Dave Sim: Conversations

By University Press of Mississippi

In 1977, Dave Sim (b. 1956) began to self-publish Cerebus, one of the earliest and most significant independent comics, which ran for 300 issues and ended, as Sim had planned from early on, in 2004. Over the run of the comic, Sim used it as a springboard to explore not only the potential of the comics medium but also many of the core assumptions of Western society. Through it he analyzed politics, the dynamics of love, religion, and, most controversially, the influence of feminism--which Sim believes has had a negative impact on society. Moreover, Sim inserted himself squarely into the comic as Cerebus's creator, thereby inviting criticism not only of the creation, but also of the creator.

What few interviews Sim gave often pushed the limits of what an interview might be in much the same way that Cerebus pushed the limits of what a comic might be. In interviews Sim is generous, expansive, provocative, and sometimes even antagonistic. Regardless of mood, he is always insightful and fascinating. His discursive style is not conducive to the sound bite or to easy summary. Many of these interviews have been out of print for years. And, while the interviews range from very general, career-spanning explorations of his complex work and ideas, to tightly focused discussions on specific details of Cerebus, all the interviews contained herein are engaging and revealing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626744202

Book preview

A Talk with an Aardvark

MAGGIE THOMPSON / 1982

Originally published in Comics Fandom Forum (November 1982) pp. 41–48. Reprinted by permission.

The interview took place at the Chicago ComiCon on July 16, 1982. Dave was sitting in the artists’ room, working on an intricate sketch of Arnold the Isshurian, a character he’d created for an upcoming issue of Epic Illustrated [Arnold the Isshurian is a parody of Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s portrayal of Conan the Barbarian in the eponymous John Milius film, done in the style of the MAD Magazine Harvey Kurtzman–Wally Wood Superduperman satire with a Winsor McKay–inspired framing device]. As he drew, an assembly of fans and I asked him questions, beginning with a discussion of how he created the character of [Lord] Julius [Grandlord of the city-state Palnu, a caricature of comedian Groucho Marx] for his Cerebus the Aardvark.

MAGGIE: You’ve parodied everything under the sun; what do you parody next?

SIM: They just crop up. You need a character for a specific function, and that’s where it comes from—I need a character who’s like this. The Regency Elf [a mystical being who resides in the Hotel Regency, where Cerebus spends much of his time during the High Society story arc] started off as the Regency Hermit, an old guy with a long beard that just hung around in the walls and would just come bursting into people’s rooms. But there was a quality to it that wasn’t going to work, because the reason I wanted to introduce the character was so Cerebus would have somebody to talk to—the same reason they introduced Jimmy Olsen into Superman.

That’s basically all it is: you have to have a function in mind for the character, and then it either develops into a real popular character or it’s just another one of the group. I find that people tend to be crazy about the characters that I just sort of toss off.

Astoria [Kevillist leader and former wife of Lord Julius, Astoria orchestrates Cerebus’s campaign for prime minister] is one of my favorite characters, easily. I love doing a real, ordinary person—like an extraordinary female but, at the same time, she’s not a broad caricature of any kind. Just to be able to do a group of females—and I haven’t really done one since Red Sophia that was really built out to here. I get so sick of that in comics …

One of the big reasons that I decided to do the High Society story was to get more females into the story, because if you’re talking about out in the countryside or you’re talking about the smaller towns and whatnot in the book, females are not much in evidence. Females are never much in evidence in those environs, because they are dangerous. They just don’t go out walking around, finding things to do. Whereas in Iest (which is a very, very upperclass sort of place), it far more lends itself to female characters.

MAGGIE: In what order do you tackle the creation of a story?

SIM: In High Society, it was a vague idea of where I wanted to go. You start off with this very vague, imprecise series of events that you have—touchstone lines, jokes that you can’t wait to get to do, confrontations, things like that. And, after that, it’s a matter of putting them in at opportune moments.

High Society consists of X-number of points that have to be touched on in a specific order, but it doesn’t have to happen on page twelve of issue 41.

Well right now, I’m working on the campaign for prime minister. So that goes 40, 41. All you do is a campaign. I know what campaigns are like, having read [Theodore White’s] Making of the President 1960 and whatnot, which is about the end of what American politics was—the classic campaign touching down with each of the bigwigs in each different vicinity and getting their approval and they’ll get you the delegates that you need.

Then, it’s just a matter of surrounding Cerebus with all the campaign people that you want him with. You don’t take all the politicians you had in the last year. You take Dirty Fleagle and Dirty Drew [two kidnappers, a mixture of Yosemite Sam and comics artist Gene Day and his brother David] and Bran MacMufin [former barbarian warlord and member of the Pigt tribe that worships an idol reminiscent of Cerebus, a parody of Robert E. Howard’s character Bran Mak Morn] and the Moon Roach [a subsequent incarnation of the Cockroach, this time a parody of the Marvel Comics character Moon Knight] and then it’s just a matter of playing one off of each other.

