To say this page contains spoilers would be a massive understatement. If you have not read the Cerebus story, but intend to, DO NOT read this page. It contains a treasure trove of information obtained from Dave Sim from June 2004 to June 2006 through online question and answer sessions on the Cerebus Yahoo! group.

It is arranged by volume, with some extra trivia at the end. Further formatting to follow shortly.

Cerebus (#1-25)
High Society (#26-50)
Church and State I (#52-80)
Church and State II (#80-113)
Jaka's Story (#114-136)
Melmoth (#139-150)
Flight (Mothers and Daughters vol. 1) (#151-162)
Women (Mothers and Daughters vol. 2) (#163-174)
Reads (Mothers and Daughters vol. 3) (#175-186)
Minds (Mothers and Daughters vol. 4) (#187-200)
Guys (#201-219)
Rick's Story (#220-231)
Going Home (Going Home vol. 1) (#232-250)
Form and Void (Going Home vol. 2) (#251-265)
Latter Days (Latter Days vol. 1) (#266-288)
The Last Day (Latter Days vol. 2) (#289-300)

Trivia

Volume 1: CEREBUS

Q1a: Did you deliberately choose the name "succubus" - a female demonic figure from legend - for your soul-sucking creature from #2 or was that a "coincidence" (acknowledging that you would of course see that later as a message regarding God and YHWH)?

DAVE: I'm not sure that I even knew what a succubus was at the time. My recollection of writing that segment was having the mental image of Cerebus' head surrounded by a lattice-work of energy-draining tentacles and then having to come up with the name of whatever it was that was doing that. It's actually interesting to me that I would have chosen "succubus" as a term, rather than coining a fantasy term like G'rikkha or something. "Oh No! A G'rikkha!"

Q1b: Also, the female succubus Khem is hiding out in "The Eye of Terim." Terim, of course, is later depicted as the female deity. Was the later use of the name Terim deliberately linked to the earlier use?

DAVE: I can't say with 100% certainty that that was the case. As I recall, the two different spellings of Terim and Tarim were accidental at first, in the same was that I had trouble bearing in mind that Cerebus was supposed to refer to himself in the third person and would later cover for it by saying that he referred to himself as "I" when he had been around the civilized areas too long. I was covering for not remembering how to spell Tarim by making it the masculine version of the deity's name.

Q1c: Similarly, is the demon Female (Void) sucking the souls out of the Male warriors, who at the end when released are depicted as Lights flying off into the night an intentional direct parallel to the similar description of the Void and Light that you presented in i186?

DAVE: I went back and reread the section and it seems clear to me in retrospect that this was me unconsciously documenting what would have been, at the time, my overwhelming and all-encompassing connection to the female half of reality which resulted from my first non-familial exposure to it as a result of being in my first boyfriend/girlfriend relationship for about a year by this time.

Certainly all of the central YHWHist female realities are there: the living thing in the middle of the earth that's a bright light, the rarest jewel, blah, blah, blah. And it certainly anticipates the ultimate conclusions I came to about the devouring, ensnaring nature of the light as presented in i's289/290 (is that the plural form?) about which, in my view, men would do well to remain always and centrally vigilant if they intend to shilly-shally on the romantic borderlands or (God forbid) plunge joyously headlong,as I did,into the Alice in Wonderland environs of the members opposite.

[Relative to 186, I think it's safe to say that my best amended perception of Reality is that males and females are both light and void. That is, that masculinity is represented in the light by the Spirit of God which "went in unto the light" and the "true light which lighteth every man that commeth into the world" (John's Gospel). Femininity is represented in the light by the empty facade of radiance (un-true light, if you will). Masculinity is represented in the void by the fact that it is the medium in which God exists.
I mean, that's my best guess,that the void is universally conscious and aware for the most part across untold trillions of light years interrupted here and there by pinpricks of empty facade radiance and that the void also constitutes the space between atoms and molecules. It's all one awareness which allows for the literal definition of God as an omnipresent Being. He is literally everywhere around you and inside of you. Boo!

Femininity is represented in the void as a vaginal nature, desirous of things to ensnare and transform. That is, apart from the facade of radiance, with the seminal light there was, literally (to quote Dorothy Parker) "no 'there' there." One of the descriptions of goddess nature is "everything she touches she changes." Well, true enough. All the Spirit of God wanted was to have a co-equal existence with the light and we see what that's led to. YHWH the transformative tar baby. Enter at your own risk.]

It seems to me that I was telling myself that very basic story as well, even way back at issue 2. Notice that all Cerebus has to do is pick up the Eye of Tarim and walk in a straight line to the exit. The thing is there are no straight lines in the female half of reality. They are,physically, mentally and spiritually,all curves which lead nowhere. Fun house mirrors and roller coasters. I was surprised that no one picked up on the analogous usage of "The path suddenly drops and the aardvark stumbles�" segment and the same trick that Viktor Davis played on the reader in i183, where the path suddenly drops away and then comes back when he announces that Cerebus is going to end at issue 200 instead of 300.

In both case, the one unconscious and the other conscious,I was attempting to demonstrate (first to myself and then to the reader) what reality is like once you enter the opposing camp where everything is made up of curves that lead nowhere. On the way in, it all looks perfectly straightforward. That's the trick.

Q2: In either an early letter column or a "Swords" intro you brought up the fact that Elrod always shows up again with no explanation how he extricated himself from the impossible predicament we last saw him in was a "hint" about something important about his nature. Did you know back then they he was a manifestation of the chaos gem or were you referring to something else? (And if so, what?)

DAVE: Yes, definitely. That was what I was referring to and that was what I was trying to prepare everyone for. By i4 I was beginning to understand that if I didn't get a firm grip on all of the continuity at the beginning it was going to cause a lot of problems later on (however "later on" later on would prove to be). It was when I had Elrod give the name of his blade as a "Seersucker! That's a joke, son,but no one's going to get it for at least five thousand years!" That was just too big a break from the internal reality that I was building so I decided then and there that he had to be a rather-more-than-usually-substantial illusion.

Q3: Jaka's self-exile from Palnu: From her letter at the end of i16, it would seem that if she doesn't actually visit on occasion, she carries on a friendly correspondence with Julius. Later, in i24, Katrina relates the story from A Night at the Masque with Lord Julius as the hero, as told by her sister/Julius' niece, obviously Jaka, who must have again been talking to Julius, at least through the posts. She doesn't sound like the missing person who was the object of a 12 year search. Is this just an unintended inconsistency in the book? Was the 12-year search a ruse put on by Julius to cover up that he was, whether rapist or mere humiliator, the cause of her flight? (And if he was, why is she so chummy?)

DAVE: I've just noticed that you guys often manage to ask three questions while only using one number. Well, I apologize that this one gets pretty complicated in a hurry, but here goes:

The situation between Jaka and Lord Julius was the same as the relationship between Lord Julius and anyone. Julius stayed ahead of the game by staying ahead of everyone playing it and being the only one who knew how the whole thing fit together (that is, that it doesn't fit together, but as long as you can keep your forward momentum and treat everyone in your life as a straight man, it all works out in the end. This was my insight at the time that, at essence, conducting an effective and successful leftist government is really no different from how Groucho handles the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera).

The difficulty that this posed for Lord Julius' family and romantic relationships is obvious,it's essentially playing the female trick back onto them. Lord Julius' government, life and relationships consists entirely of curves that go nowhere. He's a fun house mirror and a roller coaster. I would assume that he had a certain affection for Jaka that was probably half genuine familial love and part Groucho "Memoirs of a Mangy Lover". Let me put it this way, if Harpo had had a gorgeous willowy blonde daughter, could you actually picture Groucho keeping his eyebrows in one place when she hit the age of majority? To kick it up a notch, in the context of political power that we're discussing it is, after all, very difficult to differentiate "uncle" and "mangy lover" if you have someone's fate in your hands as would be the case with Lord Julius and his entire family. As can be seen with the Caesars, once you start trafficking at or near the levels of absolute dominion, incest is never very far down on the list of executive privileges you're going to be tempted to allow yourself if only because you're allowed everything else. What is illicit to other people is commonplace for you and consequently not exciting, so you gradually find yourself contemplating larger and larger societal taboos. The situations are not entirely comparable, Lord Julius relative to Palnu was more comparable to Caesar Augustus than, say, Nero or Caligula relative to Rome.

As with the Caesars, proximity is all and the greatest female proximity to the apex consists in legitimized sexuality (marriage), family ties or illegitimate sexuality (the mistress). When absolute power devolves upon an individual man, the latter two categories of women are quite apt to aspire to the primary one, proximity always seeks greater proximity. Given that in any hierarchy a wife outranks a sister, a sister will be tempted to become a wife if it's on offer. This is part of the conundrum that Jaka poses. You can certainly understand a young girl being humiliated as she was on her birthday, being "mistaken" for Astoria, but presumably this didn't come out of thin air.

