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Dave Sim is the creator of Cerebus. He began self
publishing the comic book in the late 70's,
promised to do 300 issues of the book and did so.
It's a feat few see anybody else repeating. Along
the way he selflessly taught people how to self
publish their own comic books, helping many to
realize their dream of publishing their
creations. A few of those self publishers managed
to get rich or get better paying work afterwards.
With this interview we talk about Dave's start
with comics, Cerebus, the help and difficulties
he encountered along the way, what's he doing now
and a lot more.
Note: This interview was done via fax machine.
Dave normally only allows interviews to be 5
questions, but let me ask him 20. So an extra
thank you goes out to Dave for allowing the extra
questions and for being a great interviewee.
Jamie:
Assuming you read comics as a boy, which ones
did you read regularly?
Dave Sim:
I read the Mort Weisinger-edited Superman
line of comic books, Superman, Action, World's
Finest, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, later branching
out into the rest of the DC line and then Marvel
Comics, Warren and then undergrounds by the time I
was fifteen or sixteen.
Jamie:
I take it you were a big fan of Conan during
the 70's?
Dave Sim:
No, I wasn't really a big fan of Conan in the
70s. I had read all of the Robert E. Howard
material once and then-reading the lesser L.
Sprague DeCamp knock-offs that came later-swiftly
lost interest. I really should go back and find
the Howard material at some time and re-read it.
I would pick up the occasional issue of Conan if I
liked what Barry Smith was doing on it-such as the
"Frost Giant's Daughter" issue that reprinted the
black & white strip or the two-part "Red Nails"
story as it originally appeared in Savage Tales
magazine, but early on-with Dan Adkins and Sal
Buscema inking-it just looked like a really bad
Marvel comic to me. By that time I was starting
to draw on my own, so a comic needed to have
something more to it in order to get me excited
creatively or make me want to swipe the style of
the artist. Barry inking himself definitely had
that effect on me. Barry inked by others
definitely didn't have that effect on me and most
of his work at Marvel was inked by very
incompatible talents.
Jamie:
If you didn't like Conan, why did you create
Cerebus to be a parody of it?
Dave Sim:
The decision to do Cerebus was based on my
insight that what had made Howard the Duck
successful was the "funny animal in the world of
humans" motif whereas everyone doing work for
Quack! (my intended market) was doing all funny
animal strips. Since Howard had modern-day sown
up that, to me, left the possibility of a science
fiction "funny animal in the world of humans" or a
sword 'n' sorcery "funny animal in the world of
humans". Science fiction required drawing a lot
of straight edges and learning how to use French
curves properly, so that left only one
possibility. Coincidentally I had the unused
mascot for Deni's fanzine and I did a sample page
for Mike Friedrich which turned out to be the
splash page of issue 1. The fact that it was
successful was a very hard lesson in what happens
when you do something because you think it's
commercially viable rather than being what you
want to do. I was stuck going through the
checklist of sword 'n' sorcery clichés and was
quickly running out of them.
Jamie:
Considering Cerebus started off as something
you believed would be commercially viable, if you
were able to go back and re-do your comic career
all over again what would you do differently?
Dave Sim:
I'm afraid that one of my core beliefs is to
never traffic in the hypothetical which I suspect
is one of the reasons that it was possible to
finish Cerebus. If you make a choice and then
live with the consequences of that choice you are
always moving forward. If you make a choice and
then spend all of your time trying to assess the
different choices you might have made and the
possible outcomes of those hypothetical choices,
then you just end up spending your life treading
water and getting very little done. I conducted
my comic-book career the way that I conducted it
and it ended up the way that it ended up. I only
see what happened, not what might have happened.
Jamie:
How did you meet Gene Day?
Dave Sim:
I met Gene Day in the summer of 1974. We had
started corresponding in the fall of 1973 after
John Balge and I had interviewed Augustine Funnel
for Comic Art News & Reviews. Gus had started
writing for Al Hewetson's Skywald magazines and
told us about his roommate, Gene Day, and that we
should talk to him about doing some work for CANAR
and that I should ask about doing some work for
Gene's Dark Fantasy. I had already arranged a bus
trip up to see my aunt and uncle in Ottawa so I
decided to make a side trip to Gananoque on the
way and stay over for a couple of days. It ended
up being the first of many such trips.
