Dave Sim: Genius or Jackass?

Some of you may not know who Dave Sim is. Well, he was something of a rock star in the industry back in the late 80s - early 90s. If this sounds "weird" to you, you should know that Rob Leifield once did a 501 Jeans commercial; this was the comic books Hey Day of which we old-timers sometimes speak and there absolutely were some "rock stars" in the field back then. (In fact, Todd McFarlane used to draw comic books! True story!) Dave Sim was one of these, but not unlike the famed Ziggy Stardust, Sim tended to take it all a little too far.

Now, I've met Dave Sim -- on numerous occasions, actually -- even had dinner in his general area once or twice, and he's an okay guy. I say "okay" and not something like "insightful," "interesting," or "nice" because he is all of those things except the latter. He will talk to you no matter who you are, but he has a chip on his shoulder about... well, most everything. In fact, Dave Sim was never as much of a rock star in the industry as in his own mind; he was no Jello Biafra, he was just an arrogant Unknown. An excessively talented guy, he's extremely well-read, articulate, and personable, but he has a tendency to sneer at most every subject having to do with the industry outside of Cerebus and himself.

So I bought 150 issues of Cerebus that arrived last Friday and have been doing little else all weekend, aside from indulging. Every issue has a foreword/op-ed column called "Letter from the President," penned by Sim himself and he is usually combative and full of himself, but you ain't seen nothing until you get to the letters at the end, where he really goes over the top!

But here's the thing: there was no Internet for almost the entire run of the series; this comic book was really his only forum. So when you're reading these things, you should know that he wasn't locked away in a stuffy apartment somewhere, doing nothing but smoking weed, watching bad TV, and working on his projects (like... well, you know, whoever, I mean, I don't know people like that, but I've seen them on TV); Sim was always on tour in comics shops and at cons, and always talking about his works and the subjects with which they dealt. You're reading what was, back then, kind of "real time" exchanges within the industry, having to do with the series, and Dave's own, personal outlooks and thoughts on whatever he is discussing at that time. In fact, though he is known to consider himself something of a Luddite and swore he'd never have anything to do with the Internet medium, he's come around since then.

Sim had a lot of somewhat public fallings-out with a lot of industry peers, but his work stands on its own. Cerebus is one of the most consistently well-written and drawn books in the history of the medium to-date, and while the plot and overall story is hit and miss, you're unlikely to be disappointed by an issue. Besides, isn't the old saying, "Judge the Art, not the artist"?

Or was that "suffer the Art and not the artist"?

It's "something Art, something something artist," I know that.