©
J. Pinkham, Kevin Moore’s new co-blogger over at blargblog, asked Pizzicato Pizza about acquiring one of their advertising posters. The response he got opens up a brand new frontier in our understanding of the nuances of copyright.
April punk’d.
“Oh, geeze,” says a friend of mine, who actually works in the industry, when I told him about the whole Tony Millionaire thing. “I just figured he was posting drunk again.”
You know, if Dirk Deppey were still kicking it, none of this would ever have gone as far as it did.
Oh, but that’s no excuse. I posted the link, and the write-up; I kicked it up to Atrios, who bit; and even though I admitted I was unsure of the whole shebang, I stacked the deck with I’d thought was a reasonably coherent translation of what it was Millionaire was reporting, but in retrospect, looks a little too much like me, who worked as a managing editor for a tiny little alternarag for a bit, imposing my own sense of what must have happened to make some sense out of what it was Millionaire was reporting. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why it’s probably a good idea I stay away from your more journalistic endeavors: I’m all too willing to carry water for whatever my immediate take on the story is (must be), skipping blithely down the paving stones of my own damned good intentions.
1995: Acting on a tip from Oklahomans for Children and Families, undercover police officers purchase adult comics from the box Planet Comics kept behind the front counter, where kids couldn’t see them. Then the shop was raided. The shop’s owners, Michael Kennedy and John Hunter, were charged with four felonies and four misdemeanors for selling adult comics to adults. The shop was evicted and had to relocate. Sales plummeted. Cops raided Hunter’s home and confiscated his computer. Somebody heaved a brick through the store’s window one night. A divorce was filed. Hunter and Kennedy plead guilty to reduced charges, got three-year deferred sentences and fines of $1,500 each. Bob Anderson, the president of Oklahomans for Children and Families, said his group was opposed to censorship, but “There is also material that is not illegal which is not suitable for children under [Oklahoma’s] harmful-to-minors law. And who buys comic books but younger children?”
(Then Oklahomans for Children and Families went after The Tin Drum. The ACLU shut them down, hard. They don’t even have a website anymore.)
“Attorney General Hardy Meyers’ office.”
“Um, hi. I’m trying to look into claims that—well, there’s a letter that apparently was written by Attorney General John Ashcroft directing state attorneys general to aid him in cleaning up comic strips? And I’m trying to find out if this letter was really written?”
“Goodness. It sounds like you need Financial Fraud and Consumer Protection. Hold on a moment.”
“Financial fraud—?”
“Hi, this is Kevin. I’m not available right now, but if you leave your name and number…”
I suppose the clues are there if you want to look for them. “I’m growing it for the ‘April Fools,’ says Uncle Gabby, after all. And even if Millionaire backed off from the absurd claim that the FCC made him do it, his story’s still incoherent at best. The way it’s written, it sounds almost as if the three editors who requested the change in wording did so under specific instructions from their attorney(s) general: as if these public servants were poring over pre-release copies of Maakies and Dwarf Attack to determine if younger readers might be harmed by anything these pen-and-ink contraptions might say, before publication. This is absurd, of course. —But if it is all a joke, why would Millionaire take it so far? Posting thick chunks of Ed Meese’s famous Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography report? Going on the record with The Pulse? —Verisimilitude, of course. What’s the use of a prankish publicity stunt if you cave on the first salvo? And he’s been notably reticent about letting slip any actual facts that might back up what he’s saying: “I find it interesting that fuck you,” he says. “Are you the prosecuting attorney or my mother? Because if you’re my mother I guess I’ll have to answer you,” he says. — So what? Why does he have to answer every single one of our questions about this? Why can’t he be a grouch? Maybe it’s irresponsible and maybe it’s even dumb, but it’s hardly proof that he’s lying. Maybe he’s posting drunk, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a kernel of truth in all this. Maybe he got his facts out of order. Maybe the editor(s) in question lied to him. Only one is claiming it came from their attorney general somehow, after all, and maybe they’re getting their facts wrong, and there was never a letter from Ashcroft at all. Wouldn’t be the first time some cowboy went after the funnybooks for perfectly stupid reasons. —But cowboys want noise, bright lights, big rooms full of an adoring public grimly celebrating another hard-fought kulturkrieg. You don’t get noise and lights and big rooms with a quiet request to back down to “vagina” from “cunt.” Doesn’t make for good headlines. You know?
1994: Michael Diana used to do an underground comic called Boiled Angel. In 1990, someone rather brutally killed five women in Gainesville, Florida, on and around the University of Florida campus. Solely on the basis of the story and art in Boiled Angel no. 6, investigators decided Diana was a plausible suspect. The cops later picked up the real murderer when he tried to rob a Winn Dixie. —In 1993, a state attorney going through the old case files stumbled over more issues of Boiled Angel and decided Diana’s stuff was obscene; Diana had to be stopped. A jury determined that Boiled Angel had no literary or artistic merit. The terms of Diana’s three-year probation allowed his house to be searched at any time without warning or warrant for evidence that he either possessed or was creating obscene material. Psychological testing was mandated. He paid a fine of $3,000. And he was allowed no contact at all with anyone under the age of 18. (A prohibition against his drawing anything at all was later dropped.)
