Jeff Smith vs Dave Sim: Round 3

Round 1 | Round 2 | Round 3

The Comics Journal #218 (1999)

Cover art by Charles Vess

DAVE SIM:
(from The Blog & Mail, 15 September 2007)

HERE IT IS AT LAST, FOLKS! THE REASON THAT YOU'RE ALL SUPPOSED TO SHUN DAVE SIM AND VILIFY HIM AND SNEER WHENEVER YOU MENTION HIS NAME. YOU KNEW THERE HAD TO BE A REASON SOMEWHERE RIGHT? WELL, THIS IS IT, FROM JEFF SMITH'S INTERVIEW IN THE COMICS JOURNAL BACK IN 1999:

SMITH: There's not much to tell. A lot of it was based on Dave's infamous CEREBUS #186 where he published his little "tract" about women sucking the life blood out of men, and how they can't "think", they can only "feel". He put Vijaya and I [sic] into that issue. That was unacceptable to me. He was crossing a line that he had been warned not to cross.

[This was interesting to me in that the only line I had been warned not to cross was when I had told my then-horizontal-mamba-partner (1992-1994) Diana Schutz how READS was going to be structured: along the lines of Truman Capote's "Cote d'Azur" – real comic-book people and incidents fictionalized in the first half, then shifting to an actual documenting of what was going on in my life at the moment that I was writing the concluding issues and seeing what the result was in juxtaposition with the Cerebus vs. Cirin wordless battle in the comics parts of the stories. She said, "Leave me and my family out of it."

Which I was more than willing to do.

The only interesting person in the extended Schutz family – the then-current members, anyway -- on a "Cote d'Azur" basis that I could see was her sister Trishie who had only been interesting when she was going out with Joe Matt and only because Joe documented their relationship in an interesting and humourous way. As soon as they broke up Trishie vanished into obscurity along with the rest of Diana's relatives. I did use a lot of the comic-industry dirt that Diana trafficked in extensively and compulsively told me about no matter how many times I told her I hate gossip and I don't like listening to it. How Jeff Smith could be construed to be part of Diana Schutz's family is an interesting Marxist-feminist story in itself, but unfortunately a YHWH speculation for another day: here I'm sticking strictly to the facts, ma'am]

SPURGEON: He talked to you about it beforehand?

SMITH: He was writing [it] about the time he came out to California to stay with us during the first APE show. The night he arrived, Dave sat down on the couch opposite us

[This isn't true. I was seated on a single chair at right angles to the couch. Jeff was at the near end of the couch to my right and Vijaya was at the opposite end of the couch]

and said, "Let me tell you what color the sky is in my world." Then he proceeded to lay out this horrible, upside-down, conspiracy-theory view of the world. Vijaya and I sat there, and at first we talked with him about it. We were like, "Wow. You almost have a point, sort of, but it's upside down there at the end." And he goes on for hours! Droning on and on…

[This isn't true either. What I was doing was responding to Jeff's conversational question when we had arrived at their A-frame house atop the San Andreas fault – he had picked me up in a limousine at the San Francisco airport -- "So what are you working on?" What the hell. I had nothing to hide. Literally. I described the structure of READS, with the fictionalized comic book first half and then, in the second half, moving into a more literal "here's what's going on in my life right now," and I explained some of the anecdotes that I was working with, newspaper stories I had been accumulating that had been getting weirder and weirder as soon as I began collecting them: particularly a recent one that I had found about some environmental group which had spent an unearthly amount of money cleaning spilled oil off of a seal and had then had this ceremony releasing it back into the wild where it was promptly eaten by a killer whale.

My thesis was that life was out of balance and these ludicrous excesses of Life Uber Alles (now pretty well swept under the rug beneath the label of "politically correct" – as if that justifies them) were becoming more the rule than the exception. But I was aware that most people saw the killer whale eating the seal as a Profound Tragedy instead of seeing it for what it was: what killer whales, you know, do. This is, presumably, what Jeff meant by "upside down there at the end". I was viewing a Profound Tragedy and seeing it as a Weird Burlesque.

