Happy Thanksgiving, Sneaky Dragonettes! Well, it’s Thanksgiving in Canada where we don’t like to withhold our thanks until November due to our fear of God’s reprisals! This week Ian and Dave also celebrate the upcoming release of Dave Sim’s Cerebus: High Society Digital Audio Edition on October 10 by talking about their appearance with Dave Sim as part of the Spirits of Independence tour in 1995. They have photographic evidence! They also talk about Dave Sim himself and try to sum up Cerebus; discuss being friends with people with outrageous opinions; reminisce about party crashing at the first APE show; and Dave gets his comeuppance (because karma is a bitch, dude).
Here is a picture of Ian and Dave with Paul Sloboda at the Cerebus Spirits of Independents Seattle stop in 1995. (Only Paul seemed aware that he was having his picture taken.):
Here’s another picture from the same show. This time with Ian’s future collaborator on Futurama (woah!) comics, James Lloyd (on right) and unknown fellow in hat:
(Even knowing that my picture was being taken didn’t help me.)
And finally, from a different small press show, Ian and Dave as a couple of young pups (with Susan Ferguson):
We hope you enjoyed this little stroll down memory lane. Next week, back to the future!
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I’m hitting the Sneaky Dragons a bit out of order. I must say I really dug the smooth laidback stylings of Sneaky Dragon after dark. Maybe you can do a “Morning Zoo” wacky drive time type show as well.
Was Pop the comic store that was on Hastings and Cambie back in the early nineties? That’s where I picked up Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur and some Zippy the Pinhead. If I remember correctly, he had a pretty cool selection of alternative as well as self-published comics and zines.
Dave, sorry to hear your wife had a trip to the hospital. I hope everything is/went well.
Toodles
Mike
I recall finding myself defending Dave Sim quite a lot after Cerebus #186 came out, tempering that defense as months went by and it became clear it /wasn’t/ just an intellectual exercise carried out by a not-in-the-slightest-veiled character stand-in. Nevertheless, I had to tell everyone who was willing to listen that Sim wasn’t some one-dimensional monster; he had done, and was yet to do, a tremendous amount of good for independent publishers and self-published comics. He was a huge help to me in promoting Greymatter, going so far as to send us his comics store mailing list, mainly acquired during a recent tour. We weren’t the only recipients, of course; several other self-publishers got the same list (including a few female artists) with which to directly solicit indie-friendly retailers. He called a few times over the years to see how things were going, offering encouragement. These actions were incalculably heartening to a struggling self-publisher, but almost nobody ever heard about them.
Rather than re-hash the analysis, I agree with all the irritation, provisos, and qualifications you guys talked about. While at the bar, following the Spirits of Independence show in Seattle, I had a chance to talk with Gerhard about the whole kerfuffle. He thought people were making ready the pitchforks and torches (or the guillotine, some of them) a little too eagerly. In his view, Sim’s opinions were more philosophical than prescriptive. “Look, Dave thinks this way and other people think that way,” he said. I tried to keep that in mind afterward, not shying away from talking about Sim’s anti-feminism, but doing my best to offer a view of the whole person as I knew him (which was very little), not some cackling, evil nazi.
Leaving aside the business part of comics, I think a huge part of Sim’s influence is as a letterer. I put him at the top of my list as one of the most original with a near-perfect ability to convey emotional intent through the visual depiction of dialogue. He just kept getting more adept as Cerebus went on, never running out of new ways to experiment, nearly always successfully.
Well, Marcus, I agree with many of your points here. Sim was a remarkably generous person with his time and encouragement. I sent him a copy of Rounders when I finally finished it and he sent a little note back that meant a lot to me at the time. The most fulsome praise I got back though was from Jim Woodring. A handwritten note too. I remember Gilbert Hernandez taking a book from me for Jaime to sign and mailing it back to me (at his expense!). My point being that kindness and support was not limited to Sim at the time, but I will always appreciate what he did for small publishers and the small press.
I think that Gerhard was less patient with Dave when he switched from being a mere “anti-feminist” to something a little more sinister in his highly suspect, “anti-feminist” syncretization of the big three monotheistic religions.
Despite all this, and despite my hesitations and back-tracking during the show (sometimes it’s hard to marshall my thoughts on the spot), I do admire Dave Sim a great deal. Not just for his lettering, which is very good (and which should be available from Comicraft – get right on that, Richard and JG, would you?), but also for his synthesis of Will Eisner and Mort Drucker for much of Cerebus, his great, great writing and plotting, his sense of humour and his sheer tenacity and testicular fortitude to do what he did.
One point I wanted to make during the episode, but couldn’t fit in edgewise, was that in some ways the Reads section of Cerebus suffered from the once a month time lag. I think that Sim began to think and plot in novel lengths and the issue to issue pacing began to suffer. If you read Jaka’s Story and Reads, and then read Women and Flight, the violence of those stories will knock you right between the eyes after the torpor of the preceding stories – or if you prefer, stately pace. Something that didn’t really come through with the monthly comics at the time (although admittedly I’d jumped off the comics scene bandwagon around that time and stopped buying any comics so I missed it anyway).
Thanks for your thoughts on Sim! And thanks for listening to the show. We’ll be discussing your Top Ten list on an upcoming show.
David