Gaiman on Sim

The Comics Journal #139 (July 1994)
Art by Michael Zulli

NEIL GAIMAN:
(from an interview with The Comics Journal #139, July 1994)

Dave Sim gave a speech in London recently... where he was pointing to me and saying, "DC treats Neil really, really well, but they treat the rest of you like hired hands out in the field," and I'm now in the position of the foreman allowed into the house... I think Dave's perspective is probably [that] I am perpetuating the evil system here and I am lending a veneer of legitimacy to an evil system... I'm not sure I would agree with that. I think to some extent it goes back to the original thing of, How do you get good comics out there? Well you do them... DC gives me a huge audience... At the end of the day I'm fairly satisfied with DC's ability to sell things. I like that. I write for an audience. I like writing things for people to read.

...one of the greatest advantages that comics had is their cheapness to produce - you can do them. You need a pen, you need paper, you need access to a photocopier, and you can do comics... other media are more expensive and less immediate than a comic. A comic is very cheap and very immediate. I don't understand why there aren't billions of Los Bros., why there aren't oodles of Peter Bagges and hordes of Chester Browns and armies of Dave Sims.

...I've never quite been able to figure out for myself why comics fragments the way it does; why political lines get drawn and stuck to... It seems fairly odd to me... there are people with whom one can disagree philosophically on things. There are people in the world of comics, people in the world of corporate comics, whom I do not particularly like, and in most cases, generally speaking, do not work for. There are people in the world of corporate comics whom I genuinely do like, I find them interesting, amusing, or fascinating. Comics are filed with a lot of one-of-a-kind people, and I like that. There is nobody on the entire face of the planet who is anything like Jenette Kahn. There is Jenette, and that's it. There is probably only one Gary Groth. And definitely only one Dave Sim.