So, I attempted to tackle the question from another angle: For the first time in human history birth was exceeding death by a wide margin but we were still behaving as if death was this near-universal condition and that birth was barely able to stay ahead of it. Essentially, we were still selling ourselves (as a society) on the view that we live in a tragic, death-based patriarchy. My view was that it was a lunatic, out-of-control birth-based matriarchy and had been for some time. At that point, Jeff and Vijaya became part of the point of my story I was working on. As I wrote:

"Oh, NO! No way. Uh-uh." Jeff smith is shaking his head violently from side to side. He has lunged forward in his seat, his hands waving in the air, as if shooing away a large insect. All of his movements are agitated. At the other end of the couch, his wife sits, her feet tucked beneath her, calmly smoking a Marlboro Light. Her features are inscrutable. Viktor Davis takes another sip of his beer.

[a Heineken, and not only a Heineken but a bottle Heineken: Jeff and Vijaya definitely had good taste in beer, unless they had bought it specifically for me]

"You'd agree that Death is Male?" he asks.

"Yes."

"You'd agree that Birth is Female?"

"Yes."

"Which one is winning?"

"No. No, no way. It's just not true." He stares straight ahead for a moment or two and then looks at Viktor Davis. "I just don't think that way, man. I just can't see that at all."

Vijaya grinds out her cigarette in a small glass ashtray.

At Jeff's insistence, the discussion ends. They agree to disagree. Viktor Davis isn't certain what the disagreement is, but clearly an impasse has been reached.

They begin to discuss animation instead.

[Deciding to do READS the way I did it, was really a matter of my saying to myself, "I really have to start documenting some of this stuff that keeps happening to me, because it is really getting to be too weird for words and everyone is acting as if their reactions are normal and my observations are weird." And Jeff's extreme and agitated reaction to a simple discussion about the balance between life and death in the world – coupled with Vijaya's complete non-reaction – was definitely in that category. "This is so weird. What IS he so upset about?" I was a guest in their home and I think I'm a very accommodating guest. You don't want to talk about a subject, boom, subject dropped. You asked me what I was working on and I started to tell you and then you freaked out. No problem. Let's – very calmly and rationally, so I hopefully don't upset you that badly again -- talk about your background in animation.]

SPURGEON: Dave can talk.

SMITH: Now I knew what it must've been like to be trapped in Waco listening to David Koresh! Vijaya and I were rocking back and forth, going, "Can we please go to the bathroom now?" I'm making light of it but it was really offensive stuff, and there was no arguing with him. Finally I said, "Dave, if you don't shut up right now, I'm going to take you outside and deck you."

SPURGEON: Really? Wow!

SMITH: It was that serious. Well, he shut up. There was dead silence, and he squinted his eyes. He took a drag off his cigarette, and that was it. We went on with our weekend and forgot about it. At least I did.

[There are a couple of interesting things here: first, "it was really offensive stuff, and there was no arguing with him." Well, it seems to me that if a point I'm making is "really offensive" then it should be easy to refute. If a devout Muslim told me, as an example, that Jews are pigs and monkeys, which many of them believe, it would be pretty easy to just say, "No, Jews are human beings. They just have different beliefs from you." Call it the Sixteen Impossible Things Syndrome. It's not actually offensive, it's reality. You, as a Marxist-feminist, only react to it as being offensive because you have strong in-built prejudices against reality. Just explain to me why it is critically important for us as a society to lower standards for soldiers and policepersons and firepersons so that we have more women in those professions and how that is more important than having high standards where public safety is concerned. See, you get offended because you want half of every profession to be made up of women. But to do that you have to erode standards. That's not offensive, it's factual. The fact that birth is outrunning death by a wide margin in our society isn't offensive, it's factual. The person who has a problem is the one who thinks that the correct reaction to the enunciation of a fact is to react emotionally and explosively. Except in a Marxist-feminist society where the correct reaction to a fact that doesn't conform to Marxist-feminist prejudices is always to react emotionally and explosively.]

 DAVE SIM:

(from The Blog & Mail, 17 September 2007)

TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT HIS 1999 TRILOGY TOUR INTERVIEW AND SEEKING AUGURIES IN ITS ENTRAILS

