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David Victor Sim (born May 17, 1956 in Hamilton, Ontario) is a Canadian comic book writer and artist, best known as the creator of the 6,000 page graphic novel Cerebus the Aardvark.

Early years

Sim was born in Hamilton, but moved to Kitchener with his family when he was two. His father was a manufacturing plant supervisor and his mother a secretary. He has an older sister named Sheila.

He was interested in comics from an early age and dropped out of high school to pursue a career in the field. His only ever 'real' job has been working as an employee at Now and Then Books.

He published a fanzine called The Now and Then Times (financed by Harry Kremer, the owner of the comic book store after which the newsletter was named) and did work for such other fanzines as John Balge's Comic Art News and Reviews and Gene Day's Dark Fantasy and National Advisor. Sim often interviewed professional comics artists such as Barry Windsor-Smith and Neal Adams.

Sim also created various other comics, including a newspaper comic strip called The Beavers which was published in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, and wrote or drew stories published in anthologies such as Phantacea.

Cerebus

In December 1977, Sim began publishing Cerebus, an initially bi-monthly, black-and-white comic book series. It began as a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Howard the Duck. Progressively, Sim shifted his narrative style from story arcs of a few issues' length to longer, far more complex "novels," beginning with the storyline known as High Society. The prominent sword and sorcery elements in the series up to that point were minimized as Sim concentrated more on politics and religion.

Cerebus was published through his company, Aardvark-Vanaheim which was run by his wife, Deni Loubert. The two met in 1976, married in 1979 and divorced after nearly five years.

In 1979, Sim was admitted to Kitchener General Hospital by his wife and mother after several days of taking LSD He has stated in his Getting Riel [http://www.cerebusfangirl.com/artists/louisriel1.html dialogue with Chester Brown that he was "diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic." During his convalescence, Sim hit upon the idea of making Cerebus into a 300-issue series, something that had never been done in Western comics with the same artist and writer. It would continue the story of the life of Cerebus the Aardvark, culminating in his death in the final issue (which appeared in March 2004).

Sim continued to chronicle the life of Cerebus with the story arc Church & State.

In the 1980s, when Cerebus was a large independent-comics success, Sim did much travelling to promote the series, which was selling at least 30,000 copies an issue at its height. In 1984 Gerhard became his collaborator and handled the background drawings in the series. Aardvark-Vanaheim, managed by Loubert, began publising other comics besides Cerebus, such as William Messner-Loebs' Journey and Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot. After Sim and Loubert's separation, Loubert started Renegade Press, which assumed publishing duties for all non-Cerebus Aardvark-Vanaheim titles.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Sim used his sales leverage to serve as a major proponent of creator's rights and self-publishing within the comics industry. In addition to speaking on these topics at comic book conventions (as in his 1993 PRO/con speech*), Sim published The Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing in 1997 and often promoted other creators' work in the back pages of Cerebus.

Feminism and religious conversion

Sim completed the series on schedule. In the course of it, he expressed views contrary to feminism, modern materialism, and leftist politics. Sim chose to make his views on gender public in issue No. 186 of Cerebus in a text piece as part of the story arc Reads (one of four books in the larger Mothers & Daughters arc), using the pseudonym Viktor Davis. * These views caused major controversy in the comic book industry and among his readership, resulting in a substantial decline in sales. In 1995, issue No. 174 of The Comics Journal featured a Bill Willingham caricature of Sim on one of the covers while bearing the title Dave Sim: Misogynist Guru of Self-Publishers, while inside was a lengthy article about responses to Sim’s essay in Cerebus No. 186, which categorized humanity into metaphorical lights, which tended to reside in biological men, and voids, which tended to be in biological women. The article solicited responses from comics creators such as Seth, Rick Veitch, Steve Bissette and Sim’s friend Chester Brown as well as including a short interview with Sim’s ex-wife wherein she described her perception of the essay as evidence of Sim being very scared. The article was accompanied by an illustration depicting Sim as a Nazi German concentration camp warden, standing in front of a gate with the name of his publishing company on the top with piles of emaciated bodies within. Sim refers to this as the “Dave Sim is a Nazi” issue of The Comics Journal. The responses in the article ranged from anger to a belief that Sim was joking.

In 2001, Sim published another essay called "Tangent" in Cerebus No. 265, (April 2001). In it, Sim describes the veering-off course or tangent he contends western society has taken due to the widespread acceptance and proliferation of feminism which he places at beginning in 1970. The Comics Journal posted the full essay on its website under the title Dave Sim: Masculinity's Last Hope, or Creepily Paranoid Misogynist?, * As a result of the essay, the site's message board filled with many opposing responses to Sim’s arguments.

Post-Cerebus Sim still lives in Kitchener, provides occasional guest work, goes to conventions and attends city council meetings. Following a religious conversion from atheist secular humanism to the monotheism of the Abrahamic religions which occurred upon his reading of the Bible and the Qur'an beginning in December 1996, he lives a lifestyle of fasting, celibacy, prayer and alms-giving and considers the Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures to be equally valid as the Word of God.

