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Everyone has a dirty internet habit. Mine is reading Dave Sim's Blog & Mail, linked above. He writes a fortnight's worth of entries in a single 14-hour coffee and jalepeno-fuelled day and I generally read them from top to bottom, which is chronologically backwards. Often it's deeply skippable, sometimes it's oddly engaging, and on some subjects Dave can be so rational you wonder if it's the same guy.
One of those areas where he seemed able to remain rational was in talking about the creation and promotion of his Secret Project. A response to a retailer’s request for a 48-page comic that could be given to readers unfamiliar with the medium to demonstrate what could be done with it, the project required a lot of research and has photorealist art at points. More than that I don’t know. Dave’s ideas for how to get this thing out and into people’s hands weren’t too bad, IIRC, even if he ignored the fact that comics are in bookshops now.
Anyway, the Secret Project is finished now and has been put on the shelf. It may never be released. Dave’s writing has been getting more paranoid in recent weeks. His prose has become breathless and relentless, like the hammer of fingers on keys was drowning out other noise. There was a while when each post was preceded not by his usual Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist but by a response to a letter from Roberta Gregory which should have been an apology, as she’d been unfairly attacked in a previous Blog & Mail, but turned into the usual Sim Vs The World anti-feminist rant.
The announcement of a planned Dave Sim Celebrity Roast - an idea suggested by a friend to help promote the Secret Project - sent Dave off the edge. To quote:
The DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST as far as I can see was the means of countering whatever positive sales effects there might have been from whatever promotional effort I might be able to mount. "Here read this thick book full of slander and vilification and just forget about Dave Sim as anything but an industry joke and fourth-rate creator."
And I have to admit that I am now "past" any interest in how the secret project might do given that the over-arching reality of the comic-book field is of universal Feminist Prejudice against Dave Sim and, as I say, that that universal Feminist Prejudice controls everyone and everything in proximity to me.
My guess is that the mob mentality upon which the vast majority of the comic-book field is based will ultimately channel itself through an UNAUTHORIZED DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST and that (Oh, what an INTERESTING coincidence) that project will be scheduled for whenever (make that IF ever) I choose to schedule my secret project.
And there’s this, the post in answer to the aforesaid friend, which really feels like the writing of someone on the edge of a breakdown:
Let me put it this way: if all of your friends abandoned you and you were universally vilified and shunned and disparaged and your livelihood started to evaporate on you and your business partner and creative collaborator of a quarter of a century suddenly announced "I don't want to do this any more," and was gone…
…would that start to convince you that two and two doesn't equal four? Would you start to think, The reason I've lost all of this is because I'm wrong – everyone else believes that two and two equals five. I must be being punished because I'm so very wrong about what two and two is.
Watch my lips:
The one. Doesn't have. ANYTHING. To do. With the other.
If the earth opened up beneath the house and swallowed me alive tomorrow and giant flames lit up the night sky spelling out "DAVE SIM IS SO VERY, VERY WRONG," and every Cerebus trade paperback in the world suddenly collapsed into a pile of maggot-riddled dust…
…Two. Plus Two. Is STILL. Going. To equal. Four.
I wish we still had a psychiatrist on the board, because that whole sequence of blogging reads like a mental collapse and a desperate attempt to hold on to rationality even if that consists of maintaining irrational positions. Dave’s paranoia rises like a tsunami... and then subsides, to the extent where the posts at the top are rational and even funny. |
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