In one sense a practical joke, but in another sense, Lord Julius was very directly addressing a specific speculation (in a Caesar-like context) which would result from Jaka reaching a marriageable age. All part of the "keep 'em guessing" Lord Julius travelling circus. And what's her reaction? She flees to another city and becomes a tavern dancer. So, to me, at one level she's asserting her basic decency which has been offended at even the surface level of meaning and, at the same time, she's playing right along in the same way that any "woman scorned" usually does when you hit those kinds of hot buttons, she usually goes out and does something slutty (or many slutty things).

On another level she could be indicating, yes, this is what I am and then biding her time until she comes back and takes her place as "Lady Julius". I would assume that she reacted to any overt contact from anyone from Palnu by moving along to another tavern and would only respond to actual letters from Lord Julius, himself, (in her case, sent to various "general delivery" outlets). To which she would respond in what she would see as a comparable fashion to his own as possible. She is a pretty decent and guileless individual on a strictly human level, so she would only be able to address the practical joke at a certain number of levels. (given that she's a largely humourless and intrinsically easily offended individual,that is, that she is irretrievably female,this mostly consisted in being contrary and indulging in contrary behaviours: to punish Lord Julius for not being who she pictured him to be, she would repay unreliability with unreliability: promising, as an example, that she would come for a visit,repeatedly,and then not showing up when she says she is going to, as in i16. There. That'll show him. Which of course it wouldn't.

To her it's about as withering as her later "Ha-ha on you Gertrude Cirinist Poopiehead." In any tit-for-tat exchange she's largely unarmed. The larger consideration that she misses, it seems to me, is that she was implicitly inside of Lord Julius' context to a far greater extent than he was inside of hers. That is, given his greater importance in the larger Estarcion scheme of things, she was Lord Julius's niece to a far greater extent than he was Jaka's uncle. But, these are just the sort of things which feminism,actually their more refined dichotomies, Cirinism and Kevillism,causes to be seen through a glass darkly.
If you are sufficiently perverse, that is, at essence so intrinsically composed of funhouse mirrors and roller coasters, it is possible,as was the case from 1981 onward, to see the former Lady Diana Spencer as larger than the British crown, of greater significance than God's Anointed on earth that the bearer of that Crown is held to be and, as happened with Diana Spencer, feministic "All you need is love" perversions take on a life of their own and, in my view, compelled what would otherwise have been a very nice, pretty nursery school teacher elevated to Princess of the Realm to feel obligated, as part of the feminist zeitgeist in which she unhappily found herself, to contend against the British Crown in the way that a three-year-old rebels against parental authority (because women are incapable of seeing anything as being larger than themselves if they are raised in the feminist manner). The only things that have any importance in the feminist context are a) to be strong, which is to say wilful ("My way or the highway.") and b) to be independent, which is to say contentious and contrary.

The legions of perverse women which feminism had unleashed upon the world, observing these goings-on, nurtured the conflict: every daughter aligning with Diana against every mother, Queen Elizabeth. As long as it's just your mother-in-law, it had what it proved to have: wonderful soap opera potential of the beautiful stylish young girl against the miserable old bag. But this was one of God's Anointed on earth. That's a very different scrap. "Oh, pooh. No one believes that load of old bullocks anymore." Well, if that's what you choose to think, that's what you choose to think, but don't come crying to me if you find out that a good millennium worth of tradition proves to be a slightly larger counterweight to your "Oh, pooh" than you want it to be.
No, of course Jaka couldn't evade detection any more than Princess Diana could (well, somewhat more given the absence of electronic media). But, you can, and both did, create the illusion of having your own life if you're willing to force yourself to be fundamentally ignorant of reality on an on-going basis. In Princess Diana's case you have to date a Muslim to even create the illusion that you're outside of the orbit of your estranged husband. The situations are analogous. How do you stop being Lord Julius' niece? Answer: you can't. Who can you be or aspire to be in 20th century Britain if you're Prince Charles' ex-wife?
Answer: nobody. All options are well down in the pecking order. All you can do is to create either the illusion or the reality of building your own power base or just accept that you're a marginalised,instead of a central figure,in the cast of the play you were just performing in. Completely unacceptable from a feminist standpoint. So, that's essentially what happened with Jaka. Everyone kept watching her to see what sort of a power base she was going to build. Which was fine from the Cirinist and Kevillist standpoint as long as it was just her and Tom, Dick and Harry on the side of a mountain acting out all the parts she had written for them (well, except Dick,that is, Oscar). Once Cerebus moved in, it was a different situation. The self-exiled Princess of Palnu and the former Pope. It was distinctly analogous to Diana Spencer taking up with the son of an extravagantly wealthy arriviste Muslim (and it was certainly interesting keeping track of the many misadventures of Ms. Spencer even as I seemed to be pretty accurately fictionalizing them) where "what is up with that?" it seems to me, became no longer a merely soap-opera based inquiry, given that several ascending layers of reality were possibly and quite suddenly in jeopardy both from the Cirinist and Kevillist perspective (in our world, I mean) and from the vantage point of those institution(s) they were, as usual, attempting to undermine.
I mean, feminism is the real-life version of TV's Survivor. The idea is to pay lip service to pluralism, freedom and inclusiveness while ruthlessly destroying anyone who might even potentially be competition. I don't believe in the conspiracy theories about Diana's death because there were too many layers of reality "in play" that I can see. A direct line attempt to threaten to "bring down" the Anointed of God (it is noteworthy, to me anyway, that so many of those vulgar baskets and balloons and signs outside Kensington Palace asserted that "Heaven has found her Queen" and so on. Diana of the Hunt and all that Alan Moore-like rubbish that was, I think, the actual underpinning of the Diana Spencer Story as she chose, however inadvertently and naively, and to her own decided detriment in the long term,to tell it). Meanwhile, back at my funnybook and speaking of inadvertently, it's a hallmark of Jaka's actual disingenuous nature that looking slutty was probably entirely inadvertent on her part. It was just "fancy dress" in the English sense. Putting on costumes and dancing. It took Mrs. Thatcher to get her, kicking and screaming all the way, to see what a tavern dancer actually is. On another level she could never actually detach herself from Palnu and Lord Julius. Ostensibly because she loves him, but, at a deeper level, because of the extent to which being the Princess of Palnu was central to what she was.

She certainly didn't forget her diplomatic immunity or fail to make use of her status in displacing bartenders from their premises all across Estarcion. She was always the Princess of Palnu who thoroughly enjoyed playing "Just call me Jaka."
I should probably have made clearer in my earlier answer that Jaka was indeed molested as an infant but that the recollection was very deeply buried,only coming out in fever dreams, as an example. That is, my having conveyed that information, there is a part of Jaka you know more about than she does. It would actually be unlikely that Lord Julius would be the culprit. In the context of absolute political power there just wouldn't be any occasions when the Grandlord of Palnu would be left alone with his infant niece. What would even be the pretext? Of course at the Caesarian level you don't need a pretext, but it would be extremely unlikely for an Augustus,although I grant you it would be less unlikely for a Nero or a Caligula.

Q4: In the last of the Cerebus the Barbarian stories before "High Society" we have the Three (girls) killing the One (barbarian) at the door. Were (Ja)nette, (Ka)trina, and (T)heresa meant to represent Jaka's relationship with Cerebus, i.e., slaying the barbarian and "domesticating" Cerebus? Also, were they meant to be "lesser" versions of Sophia, Jaka, and Astoria, the way that the early Pos that Cerebus encountered were "lesser" Pos? Is their names spelling out "Jaka T." just a coincidence?

DAVE: I think I wrote about this in the original Swords introduction. Really, this was just my attempt to do a Clint Eastwood film because Gene Day was such a Clint Eastwood nut. I really did think that The Beguiled was the best Clint Eastwood film I had seen, (That was one of the things that I saw that separated me from Gene, a big reason that we chose different comic book careers. With slight alterations you can Do High Plains Drifter in the comic-book field month after month and make a good living. There wasn't any precedent in the comic-book field for doing something like The Beguiled even as a change of pace, let alone making a living at it.), although I could see a lot to recommend The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and A Fistful of Dollars. Great tone, particularly the music and Eli Wallach.

Those sort of got ruined for me when, years after the fact, I saw the fumetti parody in Playboy, "A Fistful of Ugly" or "A Fistful of Garlic" or whatever it was called, with the late Tony Randall in the Clint Eastwood role. There just wasn't enough content to the spaghetti western as form to hold up under the onslaught and besides that the chicks in the fumetti were naked. Game, set and match, Mr. MacEnroe. I thought at the time that young girls, not just their bodies, but the girls themselves, were incredibly interesting, so the idea of Cerebus trapped in a girls' school seemed really interesting as a pure mood piece and writing exercise. I was also worried that I was losing the ability to do a self-contained issue after the three-issue Palnu Trilogy, the two-issue President Weisshaupt/Captain Cockroach storyline. So, I really wanted to prove to myself that I could do a self-contained issue, as I said, a mood piece: all tone, like a spaghetti western but with humour. Of course, the problem was that the next issue he was still in the school, so the issue only appeared to be self-contained, and that became the latest instalment in a large interior discussion I was having about what I was actually doing here.

