This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

At least he’s his own boss

In 1986, DC spent a year negotiating to buy the publishing rights to Cerebus. Eventually, Dave bent over the contract in P4ul L3vitz' New York office with pen in hand, and asked the publisher to give him a reason not to sign it. L3vitz asked "can you think of an easier way to make $100,000?"

Sim sat back, thought briefly, put the cap back on the pen and flew home to Canada, where he then invented the entire trade paperback comic collection / perennial reprint market from scratch. Single-handedly.

He then spent a decade proselytising and campaigning and marketing (and sometimes financially assisting) for every single comics author to be their own boss via self-publishing. All while writing and co-drawing and publishing and marketing a monthly book, publishing the odd bit of other work, having a major marketplace war with the largest distributor, and smoking weed daily, drinking weekly, "partying" on the road every month or three, pursuing fornication regularly, or being a diligent, communicative, supportive monogamous partner to his long-distance womanfriends. In 1994-95 he even built a network of international author-owned small press arts festivals from scratch, and toured once a month to help found or expand them, all while only making the monthly comic larger, rather than slowing down.

Then he stopped doing drugs or chasing women and started reading the Torah and the bible and the Koran, and consistently reduced his personal worldview, influence and audience for 25 years and counting. makes u think.

the completed work as a 350-page paperback

Not going to lie, I will buy this if it's a reasonable price and not his $300 'limited edition' bullshit.

(The California promo wasn't printed by Grubagh, and was only limited to 100 copies because the guy that had printed 400 copies for Sim gave Grubagh the last 100 copies (plus was a mere $105 for 132pp).)



Finding myself very compelled by these summaries of recent posts on a strange man’s blog tbqh.

A dude who was transcribing Dave's videos a few years back pops up in the comments to say that he's back at it. But instead of, say, condensing salient points in the comments of the latest post, he's still diligently getting every um and uhh and repetition from years-ago videos. Another dude posts to say he'd rather have a printed version of the videos to read, like the old Aardvark Comment, than click and sit through dozens of hours of audio at a computer. The blog dude leaps in to object that if this happened, he would want the comics he draws to accompany each monthly call with Sim to be included, so they would have to either pay for colour printing, or pay him to redraw them in black and white.

Here is an example of one of these.

Darkness

Sweet suffering fuck

That covers all of this, not just the inept zombie penis thing

Dave has just read New Mutants for the first time, on the urging of a fifty-something fan so obsessive (he posts multiple times a week in the blog comments about how often he has spoken to Dave on the phone, or how he just sits next to Gerhard at Gerhard's convention table for hours and talks to him instead of walking around discovering new work) that Sim has iiirc logged on himself to caution people not to believe half of what the guy says.

He has thus learnt for the first time what an extensive impact the demon character S'ym actually had on the Marvel Universe, and that as an agent of YHWH, Chris Claremont therefore created the association that would lead to Sim being demonised within the comic-book field a decade later. "All of it predestined." This is underscored by Claremont having written 185 issues of X-Men: therefore Sim's revelations of the true evils of feminism came in Cerebus #186.

Also, it was the "newly minted online mob" of the Comics Journal Message Board that "eradicated" Sim from the field in 1994, even though he continued to publish Cerebus until 2004, and the message board did not exist until 1999.

You don't have to read this stuff, sic.

Sometimes I go for six or eight months without looking in. But then it'll occur to me to wonder if Dave Sim has managed to develop a completely counterfactual opinion about something, or to devise a confoundingly elaborate method to keep himself from publishing simply or from creating work that connects with the genuine artist inside him, or uncovered new evidence that he is the central figure of the metaphysical universe. And by gum, he'll always be deep in at least one of the three.

I'm very happy for you to carry on reading and summarising it for us, TBH.

Dave believes that the duration of his seven-year relationship with a 14-year-old girl, beginning when he was about 29, is "metaphysically pertinent" now that he's reading Claremont and Sienkiewicz' New Mutants, because he read on S'ym's wikipedia that

During Illyana's seven years in Limbo, Belasco takes her as his heir and apprentice. She ultimately defeats him, becoming Limbo's new ruler, and S'ym's master, before returning to the X-Men. S'ym challenges Illyana's newfound status as Limbo's ruler. Illyana defeats S'ym, leaving S'ym to agree to serve Illyana whenever she visits Limbo.[

Because the seven years represent a limbo period where the metaphysical forces of feminism were trying to neutralise Sim's mind by placing him under female control before he could reveal the truth about their voidly agenda in his four-year Mothers & Daughters graphic novel, that followed the end of the relationship.