Jamie:
I've always heard he was your mentor. What
exactly did Gene do for you?
Dave Sim:
Gene really showed me that success in a
creative field is a matter of hard work and
productivity and persistence. I had done a
handful of strips and illustrations at that point
mostly for various fanzines but I wasn't very
productive. I would do a strip or an illustration
and send it off to a potential market and then
wait to find out if they were going to use it
before doing anything else. Or I'd wait for
someone to write to me and ask me to draw
something. Gene was producing artwork every day
and putting it out in the mail and when it came
back he'd send it out to someone else. He would
draw work for money and then do work on spec if
the paying markets dried up. He kept trying at
places where he had been rejected. He did strips,
cartoons, caricatures, covers, spot illos,
anything that he might get paid for. He gave
drawing lessons and produced his own fanzines. It
was easy to see the difference, to see why he was
a success and I was a failure. It was in the fall
of 1975 that I bought a calendar and started
filling the squares with whatever it was that I
had produced that day and worked to put together
months-long streaks where I produced work every
day. The net result was that I started to get
more paying work and a year later I was able to
move out of my parents' house into my own one-room
apartment/studio downtown. I doubt that would
ever have happened without Gene's influence.
Jamie:
Gene died an early death. Can you tell me about
Gene sleeping at Marvel's office to fulfill a
deadline and the health problems that stemmed from
that?
Dave Sim:
Yes, Gene died at the age of 31 from a heart
attack. He had been working for Marvel for
several years at that point. He started as an
inker which was the thing that he was the fastest
at, so he built up a really good reputation as a
guy who could turn a late job around in a hurry.
He was so fast, the people at Marvel were
convinced that he had a whole studio of Gene Day
clones working night and day, but it was just him.
When I'd go and visit him, he'd have piles of
11x17 photocopies of the jobs he had done-he
traded his weekly Cap'n Riverrat cartoon to the
local weekly newspaper, The Gananoque Reporter for
free photocopying. When Mike Zeck left Master of
Kung Fu to work on Captain America, Marvel was
left without a penciller for the title and the
editor persuaded Gene to step in which instantly
cut his revenue by a substantial amount-he was a
much slower penciller than he was an inker. He
also ran afoul of then editor-in-chief Jim
Shooter's strict rules about storytelling-that you
needed to do the basic six panels to a page method
with occasional lapses if you had a good reason
for it. Gene, of course was a major fan of Jim
Steranko-style storytelling which was exactly what
Jim Shooter was opposed to and they locked horns
over the subject many times with Gene doing
continuous backgrounds in his panel-to-panel
continuity (one large background on the page with
the action taking place in individual panels set
against the one background). Shooter would tell
him not to do it and Gene would do it, finally
doing I think a five-page sequence that was all
one background. At the same time he was doing
outside assignments at Marvel including a story
for one of the black-and-white magazines (I think
it was) which Gene was supposed to pencil and ink.
The deadline got moved up or something and they
told Gene on the phone that they were going to
have the story "gang inked" over a few days. This
was something that Marvel did pretty regularly in
the 70s to keep books on schedule. They'd get
five or six guys to sit in the bullpen and ink a
job to get it done faster. As you would expect,
the results were usually horrible. One of P.
Craig Russell's first jobs for Marvel was part of
a gang-inking on an issue of Barry's Conan. For
the longest time, my impression of the story was
that they had phoned Gene and wanted him to come
down and ink the job and that Gene had done so out
of loyalty to Marvel even taking the train to
Manhattan because he was afraid to fly. It was
years later that his brother Dan mentioned to me
that what Gene was concerned about was doing as
much of the inking himself as he could to keep the
job from being a total abomination. The more I
think about that, the more it explains what
happened. Gene showed up at Marvel and they gave
him the address of the hotel he would be staying
at. He went there and the place was covered in
cockroaches so Gene went back to Marvel and asked
to be put up in a better hotel. Nothing fancy,
just a place without cockroaches. That was when
Tom DeFalco gave him the choice of the
roach-infested hotel or sleeping on the couch in
Marvel's reception area. Gene chose the latter,
not realizing that they turned the heat off in the
building overnight (this was in the dead of
winter). So he slept there with his coat pulled
over him and developed as a result a kidney
infection which stuck with him the rest of his
life. In retrospect, I think the problem Marvel
had was that they had no policy for the situation.