As of 2006, Sim is working on the Cerebus Archive Project, an online searchable database of Cerebus materials. He is also working with Win-Mill Productions on the comic-sized magazine Following Cerebus *, writing for local publications and doing work for creators including Howard M. Shum's Gun Fu and Shannon Wheeler's Too Much Coffee Man.

Sim has made arrangements for the copyright of Cerebus to fall into the public domain following the deaths of Gerhard and himself.

Sim and The Comics Journal

Dave Sim and Gary Groth, editor-in-chief of The Comics Journal have enjoyed a combative relationship over the years. The magazine was the first to publish a review of the first dozen or so issues of Cerebus, by Kim Thompson, in 1979. Groth and Thompson are co-owners of Fantagraphics Books, which publishes such high-profile creators as Daniel Clowes, Peter Bagge and Chris Ware.

Early in the 1990s, Groth took issue with Sim’s stance of self-publishing as the best option for creators, and began to disseminate the view that it was best to work for a publisher and mentioned Ivan Boesky’s address to the University of California's commencement ceremony in May 1986 where Boesky informed his audience that “greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself." Sim took this as Groth implying that the motivation for self-publishing is greed, whereas what he really believes is that is the best option for any creator for any number of reasons; creative autonomy and ownership of one's creations being topmost among them.

In 2000, the Journal published a list of what its writers had selected as the 100 greatest comics of all time, which some commentators noted appeared biased towards Fantagraphics titles and seemed to pointedly omit Cerebus .

Later, on a panel at the San Diego Comic Con Groth indicted Sim in a "Nuremberg-style tribunal designed to bring to light the most deserving criminals who had over the past decade and longer besmirched the good name of the comics art and industry."* Sim was charged with boosting the speculation boom in the comics market in 1992, early boostering of Image Comics, making a "misogynist rant" and boostering self-publishers at their expense, this last wherein Groth accused Sim of promoting self-publishing to the point of possibly bankrupting thousands of self-publishers.

Sim was interviewed by Tom Spurgeon for the magazine in 1996, the second part of which interview was published eight issues after the first, which was interpreted by Sim as a slight.

Despite this adversarial relationship over the years, Groth personally telephoned Sim to congratulate him upon the completion of his share of Cerebus in December 2003 and later published an issue of the Journal featuring a critical roundtable on Cerebus.

Awards

His work has won him a good deal of recognition in the comics industy. Along with being nominated for many awards, Dave has won several awards for his work on Cerebus:
  • Eisner Award : Best Graphic Album: Reprint, 1994, for Cerebus: Flight by Dave Sim and Gerhard (Aardvark-Vanaheim)
  • Harvey Award: Best Cartoonist (Writer/Artist), 1992, Dave Sim, for Cerebus (Aardvark-Vanaheim) and Best Letterer, 2004, Dave Sim, for Cerebus (Aardvark-Vanaheim)
  • Ignatz Awards: Outstanding Artist, 1998, Dave Sim, Cerebus (Aardvark-Vanaheim)
  • Kirby Award: Best Black & White Series, 1987 and 1985, Cerebus by Dave Sim (Aardvark-Vanaheim)
  • Shuster Awards: Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Achievement, 2005, Dave Sim and Gerhard for completing Cerebus in 2004.
  • Squiddy Awards: Best Creative Team, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993 (all for the team of Dave Sim and Gerhard); Best Letterer, 2001.

Day Prize

In 2001, Sim and Gerhard founded the Howard E. Day Prize recognizing excellence in self-publishing in memorial of Sim's mentor Gene Day. Sim selects a Short List of nominees from the applicant pool, then names the annual winner.

Quotes

  • "No corporation will ever pay a creator enough to sue them successfully."

  • "What the feminists and their ventriloquist puppet husbands are talking about doing with Government-Funded Daycare is raising children as if they were a herd of interchangeable swine. No surprise coming from a gender which has no ethics, no scruples, no sense of right and wrong."

  • If something knocks you five degrees out of whack, the journey of a thousand miles that begins with a single step ends up thousands of miles away from its intended destination. *

  • It seems to me a core element of belief in God that a choice is a choice and it eliminates all other choices.*

Collections of Sim's Writing

Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing (ISSN 0712-7774) collects selections from Sim's 'Notes from the President' column that dealt with self-publishing, the Pro/Con speech from 1993, and more.

Collected Letters: 2004 (ISBN 091935923X) collects Sim's responses to readers' letters (the original letters are not included) after the publication of Cerebus #300.

See also

External links

1956 births | Living people | Canadian cartoonists | Comics artists | Comics writers | Kitchenerites | Ontario writers | Scottish Canadians | Hamiltonians

Dave Sim | Dave Sim | Dave Sim

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Dave Sim".

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