My first thought on the digital copies of Cerebus: they are biweekly reprints taken to not the next level, but a couple levels up.

First, if you haven’t gotten your free digital copy of Cerebus #26 yet, you can go to the Cerebus Downloads website, scroll to the bottom and then right click on the picture of whichever of the four options you want and save link as: PDF (Adobe Acrobat), CBZ (comic book archive format), EPUB (electronic publication, an open format used by iBooks), and if that wasn’t enough, you can get the MP4 format – which is shown as the quicktime Q picture – which is an audio visual copy of the issue. When you download the files, be advised they are large files, so it could take some time depending on your connection speed. For example, the PDF version of Cerebus #26 clocks in at 176 MB. I downloaded both the PDF and the MP4 files, one at a time, and just let them download in the background while I surfed the web – so I can’t remember how long it took to be honest.

The first 29 pages of the file is the complete comic book. I mean complete: everything from covers, to letters pages, to ads. Nothing was left out. The next page is dividing page show the title Cerebus Archive, and pages 31 – 45 are copies of items from Dave’s Cerebus Archive file cabinet and they have commentary by Dave. Some of the items may seem a bit . . .trival? boring? unnecessary? For example, I’ve heard people wondering why we have copies of Aardvark-Vanaheim’s invoice books:

These invoices will help figure out print run estimates for these early issues. Starting with issue #46 the print runs were printed on the inside front cover, so figuring out the print runs for the earlier issues is difficult. So along with estimating print runs for the earlier issues, they also give us a glimpse into the financials of self-publishing a comic in the early 1980s. Cerebus #27 has a cover price of $1.50, and with the above invoice, we can see Bud Plant buying five thousand (!) copies at 45 cents a piece! While Now & Then Comics, a local Kitchener comic book store, brought 1,000 copies at 52.5 cents a piece:

It makes me wonder what Aardvark-Vanaheim was paying the printer for the copies, seems like a slim margin to me, but I’m no expert. Oh, wait, on page 38 there is a copy of a bill from their printer at the time: Southern Dutchess. So the quote from them for issue #24 of Cerebus shows 12,200 copies at a cost of $861.50, so 7.1 cents a copy. With shipping and one other charge put into the cost, it comes out to 10 cents per copy. So using the price given Bud Plant of 45 cents, that is 35 cents profit, over 12,200 issues – I know, I know, I’m using numbers for #27 with costs for #24, but this is just a rough estimate for curiosities sake – that is $4,270 per month. Not to shabby. Of course, there are other expenses in there that we aren’t seeing, so it wasn’t quite that good.

Showing all of this seems like a new level of openness that I’ve not seen before with regards to comics. Again, could just be me.

Then on page 46 we get another divider page: Cerebus Archive Notebooks and on page 47 the cover to Albatross One. As Dave’s comments below it reveal: “I began using notebooks to plot CEREBUS beginning with issue 20. I called the notebook my ‘albatross’ since it was always with me, a constant reminder of work I had to do.” From page 47 to page 66 we have the scans that I did of the notebooks way back when, along with Dave’s commentary for each page. Even though I did these scans of the notebooks, it is like I’m seeing them for the first time again – while scanning them I usually didn’t stop to read them as I wanted to scan them quickly and get them back safe and sound to Dave. But also this time I get Dave’s commentary – so when I stopped to look at something before and went, huh?, this time it makes more sense as Dave explains what it is and why it was there.

So for 99 cents a piece to get the next digital copies of Cerebus – and I didn’t even go into how high quality the scans of the actual issue are, download it for yourself and see – I think it is worth it. Of course I help funded the kickstarter, so for me they are all free, but when the other phonebooks come up for digital treatment and we get the same high level of detail, both scan of artwork wise and background materials, then I’m so willing to pay 99 cents per issue.

If you’ve been following the great Moment of Cerebus blog (and if you’re not, you really should if you’re a Cerebus fan – daily updates with tons of great Cerebus / Sim / Gerhard content), you’ll know about the “HardTALK Virtual Tour” that will be going on:

GOT A QUESTION FOR DAVE SIM? 
Already signed up for the HARDtalk Virtual Tour are Bleeding Cool, Millar World, Terminal Drift, Canadian Comics Archive, The Comics Journal, The Beat and Comic Book Resources (CBR link to follow). Add your question for Dave Sim at one of these fine websites before 10 October and if your question is chosen (they’ll need to be tough, interesting questions!) you’ll receive a personalised, autographed Cerebus back-issue, with a Cerebus head-sketch by Dave Sim!

So if you have a question for Dave Sim, just post it to one of those links, and it could not only get answered, but you could get a free issue of Cerebus personalised, autographed and with a head sketch! w00t!

