Here's the second group of questions and Dave's responses to them -- an all Jerry Sweet posting! Please send follow-up questions to me (jim [o--v--i] at [um.cc.umich.edu]) and I'll pass them along. *** Jerry Sweet ([j n s] at [fernwood.mpk.ca.us]) -- Has anyone "seriously" optioned Cerebus for an animated series recently? If you would still like to see Cerebus done as an animated series someday, how much control would you insist on exerting over such a project, say, to prevent the perversions we see with typical Hanna-Barbera cartoons? Dave -- Oh, hey, Jer. Whussup? Hey I know you. You hang around inside these contraptions, too, do you? Far out. Hey is Arthur C. Adams, like, Art Adams? Artie, is that you? Everything is so strange in here. I never really intended to do Cerebus as an animated series. I like the look of cels and backgrounds together which is why I did The Animated Cerebus, but I am under no illusions as to what sort of treatment I could expect to get from television and/or movies with a character no one has heard of (We love the whole thing, Dave, really we do. The guys in the art department think he should be a light purple so he, you know, stands out). Taking option money would be inviting the worst of the worst possible end result. Besides no one in Hollywood would just buy the film rights, they'd want all the vomitus corporate product food rights as well; what they called at DC The Big Score (we could do a mini-series like you're proposing and you'd make a few dollars and we'd make a few dollars, but we think its a better idea to go for the Big Score). Creators don't "insist" on anything. You take the money they give you and tell everyone how happy you are. No corporation will ever pay a creator enough to sue them successfully. Jerry -- Which of your characters, other than Rick, in your opinion, is truly the least guileful? Dave -- The Regency Elf. Jerry -- Is Countess Detin scheduled to show up again in Cerebus's life at some point? Dave -- No. Jerry -- Is there any direct influence on your work from collected folk tales, e.g. the Red, Green, Brown, Pink, etc. Fairy Books? (I mention this because much that was magical in these stories was simply taken for granted, rarely explained, and sometimes completely lacking in logic -- yet didn't destroy the pleasure of the stories.) The point of this question is to ask whether there is any true structure to the way extra-normal things happen in Estarcion, or is magic just intended as a "wildcard", or perhaps just to add extra spice to the story? Dave -- Yes, in a way, to all of that, though probably not the way you intended. I think once you become aware of magic, of the occult (in its most literal sense "the hidden") you become aware that there is a structure to it. Everything falls into patterns and the more aware you are, and the more you seek out hidden realms and meanings; the synchronistic as opposed to the coincidental, the more surprises crop up at unexpected moments and in unsuspected ways that confirms the overall impression of many voices, many rooms. Sometimes its quite terrible in a soul-clenching way and other times it's like reaching the "payoff" in F.D.'s The Idiot. You really feel like you might start laughing and never stop. I try to portray magic as I've found it in day-to-day life and I try to make it faithful to the kind of structure/not structure in which I see it functioning. Because it can't be narrowed down to specific cause/effect rules (which, when you think about it, makes it what it is) it does tend to take on the appearance of a wild card. Does it appear at the critical moment when everything is about to change anyway, or does everything change because it appears? I thought it was quite funny when Neil Gaiman started manufacturing Folk Tales. Talk about flirting with hidden forces. Or the last chapter of >From Hell with Alan's giant pentagram. Bit odd to be talking about these things in the Heart of the Machine. I wonder what the Machine will ultimately make of it? Glad I'm just visiting. Jerry -- We see Iest enjoying something like an 18th or 19th century level of technology. How much of Estarcion is in fact mired in 14th or 15th century standards of living? Do you regret giving 14xx dates in Cerebus as a general indication of social and technological development, or is it just something we can and should discard as unmeaningful? Dave -- I'm the last person to recommend that anyone discard anything as unmeaningful. I only have one point of view about Cerebus. I've had a number of people describe their working model of what its all about in very effective terms that would certainly encompass everything I have com[ing] up ahead, but which in no way is what I intended. In the Cerebus chronology, I'm just trying to point out that I think we've been up here before many times in the past. We are trying to develop a culture at every point that has a proper balance