27 YEARS WITH AN AARDVARK:
TWO-HANDED MAN INTERVIEWS DAVE SIM

Dave Sim has dedicated a large segment of his life to documenting the life of Cerebus the Aardvark in a series of graphic novels. When he finishes the project in 2004, Cerebus's life story will consist of 6000 pages of comics, an impressive and singular achievement. Dave Sim's sophisticated writing, beautiful artwork and brilliant design make Cerebus one of the high points in the history of modern comics. The Two-Handed Man interviewed him in June of 2000, when Cerebus was journeying north to reunite with his parents. Along the way, he runs into fictional stand-ins for both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, with Sim expressing his analyses of them through the actions of their counterparts in the story he is telling: fiction as a tool for literary criticism.

 

THM: As Cerebus makes his way up-river to his birth-place Sand Hills Creek -- wasn't Sand Hills the original name of Kitchener, his literary birthplace?

DS: Yes. Sand Hills Creek is my cute way of combining Kitchener's original name with Stoney Creek, the town where my parents first lived. I think Comic ! is right around the corner from the house my parents built themselves: 44 Wardrope Ave. which (I am told) I called Forty-Four 'Drope. My paternal grandparents lived just down the block at 16 Douglas Place. -- This interview was originally prompted by a conversation with the owner of a comic shop in Dave Sim's old home town of Stoney Creek. Stoney Creek is just to the east of Hamilton, Ontario, home base for Two Handed Man Publishing. Dave Sim has lived most of his life in Kitchener, about 45 minutes away--THM.)

THM: He gets to spend time with your version of Ernest Hemingway and you get to devote an impressive amount of study and thought to Papa. My question is, why Hemingway? After admitting you're no great admirer of his work, it seems strange to give so much serious thought and energy to him. then again, Dostoyevsky has never appeared in Cerebus, while Oscar Wilde, a far lesser artist, 'guest-starred' in the Melmoth graphic novel, clearly because Wilde's life helped you make a metaphorical point. So what interested you about Hemingway that compelled you to devote so much space to him?

DS: Well, I'm no great admirer of Oscar Wilde's work either, in toto. As you pointed out, it helped me to make a metaphorical point, or rather, many metaphorical points. Using his too-saccharine "fairy tale" voice for his "Jaka's Story" (the text pieces) cast Jaka in an entirely different light than the one which she sees herself and a far different light than the person that she was at the time of the events depicted. All biography is fraudulant, being my point. The only place that I make the point overtly is in the beginning of the "Action Figures Pub" sequence in Going Home, a good nine years after the fact. Just one of those things that I like to do. I had hopes that there would be something of Hemingway's that I would like enough to use as a raw material. I had high hopes for Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon which is why I read them last. One good chapter or grabby ten page sequence that I could play with as I had played with Fitzgerald's Maury Noble monologue in "Fall and the River". There was a lot of promise, to me, in the one and two paragraph sketches featured in In Our Time unfulfilled (to me) in To Have & have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls and his later works. My hope was that the promise had been fulfilled in either Green Hills and Afternoon, both, or a part of either. No. To me, they both consisted of a few clever tricks and a lot of typing. MARY Hemingway's account of the 1953-54 safari turned out to be tailor-made for my purposes. I hope everyone agrees once I've finished "Form & Void".

THM: Why Scott Fitzgerald?

DS: I need a "third party" for Cerebus and Jaka after they had gotten together. Actual infidelity, in my view, is often not required for a third person to have a disastrous effect on a couple and that was the sort of character I was looking for in the years before I brought Cerebus and Jaka back togethr at the end of Ricky's story: I intended to improvise eight or nine issues of basic honeymoon and then "enter the villian". But what I was searching for was a sympathetic villian. That was important, to me. Non-threatening to Cerebus (if at any point Cerebus even remotely suspected that he was "hustling Jaka" he would be a dead man) from Cerebus' viewpoint but clearly a threat from what the reader could see unfolding. Far, far more sophisticated. I read Zelda's Save Me The Waltz and Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night for my own pleasure. About fifty pages into Tender it seemed to me that I had found my man in Dick Diver (who I pictured played by William Powell, ca. The Thin Man for the movies were at the periphery of Fitzgerald's orbit, so a lot of the William Powell/Myrna Loy banter is second and third generation Scott and Zelda. Of course Dick Diver was an idealized Fitzgerald as I discovered when I began to research the character and, luckily enough, Fitzgerald himselfproved to be an even better"fit" for my story's purposes than Dick Diver.

