Table Of ContentDAVE SIM: CONVERSATIONS
Conversations with Comic Artists M. Thomas Inge, General Editor
Dave Sim: Conversations
Edited by Eric Hoffman and Dominick Grace
University Press of Mississippi Jackson
Works by Dave Sim
All titles published by Aardvark-Vanaheim Press, Inc.
Fiction
Cerebus, 300 issues (December 1977 to March 2004), collected in sixteen trade paperbacks:
High Society (1986) Reads (1995)
Cerebus (1987) Minds (1996)
Church and State Volume 1 (1987) Guys (1997)
Church and State Volume 2 (1988) Rick’s Story (1998)
Jaka’s Story (1990) Going Home (2000)
Melmoth (1991) Form and Void (2001)
Flight (1993) Latter Days (2003)
Women (1994) The Last Day (2004)
glamourpuss (2008–2012)
Nonfiction
Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing (1997, rev. ed. 2010)
Collected Letters 2004 (2005)
Collected Letters 2 (2008)
Cerebus Archive (2009–2012)
Judenhass (2009)
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University
Presses.
Copyright © 2013 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Page ii: Drawing of Dave Sim, by Dave Sim and Gerhard. Reprinted with permission.
First printing 2013
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dave Sim : conversations / edited by Eric Hoffman and Dominick Grace.
p. cm. — (Conversations with comic artists)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-781-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-782-5 (ebook) 1. Sim,
Dave, 1956–—Interviews. 2. Cartoonists—United States—Interviews. I. Hoffman, Eric,
1976– II. Grace, Dominick, 1963–
PN6733.S56Z58 2013
741.5’971—dc23
[B] 2012033438
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Chronology xxi
A Talk with an Aardvark 3
Maggie Thompson / 1982
Dave Sim and Gerhard 9
Martin Skidmore / 1989
Cerebus: An Interview with Dave Sim 25
Stephen R. Bissette / 1992
Original Sim: The Dave Sim Interview 48
Jason Sacks / 1992
An Interview with Dave Sim and Gerhard 60
Adrian Reynolds / 1993
Sim Speaks 70
Comics Forum / 1993
Dave Sim 78
Tom Spurgeon / 1996
Whatever It Is, I’m Against It 148
Sandeep Atwal / 1996
vi contents
Dave Sim: 20 Years of Cerebus 169
Charles Brownstein / 1997
Dave Sim 205
Tasha Robinson / 2004
A Selection from the Yahoo Q&A Sessions 216
Cerebus Yahoo Group / 2004–2006
Selected Resources 236
Index 238
INTRODUCTION
Dave Sim. Chances are, if you’re reading this book, that you probably know
who Dave Sim is, and you probably have strong opinions about him and his
work. For better or worse, Sim’s outspoken opinions concerning publishing,
comics, artists’ rights, the relationship between the sexes, and religion, among
other things, have caused various flare-ups of controversy. Only a true origi-
nal, someone whose ideas provoke and inspire, draws the kind of praise and
criticism commonly directed at Sim. Sim poured his creativity and ideology
into Cerebus, his ground-breaking 300-issue comic-book magnum opus, ulti-
mately producing some 6,000 pages in the series, most in collaboration with
his background artist Gerhard, who became Sim’s background artist in 1984.
In addition to the comic proper, Sim filled the back pages of Cerebus not
only with traditional material such as letter columns or previews of other
work but also with essays, annotations, and dialogues with other creators
such as Alan Moore and Chester Brown. Consequently, differentiating be-
tween the comic book (the fiction) and Sim’s own beliefs and opinions (most
often expressed in the back of the book) is challenging and explains to some
extent why Sim is often granted less latitude than other creators. Though cur-
rent trends in literary criticism dictate that art and artist are wholly distinct,
Sim does not generally benefit from this differentiation. Admittedly, to a
considerable extent Sim invited this confusion not only by publishing essays
in the comic book but also by introducing himself as a character, Cerebus’s
creator “Dave,” mid-way into the narrative. (Though the book is not autobio-
graphical in any conventional sense, elements of Sim’s life, such as the fact
that Sim’s home town of Kitchener was originally named Sand Hills, which
is also the name of Cerebus’s home town, do appear from time to time.) As a
result, among its numerous innovative strategies, Cerebus becomes a complex
metafictive text in which the character Cerebus engages in dialogue with his
creator, and the comic depicts its own creation as a comic book. Neverthe-
less, regardless of how people have reacted to Sim, Cerebus remains one of the
high-water marks of the comics medium and Sim among the most talented
vii
viii introduction
and fascinating comics creators. The interviews included in this collection
provide insight into both the man and the work and help to clarify why Sim
and Cerebus matter, regardless of what you think of his ideology.
