If this doesn’t sober ya up
…nothing will. Sad, worrisome article about Dave Sim. You may need to scroll down, and the pages are scanned from a magazine so make sure you can read them at full size. For those of you who don’t know, Sim is the creator of Cerebus, a massive, 300 issue, 25-year comic book project which gained praise, fame and fans, rightly so. Until, in it’s last decade, Sim seems to have snapped under the weight of producing the book virtually alone all those years. He turned it into a forum for anti-feminist and religious screeds.
Among the many sad points made in the article is that many fans thought Cerebus was going to be the point-to book when people said, “But what can comics really accomplish?” Now, it may be best remembered, at least in part, as a cautionary tale.
BTW, I got the link to the article from Neil Gaiman’s blog. The sad coincidence is that Gaiman’s Sandman is the point-to book for fans when people ask, “What can comics accomplish.”
I find myself thinking of a line from one of Harlan Ellison’s characters: Alone is all right, but loneliness can kill a good writer. No doubt Sim would deny that he is lonely, and for his sake I hope he’s right.
