SANDEEP ATWAL:
(from comments on 'An Interview With Gerhard', 25 February 2011)
I interviewed him for the first time back in 1991 for the UW student
newspaper,
Imprint, then a couple of more times over the years. Shortly
before
Cerebus ended I asked if I could come over with some friends and film one of his last days drawing
Cerebus, we shot about eight hours. Shortly after
Cerebus
ended, I moved back to Waterloo from Toronto and started a small
magazine in town with some friends and got in touch with Sim to see if
he would be willing to write some stories to help out a self-publisher.
He was and he wrote some opinion pieces and we got to know each other a
bit better. The magazine only lasted a year but about a year after that I
started another magazine [
Versus] which lasted about three years. Dave helped
with that one as well painting several covers including portraits of L. Ron Hubbard, Lennox Lewis and Napoleon. Plus I'm really into Malcolm X
and he drew me a couple of pictures of him as well. (These days I
basically get one of those for every issue of
glamourpus and
Cerebus
Archive. I've got a job, so I really don't need the money and would MUCH
rather have the original art, and Dave's still paying off Gerhard, so
Dave agreed to a work-for-art deal. You should see the Groucho I've got,
it's great.) It was early 2006 (Sim had finished
Judenhass) when he asked if I wanted to help him out with
glamourpuss. Sure, why not?
To be perfectly honest, and I know nobody's really going to
believe me, but Dave Sim is pretty much just a normal guy. He's very
calm, deliberate, speaks thoughtfully, has a great sense of humour (as
one would expect if you've read Cerebus), likes to laugh, etc.
He's doing his best to be a straight-edge / no booze / no drugs / no
sex / upright / Godfearing / work hard / save money kind of guy. (Okay, I guess
that's not really normal....) He's up on his politics for sure, as am I,
which is what we spend most of our time talking about when he comes
over. But he's more of a classic old-school small-c conservative these
days, so we sort of clash on that front, but he's not exactly a stupid
man so the conversations are always quite interesting. We talk about
pretty much everything from comic books to the oil reserves of Saudi
Arabia to whether computers have a deleterious affect on human memory to
the Marx Brothers
to the current state of feminism to the possible unintended
consequences of QE2. Construction on King St. Whatever, just normal
conversations. You can't really talk to him about what's on TV or music
or movies, he doesn't keep up on it, though he does know some older
stuff. He knows all the words to Little Red Corvette.
He's quite generous. He is ALWAYS doing free stuff for people and
always has. As it says in the follow-up to the Gerhard interview:
...Sim
extended credit (and praise) to his partner in every way possible-
nominally, publicly, and financially...Sim noted and praised Gerhard’s
contribution to the book in virtually every public forum he had- in
interviews, in speeches and public appearances. Eventually Gerhard was
made a financial partner in the work as well, having a 40 percent stake
in the company up until the dissolution of their partnership."
Typical.
But he's a complete luddite (and proud of it), so he brings over the
original artwork for
gp and
CA on Saturday afternoons and I scan it in,
clean it up in Photoshop, bring it into InDesign, build the pages,
sometimes do some colour work for the covers, lay out the text, etc. and
create a PDF for the printer,
Lebonfon
in Quebec. (Who do a superb job on
glamourpuss btw.) Plus, I help him
with other stuff, look up Alex Raymond pictures on the internet, order
The Heart of Juliet Jones from Amazon, send the solicitation for the
next issue to Diamond, email someone a video clip for
Cerebus TV,
etc. It's pretty interesting. I work at Research in Motion like
everyone else in Waterloo, so basically my Saturdays are taken up with
Sim stuff. I work during the day, he usually swings by between 3 and 6,
we do the proofreading, scanning, download some photos, whatever. It's
work. Time consuming, don't mess it up, double check it, need to buy a
new printer, artist who drew the page is literally looking over your
shoulder, scanned in that page at the wrong dpi, why the fuck won't it
print the crop marks properly when I export it as a fucking PDF?!?! type
work. Plus, when you throw in
Cerebus Archive, some stuff for
Cerebus
TV, get a few more Stan Drake books, scan in all of
Rick's Story at 1200
dpi, set up a paypal account, email the publisher of the Italian
edition, double check the sales of the Spanish Edition-type mission
creep (that's not surprising when you're working with a well-known
workaholic) and it can be taxing.
He's just really into his work, so he can talk
Alex Raymond and
Al Williamson and
Stan Drake and
Hal Foster
and the difference between a Gillott 290 and a Hunt 102 till the cows
come home. I'm certainly interested in that as much as the next guy, but
outside of Sim, Moore, Ware, Pekar and a couple of others...
Akira,
Lone Wolf &Cub, I'm not really THAT into comics. I mean, not compared to Dave
Sim! (Here's a funny game I will play every once in a while....Q: "Hey
Dave, who did the lettering on Superman...uh....317? A: Uh,
geez...317....hmmm...that was that Neal Adams cover...November 1977 so
that would be Ben Oda. Curt Swan did the pencils." To describe his
knowledge of comic book history as astonishingly encyclopedic would be
an understatement. But, he would have no idea who's writing and drawing
Batman or Superman today. Having said that, he's probably helped out a
dozen self-publishers in the last year alone.)