So by now the word about the fire that not only destroyed the negatives of HIGH SOCIETY but of everything that Sandeep, the director of communications for Aardvark-Vanaheim, owned is out. To help Sandeep get some funds get to some essentials, a donation button that goes directly to Sandeep has been set up on the Lets Help Sandeep page.

There was speculative talk yesterday on the Cerebus Yahoo!Group regarding how this would impact the Cerebus digital kickstarter. We were trying to estimate how many pages would have to be found “in the wild” so to speak, that is the original art would have to be tracked down and scanned.

Sandeep sent me an email that I forwarded to the group. The email stated this:

“issues 26-40 were scanned and uploaded to George’s server,leaving issues 41-50. Of those, Dave has about half of the original art, so we’re probably looking at about 100 negatives lost that weren’t scanned.”

So if you have a page of original art from 41 to 50 that hasn’t been scanned in yet, is more important now that you contact the people at the Cerebus Art Collection website to see about getting them a high resolution scan of the page. I know I’d appreciate it, as I’m sure other Cerebus fans waiting for the digital HIGH SOCIETY will appreciate it.

So this news came out yesterday via the Digital Cerebus Kickstarter:

Bad news

Update #78 - For backers only · Aug. 24, 2012 ·

Dave Sim, here:  Just thought everyone should know:  Fisher came over today and asked if I had heard from Sandeep.  No, I hadn’t.  Hands me today’s RECORD.  Front page: Sandeep’s place — and the buildings on either side of him — were gutted by fire yesterday afternoon. He got out in one piece but with nothing but the clothes on his back and his wallet (he had been in the shower and a cop showed up at the door:  ”You have the leave. NOW”) The whole place went up in about five minutes.

John Linton Roberson had a good write up on it as did the Moment of Cerebus blog.

Of course it is great news that Sandeep, the guy who helps out Dave with the computer end of things – he gets a Graphic Design, Digital Production credit on CEREBUS ARCHIVE, is the guy responsible for the Dave Sim Art website where he was helping Dave auction off some of Dave’s art, etc – got out alive, but without insurance and all his stuff up in flames, Sandeep will be starting off new. I just think – if that was my stuff. . .the irreplaceable momentos, the pictures (hopefully scanned in so there is at least a digital copy of them out there somewhere), and my entire Cerebus collection. Sure, you could put a price tag on it, and try to replace some of it. . .but some of it you can’t replace. The original art, the hard to find items (would I ever be able to find another first printing of the Melmoth phonebook?), et al. The mind boggles.

But still, it is just stuff. Sandeep got out alive.

It sickens me that there are some people out that trying to claim that Dave committed arson. I shit you not. Though to give him the slightest bit of credit, he did say ‘whoops’ after he learned the facts:

And the original post was deleted (so I’m linking to a post where someone else quoted it, not the original poster), but someone commenting on the story at Bleeding Cool? All I can think is troll.

If you have original art from HIGH SOCIETY, the need for high quality scans of the artwork is even more imperative. You can go to the Cerebus Art Collection website for info on how to help with the scans. I’m asking Sandeep what we can do to help him out as he has been there for Cerebites before.

So if you’ve ever written into Aardvark Comment, then you know the number 1674. As in PO box, station C. So of course, when I went to Kitchener, I had to track down this PO box. I wanted to see where all those letters I’d been writing were going to – well, not the off white house, but the PO box.

Do a google search for station C in Kitchener and you’ll find a mystore website that has an address of 618 King St E. So that is what we plugged into the garmin gps and this is what we found:

We didn’t know what to make of it. So we circled around. Nothing near by. We went to 618 King St W thinking perhaps typo? Nope. Nothing there. So we returned to 618 King St E and went inside. The outside said coin shop, but inside we found hockey memorabilia and other such collectibles. And some coins. No comics though. I asked the guy, we were looking for the station C post office did he know what happened to it?

He laughed. Said the building hasn’t been a post office for at least two years. He said that station C was in Market Square. I went ohhh, the large green clock tower. He just looked at me blankly. I said the mall down the street, he responded yeah. I only know it from the introduction to CerebusTV, but had seen it driving down King St as it was only a bit down the road from 618:

Since it was 6pm on a Friday, the mall was closed. I kid you not. Nothing stayed open very late in Kitchener. We did find a lot of people at Queen Victoria Park later that evening. So we returned at 9am on Saturday morning. The mall had just opened and this is what we found:

Closed for the holiday on Monday. Yes. Closed on a Saturday for a holiday on Monday. Civic holiday. Aka Simcoe day. But the access to the PO Boxes was open:

Click on the above picture for much larger version, 1674 is on the far left, the first medium sized box under the four smaller boxes. Yes, it is only a medium size box. There were larger boxes. Surprised me, I’d think Dave would be getting enough mail to warrant a larger box.