THM: Cerebus #235, Going Home part 4, is one of my very favourite comics of all time. That two-page spread near the end where Cerebus is silently and powerfully pushed away from Jaka by the page layouts themselves, with him ending up imprisoned alone in a stormy panel and Jaka pushed out into the white empty spaces between the panels, is a masterpiece of design, and it made me think, for not the first time. "This guy relly likes Bernard Krigstein." Another page that always comes to mind is the last page of Melmoth, where the image of Cerebus running is refracted through ever-narrower and smaller panels, really giving the impression of movement through space, and the passage of time. This links up in my mind with Krigstein's 'Master Race,' where the off-liter narrow panels at the top of the last page make it look like the guy losing his balance is about to, not just hit the ground, but fall out ogf the panel itself! Talk about what discovering Krigstein meant to you, as a reader, as an artist.

DS: Ah, Krigstein. The first I heard about him was interviewing T. Casey Brennan who went on a considerable length about his story, "Master Race" and how it was the single most important influence in Casey deciding to write comic books. A couple of years later, John Benson's Squa Tront issue 6 came out. Legendary EC fanzine, came out once a year, I believe. Issue 6 was the special Krigstein issue and it is still, as a fan and a professional, one of my most important possessions. Just as an example, I probably haven't looked at it in three years but I knew --exactly-- where it was in the studio library. Here's a couple of extracts from the Krigstein interview which was originally done in 1962 or '63. He's talking about "Master Race".

That was originally given to me as a five page story, and I persuaded Feldstein and Gaines to let me make it into an eight or nine page story. And I got the thing apart and repasted it and relaid it out and redesigned it in order to realize my ideas of developing and breakdown of the story. I happen to be extremely proud of it; I think it's a very serious effort. And I don't know if I'm being very self-indulgent, but I think that it does something very new as far as break down is concerned. By the way, they held that story for about ten months after I brought it in. I think they didn't know what to do with it. Every time I came in the office, I'd urge them to run it; I kept telling them the story had impact. I kept emphasizing that, and then when it finally came out, it was in the first issue of Impact. I always thought they got the title from me, the way I kept emphasizing that word. But I never asked them if that was the case. I recieved this five page story and read it, and it was just the most explosive story that I had ever come across in my work in the field. I called Bill up and told him that I wanted to do it as a twelve pager, and he immmediately came back with, "Twelve pages, it's impossible!" And then he told me that he couldn't do it because it would be an expense to have it relettered, which was an amusing reason to give. And then I said, "You won't have to reletter it; I'll cut it up. I like the story so well, I'll cut it up and paste it down on new pages." Now this was such a ridiculous thing for any artist to do, but I felt the story was worth anything. Finally we agreed on I forget whether it was eight or nine pages. I think that we were fighting back and forth for space, and he offered nine and then called back and said he couldn't let me have more than eight. And then, finally when I was in the middle of the story (and nobody had seen what I was doing with it), he called me up and said, "I'm kinda worried, Bernie, I think we made a mistake, and I convinced him that I was doing something very good with it. When I brought the pencils in, Feldstein and Bill agreed that it was well worth the expansion. But if only-and this I felt for years afterward-if only they would have allowed me to continue on this track. If I could have expanded the material there, I felt that I could have done very new and good things. And all these years, frankly, I have been nurturing that frustration. I've done many things since then; books, record albums, book jackets, and so on, and I've been very happy with stuff I've been doing, but I always nurtured this feeling that something tremendous could have been done if they'd let me do it. I asked him to give me, say, twelve pages-just let me expand a five page story into twelve pages and break it down in my style, because I had all these things that were seething in my mind. And then he would come back and say, "I'll give you a five page story, and you can break it down any way you want-within five pages." It was rediculous. He wanted me to subdivide it, in other words; to take a six panel page and create a fifteen panel page. Well, that was getting alot for your money. if you get fifteen panels on a page, that sounds like a good proposition. Meanwhile, they were getting desperate, and they were taking their rich story material and cutting them down from seven pages to six pages to five pages. In othere words, they were doing precisely the opposite of what they sould have been doing! Instead of expanding and penetrating into the meat of the story, and enriching the dramatic effect, they were compressing it from the outside and were just working against themselves.

