Dave Sim Discusses 'The High Society Collection' Art Auction

When Dave Sim announced in early February that he was auctioning some of his original Cerebus art from High Society via Heritage Auctions, I was worried. In his essay The End?, which appeared in the final issue of Glamourpuss #26 in 2012, he had outlined a 'Doomsday Scenario' in which a combination of falling sales on the Cerebus graphic novels and little prospect of other paying comics work, would force him to liquidate Aardvark Vanaheim and seek work in the Alberta tar sands. Had things really got that bad for him? I immediately faxed Dave 10 questions seeking clarification, and in the answers below, Dave explains his motivation behind the current art auction, his prospects in the comics industry, and thoughts on preserving the Cerebus Archive.

The 10 pages of High Society artwork being auctioned are reproduced below, together with links to Heritage Auctions, where you can place your online bid until 21 February. Alternatively you can bid in person at the live auction being held on 22 February at the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion, 2 East 79th Street, New York.

Cerebus #26 Page 10 - Cerebus #29 Page 9

A Moment Of Cerebus:

How did you select the 10 pages for The High Society Collection art auction?

Dave Sim:

I sent a copy of HIGH SOCIETY to Lon Allen, the consignment director at Heritage Auctions. A stand-up guy and early signer of the petition. Which blew me away. I only met him once when Pete Dixon brought him to town. Anyway, I sent him HS with all of the pages in the Cerebus Archive marked with a check mark in the upper right and left corners of the pages and asked him to list his preferences. Which he did.

Did you think these would be the most appealing to potential bidders, or were they just your least favourite pages?

Well, no, you can't really DO that: least favourite pages. Heritage is the third largest auction house in the WORLD right behind Christie's and Sotheby's and surging like crazy in the last year or so. Lon has years of expertise as to what sells and what doesn't -- not just good pages but pages that will look good on the catalogue page which is often -- but not always -- the same thing. Giving Heritage "least favourite" pages would be like going into the Stanley Cup finals, thinking, Well, let's just hang back and see how this goes. It's the Stanley Cup finals. You give it your absolute best. Like Mitch Williams (to mix a baseball metaphor in here) "I pitch like my hair's on fire."

What was the motive for the current auction? Are you just "testing the waters" of the original art market place, or is the auction part of your "Doomsday Scenario" as outlined in your essay The End? in glamourpuss #26?

Well, in a sense, when you're 57 years old in the comic-book field, everything is a Doomsday Scenario. I set this in motion by calling Lon and finding out if Heritage was interested, which they were. Very. So, that was very gratifying. But you have to start early. It's a long process of negotiation and I knew that would be the case. I set that in motion and then John and I did the Kickstarter campaign which didn't require AS early a start. It was successful but I guessed the money wouldn't last much past the end of the year with all the overhead and that was what happened. Lon and I weren't ready for the November auction which is what we originally planned. There was still some negotiating to do. But we were ready for the February auction. Lead time. Everything is lead time.

Cerebus #30 Page 13 - Cerebus #32 Page 16

Will you be selling any other pages in the foreseeable future, or is this it for a while?

I HOPE this is it, period.

In between winding up Kickstarter and moving the Heritage Auction along, Ted Adams at IDW -- another signatory to the petition, which is why I trust him implicitly -- sort of cautiously mentioned that they were doing MARS ATTACKS month and was I interested in doing a variant cover? My reputation -- which bears (and always has only borne) a vague resemblance to me -- precedes me. Everyone expects me to bite their head off whatever they're asking me. Heck, Ted, it sounds like fun. Is that really what they pay for covers these day? Wow. I was impressed.

A couple of weeks later, I thought, Maybe I'm being way too Rube Goldberg about this "how do I make a living in my fifties?" thing. Why not get basic and just do, say, four covers a month? So, I asked. Apprehensive that it would be, "Uh, no Dave -- just MARS ATTACKS, okay?" Letting me figure out for myself that I'm a) too old and b) completely out of fashion. No, not YET anyway. They had, like, 19 titles for me to pick from. Warning me away from the franchises that tend to want to micromanage the property.

And then a couple of weeks later it occurred to me: hey, what if I auction the covers through Heritage? That was one of the things Lon and I went around and around about. You want to BUILD a market for your work. Put a bunch of pages in the catalogue, fine, but they also do weekly auctions. Get buyers used to the pages turning up on an on-going basis. This ties in with your next question, so go ahead.

Cerebus #34 Page 12 - Cerebus #35 Page 19

Would you prefer to hang onto all your original art, and if so, why? Once you have a high resolution scan, what is the merit in holding onto the original art? Do you see this as your pension fund to sell at a future date, or would you prefer to keep the Cerebus Archive as complete as possible as part of your "legacy"?

Well, "legacy" in quotation marks pretty much sums up the current status quo, but, yes. The essence of the Cerebus Archive is the original artwork. Like the Andy Warhol Museum. What's the point of the Andy Warhol Museum? The paintings and the prints. The pages aren't stored in the house but the house, all the contents of the house and the off-site storage are considered the Cerebus Archive. That's what I see as my job to preserve. MY work and OUR -- Ger's and my -- work. No scan can do justice to original artwork although the technology is getting better. I don't think it will EVER be as good as the original art.

When we had a number of pieces in the Norman Rockwell Museum's COMIC LIT show that toured for years, I went to the opening in Stockbridge. Rockwell signed a PILE of prints before he died and they're using those at least partly to buy paintings back. Which was very foresighted of him. You see behind the scenes: this is how you do this. You create currency that will appreciate over the years that you can use to get the work out of private hands and into the hands of those charged with preserving your -- in Rockwell's case -- LEGACY.

In other words, you don't build the Cerebus Archive by selling HIGH SOCIETY pages. But I'm at the low ebb of earnings potential because of...let me be diplomatic...the political climate. I'm pretty sure the climate will change:  you can't ignore the only 6,000 page graphic novel forever, I don't think but it has been ignored for twenty years and there's no sign of it being paid attention to. People love Rockwell. People hate Dave Sim. So, for me, it requires more of a process of pulling the wagons in a circle and keeping my powder dry. Keeping myself and CEREBUS from being destroyed in my lifetime and for as long after I'm dead as proves to be necessary. I think about it a lot. I'm making progress.