In one sense, it was all one story, a series of adventures. I was paying very close attention to exactly that sort of continuity so, no matter how you sliced it "self-contained" really had quotation marks around it by this point. I was also aware while I was doing the story that it was dishonest, that "woman as super-hero" quality which had already worn out its welcome as far as I was concerned (if I could only have seen the Diamond Previews catalogues that would be coming out twenty years from then!), which then led to my shifting gears to the opposite end of the thematic spectrum with Charles X. Claremont.

Chris Claremont was sort of notorious at the time for his "Is there any reason this character can't be a woman?" gender-interchangeability shtick. John Byrne rather dryly observed at one point, "Well, apart from the fact that it's been a male character for the last thirty five-years, no, Chris, I can't see any reason why this character couldn't be a woman." That's proven to be a whole less funny in recent years than it was at the time, now that they've done it with the Creeper. The Creeper, for crying out loud.
So I was undermining the basic theme that I started with (that a school full of girls is implicitly interesting quite apart from the sexual frisson implied. It isn't.) and also moving back into complete comic-book fantasy by way of emphasis as a way of retaining the quality of self-contained issues. Did that make "Swamp Sounds" and "This Woman, This Thing" self-contained stories? Or was it a hair-splitting difference between a woven rope and link sausages?

I decided to see it both ways, to try to make each issue self-contained and also part of a larger whole. And, of course, that implied the question of how long I could, or would choose to, sustain that narrative approach, which is why High Society starts pretty timidly with the Regency Hotel in the first issue, then Dirty Fleagle and Dirty Drew, then Mind Game II, then the Regency Elf: I was attempting the same trick, oscillating as wildly as possible when it came to the tone of each issue. But, then it became pretty pointless. Cerebus is stuck in a snobby hotel. You can dance as fast as you can and dress the set differently and light as many sparklers as you want, it's going to be pretty obvious what the book is. Cerebus is stuck in a snobby hotel.
Sorry, returning to your question: The names, actually, were adapted from Deni's two middle names, Janet Catherine and her sister Karen's middle name, Theresa. I was definitely far more interested in Karen at that point than in Deni, both in a less extreme form of the character Michael Caine played in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters and in the literary context of the borderland between girl and woman. Karen would've been twenty at the time and I had known her since she was sixteen. Girls all think that they're women much sooner than they are and that was the first time I had seen it up close.

The best example I ever read of that borderland quality was reading about Paula Abdul when she was seventeen or something, and messing around with one of the married Jackson boys and I guess the wife chased her down in her car. And Paula Abdul gets out of the car and just bursts into tears. And the wife is brought up short by it, suddenly realizing this is a little girl I'm dealing with here. This isn't a woman. Too true. I could never figure out why any guy would be interested in a twenty-year-old if he could get a sixteen-year-old. I saw the movie Lola with Charles Bronson and Susan George, about a fifty-year-old man with a fiance in high school, when just looking at Susan George was enough to make my eyeballs bleed. And I thought, well, YEAH! OF COURSE! IT'S SUSAN GEORGE FOR CRYIN' OUT LOUD!

However, It's one thing to see it in a movie, quite another thing to see your Achtung-Verbotten-Zis-means-you- schweinhund sister-in-law going through it. Oh, isn't that interesting. And (trust me on this one) it's a whole other thing to be going through it with a sixteen-year old of your own. Maximum distortion funhouse mirror, warp speed roller coaster.

Q5: We just noticed that the 11th printing of Cerebus includes, for the first time, the Silverspoon story (which, technically, would make the "11th printing" the "1st printing of the 2nd Edition" of that book). Why did you choose to include this story now? Have you changed your view of what constitutes the technical "complete Cerebus Novel?" Do you view that as being (a) the 300 issues; (b) the 16 phonebook volumes; (c) either of those PLUS some/all of the miscellaneous material (Swords stories/issues 51, 112/113, Likealooks, ElfGuest/Epic stories/Cerebus 3D/Cerebus Jam/the letters pages & notes from the President) or Cerebus cameos in other creators' books); and/or (d) some other combination of these or other materials?

DAVE: Um, actually, that came about because of a completely unrelated re-reading of Cerebus: this one having been initiated by Joe Matt who suggested that he and Chester Brown should re-read all of Cerebus because I was coming down to visit reasonably often and, basically, Joe's just like that. Pull out a chessboard at lunch. "Let's play chess." Uh, I'd really rather just talk, Joe. "No, let's play chess. C'mon. I'll let you be white." Most of the time you just give in because it's easier than discussing it for an hour or something. So, they both re-read Cerebus. And one of the things Chet wanted to know about was "Why aren't the Silverspoon strips reprinted in the Cerebus volume?" And I said, they are. And he said, mm, not in my copy. Really? And I went home and checked and sure enough, he was right. They weren't in there. One of those "I must've dreamed that last part" moments (apologies to Fat Freddy's Cat).

So, I made a note to put them into the next reprinting, having wrestled with whether or not to promote it as such, since that would seem like I was conniving to find a way to get everyone to buy another copy even though I was aware that a certain number of people would buy another copy. The Silverspoon strips I tend to see as being in a different category because without them Lord Julius just suddenly appears in the story with no explanation.

"Magiking" I figure can be left out because there isn't that big a leap from i12 to i13 without it. Cerebus is on a river and wakes up washed up on a bank, with only one caption indicating you might've missed something. Likewise "What Happened Between Issues 20 and 21". It's more of curiosity item if you're one of those really intense Cerebus fans. i51 and i's112/113 I still don't see sitting comfortably on the end of High Society, or the beginning and end of Church & State OR the beginning of Jaka's Story. "ElfGuest" I tend to leave out because Wendy and Richard just aren't "that way". Like just about everything else about me, they consider it an insult. I'm sure they considered it an insult when I congratulated them on their DC deal in my comp space in Diamond Previews and I'm sure they would have considered it an insult if I neglected to mention them. They seem to me to epitomize the comic-book field in that way.

All of the material that you mentioned, apart from "ElfGuest" for the reasons outlined, I picture doing in a single supplementary volume at some point. That's somewhere up ahead, as in late 2005 or early 2006. Since it will be the last "new" Cerebus volume, we obviously would like it to make its own splash if possible and not to bunch it up with The Last Day. And if the books keep selling at their usual predictable rate we're going to have to be doing a number of reprintings back-to-back through 2004 and 2005, so we'll try and schedule the book for when we catch up. Apart from that, there are a few semi-published stories, including "Passage" which only the near-fossilized Cerebus readers (I won't embarrass Steve Bolhafner by identifying anyone by name) would remember from the Cerebus Fan Club Newsletter days. Actually that was probably before Steve's time, so that makes me the only pre-crustaceous life-form that knows it was an unpublished Cerebus short story done between issues 3 and 4 and originally intended for Dave Cothrane's Faerie Star groundlevel comic (as we pre-crustaceans used to call them back in the late 70s). It only exists in the form of really, really grey photocopies (I tried "blacking in" the grey areas and gave up partway through the first page). Anyway, it's the official first appearance of Cerebus' black vest as well as not being very good. And then there's "Anatole's Solecism" (seriously, "Anatole's Solecism") which I did for Magic Eggrollian Funnies (seriously, Magic Eggrollian Funnies) which survives only in script and rough outline form. These Craig Miller will be publishing in Following Cerebus as curiosity items but they'll almost definitely not be in the Miscellaneous Cerebus volume.

I'd have to say that my personal view is that the 16-volume story stands alone now that the Silverspoon strips have been incorporated. The other pieces are either historical curiosity items or "untold stories" from between the principle graphic novels. It will be a while before all of these pieces are in print. As an example, we had tentatively planned to do a colour volume with Bob Chapman of Graphitti Designs years ago that would contain the colour stories from Epic magazine, the Animated Cerebus portfolio, various unpublished colour pieces as well as a variety of covers without the logos and typesetting and issue numbers on them. There are a couple of problems. Bob has all of the negatives for the Epic stories except, I believe, for "A Friendly Reminder". The negatives for the Animated Cerebus Portfolio were accidentally totalled at Preney which would have meant that we would have had to shoot from a printed copy. Until recently, that is, when I unearthed the original overlays and backgrounds, so it would be possible to reconstruct it probably a lot more cheaply in today's age of computer scans (the original negs were all hand-cut and stripped in by hand, unbelievably expensive and difficult). Of course the backgrounds are kind of rough, which then raises the possibility of getting Gerhard to do new backgrounds. But, then, if Ger's going to do new backgrounds, why don't I redraw my part of the portfolio as well? And then you have people who would want the new version but also the original version, so you have to ask yourself, well, what is it that we're doing here? Reproducing an artefact or using it as a blueprint for a new piece?