“Hi, this is Kevin. I’m not available right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
“Um, hi. This is Kip Manley again. I left you some voicemail yesterday? I’m just trying to confirm this, uh, this claim that there might be a letter, from Attorney General John Ashcroft, directing states to look into, um, cleaning up or even, I guess, censoring comic strips in newspapers. This cartoonist says his editor told him he was told by somebody that this was the case, and, um. Anyway. You can reach me at my work number, during the day, or at home, in the evenings. Um. Thanks.”
Reaction was swift (and furious): there was the Fuck Asscroft brigade, of course, and the Comics Journal thread was locked down after an avalanche of what can best be described as juvenalia. Comixpedia assured webcartoonists everywhere that the FCC had no power to regulate content on the internet, and thank God for that. Scott Kurtz did some homework, and ended up throwing up his hands. —But running through a lot of it was a contrapuntal strain: gee, I dunno, I mean, I hate Ashcroft as much as the next person, but that word, y’know, “cunt,” in a comic strip? I can’t believe anybody would try to get away with it in the first place. I mean, what about the children?
Keeping in mind that Maakies appears in the sort of alternaweekly newspapers that run features on trends in group sex at local swingers’ clubs. Where on earth do these “children” come into this?
1999: Jesus Castillo sells a copy of Demon Beast Invasion to an undercover cop in Dallas, Texas. He is, of course, convicted on obscenity charges. —Leave aside for the moment the question of whether or not the CBLDF was rather staggeringly incompetent in their defense of Castillo, and leave aside for the moment whether or not the comic in question is or is not obscene, misogynistic crap, and leave aside for the moment whether or not it was the height of folly for Susan Napier to defend Demon Beast Invasion as filled with symbolism and political themes—literary and artistic merit that justified its pornographic excess. After all, the prosecution did:
I don’t care what kind of testimony is out there. Comic books, traditionally what we think of, are for kids.
What kids? Where?
Looks like somebody didn’t get the memo.
“Mercury.”
“Um, hi. Who’s your comics editor?”
“Our art director is Jen Davison.”
“So she’s responsible for the content of your comics?”
“Yeah. Well, she picks them out.”
“Is she available?”
“She’s on vacation.”
“Oh. Um. Thanks.”
Oh, hey, check it out! Tony Millionaire put the word “boner” in Maakies and 23 newspapers dropped him!
—He said, on April Fool’s. Oh, and he said some more, too:
posted April 01, 2004 08:41 PM
I only wish it was a good joke…
but I got a lot of mileage out of it. two weeks and a hundred bloggers.
blog…..
....sounds like a turd coming out of an ass….
Ha ha. Oh, that Tony Millionaire. Posting drunk. —And was this spectacularly stupid, then, and grossly irresponsible? I dunno. How many more people were prompted to look at Maakies again, or for the first time? How many more Uncle Gabby statues did he sell? How much respect did he lose? (How much did he have in the first place?) Does he owe anything, anything at all, to the larger idea of comics as a struggling medium? Should he go around insulting the legacies of Michael Kennedy and John Hunter, Mike Diana and Jesus Castillo like that? —Sorry. Tried to keep a straight face. Look. It’s not like I’m going to revile the name of Tony Millionaire now. It’s not like I’m going to throw the paper across the room rather than read Maakies ever again. It’s a great strip and he’s a great cartoonist and that’s all I want or expect from him, you know? It’s not like one false cry of wolf! is going to make us all pack up our gear and leave the kultur undefended: there’s plenty of wolves out there yet, and there are plenty of crusaders out there. This is comics we’re talking about, after all.
But, man, Tony. I woulda stuck with “cunt.” Short, pithy Anglo-Saxonisms are always funnier.
PS— Confidential to Michele: Calvin Klein boxer briefs, actually, which don’t tend to wad up in a bunch. But thanks for the concern—and the traffic.
PPS— Oh, hey, I finally heard back just now from Kevin at Financial Fraud and Consumer Protection. “I haven’t turned up a thing,” he says. “But let me tell you: we’ve gotten weirder things from the Department of Justice.”
“Yeah,” says I, “I just found out for sure it was a prank myself. But it sure sounded plausible.”
“Oh,” he says. “It sounds very plausible.”
Facetiæ under contract of the King.
It’s National F-Word Day! So take one fuckin’ moment to send a fuckin’ memo to FCC Chairman Michael fuckin’ Powell and tell him to fuck off and stop fucking us over by clearly departing from past fuckin’ precedent in important fuckin’ ways. —Mercy!
(Yeah, I know. Late to the party. Fuck.)
Especially since the FCC wants broadcasters to implement a set of voluntary guidelines to define and police indecency. Well, hell, there’s plenty precedent for that.
