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Cerebus: An Interview with Dave Sim
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
25 Cerebus: An Interview with Dave Sim STEPHEN R. BISSETTE / 1992 Originally published in Comics Interview 107 (1992) pp. 8–39. Reprinted by permission. Too often in the comic-book medium, artists and writers go from one project to another, leaving the reader with a feeling of disconnected continuity. Not so with Dave Sim, who has made a lifelong commitment to complete 300 issues detailing the life of his creation Cerebus the Aardvark. Conceived in 1977, Cerebus is a clever animal surrounded by both humans and monsters in a world of swords and sorcery. The strip, which the Village Voice has called “the most ambitious project in the history of comics,” parodies politics, religion, films, literature, and even comic books with an acid-edged wit that leaves the reader laughing every time. Sim, who was born in 1956, is a completely self-taught artist whose first comic-book experience was a local one-shot book called Oktoberfest Comics, which commemorated the 1976 Oktoberfest Festival in Kitchener, Ontario. He went on to draw the weekly comic strip The Beavers for Kitchener’s daily newspaper , and worked as senior editor for Orb Magazine in Toronto. In 1977, he drew two full comic books for independent publishers, Phantacea and Revolt: 3000. Sim recently completed the first 150+ Cerebus issues. He has also been a well-known proponent of creator’s rights and self-publishing. . . . STEVE BISSETTE: You just finished another novel, Melmoth, and you ended it with such a motherfucker epilogue, Dave . . . I don’t know. . . . This had to be the most explicit issue of Cerebus you’ve ever done. DAVE SIM: Yeah, I’d go along with that. STEVE: It doesn’t bode well for Mothers and Daughters. DAVE: In a way it does. It depends on what you call “boding well.” I know what you mean. 26 dave sim: conversations STEVE: I’m worried for your characters’ fictional lives right now. Let’s put it that way. DAVE: It’s always difficult for me to see. That ending was in my mind pretty much from the end of Church and State on, so you’re talking four years, three and a half years. STEVE: So, you had a sequence in mind for four years . . . how vivid was that? Was that a goal for you when you started Jaka’s Story? DAVE: Oh, yeah, Jaka’s Story, the breaking-down-the-door part in issue 130 [the moment in which the Cirinists arrive at the pub/grocery store of Pud Withers and arrest Jaka for dancing] was vivid in my mind for a long time. This is one of the things in doing a twenty-six-year storyline, obviously the longer you think about it, the more you have things up ahead that you want to get to. One of the great satisfactions and one of the weirdest experiences in doing this is exactly that situation, of sitting, watching yourself draw a page you’ve been thinking about for nine years. STEVE: When did that happen? DAVE: The ending on Jaka’s Story, the ending on Church and State. STEVE: Those were clear in your mind for almost a decade? DAVE: Oh, yeah. STEVE: Wow! DAVE: I have very vivid parts at the end of Mothers and Daughters, along about the third or fourth years, which have been vivid in my mind since ’79. So at one point I will be drawing pages in Mothers and Daughters that I have been thinking about for fourteen years. STEVE: I take it that you don’t work with any kind of schematic plan to that? DAVE: No, no . . . STEVE: This is all retained in your imagination, until it gets down on the page . . . ? DAVE: Yeah, and a lot of it gets modified once I get to that page. A lot of things that are very vivid in my mind don’t actually work once I sit down and actually draw them the way that they have to be. You get it down on the page, and, wow, you’re drawing, and you get a better idea of just how [3.226.254.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:14 GMT) stephen r. bissette / 1992 27 to do it. Astoria’s trial. Close to the end of Church and State (issues 98, 99), that was about the closest to coming out exactly as I pictured it. With Jaka’s Story, something that takes two years in doing, the ending was clear in...