March 11, 2004

• The Dave Sim Misogyny Page.
• This review of Cerebus nicely sums up Dave Sim's descent into madness: It fascinates because Sim is an absolutely brilliant maker of pages, a sublime cartoonist with total control of the form... and because, during the progression of the work, you can clearly see his mind crumbling under the pressure of his immense undertaking and twenty-five years of increasing solitude in which he can only express himself to the world through the agency of a talking anteater. It's almost a shame that the big 500-page collections don't include the personal notes that fill out the serial singles in which the work sees initial publication, in which Sim details the entirety of life on Earth as a war against the evil of women and proclaims that "if you learn to leave your penis alone, it will learn to leave you alone." For a while now, people have been taking bets on whether Sim will commit suicide immediately after CEREBUS is complete. Also, I never did see The Brown Bunny - was it as bad as everyone suggests? The trailer for it is excellent, though, oddly (maybe).
• What about women we hate to love?
• i didn't know anything about this sims....except that when i first saw his comics i thought them unattractive stylistically and the matter too crude to capture my attention. so i was startled to see that this comic even had any significance, let alone continued for so long. after reading this, i can only wonder where such a deep fear of women and this emotion they symbolose, came from....
• I read a few Cerebus back in the 80's but never found them particularly compelling. Sim was controversial even then. Buffalo 66 I thought was an aesthetically pleasing film largely because of Christina Ricci's pin-up performance, and I think Gallo knew this was the case, that he was trading on her star power. These are men who are pathologically jealous of women, and you can probably add some form of bipolar or schizophrenic analysis to that.
• holy jeebus... i have 5 issues of cerebus, #2 thru' #7, and they're whatever you call first issue comics. first editions...? mint condition, in plastic covers. a friend who died of aids in '87 left them to me in a box of his personal items, like his favourite book, and our letters to each other when he was abroad. that sims thinks he can possibly get a million dollars for a mint issue of #1 is making me feel slightly nauseous... i mean, what's the potential for me if i sell my issues...? i'd love to increase the amount i was going to put down on a new house this summer... i guess i have a bit of reasearch to do...
• dxlifer: I was generally unmoved by Cerebus, but Melmoth, his piece tying in Oscar Wilde, enjoys a home in my library. The really sad thing is that earlier on in his career, Sim was lauded by many feminist cartoonists for putting in a lot of work to help them learn the business side of their art. Somewhere it all went horribly wrong for him.
• i shall have to look at the library for some of these early works and give him another chance. it almost sounds like a howard (what's his name?) decline...without the mormons.
• High Society and Church & State are the best introduction to Cerebus from a funny-comics perspective.
• I read Cerebus in high school. It's nice in the way it insidiously moves from childish swords-n-sorcery into literary, political and historic references. Might make a good gift to a kid you'd like to prod toward more interesting choice of reading without being too overt about it.
• exppii: Only so long as you're prepared to keep an eye out for signs of said youngster taking on Sim's views on women (vile), gays (vile), and religion (fanatical). If I wanted to catalyse thought, I think I'd prefer Pullman.
• I own something more than the first two hundred issues of cerebus (in reprint and original). Shortly after Melmoth, the Oscar Wilde biography, something in his head cracked. I remember I stopped buying after about ten issues in a row with more text than pictures. The Jeff Smith thing was truly shameful; Sim wrote a thinly veiled story about getting dinner with Jeff and then watching in horror as his girlfriend literally ATE HIS BRAIN. I used to be a massive fanboy and pore over his stuff avidly. Now I wasn't even aware it had finally hit 300. Hearing he only got more out of control is deeply depressing.
