Jeff Seiler: Dave Sim & Me

JEFF SEILER:

Eleven years ago, when Cerebus ended, Dave Sim decided to answer all of his back mail. A month or so later, he had his "Jeff Seiler Day" in which he answered multiple letters I had written over the previous year. After I received that letter, I decided to keep writing, and he kept his promise to answer every letter he received. And now, I have a foot-high stack of letters written and received over 10 years or so. I will be posting full paragraphs or pages of interesting excerpts from those letters every Saturday.

From a letter dated 13 November, 2004, from Dave to me, written during his days of attending the weekly city council meetings religiously, so to speak:

I wonder myself at what the city council members think of me. They had a special tent set up in front of City Hall during the Oktoberfest opening ceremonies and, as a promotion, the Council members were all dishing up the sauerkraut and weiner-schnitzel. Councillor Geoff Lorentz saw me walking by and yelled, "Hey, you should be in here doing this with us." Which would seem to indicate a "we consider you part of the family" gesture, which was nice. I try to maintain a distance because I see myself as monitoring what's going on, rather than as a participant and I think it's very easy to get seduced into taking their side, rather than keeping an adversarial frame of mind, which seems necessary if only because I'm about the only person who's there every week. Mayor Zehr always tells the people who are there for the ceremony, "You’re welcome to stay for the rest of the council meeting..." This invariably gets a big laugh. "As if!" Disheartening for obvious reasons.