Fuckin’ idiots.
If, if they take his stapler, he will, he will set this building on fire.
INT. CLARKE’S APARTMENT—NIGHT
CLARKE is sitting glumly on his couch, watching CNN. Suddenly a voice, that of former president BILL CLINTON, booms through the wall.
CLINTON (offscreen): Hey, check it out, Clarke, man, Juliet Huddy’s on “Fox and Friends” and she’s got her high-beams on, man!
CLARKE: (rolls his eyes) Bill, I already told you, if you want to talk, just come over!
CLINTON (offscreen): Oh! Sorry, man!
Within seconds, CLARKE’s front door opens and in walks CLINTON, who takes a seat on the couch next to CLARKE.
CLINTON: What’s wrong, Clarke, man?
CLARKE: Bill, when you were on Capitol Hill, trying to drum up support for a bill or something like that, and you weren’t making a lot of progress, did anyone ever tell you it looked like you had a case of the Mondays?
CLINTON: A case of the Mondays? Hell no, man. Hell no. Matter of fact, I think I’d kick somebody’s ass for saying something like that, man.
CLARKE: Now let me ask you this—what would you do if you had a billion dollars?
CLINTON: A billion dollars? Tell you what I’d do, man—two interns at the same time.
CLARKE: That’s it? Two interns at the same time?
CLINTON: Yeah. Man, I’d hire Pamela Anderson for one of them and Carmen Electra for the other. Always wanted to do that, man. And I figure if I had a billion dollars I could hook that up, ’cause chicks dig a dude with money.
CLARKE: Well, not all chicks, Bill.
CLINTON: Well, the kinda chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.
CLARKE: Good point.
CLINTON: What about you, man?
CLARKE: Besides two interns at the same time? I would do nothing.
CLINTON: Nothing?
CLARKE: Yeah. I’d just sit on my ass all day and do nothing.
CLINTON: Well, hell, man, you don’t need a billion dollars to do that. Look at Jeb Bush, his state’s broke, he don’t do shit.
Oval Office Space. Damn, I’m still giggling. (Via My Whim Is Law.)
The pros from Dover.
Bob Somerby is as ever on the case, and Lord knows the media is providing him with every reason in the world to howl, and Atrios is all over Jack Kelley and the festering illness of which he’s merely a symptom, but it’s the pseudonymously lower-case skimble with the perfect parable to put the journalistic integrity of today’s fourth estate into proper perspective:
Sometimes it’s not an ethics dilemma, just dumb stuff, that tarnishes credibility. MSNBC got gigged last week when Deborah Norville reported a federal study that supposedly said 58 percent of all exercise done in the United States occurs in those TV infomercials for body-sculpting workout machines.
But the story was a spoof from The Onion, a satirical newspaper and online publication. The network said it inadvertently dropped the attribution in picking up the story, but c’mon—most of the exercise done in America is on TV? Shouldn’t somebody in the control room have said, “Hey, wait just a minute …”
Oh, pshaw. Why start now?
We are all oblique leftists now.
Belle Waring reminds me (well, all of us, really, I suppose) that the Onion’s underrated AV Club did an interview with Dave Sim on the occasion of getting to 300. Here’s the story behind the interview: what Tasha Robinson had to go through to talk to the man from Kitchener. —Ooh! Here’s more behind-the-scenes Simmery, including a (partial) transcript of the Onion’s recent appearance on The Cerebus TV Show.
Toast.
So my father. He’s very proud of his long-standing membership in the fraternity of Gamma Damma Iota (“The goddamn independents!” he bellows), but he’s also terribly rocky of rib; as an entrepreneur and a Southerner, this is, perhaps, not unexpected. He’s got a strong thick streak of leave-me-the-hell-alone, but looks to his bottom line first (only sensible; that’s where the government’s most likely to hit him, after all), and so he’s voted for an overwhelming assortment of Rs in his day: Ford, Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Bush, Dole, Bush, as a few for instances.
Anyway. Called the folks yesterday to let them know I’d broken my first bone in about 20 years. My father was pounding away in the background, putting the finishing touches on a pressed-tin ceiling for the downstairs den: they’d bought the tin from a shop in Nevada, apparently, that had stopped making pressed tin tiles back in the 1930s, and only recently started up again, blowing the dust off the 70-year-old molds and picking up pretty much where they left off. He came to the phone and teased me about breaking my elbow and we half-joked about suing the city and then he said, “You know, I really don’t know what I’m going to do in November.” Bush stubbed his toe on the economy, you see, and Bush stubbed his toe in Iraq—Dad doesn’t know whether they’re liars or woefully stupid (me, I say both, but he’s pretty much in the “they wanted a little too hard to do what they thought was the right thing” camp), but whichever—Bush isn’t making him very happy at the moment.
“I’m starting to think,” he said, “that maybe the best thing is a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. Just tie the whole country up for a few years so nothing gets done and we have a chance to sort it all out.”
And hey: who am I to disagree with my father?