He's kind of tired of Cerebus! Bit of an aardvark around his neck. If he
never has to draw Cerebus again, he'll be a happy man! Not bitter about
it, but you know, after 30-odd years you want to do something else once
in a while. (Like pretty girls in your best Al Wiliamson style, hence
glamourpuss). You know the funny thing is, even though he's been coming
over to my place for several years, we often end up talking about
everything EXCEPT Cerebus. But, whenever I ask him about something
C-related, you get the big whole long detail about what he was thinking
about at the time, the process that went into that, other possible
storylines, what he likes about it, what he doesn't like, what he thinks
about it twenty years later, etc. He can't stand looking at early work
like High Society, thinks it's completely amateurish. It's fascinating if you care about the work at all.
He's certainly no frothing-at-the-mouth misogynist, sorry to disappoint
the haters. The topic of feminism comes up as often as any other topic
of the day and quite frankly he's always pretty rational and evenhanded
on the issue. A little confirmation bias I suppose but not as bad as you
think. Traditional, I'd say. The thing I think people need to take into
consideration is this:
Cerebus, and specifically the Reads anti-feminism stuff or the God/YHWH stuff in Latter Days
is his best attempt to tell a story and explain how he sees the world
and he makes his argument as best he can, hopefully in an interesting
way as part of this large 6,000-page work. But by definition his book on
religion or his book on alcohol or his book on feminism is going to
have to be a tightly encapsulated point. He did the best he could. if
you don't buy it, and think it's all hatemongering nonsense, fine,
that's your view and you're entitled to it. But say you were to sit down
with Sim for a coffee for a few hours. Then maybe a couple of more
afternoons after that, well, then you get to have the back and forth
dialectic and ask him why he wrote X or Y and he explains it from his
point of view, and you agree with this part but not this part, and you
say why, then he says why he thinks he's right, because of a, b and c
reasons, and you say that you agree with a but b and c are not the case,
and he explains how he thinks that a necessarily leads to b because of
these clear historical examples and you disagree with the argument, and
you define your terms in a different way, then you settle on common
ground on this issue, but still have to deal with how you get to c, etc.
etc. etc. Well, after only a few conversations like that you might
still come to the conclusion that he's wrong about what he thinks are
the negative effects of feminism on marriage, alimony, paternity, domestic abuse,
etc., but I really don't think you'll come to the conclusion that he
deserves the batshitinsane tag. At least half a dozen of my friends have
met him, Trevor did some filming with him, Dave works on CerebusTV, and
I'm pretty sure we're not all misogynist assholes. Get all pissed off
about the Void thing and decide it's so evil he shouldn't be allowed in
polite society, I think it's an interesting story. And come on, he's
just as hard on Guys.
Maybe you don't see things as being as bad as Sim makes it out to be,
fine, but insane? Hardly. A lazy label and it just doesn't fit. (Anyway,
how the hell does a 'crazy' person run a successful publishing business
and get a monthly comic book out on time?)
As for the REALLY out there stuff? Well I certainly don't agree with him
100% of the time, but hey, if you're going to do a 6,000 page story
about an aardvark, you have to be a little crazy! (Tip your waitress.)
But seriously...yes, he can be harsh and yes he can be out there and yes
he can infuriate you and yes he can make you think. Isn't that what we
want out of our artists? If you want to talk about Dave Sim and
feminism, don't come at me after reading some quotes on some site. Read
the entire thing first. It's the least you can do if you want to engage
in some character assassination. Oh, you've read it all and you think he
IS batshitinsane and belongs in the same garbage dump as other complete
whackjobs like that crazy Steve Ditko? Fine. Goodbye.
I honestly consider Cerebus to be one of the most important
works of art of the 20th century. No doubt. Sure some of it's a slog,
but rip out the pages you absolutely hate and you'll still probably have
at least 4,000 pages of artistry, comedy and brilliance that defined
and redefined an entire medium. Both Dave Sim and Gerhard are two of the
world's greatest living cartoonists and yes I'm biased but I'm not the
only one who thinks so. Personally, I don't think Crumb, Clowes, Ware,
Spiegelman, McFarlane, Finch, Jaime Hernandez or any of those guys hold a
candle to him in terms of drawing or storytelling talent and I really,
really like some of those guys. Hidden amongst the silliness of
glamourpuss, you are watching a man who is learning how to draw as well
as Alex Raymond. Alex. Raymond. The Alex Raymond.
Alex "chastised for making his pictures too realistic, too gorgeous for
its own sake", "some sort of genius", "the artist's artist" Raymond. A
man who was able to draw lines with a Winsor-Newton Series 2 brush (not
pen, brush) that were so thin
that nobody else can do it. But Sim's getting there. As far as I'm
concerned, this is artistry and skill at a whole other level from Ghost
World or Love and Rockets.
It's been a pretty cool experience, that's for sure. But it's coming to
an end, it's just too much to work six days a week, it takes up too much
time, so after about 20-odd issues, I'll be slowly teaching Sim how to
do this himself. But yeah, overall, supernice guy.
Sandeep Atwal is currently Director of Communications at Aardvark Vanaheim.
