That's right, starting at approximately 7am PST, 10am EST Dave Sim will be here to answer questions, talk about his new project Glamourpuss, as well as the craft of comics, and the marketing promotion of the aforementioned.

For those of you trying to break in to this biz, this is a valuable opportunity to learn from a man who's been around the block more times than most of us can ever hope to. Dave doesn't 'do the internet', so don't miss out on this chance!

See you all here on Monday!

Rantz Hoseley

EDITED: 9 Feb 2008 by RANTZ HOSELEY

If this will be done here in a thread, I will be interested in reading it when I get home.

If it is not, will a transcript be available?

It will be done here, in this thread.

the cerebusfangirl.com site also has archives of all of the various forum chatter from this 'tour'

Rantz Hoseley

Hopefully this'll still be in full swing when I get home from work here in the UK.
Well done on getting him over here Rantz, I didn't find out about the Newsarama one until it was all over.

Looking forward to this, Rantz.

Not that I'm really interested in having moderators play Miss-Manners with a wooden ruler, but I can easily see how a potentially valuable thread might get seriously derailed by snark and and history rehash.

Are there any general ground-rules you'll be expecting folks to abide by?

lelandpurvis.com

Since I will be taking my progeny to school when Dave first gets here, and in keeping with the Featured Creator format I'll open with a couple of questions for Dave to answer when he first arrives.

- Why fashion? Is it strictly because of the appeal of the craftsmanship of those old 'soap opera' newspaper strips that you are making a stylistic nod to in GP, or is there something about the industry itself that drew your interest.

- In Following Cerebus 8 (9?) you had a LOOOONG interview with Neal Adams about the history of advertising illustration and its relationship to the aforementioned strips. Was that interview one of the 'spark' points for the genesis of GP?

- in that same interview, Adams mentioned the Gillotte nibs for inking... have you gotten to try these 'miracle nibs' yet?

- From a production side, is GP being drawn in the same methods (paper/board stock, pen types, size of original art, etc) as Cerebus was?

- Dealing with marketing... one of the frequent points of discussion here is marketing indie books and the most effective methods. The idea of calling retailers has been discussed here previously, and I know you've been doing that with GP. How has retailer reaction been to this approach?

- You have a completed OGN besides GP... what made you decude to launch GP before the OGN?

back to pages, I'll post some more questions during my next cig break.

Rantz Hoseley

Dave,
First of all, thank you for taking the time and effort to meet with people here at P&P. You used to make a point of getting out and meeting readers, maybe this will be the beginning of something you do more often online.

As years go by, artists and writers often change their views dramatically on their earlier work. When was the last time you read Cerebus all through, and how do you feel about it now? Are there sequences that stand out now which make you wince or grin? Are there things you would change or do differently?
Leland

lelandpurvis.com

Mr. Sim,

First of all let me tell you that I'm a huge fan of your work, looking forward to GP, so this leads to my first question,What is the process for an issue of Glamourpuss? I'm interested specially in the writing part, since I'm trying to make the artist to writer/artist transition myself, and it is a bit daunting.

Also, you are my favorite letterer of all time (sorry Mr. Klein!) you did so many innovative things with the lettering in Cerebus, and I kind of feel bad that GP is going to have a computer font, but, your other projects are going to be hand lettered?

Thanks in advance, and good luck with Glamourpuss and all your future endeavors

Hi. Well, here we are. Thanks to Rantz for the waffles. The apple butter and honey combo was a nice surprise.

Anyway, before we get started, since I suspect most of this will center on how to become a success in the comic book biz -- either as a self-publisher or as a freelancer -- I've always said that the most important and most often underrated route to success is, simply, reliability.

Shared Risk, Shared Responsibility and Shared Rewards. If you are entering the comic book field on the creative end, you have to realize that what you are doing is participating in the day-to-day business of roughly 3,000 other businesses -- that's how many comic book stores there are. With a handful of exceptions, these guys are all incredibly reliable: that's why they're still in business after four years, eight years, ten years, twenty years. A big part of any success story is just showing up for work in the morning and then giving it your level best from the moment the door opens to the moment the door closes.

Put as plainly and as simply as possible: if we had even half the work ethic on the creator side that we see on the retailer side, this business would be functioning at a much higher level of success.

When you solicit a book in PREVIEWS, you are asking 3,100 retailers to Share the Risk with you that there's an audience out there for what you do. You're asking them to bet $5 or $10 or $15 on what you do, usually based on a cover reproduction the size of a postage stamp and two lines of copy.

If you're one in a hundred guys whose book actually clicks: the retailer sells out of the three copies or five copies he ordered, you have now Gone to the Show, you are playing in the Bigs with Neil Gaiman, Jeff Smith, Brian Michael Bendis and everyone else. There is no other field in he world where that opportunity exists.

That's were Share the Responsibility comes in. If you take your entree, your entry level success and fritter it away being a Cartoon SuperStar at every convention that summer and don't even get started on your second issue until Christmas, then you have not only frittered away your chance, you have frittered away the investment in you of 3,100 other businesses.

If you let anything get in the way of getting your book out on time, what you are doing is saying, "I choose to be a failure. I had the chance and I blew it and I have no one but myself to blame." Whatever you think you're saying, whatever excuses you come up with (and anything besides "Here's my new issue, right on time" constitutes an excuse. There is no REASON that qualifies) that is what you are ACTUALLY saying.

Okay. As Joe Matt used to say, "I love talking to Dave. It's like this exhilirating Nuremberg Rally".

The conflict between hand-lettering and a computer font, for me, gets settled by the fact that as a writer I can "letter" the book and then change things right up to the last minute. When you hand-letter something, you have to "settle for" whatever you've hand-lettered more often than not, or make a correction that fills the same amount of space as what you're taking out. What the writer has to say is more important than what the letterer's lettering looks like. I'd consider doing a computer font of my own lettering, but frankly -- when it comes to basic narrative lettering -- Joe Kubert buries my stuff six ways to Sunday.

I still do speciality lettering in glamourpuss. But the style is modeled on the great photorealist newspaper strips which all had Ben Oda or Ben Oda looking lettering.

Secret Project One is done with Joe Kubert's compute font as well.

Hi Derek.

The Skipper is JFK, Gilligan is RFK, Mr. and Mrs. Howell are Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy, Ginger is Marilyn Monroe, Maryann is Jackie and the Professor is Robert McNamara.

The idea is that it's the Kennedy White House from McNamara's point of view. He's the computer genius, he's the normal one, all the rest of them are cartoons of one kind or another.

The most dispassionate metaphor, I think, is the Munsters. Herman is JFK, Lilly is Jackie, Grandpa is Joseph P. Kennedy, the kid is JFK Jr. and Marilyn is Marilyn Monroe -- the only actual normal one in a family of out-and-out monsters.

I can't believe you remembered all that for that long.