Eating crosswalk.
I have quite possibly fractured my right radius (which is strange, since it was the ulna that hurt). Stepped off the bus on the way into work, waited for the light, stepped blithely into the crosswalk, caught my toe on a sandbag the city had left by the stormdrain, and went down hard. The immediate pain faded rather quickly, which is good; I haven’t been in that much pain in years. But now it just feels—weird. One doctor seen, x-rays shot, the orthopædic doctor this PM, thank God for health insurance, and since I work for a litigation support firm, one of my fellow project managers nipped out on the double with a camera to snap photos of the offending bag. (Many thanks; they all rallied with alacrity when I stumbled into the office, grey of face, cradling my arm; my only regret is that I misplaced the bag of frozen peas and carrots and broccoli somewhere in the Portland Clinic, but until then, it served admirably to keep the swelling down.)
But fuck the arm. The important thing was, I’d been carrying my iBook, and even as I was lifting my face off the pavement I was sick with worry—the bag had bounced. So the first thing I did (as my co-workers were rallying round, scaring up phone numbers, calling the clinic for me, digging up various bags of frozen vegetables) was yank open the padded case, pull out the computer (wincing not at the considerable pain but at the sight of the CD drive, popped open), and fire it up.
It was fine.
Anyway. Blogging and suchlike will be light the next few days, I think. (Most of this typed left-handed, which, well. Not recommended for the dextrous.) Further bulletins yadda yadda. —Oh, for those with my medical history at hand, keeping score: it’s the right elbow, which means if I’ve broken it, it’s a first. (The left elbow I’ve broken twice, and it’s better if I tell that story in person, since it involves gestures. The right has only ever been severely contused a couple of times.)
Severe contusion; tiny, minor fracture; wear a sling, work the elbow now and again to prevent stiffness, don’t lift anything heavy, and see the doctor again in about 10 days.
Oh, and typing is not contraindicated.
Another memo I didn’t get.
So how come nobody told me cartoon journalist extraordinaire Joe Sacco was doing strips for the Washington Monthly? —I’d point you to a couple of examples, or maybe the archive listing so you could browse ’em yourself, but there doesn’t appear to be one, and the Washington Monthly’s front page has no search function (appalling enough for the rather notable blog currently enhancing it; inexcusable for the site as a whole). (Maybe they don’t archive the strips? But why on earth not?)
Anyway, here’s April’s, and I for one will be keeping an eye on Kevin Drum’s sidebar for updates.
Paging Michael Graham.
Yo. You with your oh-for-fuck’s-sake-not-this-bullshit-again about how liberals are humorless and how it’s obvious in that “Where’s the WMD?” bit all the nabobs laughed at that the President’s just joshing about something he madly, truly believes so could you liberals just lighten up, please. Your ass just got handed to you.
(“Please,” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “don’t kill me.”)
To do:
The homosexual agenda:
0800 – Breakfast
0900 – Work day begins
1000 – 1st coffee break
1200 – Lunch hour
1210 – Go to local deli
1230 – Plot to convert world to queerness
1300 – Back to work
1500 – Coffee break
1700 – Work ends
1800 – Dinner
1900 – Walk dog
1930 – Scrub kitchen
2000 – Read book
2200 – Bedtime
—with thanks to them.ws
The feminist agenda:
0800 – 0815
Introduction, Opening Remarks
0815 – 0915
Plot to Overthrow World Leadership
0915 – 0930
BREAK – Coffee and donuts
0930 – 1030
Undermine World Religions
1030 – 1200
General Attacks on the Institution of the American Family
1200 – 1300
Catered Lunch and Fashion Show
1300 – 1330
Plot to Remove All Men From The World
1330 – 1400
BREAK – Cake and Champagne
1400 – 1500
Leave Husbands (If Applicable)
1500 – 1530
Kill Children
1530 – 1700
Become Lesbian
1730+
Evening Mixer; Open Bar
—with thanks to Monster Island
The fundamentalist agenda:
Five Year Strategic Plan Summary
The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a “wedge” that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the “thin edge of the wedge,” was Phillip ]ohnson’s critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds . Michael Behe’s highly successful Darwin’s Black Box followed Johnson’s work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.
The Wedge strategy can be divided into three distinct but interdependent phases, which are roughly but not strictly chronological. We believe that, with adequate support, we can accomplish many of the objectives of Phases I and II in the next five years (1999-2003), and begin Phase III (See “Goals/ Five Year Objectives/Activities”).
—with thanks to the Panda’s Thumb
Oh, thank God.
Python’s stepping up. (It’s not only their best and most great-hearted flick, but it’s also probably the most historically accurate movie ever made about the period and the region and the politics. —So what if they used Latin, too? At least Brian wasn’t a fecking robot.)
300.
