Dave Sim: Conversations

Whatever It Is, I’m Against It

148 Whatever It Is, I’m Against It SANDEEP ATWAL / 1996 Originally published in Filler (Spring 1996). Reprinted by permission. Q: I want to talk about issue 186 for a while, but I want some background . . . When did you get your divorce? A: About ’83. Q: Now, wasn’t there also a screw-up in Cerebus’s schedule around that time? Were the two things related? A: No, no. The schedule of the book got screwed up around ’84–’85. It was one of those things where there was enough money coming in from selling the trade paperbacks of High Society directly that that was the first time that neither Ger nor I had a situation that we had to produce to have enough money coming in. All of a sudden you start getting a little slack on it. Q: Was the breakup painful at all? A: No, it was over. It went on a little too long. I wasn’t very sophisticated. She was my first girlfriend, and we got married, and it was difficult only in the sense that we kept working because you do things like that, you go, “Oh we’re grownups. Even though the marriage is breaking up, we’ll still run the business together” sort of thing, and there’s no way to separate the two things. Q: How many of the ideas in issue 186, or how much of that perspective, do you think, was formed because of your experience with your marriage? A: I don’t even know how to answer that. It’s all observation. I did have a sense for a very long period of time that the world wasn’t quite going the way the world was portraying itself as going; that was always my quarrel with feminism. You know certainly the more time that went by and the more experience that I had with women, the more there seemed to be a portrayal on sandeep atwal / 1996 149 the one side and the actuality on the other. Both of them I was very interested in, but I was interested in the portrayal as a portrayal, and the actuality as the actuality. Q: You just took exception to the portrayal of there being a patriarchy? A: Sure I took issue with that but more to the point, relative to Reads, it was the ambition of feminism. The homogenization of human society into “It doesn’t matter what gender you are.” This sort of taking the hand-off from the civil rights movement, and “We’re going to take the ball further down the field,” and we’re still living with the consequences of that. It really represented the death of liberalism after, let’s say, maybe not a hundred years of progress, where suddenly the liberal instinct just sort of got carried to its most ridiculous extreme, where liberalism itself became synonymous with this sort of carte blanche for victimization. Which is just an extension of the pendulum going too far in a specific direction. Q: Has the pendulum swung so far to feminism’s side that it’s becoming dangerous? A: Dangerous in the one sense, but very safe in the other. I don’t think we would have seen the progress in civil rights or the “progress” in feminism, or the “progress” of victimization as a societal status if it wasn’t for the fact that the world has become incredibly safe. World War II was the last major global conflict. I think Archie Bunker was a good example of the guys that went and fought in the big one, and that guy was always good for a laugh on All in the Family, and yet the world in 1970 and the late ’60s was filled with guys who had gone and fought this battle which is the same basis for superheroes and James Bond, and all the rest of it, and were suddenly being made light of. It’s hard to fault them for just sitting and reading the sports page, and grumping at the wife and the kids, and the long-haired son-in-law and the black neighbors , and the rest of it. Q: Your portrayal of matriarchal/feminist forces in Cerebus is parallel to, but different from, what I think is going on in the “real” world. It’s obvious that it’s something that you follow. What do you see as the course that feminism in the “real...