzenegger/

Proposition 8 amended the California Constitution to eliminate marriage rights for same-sex couples. As a result, the State of California is in violation of the United States Constitution, the “Supreme Law of the Land.” The United States Constitution guarantees every American basic fundamental rights, including the right to equal protection under the law.

As its first step in its mission to advance equal rights for every American, The Foundation filed a federal court challenge against Proposition 8 in May 2009. The case’s significance has seen it move swiftly toward trial, which will begin on January 11, 2010.

Specifically, Proposition 8:

• Violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
• Violates the Due Process Clause by impinging on fundamental liberties.
• Singles out gays and lesbians for a disfavored legal status, thereby creating a category of “second-class citizens.”
• Discriminates on the basis of gender.
• Discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation.

So if you got a couple extra bucks floating around, please donate to these guys – as they are fighting the battle that will make gay marriage a right in every state in the united states if the court finds in our favor and that the California law is unconstitutional. Everyday I’m thankful I live in Massachusetts, but there aren’t many other places I’d feel welcome / safe living in.

Rachel Maddow interviewed the two lawyers fighting prop8, a conservative and a liberal oddly enough:

And if you have even more free time, the New Yorker has an excellent piece up on it:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/18/100118fa_fact_talbot?currentPage=all

And even more free time:
The conservative lawyer for the case penned an article entitled “the conservative case for gay marriage”:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/229957

So back in May of 2009 I had gotten a large poster tube from Dave Sim containing a bunch of mylar sheets. I blogged about issue #104’s Flaming Carrot cover then, but not the cover to Cerebus #103 which was also included (along with one sheet for the cover of #100):

The above picture is actually two smaller mylar pieces – one the size of a standard comic book cover, with all the text on it shown and the next the smaller one with the Cerebus art on it. The blue lines you see on it look like blue pencil, but I’m not going to try and erase it to validate that or not – I rather preserve the mylar overlays as is.  As I work with mylar on a daily basis at my job – in my experience mylar has emulsion on one side for plotting and that emulsion is one color: black. (edited to add: the red overlays I think are mylar too, but they don’t appear to be printed on they have cut outs in them to either show or hide the smaller mylar pieces.)

Looking at the large mylar overlays I got to wondering about the registration of each overlay to itself. I mean smaller overlays are just taped to the larger mylar overlay – no type of registration target system to align the two layers. But the larger overlays do have 1 hole and 4 slots on the side of them. Why one hole and 4 slots you ask. If you used all holes of the same size it wouldn’t allow for slop – mylar will expand and contract depending on the humidity of the environment it is located. So if it is really humid, the mylar will contract. If the air is really dry, the mylar will contract. Expect on average that mylar will expand / contract by ± .0005″ per inch (or .006″ per foot). So these large 4 foot mylar overlays could expand or contract by .024″. Yoinks!  That may not seem like a lot, but when you’re fixture a pin through a hole that means you’ll have to make the hole at least .024″ larger then the pin, just in case the hole “moved” due to the mylar expanding or contracting. But then there could still be fixturing issues. So just make the holes slots instead. Place the pin in the center of the sheet so it is as close to all 4 slots as possible, and use that to actually register the mylar overlays to each other – the slots are just there to make sure the mylar overlay stays in place on the fixture.

When you do this – I’d suggest using mylar that was made together (i.e. the same manufacturing lot) so it should expand / contract at the same rate, and you’ll have to have a special tool to punch the holes in the exact same spot on your mylar overlays – so they all align together. Though just taping the smaller overlay on top of the larger overlay just throws all registration out the window. . .

I’m not sure if these mylar overlays were just used to image onto a metal plate to use the metal plates as the printing plates or if they were actually used as the printing plates – I’ll have to ask Dave if he knows what Preney used, or if he has someone I can contact.

But I did my best to line up the different images and made a small animation of them:

I’m going to post all four of those pictures to my flickr account so you can ge a better look at them if you’d like.

So I went and retagged all the posts with Cerebus content with the “Cerebus” category. It was pretty easy thanks to wordpress.

Also, for those that don’t have a monitor with a resolution larger then 1680, here is a look at what the CFG site looks like with one:

CFG Site as of Jan 2009

The picture of Cerebus along the right side is from the cover to issue #157. It is the full picture all the way down to Cerebus toes, but you’d have to scroll down to see it all. The small Cerebus along the top right is from the opening sequence to CerebusArt.com, you can see it in this picture, it is the bottom prelim:

CerebusArt Intro Prelim sketch

I scanned in the original prelim sketch and tweaked it in Gimp to outline it and color it in.

Just downloaded an app for my iPhone (heh, the auto spell checker made the p a capital p), so I can post blog entries without having to use the phone’s Safari browser. It is called WordPress 2.0 from Automatica. Good stuff. Free too.

So after I restored my blog the other day, something goofy happened: the blog entries with a tag of ‘cerebus’ had the tag removed.  It sounds like a project for the next long weekend: going through the 750+ blog entries and retagging them. . .oy. I only tag this one with Cerebus so y’all know what is going on if you try to sort the entries by this tag.

I went back to the Wayback Machine to see the different incarnations of the CFG site. I’ve had 3 previous ones that I can remember. The last one was the blue design, using html tables and a touch of CSS:

The design previous to that was HTML only and had the menu bar along the top (doesn’t that logo look familiar. . .):

Both of these were when I had the CFG domain name, either pointing at the GeoCities free website, the 0catch site or the current godaddy locations. The wayback machine’s records only go back to Sept 3, 2000. Following links there the ’site update bulletin’ shows the first entry as being May 23, 2000. They don’t have it, but it is still on my harddrive:

May 23, 2000: update bulletin created, cerebus checklist finished — pictures currently being added, created new index.html file for y’all to choose frames or no frames versions — this seemed to get rid of the ‘error’ message that keep popping up. Just finished added all of the pictures (that I currently have) to the Cerebus Checklist.

Frames? Wowza, that does take me back. Before GeoCities I had the CerebusFanGirl site on Juno using their WYSIWYG Homesteader interface – before I learned HTML. I don’t know when I started the CFG site, I want to say late 1999, but I don’t have any code dated that far back. The first IMHO column that I did, the precursor to my blog, is dated April 01, 2000. I know I had the CFG site before then – and as you can see by the above update, I had finished (ha!) the Cerebus checklist at that time.

10 years.

So taking what I learned about CSS from developing the CerebusTV website, and learning more (if you’ve been by in the past few weeks you’ve seen drop down menus and the links page was set up with tabs), I’ve redesigned the CFG page yet again.

Yes, I like purple.

The site looks best with any web browser other MicroSoft’s Internet Exploder – I’ve tested with FireFox (which I use and highly recommend), Safari and Chrome, and it looks like I want it to look with those browsers (MS claims that they are CSS 2.1 compliant with MSIE8, but the site still looks different on that browser while on the others it looks the same). I’ve set it up so it is formatted for a 1024 wide resolution monitor, but it looks the best if you have a monitor with at least a 1680 wide resolution screen. There are a few more tweaks that I want to do to it, but they’ll be minor.