• tracy: re your back issues: The comic book market crashed hard in the mid nineties and never really recovered. Cerebus, however, is an exception to that rule as it had a very limited print run. Still, I wouldn't finance a house with it. My guess would be something like $150 bucks or so for the lot. You might be able to get more since it's a complete early run. A word of caution: you'll see a lot of "price guides" and whatnot: those are made by COMIC DEALERS. That's playing with house money. It's EXCEEDINGLY unlikely you'll be able to sell those comics for "book value". The best rule of thumb is that they're worth what you can find somebody to pay for them. Find a rabid Cerebus fan who desperately wants to complete his collection and is missing those issues and you'll be able to pull in a hundred bucks a pop. Find a guy running a comic store who's not a fan and he'll probably give you twenty apiece, twenty five for number 2. I'd recommend you ebay if you have no emotional attachment; keep them as an oddity if you do.
• thanks forks - we're going to see if we can find a rabid fan or 2 at an upcoming toronto comic book convention and thru' some other venues and media... i made a bunch of calls today and found an aquaintance who's a toy and comics dealer (as a sideline, it's not his career) and he says he recently saw issue #1 sell for $500 (cdn) at a local toy show. he'll be doing a few things to help me find buyers. anyway, if i can't get $1000 for the 5 i won't bother selling. i know i'm being overly optimistic but i generally have good luck with stuff like this *crosses fingers* *and eyes!* there's a #1 from '77 going for $399 (usd) on ebay right now - well that's the "buy it now" price at any rate.. (i already have a healthy downpayment ready for our new house, i just thought it would be nice to add more to it. the smaller the mortgage the better :-)) it's sad reading about sim becoming so unstable and basically hateful over the years, and it's pretty awful that people might have taken bets on his potential suicide. maybe with cerebus out of the way he'll have a turnaround for the better, not a permanent downward spiral. sounds like he needs some therapy and meds tho'.
• Only so long as you're prepared to keep an eye out for signs of said youngster taking on Sim's views on women (vile), gays (vile), and religion (fanatical). Like forksclovetofu said, none of that really pops up until after Melmoth, when the Cirinists take center stage. Flight, the last Cerebus novel I bought, is the one where Sim's sexism takes off. (There's a rape scene in Church & State II, as I recall, that is graphic but neither explicit nor sympathetic to the perpetrator in any way. It's still a difficult sequence.)
• the rape is especially disturbing considering that out of the blue he drew the victim to look like his ex wife, who by all accounts was completely taken aback. i find it fascinating that he sees women as lacking reason when he's very into religion - something that requires you leave all logic and reason behind to believe in something you can't see/have zero proof of. it's hard to keep in mind that he's nuts, and not waste time trying to analyze him. i'll be at the comic book store tonight flipping thru' the last ish, but i don't think i'll be buying it.
• Interview with Sim in this week's The Onion A.V. Club.
• Oh man - Cerebus spoiler in the opening paragraph. Damn. (I am about 8 volumes behind though, and have no idea whether I'll ever finish it)
• Nuts, sorry about the spoiler. I figure that this is my wake-up call to catch up (I stalled a couple of years ago, right as Cerebus abandoned Jaka).
• "Later, when we realized that what Deni had intended to call the book was Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded Hades in Greek mythology, I told her we would just make Cerebus the name of the aardvark. The fanzine never got off the ground, so I decided to try drawing a sample comic page of Cerebus The Aardvark. And, for a number of months, that was all that existed: the page that turned out to be page one of Cerebus No. 1." So, basically his wife's sister thought of the aardvark, and his wife named the aardvark for him. He owes his entire career to women. May be that's what's weighing him down. Considering he's not gay, I feel very sorry for him. A straight man hating women must not have a very full lovelife.
• Sorry - I started reading more, and realised he doesn't hate them. He just doesn't respect them as fully human beings. That, and he wishes to tar all with the worst excesses of academic feminism (which does, like many other academic forms) use excruiatingly bad English.
• (Worse than my misapplied brackets).
• He seems to have some good ideas. Particulary the one about leftists (I would choose here academic ideologists, right or left, and postmodernists instead, but that's my bias) circling around problems instead of confronting the facts. But there's nothing new to that. Also, he boggs down everything useful he might say with his paranoid misogynist rethoric and masturbatory self-praising.