The fan who has sent the comics to Dave to read thinks that the "Colossus' kid sister" character became one-dimensional and her development went "off the rails;" Sim infers that this is because Claremont is a feminist and tried to frame the plot positively in that direction.


The personality "Jack Wayne" manifested by the character Legion in New Mutants #27 also ties in to Dave: he infers that the character is named for Jack Kennedy (who was the most successful playboy alive in 1963 because Marilyn Monroe fucked him, which also proves he was as attractive as a human male could be at that time) and Bruce Wayne, and Dave was perceived as a playboy-like-figure within the comics field in the 1980s because he fucked so much. Proof that this personality is metaphysically connected to Dave? "My Inner Jack Kennedy would wane," fourteen (7 + 7) years later when he gave up sex and masturbation .

In the 1980s, Sim would write angrily about his friend and mentor Gene Day's death after Day's travelling to NYC to deliver a job to Marvel, being given a rush job to draw in the office, and left to sleep in an unheated Manhattan office lobby in winter, catching (iirc) a pneumonia that Sim believed weakened his health leading to him dropping dead months later.

Now, seeing that the character S'ym first appeared in August 1982 (probably May, actually, but Dave is evidently forgetting how cover dates work), Day died in September, and Dave & Deni Sim went on their first US tour in October/November, Dave "infers" that by leaving his wife and becoming a fornicator in 1983, he "forced" God or the universe or something to send him a message by killing his only friend.


Lest anyone think that Sim is somehow reaching, or exhibiting some kind of weird narcissism by going beyond the S'ym character to read metaphysical connections between his own life and other characters in the comic: another one of Legion's manifested personalities is called Cyndi. And Dave has been told that his parents would have named him Cindy if he'd been a girl. And Claremont writes Cyndi saying "

..."They say they love you. But when it's their life and yours, they'll dump you every time." And that is the sort of thing that Dave's parents might have said to him, or vice versa, when they still spoke! AND he did dump his parents when they remained atheists after he invented, then converted to, his own religion! QED.

Dave found those details on the S'ym wikipedia because he phoned his research assistant and asked him to print out the page and bring it to the house.

He has since taken a break from reading the New Mutants comics from 1982 to watch the New Mutants film from 2017, released in 2020, and pausing to transcribe all the bits about religion. Sim had noticed it on two Worst Movies Of 2020 lists in Canada, despite it containing "LGBTQ propaganda," so he concludes that this is a result of the "sharp shift in Trump-era Identity Politics". (He thinks it's bad too, but not because it happens to be a bad movie. It's because every single film made today is just filler between CGI effects - Dave can tell this, unlike professional nationally-published film critics, presumably because he watches one movie every five years and thus knows better.)

He is noting his reactions by watching fifteen minutes every two days, typing up two pages of analysis addressed to the fan that asked him what he thinks of the comic, and faxing these to his blogspot dude.

starting to think there may be reason to be concerned about dave sim’s mental well-being tbh

"dave sic" press submit

Sim had a sexual relationship with a 14 year old girl when he was 29? Or am I reading that wrong.

*phones research assistant*

*checks voicemail*

They only met a few times in those seven years, rarely corresponded, didn't have sex until a few days before her 21st birthday, and have not seen each other since three months after her 22nd. Sim regards the association as unequivocally morally wrong, legally criminal, and the handful of days they spent in each others' company as the only times he has ever experienced happiness in his life.

I checked back and Dave has faxed another 18 pages of daily commentary on the New Mutants movie in the last week

I really need a fax machine

it's the internet of paper

Dave believes that the concept of teenagers making out in a cemetery is something that The New Mutants movie invented as gay propaganda to undermine religion, and not something that teenagers have been doing since approx. 12 hours after cemeteries were invented.

https://i.imgur.com/qFe8s13.jpg



Dave believes that Marvel Movies, which he has not seen, developed a recognisable template, that this film, not made by Marvel Studios, deviates from. He also believes that 20th Century Fox delayed its release five times because of poor audience reaction when it was released three years later.

https://i.imgur.com/Od875KL.jpg

Also, he thinks it's a bad movie because it's bad, but the audience thought it was bad because they are too dumb to appreciate that it is interesting and creative.

Also, a global pandemic forcing cinemas closed in most of the planet, and nearly all of North America, had no impact on the box office in 2020.

Dave Sim, who has been self-employed since 1977, is very familiar with HR Departments, and how feminists infiltrating the otherwise sensible institution of HR departments created the COVID hoax.

https://i.imgur.com/AfI3dyq.jpg

If any span of time between two events in Dave Sim's life can be measured between two events in other people's lives, or in world events, then it means that the Sim span of time influenced or outright controlled the other events.

https://i.imgur.com/zgcpcRX.jpg

Any genuinely open-minded person reading Sim's anti-feminist essay from 1994 will conclude that this time-span theory is correct. If they don't? QED, they are not genuinely open-minded.