of large forces. Right now I think we have too much Business, not enough Currency, too much Childbirth, too much Religion, not enough Spirituality. In Estarcion, there is too much Religion, too much Childbirth, too much Motherhood. The overall dating system is not really relevant to my way of thinking. Different things come along at different times depending on who's advocating them and how appropriate it is. Feminism is inappropriate in a world that is eliminating work. Unemployment or Machine Success. The right of every woman to have a high- paying job in an age when we have half the available jobs we had twenty years ago because of mechanization is just silly. One of the better Jests from the Upper Chess-boards. I digress. Countries after they have been going for about a hundred years come up on the Civil War phase of their existence. Canada and the Not The Soviet Union are just going through the profound cell-division the Great Republic went through eighty years into their (er...your) existence (are you all Americans in here? It's so hard to see with all the wires and shit). The wealthy areas of Estarcion (Basically Iest, Palnu City and Serrea) are many years ahead of their surrounding city- states and environments. Tijuana a half hour away from Marina del Ray if you think I'm making all this stuff up. Jerry -- The Cirinists seem very repressive indeed. Their recent executions in Iest seem reminiscent of ancient Asian styles of mass punishment, or perhaps, to make a more modern comparison, of Stalinism. Although the Tarimites had an Inquisition, what little we saw of them seemed to indicate that they were worrisome to all, but not necessarily horrendously bloodthirsty -- perhaps like the last gasp of the Catholic Inquisition at the start of the Reformation...perhaps. Do you see the Cirinists as more or less repressive in general than the Tarimites in that respect? Or are we just seeing the "normal" level of excess applied by occupying forces or purges seen in the initial stages of coups d'etat? Dave -- More oppressive. Very much more oppressive. The end result of Mothers Unchained. The centerpiece of fascism and totalitarianism is Maternal. We have always had a Matriarchy, and the centerpiece of its thinking is to make life safe for babies. If you call that "thinking". People who are otherwise reasonable adults, the moment they drop a litter begin mentally dismantling everyone's civil rights with the idea of making the world a universal nursery. We see them today most profoundly in the anti- smoking forces. Second hand smoke is dangerous so it must be wiped out! Life at all costs! Mother Theresa using one of the ancient temples of Kali to tend to the sick and the dying; BEAMING with happiness when another baby is brought to her. I'm sure we will have a very large, very charismatic Mother Theresa in the year Three Thousand when the whole world looks like India, cheerfully finding a way to keep everyone alive for another three years at whatever cost in resources and space. Did you know that medical science discovered a way to impregnate women who are past child-bearing years? That a seventy year old woman can have a baby now? I'm sure Mother Theresa is MOST pleased. Not for herself. Just the idea of more babies. I read an interview with someone close to the HUAC committee in the fifties who said the Senators for the most part, were no better or worse than your average politician, but it was their WIVES who took to the inquisition like fat little ducks to water. "What about that Hollywood producer? He's a red isn't he? Why aren't you going after him?" Mothers don't much care what happens to mothers Over There, as long as Johnny is fighting to keep her hearth and home safe. Salome was not an aberration; just the clearest possible manifestation. Jerry -- In Church & State, with the argument between Cerebus and Astoria, you twisted the pronunciations of "Tarim" and "Terim" away from what we expected, mixing them up in a way that seemed intended to play off the animus/anima idea of male in female, and female in male. Were the varying representations of Church icons -- ankhs vs. "female" symbols -- in Church & State also deliberate? Did you consciously mean to convey something, or were you just playing with symbols? Were you reading Carl Jung's writings before or during your Church & State run? Dave -- Boy. I really don't know how to answer this one. I haven't read any Jung. Clinical examination of the hidden can occasionally extract a graveyard chuckle from me, but I can't say that my sense of humour is perverse enough to sustain an interest. It's like Hawking's Beginning of Time. Skip through for the punch-lines and try not to snicker too much. There is Tarim and there is Terim. The end of Church & State contained the Judges point of view which is only a part of what I'm driving at. Mothers & Daughters will develop that a little more thoroughly and