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Thursday, September 2, 2010
Even Aardvarks Have An Ending
Dave Sim reflects on the evolution of Cerebus, the independent market, the future and more...
Curmudgeon or Custodian Dave Sim talks with Comic World News Dave Sim needs no introduction. If you have been reading comics for any length of time, you likely have heard of Sim, either by way of CEREBUS or his political ideology. CEREBUS itself is a landmark I/SP comic, and even people who haven’t read it will claim to have done so simply to appear in the know. Now that CEREBUS’s final issue – the end of an impressive 300 issue run – is complete, Sim’s legendary status in the industry is cemented. Whether you like or hate the man, his work or his views, one thing is certain: Dave Sim has earned his place in the history of comics. In this interview, COMIC WORLD NEWS discovers Sim’s opinions on CEREBUS, the future of the industry and more. Comic World News (CWN): When you look back at your early work on CEREBUS, how do you feel about it? Is it something you still look upon favorably?  Dave Sim (SIM): It’s what I’m best known for. The Cerebus trade paperback outsells the others and always has. It looks pretty amateurish to me, so in that sense it’s kind of embarrassing. But you have to bear in mind its value to other people and try to value you it yourself in the same proportion. As a reader and fan myself of many things, there’s nothing more disheartening than someone not valuing what you value of theirs. CWN: Now that you're done with the series and can look back at the whole thing, does it look anything like what you expected it to when you began? SIM: Yes and no. The 300-issue goal wasn’t established until 1979, so I had no larger expectation in the beginning than that I might have three or four issues which, together with my work for Star*Reach, Imagine and Quack would serve as “more professional than fanzine” samples and maybe get me work at Marvel or DC. When I started High Society, I pictured being able to get a lot more into five hundred pages than proved to be the case. Mentally, I thought I would be able to do what turned out to be High Society and Church & State in five hundred pages. So I was off by about eleven hundred pages at first. What I had pictured Cerebus as being was a series of elaborate Russian novels with more laughs. A funny Crime and Punishment, a funny Brothers Karamazov, a funny War and Peace. Ultimately, I think the entire 6,000 pages, taken together, might be the comic-book equivalent of The Idiot, but nowhere near the ballpark of War and Peace. CWN: Over the years, you've provided support for other I/SP (independent/small press) creators, whether as financial support and/or advice. Many of the people you've guided haven't had the same longevity that you have. What advice would you have for someone trying to make a lasting self-publishing venture?  SIM: Recognize that it’s a very long-term proposition and, therefore, you have to be prepared to put a lot more in than you get out of it for the longest time. Most people aren’t really looking for new things to buy, so establishing any title is an uphill struggle. I get so many letters from people who started reading Cerebus at say, issue 52. Today that’s considered by most people to be pretty close to the beginning, but it took me six years of very hard work to get there. Picture working six years on something and you’re still only at the beginning of your work. If the idea of that scares the hell out of you, you really should find something else to do for a living. If it sounds interesting and worthwhile, the direct market might have a place for you. CWN: Financially, would you have still been able to produce new issues of CEREBUS if not for the Phone Directory collections? SIM: Probably not. But it’s a very hypothetical question. Even back when we were only doing four issues in each volume of Swords of Cerebus, the whole point of self-publishing—the thing that makes it “work”, that makes it more lucrative than freelance work—was that the early material continued to produce revenue. There isn’t a month that has gone by since 1979 that I haven’t made money off of Cerebus No.1. CWN: Was there a point at which the books became noticeably more profitable than the comics? SIM: Yes, but offhand I wouldn’t know when that was. The ratio the last year was about 70:30. CWN: How should the industry be vying for new readers, and what type of readers should they be gunning for to make it a dynamic, viable industry? SIM: I don’t think the industry has those abilities. The industry didn’t make the Fantastic Four a runaway success. Stan Lee deciding to write a comic book that he himself would enjoy reading instead of writing down to his audience, to me, was what made the FF a runaway success. CWN: More relaunches of older characters? SIM: That’s hard to say. If it’s something you really, really want to do, and you’re really, really good at it, I suppose it could work, but I think a lot of times people are just trying to relive their experiences as a reader when they do that. I’d say the only person who did that successfully on a