So the word from Dave Sim on last Friday’s episode of CerebusTV, is that as of Monday, October 26 (tomorrow!), Cerebus Archive will not be carried by Diamond Distributors due to Diamond’s recent requirements change, but it, along with back issues of glamourpuss will be offered through the P.O.D. publisher, ComiXpress.

Yup, you heard right – the new issue of Cerebus Archive, issue #4:

Will be offered tomorrow at ComiXpress. I’m hoping they have the zombie variant cover, a homage to issue #4 of Cerebus:

For more promo pictures of Cerebus Archive click here.

So Facebook is really acting up on me. So much that I logged out of it, cleared the cookies for it and relaunched firefox. I tried to log back into facebook and this is what it told me:

Account Unavailable
Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

uh-huh.

So I keep refreshing and trying to log on, after a couple times I get this instead of the above:

So now I’ve got to log in to see the log in page? Jackasses.

And when I do manage to log in – FaceBook thinks I’m new. As my friends list has totally been wiped out, at times my wall is totally blank with nothing in it ~ not even my status updates, even ones I somehow manage to just post:

and when I try to post status updates? It tells me I need to be logged on to do that – but you can plainly see that I’m logged in:

What the hell Facebook? I know your service is free – but I’ve still got to look at the ads, so while I don’t pay for it, you are ad supported, you should be able to afford some level of quality to your site. I’ve reported it twice now. Once I got a form email back. The next, nothing. What the heck.

How long can she talk about phonebooks you say? Until I get the answers I say.

So luckily for us, Al from the dambrots sent me this picture:

Yes, that is #6 of 250 signed and numbered CEREBUS phonebook. Lets take a look at history shall we, you can play along at home by grabbing your CEREBUS, HIGH SOCIETY and CHURCH & STATE I phonebooks from your bookshelves. Open them up to the title page and then flip it over so you can see the small little print:

June 1986: First printing HIGH SOCIETY
June 1987: First printing CHURCH & STATE I
August 1987: First printing CEREBUS
July 1988: First & 2nd printing CHURCH & STATE II, with the first printing being a limited, signed & numbered edition
January 1990: 2nd printing, CEREBUS
October 1990: First & 2nd printing JAKA’S STORY, with the first printing being a limited, signed & numbered edition

I only have first editions of HIGH SOCIETY & C&S I,  so I don’t know when the 2nd printing of those came out. . .anyone? Anyone?

The first edition of HIGH SOCIETY I have is not signed nor numbered, and when I was looking through back issues, I don’t remember seeing any reference to a signed / numbered edition. But at the same time, I don’t remember seeing anything for neither C&S I nor CEREBUS. . .and well, we see how that ended.

But now we know C&S I has a signed / numbered but not limited first printing, CEREBUS has a signed / numbered but not limited first printing, and with C & S II Dave went with the signed / numbered limited edition for the first printing and a 2nd printing pretty much at the same time.

~~~

For those that haven’t seen all the Cerebus related goodies out there on the market right now:

Map of Estarcion:  For sale on eBay is a huge, 26″ x 57″ map of Estarcion made by Jeff Tundis. Here is Dave standing with one at SPACE in 2007:

(more pictures of the map in this flickr set)

Cerebus tee-shirts: Poetic Licensing is offering several new Cerebus tee-shirts, one has completely new art work by Dave Sim, and the other three have the covers to issues # 1 – 3. Eventually they’ll be offering tee-shirts for all the issues.

Cerebus Companion: Not really for sale. This is Jerry Sweet’s epic work from 1991, 130 pages about the first 5 phonebooks, all in one large PDF, 18.3 MB, here, free! Yes, FREE! w00t!:
http://www.cerebusfangirl.com/uploads/cerebuscompanion.pdf 

So an update from Dave Sim on yesterday’s blog entry, more specifically this question:

“I have several copies of the first printing Church & State I: one is signed and numbered 136 / 525 by you and Gerhard and has no page numbers, the other first edition isn’t signed nor numbered, and has page numbers. I don’t remember seeing anything in the back of the issue stuff in Cerebus for a signed & numbered edition of C&S I – was this something ou came up with due to the “misprint” of not having page numbers?”

Dave responded:

Though I forgot to ask him if High Society had the same type of second printing as Cerebus did. . .d’oh!

So a while back (whoa, over a year ago!), I posted about the different Cerebus phonebooks. And in that time I’ve found some corrections as phonebooks have surfaced on eBay, and questions posed to Dave Sim. Take for example, this misconception I had:

With the first three phonebooks: High Society, Church & State I and then Cerebus (the order in which they were printed), did not have a signed first edition.

I thought that because I had gone through the single issues looking for full page ads for the phonebooks and all I could see was Dave selling directly to fans and a print run of 6,000. No notes of signed / limited edition first prints. To top it off, I have a first print of Church & State I which is not signed nor numbered.

And it had page numbers.

In the following year, I hear of a copy of Church & State I that had no page numbers. Interesting I thought. Then I found a copy of Church & State I that is a first printing and is signed and numbered 136 out of 525, and it has no page numbers.

Then a second edition of the Cerebus phonebook shows up on eBay with this picture:

What the heck? Seriously? I was befuddled at what the DIA meant: was it a convention that Dave went to and sold 167 copies of Cerebus at?  Or some store that ordered a huge amount of copies? Confused, I asked Dave Sim, because if anyone would know, it would be him. Here is what he said about it:

“The signed and numbered you were looking at would have been me trying to make nice on the Direct Market after everyone when ballistic over my selling HIGH SOCIETY directly (justifiably). “DIA” signifies that this was Diamond’s order for the first trade paperback to be offered through the distributers, 167 copies, evidently of the CEREBUS trade.”

So after the big to-do that Diamond made about Sim selling the phonebooks directly, Diamond only order 167 copies? Or perhaps they ordered 167 signed limited edition copies and X amount of “standard” copies? From the sound of Dave’s note it sounds as if that was the entirity of Diamond’s first order for it.

It’s times like this I wish I had all the back of the issue stuff (including Aardvark Comment) in electronic searchable format.

If it isn’t their tabbed broswering, cool add ons, it is how they show their love to me:

But oh, FireFox, why don’t you block pop ups like you used to?