“You Don’t Know Jack (page 11) B” (2020)
by Carson Grubaugh (1981- ) and Dave Sim (1956-)
11 x 17 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

Parody of Tales of Suspense #48 Cover (1963)

You Don’t Know Jack: Two-Fisted Comic-Store Manager is a 48-page comic-book collaboration between legendary Cerebus creator Dave Sim, real-life (now, former) comic-store manager Jack VanDyke, and artist Carson Grubaugh.

During the kickstarter for “You Don’t Know… Jack” (July-August, 2020), Carson included the option of creating your own package that combined the kickstarter rewards with some of the original art from the book. I like Carson’s work quite a bit (you can check out his stuff), so I grabbed the three parody covers from classic Iron Man books.

As weird as they are.

I admit freely to not agreeing with Sim’s strategy of taking what he believes to be the diametrically opposed position to the DEI and social justice movements, precisely because he is intentionally exaggerating what the latter is trying to accomplish, as a way (I infer) to claim that the perceived attacks on his own privilege are extreme and unfair. Yet, he’s starting from the historical status quo of privilege unfairly skewed in his direction, claiming it as Natural if not Divine Law, and so the movement towards equity is seen as a bigly distanced and wrong-minded swing.

George Bernard Shaw has a nice statement about this (the original is longer, but this line is apt): “Where there is no ventilation, fresh air is declared unwholesome.”