They had found their solution, they were going to
get the job gang-inked. When Gene insisted on
coming down to work on it, it just didn't make
sense to them editorially to pay for a hotel room
for him given what that was going to add to their
costs on the story. For Gene, it was an obvious
plus-by coming down and working on the story it
would be that much better looking than it would be
being inked by whoever happened to be around at
the time. But, how the job looked wasn't as big a
priority for Marvel as having the job done. What
to Gene looked like a sensible improvement
solution looked to Marvel like a needless expense
and intrusion by a troublemaker. The same could
be said of Gene locking horns with Jim Shooter.
To Gene, he was trying to make the book better and
more interesting. To Shooter he was making it
unreadable and therefore uncommercial. On Gene's
side of the argument, sales were up on Master of
Kung Fu-it had always been a marginal title since
Paul Gulacy had left, on the verge of cancellation
and now it was turning into a fan favourite again.
On Jim Shooter's side of the argument, good
nuts-and-bolts six-panels-to-the-page storytelling
always sold better in the long run for Marvel.
John Buscema's Conan outsold Barry Smith's by a
wide margin, as an example. Eventually Shooter
fired Gene and I think that, as much as anything,
killed Gene Day. His heart and soul were at
Marvel Comics. His lifelong dream was to work in
the House that Jack Built. Of course, what he
failed to see was that working in the House that
Jack Built even became an untenable prospect for
Jack. And, of course, interviewing as many
professionals as I had in my fanzine days, I had a
much clearer idea of what Marvel and DC were
actually like and just how ruthless the editors
could be when the situation seemed to call for
ruthlessness (which, as they saw it, it usually
did). I knew that in a lot of ways the worst
thing you could bring to the table as a freelancer
was unwavering company loyalty. For many of the
editors at the time, that was just inviting them
to rip your heart out. Which, to me, is exactly
what Gene did. And exactly what Marvel did.
Jamie:
Prior to Cerebus you did work for other comics.
What happened that made you want to self publish
instead?
Dave Sim:
That was a combination of things. Everyone
that I did work for I was either a minor guy on
their roster and so didn't get the attention that
I thought I needed or I was a major guy on their
roster only because they were too small to get
anywhere. They'd announce that the new issue
would be out in July and then write you in August
saying they hope to get it out by November. There
was a sense of time slipping away while I waiting
for everyone to get to the project that I was in.
Gene was more interested in getting Dark Fantasy
out than Hellhound, his proposed comics title.
And then he acquired the rights to do an
adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Pigeons from Hell
and I knew that was going to push Hellhound even
further back. I had printed samples in Quack and
Oktoberfest Comics and Phantacea No.1 which I had
drawn from someone else's script, colour covers
with black & white interiors and what I figured I
needed was a few more samples like that where it
was all or mostly my work inside the book. So
that was why I decided to do three issues of
Cerebus, do it bi-monthly and make sure it came
out on time, keep the price the same, keep the
format the same, keep the logo the same, have a
letters page, keep it to twenty-two
pages-basically do all the things right that I
thought the other guys were doing wrong and if I
fell on my face, well fine, I'd fall on my face
and I'd stop complaining about what a lousy job
everyone else was doing and just go back to doing
it their way. But, at least I'd have three issues
of my own comic book to put with Oktoberfest
Comics and Phantacea so that editors could see
what I was capable of. And as it turned out I was
right. To this day, I try to emphasize how
important it is to come out on time and everyone
just ignores me. They want to know the secret to
self-publishing but they don't want that secret.
That secret just sounds like a lot of hard work.
Which it is.