Some time early in 1992, when it was still bitterly cold, a bunch of us went down to Boston for Dave Sim’s signing at the Million-Year Picnic. I shared a car with Barry and Kurt Busiek, which meant I kept quiet in the back while they kept up an argument about whether James Bond could strictly speaking be considered a superhero, and for the life of me I can’t remember who was on which side, or why. (I mean, sure, I guess: he’s an iconic figure in a starkly simple, expressionistically drawn moral landscape; more powerful than mortal ken, he lives in a world bent and shaped by the rules of his genre to at once enhance and conform to his role; he has his catchphrases, his signature style, and if he isn’t always wearing a tuxedo, well, the bad guys are usually all wearing the same sort of jumpsuit, so it’s easy to pick him out in a pop art “Where’s Waldo?” fight scene. On the other hand, his underwear is pretty much always under his pants. But I didn’t care to put a dog in this fight then, and I’m only taking it for a walk around the block at the moment. We were, after all, talking about Sim, and Cerebus, and Cerebus isn’t a superhero. So.) —I kept quiet, then, because I didn’t really care, and I didn’t know from Kurt Busiek at all, and I had this secret burning a hole in my backpack.
It’s traditional, after all, to bring something to be signed to a signing, and I had a doozy. The year before, I’d worked as a clerk for New England Comics, and I’d stumbled over a treasure: before he started his aardvark-headed Conan pastiche, Sim worked on a number of freelance art projects, among them the first issue of a Canadian small-press superhero comic called Phantacea. It was about—well, there’s this kid who walked with a couple of orthopædic crutches who really loves Baron Justice comics only his Scottish grandfather (“Laddie, have ye naught to do but read this smut?!”) doesn’t like him reading this garbage because it will give him ideas just like it gave the boy’s father ideas to dress up as a superhero and fight crime as Baron Justice only he doesn’t do that now because he’s the head of security for a mad scientist who’s building some sort of gravity train to alpha Centauri except this Romani master of electromagnetism who helped design the gravity train has decided it’s a misguided effort doomed to disaster and is determined to stop it any way he can even if it means going through the boy’s father to attack the train itself only the boy after he fights a mugger to save a little old lady (“Justice for all!” cries the caption box. “If a cripple can help—why can’t you?”) finds his father’s Baron Justice costume in the attic I think and he decides to put it on and fight crime even though the orthopædic crutches are going to make the whole secret identity thing problematic except oh my God! The train has launched! What will we do! See you next issue, pilgrim!
I don’t think there was a next issue. (Google: oh, wow. There was. There were several. Oh, my. It’s still sort of going on. Oh, goodness.)
Anyway. That’s what I had in my backpack. Phantacea #1.
So we end up at Million-Year Picnic and stand in the long line and the guy ahead of me is asking some really long convoluted question about Cerebus continuity (what had become of the false albatross, maybe), and Dave has signed whatever it was he was going to sign for the guy and he waves him along and it’s my turn. So I reach into my backpack. To his credit, he grinned and rolled his eyes when he saw the oversized bright magenta cover. “I really liked what you did with Jaka’s Story and Melmoth, Mr. Sim,” I said. “But I think I liked your earlier, funnier stuff better.”
Ha ha, right? He suddenly gets this serious look. “You know,” he says, “everybody thinks Woody Allen was kidding when he said that. But he was serious. That really happens. People really do come up to you and say that stuff.” He starts drawing a quick Cerebus head on the inside front cover of Phantacea #1. I make a noncommittal noise, something not unlike “Uh-huh.” The guy who’d been ahead of me says, anyway, about the Conniptins, and Dave looks up at me and says, “You going to let him take up your time?” and I kind of shrugged. I’d pulled off my great joke. I’m lousy meeting people I admire for the first time. My tongue was tied. Dave signed the sketch with a flourish and never got around to answering the guy’s question about Onliu Diamondback variants.
That’s my Dave Sim story. It was funnier then than it is now.
I stuck it out through Guys, looking back, and most of Rick’s Story, which I never got around to finishing. (The Spouse made it through Going Home, I think.) For all his faults (and they are legion), Sim’s the best fucking cartoonist on the North American continent, and up there in the pantheon of Best Ever Anywhere for All Time. His lettering, sure; his unparalleled ear for dialogue and dialect; his spot-on caricatures of Groucho Marx and Mick and Keef; his acerbically satiric edge and the loopy mysticism that kept leaking around the edges, making the world a bigger and weirder place than it had any right to be, to step away from the strictly speaking cartooning portion of the proceedings. His flawless compositions, his fearless bending and melding and splintering of panels, his design sense, his ability to make a whole page—a whole issue, a whole run of issues—work as a tightly considered unit in a staggering variety of styles that juggernauted from belly laughs to wailings and gnashings of teeth. His brilliance in scooping up the last of the Renaissance masters to painstakingly work out the perspective in all his backgrounds and cross-hatch them into things of beauty (Gerhard, take a bow, man; you more than deserve it). His quixotic stand for self-publishing in the face of all else, to step away from the cartooning again, and his not-so-quixotic stand for creators’ rights and the importance of the cartoonist over the importance of the property (and yet, while a lot is made of his influence over self-publishing successes such as Jeff Smith and Terry Moore, not so much is made of the influence his cartooning has had on folks like Alex Robinson, who wears it well). —There’s a simple, beautifully cinematic sequence in Guys that’s just a piece of paper blowing away from Cerebus; the paper stays in the foreground of each panel, and Cerebus and the background drop further and further away from us—it’s simple and wordless and flawless and perfect.