Finishing off your previous question: I realized, God willing I'm going to have 48 IDW covers a year to sell. So, that's the fall-back position: Lon gets a cover a week pretty much through 2013 for his weekly auctions. I don't own the images. It's work-made-for-hire. It's really just a way to practice and learn photorealism and stylized realism. Once it's done it's a lesson learned, percolating through me during the three weeks I'm writing THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND and then applied to the next batch of covers and (ultimately) to the STRANGE DEATH pages when I'm at the point of doing them full time. And -- potentially, anyway, we'll see how it goes -- it means I don't have to sell CEREBUS artwork or STRANGE DEATH artwork or glamourpuss pages.

But I have that option (in reverse order of preference) if the economy continues to just limp along.

Cerebus #36 Page 1 - Cerebus #39 Page 17

Have you ever regretted selling a piece of your original art?

At a specific level, I regret having sold ANY of it, which is why I try to structure things so I don't have to. I envy people who have ALL of their own work. I think Wendy Pini still has all of ELFQUEST. I think Jeff Smith still has ALL of BONE. The Walt Simonsen THOR book IDW did was only possible because he had all the artwork. Good for Walt! I wish I could say that about HIGH SOCIETY.

Is it that you feel a bond toward it, or could you care less about it once it's printed?

Well, as I say, it's off-site so it's not something that's -- with apologies to Burt Bacharach -- "always there to remind me". Personally, no, I don't have a bond with it. It's just bad art. Things I tried to do well and was successful with to... a degree. 75%-happy-with-it pages, 50%-happy-with-it-pages. Some 90% happy with it. Mostly 95% happy with what Gerhard did pages, which is a different thing. The best analogy I could come up with would be Barry Windsor-Smith and "Red Nails". Barry isn't happy with it. It's like, "I know how to do all that much better now." The proportions are off. All you can see are the flaws that you couldn't see when you originally did it. But I saw it when I was 17 so I'll always see it as a 17-year-old would see it. "THIS IS BLOWING. MY. MIND." But to Barry it's just bad Barry art.

But, yes, definitely -- it's the work he's most known for in comics. For me, there should be a Gorblimey Museum or a promise of a Gorblimey Museum where you can go and see all of "Red Nails" on the wall. Or rotating 10 pages at a time. And that isn't going to happen. "Red Nails" was purchased in its entirety. So, it's in private hands. That means only one lucky guy gets to see it. Well, CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY are my "Red Nails" and I know that. You have to be able to stand back far enough to see what everyone else sees the way they see it and be... responsible... towards that. If I sold all of the CEREBUS artwork and STRANGE DEATH artwork and hung onto the glamourpuss pages -- my personal preference -- posterity would take a dim view. Like Lewis Carroll annotating thoroughly all of his treatises on mathematics and preserving the material. Get a grip. ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. That's what people want.

The political climate I referred to is at its worst in Kitchener. On top of which even the people who know what I did look down on it. Not with any animosity. It's just a comic book. Weird thing to do for a living. I know the guy who pretty much runs Heritage Kitchener. I know the Mayor. It's just not something we could have a conversation about. So, preserving it to a future day when that... POSSIBLY... isn't the case is a pretty much insurmountable task. But, then so was producing it in the first place, right? One example of insurmountable follows another. As Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his notebooks, "Learn young about hard work and good manners and you'll be through the whole nasty business and nicely dead again before you know it."

It came as an enormous surprise to me that I still had 190 pages of HIGH SOCIETY when I had to go and get them for Sandeep to scan. Just a PILE of artwork. I thought it was like CEREBUS where I have maybe two dozen. That was what made me think: Well, okay, you've got about 170 pages more than you thought you did. It's a good representation. What's 10 pages going to hurt?  It was a very unhappy first step though.

Cerebus #44 Page 1 - Cerebus #50 Page 1

Are there any pages/illustrations you absolutely would never sell?  If so, which and why?

Never say never. Another massive hit to the global economy like September 2008 and I could be trading HIGH SOCIETY pages for loaves of bread in my 70s and 80s.

I think you mentioned during HARDtalk interview / HARDtalk Tour that Gerhard still had an ownership interest in his Cerebus art. Does this factor into your selling timetable at all, or do you control when/where it sells?

It factored into the decision to do HIGH SOCIETY pages. Those pages are mine so I have control there of when/where it sells.

For tax reasons, the artwork is considered the property of Aardvark-Vanaheim and is valued based on the raw materials that went into it which Aardvark-Vanaheim paid for. So, basically $5 worth of illustration board, ink, tone, border tapes, etc. When I bought Gerhard's 40% of the company, we basically did "one for me, one for you" on paper. We both have a complete inventory of the artwork with every other listed page highlighted in yellow. It was a way of avoiding trade-offs -- oh, I wanted THIS page or I'll trade you all of THIS issue for all of THAT issue. I forget if Gerhard has the yellow pages or I do. The idea is if someone wants to make an offer on a page or cover, he or she makes it to whoever has "jurisdiction" over that page or cover. The "jursidication" guy says a) okay, it's yours.  b) he gets paid and c) he pays the other guy whatever he considers a fair share of the offered price (bearing in mind that he'll be on the other end of that if the other guy sells a page). We did that with a few covers that Gerhard had jurisdiction over -- wide range of prices, to establish the principle: these don't have a fixed value until someone makes a solid offer. Ger looked at what I had done and paid me what he thought my part was worth on THAT cover. That's the way it's stood since 2006. I haven't sold anything I have jurisdiction over and neither has Ger. We're both old enough to think "You know, I will probably live to see the $20 loaf of bread and the $40 jug of milk." 

Have you kept a scan/photocopy of all the non-'comic page' illustrations you do? I'm sensing the potential for an ART OF DAVE SIM book from IDW after the CEREBUS COVERS books.