It’s one of the benefits of being the writer and the artist that I will write dialogue and then, when I freeze on the dialogue and I can’t picture any more, I’ll start doing pictures. And, if you do a picture of Cerebus in his suit, and the Moon Roach is behind him, then I’ll think, Oh, wait a minute. What’s that bit that I’m doing this issue—the Moon Roach is going to be doing this with the Elf? Let’s see how they look together. And you do a sketch of that. And then you start thinking dialogue again. So you write some more dialogue and then you write dialogue and you go, Well, is that going to work visually? And you sketch it out.

Playing one character off on another. From High Society p. 279 © 1986 Dave Sim.

And I usually do it six pages at a time, knowing roughly it’s got to start here, it’s got to end there.

Then I go into the studio with the notebook and I look at the note that says, Page one, page two, and I go OK, this starts here and this is the end of page two. He’s got to be saying this. And then you just sort of play with the elements. Do I want him to be big in this panel? Do I want him to be small? Do I want him to turn around? Whatever—

The dialogue is implied by the situation. From High Society p. 327 © 1986 Dave Sim.

And from that stage I just improvise the dialogue on the page. Sometimes, I’ll sit down and write dialogue out completely. The last issue—41—I wrote the last three pages. The Elf has an enormous speech to make. And it just sort of flowed, because that’s the way the Elf tells a story. She’s like an eight- or nine-year-old girl, where they just tell you da-da-da-da-da every detail of the whole thing until they get to the point, because they don’t really know where the point is. They know they’ve got to tell you the whole thing to get it all out. So you just go, Uh-huh. That was Cerebus’s dialogue, Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. That’s largely a matter of knowing your characters; the dialogue is generally implied by the situation. As I said to Deni [Loubert, Sim’s wife at the time and Aardvark-Vanaheim Publisher] a while ago, you just have to take a situation, like the Moon Roach’s mother shows up. If the Moon Roach’s mother shows up, everybody’s laughing just thinking about it. Wow, that’ll be really funny, a little old lady beating on him with an umbrella, or something like that [Sim used this gag years later, but it was Red Sophia’s mother, modeled on the grandmother from the cartoons by British cartoonist Giles]. The humor is implied, because you know the character. You know who takes himself seriously or whatever.

And it varies from issue to issue. There are issues I write all the way through. Issue 28 I wrote forty pages of single-spaced dialogue and probably used five pages out of it and improvised the rest. But it was a thinking process. By writing it all down, I went, OK, that’s not what I want to do; now I know what I do want to do.

MAGGIE: How do you schedule your working day?

SIM: Right now I’m working thirteen hours a day, three days a week, on the actual production of pages. The rest of the time I have the notebook with me, I’m thinking about it, I’m looking at Xeroxes of the pages. I’ll Xerox pages side-by-side to see how they’re going to look across from each other in the book.

As to getting back to it when I do go in on Monday, it’s usually not too tough, because I’m involved in the story. If it’s too tough, it means the story isn’t good enough, because it’s not involving me. That’s when I know it’s time to sit down and go, OK, we’re going to need something else. We were going to finish off the issue with five pages of this, cram it into two pages, and do another three pages of this, so that I keep up my own interest.

That’s a real working method that I have: if you lose interest, start cramming it together. You’re being too luxurious with the amount of time it takes to tell it. Boom! Get it done. 41 was that way. 41 ends up being just about a series of one-pagers, because I went, OK, I can do that scene in four pages and that one in about five pages and that one in about four pages. Right, there, you’re up to page fifteen, and you haven’t really gotten enough of it across, it had to be: Boom! he’s here. Boom! he’s here. Boom! he’s here.

MAGGIE: How well are you able to pay yourself?

SIM: Let’s try and keep it vague. I’m making on the order of about five times as much as most Marvel guys are making right now. That’s because I own the company.

You see, this is where I lose sympathy for the publisher. I lose sympathy for them saying, Oh, we can’t pay the artist that! My God, we’ll go broke! They won’t go anywhere near broke. They’ve got them squeezed in somewhere between the ink and the paper. The ink costs this, the paper costs that, the artist costs this.

MAGGIE: What outside work are you doing?

SIM: Arnold the Isshurian. I just did that over a weekend for something to do—and because I had told Archie [Goodwin, editor of Epic Illustrated] I’d do something for Epic a long time ago. Aside from that, most of the stuff that I’m going to be doing in the next while is going to be Cerebus-related.

Dave Sim and Gerhard

MARTIN SKIDMORE / 1989

Originally published in Fantasy Advertiser 115 (1989) n. pg. http://comiczine-fa.com.

Martin Skidmore: What sort of comics were you reading as a kid?

Dave Sim: Superman comics. Superman, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, World’s Finest, all the Mort Weisinger [famed Superman editor at DC Comics] stuff. I wouldn’t read Marvel comics ’cos Mort told me not to. I was under strict Mort Weisinger control. I wouldn’t even look at a Marvel comic. Literally. I had friends who were fans of Marvel and when I was ten, eleven years old, they were holding one up trying to get me to look at it, and I was turning my head because it was absolute blasphemy, Marvel comics were terrible, I knew they were inherently bad and you shouldn’t read them. But you should read all the DC stuff, because DC comics were good comics.

