Random Stranger posted:

FWIW, the void stuff is actually the end of Church and State. While there were a few people going, "Hey, this is kind of creepy," at the time, Sim was the big man in indie comics and so it was generally ignored. I was referring to the Reads issue that you mention later as it triggered a giant response in the comics community and after that point Sim was pretty much on the outside and becoming more and more crazy in his isolation.

The AVClub posted:

The Onion: Why an aardvark?

Dave Sim: You know, it's really quite unbelievable to me that you have 4,000 words in which to cover the longest sustained narrative in human history, and your first question is "Why an aardvark?" What would your first question to Franz Kafka have been? "Why a cockroach?"

O: If Kafka had spent 30 years of his life writing one 6,000-page book about a man who turned into a cockroach, then maybe.

DS: [Sighs.] Why an aardvark? Before there was Cerebus the comic book, there was Cerebus the fanzine. That's how I met my ex-wife, Deni. I told her she needed a company name—the way Gene Day published Dark Fantasy through Shadow Press, which was what she wanted the 'zine to look like: digest-sized. She asked her brother Michael and her sister Karen for suggestions. Michael suggested Vanaheim Press, Karen suggested Aardvark Press. I suggested combining the two. It turned out later that a boy that Karen had a major crush on—she was in high school then—had made a joke, posing his hand on the table so that the thumb and three fingers were balanced on their tips like legs, and his middle finger was extended like a snout. "Aardvark." When you are a high-school girl and you have a crush on someone, these are the sorts of things that stay with you. So I drew a cartoon barbarian aardvark as a mascot for this fanzine publishing company. Later, when we realized that what Deni had intended to call the book was Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded Hades in Greek mythology, I told her we would just make Cerebus the name of the aardvark. The fanzine never got off the ground, so I decided to try drawing a sample comic page of Cerebus The Aardvark. And, for a number of months, that was all that existed: the page that turned out to be page one of Cerebus No. 1.

O: That's interesting.

DS: I'm glad you think so.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Edge & Christian posted:

You mean for being an Aardvark? In the early juvenalia the world was less defined but there was a cult that worshipped Aardvarks. Their prophecies helped propel Cerebus into being a prime minister and pope later on. There was some stuff with the Two Aardvarks that played into the main plot, but for the most part it was handled just like yeah, sometimes people are aardvarks.

quote:

O: Are there parts of your story that you would still like to address, or perspectives that you feel you haven't yet had the chance to get across?

DS: Ever the oblique leftist. I don't "feel." If I "felt," I would never have gotten the book done. I'd be off "feeling" somewhere. My best intellectual assessment of the completed work is that I said exactly what I wanted to say, exactly the way I wanted to say it. What you want to know is if I'm going to continue to attack feminism, and what sort of artillery I have left. I have a lot of artillery left. My best guess would be that I emptied one metaphorical clip from one metaphorical AK-47, mostly firing over your heads and at the ground, although most of you are feeling as if I dropped an atomic bomb on your house on Christmas morning.

Leftist reactions are always histrionic. If it becomes necessary to renew my attack, I'll renew my attack. At this point, I think history will do most of the dirty work. Feminists are in an untenable position, defending something they no longer believe in, and which history will force them to recognize was destructive of most of the central pillars of civilization. I'm just the first one to point it out publicly. Everyone ignored Winston Churchill's warnings in 1937, but the question for Churchill wasn't, "What are you going to do to convince people you're right in 1938, 1939, and 1940?" If you perceive reality accurately—and I think I perceive reality a lot more accurately than feminists do—then ultimately, history will prove you right.

O: Again, I wasn't referring specifically to your writings on feminism. You mentioned that you should have made the series 250 issues, instead of 300. But if it took 300 issues to say exactly what you wanted to say as you wanted to say it, presumably 250 issues wouldn't have been enough space. Did you ever reach a point where 300 issues didn't seem like enough space?

DS: Oh, no. Sorry, I misunderstood.

Nessus posted:

Nah I mean wasn't he a biological hermaphrodite or something? Cerebus the character, I mean.

Also that interview was a hoot and a holler.
https://www.avclub.com/dave-sim-1798208330

Rhyno posted:

I will never tire of seeing people's first exposure to the weirdness that is Dave Simm.

Uthor posted:

I really need to get through my back log so I can justify rereading the first half of Cerebus.

TwoPair posted:

gently caress wrong thread Jesus how did I do this thrice

Nessus posted:

I think that's some kind of a new record, just like Dave Sim's longest comic book record!

big dave sim posted:

the longest sustained narrative in human history

VileLL posted:

it would be pretty funny to show him a collection of one piece or something similarly huge with no pictures (maybe the fantomas series?)

VileLL posted:

it would be pretty funny to show him a collection of one piece or something similarly huge with no pictures (maybe the fantomas series?)

LadyPictureShow posted:

Been reading Iceman, and when the heck did Pyro come back to life? Or is it just a different guy that has the old Pyro's gear?

EvilJay posted:

Like 2 or 3 issues ago of (I think) X-Men Gold. New guy with Pyro's gear and similar powers. I believe he's currently on the Gold team after being freed from Mesmero.

LadyPictureShow posted:

Haha, I read those issues of Gold like 15 minutes after posting that question. But in Iceman he had a different costume than ‘good’ Pyro, but I’m like that could have been the one controlled by Mesmero...
But they could have handwaved ‘bad’ Pyro having stayed alive after Necrosha...

Basically , but it wouldn’t be the most ridiculous things comics have done.

Follow up to that, are there any silly examples of an author having a character show up in a comic, not realizing they had been killed off?

Edge & Christian posted:

I wrote about that two-parter, it was my first favorite comic! The best/dumbest part about it is when the Avengers all drop dead in the middle of a softball game and somehow the West Coast Avengers are convinced by the Collector to drink poison so they can save their friends from Death.