[I also think it's interesting – in the same way a multi-car pile-up traffic accident can be said to be interesting -- that the Marxist-feminists who exert an absolute tyranny in the comic book field and who, politically, pride themselves on deploring violence of any kind, immediately and universally leapt to Jeff Smith's side – as all of you reading this, I assume, are about to do if you haven't already -- when, if you take Jeff's version of events in the COMICS JOURNAL at face value, we were discussing a number of weirdly humorous facts that have resulted from the feminization of society – spending thousands of dollars to clean all the oil off of a killer whale's lunch, being a good example -- and Jeff, out of a clear blue sky, suddenly told me to shut up and threatened to take me outside and deck me. What kind of a way is that for a theoretically civilized human being to behave towards someone he is having a disagreement with? It's an actual question but since the odds are that whoever is reading this is a Marxist-feminist no, I don't really expect an answer. Just your usual high altitude intellectual tour de force which consists of going quiet and sullen and blocking out whatever was just being discussed] [Yes, like you're doing now] [What Jeff's manufactured after-the-fact Tall Tale really did for me, as someone who is only interested in reality, was to escalate the level of weirdness attached to the incident, the initial weirdness being Jeff suddenly and explosively reacting to a simple observation on my part and insisting that we have to stop talking about this NOW and the subsequent weirdness being Jeff feeling compelled to add, years after the fact, a threat of physical violence to his already bizarre and excessive emotional reaction to a simple conversation] [to repeat: What are you so upset about?]

[Okay, now that none of you are paying attention again, here is Jeff's version of what I wrote in READS. If you were fair-minded people – which I know you aren't, but let's pretend that some of you are – here is a living example of how Jeff Smith wouldn't know the truth if it came up and bit him on the ass:][and because you're Marxist-feminists and won't look up what I actually wrote so as to maintain your eight-year delusion that Jeff was telling the truth and is therefore Good and Dave Sim was lying and is therefore Evil, I am pleased to repeat what I actually wrote immediately after Jeff's version. Oh, you're more than welcome:]

SMITH: He wrote about it in CEREBUS #186. But in his version, instead of me threatening to give him a fat lip, he has me fawning and begging him not to reveal the true evil secrets of women in front of Vijaya. [Scared voice] "Dave, stop giving away the secrets of the universe! Please! Stop giving them away! I'll get in trouble with Vijaya!" And Vijaya is portrayed like a scheming Mata Hari, when really she was just angry and bored. [Laughter]

Okay this is actually what I wrote:

`Oh, NO! No way. Uh-uh.' Jeff Smith is shaking his head violently from side to side. He has lunged forward in his seat, his hands waving in the air, as if shooing away a large insect. All of his movements are agitated. At the other end of the couch, his wife sits, her feet tucked beneath her, calmly smoking a Marlboro Light. Her features are inscrutable.

Viktor Davis takes another sip of his beer.

`You'd agree that Death is Male?" he asks.

`Yes"

`You'd agree that Birth is Female?'

`Yes"

`Which one is winning?'

`No. No, no way. It's just not true.' He stares straight ahead for a moment or two and then looks at Viktor Davis. `I just don't think that way, man. I just can't see that at all.'

Vijaya grinds out her cigarette in a small glass ashtray.

At Jeff's insistence, the discussion ends. They agree to disagree. Viktor Davis isn't certain what the disagreement is, but clearly an impasse has been reached.

They begin to discuss animation instead.

[For the two or three Marxist-feminists still reading at this point – I know, I don't believe anyone is still reading at this point either, but let's pretend that some of you are still playing along with our home version of the game and you don't have access to a dictionary] [Well, obviously you have access to a dictionary, but you're Marxist-feminists. You aren't going to go and look up a word if it means that it will prove another Marxist-feminist to be full of hot air:]

inscrutable – not readily investigated, interpreted or understood: MYSTERIOUS (i.e. "God, thy judgements are inscrutable" Robert Browning)

There is no pejorative connotation for the word inscrutable. It was the most apt adjective I could find to describe Vijaya's complete non-reaction. She didn't look angry and she didn't look bored. Jeff looked angry. Vijaya was completely blank. That was what I found remarkable. Jeff is going ballistic over... I don't know what, considering that we both agreed that Birth was Female and Death was Male and the former is, factually, exceeding the latter by a wide margin… and Vijaya isn't going ballistic with him but also doesn't say, "Jeff, calm down. What are you getting so excited about? We're just talking." If there was something to get extremely upset about, why isn't Vijaya getting upset? And if there's nothing to get extremely upset about, why isn't Vijaya more concerned about Jeff's erratic behaviour?

