Dave Sim: Conversations

Dave Sim: 20 Years of Cerebus

169 Dave Sim: 20 Years of Cerebus CHARLES BROWNSTEIN / 1997 Originally published in Feature (Winter 1997) pp. 4–30. Reprinted by permission. To mark Cerebus’s twentieth anniversary, Feature editor and publisher Charles Brownstein contacted Sim to discuss the series and his relationship with it. Their interview, composed of two months’ worth of faxes, follows: FEATURE: It’s been well documented that Cerebus began as a parody comic and soon took its own form as a 300-issue “maxi-series.” What is it that sparked that transition? What is the trigger for this 300-issue epic? SIM: It really didn’t seem that “soon” to me. I did two years worth of bimonthly issues. Even twenty years later getting thirteen or fourteen bimonthly issues out on schedule compares very favorably with other “track records.” To be honest, I was so hot and heavy about being “rich and famous” at the time, switching to a monthly schedule probably had as much (or more) to [do] with that as it has to do with anything. “If I switch to monthly and crack the ‘issue 30’ barrier everyone will see how serious I am about this and I’ll be ‘rich and famous’ overnight.” Issue 40 at the latest, I thought. I’m not really sure I want to go into the transformational experience I went through too extensively—it’s very difficult to just explain it in a matter-of-fact way without getting involved in endless and confusing digressions. My mental filing cabinet exploded—but even today I couldn’t tell you how much of the Cerebus story came out of introspection and internal dialogue over the subsequent eighteen years. I was extremely immature at the time in every way that matters in the real world. I wanted to achieve illumination and enlightenment —but simply as a means to achieve wealth and fame. And to be really honest, the wealth and fame were only of interest insofar as they led to sexual “conquests”—and I had been married less than a year at that time. Immature doesn’t half sum it up. 170 dave sim: conversations FEATURE: Let’s try a more conventional opener and it will be smooth sailing from here. What is the root of Cerebus? What were your motivations for creating the comic and how did that impact the creative content of those early issues? SIM: Apart from the desire to be rich and famous, as I said, at the time I considered a handful of works to be highwater marks for the comic-book medium . Particularly Berni Wrightson’s Badtime Stories which came out in 1971 or so, Wrightson’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” in Creepy magazine, [and] Barry Windsor-Smith’s adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails” in Savage Tales. There were others, but these were the works that were the most influential on Cerebus because they were in black and white. Pure pen and ink rendering. Having only had limited success freelancing for various ground-level comics and doing Oktoberfest Comics for Harry Kremer at Now and Then Books, I had gotten past the stage where the printing process was mysterious. I knew about how much it would cost to do twenty-four pages of newsprint and glossy covers in a print run of two thousand copies and I saw self-publishing as a chance to prove that I was capable of highwater marks. Pessimistically, I thought that a failed self-publishing experiment— the first three issues of Cerebus—would at least make more appropriate samples of what I wanted to do in comics than did Oktoberfest Comics and Quack and so on. Optimistically, I thought I could get away with stealing Steve Gerber ’s Howard the Duck “hook”: the funny animal trapped in the realistic world and transposing it to a sword-and-sorcery setting. The mental image that I had was of BWS’s “Red Nails” pages with Chuck Jones and Robert McKimson animation cels dropped in—the 30 percent gray tone on Cerebus being my attempt to imitate the flat color you get on an animation cel. I admired what Steve Leialoha and Frank Brunner had done with the drawing style on Howard [The Duck], but I thought it tended to be over-rendered on the duck himself, which took away from the funky contrast that was possible. FEATURE: How did your view of and intentions for Cerebus change when it didn’t...