Dave Sim

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Dave Sim

Dave Sim at home in Kitchener on December 15, 2003, shortly before finishing work on Cerebus. Photograph by Dave Fisher.
Born: May 17, 1956 (age 50)
Hamilton, Ontario
Occupation: Writer, Cartoonist
Nationality: Canadian
Writing period: 1970s—present
Genres: Political satire, fantasy
Website: http://www.cerebusart.com/

David Victor Sim (born May 17, 1956 in Hamilton, Ontario) is a Canadian comic book writer and artist, best known as the creator of the 6,000 page graphic novel Cerebus the Aardvark.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Sim was born in Hamilton[1] and moved to Kitchener with his family when he was two. His father was a factory supervisor and his mother a secretary. He has an older sister named Sheila.

He was interested in comics from an early age and dropped out of high school to pursue a career in the field. The only 'real' job he ever held was working as an employee at Now and Then Books.

He published a fanzine called The Now and Then Times (financed by Harry Kremer, the owner of the comic book store after which the newsletter was named) and did work for such other fanzines as John Balge's Comic Art News and Reviews and Gene Day's Dark Fantasy and National Advisor. Sim often interviewed professional comics artists such as Barry Windsor-Smith, Harvey Kurtzman and Neal Adams.

Sim also created various other comics, including a newspaper comic strip called The Beavers which was published in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, and wrote or drew stories published in anthologies such as Phantacea and Star*Reach.

He has been caricatured as the DragonSlayer, or "earth-swine" character in Matt Wagner's Mage: The Hero Defined comic book series.

[edit] Cerebus

In December 1977, Sim began publishing Cerebus, an initially bi-monthly, black-and-white comic book series. It began as a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Howard the Duck. Progressively, Sim shifted his narrative style from story arcs of a few issues' length to longer, far more complex "novels," beginning with the storyline known as High Society. The prominent sword and sorcery elements in the series up to that point were minimized as Sim concentrated more on politics and religion.

Cerebus was published through his company, Aardvark-Vanaheim which was run by his wife, Deni Loubert. The two met in 1976, married in 1979 and divorced after nearly five years.

In 1979, Sim was admitted to Kitchener General Hospital by his wife and mother after several days of taking LSD [1]. He has stated in his Getting Riel [2] dialogue with Chester Brown that he was "diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic." During his convalescence, Sim hit upon the idea of making Cerebus into a 300-issue series, something that had never been done in Western comics with the same artist and writer.

Sim continued to chronicle the life of Cerebus with the story arc Church & State.

In the 1980s, when Cerebus was a large independent-comics success, Sim did much travelling to promote the series, which was selling at least 30,000 copies an issue at its height. In 1984 Gerhard became his collaborator and handled the background drawings in the series. Aardvark-Vanaheim, managed by Loubert, began publishing other comics besides Cerebus, such as William Messner-Loebs' Journey and Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot. After Sim and Loubert's separation, Loubert started Renegade Press, which assumed publishing duties for all non-Cerebus Aardvark-Vanaheim titles. Sim completed the Cerebus series on schedule in March, 2004.

[edit] Creators' Rights

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Sim used his sales leverage from Cerebus to act as a major proponent and advocate of creator's rights and self-publishing. Sim was instrumental in the fight for creators' rights. He helped write the Creators' Bill of Rights along with Scott McCloud and Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In addition to speaking on these topics at comic book conventions (as in his 1993 PRO/con speech[3]), Sim also published the seminal The Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing in 1997, which instructed readers on the ins and outs of how to successfully self publish their own comics. Sim often promoted other creators' fledgling work in the back pages of Cerebus.

[edit] Feminism controversy

In the course of writing Cerebus, Sim expressed views contrary to feminism, modern materialism, and leftist politics. Sim chose to make his views on gender public in issue No. 186 of Cerebus, in a text piece as part of the story arc Reads (one of four books in the larger Mothers & Daughters arc), using the pseudonym Viktor Davis.[4] The piece categorized humanity into metaphorical lights, which tended to reside in biological men, and voids, which tended to be in biological women.

