Hey!?! When did the Ol' AMOC Mailbag turn into Aardvark Comment? (Of course when Dave started answering the letters, dip$#!*...)

Hi, Everybody!

Mail there, or just Fax: 519 576 0955. Or email me at momentofcerebus@gmail.com and I'll take care of it. (That's how this one worked!)

I feel like we need to give Adam
a Marvel Bullpen style nickname,
 like Adam "Storming" Beechen.
Ah, but that's not alliterative.
Oooh, "Amazing" Adam Beechen.
Or "Astounding" Adam Beechen!
That's the ticket!

Adam Beechen's Hench is available from Amazon. (Which is were his website sends you.) Most recently, Adam wrote an eight-page story featured in the 'ROBIN 80th Anniversary Special' for DC. [I read it, it's a good story -Matt]
Adam Beechen's  question to Dave (in case you forgot...):

CEREBUS continues to stagger me in many ways, but one of the most profound is its sheer size and the duration of its production. You did it. Like you said you would from the very beginning. Twenty-six years. Three hundred monthly issues. Like clockwork. All of those issues fit into the larger narrative framework, the characters are consistent (and if they change, it’s a sense of evolution, not an arbitrary left turn – It’s all motivated), and I never have the sense that you “took an issue off” here and there.
Your work on CEREBUS strikes me as a pretty unbelievable act of commitment, conviction, determination, sheer will, imagination and love. I work on a contract-to-contract basis. I write a script for this show as a freelancer, and then I move to that show and write a script for it. If I’m under contract to produce or story-edit a series, it’s for a limited period of a couple years at the absolute most. All of which suits me fine – I enjoy playing in other creators’ sandboxes. And I respond well to deadlines placed upon me, much better than I do to self-imposed deadlines. But after a few years on the same series, I can itch for new material on which to work.
Of course, I’ve never sold a series I created, and I might feel otherwise if that were the case. I hope I get to find out. Even so, I’d like to tell so many different kinds of stories over the course of my career, featuring many different kinds of characters. I don’t know that I could come up with a “vessel” of a framework story that could encompass all of them, the way CEREBUS encompassed multiple stories of a range of styles (illustrative and textual), all the while maintaining the central thread of Cerebus’ journey. If I did, there would probably still be times when I wondered if the narrative grass wasn’t greener somewhere else.
So, my question(s) to you becomes this (these):
Do you have a sense of where that drive, that commitment, within you comes from? And how hard or easy was it to maintain over the course of the 26 years?
Was there ever a time when you wanted to just walk away entirely before reaching 300? If so, how did you overcome it? Did you have mornings when you sat down at the drawing table and just said, “Ugh. I am just not in the mood for this.” If so, how did you fight through that?
Was there a time when you thought, “No one’s forcing me to do this every day, every month, every year. I’ll just take a couple months off. Just a couple. I’ll come back rejuvenated and get right back into it.” If so, what kept you from heading down that path?
Were you ever seriously tempted to step away from CEREBUS, temporarily or purposely, to pursue other projects that you’d either create or that someone else had created?
In short, how did you cope with CEREBUS fatigue and outside distraction?
If these are questions you’ve answered a hundred times before elsewhere, I apologize – I haven’t seen or heard those interviews – and I hope the way I’ve asked them here might give you a different approach or angle to answering them than you’ve had previously.

Dave Sim's answer to Adam Beechen's fourfold question above is being serialized this week (for as long as it has too -Matt) on AMOC.  Link to PART ONE.  Link to PART TWO.  Link to PART THREE. This is PART FOUR.

PART FOUR: DIGRESSION WITHIN A DIGRESSION: KANE "VS." SICKLES

What I infer that I'M reading is Ron Goulart's and Gil Kane's interest in the evolution of the 1933 to 1936 Sickles and Caniff style.

Which, to me, is distinct from the Caniff School -- Cartoon Realism as I call it in THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND -- the foremost comic-book practitioners of which I infer to be Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert and Will Eisner: the Caniff School is where their style comes from.