It would be nice to think. Like I say, people love Norman Rockwell and people hate Dave Sim. That's going to be reflected in the level of interest for however long that proves to be the case. Could be "all better" now, could be booming like a skyrocket -- everyone loves me or loves my work, could be tanking -- Dave who? Chris Ryall, the editor-in-chief,  really likes the covers I'm doing for IDW. REALLY likes the covers I'm doing for IDW. Right now, that's the middle of the circle around which I have my metaphorical wagons. I really don't want to do anything with IDW which has the potential of them saying "WTF?" when they look at the sales figures. The impression is that the COVERS books will do land-office business. If they DON'T do land-office business, I'll still have my cover rate and whatever I can make from Heritage auctioning them. It's buying me time to do THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND. I really can't ask for more than that.

The prices on the HIGH SOCIETY pages are already about as high as I thought they would end up, so there IS cause for optimism. I can't even guess which page will go for the most. But, that's what makes horse races.

Bottom line: if the covers deal with IDW maintains itself and they hit a certain price point in the Heritage Auctions, yes, these will be the LAST "High Society Collection" pages you will be seeing.

Now, YOU guess what that means. :)

Own a piece of Cerebus! Dave Sim's High Society Collection of original Cerebus art is being auctioned by Heritage Auctions. You can place your online bid until 21 February or bid in person at the live auction being held on 22 February at the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion, 2 East 79th Street, New York. The pages being auctioned are:

Cerebus #26 Page 10 - Cerebus #29 Page 9 - Cerebus #30 Page 13

Cerebus #32 Page 16 - Cerebus #34 Page 12 - Cerebus #35 Page 19

Cerebus #36 Page 1 - Cerebus #39 Page 17 - Cerebus #44 Page 1 - Cerebus #50 Page 1

"The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond" Update - February 2013

Help finance Dave Sim to complete 'The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond'.

Originally serialised within the pages of the self-published Glamourpuss #1-26 (April 2008 to July 2012), The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond is an as yet uncompleted work-in-progress in which Dave Sim investigates the history of photorealism in comics and specifically focuses on the work of comic-strip artist Alex Raymond and the circumstances of his death on 6 September 1956 at the wheel of fellow artist Stan Drake's Corvette at the age of 46.

DAVE SIM:
(from the Kickstarter Update #141, 14 February 2013)

Okay, I'm making some progress on THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND but there will be a period of time where HIGH SOCIETY and CEREBUS being brought back into print will be taking precedence.  George [Gatsis] is finished his months-long meticulous tweaking of the digital files and everything is up to snuff. Now we have to coordinate with the printer and get an idea of how many copies Diamond wants (that I will be signing and numbering). If you're interested, you should mention it to your local store owner and tell her or him to watch for word from Diamond when the books are all actually printed and ready to ship (I'm guessing the beginning of April at the earliest -- but it's hard to tell). Gold Logo HIGH SOCIETY, Gold Logo CEREBUS -- the signed and numbered ones.

I appreciate the donations to the Dave Sim Fund -- $1, $5 or $10, it all helps. It all tends to come in right after one of these updates, so I'm trying to figure out how to do more frequent updates. :)

The bottom line on this Kickstarter campaign is that we are about $3K in the red (the total tax bill came to about $10K and there was $7K left). So, at some point John and I are going to have a serious discussion about whether it's really possible to do Kickstarter. With this first one, all of the money basically paid me to do all the pledge items for three months and then pay to ship all of them, get the HIGH SOCIETY pages scanned and... that was it. Of course a lot went wrong. Learning experience.

So -- right NOW -- I'm trying to get really basic and just do regular covers and variant covers for IDW (which is actually quite a bit of fun) and then auction the original art through Heritage Auctions, so I should have a good idea of how viable that is as an economic model as we go along here in 2013.

Glamourpuss #15 (September 2010)
Art by Dave Sim

Still no idea how LONG THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND is. Every time I read it through from the beginning, it's a lot better than I tend to think it is, which is a good sign.  Lots of research materials from Eddie Khanna. He seems to have an unnaturally good eye for what it is that I'm looking for. I'm being really thorough since it's my full-time -- 12 hours a day -- job. As an example I read a 186-page book yesterday from about 3 pm to midnight and got maybe three or four captions out of it. But, that's a luxury that YOU'RE helping to pay for. So far, I'm not having to say "Um, the bank account is dropping like a stone -- have to figure out something to make money at."  It's dropping, but not like a stone. So, I can just go item by item in my head. "I need to find out about...THIS". Like the Grace Kelly material Eddie I had a dialogue about in the last few issues of glamourpuss. Okay, I have to fit this into the actual narrative. Which means reading the "state of the art" biography which varies a lot from Wikipedia and movie sites. Wikipedia is good, but anything that I read that I'm going to use, I want to check with actual BOOKS. Check a Wikipedia listing and LITERALLY go, "You're s--ting me!" (and I don't usually swear). Find another state of the art biography. Read the relevant section. Uh, yeah, seems it really DID happen. Read all the stuff around it. Seriously creeped out. Put the book back and go home. Sitting there going, You can't just get creeped out. You have to read ALL of it. Which I did. 15 or 20 captions out of 500 pages. So that's been a couple of 500-page books just in the last month. But, that's really only two days each because it's my full-time job. And I read VERY fast when I'm working. That hooked up with a movie. So, I borrow that at the library. I'll just sit back and watch it. And I'm pausing it every 45 seconds and sitting there going. WHAAT? Did I really just hear that? Yes, yes I did. Which led to another movie. Again, only a dozen or so captions out of each, but WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN first. Then mull it over. Clear image of the structure in my mind:

THESE parts go in the narrative, THESE parts go in the annotations at the back (literally thinking of calling it TMI [Too Much Information] -- don't get in the way of the forward momentum, the jaw-dropping stuff, but if you're someone who likes MORE jaw-dropper after the original jaw-dropper, well, here you go).

