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

[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]

That's a better analogy, actually.
Miller is just a typical right-wing USian crank, who's just done a comic about Batman going and beating up Osama Bin Laden (though he had to change it to be just a Batman-like character because DC wouldn't publish it) and who thinks that the Occupy Wall Street people should all join the army and go and fight the terrorist menace in Afghanistan and Iraq, that sort of thing. Pretty much exactly the kind of person you'd guess from reading any of his comics really. He's not even interestingly mad, just a curmudgeonly old bigot.

[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.

[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.

[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...

[nmg.livejournal.com]

To be fair, just as he's quite relaxed about using other people's IP (in the context of fair use and parody).

[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]

Absolutely. He essentially believes that intellectual property laws are immoral - one of the few consistent positions he's always held - and that an artist should have rights over *the artist's specific work* but that if someone else can create a better Spider-Man comic than Marvel put out - or a better Cerebus comic than Dave Sim put out - they should have the right to do so, and let the market decide whose is the 'real' one.

[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.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

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

[nmg.livejournal.com]

For me, the last few volumes were interesting to read because of what he was doing with the comics form, but the story stopped being of interest to me somewhere in the middle of Form and Void; I found Latter Days and The Last Day very hard going.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I agree for the most part, but there were still flashes of enjoyability - the Three Wise Fellows' "Calumnity! Capostrophe! Catachresisclysm!" is great, and some of the stuff about Rabbi was amusing. But yeah, in general the last fifty issues or so were interesting rather than enjoyable.

[andrewducker]

I was much the same. I started to lose my remaining interest during the Ham storyline, and had basically no interest in the last two books.

And then was very frustrated when the final couple of issues showed that Sim could still write fantastic comics when he wants to.

[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.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I think because of this Shortpacked strip from five years ago.

And I think it's mostly a criticism of his more recent (post-2001) work.

[andrewducker]

It's a funny strip, but people seem to have taken it all too seriously.

Has he done much since 2001 apart from All-Star Batman and Robin?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That strip's a reflection of the impression, not the source of it.

Miller *really does* write women as prostitutes and freezerbait almost all the time. In fact, I can't think of any female characters from Miller's own work that aren't, but I'm also not a big fan. There are a few characters *he doesn't own* who are neither, but I'm suspecting that Barbara Gordon's continued non-prostitute survival is more a DC editorial order than Miller's preference.

I mean, this is the guy who wrote Vicki Vale as a prostitute.