A lot of the motivation in doing the Animated Cerebus was to get the animation bug out of my system. Which worked. No more bug. Given that it's out of my system, why stick to an animation format? Why not redraw them as comic strips with all the extra detail and contour you can get in there? And that's fine until you run up against the fact that it's like pulling teeth to get Gerhard and I to do one Following Cerebus cover every three months. And then there's all the covers that we have in their original form. Well, as soon as you print an assortment people are going to want all of them. You can do all of them, but what's that going to cost? And (the more important question from my standpoint) how much are you competing against yourself? If it's a hundred-dollar colour volume, a store that orders one is probably going to cut their trade paperback order by five or ten books and, to be honest, I'd much rather have the chance that ten new people were giving the story a try than that one long-time reader was oohing and aahing over the covers, the Epic stories and The Animated Cerebus. Not the most diplomatic thing to say on a website made up of long-time readers, but I'm afraid it's the way I look at it. These are the sort of circles that I go round and round on a good bit of the time.

There are so many angles and permutations that its really difficult to arrive at a conclusion. The fact that the first priority is keeping the trade paperbacks in print 1-16, I think that shows what I consider, personally, to be The Definitive Cerebus. Collected Letters 2004 is running at about 500 pages at this point, in the same format as High Society. I think Cerebus readers will "get it". At least I hope they will. It seems to fit the bill in the same way that Aardvark Comment used to close out the total monthly Cerebus package. The sixteen volumes needed something like Aardvark Comment to finish off. My own first experience with a collected letters volume was Oscar Wilde's. It seemed very strange, at first, because you're only getting the one side of the story, but, to me, it's certainly the best way of familiarizing yourself with a writer. When I did my Hemingway research, the first thing I did was to read Selected Letters, which wasn't nearly as good because of the motive in selecting the letters (Mary Hemingway wanted to discredit all versions of Papa except her own), but it was still a very good introduction to Hemingway. I actually happened on the idea of doing it myself accidentally. It seemed to me that the easiest way to answer the letters was to put them all in one "save as" computer file and just print them out one at a time as they were completed. At that point, I thought, you know if I just delete each person's address as I go and center their name over their letter in 20 pt. Type, badda-bing-badda-boom instant Collected Letters format. So, I thought, It will make for a nice little one-off volume, a quick eighty- or a hundred-page snapshot of what was going on a month after I finished, as I answered the three-year backlog of mail, leading up to Cerebus 300 coming out and then on through what response there was to issue 300.

I've just finished file No.17 of 50 pages each, so the modest little volume idea has gone by the wayside. It might turn out to be a strange enough book that it could end up becoming the Cerebus introductory volume. Here, read this. If this interests you, Cerebus will probably interest you. And for long-time readers, here's everything that was going on in my life from January 23, 2004 on. As I'm doing here, I tried (and am trying) to answer everything as exhaustively and as honestly as I could (and can), in no small part because somewhere up ahead (with sufficient cross-referencing) I may end up having answered virtually every question anyone can throw at me. This was the idea behind The Guide to Self-Publishing and it seems to me that that's worked for about seven years now: if you make sure that you answer everything in print, rather than in conversation, you can just hand someone the whole package.

A number of these letters are ten and fifteen pages long, so when I say that I'm trying to answer the questions exhaustively I mean to the metaphorical point of utter collapse in a lot of cases. As it stands I'm still answering mail close to ten or twelve hours a day so, obviously, even if there wasn't the "permissions" problem, I would never have time to input all of the mail that I'm answering, but I will certainly be encouraging those Cerebus readers who are interested to post their side of the correspondence to the Newsgroup if they're so inclined cross-referenced to the relevant page numbers.
I detect an ill-concealed lack of interest whenever I mention Collected Letters 2004. I mean, I do understand that people are hoping that I'm going to do more comics, but I have to say that the odds are not very good for a variety of reasons, foremost among them the fact that feminism is still a universal condition in the comic-book field. It would be like asking me to do an astronomy textbook for a world that still universally believes in a "flat earth". Mentally, this is always what I run up against when I consider doing a new comic-book story. I don't believe the earth is flat and, while acknowledging that belief in a flat earth is a fully protected free will choice and honestly meaning no offence, I really don't have anything to communicate to people who do believe in a flat earth beyond what I've already said. When I look at the Diamond Previews catalogue, all I see is super-heroes, soft-core pornography, paganism and Marxist-feminist propaganda, all perfectly valid free will and First Amendment protected choices but of zero interest to me.

If that changes, even incrementally, I think I'll know. But the pendulum has been swinging at top speed away from me for at least the last fifteen years and it shows no signs of stopping or even slowing down. I'm very appreciative, more than I could ever express, that the store owners whose customers genuinely prefer super-heroes, soft-core pornography, paganism and Marxist-feminist propaganda are also willing to carry some or all of the Cerebus trades. I consider that a very open-minded thing to do for someone whose only claim to fame is that he's lost the Best Letterer award every time he's been up for it.
I still have high hopes that Cerebus might be a top-selling line of trade paperbacks someday. As it stands right now it seems more polite to just to stay out of the way and let the Marxist-feminists bring the comic-book field to dizzying new heights now that Dave Sim and Cerebus aren't in the way, irritating everyone and being evil. I mean, for me, this is a very comfortable situation. I don't owe anyone anything that I'm aware of, so I'm able to correspond with people who are genuinely interested in ideas. I don't have to worry about any of them. They read the book. They know who I am and they know what I think and they're actually interested in an exchange of viewpoints.

Likewise with Following Cerebus. Craig and John are big boys. They read the book and they're actually willing to attach their names to a magazine devoted to it. Not something I would have recommended personally, but, as I say, they're big boys and able to make their own decisions. And then there's the Newsgroup, the only place in the world right now which is willing to discuss my work or myself as having any sort of merit. And even that is mostly a dozen or two dozen people with 500 people listening. Can you imagine how many of those 500 people would be flat-out humiliated if anyone even suspected how often they sneak over here when no one's watching them because they feel compelled to check and see what everyone's saying on that weird website where freedom of expression actually means something besides using the word cunt nine times in the same sentence or gratuitously insulting people because you're hiding behind a pseudonym?

And personally, I think that's great.

Genuine freedom is an irresistible concept so, to me, anyone in the comic-book field who sneaks over to see what the Cerebus Yahoos are talking about, well, to me that means that there's always hope. Even so far off in the future that you can't even pretend to see it from here, hope is still hope.

As I recently wrote to Stephen Holland of Page 45, the Yahoo newsgroup is something I never would've come up with on my own or have seen a need for. Fortunately, his business partner Mark Simpson did see a need and went ahead and filled it. And here we are on the narrow swaying rope bridge between issue 300 and Following Cerebus No.1. And, having set the whole thing in motion, Stephenmand Mark don't even participate anymore. You can't beat that with a stick.

Volume 2: HIGH SOCIETY

Q1. What caused the split of the Church of Tarim into Western and Eastern divisions?

DAVE: I’m afraid I never got very far with that. As I recall, it centered on whether or not Tarim had incarnated on earth in the form of the coin-maker—the coin that drew other coins to it and began to form a sphere when Cerebus picked it up. One of the churches believed that Tarim was a deity and the other church believed Tarim was a deity and an earthly incarnation. The Illusionist innovation was to decide that there was Tarim as deity and when Tarim incarnated as a human being he called himself Suenteus Po and wanted everyone who followed him to call themselves Seuenteus Po. That’s my rough recollection of the high-altitude mapping. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I really thought that I could fit the history of several worlds into 6,000 pages and, over the course of High Society and Church & State found out exactly how little you could get into 500 and 1200 pages respectively. My initial ambition was to tell the story of Iest pretty thoroughly over the course of High Society and then do a companion volume that would tell the history of Serrea and the Sepran Empire (this might be a good place to point out that Serrea was a typo/misreading on my part of Michael Loubert’s microscopic pencil lettering. The first “r” was supposed to be a “p” and was intended to be the more natural-sounding “Seprea” as the capital of the Sepran Empire) for which Astoria’s assassination of the Lion of Serrea would serve as a spiritual/thematic link. As you can see the assassination itself became about the deepest I was able to delve into the Sepran Empire. The entire Cerebus storyline became Iest-centered because of the space constraints. Michael Loubert was (and I assume still is) a great enthusiast of history and had excited my interest with his knowledge of the various schisms which had taken place in Christianity in general and the Catholic church in particular and the varying reasons behind them. So way, way back I had envisioned Cerebus as a kind of religio-political Tale of Two Cities. There’s a residue of this to the story, but just a residue.

Q2a. Please clarify the Exodus Inward.

DAVE: Oh, heavens. I haven’t thought about the Exodus Inward in twenty years. Well, first of all it’s an oxymoron and at the same time it might not be an oxymoron. You have to go out to come in. It’s also a good ass-covering term for any kind of escapism. At the time, like a lot of guys in their twenties and thirties I really thought that drug abuse was a means of accessing other layers of consciousness and all that rot. Exodus Inward is a good way of describing it if you don’t like to think of yourself as smoking your brains out for no good purpose. Under the influence of the writings of people like Robert Anton Wilson and Aleister Crowley and Tim Leary and that whole crew it becomes very easy to perceive of yourself as being part of an historical trend and tradition and to envision yourself as having a core societal presence rather than having intentionally shuffled yourself off to the margins. Mental masturbation for those people for whom physical masturbation just isn’t enough. Those human beings whose lifestyle most closely resembles laboratory rats with electrodes hooked up to their brain’s pleasure centers.