I can't emphasize enough how much of a luxury this is, as a writer.

Glamourpuss #15 (September 2010)
Art by Dave Sim

I dread Eddie's packages coming in in a way because I'm always thinking: what if this just drives a Mac truck through my thesis? So far, exactly the opposite. As an example, the "Unnamed Section" is still the "unnamed section" and I was leaning in the direction of just dropping it. "It's kind of grafted on, it's going to be controversial. I'll make it another book if need be." I mean, Eddie wouldn't even Google it on his work computer. Not really. But he is thinking -- as Arsenio Hall used to say -- "Things that make you go HMMMMM." And just in the last week while I'm hooking everything up, boom, there's a reference to it, boom, there's another reference to it. As another example I was thinking "Okay, I read something about this years ago, what was that book called?" Buried in a biography. I know it's there if I SEE the book title. I read it in the early 90s. Turns out that there was now A WHOLE BOOK on the subject. I thought it was a real stretch. "Here, here's my proof:  this paragraph in one book on this person that no one else has previously referred to." Turns out everyone was just waiting for the subject of the book to pass on and then they started leaking like sieves.

It's been that kind of experience.

Eddie and I keep freaking each other out: "You couldn't make this stuff up." At least I couldn't and I think we'd all agree I'm not an unimaginative person.

Glamourpuss #15 (September 2010)
Art by Dave Sim

I'm still in the situation of getting by on the IDW covers money and your donations, but I have contacted Ted Adams about IDW possibly doing THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND as a monthly comic and, yes, he's up for it. Should we have a phone conversation? he faxes back. No, I'm still writing it. It's WAY off in the future. To do it as a monthly title I need to have the whole thing finished up to...I don't know what page. Covers, text stuff at the back, letters, etc. Because monthly you're talking about Running Ahead of the Freight Train. And "RAFT" when you're 57 is a world of different from when you're 47 which is the last time I did it.  How much of a head start do I need to have on the freight train to keep from just getting chewed up in the wheels six months down the road? NO ONE is going to sit still for me saying "Um, the freight train has caught me, so no monthly comics until I get an even longer head start." Everybody be getting serious whiplash. YOU CAN'T JUST LEAVE US HANGING LIKE THIS! As you all peer in at the Dave Sim hamburger whirling around in the freight train wheels, waiting for the hamburger to reassure you in some way.

Uhhhh.

But, the point is:
This is what you're helping pay for. 12-hour days to get me into the on-deck circle. I really, really appreciate it. Okay, I'll be back in a month (or earlier, maybe, I don't know).

Comic Arts Patrons #3-5

Own a piece of Cerebus! Dave Sim is auctioning 10 pages of High Society original art at Heritage Auctions. Internet bids can be placed until 21 February, or you can bid in person at the live auction held in the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion, 2 East 79th Street, New York on 22 February. The pages being auctioned are:

Cerebus #26 Page 10; Cerebus #29 Page 9; Cerebus #30 Page 13;

Cerebus #32 Page 16; Cerebus #34 Page 12; Cerebus #35 Page 19;

Cerebus #36 Page 1; Cerebus #39 Page 17; Cerebus #44 Page 1; Cerebus #50 Page 1.

(Click image to enlarge)

Dave & Deni: Parental Approval

Cerebus Archive #14 (June 2011)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from Cerebus Archives #14, June 2011)

The thing about fornication is that it accelerates (and, I now believe, derails) the whole process of what would otherwise be called courtship. Obviously Deni was concerned that all it was was fornication and (good test) asked if I wanted to come over to her parents place and meet the family on Boxing Day and watch Yellow Submarine on their colour television (we were both Beatles fans, Deni lifelong and me mostly from working at Now & Then). Sure! I said, eager to solidify the boyfriend / girlfriend thing and having NO idea how big a step meeting the family is until I was over there and meeting the family. They were all at the dining room table eating lunch when we arrived, her younger brother Michael greeting me with, "So this is the new one." Her younger sister Karen, wearing a John Lennon t-shirt, was obviously physically more attractive than Deni so I was instantly in a pre-Hannah & Her Sisters enactment (it was certainly a relief when the movie can out. Oh, so it ISN'T just me going through this -- I seem to recall that Mia Farrow had a much prettier sister). Deni's parents seemed stand-offish but that had more to do with the family dynamic with which I was unfamiliar -- the kids at one end of the table and the adults at the other end of the table carried on separate and distinct conversations.

Most relevant to my present point, however, is that I'm pretty sure her father had me sized up as an unsuitable candidate for son-in-law pretty quickly -- which I'm sure was a 100% accurate assessment. Deni was a flighty and unfocused residual hippy who seldom lasted long in any job and here was this high school dropout making $75 a month working in a used bookstore and who wanted to be a professional cartoonist. It wasn't a good match. We had basically the same flaws and I brought nothing to the table.

But the thing was we were -- even way back then -- well past the point in our society where a father's opinion meant anything. Deni would get involved with whomever she wanted to get involved with and her father was in a "like it or lump it" situation, like all fathers post-feminism.

It's a major conundrum. If your ambition as a society is to have as many successful and lasting marriages as you can have -- and I can't think of a more accurate definition of what most women would see as the ideal society -- the evidence is clear that that happened far, far more often when a suitor needed to ask the father's permission to ask for his daughter's hand in marriage and that it was only when daughters started making their own choices the divorce rate skyrocketed. Fathers instinctively protect their daughters from long-term harm, but only if they're expected to and allowed to.

But, of course, that doesn't conform to the romantic ideal of love at first sight and so on. In that context -- as we see in fiction from the Bronte sisters forward -- any father who doesn't rubber stamp his approval is the villain, the enemy of true love. Which is absurd. No father wants to hurt his daughter emotionally but that -- more often than not -- conflicts with his deep desire not to see his daughter hurt more seriously. I assume Ned Loubert knew that Deni could only get hurt out of an involvement with me. It was just a matter of time. Of course, Deni and I would both have been outraged if he had expressed disapproval but that's just the difference that results from shifting society 90 degrees out of whack, removing fathers from their traditional role as the sole voice of reason and sober assessment in the maelstrom of emotion-based female decision-making.