For God’s sake, the man figured out how to letter an echo.
So even if he’d snapped and murdered a busload of nuns, I’d say you ought to have High Society and Church and State and Jaka’s Story and Melmoth on your shelf, you want to be a serious student of comics. Of course, he didn’t snap and murder a busload of nuns. He snapped and started saying women were dark consuming voids who latch onto male lights of reason and suck away their vital essences for nourishment and so men are vastly better than women and here’s the long, painstaking, Ditkoesque proof.
—It’s a little more complicated than that.
There’d always been a tension between Sim the Polemicist and Sim the Novelist in Cerebus. Sim the Novelist used to win, hands down, every time, letting Sim the Polemicist out for a bit of exposition now and then, and otherwise keeping him confined to the Notes from the President and the letters column, where he got up to some mischief now and again, but otherwise stayed mostly out of trouble.
Now, in Jaka’s Story, Sim had indulged himself with illustrated set-pieces written in a rich pastiche of Wildean prose, rather than straightforward comics, as a technique to distance Jaka’s privileged past apart from the moment-to-moment comics storytelling of the all-too-quotidian present. Some think this worked really well and some think it stopped the story dead, but it was all still the work of Sim the Novelist. It wasn’t until the metafictional set-pieces of Reads, where he interspersed an argument and a bloody fight scene that lasted for issues with long text pieces—at first, a roman à clef of the comics industry staring a certain Victor Reid, whose creative life collapses when he sells out to a big publisher and gets married; then a not-so-roman with an even thinner clef: evidently autobiographical essays from the soi-disant Viktor Davis, who began to tell us what it was like, doing Cerebus: roads taken, and not. —Now, here, Sim the Polemicist was starting to leak through, but it was at least as a technique okay. Reads was the apotheosis of Mothers and Daughters, his blockbuster follow-up to the relatively quiet, contained novel-and-epilogue of Jaka’s Story and Melmoth. Old characters going back years were brought back into the plot, and threads left dangling for years were picked back up and held, tantalizingly, just out of reach. Reads begins with the four prime movers of the story-that’s-finally-being-revealed (Cerebus, Astoria, Cirin, and Suenteus Po—three aardvarks, and a human, and if you have to ask at this point, don’t bother) finally gathered together (again for the first time!) in one room; it ends with the aforementioned fight scene. Everything in the comic book was finally coming together. The momentum was almost unbearable. It only made sense that Sim the Polemicist was being sucked in along with it.
And some of the effects were brilliant—backstage comics industry gossip linked with the philosophical themes of freedom and creation; metafictional leaks and linkages between the prose bits and the comics they interrupted—but most notably the trick he pulled in issue 183: he started to write about how he’d been working at Cerebus one night in 1980, about a year after he’d announced that the comic would run for 300 issues to the general scoffing disbelief of the industry.
He [the Viktor Davis pieces are written in the third person; again, a distancing technique] was in the middle of lettering “Blinky Boar and the Strawberry Patch” and humming “Strawberry Fields Forever” to himself when the local radio station interrupted its programming for a news bulletin.
“Possibilities for a Beatles reunion were dashed at eleven o’clock tonight when John Lennon was shot to death outside his Manhattan apartment building…”
That night, Viktor Davis decided that Cerebus would not run for three hundred issues. He decided that Cerebus would run for two hundred issues. Viktor Davis decided to keep this a secret, telling no one for fourteen years.
He would not announce it until issue one hundred and eighty-three, a year and five months before the end: November 1995.
It doesn’t work now, of course, since you know and I know he made it to 300 and right on time, too: March, 2004. But then: I yelled, I think. I gasped for breath. I’d been rabbit-punched. —What follows is almost a page describing the roller-coaster like motion of the ground beneath the reader’s feet, a recreation in prose of some of the trippy, looping effects he’d used in comics, when Cerebus had spoken with Suenteus Po in a magical, illusionary world. It was an impressive linkage of my memories of the comic with what I was reading right then with the very physicality of what I was feeling at that moment as I read: a truly magical evocation of presque vu, about the highest effect you can claw out of a reader.
“I was just kidding,” he said. “Cerebus goes to issue three hundred. Just like I’ve always said. March 2004.”
The reader and Viktor Davis regarded one another for several minutes, without speaking, across the strange, lighted rectangle. Calmly, Viktor Davis withdrew his pack of cigarettes from his hip pocket and selected one. Raising the lighter in his right hand, he lit the cigarette in a quick, easy motion.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, still smiling through a dissipating cloud of smoke.
“Don’t you trust me?”