McCarthyism was bad because he made people paranoid about communists in the US State Department, but the US State Department really was and is permeated with communists, and that's bad.

https://i.imgur.com/hMF0LTS.jpg

God is prolonging the COVID-19 pandemic because people have not learnt enough from their suffering so far, and still want to have sex. New Zealand's feminist and socialist Prime Minister, whose partner stays home to raise their child, absolutely did not halt the pandemic, and everyone in New Zealand died a year ago.

https://i.imgur.com/tw3aiWK.jpg

you could also not pay attention to this drivel though

I think you're missing that it has been 26 years and three months since Cerebus #191 came out, including a preview of Jason Lutes' Jar Of Fools. Metaphysics thus dictate that we are all fools, and only by scrying these runes do we have any hope of escaping the jar. Thus, until my free will can affect my actions, I am bound to continue.

better you than me man; it seems somewhere between a waste of your time and a sort of unhealthy interest in a clearly damaged man from out here

and i say that as a marked obsessive with clearly unhealthy interests, so i know whereof i speak!

If any span of time between two events in Dave Sim's life can be measured between two events in other people's lives, or in world events, then it means that the Sim span of time influenced or outright controlled the other events.

I'm just going to speak generally here but I've typically found that when these lines are crossed (or inverted perhaps?) there's an effect on yourself that's kind of like a psychic second law of thermodynamics in that you don't get out without losing a little bit of yourself.

*removes bookmark from thread*

Pretty glad now I didn't drop $$$ on SDoAR.

How’s this guy doing

Ew.

he's got his finger on the pulse

lmao

yikes

Can’t someone just put him down, for fuck’s sake?

I got given the Alex Raymond book for Christmas. Wish me luck.

it's a good thing he has a posse of younger people mostly writing and drawing these for him, or he might accidentally come off vaguely out of touch

On top of everything else what is going on with those fonts

I guess you set off to do 300 issues of a comic book about a barabarian aardvark, there is a pretty decent chance you are going to lose your f'n mind.

I was a steady reader of Cerebus from High Society onward to somewhere in the 140s when there was more text than art and seeing this all go down in real time is something. I seem to recall that Deni Loubert saying something to that effect: 300 issues about an aardvark in the wilds of Kitchner will drive him mad.

I was given a self-drawn comic this Christmas by someone who appeared as a character in Cerebus many years ago.

Hempel?

it's just such a fucking insult how good this guy is at page & panel design, and such a blessing that he's so far over the bend that nobody'll ever put his talents to use for, like, viable political candidates who'd make things even worse

As an equally epic, well-drawn and well-written comic without the baggage of its creator, let me humbly sugggest Finder by Carla Speed McNeil.

I'm about halfway through the Sim content of SDOAR and it's... something.

I hadn't realised until I read Eddie Campbell's intro that Sim had abandoned completely all the work he had included in glamourpuss (for, frankly, Sim-based reasons) and instead appears to be creating a revenge narrative where Alex Raymond is the only true artist and Caniff had him killed so the extent of his rip-off wasn't exposed.

Of course, Dave being Dave, this is only revealed when you compare King Features published funny pages vs the original art and they are in on the conspiracy. And in an even more Dave move, this is a multi-dimensional conspiracy achieved using an as-yet undiscovered school of metaphysics revealed to (possibly only) him.

The most ridiculous part so far though is obliquely comparing Rob Liefeld to Alex Raymond. Even the staunchest defenders have to acknowledge that's fucking crazy talk.

I might have to find my glamourpusses after this because I recognise NONE of this.

Is it an interesting something or a “go away Dave” something (or both!)

It's both, to be honest.

At the moment it's all mystic visionary Dave and very little sexual politics Dave - he touches on it once and backs the fuck away VERY quickly - and if it was anybody else (e.g. Scott McCloud) it'd be getting discussed very seriously.

Even if you don't agree with his central premise (and I'm not sure who else does apart from Dave) some of his Tangents are really engaging no matter how implausible (for example, Raymond's affair physically manifested a parallel Earth in another dimension which Oskar Lebeck had his ideas for Twin Earths psychically beamed from which is why they're so technologically accurate to the modern day).

Also Dave's art is, for the first 100 pages or so, absolutely undiminished and his layouts are great. Lettering sucks though.

I'm at about page 150 and Dave's last is 209 before it becomes nearly all Carson.

it's hard to think of someone else in this field whose skills have remained so high and who have stayed so prolific and yet i have no interest in anything they're making

Xpost
What is SDOAR?

Strange Death Of Alex Raymond