As I say, it's a conundrum because women are understandably loathe to surrender any part or their perceived absolute control over their romantic lifestyle choices. They don't want to be chattel -- either their father's or their longed-for husband's. However, the evidence of the last four decades suggest that the more absolute control women insist on having over their romantic choices the less absolute control, on a percentage basis, they are going to end up having over their desired outcome (stable, long-term marriages).

I point this out as a repentant serial fornicator with no further stake in either the fornication game: every serial fornicator is well aware and takes full advantage of the fact -- though loathe to admit it -- that the odds of getting a lot of sequential no-obligation sex (that is, sex that leads away from rather than to marriage) from a variety of women over short periods of time (from one-night stands to a few years of on-again off-again dating and "dating") go up exponentially the more women have absolute control over their romantic decision-making. The last thing the love 'em and leave 'em bad boy want is for women's fathers to be reintroduced into the equation even as advisers, let alone final arbiters... because that leads directly to rather than away from marriage.

It's an either-or situation that, it seems to me: women don't want to face: that absolute control leads most often to heartbreak either immediately or in a few years time while the surrendering of SOME control leads to a stable and enduring marriage.

Had Deni allowed her father to vet her choices, I'd guess she'd be happily married today.

But certainly not to me.

Deni Loubert was Aardvark-Vanaheim's publisher for the first 70 issues of Cerebus. Deni and Dave Sim were married from October 1978 to August 1983. After their divorce, Deni moved to Los Angeles to start her own comics publishing company, Renegade Press, which closed its doors in 1989. She was inducted into the Joe Shuster Hall of Fame in 2010.

Dave & Deni: First Date

Cerebus Archive #14 (June 2011)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from Cerebus Archive #13, April 2011)

In our last joint interview (published exactly seven years later in issue 31 of Toronto's Shade magazine) I said that I had "fallen madly in love" while Deni had said "I was looking for an artist and Dave was looking for a girlfriend." Both are partially true. Actually I was looking a) to get laid and b) to get married. I basically did everything Gene [Day] did. Gene was married so I wanted to be married. And I definitely didn't want to die a virgin so that was (with apologies to the Ford Motor company) "Job One". (It's the wrong way around. But this was just at the beginning of the steep plummet in successful marriages which is now below 40% and projected to hit 0% sometime around 2028). I had had my own place for two weeks. It was time to lose my virginity. Made perfect sense to me at the time...

Deni ended up making a preemptive strike, coming back to the store the next night after work and asking if I'd like to come over for dinner the next night, Saturday... (saying later, "I thought to myself, who am I? Mary Tyler Moore? I don't cook!"). I think the answer to that was that she needed something to trade, given that she didn't have an office to impress me with or a magazine in raw -- let alone prototype -- form. And she, like me, had just paid first and last month's rent so she was in no position to pay for anything... By rights, I should have just given Deni a flyer that I had done up with my price list: $10 for an illustration -- and left it at that. Instead? Why yes, I'd love to come over for dinner.

She said she would come and get me the next night when I was done work. 6pm. Which she did. Was she suddenly self-conscious about offering to make me dinner when we had just met and exchanged only a few words, all of which were -- at least ostensibly -- on a business level?... figuring the walk over to her place would 'give us time to get somewhat acquainted? Was she perhaps worried that I wouldn't show up? Was coming and getting me a way of making sure that if sh was going to make me dinner (already an 'over the top' thing to do especially in those early years of feminism) she was going to make darn sure I was there to eat it? Or was it as simple as the fact that there were four front entrances to her apartment building and she wanted to make sure I picked the right one? Whatever the reason, she was there promptly at 6pm and we walked three blocks north on Queen and two blocks west on Weber...

Deni Loubert was Aardvark-Vanaheim's publisher for the first 70 issues of Cerebus. Deni and Dave Sim were married from October 1978 to August 1983. After their divorce, Deni moved to Los Angeles to start her own comics publishing company, Renegade Press, which closed its doors in 1989. She was inducted into the Joe Shuster Hall of Fame in 2010.

Dave & Deni: "Hi, Are You Harry?"

Cerebus Archive #13 (April 2011)
Art by Dave Sim
(Click image to enlarge)

DAVE SIM:
(from Cerebus Archive #13, April 2011)

The [1976 Forest Heights High School] convention was a significant event for me: my first as a guest, actually sitting on a panel with Gene Day and T. Casey Brennan. It was also the place where Harry Kremer had announced that he was renting the downstairs at 103 Queen St S. for an expansion of Now & Then Books... and where he agreed to hire me as the sales clerk for $75 a month... It was also at that convention that I first saw Deni [Loubert], but not where I first met Deni. She was in the audience at the panel I was on with Gene and Casey, which was held in an unused classroom. The panel was very sparsely attended -- the audience members barely outnumbering the panelists (6-3, 5-3?). What I didn't know at the time -- and what I didn't find out until much later -- was that she was there doing research... research for a fiction magazine she was planning at the time called Cerebus... a misspelling of Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded Hades in Greek mythology. I would suspect this is what happened: she had glommed onto Dark Fantasy at the show... (Gene would have had copies of his zine to sell -- either himself or on the Now & Then table in the foyer 'Dealer's Room')... as the incarnation of what she wanted to do: 'How do you go about doing this?' she must have asked Gene...

Whatever issues of Dark Fantasy she had picked up at the convention, it's pretty clear that once she got them back to her parents' house and had a chance to look at them and read them she had definitely decided that this was what she had wanted Cerebus to be. Somewhere around here, both Harry Kremer and Now & Then Books entered the picture. Exactly how and when I don't know. There are several possibilities.

Possibly, she had asked Gene at the convention "If I had a magazine like this, where would I sell it?" Again, in a convention context, Gene would have avoided such a large subject by retreating into generality: "Here in Kitchener, the best place would be Now & Then Books..." Qualifying this with: "You'd have to show it to Harry to see if he was interested."

