A Difficult Interview

Illustration in The Comics Journal 130 (July 1989)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from Cerebus TV Season 3 Episode 13, 28 January 2012)

...I gotta tell you, most of the time when you hear that someone is a difficult interview it just means that they’re not playing badminton with you. You know, "You lob it over the net and I’ll lob it back at you." It’s "I’m gonna answer your question exactly the way it occurs to me to answer it right away." I’ve done that on occasion and its usually just, "Hey, this is gonna go like a 'for real' conversation. I’m not going to play babminton with you."

...It may be a bad analogy, but I remember Dan Vado, years before Slave Labor Graphics, telling me was going through a time period in his life where he couldn’t get laid walking through a red light district with a $100 bill taped to his forehead. In an analogous sense, every comic book artist goes through periods – sometimes months, sometimes years – where its like "You say that I’m in demand... that’s great, but believe me my phone ain’t ringing off the hook and I ain’t getting a lot of emails" ...something comes along eventually, it always does if you just keep working, but no, not unusual in the least. But if somebody asks you "What is it like to be in demand?" when you’re going through a stretch where that’s not the case, that's exactly the reaction you get out of me... "It’s news to me!"

...ask me about Cerebus and High Society, that’s fine... but [sarcastically] don’t ask me about Glamourpuss and ask me to name my top 10 favourite photo-realists in the comics field and then ask me about High Society. It’s like "Oh man, we’re not going back to that are we?" It doesn’t matter who you are as an artist, what you want to talk about is the latest thing, not something you did 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, or – for some of us getting really long in the tooth – like 30 years ago. It doesn’t mean we’re a difficult interview, it means we don’t like getting conversational whiplash. "WHOAH!" You see what I’m saying?

...and definitely, definitely, you don’t want to say, "Are you doing anything else?" If I tell you, "I'm doing Glamourpuss, Cerebus Archive and Cerebus TV. It's eating my life. I work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week," please don’t make it sound as if that’s not enough! As if I should be saying "Oh, on the side I’m about half way through adapting War and Peace, but I’m doing it with turtles, its kind of a Kevin Eastman-Pete Laird kinda treatment!"