Jamie:
I understand you worked for Harry Kremer at Now
and Again Books, in what years did you do that?
Dave Sim:
I worked for Harry beginning December 1st of
1976 when he opened up the downstairs at 103 Queen
St. S. which is across the street from where Now &
Then Book is now. The hours were 10 am to 9 pm
Thursday and Friday and 10 am to 6 pm Saturday and
for that I got a grand total of $75 a month. It
was all Harry could afford. And I rented my
one-room apartment at 379 Queen St. S. for $120 a
month which meant that I had to make $45 a month
from drawing and writing just to keep a roof over
my head. I had about $1,000 in the bank from
selling Harry my comic-book collection to help buy
some time, but it was definitely sink or swim. As
it turns out it was sink, swim or move in with
your girlfriend which Deni and I did in April of
1977 so I only had to come up with half of the
rent which I think still worked out to about $120
a month.
Jamie:
How did Harry help with Cerebus?
Dave Sim:
Harry helped in a lot of ways with Cerebus.
For starters, he was running the comic-book store
that I was living in (it was really my first home,
my parents house was just where I slept and stored
my comic books) when the direct market started and
he was stocking new comic books as well as back
issues, new comic books which included ground level
titles like Star*Reach which showed me that there
was room on the shelves next to Marvel and DC.
Then he agreed to publish Oktoberfest Comics in
1976. Through that experience, I found out
roughly what it cost to do a black-and-white comic
on newsprint with a colour cover and realized that
it was a lot more affordable with the new
high-speed web offset presses than I had suspected
which started me thinking about doing one of my
own. And before the first issue was published, he
agreed to take 500 copies which, when you consider
that our two distributors-Jim Friel of Big Rapids
Distribution and Phil Seuling of Sea Gate
Distributors-were taking 500 and 1,000 copies
respectively tells you what a great vote of
confidence and commitment that was from a single
comic book store. And then he would also buy
artwork from time to time. He bought the complete
issue 4 for $220, $10 a page. It may not sound
like much, but it definitely paid for a lot of
Kraft Dinners which Deni and I pretty much lived on
for months at a time. We had our ups and downs
over the years-he got seriously offended when I
started charging $100 a page U.S. He liked my
artwork but he really didn't think it belonged in
that price range. But there's no question that
Cerebus couldn't have made it through the first
few years without his help and, particularly,
without the existence of Now & Then Books. Today
(6 June 05) would have been his fifty-ninth
birthday if he had lived.
Jamie:
Is it true that Cerebus was supposed to be
titled Cerberus? If so, how did it change?
Dave Sim:
What happened was that Deni-before I knew
her-had decided to put out a fanzine modeled on
Gene Day's Dark Fantasy. When I met her, in
December of 1976, that was what she had come into
the store to find out-would Harry be willing to
carry copies of her fanzine if she published it?
I volunteered to help and wrote down my name which
she recognized from the work I had had published
in Dark Fantasy. The name she had come up with
for her fanzine was Cerebus. So I did a logo for
her, the one that was on the first forty-nine
issues and told her she really should have a name
for her publishing company in the same way that
Dark Fantasy was published by Gene Day's House of
Shadows. Her sister came up with Aardvark Press
and her brother came up with Vanaheim Press, so I
put them together and made it Aardvark-Vanaheim
Press. And then I drew a cartoon aardvark with a
sword as a mascot. At that point someone realized
that the name of the magazine was misspelled.
What she had intended to call the magazine was
Cerberus, the name of the three-headed dog in
Greek mythology who guarded Hades. So I suggested
that we just say that Cerebus was the name of the
cartoon mascot. The printer in California ran off
with the originals and the money for the first
issue, so the fanzine never did come out. And
that was when I started thinking about my own
"funny animal in the world of humans" for Quack!
so I decided to draw a sample page of Cerebus the
cartoon mascot in my best Barry Windsor-Smith
style (see question 6 above).
Jamie:
Somebody made counterfeit copies of Cerebus #1.
Can you tell us the difference between the two so
the online buyers won't be fooled?