Q2b: What caused it?

DAVE: See, I had extrapolated from that construct—that drug abuse was a means of accessing larger inner awarenesses and higher states of consciousness—that history was the result of a series of interventions by individuals along the lines of the Merry Pranksters who would—at opportune moments—introduce concepts like the Exodus Inward, in this case by burrowing within the Church. A good analogy would be the Galileo fiasco. Had the Church had a mechanism in place (went my theory) to essentially retreat into itself in a universal state of mortal embarrassment, all aspects of its behaviour in the Galileo case—most particularly the extent to which they attempted to suppress the self-evident truth and the length of time it took them to admit they were wrong—would have certainly fit the bill. Of course, what I misunderstood is that people like the Merry Pranksters get pushed to and also choose to gravitate to the margins. A Robert Anton Wilson or an Aleister Crowley or a Tim Leary is never going to “burrow within” anything except easily duped young women. There was a kind of grandiose conceit to it, that as a drug abuser I was capable of viewing my own interior in an unflinching fashion which would cause societal structures founded upon lies to collapse under their own weight, if they attempted the same thing. Of course what I missed was that I was looking inward only hypothetically and not literally. Had I been looking inward in a literal way, the most obvious question would be “Why am I smoking, snucking and snorting all of these drugs? This is like washing your windshield with mud so you can see better. What is my concept here?” And, of course, I misunderstood the nature of a church which is incapable, structurally, of retreating inward. The whole point of a church is the improvement of itself, its congregation, its society and its future. Like so many people I misconstrued what I took to be Pope John Paul II’s disinterest in doing a bong hit as being an inability to see how necessary it is to examine himself inwardly. At the same time there is a glimmering of value that was entirely accidental. In order to extricate yourself from an unsolvable problem, it is well worth going inside yourself to try to figure out what the problem actually is. It took me years to figure out that it works best when you eliminate all of the things that you’ve convinced yourself you need that you’ve grafted onto yourself over the years. If you’re still smoking pot, looking inward is only going to tell you that you really want to roll a joint. If you’re still drinking beer, looking inward is only going to tell you that you’d really like a beer. And of course, once you’ve eliminated all or most of your self-evident garbage, there’s no real need to look inside yourself in that navel-gazing fashion familiar to the drug abuser and the alcoholic.. When you eliminate the external garbage your inside is the same as your outside at that point and then you can start working on making real progress.
Obviously John Paul II was way ahead of me on that one.

Q2c: Why can an Albatross be used to reunite the Eastern and Western churches?

DAVE: Because it is the most formidable power object in the known universe: a wildly improbable plot device. Like the Maltese Falcon only more politically formidable. In a Real World context,, I called my notebooks my Albatrosses because I was as saddled with them much like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. So I was declaring in a way—by making the albatross statue that significant in High Society—that I was ambitious enough to want to do something of remarkable significance with all the half-witted notions and half-baked philosophies I was sketching out and jotting down in my own “albatrosses”. “Invoke often,” is the first rule of the sort of mysticism that one finds in used paperbacks in 5 for a dollar bins. Unless one is in a New Age bookstore, in which case one can pay 50 dollars to be told the same thing between hemp-derived hard covers.

Q2d: Why does the Exodus Inward end?

DAVE: Usually because you spent last night picking roaches out of the ashtray and rolling your last two incredibly rank and raunchy-tasting joints with them and then find you’ve spent all of your money on ju jubes and barbecue potato chips and chocolate bars and Kentucky Fried Chicken over the last three days so, unfortunately, you’ve got no way to Exodus Inward until you can rustle up 60 or 100 dollars for another baggie.

Q3. What was the relationship between Astoria, Cirinists, and Kevilists at the time of High Society?

DAVE: One of the problems that I had was that I had come up with this great concept of the Illusionists burrowing within the Church and I had no way of showing it. The Illusionists couldn’t let on without spoiling the effect and the Church would have had no awareness of it. That was when I decided to remove it one step and try to introduce an Illusionist who had been so effective at burrowing within another structure—not the Church—that he had come out on top and was running the joint so he had, of necessity, to be more public with his illusions, so I could actually show an Illusionist in action. I tried to think of real-life examples of that and either I remembered Duck Soup or I saw Duck Soup again and I went, oh, yeah, there it is. So I started picturing what that would be like structurally—what kind of societal structure would form around an Illusionist and the answer, of course, was no structure. All the Illusionist could hope to do was to maintain the illusion with double talk and snappy retorts and to make sure that he was the only one that either a) knew how the whole thing fit together or b) knew that the whole thing didn’t fit together but could create the illusion that he did and it did. That was where I started picturing things like the dinner seating that I used in a passage in Jaka’s Story, where everyone obsesses over how they’re doing in the pecking order and the pecking order is like a roller coaster ride.

Took me almost nine years to find the right place to show that.

And that, naturally, led to questioning what sort of an individual would be suited to that sort of environment, most particularly who would last the longest “staying in the pocket”. Which was when I came up with Baskin, this really competent but forlorn little human punching bag who would just keep “taking it” no matter how little sense anything made. And then I thought, what sort of a wife would this guy attract and how would she keep herself in the game? That was a tough one. And again, I kept an eye out for someone who could fill that role in an interesting way. And that was when I saw Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. In fact the first drawings I did of Astoria she looks more like Mary Astor crossed with Katherine Hepburn. All with very teary, weepy word balloons, “I’m so…tired…of all the lies.” That kind of thing. I thought it would be an interesting match, this Illusionist who is surrounded by absolute chaos of his own creation married to a woman who is an infinite number of layers, every one of them a lie. You keep peeling the onion and all you get is a new story. As Bogart/Spade says to her at one point, “How much truth was there in that yarn?” And she quite cheerfully answers, “A little. Not much.”

So, to finally get to your question, I thought the most interesting incarnation of that relationship would be its aftermath. Lord Julius and Astoria have split up because Astoria, like many a wife before her, has mistaken his charisma for hers. She’s this ambitious figure who has already split from Cirin and intends to make herself Queen of the Daughters in the same way that Cirin is Queen of the Mothers and, because she has maintained her place with Lord Julius for a period of time, she just senses that everything is coming together, all the ley lines of societal force are lining up behind her, the world’s her oyster, etc. etc. And then they split and she finds out that she’s just another person on the roller coaster and, in conventional female fashion, she just starts looking for a Lord Julius substitute. That was one of the reasons that I picked Mary Astor. Consider the relative status of Groucho Marx and Mary Astor in the Hollywood pantheon. It’s a complete misapprehension on the part of a Mary Astor to say, “Now, where am I going to find another Groucho Marx?” There is a kind of “charisma by association” but it does tend to wear off in the face of her misperception of her own illusory importance and the endless succession of intended replacements.

And then, of course, she hooks up with Cerebus on the same basis. “Wait. This weird little deformed guy. They’re still talking about him in Palnu. I’ll hook up with him and make HIM my new Lord Julius.” And, of course, she has no idea what Cerebus is or the kind of effects that are created by his magnification nature, so, of course, she thinks, “Aha! It finally worked. This is my new Lord Julius.”

She was playing two cards at the same time: one, Queen of the Daughters and the other the Eye in the Pyramid which is a way of using the glass ceiling against itself. It’s an organized assault on all manners of bureaucracy from the clerical end of things.
Unlike the actual Eye IN the Pyramid which is more the Eye ON the Pyramid (such as can be seen on the Great Seal of the United States on the back of the U.S. one dollar bill—which is actually a very basic optical illusion peculiar to pyramids. If you look intently at the capstone of any pyramidal shape, so that you are looking at the smallest percentage of the overall pyramid that is still pyramid-shaped, say the top 1/25th of the overall pyramid and then look at the top 1/25th of that pyramid’s capstone, behind the capstone you will see the image of an eye. If you try to look right at it, it will disappear, but if you focus on that pyramid-on a pyramid-on a pyramid, you’ll see it again. I mean, Whoo. Pee. But so far as I know this is one of those great Freemason mysteries that you have to ascend to a nine hundred and fiftieth level to be shown. As pagan mysteries go, it’s kind of like the ending on 2001. What’s the word I’m looking for.
Oh, wait! I know!
Pathetic.)