Cerebus was a key transitional work in a period of considerable transfor-
mation in the audience, production, and distribution of comic books, result-
ing in the rise of alternative and art comics in the 1970s and 1980s. Prior
to the late 1970s, comic books in North America were considered ephemeral
entertainment for children. Though occasional titles from mainstream com-
ics publishers, such as the EC comics of the 1950s, were later generally ac-
corded artistic merit by purveyors of taste, and though the underground co-
mix movement of the late 1960s to the early 1970s demonstrated that comics
could deal with mature subject matters, particularly politics and sexuality,
by the late 1970s, the comics medium was struggling. The once fairly diverse
range of genres and companies was collapsing, with superhero comics becom-
ing the predominant “mainstream” form (only in the world of comic books
could adolescent stories rooted in the generic conventions of science fiction
and fantasy be considered mainstream) and most of the once-popular com-
panies such as Dell, Gold Key, Harvey, and even Charlton were shrinking and
closing down, leaving the “mainstream” to the hegemonic control of two ma-
jor superhero publishers, Marvel and DC. The promise of the undergrounds
had largely burned out, as the propensity for graphic excess that dominated
them ultimately defined their limits for wide success, at least in the relatively
censorious world of the late 1970s. There were few alternatives other than
Marvel and DC for either readers or prospective comics artists; indeed, the
“alternative” comics publishing phenomenon would have to wait until the
early 1980s to have any significant impact. While a handful of companies
publishing non-mainstream work did exist (e.g., Last Gasp, Kitchen Sink,
Warren—though by the end of the 1970s Warren was dying as well), the al-
ternative comics movement spearheaded by publishers such as Fantagraphics
(which was founded in 1976 but did not start publishing comics until 1982) or
Art Spiegelman with RAW (which began in 1980) did not yet exist.
However, in 1977 Dave Sim entered the comics fray with a risky and inno-
vative move: after spending a few years trying to establish himself with differ-
ent projects such as a strip called The Beavers, freelance work for the few exist-
ing publishers (e.g. Warren, Star*Reach), and collaborations with professional
comics artist Gene Day, and so on, he decided to self-publish his own comic
book, Cerebus, establishing his own publishing company, Aardvark-Vanaheim
Press, to do so. He was not the first self-publisher in comics (Harvey Pekar
started the infrequently published American Splendor a few years previously,
introduction ix
for instance), but with his bimonthly and later monthly format, Sim began
to stake out unique territory. The DIY attitude of self-publishing and the
black-and-white format of Cerebus connected him with the underground
movement, yet his subject material remained decidedly mainstream. Despite
its kinship with the undergrounds, though, Cerebus never approached their
levels of explicitness, or even the sort of explicitness that occasionally was
and is prominent in other alternative comics. Cerebus can be contrasted in-
structively on this front with the other major Canadian comic book to emerge
roughly at the same time, Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur. Brown’s comic was as
horrifyingly explicit as anything conjured up in the imagination of even un-
derground artist S. Clay Wilson, more so than many other alternative comics;
by comparison, Cerebus maintained a consistently more subtle approach to
its adult themes, exhibiting considerable restraint given the artistic freedom
allowed Sim by self-publishing.
Initially, Cerebus, largely the story of a diminutive, foul-tempered barbar-
ian aardvark, acted as an overt parody of the Barry Windsor-Smith-illustrated
Conan the Barbarian comic book, published by Marvel Comics, with smatter-
ings of other Marvel and DC titles thrown in (e.g., Red Sophia is derived from
Marvel’s Red Sonja; the Cockroach initially parodied the DC comic character
Batman, though eventually he became a handy vehicle for parodying numer-
ous Marvel, DC, and even alternative comics figures). Sim’s artistic influences
were not the EC giants who tended to inform the underground cartoonists
but rather Windsor-Smith and Neal Adams, on the comics front, and Warner
Brothers cartoons and classic film comedy (notably the Marx Brothers) on
the other. The stories he told were relatively crudely rendered, hearkening to
an underground aesthetic, but his content avoided the explicit content that
might have limited his readership, offering instead deadly funny parodies of
the sorts of high fantasy adventures Conan had in the Marvel comics title.
Self-publishing was Sim’s first innovation. Though relatively few creators
have adopted this model as assiduously as Sim, it was key in establishing
an alternative to the mainstream and arguably serves as a precursor to the
emergence of alternative publishing (indeed, Sim himself was for a while an
alternative comics publisher, bringing out books by other creators under the
Aardvark-Vanaheim imprint, most notably Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot, the
basis for Kinka Usher’s 1999 film Mystery Men, Arn Saba’s Neil the Horse, and
Stephen Murphy and Michael Zulli’s surrealist environmental parable Puma
Blues) and of other breakout self-published works (initially, anyway) such as
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Bone.1 Furthermore, the self-publishing
model, as the most radical alternative to publishing with the mainstream