[It's an interesting basis for speculation – again, for another time, again, I'm sticking strictly to the facts here -- to wonder at the psychological transference that Jeff's unconscious mind obviously engaged in: translating what I actually said into what his unconscious mind had decided he needed to believe that I had said. Where did he get the "fawning and begging" thing from? Where did he get the "giving away the secrets of the universe" thing from? The "true evil secrets of women" thing from? The "getting in trouble with Vijaya" thing from? None of those are in there, not even remotely. I'm not, as you all know, big on psychiatry to say the least. To me, it's simple demonic possession. Unclean spirits. But, for those of you who do believe in psychiatry, what do you make of this bizarre and excessive form of transference? Where, psychologically speaking, do you suppose it comes from?]

[The important thing from a Marxist-feminist standpoint is that it worked like a charm. Frank Miller went on record as saying that he too would find it intolerable if a guest in his house had insulted Lynn. My universal pariah status – which continues to this day -- was assured. My question, in "Dear Jeff Smith": "How did I insult Vijaya?" was ignored, both by Jeff and by the comic-book field in general. I'll ask it again, "How did I insult Vijaya?" No response. Exactly.]

DAVE SIM:

(from The Blog & Mail, 18 September 2007)

WHERE TO HIS FAVOURITE ACCOMPANIMENT IN THE COMIC-BOOK FIELD (CRICKETS CHRIPING) DAVE SIM GOES ON TO SAY:

So returning to reality (as I like to do), I had come all the way to Columbus with a set of boxing gloves and, in my "Dear Jeff Smith" piece in CEREBUS 265, I had left it up to him to pick the venue, the timekeeper and the referee. It seemed to me that it would be completely dishonourable for him to just walk in at that point and tell me where and when we would be sorting this out when I had given him that much advance notice, coming in two days ahead of time to give him the most number of scheduling options, but the fact that I had brought the gloves with me indicates that it didn't surprise me that he would handle it that way. People like that are just that way: if there's a sneaky, underhanded way of doing something and a direct and above-board way of doing something, they will always pick the former over the latter, every time. Why? I'm the wrong person to ask. It's just the way those people are. Personally, I always go the other way. If there's a sneaky, underhanded way of doing something and a direct and above-board way of doing something, I pick the latter. Which is what I was doing here. Jeff had to be made to put up or shut up. I would allow him to choose the context in all particulars and weight them in his own favour whatever way he wanted to. We would insulate our hands to keep from jeopardizing our livelihoods. Jeff could pick the referee who would presumably keep him from getting seriously hurt. Presumably the biggest gorilla he could find or knew of. Presumably the gorilla would feel no comparable compulsion to keep me from getting seriously hurt if things went the other way. Fine. I had made my peace with the whole situation.

Let God judge between me and thee.

If he did just stroll in at the last minute, I assumed – again, opting for sneaky and under-handed -- he would set a place and a time for Monday, figuring that I would already be booked on a flight home (which I was) so he could say that he named the venue and the time and I ducked out. Big Tough Jeff Smith wins again. So I was already prepared that I might have to re-book my return flight or miss the dinner that I was going to buy all the exhibitors after the show if he set the place and the time that night or have to negotiate an alternative if he said everything had been arranged for Sunday which presumably he would know I wouldn't violate the Sabbath for. The last one was the trickiest one, but one way or another, we would see who would deck who and who would give who a fat lip. I sleep in track pants and a sweatshirt which would serve as athletic gear in a pinch. I had already said in the same piece that I would take my chances without headgear or a mouth-guard and left it up to Jeff if he wanted to use them or do without them.

He gestured at the table, smirking, and said, "So where are the gloves?" And I replied, straight-faced, serious and factual, "They're back at the hotel." He gave me a derisive, "Yeah, as if." look, said "Welcome to Columbus" – to which I replied "Thanks, Jeff" and then he walked on to the next table and left the room roughly ten minutes later. "Well, that was easy," I thought to myself.

Having made a point to come over to where I was sitting and to ask about the gloves, to me, established who was backing down here. Just to make sure, I brought the gloves back the following year. No Jeff. Nor has he shown up at SPACE since that second show.

The boxing gloves were among the contents of the penthouse apartment that I sold to an estate liquidation agency in 2003 shortly after the SPACE show. I didn't see any need for them anymore and in my new more aesthetic lifestyle, storage space was at a premium.

So, the issue of who was and who wasn't a coward having been established, I was pleased to shake hands with Jeff on the front steps of The Beguiling two years ago, the afternoon before the first TCAF and I made a point of seeking him out for amiable chatter over in the children's tent where he would be set up when I saw him over there, waving to him whenever I saw him at a distance that weekend and figuring the whole thing had been sorted out back at the second SPACE show when he didn't follow up on his "where are the gloves?" question with "where and when" we were going to do this and at the third SPACE show when there was no sign of him. And I haven't said a word about it since.