Dave Sim:
The easiest way to distinguish the real
Cerebus No.1 from the counterfeit is that the
inside covers are glossy black on the counterfeit
and a flat black on the real ones. The next
easiest way is that if you look at the areas of
solid black on pages 9, 10 and 11, they look
"dusty". That's because the counterfeit was shot
from a printed copy where there was already a
slightly speckled quality because it was printed
on cheap newsprint, so when that slightly speckled
quality was photographed, the-now doubled-slightly
speckled quality ended up looking like a fine
layer of dust over the entire page because there
is so much solid black on those three pages.
Jamie:
Did you ever discover who made the
counterfeits?
Dave Sim:
I have my suspicions as to who did the
counterfeit but, no, the FBI never managed to
catch the guys who were selling them-the "mules"
folded their operation as soon as word started to
spread-and therefore there was no route to anyone
who was behind the scam. I certainly wasn't about
to accuse anyone publicly without evidence to
support it but, yes, I'm pretty sure I knew who
did it.
Jamie:
I hear that after issue #11 you over-worked
yourself into a nervous breakdown. What were you
doing at the time?
Dave Sim:
Twenty-six years later on, I think it would
be more accurate to say that I had achieved a
false level of transcendence that I had been
looking to achieve through LSD-the psychic
equivalent of a massive and pleasurable electric
shock-that left me incapable of reassuring my wife
(within her own very limited frames of reference)
that I was okay: with the result that she freaked
out at one point and called my mother and she and
my mother locked me up in a psych ward at the
local hospital for a couple of days.
Jamie:
How did you recover from a nervous breakdown
and continue on?
Dave Sim:
There really wasn't anything to "recover"
from. I had gone through the false transcendent
state and come out the other side. The only thing
I really needed to recover from was the massive
doses of depressants they had given me in the
psych ward. That took two or three days during
which all of my muscles and motor functions were
seriously malfunctioning-it felt as if I had
pulled every muscle in my body so that just
speaking and walking required Herculean forces of
will in order to achieve. Essentially, at that
point-never again wanting to experience that
severe crippling effect-I began to live two
different lives simultaneously. I learned how to
portray myself as a normal person in order to keep
my wife and parents from locking me up in any more
psych wards while at the same time I began to
explore all of the thoughts and experiences that I
had had over the period of the false transcendent
state and began to work towards putting them all
down on paper in the Cerebus storyline. When I
realized, a month or two later, how large and
difficult a task that was going to be, I decided
to make Cerebus into a 300-issue project in order
to encompass it all and leave room for my own best
assessment of the aftermath. The documentation of
the state itself went from about issue 20 to about
issue 186. I was able to stop leading my double
life once I was divorced in 1983 and I no longer
had the on-going threat hanging over my head that
my freedom depended on my wife and mother
believing me to be sane.
Jamie:
How did you meet Gerhard?
Dave Sim:
I had heard a great deal about Gerhard
because he was the "golden boy" of his high school
clique, one of whose members was Deni's
high-school aged sister, Karen. He was the chief
set designer and star of a high-school production
"You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown" and also an
illustrator and the high-school clique was his
major support group. They collectively believed
in him and his prodigious abilities to the same
extent to which he didn't believe in himself:
which is to say thoroughly and completely. At one
point the high-school clique was having a
Halloween party and Karen, Deni's sister, and Bob
her boyfriend and later husband came by the
apartment to smoke a joint with Gerhard and his
(then) girlfriend Laurel. So far as we know that
was how I met Gerhard. It would've been Halloween
of 1981 or 1982.
Jamie:
I'm surprised more artists don't try and pair
up with somebody to help out with backgrounds. Why
do you think you and Gerhard have worked so well
together for the past 20 years?
Dave Sim:
I'm surprised, as well, that more artists
don't pair up with background artists. The
history of the comic-book field is filled with
things that worked really well that no one else
ever attempted. Look at Will Eisner's The
Spirit-what a great idea to do a comic-book
supplement for newspapers and yet no one ever
tried it again. It's certainly something that I
would recommend. I suspect fine arts courses and
architectural schools are filled with guys who
just have a love of drawing still-life's, which is
all that backgrounds are. Of course Gerhard grew
to hate pen-and-ink drawing which had been one of
his abiding passions when he had to do the volume
of drawing required, so you won't be seeing him
recommending it as a career choice anytime soon.