Astoria’s concept for the Eye IN the Pyramid is that the apex of any pyramidal infrastructure can be sabotaged from any level below the apex usually quite effortlessly. In a nutshell, if you rely on a secretary you’re toast. That was why she didn’t object to being merely a secretary when Cerebus became Prime Minister. A secretary can do an enormous amount of damage if her boss thinks himself “above” what she’s doing—as most bosses do— and so doesn’t pay attention to it. It’s a very low grade—albeit largely ineffective—form of bureaucratic guerrilla Marxism, but, by the time you’re thinking the Roach is your ticket back to the top, you’re willing to try anything. I was tapped into this about the time the movie Nine to Five came out which, although I haven’t seen it, seemed to subscribe to the same theory. I assume there’s a lot of it going on as the wheels are coming off of feminism. As I say, by the time you’re thinking the Roach is your ticket back to the top you’re willing to try anything.

There are interesting examples of the Groucho Marx/Mary Astor syndrome in the real world, most of them in Hollywood where personal lives are public property. It’s so far advanced that you really have to know which one you are before you get involved with someone in such a way that makes the tabloids. Because if you’re actually Mary Astor, the break-up is only going to emphasize that. Jennifer Lopez, as an example, seems to be making a contact sport out of it. What is it, four relationships where she’s come out being the Groucho Marx and the guy has been stuck being Mary Astor? It’s like she’s trying to set a record for longest uninterrupted Groucho Marx string since Elizabeth Taylor who won every round til it came to Richard Burton. That one came out even and destroyed both of them.

I suspect that that’s the answer to the feminist question, “Why didn’t Hilary dump Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky?” In her heart of hearts she really doesn’t know which of them is Groucho and which is Mary Astor. And, fortunately for her, neither does Bill. Both of them would rather stick it out in an empty marriage than take the chance of ending up being the Mary Astor character. And both have such an over-inflated awe of the other that both believe it could be a real possibility.

And to finally come to the end of your question (which you really believed was straightforward, I’m sure) at the time of High Society, the Cirinists are just waiting to move into Iest. The closest analogy I could draw to that is the United States and Iraq. There would have been a lot of “sidelines people,” “armchair quarterbacks” among the Cirinists who would be wary of trying to take Iest—largely because the Eastern Church comes with it (the same problem you would face taking Saudi Arabia: Mecca and Medina come with it)—but it would be comparable to what the Pentagon knew about the U.S.’s advanced capabilities going into Iraq. It was going to be a cakewalk. There would be roughly the same number of casualties in a year that you would have had in a week in Vietnam. As Collin Powell reportedly said to President Bush, “You realize that you are going to own this place?” That was the level of the debate. Winning wasn’t the issue, there were only the implications of winning. Cirin obviously knew a lot more about Cerebus than Astoria did and that would have been a source of some concern but more in terms of what Astoria might lead Cerebus to do accidentally or that Cerebus’ magnifier nature might cause to happen (a justifiable fear as it turned out) than anything the two of them were going to accomplish together in a programmatic sense.

The Church was the only significant opposition and the Church was done for. It had become too worldly and too timorous. Again the best analogy I could draw would be today’s Christian churches of the squishy Marxist variety. There’s no need to take them over because they’re no longer in the way. They’re partly a quaint custom—great candles, great music— and partly a Marxist-feminist faction differing from the core societal Marxist-feminism only in a few shadings and nuances that can be easily glossed over. Like the worldwide schism in the Anglican Church and Reformed Judaism over same-sex marriage and homosexual clergy. Where the split occurs, I think, will tell us how close to hell we are. 30-70? 70-30? And which faction is preparing to take over the Vatican after Pope John Paul II (God forbid) is called home? There’s a good case to be made that he will single-handedly save Christianity by hanging on long enough for the conservative cardinals to see—in the Anglicans—exactly what a fully liberalized church can expect: literal hell on earth. The longer John-Paul II stays alive the more transparent the Anglican fiasco will become and the more conservative the Catholic Church will choose to be.
The fact that the Conniptins, this ragged mob of barbarians made it right into the heart of Iest at the end of High Society indicates that the fruit is ripe for the plucking.

Q4a. Larry noticed that the cab driver who drives Cerebus to the Ram's Lords Tavern in the first issue of High Society is, in fact, the Moon Roach all along. You show us the cab driver persona in that first issue, we see Moon Knight in the others, L nny is curious if you were tempted to slip in the other 2 personas to complete the set (soldier-of-fortune & millionaire playboy), it might be in the book, but he's too lazy to re-read it?

DAVE: Whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. Lenny Coop…I mean L nny (sorry, forgot I was at a KKK meeting for a minute there, brother L nny)…is too lazy to re-read it? L nny’s the one who keeps pushing for these re-reads, isn’t he? Billy Beach’s wife, Francesca, with both of whom and both of whose family I just spent a pleasant week sunning myself on Italy’s Adriatic Coast asked me about the re-reads on the Newsgroup when I was over there and I said, “L nny (which I can assure you is very difficult to pronounce to someone whose native language is Italian), L nny with these organized re-reads of the storyline is like those guys who go to NFL games and spend the whole game trying to start ‘the wave’. Vague sort of peripheral interest in the sport, the home team, the score. But the thing that really floats his boat is standing up and throwing his hands in the air and seeing if he can get everyone else to do it. Gets so obsessive about it he’s still trying to make it happen when the home team gets their field goal blocked.” Whoa! HEY! Blocked field goal, everybody. C’MON! EVERYBODY! WHOOOOAAA!

Q4b: Can you answer his question for him?

DAVE: Huh? Oh, uh,
Sure.
Sure thing.
Sorry. I forgot these rejoinders are “pre-recorded”. Like the hologram of the dead scientist guy in “I, Robot”. Did everyone see that? What a great movie. Millions and millions and MILLIONS of dollars worth of top-notch CGI special effects and deep, deep, deep Dolby sound that’s so loud it drowns out everything the television-raised pinheads around me are jawing at each other about and all it cost me was $5.99 Canadian. What a bargoon, as Eddie Shack used to say. That’s all I look for from a movie. Same as Spider-man II. WHOA! Did you see Doc Ock climb that wall? With his little CGI-generated arms smashing the chicken soup out of the building? Wicked cool, Dude!

Q4c: What amuses you more--that someone noticed this at all, or that it took twenty years for anyone to do so?

DAVE: Okay, so Kirsten Dunst looks like she’s been staying after hours at a few too many press receptions in the last two years (if you catch my drift) and she now looks more like Peter Parker’s really rather well-preserved for her age all things considered guidance counsellor than his girlfriend. Well, let me put it this way, my finely-attuned “bootie sense” wasn’t tingling, y’all (y’hear whut I’m sayin’?) but…but…
Uh, amuses me? Actually, no, I think it’s great. Big brownie points for Larry on that one (hey, how come Larry gets to be Larry? Larry, dude. Where’s your pointy hood? Like you should be L@Hart or LarHar or L rry? Shouldn’t you?). Just to fill in the brethren and cisterns on the extent of brother L@H@’s accomplishment, so far as we know L@H@ is the first person to notice that I used a cab driver secret identity for the Moon Roach, which was a parody of the Moon Knight, one of whose secret identities was as…tad a!…a cab driver. Very gratifying when someone gets one of my jokes twenty years later.

So, I spend twenty-six years worrying constantly that I’m being too obvious and telegraphing my story points and then spend twenty-six years explaining all the stuff I spent twenty-six years trying to make less obvious. The way I look at it, it beats the only other thing I’m qualified to do which is washing dishes.

Q4d: L nny thinks Larry wants your praise.

DAVE: Uh, yeah. I just said…

Q4e: Was Larry the first to notice this?

DAVE: Yeah. I just said. You can read it up right up there. It doesn’t even move as fast as it does on CNN so you’ve got plenty of time. Let me see. One, two, three, four……..twelve lines up: “so far as we know L@H@ is the first person to notice that I used a cab driv…

Q4f: Do you think he deserves your praise?

DAVE: Shit. I mean, sh*t. How did you do that? This is supposed to be on disk. It shouldn’t be possible for you to interrupt me like that. What is this? One of those computer viruses? I have NO idea where Gerhard’s floppy disks have been. If he’s given the office computer cybernetic syphilis or some damn…

Q4g: Larry thinks L nny is lazy.

DAVE: Lazy? Uh. No, I wouldn’t say that. I think it’s more a case of once L nny has got everyone doing “the wave” he gets this Lone Ranger quality about him. You know. “Well. My work is done here.” He won’t get an actual recharge until you finish analyzing the last five pages of The Last Day (available this Wednesday or next, God willing, at better comic book stores everywhere!) and then it’ll be (two, three, four) Hey, everybody! I, L nny, have a GREAT. IDEA.”

Q4h: Dave, do you think that L nny is lazy?

DAVE: Lazy? Uh. No, I…that is LAZY? UH! NO! I WOULDN’T SAY THAT. I THINK IT’S MORE…

Q4i: or could he be slipping behind on the reread simply because of a heavy workload and the recently enlarged family? (Talk about 3 questions in one, this is about 6!:^)

DAVE: Yeah. It is. Sh*t. Look at that rash or those three pustules or whatever they are after “about 6!” It’s probably cybernetic syphilis or software crabs or some sh*t. Damn.
Enlarged family? L nny starring in “Honey, I Enlarged the Kids”? Or, wait a minute. “Heavy workload!?” “Recently enlarged family!?”
WHY!
BROTHER L NNY!
YOU’VE GOT SOME ACTION ON THE SIDE! Man, fundamentally bad concept talking about it here. These people leak like sieves. What if one of them e-mail’s Mrs. L nny?