Possibly, While she was buying the issues of Dark Fantasy at the Now & Then Books table she picked up or was given one of Harry's store business cards (knowing the VIP treatment girls get in comic stores today, you can imagine what it was like in 1976).

Possibly the convention didn't enter in to it, she might have bought a Dark Fantasy issue or issues at Now & Then, read it or them and then gone back, asking someone working the till about how she could sell her magazine, Cerebus, there and had been told by Harry's mother or someone, "You would have to talk to Harry."

Actually, that last scenario fits the known facts in a way that doesn't otherwise accommodate an obvious question: Why would Deni have gone into the downstairs section looking for the owner of Now & Then Books... when the only Now & Then sign was over the upstairs window? Unless she had been to the upstairs earlier in the week when the Thursday-through-Saturday downstairs had been closed and now seeing the downstairs lit up, and a guy standing behind the counter -- visible through the window -- had thought, "Oh, this must be him." Anyway, she's just gotten off work at the Forsyth Shirt Factory at the corner of Duke and Young Streets. About four blocks away. She opens the door, steps inside, closes it behind her and says: "Hi, are you Harry?"

Cerebus Archive #13 (April 2011)
Art by Dave Sim

Deni Loubert was Aardvark-Vanaheim's publisher for the first 70 issues of Cerebus. Deni and Dave Sim were married from October 1978 to August 1983. After their divorce, Deni moved to Los Angeles to start her own comics publishing company, Renegade Press, which closed its doors in 1989. She was inducted into the Joe Shuster Hall of Fame in 2010.

Comic Arts Patrons #6-9

Collect the set! 'Comic Art Patrons' images #10-14, #15-20.
(Click image to enlarge)

Own a piece of Cerebus! Dave Sim is auctioning 10 pages of High Society original art at Heritage Auctions. Internet bids can be placed until 21 February, or you can bid in person at the live auction held in the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion, 2 East 79th Street, New York on 22 February. The pages being auctioned are:

Cerebus #26 Page 10; Cerebus #29 Page 9; Cerebus #30 Page 13;

Cerebus #32 Page 16; Cerebus #34 Page 12; Cerebus #35 Page 19;

Cerebus #36 Page 1; Cerebus #39 Page 17; Cerebus #44 Page 1; Cerebus #50 Page 1.

Collect the set! 'Comic Art Patrons' images #10-14, #15-20.
(Click image to enlarge)

Beat The Hsiffies! Buy Bonds!

Cerebus #21(October 1980)
Art by Dave Sim

MATTHEW MEYLIKHOV:
(from 365 Day Of Cerebus: Part 1, posted at Multiversity Comics, 31 January 2013)

...rather quickly the book [Cerebus Vol 1] becomes full of pieces that offer up parodies or satire of various characters, tropes and ideas. The earliest I can recall seeing it is the Red Sonja parody Red Sophia, but it continues throughout, such as the above Cockroach/Captain Cockroach, a figure who comes into clash with Cerebus. His first appearance allows Sim to lampoon the Batman-archetype of a character seeking justice within the night whose secretly a rich man by day, and Sim plays up Cerebus’ inherent greed in the issue for quite a few laughs. Later Cockroach comes back as a Captain America-type goon (complete with sidekick Bunky) who is molded and used by the aforementioned President Weisshaupt, and through this Sim gets to have his kicks at Marvel/DC's expense long before it became a popular storytelling mechanic in modern day comics. And, honestly, it's a lot more funny when Sim does it, because not only does he act 100% less subtle about it (going so far as to actually draw Swamp Thing and Man-Thing together at one point) but he uses the parodies to actually say something, rather than simply using it as a device for readers to instantly connect with a "new hero."

That's one of the things about modern day comics that pales in comparison with the examples in this book. You pick up a book like Invincible, which is great on its own, but it features a Justice League parody in the second arc that is very little more than a parody of the Justice League. There’s really nothing more to it than that. The use of a Captain America pastiche in Cerebus gives Sim an issue or two to criticize several things, the most obvious two of which are the depictions of costumed crusaders and how foolish/unrealistic they are - both in the terms of their general ethos and their builds – and how they’re used, or can be used, as propaganda tools. Issue #21 is filled with this pseudo-racism against an nonexistent group of people, yet what Sim is calling attention to is not even remotely subtle within the books depiction of characters and the reflection of cultural tension in a post-WW2 environment while taking stabs at cultural tension during WW2. Sim does more with one issue and a few elements than most writers bother to do today, because it’s a lot easier to just throw in a character who is like Batman or Captain America into your book than to actually do anything of meaning or worth with.

Cerebus vs Spider-Ham

Cerebus vs Spider-Ham (2008)
Art by Dave Sim

This original art for this Spider-Ham parody was auction on e-bay for $1,513.

Secret Invasion was a Marvel comic book crossover storyline that ran through a self-titled eight issue limited series and several tie-in books from April through December 2008. The story involves a subversive, long-term invasion of Earth by the alien Skrulls. Capable of shapeshifting, the Skrulls have secretly replaced many of Marvel's heroes with impostors over a period of years, prior to the overt invasion. Marvel's promotional tagline for the event was "Who do you trust?"

This Man... This Monster!

Fantastic Four #51 (1966), art by Jack Kirby
Marvel Fanfare #15 (1984), art by Barry Windsor-Smith

DAVE SIM:
(from The Jack Kirby Collector #27, February 2000)

I'm not sure what issue the FF was up to at the time I finally started reading it. I think around #70 or #75 and, as I said, you could pick them all up for a dollar or two at the time - most of them for a quarter, so I had a run in pretty short order except for the first ten or so which I had seen and read. I don't know if you're allowed to say this in The Jack Kirby Collector, but I thought the quality had tailed off pretty dramatically by the time of Wyatt Wingfoot and the Negative Zone and stuff. The first Inhumans storyline - #44 or #45 and leading into #51's This Man, This Monster, which I really thought was the high point of Stan and Jack's run on the book - I guess that I'm really thinking about the Thing here. When you consider what Kirby did in developing the look of the character in a little more than four years - when Barry Windsor-Smith did his Thing story in Marvel Fanfare, I got the sense that he responded to the character in the same way and had to do his This Man, This Monster take at some point or die a lesser man for not having done so. I've never been that way about corporate characters or I would probably have to do a Thing story myself at some point. I think Jack Kirby put a lot of himself into the Thing. I think Stan Lee was a mix of Reed Richards and Johnny Storm the way Jack Kirby saw him, but Jack was just this irresistible force of nature who saw himself as a big pile of orange rocks.