When I got back home, I checked google street view and found a picture of the 618 address when it was a post office:

I don’t know how long that location was where all the letters to Aardvark Comment went, but it was one of them. A piece of tangentially related Cerebus history.

So recently I took a vacation to Canada, part of the trip was to Kitchener. No, I didn’t get to see Dave, who is busy with the Kickstarter stuff and it is Ramadan, nor Ger, who was busy in Cambridge. But I did get to go to Kitchener, and see some things from Cerebus history. Take Highland Park, home of Magic, a wooden rocking horse that resided in a playground that Jaka would go to when she was a child in Palnu.

It was easy enough to find Highland Park – though not easy to find somewhere to park by it, we drove down Highland Road, and we couldn’t drive down Mill St as it was under construction, but we drove down the street just to the other side of it. We finally just gave up and drove down the dead end street: Wentworth Ave. In an earlier blog post, a fellow Cerebite (hi Eric!) helped find it on google maps and we got to see it from google’s street view. While I was there,  I took the same picture in panorama (click for a much bigger version of it):

So as you can see, the playground now has a spring type rocking horse, doesn’t really seem like Thunder or even Magic:

(Though the girls using the park at the time thought I was a bit. . .insane?. . .walking around and taking pictures of a park.)

Walking around the park – the dirt path from Dave’s earlier recollections is no longer there, but there is one of asphalt that runs in the general direction of the dirt path that Dave had laid out. I did see some  cement pads on the other side of the walk from the playground, long skinny things that possibly an old style wooden rocking horse could sit upon:

Part of me thought that Jaka Tavers, when she returned to Palnu after the events in issue 265, had just found the springy horse, and knew that Magic was gone from her life.

Two good bits of Cerebus tonight:

The Cerebus Digital: 6,000 kickstarter campaign ended tonight with 1,140 backers and $63,634 which is 1,060% of what they set their goal. Dave had set the goal of $6K to digitize the phonebook High Society. Within 9 hours it had shot pass that and kept growing. Dave was thinking that $100K would be needed to digitize all of the Cerebus epic. . .$63.6K is a decent start to getting that done.

I finally managed to track down a Melmoth first printing. It arrived a day or so ago and I finally got it in my hands today. w00t! Cross that off the list. That was the last of the first printings that I was missing.

For the Cerebus Digital 6K kickstarter and it is up to 870 backers and a hair over $48K. Dave originally had asked for $6K to digitize High Society, but now the stakes are higher – if we can get to $100K we could have all of Cerebus digitized. Dave even continues to up the ante, as he talks in his latest update:

 Along with multiple formats, your generosity makes new features possible (and thank you all again).  Sandeep has just finished scanning all of the back-of-the-book material for HIGH SOCIETY DIGITAL.  It’s close to another 250 pages.  500 pages is just the STORY material.  The total page count is close to 750 pages.

It’ll be nice to have all the little extras digitized as well – though part of me wishes it would be in a format that would be searchable – so in case I wanted to see where there is talk of say, Sir Gerrick, I could easily find it by doing a quick search.

Another good bit of news from another of Dave’s updates regarding him signing contracts with several of the large digital comics companies:

I can say, having had some very good conversations with David Steinberger of Comixology, Ron Richards of Graphicly, Steve May of iVerse and Bill Schanes of Diamond Digital (I’ve signed non-exclusive, finite, term multi-year contracts with three of them and will soon sign with the fourth for HIGH SOCIETY digital only– my thinking being that a multi-year contract will give me a chance to find out which operations are a “good fit” for my work and give me an overview of how good they are relative to each other for future digital books) that each company has a very different plan and a very different mental image of where we are and where we’re going, none of which I can really discuss publicly because of confidentiality clauses in the contracts.  I think I’m safe in saying the next year in particular is going to be really, really, really interesting in digital comics.

He also mentions in that same update that the release date is either going to be Oct 3 or Sept 19, he is debating tying in the release of several issues to the US presidential election. . .my thoughts? Take the time to do it right, if you need the extra couple of weeks lead time, use them. Also, if you have a piece of original art from the series, Dave is asking for your help. Now I need to figure out how to get the one page I have out of its frame. . .

From 1979 comes this homage to Batman #9 cover, a Dave Sim pin-up of the Cockroach and Cerebus entitled:

“Cockroach and Aardvark the grey wonder”. For comparison, Batman #9′s cover: