This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

I will never read this terrible comic, if only to deprive Sim of money.

Seeing the recent Dave Sim "humorous" covers make me think he needs to be beaten with a metal bar.

you can't argue with this level of comedy

I can't really begin to parse that.

I think it got discussed further up but once you relate it back to the source image it just gets (unbelievably) worse.

try parsing this one: per Dave's weekly Bible commentary, the droughts and fires in California are the God's punishment for the malignant and rebellious free will choices made by the citizens there (Dave does not explain why God is madder at the conservative inhabitants of Northern California than the fornicators and homosexualists of West Hollywood), but God's wrath cannot impact upon his female rival YHWH because dirt and stone and rocks and sand are the embodiment of the vagina. In conclusion, this is why John The Baptist had a thin neck.

He explains (or "explains" or Explains) the lack of vegetation associated with YHWH somewhere in the Torah commentary. Something to do with YHWH not actually being able to create (because of her inferior female brane) but just make limited copies of God's ideas and since her useless female brane is filled with making cows (which are fruit, remember) she can't remember to make plants in many places except the Garden.

You can cure this by shouting at the ground, telling it to listen to you and grow plants, alongside the occasional beating with a belt to let it know who's boss.

I can't remember if that last is an actual thing or just a joke about dirt and sand being female, but I do remember that his rule about beating women was that it = wrong if you used a rod thicker than your thumb. So a belt would be right out, probably.

also I assume Sim has never been to a desert nor to a working farm nor to a local economy impacted by drought, and his cartoonist instinct is sketching the most basic Ernie Bushmiller version of dry weather for him: three rocks of different sizes, and... dirt? that's something that's outside, right?

It's all about scale and the earth is much bigger than a woman so a belt is fine.

If you read the pages it seems like it's just a joke but Dave says in the annotations the only joke is shouting "O YOOWHOO BELIEVE!" is a pun on "oh, you who believe" which is a frequent salutation in the Koran. What a ribtickler. Apparently it says in the Torah men are supposed to "subdue the Earth".

Since I went and got Latter Days out for that I should really check why YHWH just has dirt.

Had an initial look, couldn't find it but realised there was no way I was doing any in-depth searching in that mess.

I like dunking on Dave but think it’s worth distinguishing between Dave Sim (a very unfamous comic book artist with mental health issues, who struggles to even influence even his minuscule devout fan base) and, say, Scott Adams (a genuine asshole with hundreds and thousands of followers who’s been to the White House)

Not to whattabout

Dave's greatest achievements may have been hiding his Kaczynski-level issues* from the general public for so long, and maintaining his focus and getting the book to the finish line ~on schedule after his issues* became apparent.

*really would like to use the word "madness" here but not sure it's appropriate

I would happily consign both sim and adams to the flames

https://i.imgflip.com/1xvnfi.jpg

This was on the outbreak! thread but it's actually a clearer summary than I can give on Dave's theory regarding God, YHWH and The Earth. (Or men, women and every idea ever, if you like)

Dave elaborates on the thinking behind his COVID skepticism:

Everyone else has now been forced to live the ascetic, hermitic life that Dave has lived since 2003. Dave has spent twenty years trying to live in a way that shows he does not deserve to die, or at least to die in excruciating, extended pain. However, every single person who dies in excruciating extended pain from it is suffering by God's choice, therefore it would be defying God for Dave to wear a mask or wash his hands to avoid transmitting the virus. Nowhere in the entire world has had professional sports, concerts, cinemas, restaurants, vacations or airline travel since March - meanwhile Dave has eschewed all of these things for seventeen years because "they're all feminists," not even providing his usual account that when he does fly on airlines or go on vacations, he talks to people about God. In the 12 months of studying the virus and multiple vaccines being developed, nobody has been able to identify the type of virus or observe how it behaves. When a vaccine is found (nb: no explanation of how this will happen when we are yet to even identify it as a novel coronavirus, or why the three vaccines that already exist are imaginary but only Dave can tell), society will tear itself apart because weed will be made legal and people will fornicate.

Also, anyone who stopped reading Cerebus at any point after its sales peak did so because they could tell Dave knew the immutable secrets of the universe, but wouldn't allow themselves to acknowledge it.