Until now.

And if everyone would just learn to leave the whole subject alone I won't have to say a word about it again. On the other hand, if Jeff wants to opt for the Bryan Talbot version of events, or if any one of the other hundreds of people he has told Tall Tales to over the years about what happened choose to revive the issue publicly, my offer remains open. I come to Columbus every year for SPACE.

Name the time and the place – publicly, I have no interest in any private communication with someone who says one thing privately and another thing publicly as Jeff has continued to do -- and I'll be there. I don't have as much money as I used to, but I would consider buying another pair of boxing gloves to be an investment.

A solid investment.

And if Jeff chooses to ignore this, then obviously he's the coward -- which he and I both knew five years ago after I answered his "So, where are the gloves?" question and he wandered off and which I was willing, until Bryan Talbot's book, to keep just between the two of us. I have a great deal of compassion for the "accuracy challenged" having been married to one. He backed down and that was good enough for me. I would prove that I was a bigger man than he by keeping it confidential. Anyway, he now has Bryan Talbot to thank or blame (as the case may be) – not me -- for my now, of necessity, making his cowardice a matter of public record.

Only one of us is a coward and trust me, folks, it isn't me.

Gary's follow-up fax, still full of vituperation and vilification and "Crazy Dave Sim" stuff at least contained one sensible sentence:

"For what it's worth, I can understand your need to set the record straight."

Which I appreciated. A great deal. More than I can say. One faint glimmer of light in the Marxist-feminist darkness that has surrounded me since 1994. I assume from that, that thirteen years later Gary finally (finally!) read what I wrote and read what Jeff Smith said I wrote and understood that a disservice had been performed towards me by Jeff with the full duplicity of his magazine (and the universal endorsement of the comic-book field).

Should he or Tom Spurgeon or someone else have actually read the passage in READS and compared it to Jeff's version before publishing Jeff's version and launching another wave of self-righteous Marxist-feminist trashing of Dave Sim on the Internet which lingers to this day? It depends. If we're supposed to take the COMICS JOURNAL at face value as a journal -- that is as an example of journalism, presumably yes. Presumably it should have been checked at the proof-reading stage or it would have made an interesting side-bar on that page or someone might have looked up the passage and done a follow-up question with Jeff.

Of course, I don't take the COMICS JOURNAL at face value as journalism. Far from it. It's Tabloid Journalism of the vilest Marxist-feminist sort, the comic book field's answer to Pravda and all you have to do is find yourself outside of their high school girls' clique and you know the full extent of what that means for you and for your career. Just ask anyone who has gone through it.

Jeff is drawing the covers to Fantagraphics' reprints of the Walt Kelly OUR GANG material and designing their POGO reprint collections, which I hadn't known. Gary told him that I'd be responding to the slander in Bryan Talbot's book and Jeff asked him to pass this along to me:

Well, next time you talk to Sim tell him to calm down. I don't have any bad feelings about him anymore. He can write whatever he wants.

I had to laugh. He ruins my career and incites everyone to treat me as a pariah and thirteen years later he doesn't have "any bad feelings" about me. No, I'm sure he doesn't. What would he have left to feel bad about now that I have been permanently exiled from the comic-book field and he has assassinated my character with his Tall Tales all over the world? He's done a solid job for thirteen years. He hasn't completely destroyed me, but he has come very close. I asked Gary to relay this on my behalf to Jeff:

I am calm, Jeff. I've been calm for thirteen years while all of you people have done your level best to destroy me. It hasn't worked out BECAUSE I've been completely calm. Now I'm – very calmly through the Blog & Mail – reading into the record what has happened for the last thirteen years and – you can thank Bryan Talbot for this – revisiting your key role in that attempted destruction. I don't care and never did care what your "feelings" were about me or anyone or anything else. All I'm interested in and all I ever was interested in is reality.

And there you have the reality as it stands: Jeff Smith the lying coward. We'll see if he wants to change half of that next April at SPACE.

And to the familiar sound of Marxist-feminist crickets chirping in the dark emptiness of the comic-book field, let me say here and now that I'll be happy to update all this the next time a Marxist-feminist chooses to follow in Bryan Talbot's footsteps and slander my name in public by recounting the lies Jeff has been spreading since 1994.