But, yes, I do think that guys who love writing
and lettering and drawing people should look
around for guys who like to draw inanimate
objects. Mutual tolerance would, I think, best
describe how the collaboration worked and how it
continues to work. If I really needed something
to go in the background, I'd be specific with
Gerhard but if not, I let him do whatever he
thought would look best. I always got my own best
results by doing what I thought was best and
always got second-rate results when someone was
telling me what to do, so it just seemed natural
to me to treat Gerhard the same way. If you want
the best results let the guy call his own shots.
Jamie:
I recently read that DC made an offer to buy
Cerebus from you at one point. When did that
happen and how much did they offer?
Dave Sim:
Those negotiations took place over the course
of 1985 to 1988, I think it was. Ultimately they
offered $100,000 and 10 of all licensing and
merchandising and that I would be allowed to keep
doing the monthly black-and-white and Swords of
Cerebus on my own. In the middle of the
negotiations I came up with the idea of the High
Society trade paperback and selling it direct to
the readers which brought in $150,000 in the space
of a few weeks and made their offer look kind of
puny by comparison. What I wanted to develop was
a Superman contract-a contract that would have
been fair to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster-where DC
could pick the revenue thresholds, but at some
point we would split all revenues 50-50 just as is
done with syndicated comic strips. No go. They
made a final offer to give me the whole $100,000
all at once or half now and half later on which,
to me, completely missed the point. You start
with a dollar amount and negotiate upward, you
don't say "You can put it all in your right front
pocket or you can put half in your right front
pocket and half in your back pocket." When I
realized that Paul Levitz wasn't going to budge, I
packed it in.
Jamie:
Now that Cerebus is done are you more open to
selling it?
Dave Sim:
No, not really. The difficult part is done
now-actually writing and drawing the 6,000 pages
so it's more like it's nice that the book still
keeps us busy, me with answering the mail and Ger
doing the business side and renovating the house
and both of us working on Following Cerebus and
developing a website for selling the artwork and
putting together a First Half package of the first
six volumes in a boxed set for Christmas, 2006.
If we sold it we'd just have a pile of money and
nothing to do. I really like being one of the two
Cerebus custodians. Part of the fun of sculpting
a statue over twenty-six years is spending the
rest of your life washing the pigeon droppings off
of it every day.
[Note: Following Cerebus is a magazine that Dave
and Gerhard work on. You can find more info about
it here:
http://spectrummagazines.bizland.com/]
Jamie:
I understand that since Cerebus ended, you are
now organizing your archives and this will likely
take another few years. What do you plan to do
with your archives when you are done?
Dave Sim:
Actually I have a lot of help from the
Cerebus Newsgroup readers at Yahoo.com who are
working out all the computer technicalities and
Margaret Liss of the w.w.w.cerebusfangirl.com
website who has started scanning in all of my
notebooks. After that it will be all of my comics
material starting with my first fanzine in 1970
through until the present day, all of the
paperwork and correspondence, interviews, reviews,
etc. in chronological order. As she scans that,
she'll be "key-wording" each document so that it
can be indexed for content and you'll be able to
type in, say, "Kevin Eastman" and it will call up
every document that mentions him. The idea is to
arrive at a point where that becomes the primary
research resource for Cerebus. Someone wanting to
do an interview like this, I can just go through
and check off the questions that they can find
answers to in the Cerebus Archive so that I don't
have to keep answering the same questions over and
over and over. Basically the same thing that I
did with the Guide to Self-Publishing where I went
out and promoted self-publishing through the
Spirits of Independence stops for a couple of
years and then wrote down everything I had been
telling people and now I can just give them a copy
of the Guide to Self-Publishing if they come to me
for advice. I almost never get asked about
self-publishing anymore for that reason.
Regards,
Jamie Coville
2005-06-16
http://www.TheGraphicNovels.com
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