• Monkeyfilter: paranoid misogynist rhetoric and masturbatory self-praising. (sorry - it just had such good rhythm. No actual statement meant :) Yes - academics can fall prey to the circling a problem, but that would be bad academics. (Just like art, they come in more than one flavour - good, mediocre and bad) But I rarely find that decent academics don't confront facts. In fact, facts of history are what have changed my mind about many things, and made me a "leftist". (I hate this word - it's very American biased to assume the world comes in left and right - by American standards, the rest of the world comes in left, and even lefter). The facts would have me say, probably to Sims' chagrin, that women should be paid as much as men, because they do just as much work and have for eons our species has existed, and often times more. Facts are the bread and butter of all social science. Love of evidence should be put above all other things, or else your work will be biased. Except love of chocolate. Or coffee. Or plain goofing off.
• Well, I don't argue that social sciences are based on evidence as any other kind of research. The difference is the context of research, how it's done and with what purposes. Unlike "hard" sciences, social sciences tend to be highly subjective over facts. Due that they work over more complex subjects that couldn't be meassured or abstracted quite neatly into equations. Nowadays, hard sciences are catching up on those complex subjects and there's an understandable resistance in some high profile circles to the new facts which can't be interpreted without the aid of researchers and/or can't be interpreted in the light of their old prejudices. The worst insult is postmodernism. Which sounded good on the beginning and acted as a counterbalance against the overconfidence in scientist that simplified too much the nature of things. But now it's becoming the main justification for many academicians and idelogists to ignore scientific research when it doesn't fit their interpretation of evidence. --- Argh, I hate ranting like this because I know I'll repent for what I said. But don't take me too seriously since I don't do it myself.
• Zemat - You might find that the social sciences are much less subjective about facts than many people think - and that the hard sciences have their fair dose of subjectivity. I am no post-modern critic of scientific reasoning, but you would have a hard time convincing me that biology or chemistry (lots of trial and error still used)is more "fact based" than epidemiology or demography, both of which are classic social sciences. Perhaps you are thinking about anthropology or cultural studies? The latter is actually normally considered a humanity (in our crude three part division at universities), and the former can either be very humanistic (in its socio-cultural incarnation) or extremely fact oriented (in its physical anthropology or archeology incarnations). Sociology is another field that depends on the researcher - some is what we would call humanistic work, but a lot is also much more like epidemiology and demography, seeking to only base theory on careful study of the facts of society, including through statistical methods and case studies. History definately crosses the line - it has been traditionally considered a humanity, but I think it is the truely empiracal science. It's primary purpose is the establishment of facts (what happened) - and theory (why) comes second. Being a historian is like being a detective - you want to find out everyone's story, but you also want to know what really happened too. In fact, I think history is much more about facts (especially the immediate details) than most science, which generally looks to generalise. But we certainly shouldn't go to the opposite of the extreme I have disliked in post-modern critiques of positivism, to say that humanities are not valid. Where would be be without someone to think about our art and literature, to talk about morality and purpose, to ask questions not about the facts of the world, but about what we think about that world. Most of what they study is either too slippery to be studied in other ways or simply inappropriate to be studied in that way, like literature. But we also shouldn't fall into thinking that the humanistic mode is less rigourous than the evidential. The most rigourous academic discipline on the planet - analytic philosophy (trust me - do not argue with a philosophy grad) - is a classic humanity. The difference (in my mind) between humanitic reasoning and social science is that humanistic is based on logic and argument - a philosopher does not add up facts, but says that "If a=b and b=c, then a=c". Maths is really a kind of philosophy with numbers instead of words, logic working itself out. Whereas in the evidential mode, we would say "In the archives I found that 45% of As=B and 55%=C so I think X". (See, I can summarise history in a really bad way too!) Neither is more valid - they are just getting at different questions. And I think for the really big questions of life and society, we need both. ---
