This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

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

whose skills have remained so high and who have stayed so prolific

His past skills at comedy, dialogue, pacing, design and lettering are not at all evidenced by the work he is prolifically publishing

Can't disagree.

The Dave stuff in SDoAR is somewhere between 15 and 8 years old, depending on reuse. Haven't got to him just doing layouts yet.

I can't remember how I got them (might have been the Diamondback deck reprint?) but I have some of the early Swords of CiH and they're pretty much as bad as you think they are.

I obviously meant his visual skills, which seem pretty strong yet.

Got to the end of Dave's art life and it's losing its way a bit, meandering around the Margaret Mitchell revelation it promised earlier without actually getting anywhere near revealing.

Scott and Zelda turn up about now so I can see Dave folding himself into the metaphysics soon.

And in other cosmic alignment, a GoFundMe was launched while I've been reading to put online the TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY pages Dave has done outlines for since he stopped interacting with Carson Grubaugh (obviously including the Dave versions of the blue pages in SDOAR).

I am resisting, even at the $5 entry level, and looks like I'm not alone as two weeks in there are only 34 donations.

I obviously meant his visual skills, which seem pretty strong yet.

The work he is prolifically publishing is three older existing drawings of cerebus, cut-and-pasted by other people onto a 140-year-dead guy’s drawings! He’s only just started doing some variant covers again in the last year, after …seven years? of not drawing for publication, and mostly copying photos for about as many before that. It’s possible that the SDOAR 3.0 which aldo is resisting gofunding show that he still has a facility for original composition, page structure and visual storytelling, but it’s also possible it shows a significant deterioration — and I dunno that sketching layouts for one patron’s commission can be judged as prolific without seeing any of them.

ie yes one might argue his drawing has not deteriorated to the same degree as his comedy, dialogue, pacing, design and lettering; however, he is prolifically publishing all of those, and his drawings are published a couple of times a year, usually via POD to an audience of …dozens?

I am referring to what I have seen of strange death, which seems cleanly and well executed. Glamorpuss, the Dore stuff and Judenhass are varying levels of embarrassing, yes

With only 34 in for SDOAR3.0 dozens feels accurate at this point.

It's hard to tell just how far Dave's drawing has deteriorated from the limited stuff I've seen because once he moved to the tracing paper technique the 'good' is introduced at the inking stage and the trace drawing is quite literally a bit sketchy. So because all we see now is really the pencil we should be comparing it to something that looks unfinished - and if we do that then it looks fairly sustained. But the point is kind of moot because imo there's no way Dave will ever produce finished art again (not least because that would mean not falling out with a collaborator).

It's also fair to say though that going down the SDOAR route and reproducing other people's work, plus the reproducing photos stuff, has ruined his creative art abilities.

Based on SDOAR2.0 layouts are the only real strength he has at Cerebus levels but I haven't seen any of the SDOAR3.0 stuff and the SDOAR2.1 layouts are a drop off from the rest of the book.

CiH is absolutely dreadful.