DS: He goes on to talk about the importance of what happens between the panels. It's Scott McCloud's "blood in the gutters" thesis he developed in Understanding Comics and this is in 1963! What attracted me, what I found most compelling was the sheer helplessness that Krigstein obviously felt in the face of that idiotic "cutting off your nose to spite your face" syndrome that seems to afflict all companies that make their living off creativity and don't understand it. I'd have to say that this was one of the single biggest influences in pushing me towards self-publishing. I mean, Krigstein's argument is irrefutable. The evidence is right here in front of them. The time is right. All they have to do is give them his own book as they did with Kurtzman and comic books could have jumped three or four decades in maturity inside of a year. No go. In fact, just the opposite happens. They start cutting the page count.To me it was an object lesson in the fact that innovation and business interests, while completely compatible are seen by businessmen as completely incompatible. If I intended to be innovative (and I certainly intended to be innnovative), I had to find a way to blow the business impediment to smithereens. And that's what I ultimately did by keeping the business side as simple and basic a life support for the creativity as I could manage-and making sure it was under my exclusive control. I made the mistake of sharing that control with a non-creative person-Deni-and then corrected the mistake when I shared the control with a creative person-Gerhard.

      You would really have to reprint the entire issue 6 of Squa Tront to get across how important Krigstein was and is to me, was and is to the comic book medium (not industry). I single out the creativity vs. business thing only because, to me, it's the cart you have to get before the horse. Until you find a way to bind and limit business you are just asking for trouble, asking for your innovation to be limited by business, hamstrung by business, blunted by business, deflected by business. Of course that always puts me at odds with the comic-book industry and has made me the philosophical exile and the comic-book pariah that I am. Small matter. I fgured out what the problem was and I fixed it-for myself. If in later years, long after I'm dead, someone sees something in my work that seems-to them-as innovative as "Master Race" seemed-and seems-to me...Well, I'm pretty sure they will also see that what I achieved was only possible through self-publishing and, hopefully, I will have saved a handful of future creators from hitting a brick wall at their innovative peak that Feldstein and Gaines forced Krigstein hit at his own creative high point. (Most of Krigstein's comics work was done in the early 50's for EC publishing, most famous for giving birth to both Tales from the Crypt and Mad magazine. His `Master Race' story appeared in an EC comic called impact. He also did work for EC's sci-fi and horror magazines, all of which have been reprinted by Gemstone Publishing. Ask your local alternative comics shop to order through them, or try their tollİfree number, 1 800 EC CRYPT --THM)

THM: When it comes to six-thousand-page comic narratives, there's only one guy to talk to. So tell us, what is the experience of writing and drawing 20 pages every 30 days for 27 years like? How was the task changed over the years? What's gotten easier, what's gotten harder? What changes have you noticed in your drawing techniques, your drawing ability?

DS: "Like"? To what is it comparible? It seems to me that it's too big to really attach to any metaphor to it. What was it "like" for Charles Schulz to draw like six dailies and a sunday newspaper strip for 50 years? What could he compare it to? It's the only reality he ever knew. The task hasn't really changed in a lot of ways. Every day, I try to hit a creative high and every day I fail. The degree of my own percieved failure will be the exact measure of my mood at the end of the day. There are many days that start out good and end badly, others that start badly and end well. There is also more of a range between and average page and a high-water mark page that I can hit with some degree of consistency. In my twenties and early thirties, I was always going for the homerun, the towering shot to straight awy center into the third or fourth balcony. So I was disapointed if the ball just cleared the fence or ended up a bloop single. Through the balance of my thirties and into my fourties, I've learned to try to place the ball. If you can hit a well aimed double into the gap three out of four times up it really dosent matter if you hit a homerun. Also, you cant help but acquire a certain amount of drawing knowledge by drawing pretty much every day for twenty-plus years. Sometimes that can be a hindrance and make things more difficult. You find yourself trying to do something complicated when what is required is simple. That happens more often than I care for it to. Spend an hour or an hour and a half solving a problem in the pencilling of a figure, finally solve the problem and then realize that a close-up is needed. That was the problem that needed solving. Having less energy is a problem. Just by virtue of being 44 insted of 22. A professional can do professional comics at any age.---look at Eisner ---(Will Eisner is an amazing artist, an amazing writer, and an amazing guy. Starting in the 1930's with his newspaper strip Spirit, his relentless experimentation was essential in creating the language of modern comics. From Hell writer Alan Moore says, "He is the single person most responsible for giving comics its brains." Incredibly, Will Eisner, now in his 80's is STILL working, still doing top-notch work. He has many graphic novels in print, like To The Heart Of The Storm, A Family Matter, and A Life Force, and they are all worth tracking down --THM) but a monthly book is a young man's game. I'm glad I understood that when I was 23 and didn't say 400 issues. There are days I really wish I would've said 250 issues.

