So remember my Adventures In Interviewing Dave Sim last year?

He's just come out with a collection of his correspondence from 2004, a 500-page phone-book-style collection which reportedly comprises responses to three years' worth of backed-up fan mail, among other things. Such as, for instance, his fax exchanges with me over that interview.

I'm finding it pretty hard to locate a copy locally, though I've got a scheduled visit to a local comic shop on Tuesday, and we'll see whether they have one in stock. Meanwhile, stealthmunchkin has been feeding me snippets from the book: "His letters to you are there, along with a couple of references in other letters to 'the chick from The Onion' and how he's certain you're going to do a hatchet job on him… He doesn't say so in so many words, but I think he liked the piece — he faxes copies of it to several people who are interested in doing articles or whatever about him — though every time he complains about the limited space."

Then he sent me this excerpt:

The Tasha Robinson weblog I had heard about, but it's always interesting to read someone else's view on things. I suspect Ms Robinson was intended by the zeitgeist of the opposing camp to be my New Joanne: the interested journalist that was Cerebus' undoing. Since she's the only one who wrote about the End of Cerebus, I suspect I was supposed to become intrigued by her and maintain contact after the interview, arrange a meeting etc. The other team, as far as I can see, is still holding out for my comitting suicide or falling in love and getting married. They have a distinct shortage of story concepts that they attach to everything within and without their purview.

Um. Wow. I was intended to be the Bride Of Sim, bringing him back into the feminist/homosexualist/Islamo-fascist fold? Good thing the zeitgeist didn't tell me that, as Cass might have objected to sharing me, and I definitely would have objected to sharing me.

Mostly, though, I find it oddly flattering that Dave apparently found me unobjectionable enough on some level that he thought I was intended as bait, a carrot rather than a stick. Considering his opinion of most women and their ways, the role of a pawn of the female demiurge, the faithless Blodeuwedd made as his intended opposite number, seems downright benign. Unless, of course, I was supposed to be in on the plan all along, in which case my entire journalistic career has apparently just been a leadup to seducing Dave Sim for the Motherland…

I'm-a feelin': shocked