Comic Arts Patrons #10-14

(Click image to enlarge)

Own a piece of Cerebus! Dave Sim is auctioning 10 pages of High Society original art at Heritage Auctions. Internet bids can be placed until 21 February, or you can bid in person at the live auction held in the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion, 2 East 79th Street, New York on 22 February.  The pages being auctioned are:

Cerebus #26 Page 10 - Cerebus #29 Page 9 - Cerebus #30 Page 13

Cerebus #32 Page 16 - Cerebus #34 Page 12 - Cerebus #35 Page 19

Cerebus #36 Page 1 - Cerebus #39 Page 17 - Cerebus #44 Page 1 - Cerebus #50 Page 1

(Click image to enlarge)

Gene Colan (1926-2011)

Gene Colan: Master Of Darn Near Everything (2008)
Art by Dave Sim

COMICS BULLETIN:
(from Obsessions, Hard Truths, & A Plush Aardvark, Comics Bulletin, 19 January 2013)

One of my favourite books is Tomb of Dracula. What Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan did with Dracula was to make him someone you could understand and feel complex levels of sympathy for. In the series, the reader's impulse is always with the vampire hunters because Dracula’s evil. He kills people. Wolfman has Dracula marry and have a child who betrays him. Before the end of the series, Dracula is turned into a human and he is put into a position where he needs to defend a group of innocent villagers against a group of vampires. As he does so, there's this amazing scene where Dracula picks up a cross to ward off the vampires. His hands are burning as he fights, you see the steam flying off his hands and the look of pure torture on his face as he's doing it to save these children. It's a reminder that beneath his evil exterior there is the soul of a good man.

Several issues later, in the last issue of Tomb of Dracula, Dracula is killed -- oh, 'spoiler alert' for a comic that came out in 1979 -- and his castle is blown up. Wolfman writes: 'Aye, he was a hero. A hero and a scourge. A ruler and a despot. A savior and lord of darkness. He died for his country and he was reborn without his soul. His name was Dracula, and his history was a tapestry of terror sewn across the ages… We who have chronicled his five hundred years and more have stood back and shown his existence without critique. But now that it is over we have but one thing to say. Dracula was a man. And that should never be forgotten.' In an odd way, I think that's a great analogy for Sim. He's not a life sucking vampire; no one would ever accuse him of that. He's a man who has done amazing things and he's created some work that we find aberrant. He's a man and that shouldn’t be forgotten; he's got all the complexities that any of us have, only he's played them out in public. If we can't accept him as a person in all his complexity then I don't think we're doing justice to the full panoply of human experience or emotions.

Eugene Jules "Gene" Colan (1926-2011) was best known for his work for Marvel Comics, where his signature titles included Daredevil, Howard the Duck, Doctor Strange, and between 1972 and 1979 he drew 70 consecutive issues of The Tomb of Dracula, one of comics' classic horror series. 

Jeffrey Catherine Jones: Better Things

Glamourpuss #5 (January 2009)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
('The Influence Of The Studio' - from an interview in UK fanzine FA #115, 1990)
Jeff Jones, because of his ability to take Hal Foster to the next level. Hal Foster was a definite primary influence at the time of the Idyl strips. But his ability, as opposed to Wrightson who shores up the whole page - there's depth and substance and layers that go in - Jeffrey Jones in his strip work has huge areas of black, huge areas of white and anything that's rendered in detail is in the tiniest, finest line imaginable. To take that feeling and combine it with the pleasing warmth that Wrightson has, and try to filter that as well.

Jeffrey Catherine Jones (1944-2011) was the artist best known for the comic Idyl. From 1975 to 1979 she shared workspace in Manhattan's Chelsea district, with Bernie Wrightson, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Michael William Kaluta, collectively named The Studio. The film project Better Things: The Life & Choices Of Jeffrey Catherine Jones is in need of your support. Donate now at Indiegogo for your copy of the DVD and Art Book.

The High Society Collection: Original Art Auction

Own a piece of Cerebus! Dave Sim is auctioning 10 pages of High Society original art at Heritage Auctions. Internet bids can be placed until 21 February, or you can bid in person at the live auction held in the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion, 2 East 79th Street, New York on 22 February. The pages being auctioned are:

Cerebus #26 Page 10 - Cerebus #29 Page 9 - Cerebus #30 Page 13

Cerebus #32 Page 16 - Cerebus #34 Page 12

Cerebus #35 Page 19 - Cerebus #36 Page 1 - Cerebus #39 Page 17

Cerebus #44 Page 1 - Cerebus #50 Page 1

THE COMICS REPORTER:

I think those are some really cool pages, and practically even tiny dot of ink is a memory for me. While they are out of my price range, I'm sure there's someone out there reading this for which this will be a comfortable buy. If nothing else, you should maybe click through and go to the giant scans of the pages; they're really something, those scans.

Photorealistic Pin-Up #1: James Dean

James Dean (1931-1955) & his Porche 550 Spyder
Art by Dave Sim (Glamourpuss #20, July 2010)

The Eisner Influence

US Tour '92: Will Eisner & Dave Sim Meet In Miami
Back-cover, Cerebus #166 (January 1993)

COMIC BOOK RESOURCES:
(from When Worlds Collide by Timothy Callahan at Comic Book Resources, August 2011)

For all of the flaws of Cerebus, particularly in that final 7% of the series, I would say it's as good as the likes of Maus, Fun Home, or Persepolis largely because what it lacks in consistency it makes up for in artistry. There's no page in any of those three works that match any average page from "Cerebus," in terms of composition, storytelling or visual energy. And while those three books -- deservedly acclaimed -- tell autobiographical stories that resonate, "Cerebus" is a maximalist, culture-wide autobiography of an artist trying to tell the story of reality. And even as he gets it completely wrong, he pushes the boundaries of comic book art and storytelling farther than almost anyone before or since. I might have left out the "almost," if it weren't for Will Eisner. I think it is fair to call it the "Moby-Dick" of graphic narrative.