Since it's about to come off pre-sale and go on to actual sale, the new slipcase edition of High Society appears not to have sold that well. An edition of 200, and only the most expensive tier (edition of 20) has sold out.

Colour me sceptical, but I'm not that sure there's going to be a sudden influx of customers when it starts getting advertised to... the people who have been getting adverts up to now. And people like, say, me would need convincing that a $60-70 book is worth $200.

It's entirely possible we're down to double digits for people willing to give Dave money.

I guess it’s too late for him to get on Parler

can you post to Parler via fax

I bet you could rig that up.

start up the fash machine I have thoughts to share

I can’t see reading 300 issues of cerebus being a very enticing project for a new reader, not just because of the ending but because so much of it depends on 70s/80s superhero comic parodies, which were often oblique even for me, a child who grew up in the eighties reading superhero comics. I dunno, maybe chan board types could dig it

I flipped through some recently and really enjoyed the dumb stories in the first volume, and found high society realllly hard work

reminder that Sim currently posts to his blogspot by faxing a page or two of bible commentary to a dude who then uploads it as a 600x900px jpg per page

and that he replies to comments on his 31-posts-a-month blog by having the dude fax him some of the comments once a month, then phoning dude on a landline, and reading out the comments and replying to them, as duder puts him on speaker and films the desk with his mobile phone while holding up comics and postcards Dave has sent him, then uploads (eg) a 41 minute 34 second youtube video of Dave plugging upcoming publications, followed by a 12:42 video, a 20:15 video, a 35:48 video, a 41:52 video, a 22:10 video and a 15:28 video of Dave's individual replies to comments

while I'm all for the fa slowing their own communications down to this pace, I dunno that Dave will make much impact on Parl2r even if the blog guy figures out how to cross-post Dave's thought

I listened to a few minutes of the 41:52 answer while typing, which was about an anonymous female donor who sent Dave $10,000 for his work on Strange Death Of Alex Raymond

- (the book Dave abandoned five years ago when he fucked his wrist and refused to get medical advice because he lives in Canada and therefore medicine is communist) (instead he went to the US months later to pay full price for an x-ray, then posted it to the blogspot to ask his fans to diagnose him) (then had a fan draw it in Sim's style for 4.5 years before deciding a few months ago that he wasn't going to finish it or pay the guy) -

to which Dave asked what she wanted him to do to earn the $. She said "no, this is in appreciation of the work you already did." Dave's lawyer

- (who recently retired, and has signed and is selling his complete collection of Aardvark-Vanaheim comics, 1982-2014, at $10 ((+$5 shipping)) each to fund his retirement) -

advised him that this would leave him liable for something or other, so Dave has decided that he has to do 2 or 3 half-days a week or reading through his own extensive typed commentaries on old Rip Kirby strips and rating them out of three, in case his wrist ever heals and he starts cartooning again, so he'll know which ones to re-read again, to point him to Alex Raymond drawings that he should carefully copy with his God-healed hand. Perhaps he explains in the remaining 35 minutes why the taxman will care about this.

At least he’s his own boss

Meanwhile, the dude who he stiffed on drawing the book is going to self-publish the completed work as a 350-page paperback, including 46 pages of his own comics about how the project fell apart after years of trying to massage Sim's ego and delusions. He believes that the best / most ironic way of marketing it is to buy a cover ad on Diamond's monthly distribution catalogue, for $6000. To raise this, he is auctioning a page of his artwork in the comments section of one day's blog post from a week or three ago. There is currently one bid, of $100, by the founder of IDW Books, who made his first ever internet post in order to place said bid.

Before the pandemic, Dave (from Kitchener, Ontario) was planning on marketing this book by catching Greyhound buses on a road trip to every single comic shop in the California phonebook and giving them a mockup of the first volume. This road trip would end in the offices of IDW, where he would wait until the founder showed up, and give him the last copy of the mockup. Then, per Sim's plan, which he had not told to said founder, the two of them would strategise on how to leverage the enormous internet buzz that Dave would have generated via this comic shop tour into a rush-release.

going to self-publish the un-completed work as a 350-page paperback

Finding myself very compelled by these summaries of recent posts on a strange man’s blog tbqh.

