More Dave Sim Batshittery.

lol that's the other thing i was gonna ask - for a time, sim was making serious coin from the phonebooks etc - i remember at one 80s uk comic convention, him and gerhard shared a massive suite at the Savoy in central london, which can't have been cheap (while virtually every other convention guest made do w/ far more modest accomodation) - so did it all go up his nose, in the end?

nah: money kept flowing past the millennium, but cashflow slowed hugely as sales declined and thus more of cash-on-hand would have to be sunk into reprinting volumes, which then wouldn't pay themselves back for years; he had to pay Gerhard off when he asked to leave A-V (Ger ostensibly owned 40%; rather than actually analyse their assets, Dave said "yes" to the first figure Gerhard named and they just worked out a payment plan); and I suspect most significantly he's been tithing everything he doesn't need for groceries for many years now, instead of saving it.

altho the amount of tithing may have reduced as he's been paying off Gerhard I imagine

yeah he definitely seemed like he was flaunting wealth in the late 80s/early 90s, to a totally unheard of degree in the comics world iirc

wrt RASL it should be noted that it's pretty unreadable and I say this as something of a jeff smith fanboy

Yeah, which is why Kim hailing it as some major success is jarring.

a reasonable, self-sustaining success, I think he's saying; its numbers seem to have been more consistent than pre-Image Bone, which is remarkable in the current context, and he's found three separate serialisation modes to reach different audience preferences.

yeah he definitely seemed like he was flaunting wealth in the late 80s/early 90s, to a totally unheard of degree in the comics world iirc

staying in nice hotels occasionally is nothing next to Chris Claremont's buying a private jet! afaik Sim and Gerhard lived very moderately at home* and just lashed out on holidays (where they would continue working) and suites rather than rooms at some cons. and that was also in large part to provide an aspirational example**, to illustrate to ppl the spoils that could be theirs if they fully owned and controlled their work.

* in Kitchener Sim walked everywhere - and still doesn't have a drivers licence - but when landing in another city, going to do two radio appearances and three print interviews before going to a hotel and then to a convention, and possibly stopping for food along the way, he reckoned it was more efficient and economically sensible to book a car service rather than get separate cabs for each stop.

** or, in the case of the Savoy, also to impress British journalists that this interview booking wasn't a waste of their time:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-o1yaiwq2IVE/T7jEGd3319I/AAAAAAAAA4U/1-5nqFJScRQ/s1600/photo_savoy_neil_gaiman.jpg

oh man where did you find that photo!??!! pure nostalgia - any idea who the person in the mirror is (for a moment i thought it was me, but tho' i visited sim at the savoy, it was in the evening and gaiman wasn't there...)

yeah, there was def an aspect of "look what you can have when you're a self-publishing cartoonist" abt sim's choice of luxurious digs, but he and gerhard def seemed to be living out the rock star lifestyle trip, too.

<3 gaiman's footwear

Hah my first reaction to that is holy shit at inside smoking :)

I remember that photo from an issue of Cerebus -- since it's in full color, it must have been the back cover.

yeah, he ran it on the back after Sandman became a thing - somewhere during Melmoth, so I think he probably found it to draw Oscar connections and then went "oh lol yeah" when he realised who was in it. (there was one the month before or after of Dave posing [and smoking] in the window, too)

mirror dude is probably just the next journo waiting, or possibly hired publicity dude (this would be earlier than Igor Go1dkind's time on the scene, right?). if it's not P. Grav3tt. looks shorter than Gerhard, but the angle's unhelpful.

ah yeah, looks like it was the Man At The Crossroads

nah, ig0r was def the FP/Titan publicist at the time.

i don't know if sim is avoiding mentioning something reasonably...pertinent...abt someone he talks abt in the first part of his essay, or if he didn't know, or what...

yeah that was amazing! coming from 1986 (at the time) you would assume it was Dave being aware and respectful - from 2004 Dave it feels more like... he must not have known... but is that possible?

* not in on the gossip *

:-(

sorry, not trying to be coy, and it isn't really gossip as such, just something that shldn't be discussed on a public forum w/out the relevant party's permission (who, I hasten to add, I only know in the most superficial way, and who doesn't know me from adam).

100% inferrable from our conversation and no secret AFAIK, just being polite

Interesting response from Sim on the Fantagraphics thing:

http://www.tcj.com/dave-sim-responds-to-the-fantagraphics-offer/

Sim's well-poisoning starts as soon as the phrase “New York Times-worthy” emerges from his typewriter.

He digs a ditch, jumps in, and backfills it with shit. Kinda amazing.

