Dave Sim - The Song, Not The Singer

A few days ago I had the most exciting comics-related news of the year - Dave Sim has announced his new project, Glamourpuss. Given that in the four years since Cerebus ended, his only comic work has been a couple of jam pages with Chet Brown, a few pages of webcomic about the life of an obscure actress, and a co-authored script for an issue of Gun Fu, I'm excited to finally read some new work from the person I consider the single greatest comic creator ever.

Others are not so enthusiastic. Pretty much every reaction I've seen online to this has been along the lines of "Who cares about David Simms? He's a misogynistic misogynist. His comics must be like Chick tracts or something."

Now this irritates me. Not because of the people reacting that way - had I only read Sim's interviews, blog or text pieces I would have absolutely no desire to listen to anything he had to say. Even the most cursory reader of any prose he's written after about the early 1990s would come to the conclusion that he's both severely mentally ill (not in itself a reason to ignore someone - my day job is on a psychiatric ward in a hospital and I know that mental illness does not preclude someone from being intelligent, witty or perceptive, and may even give people perspectives others don't have, perspectives that are worth having) and also a rather unpleasant person (something that's apparently not true in person, but seems to be the case with his writing persona). Pulling my copy of his Collected Letters 2004 vol 1 from the shelf and opening it at random I find:

Satan, like Lucifer, was an ill-advised escalation of hostilities on the part of YHWH, like Leviathan. I think God was happy to keep it on the level of "an adversary" which is what opposing spirits were called. As in the way that Samuel's mother was childless for years because of "her adversary". YHWH was aware of God and God was saying that there is no question that there is only one God. Let's be patient and see how the whole thing hatches out.

And so on. Sim as he comes across in print is dogmatic, rude, paranoid, believes women to be subhuman and evil, and holds political and religious views which, to the extent that they're comprehensible at all, are totally incompatible with humanity. He's read the Bible as a struggle between Good and Evil and thought that Evil sounded like a good idea.

Which is what infuriates me, because he's destroying the reputation of the finest creative mind of his generation, and I'm sick of trying to defend someone who I find (as an essayist - again, no judgement of him as a human being implied) utterly repellent and inimical to everything I hold dear. But I have to, because he's that good.

Even was Sim's comic writing as bad as his prose would imply, I would still want to read anything the man did just because of his technical skill. Sim is one of the best artists working in comics today, a master mimic who can 'do' any style - a Sim page will often contain an Alex Raymond photorealistic character next to a Mort Drucker caricature next to a perfect Eddie Campbell figure - as well as having his own distinctive style, and do it in such a way that they inhabit the same world - the different shapes, inking styles and degrees of realism complement each other rather than appearing incongruous. (This is of course aided in Cerebus by Gerhard's wonderful backgrounds, by far the most detailed black & white line art I've seen in comics, but with that detail all being there for a deliberate aesthetic effect. I can't even imagine how much effort it must have taken for Gerhard to produce work of that quality day after day for nearly twenty years, and hitting pretty much every deadline).

Sim's layouts have also always been hugely inventive, from the early "Mind Games" issue (which prefigured the last issue of Promethea by more than twenty years) through the dream sequences in Guys and the hallucinatory sequences in Rick's Story to the Citizen Kane establishing shot in The Last Day. On every single page in at least the last 220 or so issues of Cerebus , just looking at the page you can see that it is the creation of people who are working full out to make the best comic possible - every single element is very obviously the result of a conscious creative choice, never falling back on cliche except for parodic effect.

And even Sim's detractors praise his lettering. While he's not as versatile as a Todd Klein (he tends to stick to one look for his hand-lettering, a blocky but very readable look that can be traced ultimately to Spirit letterer Abe Kanegson, and is limited enough that he had to get Rick Veitch to letter 'his' dialogue parts when Veitch appeared as a character in Guys and Going Home) he's almost unique in his ability to integrate the lettering with the page, having it become a physical object with which his characters can interact. And in a medium where random words are often emphasised with no regard for the natural stresses of the English language, Sim's use of different sizes and shapes of letters to accentuate the different speech patterns of his characters opens up huge areas that have been almost completely unexplored otherwise. The Mrs Thatcher scenes in Jaka's Story (some of the best comics work I've ever seen) gain much of their intensity through the lettering, which evokes perfectly the mix of harsh menace and soothing insincere gentility that were so recognisable in the real Thatcher.

But despite this, and amazingly considering his prose work, it is as a writer that Sim most excels. While those who only know him for his prose might expect him to turn out Chick tracts, but possibly with less subtlety and more outlandish opinions, he's possibly second only to Alan Moore in writing ability in the comics medium. I've written before about the work I consider his best (and quite possibly the best graphic novel ever created - certainly the best I've ever read by quite a margin), Jaka's Story, but that one more than any other sums up just how different Sim's comic writing is from his essay persona.

