A Moment of Comics

Maybe if told people that superheroes were being caged alongside immigrants and other brown people, we could end ICE tomorrow and turn this country around. A slightly out of context page from Spawn #10, written by Dave Sim with artwork by Todd McFarlane. 

A Moment of Comics

Below is part of a two page spread from Cerebus #296. I'm not going to show the entire spread, but it depicts the end days of the main character where people are outside his palace--disciples of his ex wife? I didn't read Cerebus consistently at all at this point--are soliciting bestiality, pedophilia and a ridiculous take on the "end goal" of children's rights only Sim could have imagined. A "Little Miss Oral Sex Day Camp?" is the future of child protection? Really?

In an even more horrific world, Dave Sim would have been a powerful ally in the anti-trans movement. JK Rowling, for all her claims of defending against misogyny, would in all likelihood love to have him. It's a good thing we don't hear too much about Sim since his groomer  confession from a while back, He seems content to stay in his corner and occasionally build hills from his own fecal matter that he's willing to die on.

A Moment of Comics

I've been keeping up with the Scott Adams controversy over the last couple of weeks, and I am fascinated by the similarities between him and Dave Sim of Cerebus fame. There's the cadence in their speech, their smugness, their belief that people not wanting to engage in their bullshit automatically means that they're proven right, and their willingness to use black people to advance their messages. 

Adams has doubled down on that last point in a way Sim never did (because Adams now has to), but it pays to note that after Sim wrote "Tangent," in Cerebus #265, an essay that finished its thesis by blaming feminism for the failures of the civil rights movement (which is...something you can say). 

What does he follow that up with in the name of Black people?

In Cerebus #267, he introduces and kills off the one black character he ever put in the comic: Paul "Coffee" Annan. a play off of NHL player Paul Coffey and former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. 

In the back pages of the issue, he wrote about being pleased with the fact that he gave the character a "knee length schlong." 

And yes, he did depict that in the above page.

I'm sure the founders of the civil rights movement would appreciate Sim's contributions.

Why We Loved Dave Sim

Dave Sim is the creator of Cerebus. He did that comic for decades, so it's what he's primarily known for. Since finishing the book, he's known for a lot of other things. You can wiki him to find out what that means. This post is not about any of that. It's about something I found going through my collections.

Hero Illustrated was a Wizard like magazine with a more progressive slant to it. It renounced price guides later in its run, which is likely (and sadly) the reason why it didn't last very long. It took to publishing guest editorials by industry professionals. Some of of them (like Jim Shooter post Jack Kirby's funeral) were given enough rope to hang themselves. Others wrote momentous pieces, like Sim.

The essay posted below (Dave Sim has let all his prose be reprinted online) comes from Volume 1, Issue 9 of Hero Illustrated. I could mention the context of the piece, the fact that it came out around the time of the Death of Superman and Clone Saga Storylines, not to mention the countless other story arcs that allegedly changed comics forever until the next retcon. In truth, you can apply Dave's thesis to today's Marvel and DC with the crossover event becoming the norm (the story continues in 7 other separate titles, the story has always continued in 7 other separate titles...), and it still works.

Dave Sim was an author you either got into or you didn't. I never read an issue of the Cerebus comic before I read this essay, but this was more than enough for me (for a while at least) to get into Sim the author, warts and all.