Trying to think of all of this waves hands makes more or less sense than the Wikipedia summaries of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series I was skimming earlier.

At least he’s his own boss

In 1986, DC spent a year negotiating to buy the publishing rights to Cerebus. Eventually, Dave bent over the contract in P4ul L3vitz' New York office with pen in hand, and asked the publisher to give him a reason not to sign it. L3vitz asked "can you think of an easier way to make $100,000?"

Sim sat back, thought briefly, put the cap back on the pen and flew home to Canada, where he then invented the entire trade paperback comic collection / perennial reprint market from scratch. Single-handedly.

He then spent a decade proselytising and campaigning and marketing (and sometimes financially assisting) for every single comics author to be their own boss via self-publishing. All while writing and co-drawing and publishing and marketing a monthly book, publishing the odd bit of other work, having a major marketplace war with the largest distributor, and smoking weed daily, drinking weekly, "partying" on the road every month or three, pursuing fornication regularly, or being a diligent, communicative, supportive monogamous partner to his long-distance womanfriends. In 1994-95 he even built a network of international author-owned small press arts festivals from scratch, and toured once a month to help found or expand them, all while only making the monthly comic larger, rather than slowing down.

Then he stopped doing drugs or chasing women and started reading the Torah and the bible and the Koran, and consistently reduced his personal worldview, influence and audience for 25 years and counting. makes u think.

the completed work as a 350-page paperback

Not going to lie, I will buy this if it's a reasonable price and not his $300 'limited edition' bullshit.

(The California promo wasn't printed by Grubagh, and was only limited to 100 copies because the guy that had printed 400 copies for Sim gave Grubagh the last 100 copies (plus was a mere $105 for 132pp).)



Finding myself very compelled by these summaries of recent posts on a strange man’s blog tbqh.

A dude who was transcribing Dave's videos a few years back pops up in the comments to say that he's back at it. But instead of, say, condensing salient points in the comments of the latest post, he's still diligently getting every um and uhh and repetition from years-ago videos. Another dude posts to say he'd rather have a printed version of the videos to read, like the old Aardvark Comment, than click and sit through dozens of hours of audio at a computer. The blog dude leaps in to object that if this happened, he would want the comics he draws to accompany each monthly call with Sim to be included, so they would have to either pay for colour printing, or pay him to redraw them in black and white.

Here is an example of one of these.

Darkness

Sweet suffering fuck

That covers all of this, not just the inept zombie penis thing

Dave has just read New Mutants for the first time, on the urging of a fifty-something fan so obsessive (he posts multiple times a week in the blog comments about how often he has spoken to Dave on the phone, or how he just sits next to Gerhard at Gerhard's convention table for hours and talks to him instead of walking around discovering new work) that Sim has iiirc logged on himself to caution people not to believe half of what the guy says.

He has thus learnt for the first time what an extensive impact the demon character S'ym actually had on the Marvel Universe, and that as an agent of YHWH, Chris Claremont therefore created the association that would lead to Sim being demonised within the comic-book field a decade later. "All of it predestined." This is underscored by Claremont having written 185 issues of X-Men: therefore Sim's revelations of the true evils of feminism came in Cerebus #186.

Also, it was the "newly minted online mob" of the Comics Journal Message Board that "eradicated" Sim from the field in 1994, even though he continued to publish Cerebus until 2004, and the message board did not exist until 1999.

You don't have to read this stuff, sic.

Sometimes I go for six or eight months without looking in. But then it'll occur to me to wonder if Dave Sim has managed to develop a completely counterfactual opinion about something, or to devise a confoundingly elaborate method to keep himself from publishing simply or from creating work that connects with the genuine artist inside him, or uncovered new evidence that he is the central figure of the metaphysical universe. And by gum, he'll always be deep in at least one of the three.

I'm very happy for you to carry on reading and summarising it for us, TBH.