Martin: Did you read the Julie Schwartz [Jules Schwartz—another editor at DC] stuff?

Dave: After that I moved on to Batman, spinning off out to World’s Finest. Green Lantern, Flash, Metal Men—that was scary to me. Those subscription ads around 1963 that had little panels out of each one … there was just something really, really wicked about Metal Men and Green Lantern. They didn’t have television shows for one thing. It seemed OK to look at something that had a television show attached to it.

Martin: You must have started reading Marvel at some time …

Dave: Yeah. It was my sister I think … they had a flea market at school and she brought home a stack of comic books, and one of them was a Marvel Tales, the one that reprinted Spider-Man 8, the Human Torch solo tales … It was so funky, so strange. Dr. Strange was in it, there was Iron Man … It was a coverless comic [in the era before direct distribution, news vendors were required to return the covers only to receive a refund for unsold comics and as a result, stripped comics, along with magazines and paperbacks, were routinely sold], so I didn’t even know it was a Marvel comic. I was reading it and going, "This is really strange and different and it gives me a funny feeling inside that I’m not getting from Mort Weisinger and Batman, even Green Lantern and Flash aren’t really doing it for me." Then imagine my horror when I found out Spider-Man’s from Marvel! This is a Marvel comic! Yuk! Throw it away!

Martin: What were you reading, Gerhard?

Gerhard: I think I read half a Spider-Man comic and an Iron Man comic, and that was about it. The half Spider-Man did it. No, nothing here for me!

Dave: At what age?

Gerhard: I have no idea. The age most boys start reading comics, twelve, thirteen, whatever.

Martin: So how did you get into it then? How did you end up drawing much of Cerebus?

Gerhard: Deni’s [Deni Loubert, Dave’s ex-wife] sister married a friend of mine. And we both lived in Kitchener, and I’ve always liked drawing, and Dave and I just started, somehow or other, working together.

Dave: It was the Epic [Epic Illustrated] stories. Archie Goodwin [editor of Epic Illustrated] wanted a Cerebus story for Epic, and said, Why don’t you do it in color? It seemed like a good chance to test Gerhard out.

Martin: So you just started coloring the Epic stories?

Gerhard: I was trying to do my own stuff. I was doing basically pen and ink illustrations with watercolors on top of them, of which Dave saw a few I guess, and sort of chuckled.

Dave: Oh, that’s not true! A friend of ours had a restaurant and there were two or three pieces by Gerhard in it, because a former girlfriend of his ran the place, and former girlfriends are like that about artists. I’d seen the work and the meticulously labored crosshatching …

Gerhard: Millions of lines …

Dave: … graduated grays and nicely water-colored over the top of the drawings and a couple of times I’d asked Gerhard, How long did it take you to do that? Well, between drinking and smoking drugs and all of the other things he was doing it took him eight months or whatever. He didn’t grasp that I was saying, "How much working time to do all of that?"

Gerhard: Uh, I dunno …

Dave: So I said we really should try something sometime. So I was doing Young Cerebus [a short Cerebus story for Epic], so I just put him in and told him roughly what I want behind [Cerebus] and gave it to him. I thought, if it takes four months to do it, that’s fine. Four months for that page, four months for the next page, in a year and a half Archie will have a deadly five-page color story. I give it to him and modest Gerhard says, OK, I’ll take it home, see what I can do with it. He was back the day after that—you know that first page of the bar story, where Cerebus is sweeping up the bar. It was just gorgeous. So I knocked out the next page—Do that again! He took it home and brought it back, and by that point it was, lay them out on the floor of the studio and go, This is something really shit-hot here. Then it was just the decision … coming back from Maplecon in Ottawa with Arn Saba [author and illustrator of Neil the Horse, a comic book Sim briefly published] and talking to him, because he works with Dave Roman and three or four other people, Barb Rausch, on Neil the Horse, and saying, "Don’t you feel it’s not really yours if you have other people working on it? And he said as long as it’s his ideas and he’s telling them what he wants, then he figures he’s still doing it. He’s just not physically doing it, but it’s his characters, his concept and this is just making it better. It made a great deal of sense to me, so when we got back—Gerhard driving back arrives some time later. I basically said to him, Do you want to do the backgrounds on the book?" That set him back a good ten or fifteen steps. It was like, a job, on the one hand …

Gerhard: Which I didn’t have at the time.

Dave: And weren’t particularly keen on having.

Gerhard: I didn’t want a job job. I was bound and determined at that point to draw for a living or starve to death. And starving to death was the avenue I seemed to be taking.

Dave: You were getting good at it, too.

Gerhard: I was getting real good at it.

Martin: So how much are you doing now? Are you drawing any of the characters?

Gerhard: No, no. I don’t know where that misconception came from. Dave still lays out the pages, draws and inks the characters …

Martin: Does that include background characters as well, like in a crowd scene?

Dave: Sometimes. Reflections … the urge to draw people when you’re drawing objects all the time … any time he can throw in a pane of glass or a mirror and draw Jaka, he certainly relishes the