Two things, there, worth clarifying: (1) The character of Cerebus may not be a stand-in for Dave Sim the man or Dave Sim the artist, but "Cerebus" is as autobiographical as any comic book ever written, and (2) It is the only post-Eisner comic to use everything Eisner pioneered and then build on it.

That first point has led to much confusion and disappointment on the part of readers. I suspect that the reason the series has a reputation for falling apart in the final third is because readers were thinking that they were reading a comic about the exploits of Cerebus the aardvark and the world around him. It's easy to think that, after all -- the earth-pig's name is the title of the comic, and the character appears on more pages than anyone else. But, no, this is the autobiography of Dave Sim, or at least the internal autobiography of the artist known as Dave Sim. Gerhard plays a role too, but it's only a supporting one, like Cerebus. It's not Gerhard's story. It's not Cerebus' story. It's Dave Sim's story, and they are just part of the mechanism for getting it across.

If you read the series knowing it's Sim's autobiography, sometimes symbolically, sometimes literally, then the structure of the series makes a lot more sense. You might wonder why you'd want to read the autobiography of such a person. But he's far more fascinating than any aardvark, that's for sure, and he's done something no one has ever done in history: write and draw a 6000 page story about what's going on in his mind.

The second point may seem trivial, or irrelevant, at first glance. Surely everyone who draws comics has been influenced by Eisner, right? Okay, I wouldn't argue with that -- whether influence is direct or acknowledged or not -- but with Sim, it goes far beyond mere influence. "Cerebus," once it gets rolling, and once Sim abandons the Barry Smith mimicry and moves toward more character-based storytelling after year two, becomes a comic that embraces Will Eisner more than anyone else in history. Plenty of artists have built on Eisner's storytelling techniques, but most have only taken a piece here or a piece there. They haven't taken the full array of approaches that Eisner pioneered first in his post-war "Spirit" work and later in his original graphic novels. The use of white space, the borderless images, the movement around the page, using expressive lettering and figure drawings. Everything from the expressions of characters to the crosshatching of folds to the use of staggered word balloons against a black field to demonstrate aural depth. These are all Eisnerian touches, and Sim packs them all into the story. They are the internal mechanism which makes the art work, and then Sim takes it his own direction.

Someone smart once asked me (it was probably Matt Seneca) who I would name as an artist not influenced by Jack Kirby. Every name I came up with was a failure. Everyone, at least in North American comics, ends up under the Kirby banner. And certainly Sim is no exception, since Barry Smith (pre-Windsor) started out as a Kirby clone, and the initial "Conan" comics that inspired "Cerebus" were Smith-doing-Kirby-doing-barbarian-comics. And that's what Sim started with. But by the time he got to "High Society" the Eisner influence was far stronger. And if you ignore the early issues, you can almost imagine a widespread comic book landscape that sprung almost completely out of Eisner, rather than Kirby. This is what a world without Kirby might look like, I said to myself, reading the bulk of the "Cerebus" run after issue #25 or so. Not that I'd want a world without Kirby. Not for anything. But there's more Eisner in Sim's work than in all of his contemporaries, combined. To speak metaphorically about the effect on Sim's art: while the rest of the comic book artists of his era play with one hand tied behind their backs, Sims plays as if he's got five hands, and they're all trained by Eisner.

True Creative Freedom

Glamourpuss #9 (September 2009)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from an interview in UK fanzine FA #94, December 1985)

...I talked to Bill Sienkiewicz a couple of nights ago and basically proposed that he do a book for Aardvark Vanaheim. And the way I proposed it to him was that he would have to produce 20 pages of black and white artwork. I would want him to announce how many issues he was going for - I told him I would prefer 30 to 40 as opposed to 4 or 6 or 8 as everyone else is doing that - and that I did not want story ideas, I did not want an outline, I did not want a script, I did not want to see the pencils. Get it in shape, get it in the format, send it to the printer and when the first issue comes in I'll read it. To me that's creative freedom, because it becomes a crutch if I say to Bill, send in a treatment of what you're going to do, it becomes a crutch and an impediment on the one hand because if I write back and say "fabulous, go ahead," then he feels more secure in an illusory sense that now this is a good idea because Dave said so and Dave's publishing, and that's not the point of it. The point of doing a Bill Sienkiewicz book is to say, if you do it for 40 issues it doesn't even have to make sense to you for the first ten, particularly in Bill's case. We have an idea in our mind of what Bill's going to do if somebody just turns him loose and says start doing page one, keep going, when you get near an idea start playing with that, but if you do things that you don't want to play up any more, drop them, and that's true creative freedom to me. If he sends in a treatment and I'm supposed to analyse it, or if he sends in  a treatment he's going to have to nail down elements of the story, to say and this is what happens around issue 30, and this is what happens in 32. Well, if he gets up around issue 15 and it's a Thimble Theatre situation, where it's all this band of characters and suddenly this sailor named Popeye walks in and takes the whole joint over. If he sends me a treatment saying this is where it's going and he can't pursue that, he can't just veer off here and say "here, this is what I'm going to do now." And the only restriction towards him is his own attitude to the sales figures. The first issue shipped 20,000, Bill, we've got orders for 15,000 of the second one, third issue comes out, we've got orders for 12,000 the 8,000 the 6,000, he's going to perform some radical surgery just because his income's at stake. But if he's going completely off the deep end and completely weirds out on everyone the circulation's going to go up, and if it goes up it says let's keep going as far over towards weird as we can get.