Four things make a poll

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1794887]

Comments

[pigwotflies.livejournal.com]

Addendum to 2: I know what Frank Miller's been ranting about, but I've no idea who Dave Sim is.

[andrewducker]

Another comic writer, famous for a long while for his amazing comic book series Cerebus. Latterly famous for his complete lack of grip on reality, particularly where women are involved:
http://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/sim.html

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I don't know what Frank Miller has been ranting about, but I voted for "More in touch with reality than Dave Sim" because well, what the others said about empty sets.

Update: No, Frank Miller: asshole, self-important and uncomprehending. Dave Simm: batshit.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Dave Sim is the world's greatest living cartoonist, and his comic Cerebus, which came out every month for 27 years and told a single continuing 3000 page story, is quite possibly the single greatest work of art of the twentieth century.

He is also someone who has been diagnosed in the past with schizophrenia, who gave up masturbating seven years ago because he believes women were reading his mind while he was doing it, and who believes all women, transsexuals, 'homosexualists', Islamists and insufficiently masculine men are in on a secret plot with YooHWHoo. He also refuses to speak to anyone who won't first sign an affidavit stating that Sim is not a misogynist.

YooHWHoo is his name for the YHWH of the Bible. He's read the Bible and noticed that the Elohist and YHWHist passages sound like they're written by different people (because they are) and has therefore come to the conclusion that the Bible is a secret coded dialogue that only he understands, between the real God and an evil female transsexual demiurge called YooHWHoo who lives in the centre of the earth and who controls the feminist/homosexualist/Islamofascist conspiracy.

He also sees messages between YHWH and God in almost everything around him. A typical excerpt from his Collected Letters 2004:

" I think YHWH’s contribution back in the early sixties was Peter, Paul and Mary. I mean it is a way of looking at Christianity, seeing Peter, Paul and Mary as the three cornerstones after Jesus. Of course, being YHWH her point was; if you have Peter, Paul and Mary what do you need Jesus for? I think that amused God a great deal — to the extent that he countered with John, Paul, George and Ringo. Paul of course, was actually James: James Paul McCartney. SO John and James were the leaders of the band, like the sons of Zebedee, John and James, the brothers Boanerges, the sons of thunder…

So it was a good joke that on the cusp of being famous John and James had ditched Peter, Pete Best, the drummer since this is basically what the biblical John and James had attempted to do with Peter the apostle.

The George part I think was God’s way of saying that leapfrogging Peter – that is the Vatican – lands you in England and Henry VIII’s decision to make himself not only king, but head of the church as well. There have been three king Georges...

Now, having ditched Peter, that meant you had three kings or a Ring of Stars...

The Beatles were the template that attracted their own disciples, the Rolling Stones, which was another play, in my view, on the fact that there had been a pool of disciples for the two Jesus’. There was Peter, Cephas, the rock or stone, but he rolled back and forth between the two Jesus’s."


Despite this, Sim is an absolute genius, and ten thousand times the comic creator Miller is (and that's not to knock Miller's work - Sim is just *that good*).

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

In other words, the phrase "less in touch with reality than Dave Sim" is one of those phrases like "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" that sounds like it must mean something but really doesn't.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I took it to be a meaningful phrase in the sense that "the set of natural number smaller than zero" is a meaningful phrase (defining an empty set).

Hence, I confidently ticked "more in touch with reality than Dave Sim" without any particular knowledge of Frank Miller other than reading a few comics.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Is he the guy whose books look like they have A.L.F. on the cover?

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Yep. In fact people urged him to sue over ALF, because he does look quite a bit like Cerebus and has a similar kind of attitude at times, but Sim is very relaxed about other people using his intellectual property.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Despite this, Sim is an absolute genius, and ten thousand times the comic creator Miller is (and that's not to knock Miller's work - Sim is just *that good*).

Seconded. I've read all of Cerebus at least once on average (the first two-thirds many times, the last three books only once), and it still stands up to rereading even now.

The downside is that Cerebus has pretty much spoiled most mainstream comics for me by virtue of being better than them.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I can see that. There's stuff even in those last three volumes (and occasionally in Glamourpuss) that points out whole new swathes of possibilities in how to use the comics medium, things that other people have just totally ignored. It's one of the great tragedies that Dave Sim the comic creator is pretty much totally ignored now because of remarks made by Dave Sim the mentally ill man.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I must admit, I lost the story at Melmoth... If I wanted to read Wilde I would read Wilde. Does it recover?

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

(Correction, Cerebus is about 6000 pages, not 3000).

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had wondered why Sim was crazy, and that pretty much clears it up. Yeah, he's a w hole order of crazy above Miller. Miller is just a nasty little boy who thinks all women are whores.

[andrewducker]

As he's had female characters that weren't whores, I'm curious as to why this meme seems to have caught on quite so much.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Sim was one of those twenty years ago, and unfortunately drove away most of his readers at that point, so most people who talk about Sim just talk about him as being a misogynist - which was all he was, at least publicly, in the early 90s. But over the intervening decades it's become far clearer that Sim's misogyny (very real and very nasty) is intimately tied in with his schizophrenia. He had a spell in a mental hospital in the late 70s, during which time he hallucinated the overarching plot to Cerebus, and he's said that he never stopped thinking that way, he just learned to hide it for a time.

He's both lucky and unlucky in that he had the talent to turn his mental illness into a source of income. Lucky in that he made a very, very good living for a long time doing something he enjoyed and which enriched the lives of tens of thousands of people immeasurably. Unlucky in that the cartooning lifestyle encouraged the worst excesses of his illness, and he eventually became someone who will die, as his creation did, "alone, unmourned and unloved". Very, very, very sad.

[pigwotflies.livejournal.com]

What a very strange man. I'm not hugely familiar with the work of either though.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard about Frank Miller's latest diatribe, so went and googled it. Gosh, that's a tricky one, isn't it? Dave Sim has, for a long while now, been my yardstick for crazy comic writers.

Hmmm.

I think I'm going to cautiously vote for Dave Sim as being slightly less in touch with reality, but I reserve the right to change my vote later on if further evidence comes to light.

[andrewducker]

It's worth reading David Brin's response (which was in my link post today).

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

That was nine years ago, before Sim *really* went off the deep end...

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

The fourth thing?

Combining income tax and NI would be a jolly good thing. While they're at it, they could simplify NI. At the very least, the cryptically named classes 1 to 4 could be given actual meaningful names perhaps?

The first thing I said when I learnt that there was income tax, based on your income, and NI, based on your income, was 'Why two different taxes based on your income? That's just silly'.

[andrewducker]

Well spotted. It was to make up for the poll a week ago that had four items in it, when I said there were three.

And yes, there's no reason nowadays for it to be separate.

[anef.livejournal.com]

Well, one reason is that if you combined the two without making some provision for pensioners, you would have a lot of very unhappy pensioners.

[andrewducker]

True - you'll have to give them benefits for it. Or have a different rate of tax for pension payments.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Was it Harold Wilson who said, when refering to the National Insurance Fund "I'll let you into a little secret; there ain't no Fund."