More Dave Sim Batshittery.

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.

, THE TRAGIC LIVES OF HAM & MARY ERNESTWAY: A GRAPHIC FABLE BASED ON THE TRUE STORY (or…BASED ON “THE TRUE GEN”) (…or…BASED ON “HOW IT WAS”)

lol this is so stupid

feel like there's an amazingly emotionally needy vibe running through Sim's postings on this subject (PLEASE PLEASE VALIDATE ME)

xxp not so much the comics parodies. moon knight?

yeah I think his non-comics reference points (groucho, mick n keef, wilde etc) work fine but the comics/Roach stuff is gonna be nigh impenetrable to anyone not versed in 80s comics

feel like there's an amazingly emotionally needy vibe running through Sim's postings on this subject (PLEASE PLEASE VALIDATE ME)

the NYT thing has been a bugbear for decades, used to be all "I'm just the guy who's won five Eisners, but Art Spiegelman gets called by the NYT for comment, which is the best encapsulation I can think of to illustrate my position on the Big Chessboard"

Art Spiegelman aggressively promoted his I AM SERIOUS NY JEWISH ARTISTE schtick his entire career, it's no small wonder why the NYT would call him and not some nerdy Canadian crank with a much more comics-bound cultural cachet. But beyond that it's just the entire tone of it - part of which I'm sure is borne of dire economic circumstances, but also his well-developed martyr complex - comes off as both desperate for approval and resentful for even wanting that approval in the first place. It's singularly unattractive, but also very very much in character.

it's a kind of "I want you to love me, but I hate you for making me want you to love me!" sort of dynamic

I think only Elrod and Red Sophia (and maaaybe Moon Roach) are the only parodies that are going to be out of reach for new fans, and even they become strong enough characters independent that you don't need to know the backstory to get the joke...

sacred secret wars
also all that bullshit with mcfarlane
and really the stones shit
and the marx brothers
i don't know, the whole goddam book does seem fairly impenetrable really

Wait though - which bit of Keef + Mick depends on you having any idea who the Stones are? Definitely none of the Marx brothers does.

Moon Roach is a case where I can see the other side - I'd never heard of any of the Moon Knight stuff it was parodying, and so it comes through as obviously stylised nonsense - which is exactly the part it plays in the plot.

Who the fuck doesn't at least vaguely know who the Rolling Stones and the Marx Brothers are?

young people today

I think those with enough cultural curiosity to try Cerebus would.

chap otm

i think i had only a very vague idea about the marx brothers when i started reading cerebus

also dave sim writes a good groucho marx but 'mick 'n' keef' are not funny

all the moon roach, wolveroach etc shit: not funny

The Roach is great, especially the DKR parody. Mick n Keef have their moments, though I often find Sim's recreations of accents just annoying. It makes the dialogue a bit of slog sometimes.

I love Sims' Oscar Wilde, Mick & Keef and Marx Brothers stuff and don't think a prior knowledge is required to fully appreciate that stuff. I didn't know the details of Wilde's sodomy trial before reading "Jaka's story", was delighted to read later how well Sims had integrated those details into Oscar's exchange with the tavern owner (Pud?)

I ~get~ Moon Roach and he's just fine but he's probably the weakest character imo, with or without a knowledge of who he's satirizing

nothing engages new readers like twenty five year old parodies of rock stars and eighty year old parodies of slapstick comedies, unless it's biographical fanfic about oscar wilde and ernest hemingway

I dunno man, those jokes never really get old. My younger bros read Cerebus for the first time this summer and really dug it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc0ryR-1GZI

I started reading Cerebus as a teenager over 20 years ago. At that time I knew the Marx Bros well enough but not the Stones so I didn't get all the jokes but it didn't stop me from getting into it. The comics references are definitely of their time and place though. How many people are gonna get a DKR parody today? I think this stuff is minor though and doesn't really hurt the work but I can see how it might put people off.

I quit reading Marvel/DC around '93 so I didn't get any of the Rabbi/Preacher stuff. But by then the book had gone well off the rails, so I didn't feel I was missing much.

Oh man I forgot Secret Sacred Wars Roach: that might have been my favorite Roach. The whole joke of Shooter's paragraphs of expository dialogue might lose new readers, though it kind of fits in with that sublimely inexplicable atmosphere that pervades the first 100 pages of C&S II

Well, as a firm believer in both free will and predestination, I think [the non-narrative works Judenhass and glamourpuss] -- and CEREBUS -- were fully-formed when my grandfather was still in his mother's womb. But, in the sense that I see you as meaning: the conventional "physically incarnated" hatching out of our lives, yes, definitely they were gestating throughout my life. I wanted to be Neal Adams when I grew up. Or, at least, when I got taller :) It's hard to communicate the extent to which virtually EVERYONE in my generation of comic artist wanted to be Neal Adams when they grew up. It would be surprising if I would have done something else once CEREBUS was done.

It occurred to me for the first time a while ago that in a real sense most of CEREBUS could have just been a practice tee -- a 26-year and three month practice tee, if you can believe it -- getting me ready for doing THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND. He died in 1956. I was 112 days old when he died. 56 and 56 is 112. I'm 56 this year. It seems more than a little significant to me. God grinds the axes he intends to use.

And Dave grinds any axe that gets near him.

I can admire the craft, but man, I just could not get into CEREBUS.

as a firm believer in both free will and predestination

this guy

The TCJ thread where Dave & Kim and the general public have been "negotiating" has gotten out of control in a way that reminds of the old Journal message boards. Totally entertaining trainwreck, with people talking past each other and Hitler references and Gary Groth dropping a hot load on Dave's head.

Aaaagh, I just spent 90 minutes with that thread and the Hardtalk questions and I need a brain-rinse.

I did say it was like the old TCJ boards. Those always left me feeling wrong in the head.

makes me want to take up butt-chugging

upthread i wrote:

don't think sim ever forgave fanta for (rightly, imho) not including him in their list of 100 greatest cartoonists or whatevs, back in the day.

tom spurgeon wrote this today on the comics reporter site:

suspect this latest "negotiation" was entered into in somewhat bad faith by Sim, perhaps unintentionally, and as a result it quickly become a launching pad for longstanding grievances -- grievances I further suspect are more "exclusion from Top 100" oriented than "you compared me to a Nazi" oriented.

Dave posted in the middle of the night and is now pushing the goalpost of discussions into 2013. Batshittery shall never end.

Batshit is as batshit does.

Maybe we can get Neal Adams to illustrate this trainwreck and call it BATSHIT ODYSSEY. It's likely Dave Sim sits shirtless at a table narrating his adventures.

I would buy that comic.

this is very entertaining:

http://images.comiccollectorlive.com/covers/b0d/b0d36be2-e567-48fe-ba74-e771aa338c73.jpg