These views caused major controversy in the comic book industry and among his readership, resulting in a substantial decline in sales. In 1995, issue No. 174 of The Comics Journal featured a Bill Willingham caricature of Sim on one of the covers, bearing the title Dave Sim: Misogynist Guru of Self-Publishers. Inside was a lengthy article written by Jonathan Hagey and Kim Thompson about responses to Sim’s piece. The article published responses from comics creators such as Alan Moore, Canadian Gregory Gallant (better known by his pen name Seth), Rick Veitch, Steve Bissette and Sim’s friend (and fellow Canadian) Chester Brown. The responses ranged from anger to a belief that Sim was joking. The article also included a short interview with Sim’s ex-wife, wherein she described the essay as evidence of Sim being "very scared".[citation needed] The article was accompanied by an illustration depicting Sim as a Nazi German concentration camp warden, standing in front of a gate with the name of his publishing company on the top. Piles of emaciated bodies lay within. Sim refers to this as the “Dave Sim is a Nazi” issue of The Comics Journal.[citation needed]

In 2001, Sim published another essay called "Tangent" in Cerebus No. 265, (April 2001).[5] In it, Sim furthers the themes from Reads, describing the veering-off course (or tangent) he contends western society has taken due to the widespread acceptance and proliferation of feminism, beginning in 1970. The Comics Journal posted the full essay on its website, although a short introduction by staff distanced the Journal from the ideas therein, calling them among other things "nutty and loathsome."

As a result of the essay, the site's message board filled with many opposing responses to Sim’s arguments. The next issue of the journal included a rebuttal to the first Tangent by Ruthie Penmark, a pseudonym for Anne Elizabeth Moore, one of the Journal's editors. Several years later, in TCJ issue #263, the Journal devoted a section to discussing Cerebus. In it was a reprint of a 'zine essay by Renee Stephen, written in 2001 about the Tangents, titled Masculinity's Last Hope, or Creepily Paranoid Misogynist? : An Open Letter to Dave Sim.[6]

[edit] Sim and The Comics Journal

Dave Sim and Gary Groth, editor-in-chief of The Comics Journal, have enjoyed a combative relationship over the years. Groth and Thompson are co-owners of Fantagraphics Books, which publishes such high-profile creators as Daniel Clowes, Peter Bagge, and Chris Ware. The magazine was the first to publish a review of the first dozen or so issues of Cerebus, by Kim Thompson in 1979.

Early in the 1990s, Groth took issue with Sim’s stance of self-publishing as the best option for creators, and began to disseminate the view that it was best to work for a publisher, mentioning Ivan Boesky's address to the University of California's commencement ceremony in May 1986 where Boesky informed his audience that "greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself." Sim took this as Groth implying that the motivation for self-publishing is greed, whereas his belief was that self-publishing was the best option for for reasons of principle: creative autonomy and ownership of one's own creations.

In 2000, Groth and Thompson published "The Comics Journal's 100 Greatest Comics of All Time", a list selected by its writers, which some commentators noted appeared biased towards Fantagraphics titles and seemed to pointedly omit Cerebus.

Later, on a panel at the San Diego Comic Con Groth indicted Sim in a "Nuremberg-style tribunal designed to bring to light the most deserving criminals who had over the past decade and longer besmirched the good name of the comics art and industry"[7] Sim was charged with boosting the speculation boom in the comics market in 1992, early boostering of Image Comics, making a "misogynist rant", and boostering self-publishers at their expense, this last wherein Groth accused Sim of promoting self-publishing to the point of possibly bankrupting thousands of self-publishers.

Sim was interviewed by Tom Spurgeon for the magazine in 1996, the second part of which interview was published eight issues after the first, which was interpreted by Sim as a slight. Despite this adversarial relationship over the years, Groth telephoned Sim to congratulate him upon the completion of his share of Cerebus in December 2003, and later published an issue of the Journal featuring a critical roundtable on Cerebus.

[edit] Modern Sim

Post-Cerebus Sim still lives in Kitchener. He is ostensibly retired, however he still provides occasional guest work, goes to conventions and regularly attends city council meetings and provides interviews and art for a Texas-based magazine called Following Cerebus and reports on Kitchener politics for a local magazine called Versus. Following a religious conversion from atheist secular humanism to an unusual and non-mainstream monotheism of the Abrahamic religions which occurred upon his reading of the Bible and the Qur'an beginning in December 1996, he lives a lifestyle of fasting, celibacy, prayer and alms-giving and considers the Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures to be equally valid as the Word of God.

As of 2006, Sim is working on the Cerebus Archive Project, an online searchable database of Cerebus materials. Sim is also in the process of reading the gospels and The Book of Revelation out of Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort's 1881 interlinear Greek to English translation of The New Testament semi-weekly and taking notes. At first he may have planned to publish his commentary on it. He inquired whether Chester Brown would be interested in letting him use his unpublished artwork for the Gospel of Mark from his unfinished gospel project (only the Gospel of Matthew has been finished and published so far) in conjunction with the book but at last mention Brown hadn't said yes or no. Recently Sim said he may make his notes available as a free print-on-demand book on the internet. This project was discussed in Collected Letters: 2004, and in recent letters between Sim and his readers.