then Cerebus will be making what he will of what he was told. All I can do is keep showing how things look to me and repeating the sequence until people get it. Some won't, but that won't stop me from putting it down on paper as clearly as I'm able to. If I was able to distill it down to a few paragraphs, I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of doing the book for the last fourteen years. Male and female is at the core of our existence, our disputes and our natures; everything that our culture is made up of is derived from those two separate and distinct natures. It takes a long time and many pages to address what I see when I contemplate those two natures, particularly in the face of politically correct rhetoric. Jerry -- Were the references to Jerusalem, the space program, etc. at the end of Church & State meant to set up a meaningful link between "us" and Cerebus's world -- in the sense of being meaningful to the story flow of the entire series? Dave -- Well, yes. What I'm postulating is that we have, as I mentioned before, been up at this height before insofar as civilization is concerned. Little enough is known about the global picture of four thousand years ago, that it is not difficult to picture an entire culture rising up over the course of a couple thousand years and then doing themselves in with stupidity or by some magical cataclysm or natural disaster. I see human existence as a kind of acne on the face of the blue planet. Sometimes just a few spots here and there, sometimes a dramatic flaring. It's usually not permanent. The six foot telepathic cockroaches and the redwoods having their own distinct cultures doesn't seem too far-fetched to me. I think our aversion to cockroaches is the same that the President has when regarding the Vice President. No one wants a potential successor. With cockroaches it runs even deeper than that because they are our inevitable successors. If, several years after my death, Bank of Iest currency is discovered in some remote area of South America, I will be relishing a post mortem chuckle. Jerry -- Can we expect as much merging, mixing, and playing against expectation in Cerebus as we saw in the Illuminatus! trilogy? Or has the fun mostly drained out of those references? Dave -- I probably won't elaborate on the direct Illuminatus references, because it is more important, I think, for the people to see that we are all mining the same vein; that the Illuminatus trilogy created very little, but essentially documented many of the Hidden things which are all around us and which have followed us since Ancient Egypt and beyond. Alan Moore is definitely putting it all under the microscope in "From Hell". When I asked him if he ever worried about whether he was propagating a great lie or serving some dark force(s) associated with human existence, he said he had considered it, but "ultimately, it's a great story, and that's all that really matters." Alan has a way of being very reassuring on the subject that troubles me deeply. I think he's right though. Jerry -- What was your reaction to the comment appearing recently in Comics Journal about your occasional descents into "melodrama" in Cerebus? (Hey, I *like* the melodramatic moments, if that's what you want to call 'em! But what are they to you?) Dave -- I don't remember any reference to that in Comics Journal, but then I've always had trouble remembering either praise or criticism since neither is, ultimately, of much use in creativity. I find it hard to believe that a company that virtually mandates the canonization of the Bros. Hernandez would be making use of that particular criticism, but then consistency is not a Comics Journal virtue. The only reason Sex in the Comics was treated as anything but inherently loathsome by Gary's publication was that he himself was up to his eyeballs. The Comics Journal is like Einstein's curved space, molding itself around Fantagraphics' perceived needs and foibles, a series of rationalizations and excuses masquerading as a political viewpoint. You could hang it on the wall, but how would you ever decide which end is up? Oddly enough I still get along with Gary, although I think his slavish pursuit of market share is going to do him in before he realizes there's a problem. *** A reminder about upcoming tour dates: April 12 Denver, Holiday Inn -- I-70 at Chambers Road (Time Warp in Boulder on April 11) April 26 Chicago, Hyatt Regency -- Woodfield Road, Schaumburg (MoondogUs in Mt. Prospect on April 24, MoondogUs in Lincoln Park on April 25) May 3 Miami, Park Plaza Hotel -- Palmetto Expressway & NW 103rd St. May 31 Kansas City, Marriott -- Metcalf Ave. in Overland Park Again, send your new questions to me and I'll pass them along. I'd also appreciate any comments you have on how to do this better. I apologize for the word-wrap problems with "Dave's responses... (I)" I think I have things under control now. jimO