It isn't Realism (Hal Foster) and it isn't  Stylized Realism (Alex Raymond pre-1946) and it isn't Photorealism (Alex Raymond post-1946)

The Caniff School really petered out after Caniff died.  There are no successors to Frank Robbins, George Wunder and Ramona Fradon working in that Caniff-heavy brush cartoony style. And definitely no one working in the Scorchy Smith early Terry style from which it blossomed.         

But, knowing, by way of Howard Chaykin, how huge a presence Sickles was in Gil Kane's life, I figured this meeting between the two of them would be a very interesting traffic accident. Which it proved to be.

My guess? Because Sickles had the cachet that Gil Kane aspired to. 

"When LIFE magazine published Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea I was their first choice to illustrate it" is a Mount Olympus "drop dead, you @#$%" line if you're inclined that way.  But Sickles wasn't inclined that way at all. He didn't aspire to cachet, he didn't think of himself and his work in terms of cachet. He was only interested in the work itself.  And suddenly he finds himself in this guy's house and the guy is obviously pretty full of himself.  It's apparent that he's either reasonably or obsessively familiar with Sickles' work and with various other illustrators' work, but the name "Gil Kane" didn't ring any bells with Sickles and Sickles knew a lot of Bell-Ringing Names who weren't anywhere near as full of themselves as this guy obviously was. And Gil keeps interrupting Sickles to establish that this is a We Who Are In The Know first encounter, thus ensuring that it very quickly became, a May Our Paths Never Cross Again gig for Sickles. I think that's cruel but fair on my part. Sickles acknowledges when Gil phrases something adroitly but mostly he exhibits what seems to me a justifiable impatience with Gil's digressions into irrelevancies..  

The real payoff for all of this, for me, is on page 152 which is why I did all of that set-up.

SICKLES: For instance I've studied history and that's what I wanted to be, a historical illustrator, going back and showing this country as it was. There are so many things, but, after all the study I did and all the preparation, suddenly history vanished completely, from not just the magazines, but from the schools. So the kids aren't even learning the history of the country now, from what I understand. The political climate of this country changed the moment that children were not given [C]ivics to study at school, and I think it's absolutely accurate. Why they would cut out the study of government when this society is based on a [R[epublic, everybody from Jefferson on? It doesn't make any sense. The public must be educated as to what the government means to them. And to not have it being taught in school is unbelievable. 

I have to interrupt Sickles -- as Kane is about to do -- to draw attention to Civics with a capital C and Republic with a capital R is what he's discussing -- but both have been transcribed as being in the lower case.  Well, there you go. There's the progressive view of "civics" and "the republic".  Kane takes issue along the same lines.

KANE:  But don't you think there's been a sort of change in what people want in education? At one time, education meant external things, the life around us. People are so interested in the life within them now, that they're obsessed with self-realization and the study of self.

To people like Sickles and to Sickles' generation in particular and (I'll go out on a limb here) to all generations previous to Sickles' generation, it isn't a matter of what people "want" in education. Education isn't like a tie that you select for yourself that better matches your jacket.  Education is about basic knowledge. Civics -- not civics -- is the study of how your country is structured, a set of immutable facts.  Here are the three branches of the government. Here are the people who came up with this.  This is Thomas Jefferson, this is what he contributed to the discussion. This is where he prevailed. This is where he was ultimately proven right. This is how laws are made.

KANE: Even journalism now no longer is reportorial activity about external things. It's a purely subjective view of everything. Tom Wolf and all these people write such highly --

GOULART: Poetry in journalism.

KANE:  Yeah, such highly personal accounts that you're not even aware of what's really happening.

If Sickles hadn't realized by that point that this was a perfectly futile environment for advancing a factual argument -- that what people wanted in education and journalism had nothing to do with what education qua education and journalism qua journalism are and need to be, in the sense that he intended with his original observation: you need to teach immutable facts as a foundation for knowledge: what Civics is, what the Republic is, agreed-upon facts as the foundation for education and the foundation for journalism  -- he doesn't get far swimming upstream against it. Exactly three words and a contraction:

SICKLES:  Well, also, they're obscuring --

KANE: Well, that's my point. You're not getting the information.