consistent basis was Alan Moore. I think a consensus has emerged that John Byrne did it with the Fantastic Four and not with Superman. Nothing was more important to me in 1964 to 1966 than the Superman family, but I don’t think I could do as successful a Superman comic as John Byrne did and, as I say, I don’t think he was as successful as he had been with the Fantastic Four. It’s a very nebulous quality, which is why so many comic books sell so badly. I haven’t seen Jim Lee’s Batman, but you know from the way people are talking about it that he accomplished that nebulous quality. But looking at what Jim Lee did in 2003 isn’t going to give DC any clearer idea of how to create a successful Batman comic than looking at Dark Knight Returns in 1987 did. CWN: Ratings on comics? SIM: I think it’s a side issue. It’s the sort of thing you discuss when you realize that making Batman comic books sell well is your job description, you have no idea how to do it and it scares the hell out of you. CWN: Lines dedicated for adults? SIM: Again, you’re discussing a very nebulous quality. Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, unquestionably. These are on-ramp books for people who think they aren’t interested in comic books and they are books which will convince them that they’re wrong and that will make them happy to be proven wrong. The bulk of the Vertigo line, I think, tends to exploit human weakness for pornography and bloodshed. It seems to me well-named for that reason. Borne aloft on Moore and Gaiman and then realizing that you’re being sustained at your elevation by pornography and bloodshed would be enough to give anyone “the spins”. It also seems to me that the latter diminishes the former and the former tends to legitimize the latter. It’s only because Moore and Gaiman’s proven abilities are so huge, it seems to me, that the erosion of the perception of them is negligible and their legitimizing extends further than it otherwise would. But, ultimately, I think you still end up with just Moore and Gaiman when push comes to shove.  CWN: Art that merges more literary concepts? SIM: I used to say, back in the early ‘80s, that the comic-book medium would never attract a writer who could write as well as Neal Adams could draw. Which was true until Alan Moore came along. The difference, it seems to me, is the urge to write for the sake of writing something good. Writing that can compete with writing of the better novelists. It’s a very hard curve to stay ahead of. In a sense, all comic-book writing is measured against Alan Moore at his best which is setting the bar pretty high. But, yes, I think that “quality lit biz” level of literacy has to be there before the earth is going to start shaking. CWN: What improvements could be made to the distribution system that can help enable small press ventures to succeed? SIM: I don’t think there are any. I think the problem is the other way around. We have the ideal distribution system just waiting—from front end to back end—to be fed a reliable, literate, well-drawn hit. What we don’t have are reliable, literate, well-drawn comics for the most part or the patience to stay in the game. Six years, ten years, fifteen years is a long time to try to sustain yourself at the top of your abilities while everyone is just interested in or talking about is what the flavour-of-the- month is doing on Wonder Woman. I remember Howard Chaykin saying that a big reason he quit doing American Flagg was that he got tired of having to top himself every month. It’s particularly tough to take because, to compete at that level, you have to be by nature, an obsessively competitive person, consumed with doing what you consider to be the best comic book on the market. And when you haven’t got a personal life, drawing the comic book is really all that you do way too many hours a day and your sales are flat-lining or, more likely, dropping like a stone, it is more than a little difficult to get yourself “psyched” in the morning. So you do tend to just compete with yourself and then you’re just raising the stakes month after month and still all anyone is looking at is the new flavour-of-the-month on Wonder Woman and it tends to become more than a little self-destructive in critical human areas. But, looked at another way, it presents an amazing challenge for those willing to take up the gauntlet. CWN: CEREBUS has been a place where you’ve been able to put your thoughts, any thought, out there for the world to see (as part of the story or in straight commentary)… what are you going to do now that you no longer have that forum? SIM: “Forum-wise,” at least so far, I’ve had the opposite problem. For the last month, I’ve been answering the backlog of reader mail from the last three years, answering questions and giving my opinions on just about everything under the sun—t o the extent that I’ve decided to publish a Dave Sim: Collected Letters 2004 volume later this year or early next year. It’s already over two hundred pages long just in manuscript form. In between, I’ve been doing a few of these sorts of interviews for various guys’ websites. To be honest, I’m starting to get tired of hearing what I think about things and coming up with new ways to answer the same questions. I’m looking forward to being caught up in another week or two and then being able to answer the mail that comes in on a daily basis and, hopefully, never having another backlog for the rest of my life and then having the rest of the day to myself after I’ve answered everyone who showed up in the mailbox that day. CWN: And since you’ve got this short forum today what is your P.O.V. of the political world today?  