In Cerebus we're time and again shown unreliable narratives - be it Oscar's book in Jaka's Story, Cerebus' misunderstanding and drunken recounting of his time on 'Juno' in Guys, the narrative by 'Suenteus Po' in High Society, the Judge's monologue in Church & State, 'Dave's description of what Jaka is doing in Minds, Rick's book in Rick's Story, Cerebus' own account of his life story in Latter Days - the more authoritative someone is presented as being, the more their account of events is thrown into question by later revelations. This appears to have originally been inspired by Robert Anton Wilson (a huge influence on the early volumes of Cerebus, though from comments he's made since Sim seems not to have fully understood his writing) but Sim carries it on throughout the story, even up to the very last pages of the comic.

If Cerebus is 'about' anything, it's about how we can never know the truth about anything, only a biased and inaccurate viewpoint which is missing crucial elements of the big picture. In a sense it is lucky for Sim that the story ends where it does, because the only logical place to go from the revelations in Latter Days is to undercut them, just as he does with every other Big Truth revealed throughout the story, and of course the religious ideas in Latter Days are in fact those Sim currently holds.

Although maybe that accounts for his current dogmatism - Cerebus is also, at least in part, a record of Sim's search for capital-T Truth, and the fact that it ends before he could undercut his current worldview maybe helped set those views in his mind. Maybe if Cerebus had continued Sim would be just as loudly proclaiming a Gospel According To Andrea Dworkin and calling for all men to be castrated.

Because one of the things that makes Cerebus - and Sim as a comic writer - work is that it is true. Not literally true, but artistically true. Throughout the years he did the comic, Sim tried to present the world as he saw it as accurately as he could (within the confines of a humorous fantasy story). And that it is the world as he saw it is the saving grace of Cerebus, and why Sim can write comics when he appears to be almost incapable at this point of rational thought.

If you read Sim's prose work (don't - it's badly written, mean spirited and generally unpleasant, except when he's talking about neutral subjects like comic creation) the problems with his thinking generally boil down to two. The first, common to autodidacts, is that he will try to make authoritative statements on subjects that he knows very little about, and ends up looking a fool to anyone who's studied those subjects in any depth (which is why he can write so cogently about comic creation or creators - he knows what he's talking about there).

The second, related, one is to look for patterns where none exist. What Sim does is take one observation ("That reporter from The Onion seemed unusually competent") and then build on it a huge superstructure that the observation just can't support ("The reporter was probably so competent because YooHWHoo wanted me to be impressed, so I'd fall in love with her and marry her and renounce anti-feminism and become a feminist-Marxist-homosexualist-atheist member of the conspiracy"). This usually involves imputing motives to people that they simply don't have. But crucially the actual original observation is accurate. In fact, because he's looking for details to support his hypothesis, the observation might be more detailed than anyone else could make.

So while Sim doesn't appear to understand how other people think, he's a keen observer of how those people behave. While the motives he gives in interviews for Jaka's behaviour make no sense when compared to real human beings, at the same time you know that the character as portrayed thus far would show her ringless hand when reaching Sand Hill Creek. And while Sim appears to regard Bear in Guys as a largely admirable figure, while I think of him as a revolting boor, both of us would, I think, agree on how the character would behave in a given situation, because he's drawn accurately. I may not like it that many groups of men, placed together in a bar without women, would behave like the men in Guys, but I don't deny that that is the way many men do behave.

Sim would make a terrible novelist, because the novel depends in large part on showing characters' thought processes, and Sim just doesn't get how people think. But comics show rather than tell, and Sim uses almost no thought bubbles. The only time we're treated to anyone's thought processes, it's either Cerebus himself (who has almost no inner life and who is, anyway, an anthropomorphic aardvark), Rick (who is clearly presented as extremely mentally ill) or for too short a time to make any judgement. If we were shown Jaka's thought processes they would be along the lines of "Ha ha! I will do this because I am a spoiled brat bitch who is controlled by the devil and I will destroy Cerebus' Male Light with my evil female void!", but seeing her act we can form our own opinions - we're just being shown the facts, not the author's interpretation of them.

In fact in some ways Sim's assigning of importance to details no-one else would notice, while a limitation for him as a thinker, adds veracity to the comic. There are times when a tiny detail ( like 'something fell') takes on an importance in the comic out of all proportion to its importance to the story itself, but they all feel right artistically, because Sim's thought out a huge superstructure which goes unsaid in the comic itself but informs every detail of it.

So I'm eagerly counting the days to the release of Glamourpuss 1, and expect it to be among the best comics I read this year.

Now if only that arsehole Dave Sim would stop promoting it, I might not feel ashamed to walk into the shop and ask for it.