THM: How do you decide how to get your point across; how much is instinct--oh yeah. I'll just do that--and how much is trial and error? How much spontenaeity do you allow yourself when looking at the next blank page? Does the finished page immediately pop into your head, or do you sometimes surprise yourself half-way through? Why do you decide to design a page one way, as opposed to another?

DS: All of those, depending on the page. It's really a matter of switching hats while I'm looking at the blank page. I look at the writer, as a designer, as a penciller, as a inker, as a letterer. Given the content of the page--the idea that I need to get across--which element is going to allow me to do that with maximum effectiveness? There are really only so many variables to work with. The shape of the page--the overall frame--is set. It's a given, 10x15 for a single page 22x15 for a two-page spread. Inside that frame you have the panel arrangement: how many panels, what shape, and how close together (foreground or background), how many word balloons, what shape, how close together and inside the balloons the same problems: how many words what shape, how close together. Layout pencilling is is really just simple and lighly indicating boundaries for everything (approximately THIS shape, THIS many. This close together). With a monthly comic book a lot of it becomes a time management as well. Doing twenty pages a month you have to be sure that it dosen't take more than a day -and-a-half to do an average page or you're off schedule. Depending on the page and what I'm getting across I might spend half the day on the lettering and do relatively simple faces or I might spend most of the day on one face or one figure that is intended to "carry" the page. Same thing with "Dave pages" and "Gerhard pages". I try to balance it so we each have about the same amount of drawing to do. I'm very critical of comic-book storytelling which makes it hard to enjoy the work of others since I'm always questioning the choices they've made. That comes from being critical of my own work. Before facing the blank page, I'll re-read the lead-in pages and try to picture the variables that will best advance the story and "fit" with what has gone before. "What would I expect the next page to look like if I was just reading this in some else's book?" I try to be as objective as I can, give n that everything in the world is subjective.

THM: Most comic talents tend to burst on the comic scene in a blaze of glory , quickly burn out and endlessly regurgitate the same stylistic tricks until they become self-parodies, or they vanish from the scene together. How have you managed to avoid this trap, and consistently and rigorously fan the flames of your creativity over such a long period of time? (And don't say 'luck').

DS: Well, a lot of it is luck---and a lot of it is subjective opinion. I mean thank you for seeing me as "consistently and rigorously" fanning the flames of my creativity. Thousands who await the side-splitting return of Elrod would disagree. You know. "Where's the Gen13 parody, Dave?" Gen13 Roach. Given that I'm answering the question of someone who thinks I'm on the right track (and again, thank you) I think it helps that Cerebus is a finite project. Huge. But finite. I'm able to devote more time and energy to micro-managing the individual panels and pages because there is less and less that needs to be conjured out of nothing as I approach the end of the book. The internal mantra of 1985: "Finish the big book about Faith and Religion, then Jaka and her husband and someone else, and someone else, the little book on the end of that, then the Cirinist/Kevillist book, and then Cerebus and Jaka together and then..." There's a lot of conceptualizing that needs to be done. A lot of empty spaces. Now, there's "A happens, then B happens, then C happens, then D happens, then E happens, then it's over." Work on A, keep A confined to the space alloted for it, don't screw up A, don't forget to foreshadow B,C,D and E here, here and here. It is a lot more difficult in many ways for a "gun-for-hire" at DC and Marvel to be relentlessly "starting over" every few months in their mid forties, than it is for me to be finishing something I started in my early twenties. Taking over a title at 44 and having to research everything that's gone before, figure out what you want to do, find out what they'll let you do and negotiate everything with an editor on a daily basis while you're trying to produce the stuff, who wouldn't fall back on the same stylistic tricks? Who would have time (or inclination) to do anything else?

THM: What has the experience of designing comics pages for so long taught you about the comics medium: its strengths...?

DS: Versatility.

THM: Weaknesses...?

DS: Too much versatility.

THM: ...potential...?

DS: Virtually unlimited Versatility.

THM: ...its future...?

DS: Versatility for the asking. Twenty-three years in and I haven't scratched the surface.

 

The following pages are from Cerebus #235, which is discussed in the above interview, and are İDave Sim and Gerhard. This issue is now readily available as a chapter in the excellent compilation called Cerebus: Going Home.