SIM: I think liberalism is coming to the end of the line. I think Marxist-feminism ate the Civil Rights movement and kept right on chewing until it had devoured liberalism as well. Liberals have to campaign on the “sixteen impossible things to believe before breakfast” and then renege on them once they’re elected. That just happened here in Ontario with the Liberal party. Marxist-feminist pie-in-the-sky promises, none of which they are able to keep because the cupboard is bare and everyone is overtaxed just to pay the interest on the national debt. I try to keep as much cash on hand as possible and to spend as little of it on myself as I can manage because I assume that taxation is just going to keep getting more and more onerous. I give as much money as I can bear to part with to the poor and the rest is for taxes. I think that’s going to become more common over the next few decades. CWN: You are not an internet presence, not even a direct e-mail address or much of a convention one either of late. What is your aversion to the net? SIM: My aversion to the net is the same as my aversion to TV is the same as my aversion to smoking. One cigarette is too many and a thousand isn’t enough. I couldn’t stop myself from channel-surfing towards the end. I’d sit down to make sure there was nothing interesting on at 9 pm and I’d still be there clicking away at midnight or 1 am when I had intended to go to bed early. That, to me, is a nicotine-level of addiction. I knew I was lying to myself when I put the TV on and said I’ll just go up and back down the dial a couple of times and I’d just watch myself capitulating to my addiction for four hours. And it was still like pulling teeth to turn the TV off four hours later. It was the same thing as smoking, which I gave up in March of ’99. “This has to go.” Not if. When. As soon after Now as possible. I threw away my television in July of ’01. To me, the net is just another form of television. Television that you read. It took me years to get rid of the television that I looked at and listened to. The last thing I needed was to replace it with a television that I would read. And actually, I am an internet presence. The Cerebus newsgroup at Yahoo.com is going like gangbusters. Over 3,000 postings last month, Gerhard tells me. Using my smoking analogy: I quit “smoking” when I threw away my television. I’m not interested in finding something else to “smoke”. A lot of people are “smoking” me on the internet. But, to me, that’s not my problem. That’s their problem. CWN: Do you feel that these could be a valuable tools for at least gauging interest or collecting critique?  SIM: Oh, definitely. I consider the fact that so many people are gathering around the Cerebus “water-cooler” to be a great credential and a great advertisement for the book. From what I’m told the exponential rise in postings with issue 300 coming out is out-of-the-ordinary, if not phenomenal. That’s great. I hope it translates into sales and that more people will read the books as a result. But the story is done. There’s not much I could do with even the best critique at this point. I think (and, to a degree, feel) I have an obligation to the readers, without whom I wouldn’t have been able to retire at 47. I think answering my mail covers that obligation. I’m here to answer questions, like the old custodian in the Cerebus Museum. Right now that’s taking up whole days. Soon, I hope it’s only going to take up an hour or two. But I firmly expect and consider it my duty to be available to answer questions about my work for the rest of my life. As far as conventions go, I do Bob Corby’s SPACE show in Columbus and pay my own way getting there. That seems like a big enough expenditure per year relative to the few Cerebus fans who show up. Cerebus fans just tend not to be convention people. So, to have someone spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to fly me to a show, I figure I would have to be able to guarantee to bring hundreds of people through the door, otherwise I’m just using up money that could’ve been used to fly someone in who would bring people through the door. It works out well the way I look at it. There isn’t enough interest in the book to warrant running myself ragged on the convention circuit, so I actually get to retire. If you’re Neil Gaiman and a big chunk of the comic-book field is riding on your back, you are sort of obligated to get out there and “press the flesh,” because it makes a big difference to you, to the convention and to the overall comic-book field. Poor Neil. Lucky Dave.
And thanks Dave from all of us here at CWN.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