Sickles must have been fuming, thinking, "No, that's not your point, that's my point. I was talking about history and Civics and our Republic and the immutable facts involved in those. You're the one who pulled this over into what people want in education. And compelling the inference that America is somehow external to all that, external to your internal world and the internal world of 'people'.  I'm not talking about 'people' generally, I'm talking about We The People, capital W capital T capital P.  And to me, as an American, that isn't external. I'm inside of that and that is inside of me." 

GOULART:  Anything as stylistic as that becomes a terribly plastic imitation of life.

Now (I infer) having a crystal-clear picture of what sort of people he was talking to and what sort of opinions they held and (far worse) what they thought when they thought of America and Civics and the Republic and education and journalism -- where that carried their thoughts -- Sickles cuts to the chase.

SICKLES:  My wife is a tremendous reader. Always has been. She's aware of everybody and how they write and so on. She just can't find things to read now, because she dislikes intensely this obscure attack-writing. She doesn't think they have anything to say. 

Which was obviously -- Sickles' definitive amputation of Kane's "and then we hit it  off" delusions: "we have nothing more to say to each other about this" -- exactly the kind of writing that Kane was feasting on and which, to Kane, constituted the highest elevations of intellectual discourse.  And which resonates -- make that Resonates -- with this appearing nearly fifty years later in a book called SPARRING WITH GIL KANE.  That's as close as you're going to get to High Irony in this world, I would say.

Kane, to Sickles, just sounded like the Times Literary Supplement and the highbrow Quality Lit Biz which had, as he relates his wife having noted, degenerated into obscure attack-writing. Everyone, like Kane, building his own DIY Olympus and tearing down everyone else's -- in his view -- faux DIY Olympus.

KANE: But, to a great extent now, that's beginning to ebb.

Well,  no, it wasn't and it hasn't. Progressives continue to erode discourse into Comics Journal-style attack pieces.  Kane, sensing too late the extent to which he has totally lost not only Sickles' sympathies but his engagement -- "We have nothing more to say to each other about this" --  attempts to project a kind of wishful thinking that "that's beginning to ebb" in an attempt to drag Sickles onto Gil Kane's metaphysical page.  What was ebbing was Gil Kane and his devoutly-to-be-wished-for status as a Noel Sickles peer. Not going to happen because he, Kane, was already too far into the progressive lotusland to even grasp Sickles' firmly-held foundational principles which weren't subject to qualification or relativism. You abandon those and you've abandoned Sickles. Period.

SICKLES:  Well, we've kind of digressed. Let's get on to the strip.

Goulart mentions in his introduction that Kane had been attempting to arrange a visit to Noel Sickles in his Stamford, CT apartment -- roughly twenty miles away -- for some time.  "To no avail". They ultimately got together at Gil Kane's place in Wilton, CT. 

It took place on September 6, 1973, the seventeenth anniversary of the car accident that claimed the life of Stamford resident Alex Raymond. Wilton is barely five miles from the Westport accident site itself. 

Raymond/Sickles/Stamford

Drake/Kane/Westport-Wilton

Comic Art Metaphysics (I infer).

END OF MAJOR DIGRESSION    

      

NEXT PART FIVE:  GETTING BACK TO DAVE SIM'S JIGSAW PUZZLE PIECE #2, THE FIRST TCJ GIL KANE INTERVIEW (I actually ordered a copy of this issue of TCJ, and will be faxing it up to Dave as soon as I get it -Matt)

Seen here with a  1958(?) corvette

Dave Sim is the creator of Cerebus the Aardvark, which ran for three hundred issues from December 1977 to March 2004 (and is available digitally here.) His latest project is The Strange Death of Alex Raymond (a fundraising Edition is available, details on how to get it here. And there is a Kickstarter for the Remastered version of Cerebus #1. His OTHER latest project is the ongoing Cerebus in Hell? (Daily strips are posted here, and the next #1 is Green Dante/Green Virgil (which should be in stores by the end of the month)). And every Friday he posts a video "update".

And HEY LOOK! a NEW Cerebus in Hell? #1:

I'm excited, this is the comic that made a "Manly" out of Matt Dow!

Link.

Click for bigger.

Next Time: Oliver and internet.