And then he says, “Bang.” Back in the comic, Cerebus looks up. “Something fell,” he thinks—the two most freighted words in the whole comic. And then, BANG!
It was all about to come together. Everything. The whole shebang so far. Questions were about to be Answered. And given what he’d just pulled off, I’d’ve followed him—Sim the Novelist, Viktor Davis, Sim the Polemicist, whichever—I’d’ve followed him over a cliff. I thought.
What he did, what Sim the Polemicist did, what Viktor Davis did, was rewrite the end of Church and State. That book ends with a creation myth, of the female light of creation being embraced and then smothered by the male void, squeezed until she shatters, sprinkling stars throughout the night sky. Now, though, Davis tells us that it’s a male light, shining bravely, and a female void, smothering sweetly.
And then, in the infamous issue 186, he tells us why.
Unbidden, the image of the Cerebus Theatre swam to the surface of Viktor Davis’ awareness. He turned away from his typewriter and allowed the picture to coalesce in his mind’s eye.
The Cerebus readership was there, composed in some (small? large?) measure of females with their male housepets. He squinted, endeavouring to see if any male was chafing at the invisible conduits and metaphorical tubing which drained his life, his essence, his energy as surely and as effectively as any fictional vampire. Cats’ eyes gleamed in the darkness, filled with malice. A couple of rows back an obese brunette was stripping away chunks of brain tissue from a thin, pale youth with a spotted face. His head lolled against his shoulder in her direction, his face radiant with ecstasy. He turned to her, his eyes half-lidded. He smiled and mouthed, “I love you.” She smiled back at him, indulgently. His eyes closed once more. She stuck out her sandpaper tongue, dotted with brains and blood, in Viktor Davis’ direction and then cackled loudly. The youth giggled quietly to himself.
To the far left, in the front row, the white husk of a heavy-set man in his early thirties squirmed in the direction of his Lady and Master, his features reflecting pain, confusion and fear. She held his forearm in front of her as if they were bound, one to the other, but in such a way that she was also holding him slightly apart from her. Viktor Davis could see that the fellow had been a quick meal—little more than a snack, by the looks of things. Traces of dried brain-matter, hard and uninviting, encrusted what little there was left of the top of his head. She looked very, very hungry. Every few seconds she turned around in her seat, the hunger in her gaze sweeping across the rows to her immediate rear. Females touched by that insatiable stare hunched a little closer to their own housepets, a menacing growl rumbling low in their throats.
Viktor Davis turned back to his typewriter.
“There is no cure for willful stupidity,” he typed and then sat back, cigarette in hand, to contemplate the words.
There’s more. You can read it for yourself if you like.
Issue 186 became something of a flashpoint. You either stuck with Cerebus in spite of it, because of everything else, or you dropped it like a hot potato. You got into knock-down, drag-out fights with people who did the opposite of what you did, if you were so inclined. It might seem these days as if almost everyone dropped Cerebus then and there, but that’s not quite right: things polarized between “I can’t read anything by such an evident misogynist” and “You shouldn’t let his admittedly odious philosophy detract from what he’s done as an artist.” And I’d have to align myself with the latter camp: certainly, I’m willing to put up with all sorts of backstage bullshit I’d never countenance at a cocktail party, say, so long as I get a moment of transcendent beauty every now and then. And Sim had delivered those, in spades. So I stuck with it: we, rather, since it was a communal house at the time, and comics were largely purchased collectively, and most of us wanted to see where he’d go, and how. We’d come this far. (Surely he couldn’t be serious, some of us said, even though we knew we were probably kidding ourselves. Surely this is some sort of joke. “What’s the matter?” said Viktor Davis. “Don’t you trust me?”)
But almost all of us have since fallen away. Because it became clear: he’d built up that momentum not to finally tie it all together, but to sweep the board clean and start over: to clear the clutter he’d been working with and start poking around in a brand new worldview. Sim the Novelist, concerned with character and plot and world-building, had inexplicably surrendered the field to Sim the Polemicist, concerned with axes, and their grinding. He was rewriting. Revising. Revisioning. And his new worldview was based on mean, mean-spirited, and above all stupid logic:
“Men like Cars. Viktor Davis doesn’t like Cars. Viktor Davis is a Man.”
These observations were all true statements. Was it a syllogism? Or was there another name for it? Viktor Davis was uncertain. To the Reasoning Mind and to the Emotional Void, the fundamental structure was sound. They were all true statements, though they appeared contradictory. Using those three statements as a template, Viktor Davis had spent much of his adult life attempting to Reason with the Female Emotional Void. In each case, whatever success he had had (and he had had very little success) had been temporary. He considered his lack of success to be central to the Issue at Hand. Within the context of the Female Emotional Void, no general observation could be considered sound if there existed an anecdotal refutation.
One hardly knows where to begin.
At least Astoria got out while the getting was good.