Q5a. There has been much discussion as to whether the ending of High Society holds up. Some might contend that Cerebus’ ultimate rationale, “For a while there, Cerebus thought he could make a difference," seems contrived. But others contend that it still rings true: that every world leader, from Hitler to Saddam Hussein to Pol Pot to any of the "good" ones, despite how many selfish and heinous acts they commit, justify their actions under this very rationale. Moreover, the anarcho-romantic Suenteus Po's final scrawling of the word Liberty on his prison wall is quite touching as well as a clever narrative device, in that the entirety of his Cerebus' Six Crises book (Read?) might have been just scratchings on a prison wall as he awaits execution by the new (old) regime. What are your thoughts on this ending sequence in light of your present views?

DAVE: Mm. About the same. I think that true believers—who act on their beliefs—run a genuine risk of becoming the first casualties when things go wrong. I mean, that’s a given, don’t you think? Don’t you think that’s the reason that most people keep their actual beliefs secret where those beliefs don’t conform to the majority viewpoint? One of the problems might even be discussing systems of belief and viewpoints as if they’re the same structural things from person to person. In a recent letter to someone after the death of Ronald Reagan, I remarked on his observation that “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” And he was talking about the late 1940’s. I mean there does seem to be a distinction between Government Setting People “Free” Within Its Context (Marxist-feminism) and Freeing People from the Governmental Context Itself (conservatism)— the former with the momentum on its side and the latter trying to take hold where and when it can for as long as it can. The best you can do is to slow the former down temporarily. We arrive into this world well along in the process and drift along with it, tending to see it as a fixed reality until someone like Ronald Reagan wakes up and realizes that liberalism isn’t stationary it’s always Slouching towards Gomorrah..

Of course the ending on High Society and the graphic novel itself is about a revolutionary time period which is well outside of the North American experience. Those historical situations like Russia in 1917 where the pot that’s been threatening to boil over for decades finally does and—whoever you are—you have to pick a side and whichever side you pick is pretty much going to decide if you die tomorrow, next month, two years from now or of old age. The only analogy in my life was the “Exclusives Wars” between Diamond and Capital where every publisher— starting from the biggest and proceeding down to the smallest—was forced to decide whether to go exclusive with Diamond or Capital. We had a “no exclusive policy” since SeaGate, so it was easy enough to announce that we would sell to anyone who could meet our terms. Which, effectively meant that we did our bit in killing Capital. They couldn’t use a tie, they needed a number of wins to stay in the game and Denis Kitchen, God bless ‘im for bucking the trend, was the only one to go exclusive with them. One of those situations where you make your choice and then wait to see what your choice leads to and what happens after that.

Q5b: Do you see it as reckless ambition spurred on by the naivete of youth, or does it hold up for you still?
DAVE: No, I still think it’s a good ending. I still think it’s a very good ending. But, then, I’m one of those people who think that a good ending tells you something about yourself in what you see in it. I mean, what’s your reaction to the Anarcho-Romantic at the end? “That idiot. He never should’ve stuck his neck out.” Well, that should tell you something about yourself. “There’s ambition spurred on by the naivete of youth.” Is that what it was? And how remote are you able to keep yourself in making that assessment? Was it personal ambition or the ambition to bring about a better world? And to put your metaphorical money where your metaphorical mouth was? The act of writing on the prison wall what he did, it seems to me, establishes the bona fides of the fact of his incarceration. A simple criminal wouldn’t do that. Even if the message gets obliterated, someone had to read it and understand it well enough to know that it needed to be obliterated which means, in a real way, as the guy who wrote it, you won the debate. Those, to me, are the sorts of things that count on the Big Scoreboard. That’s the reason that I’m perfectly willing to go to prison to prove a point about this country’s Marxist-feminist hate literature laws. If the only way to prove the point is to get ground up in the wheels, there are a lot worse ways to go. As it stands I’m comfortable with the compromise the Marxist-feminists have chosen: ignore him and his work and bet on posterity forgetting him and his work as well. Every day that goes by that they think that’s working in their favour, in my view, I’m racking up points. Four months into Phase Two of the Marxist-feminist experiment and I’d bet a lot more money on me than on them. Have faith in God and clarity tends to be the net result.

Volume 3: CHURCH & STATE I

Q1: How reliable is the information Theresa is feeding Weisshaupt in general, and specifically how does what she say about Gerrick square with the apparent contradiction of Astoria's statements about Cirin having given birth to a human son in "Reads" ("Appointments" in C&S I p.211)?

Dave: Well, one of the problems with a pathological liar character like Astoria is that pathological lying becomes endemic in proximity to her. Remember, she’s based on Bridgette O’Shaugnessy as portrayed by Mary Astor, who told her stories a little differently each time out and a little differently to each person she told them to. Or a lot differently. A pathological liar also derives great benefit from a Star Chamber approach to government such as Cirin practiced—providing she has immunity—because all of the proceedings are completely secret. Something happened behind closed doors in the series of events that Theresa is describing that probably resembles the story she is relating in certain particulars and is wide of the mark in others. I assume that Theresa is a pathological liar herself. The type tends to attract true believers who have a tendency to swallow everything whole and—when they finally start connecting the dots—tend to imitate the behaviour. If there’s no way of knowing what actually happened, there’s no reason that Theresa can’t tell it in her own way. The temptation to manufacture reality and to dictate it to others becomes too great. At that point the only guessing game is Which reality will ultimately prevail? So you might as well get yourself a dog in the fight just for the sake of having a dog in the fight. Who knows? You might win.

It’s one of those ‘well met’ circumstances. Cirin and Astoria were very much suited to each other. One hyper-secretive and the other a pathological liar. And, as I indicated last time (at least I think it was last time) Astoria wasn’t particularly good at what she was doing, so she tended to alternate between the urge to be a true revolutionary working to replace the system with one of her own devising and the urge to play Samson in the Temple—bringing everything crashing down on everyone and everything including herself. It’s a very sloppy form of anarchy and it works at cross purposes to itself. Replacing a system is a very different exercise from bringing everything to crashing ruin. So, I assume that Theresa would be pretty much the same.

Of course the overall point—whether it’s Astoria’s or whether it’s Theresa’s point—is a natural extrapolation of the abortion debate. “It’s none of your business.” Did Astoria believe that a mother had the right to murder her own children or was this one of Theresa’s innovations? I was less concerned with who thought it up or how it came to be discussed than in introducing the idea that once you have let daughters—the daughter impulse which is always to shock their mothers as a way of indicating their own superiority by not being shocked—off the leash it doesn’t take long to find the darkest corners of reality and begin to treat those corners with perfect equanimity. The recent move by Planned Parenthood to promote their cause with an “I had an abortion” t-shirt, it seems to me, is an attempt to recover that 70s frisson of sang froid, the “doesn’t bother me” philosophy that so titillated daughters at the time and which they found so compelling as lifestyle choice. “My mother is such a fossil. She thinks abortion is evil. She’s SO uncool.” There’ll be a lot of psychic debate going on between women right now about “I had an abortion” on a t-shirt and what it means. I suspect for a number of pro-choice women it’s just very creepy to picture themselves wearing an “I had an abortion” t-shirt and that (I would suspect largely unexpected) reaction within themselves is probably causing a certain amount of (equally unexpected) self-examination of how they actually feel about abortion. Having an abortion is one thing, advertising it jauntily on a t-shirt is another. At the other end of the spectrum where “Doesn’t. Bother. Me” is the ingrained, genetic level response to everything—the triple-X Hardcore Feminist crowd—I would suspect that for an unknown number of women neither abortion nor infanticide are causes for concern. Kill a baby, kill a fetus, what’s the difference and what’s the big deal? “Doesn’t. Bother. Me.” The fact that women in our society who murder their children are treated far more leniently than men who murder their children would indicate that this is, indeed, one of those dark corners of reality that is a little more crowded than most people in our society would accept it as being. Still an occult—in the original sense of “hidden”—sensibility but one which is quite widespread and one which is just biding its time before actively declaring itself. For that sensibility, wearing an “I had an abortion” t-shirt would be a good place to start.
In documenting Cirinists and Kevillists, I tried to outline what I saw as some of these interesting dark corners which daughters tend to find so enticing in their on-going need to shock their mothers. The actual facts—given that I was documenting women at war with each other and with society—I never really concerned myself about. Take the question: Was Sir Garrick adopted or Cirin’s natural son? In a woman’s world, it depends on who you ask. A big part of living with women involves simply believing everything that they say—their version of events, no matter how improbable. At this point we get into the areas of “Are women like that? or did Dave Sim just have this awful run of bad luck that the women he was with were always peddling a point of view on something?” I’m happy to discuss this further, but I’m just going to make a lot of you feel bad or angry or sad or a mixture of those. It’s why I showed a reasonably abstemious fellow like Weisshaupt drinking like a fish. If you actually try to determine the nature of reality by listening to women, you better have a bottle near to hand.

