Dave Sim: Conversations

An Interview with Dave Sim and Gerhard

60 An Interview with Dave Sim and Gerhard ADRIAN REYNOLDS / 1993 September 23, 1993. Reprinted by permission. AR: What influences would you say have shaped Cerebus? SIM: Oh, a lot of different things. A line in a book, a line in a song . . . it’s just an endless pick-and-choose process. AR: Any particular writers, film makers, or anything that have stayed with you? SIM: Oh yeah, I mean Jules Feiffer’s cartoon work. Little Murders I still read quite often, and watch the film version . . . anything that’s got good structure to it. It doesn’t have to be particularly well thought of—if it’s appropriate to my creativity I know it right away. I have to be vague about it because as soon as I get specific . . . AR: People are too quick to draw conclusions. SIM: Yeah. I think most of the world tends to look at creativity and they want to see a cause-and-effect relationship. What is it that produces creativity? The essence of it, particularly talking from the writing standpoint . . . I have no better idea than anyone else as to why this comes out. I don’t have an idea, and then I do have an idea . . . I can backtrack through the thought processes, I can say, “Well, I was thinking this and then I thought that and I hooked the two together and it became something entirely different and something usable .” Artwork is the same kind of thing—whose stuff do you like the best? I found as a fan, the older I got, the fewer things I liked. When I moved out of my parents’ place, I had whatever, 2,000, 4,000 comic books, and of the stuff I kept, what I really hung on to was Kaluta to a degree, but I would have to say the biggest ones were Barry Windsor-Smith, Neal Adams, Berni Wrightson. adrian reynolds / 1993 61 Then you get to the process where it’s not just them—it’s not that I have to go and change my underwear when I see something by Adams I haven’t seen before. Berni Wrightson—I like Swamp Thing, but Swamp Thing is really an ordinary dumb color comic book at heart. I don’t want [my work] to look like Wrightson . . . I don’t mind when it swerves over in that direction— that’s why it was great doing a parody of Sandman, because Sandman really hit its stride when Kelley Jones was drawing it and Kelley Jones looks a lot like Wrightson so it’s a good chance for me to parody a character and at the same time get some of those Wrightson brush strokes out of my system. I wanna do this—I love those round folds and things that he does. AR: With Sandman in mind, and the Dave McKean–influenced covers you’re doing . . . Do you work on something between you, or do you go to a junk shop and find “Hey—some of that will do!” GER: Yeah, that was all Dave’s doing—he went out to the used book store, and whatever book presented itself . . . SIM: It was really Robert Anton Wilson, because every book that I needed was right at the front of the store in a display, and I looked at them and went, “Yeah—I didn’t know what I was looking for but this is exactly it” and then bought those and then foolishly went and looked through the rest of the book store. AR: And a hundred dollars later . . . SIM: Yeah, and I was just wasting my time. I was walking around the store, and they were right there in the front where I needed them. AR: Also to do with the covers lately, I’ve noticed a Tarot theme. 172 you’ve got Astoria as the Lady Pope, 173 Cirin—the Empress, and then I backtracked and thought, aha, 171—that makes Cerebus the Magician, which we’re starting to come through with now . . . SIM: I’ve been sitting on this stuff for fourteen years you know. AR: At what point did it start to gain that scope for you? SIM: About ’79, just after I finished reading the Iluminatus! trilogy. I sat down and a book on the Tarot came across my path, and I started looking at that and thinking, “Yeah, there’s really something here.” I mean, this is very...