Sim is currently conducting public readings of the 1611 King James Bible at a small theatre in Kitchener in order to raise money for the Food Bank of Waterloo Region. He has booked various Sundays at the Registry Theatre in Kitchener until early 2007. His stated intention is to read the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qu'ran. All of these readings have been taped and are being sold on eBay to raise money for the foodbank. This project was discussed in Collected Letters: 2004 (ISBN 0-919359-23-X) and in recent letters between Dave and his readers.

Once the Cerebus Archiving Project is done he may also plan to have similar or the same readings on a Kitchener community channel or on Public access television channels. Previously he had considered asking retailers to show a planned taped or filmed Cerebus mini-documentary in their stores or on one of their local Broadcast television system channels as an infomercial, but now may also ask them to show it on their public access television channels. This project was discussed in part in Collected Letters: 2004 (ISBN 0-919359-23-X) and in part in recent letters between Dave and a reader.

He is also working with Win-Mill Productions on the comic-sized magazine Following Cerebus, [8] writing for local publications and doing work for creators, including Howard M. Shum's Gun Fu and Shannon Wheeler's Too Much Coffee Man.

Sim has made arrangements for the copyright of Cerebus to fall into the public domain following the deaths of Gerhard and himself.

[edit] Siu Ta, So Far

Beginning in 2006, Sim began publishing his follow up to Cerebus, an on-line comic book biography of Canadian actress Siu Ta titled Siu Ta, So Far.[9]

[edit] Awards

His work has won him a good deal of recognition in the comics industry. Along with being nominated for many awards, Dave has won several awards for his work on Cerebus:

  • Eisner Award: Best Graphic Album: Reprint, 1994, for Cerebus: Flight by Dave Sim and Gerhard (Aardvark-Vanaheim)
  • Harvey Award: Best Cartoonist (Writer/Artist), 1992, Dave Sim, for Cerebus (Aardvark-Vanaheim) and Best Letterer, 2004, Dave Sim, for Cerebus (Aardvark-Vanaheim)
  • Ignatz Awards: Outstanding Artist, 1998, Dave Sim, Cerebus (Aardvark-Vanaheim)
  • Kirby Award: Best Black & White Series, 1987 and 1985, Cerebus by Dave Sim (Aardvark-Vanaheim)
  • Shuster Awards: Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Achievement, 2005, Dave Sim and Gerhard for completing Cerebus in 2004 and Canadian comics Hall of Fame, 2006, Dave Sim, Cerebus (Aardvark-Vanaheim)
  • Squiddy Awards: Best Creative Team, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993 (all for the team of Dave Sim and Gerhard); Best Letterer, 2001.

[edit] Day Prize

In 2001, Sim and Gerhard founded the Howard E. Day Prize recognizing excellence in self-publishing in memorial of Sim's mentor Gene Day. Sim selects a Short List of nominees from the applicant pool, then names the annual winner.

[edit] Collections of Sim's writing

Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing (ISSN 0712-7774) collects selections from Sim's 'Notes from the President' column that dealt with self-publishing, the Pro/Con speech from 1993, and more.

Collected Letters: 2004 (ISBN 0-919359-23-X) collects Sim's responses to readers' letters (the original letters are not included) after the publication of Cerebus #300.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
  • Art of Dave Sim Has an extensive collection of Dave Sim artwork.
  • Cerebus Fangirl Site The Artists Page [10] contain many of Sim's essays and interviews including "Tangent" the complete text from Sim's essay on women and feminism [11]. The Checklist for Dave [12] has a list of non-Cerebus Dave Sim work.
  • Cerebus Art This is Dave and Gerhard's page for auctioning original Cerebus art, signed issues and limited edition prints.
  • Cerebus The Aardvark Fan site featuring summaries, artwork, an interactive world map, etc.
  • Interview by Tasha Robinson at The Onion A.V. Club
  • Dave Sim's blogandmail copies of Dave Sim's daily "blog" postings on the Cerebus Yahoo group. Atom Site Feed linked.
  • The Merged Void A compilation of Dave Sim's writings on women.

[edit] References

  1. ^ www.sfcrowsnest.com Biography: Dave Sim. Retrieved on January 18, 2007.
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