“An thass no lie,” as one of Crumb’s black characters might say.

xpost

and that he builds one of his classic "you probably think THIS because you're all against me" strawmen, best-ever displayed in Tasha Robinson's AV Club interview, by ignoring what Kim says about the first 2/3 of the run only and contextualising for bookstores by insisting they would want to contextualise the last third only, and for the NYT, which isn't where he belongs.

but it'll be fun if Kim & Gary do try and debate this out on the comments.

it's hard for me to understand why so many ppl want publishing rights to cerebus (assuming sim is telling the truth about like b&n) - i mean, i think it's just great but surely there isn't a huge untapped audience just waiting for groucho marx satire, mick + keith hijinks, theological/political jockeying, is there?

B&N is one company, seeking presumably the same non-exclusive digital rights that multiple other companies have due to Sim/Scrudder making deals with them, and they no doubt heard because of the High Society Digital kickstarter pulling ten times its goal

"Untapped new rights to property with a 25-year history" presumably sounds like the pure sweet chimes of cash registers to B&N.

35

So, I look at my catalogue and I go, “What have I got that’s New York Times-worthy?” My best guess would be Form & Void, the Hemingway book, or Going Home, the Fitzgerald book.

lol

going by that screed alone he is proper batshit insane.

I'm in the eyeroll camp.

have never heard of this "Hemingway was bi" argument btw

well read Form & Void then

You'll be telling us you didn't know he fucked his cats next.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-genders.html

this thread has inspired me to finish reading the batshit parts of cerebus. any recommended companion reading?

The Torah.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41JJje35GYL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

I finally got around to getting the first volume of Cerebus last weekend - it's kind of amazing how quickly he hit his stride tbh

yeah, despite all the "start with high society" talk there's plenty to enjoy in the first book.

It's always kind of amazed me that the long run of great work started with a nervous breakdown instead of ending with one.

Groth sez:

I left Dave a message telling him that I’d be willing to publish his Raymond book (assuming we could agree on terms, of course, admittedly a huge assumption). I did this mostly out of respect for his skill at and commitment to comics; and, to be honest, in order to help him out. The litany of failed strategies to make dough that he enumerated in that blog post was despairing, as was his inability to profitably continue publishing Glamourpuss himself. Basically, I was offering to jump into the breach if he’d find it helpful. Pragmatically, it’s a single book and a pretty simple prospect.

Cerebus, on the other hand — ay yi yi. I suspect that Kim and Dave could negotiate the contract for that series of books (publicly!) until one of them drops dead, which would probably be a hell of a lot sooner than if they’d never started negotiating in the first place. Good luck to them.

Sim back.

Sim's still a class A loon, but that comment thread is interesting.

wtf with this NYT obsession

Brutal question, but does Cerebus have the capacity to build a new audience? Even the first book is so date-bound to comics culture and 70s/80s politics, I just can't imagine anyone who hasn't already read Cerebus wanting to have a go. I'd say High Society and Jaka's Story maybe, but the rest, hm.

i'm kinda surprised that such an idiosyncratic work could build an audience in the first place

i think r. fiore makes a v gd point in that comments section about sim re-working/re-editing portions of the first volume of cerebus - if it was good enough for herge, why not for sim? that would help distinguish any new edition, make the whole thing 'more of a piece' (tho' i guess gerhard wouldn't participate) and reward the loyal punters who already invested in the phone books.

i can't help thinking as well that sim has a rather mundane view of literature and literary culture/criticism - wilde, hemingway, fitzgerald are all pretty canonical literary figures, 'safe' in their way, and not, i wouldn't have thought, the kind of writers likely to excite this mythical 'mainstream' audience of well-read liberal thinkers.

fwiw, if i was trying to 'sell' cerebus to the wider world i would try to position sim as a weird loner outsider figure like jandek or henry darger, and i'm sure sim wouldn't go along with that...

But Gerhard didn't do anything in the first volume so that's a moot point.

well yeah, but that's what part of what makes the first volume problematic as an introductory volume - it lacks the background lushness of the later books. again, when herge revised his work he got ppl like edgar p jacobs and bob demoor to work on the pages, even though they hadn't contributed to the original versions. perhaps if sim had looked at walt whitman or henry james instead, he might be more receptive to the idea of a text in flux.

Even the first book is so date-bound to comics culture and 70s/80s politics, I just can't imagine anyone who hasn't already read Cerebus wanting to have a go

I'd say especially the first book, but then the recommended reading order has always been second->first->second.

I think one of the things with Cerebus is that all the parodies are still funny even if you don't know the original jokes - "the kids" these days won't necessarily know who Rodney Dangerfield is, but as long as they have some frame of reference for what "a terrible borscht-belt comedian" is, and why he's funny as a counsellor, they'll be fine.