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.