• "many academicians and idelogists to ignore scientific research when it doesn't fit their interpretation of evidence." I'm afraid I don't understand this - Science doesn't even research most questions that post-modernists are interested in, largely interested in society or culture. Why do they need to care about scientific research? It is true that some post-modern writers have tried to write about scientific reasoning, but the majority are off in the other half of the library. Now, if they get their history wrong (since pomo gurus do use a lot of historical examples), that's a different story...Then I get to break legs ;) And for the record, post-modernism is not as strong in universities as many of those complaining about it imply - they exagerrate for their own purposes. I am speaking of my own experience in a large American university - but I know that in Canada and the UK it is even less prevalent. Also left wing =! post-modern. I am about as un-post-modern as they get (I like counting things in my history) but that doesn't stop me from being an evil pinko. Of course, being an evil pinko, I think that universities tend to be left wing because academics are educated people who study society, and so they see the left is right. (Aside - Actually, academic are one of the two backbones of the left - they made it and shaped it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The other backbone is labour. They don't always agree). This might be inflammatory in the US, but certainly the most right-wing person could understand why studying the nature and extent of poverty in the US would make one support more social spending. It simply makes sense that being confronted with suffering would make one want to On the less flammatory side - Many academics are simply pre-disposed to be left-wing, from their application to grad school. All academics had to well in their undergraduate education. They could have had their pick of other professions. But they chose to go to graduate school, knowing that the pay at the other end is very low compared to what some of their undergraduate friends could make. And there is the fact that academia has a lot of social mobility (more than professions of similar prestige?) Some may have grown up on social assistence, or lacked health care when they were young. Many I know do not suffering from middle-class guilt, but instead are simply loyal to the working class from which they came. They pay their taxes cheerfully because they know that "there but for the grace of god go I". And now I have more than derailed this thread. I have derailed it, and sent it flying off a cliff And I do agree that post-modernism has gone to its logical excess, and should, like modernism, be reigned in, and given a stern talking to.
• Errata (I'm sure there is more than one) The sentance "It simply makes sense that being confronted with suffering would make one want to" should read "It simply makes sense that being confronted with suffering would make one want to do something about it."
• meanwhile back at the ranch... what an unpleasant interview. Sim comes off as ACTIVELY aggressive and utterly obnoxious. What a dick.
• I noticed that. Even when not asked, Sims sought to bring the topic around to his views on feminism. He had to be told twice, the second time quite explicitly, that the interviewer was not even asking about that.
• I noticed that. Even when not asked, Sims sought to bring the topic around to his views on feminism. That's why I came with the bit about paranoid misogynism. By the way, I love your rants and I love to make rant, jb. But sorry for pushing you to it. You made me pale in embarrasment for my ignorance.
• pale in embarrasment how is that possible? I think that universities tend to be left wing because academics are educated people who study society, and so they see the left is right. I almost forgot this bit. It sounds terribly arrogant. I prefer to think they are biased to the left because of the reasons you mentioned later. Many rightist thinkers (principally, some economists) that study poverty reach the inverse conclusions. But they see things from another perspective.
• Zemat: Sorry, I knew that sounded arrogant - but the nature of politics and why we (as a society, not monkeys) are always arguing about it is that generally one does believe that one point or another is correct, which is why you vote for it. I don't mean that one party or another is correct - I don't like party politics, especially when there are so few it simply bifrucates the world, preventing most rational debate - but one does believe that certain principles are correct. The whole point is to then explain why (though this isn't the right forum). (Funny, the leftist arguing against moral relativity :) Your point about the right economists is a good one. Economics is an area I need to do a lot more reading in, because it keeps mattering so much whenever you study anything else. I'm intimidated by the jargon, and don't really know where to start.
• Maybe this is not the best way to start to get into economics but I think that Steven Landsburg's articles are the quintessential example of an economist's way of thinking, without the jargon. Well, I agree with you that one must believe some principles are right. But one must be always able to question those same principles as much as to able to defend them.