The issue which Rilstone raises in the essays I linked to above, which is also what I feel, is that sure you can separate someone's work from their political (?) views. But Sim no longer can.
Even the oh-so-scandalous #185 and 186 are, to my mind, an acceptable part of the Cerebus story. In that volume of Mothers & Daughters (Reads, #'s 175-186) Sim divides the narrative half into Cerebus's big confrontation with Cirin, Astoria and Suenteus Po, and half into autobiography. This, I think, is reasonable. It's the same trick he used with Melmoth, or even Jaka's Story, only applied to his own life.
In the autobio parts, he uses two self-insertion identities: Victor Reid is a naive writer of "Reads", the Cerebus-world equivalent of comic books. The first half of the story tracks Victor Reid's rise and fall, the vicissitudes of his Reads career, and continues in the vein of satirizing the comics publishing industry which has been an element in Cerebus since at least #23. In the second half, Victor Reid is replaced by the (much nastier) Victor Davis, who has much stronger narrator voice and proceeds to recount more personal autobiography, not in terms of events but in terms of Sims' crazed theories.
But all up, in this story, the actual batshit crazy stuff is confined to the text portions of #185 and #186. That's half of two issues, or one issue's worth, out of the first 200 issues where the content is actively focussed on advancing Sim's worldview. That's one half of one per cent. So it's certainly a component of the narrative, but I wouldn't say it's overwhelming.
But since #200 that degree of separation has been seen less and less. Sim self-inserts again at the end of a later story because he can't get Cerebus out of the bar that his life has gotten trapped in. We get to this stage where he really seems to believe that the little grey guy is alive. It sounds like Morrison's proclamations about the DCU, but without the sense of humour.
From there, things spin off and there's more and more of a feeling of Sim-the-guy pushing into the narrative, getting in the way of Sim-the-author trying to tell his tale. Sim-the-guy wants to be a cool researcher like Alan Moore, so he starts these long elaborate fictionalizations of Fitzgerald and Hemmingway. Sim the guy pushes his own feelings about women into the story and Jaka has to contort out of all recognition to match the pattern, even though it's basically at variance with how her character has been established to date. And so on.
This is why I "drew a line" under 200. That's the last point that I felt he was still on the right track. He'd talked some smack that was wrong, sure, but it hadn't affected the comic. In the last hundred issues, I feel like it has, especially with the Gospel According To Dave-The-Guy being written into the conclusion of the last story arc.
Little known fact: S'ym, the big purple demon with the quiff and the stoagie who used to chase Magik around in the New Mutants is based on Dave Sim, and is pretty much a visual ringer for him. You can certainly see it in the early issues where Cockrum was drawing him. |
Nothing about fur or Naomi Campbell here.