Dave believes that the duration of his seven-year relationship with a 14-year-old girl, beginning when he was about 29, is "metaphysically pertinent" now that he's reading Claremont and Sienkiewicz' New Mutants, because he read on S'ym's wikipedia that

During Illyana's seven years in Limbo, Belasco takes her as his heir and apprentice. She ultimately defeats him, becoming Limbo's new ruler, and S'ym's master, before returning to the X-Men. S'ym challenges Illyana's newfound status as Limbo's ruler. Illyana defeats S'ym, leaving S'ym to agree to serve Illyana whenever she visits Limbo.[

Because the seven years represent a limbo period where the metaphysical forces of feminism were trying to neutralise Sim's mind by placing him under female control before he could reveal the truth about their voidly agenda in his four-year Mothers & Daughters graphic novel, that followed the end of the relationship.

The fan who has sent the comics to Dave to read thinks that the "Colossus' kid sister" character became one-dimensional and her development went "off the rails;" Sim infers that this is because Claremont is a feminist and tried to frame the plot positively in that direction.


The personality "Jack Wayne" manifested by the character Legion in New Mutants #27 also ties in to Dave: he infers that the character is named for Jack Kennedy (who was the most successful playboy alive in 1963 because Marilyn Monroe fucked him, which also proves he was as attractive as a human male could be at that time) and Bruce Wayne, and Dave was perceived as a playboy-like-figure within the comics field in the 1980s because he fucked so much. Proof that this personality is metaphysically connected to Dave? "My Inner Jack Kennedy would wane," fourteen (7 + 7) years later when he gave up sex and masturbation .

In the 1980s, Sim would write angrily about his friend and mentor Gene Day's death after Day's travelling to NYC to deliver a job to Marvel, being given a rush job to draw in the office, and left to sleep in an unheated Manhattan office lobby in winter, catching (iirc) a pneumonia that Sim believed weakened his health leading to him dropping dead months later.

Now, seeing that the character S'ym first appeared in August 1982 (probably May, actually, but Dave is evidently forgetting how cover dates work), Day died in September, and Dave & Deni Sim went on their first US tour in October/November, Dave "infers" that by leaving his wife and becoming a fornicator in 1983, he "forced" God or the universe or something to send him a message by killing his only friend.


Lest anyone think that Sim is somehow reaching, or exhibiting some kind of weird narcissism by going beyond the S'ym character to read metaphysical connections between his own life and other characters in the comic: another one of Legion's manifested personalities is called Cyndi. And Dave has been told that his parents would have named him Cindy if he'd been a girl. And Claremont writes Cyndi saying "

..."They say they love you. But when it's their life and yours, they'll dump you every time." And that is the sort of thing that Dave's parents might have said to him, or vice versa, when they still spoke! AND he did dump his parents when they remained atheists after he invented, then converted to, his own religion! QED.

Dave found those details on the S'ym wikipedia because he phoned his research assistant and asked him to print out the page and bring it to the house.

He has since taken a break from reading the New Mutants comics from 1982 to watch the New Mutants film from 2017, released in 2020, and pausing to transcribe all the bits about religion. Sim had noticed it on two Worst Movies Of 2020 lists in Canada, despite it containing "LGBTQ propaganda," so he concludes that this is a result of the "sharp shift in Trump-era Identity Politics". (He thinks it's bad too, but not because it happens to be a bad movie. It's because every single film made today is just filler between CGI effects - Dave can tell this, unlike professional nationally-published film critics, presumably because he watches one movie every five years and thus knows better.)

He is noting his reactions by watching fifteen minutes every two days, typing up two pages of analysis addressed to the fan that asked him what he thinks of the comic, and faxing these to his blogspot dude.

starting to think there may be reason to be concerned about dave sim’s mental well-being tbh

"dave sic" press submit

Sim had a sexual relationship with a 14 year old girl when he was 29? Or am I reading that wrong.

*phones research assistant*

*checks voicemail*

They only met a few times in those seven years, rarely corresponded, didn't have sex until a few days before her 21st birthday, and have not seen each other since three months after her 22nd. Sim regards the association as unequivocally morally wrong, legally criminal, and the handful of days they spent in each others' company as the only times he has ever experienced happiness in his life.

I checked back and Dave has faxed another 18 pages of daily commentary on the New Mutants movie in the last week

I really need a fax machine