Because that’s one of the stickier ironies: Sim, misogynist, is responsible for one of the greatest female comics characters ever: Astoria, the political machinator, the power behind Cerebus’ initial rise to power. Cynical, manipulative, self-assured, confident, competent, savvy, imperious, arrogant, idealistic, committed to fighting for women’s rights as part of a larger battle for equality and liberty, she’s the opposite pole to Cerebus’ capricious, hot-headed, stubborn, foolish, oblivious plunge through the plots a-swirl about them. In the climactic, board-sweeping confrontation of Reads, before it dissolves into the (brutal, pointed) fight scene, she has her apotheosis: “Po was right,” she says,
If I’m honest with myself, I’ve only ever wanted power for its own sake… Ostensibly, I wanted to destroy Cirin. As her protégée, I came to despise everyone she kept tabs on—everyone who she felt was a threat to her… I married Lord Julius solely to set up a Kevillist empire from within Palnu… I seduced Artemis and used him to execute matriarchal sympathisers… I seduced her son and made him a glorified errand boy… When you turned up in Iest, I engineered your rise to power. I surrounded you with Kevillists and our symbols. Ultimately, I even became the Western pontiff… A short while ago, the entire city bowed down to me—hailed me as the messiah.
Just look.
I haven’t even made a dent in her—
—power.
Power over others is an illusion, she decides; “a stifling, insulating, frustrating practical joke from Terim… or Tarim. What does it really matter whether it’s a god or a goddess who’s laughing at you?” She remembers a daydream she used to have, as a little girl: a little church, open to the skies. She has several thousand crowns, enough to last her the rest of her life, to build her little house. (She will be mindful of death, and disinclined to long journeys; she will have ships and carriages, but no place to go.) —And with that simple declaration, Astoria walks out of the room and out of the dispute and out of the comic book, never to return.
And if she does return, at some point in those later issues I haven’t seen yet, I don’t want to know. Because I like to think that this simple little goodbye is Sim the Novelist also taking his bow. He’s done. The Age of the Polemicist is at hand.
(That’s on a good day. On a bad day, I think Sim the Novelist is a bastard. I think he typed that line up there, “There is no cure for willful stupidity,” knowing that no Polemicist would ever have the gumption to turn anything he said back on himself—that’s one of the weaknesses of polemic. Sim the Novelist typed one last line, a poison pill, and then he faded to black. Bye-bye.)
We used to sit around wondering what this day would be like. (Idly. Very occasionally. We had other things to do, too, you know.) We’d lock ourselves away for the better part of a week, we figured, with a stack of the Cerebus phone books to hand, and we’d read it through, start to finish, 6,000 pages of comics from a single creator, telling a single story, more or less.
And here we are, in March 2004. He kept his word. We should have trusted him, in that much, at least.
But I’m not rushing out to buy it. We haven’t bought a collection in ages. And I don’t know that I ever will, either. Don’t get me wrong: there’s maybe a handful of people on this planet who have ever worked in comics at his level. His work as a fantasist and a satirist and, yes, a novelist is astonishing. But that’s not enough—because he’s also a dreadful, didactic bore, a muzzy-headed chop-logician with the ever-shifting convictions of his courage. He lost the fight that mattered, with himself; in a very real sense, Sim didn’t make it to 300. —But he made one hell of an indelible mark on comics along the way.
Here’s one for you, then, Mr. Sim.
Even if I do like your earlier, funnier stuff better.
Pullet Surprise.
I’ve always thought the Onion’s coverage of God’s post-9/11 press conference was a shining moment—a bracing blast of righteous fury tempered with bleak humor that has you smiling at the audacity instead of the funny and fully intends there to be nothing but crickets heard at the punchline. Whenever a joke goes on too long these days, or an Area Man story gets recycled, I think of it, and I forgive them, for they are mighty. They did the impossible.
And, apparently, it almost got them nominated for a Pulitzer.
Sketching.
So if I had the time, I’d write something that started with Jim Henley’s “literature of ethics”—his enlightening apologia for the capecapades set—then whipsaw through John Holbo’s posts on imaginative resistance (here, and here), moving quickly so you couldn’t tell I hadn’t done the relevant reading, and then bring it on home with Dylan Horrocks’ new essay on art as world-creation, and what that means for comics and gaming, those squallingly disreputable media-children. —But nothing’s gelling yet. And anyway, there’s other stuff I need to be up to. So.
(But hey: if you get there first, I’ll happily crib whatever you’ve got to say.)
You’ve been to a marvelous party—
I must say the fun was intense;
You all had to do
What the people you knew
Would be doing a hundred years hence.
You talked about growing old gracef’ly
And Elsie, who’s seventy-four,
Said a) it’s a question of being sincere
And b) if you’re supple you’ve nothing to fear,
Then she swung upside down from a chandelier—
And you couldn’t have liked it more!
With humble apologies to Noël Coward, by way of Neil Hannon. Now go, let Patrick Farley tell you more about what went on—
It was in the fresh air
And we went as we were
And we stayed as we were
Which was Hell.
I’ve been to a marvelous party…
