Dave Sim: Conversations

A Selection from the Yahoo Q&A Sessions

216 A Selection from the Yahoo Q&A Sessions CEREBUS YAHOO GROUP / 2004–2006 March 2004–June 2006. Reprinted by permission. Note from the Editors: Comprised of over 900 members at the time of this writing , the Cerebus Yahoo Group is an internet archive started by Mark Simpson in 1999. In March 2004, shortly after the publication of Cerebus’s final issue, its webmasters, Lenny Cooper, Margaret Liss, and Jeff Tundis, organized a somewhat informal Q&A session with Dave Sim. Encouraged by the response, Sim agreed to several more sessions, with each session focusing on one of the sixteen Cerebus phonebooks. The sessions were completed in 2006. For reasons of space and concision, and as many of the questions are of a highly specific nature, we have decided to focus on those questions we believe to be of more general interest to readers of Sim’s work. We have also removed the names of the individuals and the dates in which the questions were asked. We have also reorganized the questions slightly so that they appear in a more-orless chronological and thematic order. Q: In making such a bold statement as “I’m going to put out 300 issues of this for twenty-six years,” how much of the story did you have mapped out at that point, i.e., how much did you know of the story at the time you made the statement, or did you decide upon 300 issues and then begin to map it out? A: Very little of the story mapped out. I really had only the 300-issue structure which was more of a “comic-book thing.” If I could do 300 issues of a comic book, I’d go down in comic-book history, one way or the other. That was the basis the decision was made on. I had always had a very fertile imagination , so I never had any doubts that I could fill the 300 issues . . . my problem has never been writer’s block, more like holding back writer’s flood. As long as I had complete control over what I did . . . I’ve just reread my multi-year correspondence with Mike Friedrich—his half of it anyway, editor-publisher of Star*Reach, Imagine, and Quack! . . . His critiques are good. He was a veteran cerebus yahoo group / 2004–2006 217 scripter with some editorial experience and good instincts, but I could never have done an extended work on that basis: where I had to take into account his criticisms and changing things that I didn’t think needed changing. If he had accepted Cerebus as a feature in Quack! I would’ve had to back off from the level of interest I had in order to preserve my sanity: I would’ve been self-editing to try and match the feature to what he wanted it to be instead of making the decisions myself and I would probably have slipped into the freelancer pattern: doing a lot of different things with different people and trying to get a cumulative level of pleasure out of writing and drawing where and when I could so that the negatives on individual projects didn’t bring me down too far. I’m glad that’s not how I had to spend the last twenty-six years of my life. Q: Early on, it appears that you produced Cerebus on an issue-to-issue basis, with very little long term plans other than getting the next issue out. Some significant events happened in your life, like having a nervous breakdown and OD’ing on acid during this period. Subsequently, Cerebus became a monthly comic [and] you vowed to produce to 300 issues, telling the life story of your character. How did these life-altering events change your ambitions for the comic, and how did they influence your thought-processes? A: In all honesty, they just sharpened everything up. The clearest memory I have of those times is that I could see everything very, very clearly and that other people—my wife, my family, my friends—couldn’t. Mostly I just wanted to watch everything coalesce and get right to the center of it, but I kept getting bogged down in trying to explain what I was going through, the experience that I was having—and enjoying at a fundamentally pleasurable level —and that just didn’t lend itself to explanations to people who were all in a distinct group-think mode centered...