Q2: How did Lord Storms'End come by his knowledge of the Kevillists, the growth of the tower, the significance of the events Cerebus initiates as Pope etc? He tells Cerebus that Tarim fever sweeps through every decade or so, until someone says "enuf is enuf" - What's this mean? (i80)

Dave: Well, you have to remember that I had a really bad grasp of what the Meschiach—a messiah—is at the point I was writing this. “Tarim fever”. I came from the benighted generation directly after John Lennon’s. Let me see if I can describe this. I assumed, like John Lennon, like most atheists that Jesus was less of a manifestation of God’s will and God’s revelation of Himself to the world than he was a…job description. As John Lennon said about going to the cinema and seeing Elvis singing on the movie screen and all the girls in the audience jumping up and down and squealing: “That looks like a good job.” John Lennon wanted to be Elvis and he got to be Elvis. I don’t think there was anything larger in John Lennon’s world. He looked around and there was no one bigger than Elvis and when he got to be Elvis, there was no one bigger than John Lennon. Not even Jesus. How many magazine covers was Jesus on last month? In the same sense that the Beatles were all said to be fascinated with Hitler. Famous name. Big crowds. Power and control. It’s really all that you have in the skyer-no-higher—Lennon’s toppermost of the poppermost—category when you’re an atheist. Elvis Presley allowing himself to be called The King. Only half-heartedly protesting that there was only one King and that was Jesus—and then going out on stage dressed as Captain Marvel, Jr. It’s a mixed message in Elvis’ case. How devout was he? You had the Gospel singing and then you had the exponential fornication, the under-age fiancee. In John Lennon’s case there’s nothing to clutter up the message. In “apologizing” for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, he said, “I didn’t mean anything against God as a thing or Jesus as a person.” That’s a very good summing up of the atheistic view of both. God as a thing. Jesus as a person.

At twenty-five or so—I didn’t really discover the Beatles until a good ten years after they broke up—I assumed that the world was made up of individuals who were all “in” on this messiah racket and that they were all contending with each other as to whose guy was being advanced at any given point. Hitler, John Lennon, Elvis. It was part of the distorting effect of television which was difficult to see at the time because I was in the first generation of television children. Television was just as much a substitute religious altar in an atheistic family as it was an entertainment source. It was the grown-ups who were insisting we had to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, had to watch JFK’s funeral, had to watch the Gemini astronauts walking in space. I was seven years old. Watch the television. This is important. Okay. I’m watching, I’m watching. Television made of civilization a community of people all engaged in what Joni Mitchell called “the star-maker machinery”. Watch the television. This is important.
At one level “the star-maker machinery” was just about big houses and fancy cars and swimming pools and all that. But, I assumed in the rarefied heights the game was a good deal more serious. Even when you dismiss “God as a thing and Jesus as a person,” as could be seen with John Lennon, you still have an awareness that the “toppermost of the poppermost” exists. Although the controversy over Lennon saying that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus was ancient history by the time I was reading about it and watching it in documentaries, it didn’t surprise me nearly as much that John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus as it did that he backed off so quickly in reaction. I mean, I was an atheist. Why not John Lennon? Why couldn’t John Lennon be the Jesus for this age the same way that Jesus had been the Jesus for his age? It’s an atheistic question, founded on ignorance. Not stupidity. Ignorance. Wilfully ignoring something you should pay attention to and understand more thoroughly.

The more I examined the situation in that strange mental landscape inhabited by writers where all questions apply to yourself and all questions apply to your work, the best assessment I could come up with was that there was some sort of exponentially wearing quality that level of fame seemed to have and that “taking the Jesus step” just amplified the crushing burden implicit in that Famous name/Big crowds/Power and control equation. Of course, now, I realize that someone in John Lennon’s situation is just courting disaster through transparent stupidity. You want to be Jesus? You remember what happened to Jesus? Okay, bud. You asked for it. I mean, you’re a singer. The reaction I had Cerebus give to Estarcion’s Frank Sinatra. When did a singer get to be thought of anywhere NEAR this category? And on what basis? The number of underage girls who want to have sex with you? Moon June spoon? Having “come from” that side of things, that level of absolute atheism, it just seemed obvious. Sinatra! Presley! Kennedy! They were obviously Exalted Beings. More than mere mortals. What more is there to say? But all of them —I see now in a life where God has His pre-eminent position—functioned on a very mundane and largely disreputable level. They’re only “up there” to someone even further down than they are.

I’m going on at length about this, because this was really how I saw the world as I was working on Cerebus through most of High Society and Church & State. People hook up with other people. One in ten million is a Brian Epstein and one in ten million is a John Lennon. I was pretty sure I wasn’t in either category. Apart from really liking hotel suites—the bigger the better—I could never see the percentage in materialism and materialism on a profound level seemed to be a necessary part of the equation. George Harrison buying a castle to live in. You aren’t going to get to that point unless you think buying a castle and living in it is a great idea. Really consider that mentality. Waking up in the morning and going, “Yeah, I’m going to buy a castle and live in it.” The idea of owning and living in a castle or a mansion repels me. All I see when I look at world-class materialism is: you own it, you have to take care of it. As one rap singer rather famously—and astutely—remarked, “Mo’ money, mo’ problems.” I mean, not necessarily. It depends on what you spend your money on. If you like supermodels, cocaine, platinum jewelry and antique sports cars you will indeed have many, many problems to go along with every dollar in your rapidly diminishing bank account. I just wasn’t in that category, nor was the medium in which I was working. A comic-book convention is a flea market, not a rock concert. Even Todd McFarlane’s home in one of Oregon’s posh bedroom communities was a “mansion,” not a mansion or a Mansion. There was no access point to that toppermost of the poppermost from where we were, so the point, very early on, became making the book into an “in context” monument, to try to make Cerebus the 6,000 page graphic novel and Cerebus the character into comic-book fixtures.

I assumed that the portrayal of JFK’s assassination as “martyrdom” and John Lennon’s “The way things are goin’, they’re gonna crucify me” were just pointing towards the year 2000 and that these kinds of messianic expectations were just going to start coming closer and closer together like labour pains. Again, in retrospect, I think this was a skewed and disproportionate view of reality which resulted from being born into an atheistic family, in the first television generation with televised images taking the place of the religious altar and celebrity substituting for scripture.

Now, trying to bring this around to Lord Storms’End, I also assumed that in this structure that I pictured there were a lot of abstainers. I certainly started out as a would-be contender and then turned abstainer. Why bother? If you aren’t a materialist, all that leaves is (if the ladies will forgive me) pussy. And the one time that I had three women I was sleeping with at the same time—very, very brief time—told me that a lot of female genitalia sounds a lot better than it is in actual practice. I hadn’t realized, at the time, how deep this thought went. Access to a lot of female genitalia was like “Mo’ money, mo’ problems.” More female genitalia, more problems. But, I still wanted to get laid. A lot. It was a contradiction I continuously evaded and then paid the price for evading well past the age when I should’ve known better. When I finally stopped evading it, when I finally recognized what getting laid actually was, then I was a complete abstainer and I got off the treadmill I had been on, started climbing out of the pit I had dug for myself.

But, it’s interesting to me that—back in the days when I was completely absorbed in the contradiction, I was coming up with characters like Suenteus Po and Lord Storms’End. It was as if I was really trying to tell myself something. Which, I think now, I obviously was. When you really start to abstain—when abstention becomes your way of life—you really start to figure things out and the more you figure things out, the more you abstain, and each begins to reinforce the other. If I see a picture of a millionaire in front of his mansion, I just look at it and think, wow, what a headache: think how much of your conscious attention has to go into maintaining that. When I think of all the things that go wrong around this dinky little place that I live in and multiply them by mansion scale. Wow. Boggles my mind. How aggravating.

So, it interests me that I tended to document that viewpoint as the highest imaginable reality long before I experienced it. I wish I could supply you with backstory for Lord Storms’End but, just because of the nature of the character, I wouldn’t have come up with backstory for Lord Storms’End so I have none to offer. Obviously, wherever he came from, whoever he was before, whatever pit he might have dug for himself—and he is, clearly, well-informed on any number of levels, several of which you identified—he realized at some point that no good could come of it. And he chose to just be a farmer. Actually clings to just being a farmer. For his own safety and for the safety of others. And, of course, Cerebus’ magnifying nature screws that up—gets him where he lives and breathes, the same as Cerebus got Suenteus Po. They know abstaining is the only sensible course and then, suddenly, there they are, nattering on and on, interfering, trying to affect events, advocating, showing off what they know, using what they suspect as a cudgel. It’s another vice, because the urge to show off accompanies ideas when you’re a thinker. You always want to “try an idea out” on someone else. But that’s the opposite of abstention. It’s one of the reasons that I’m glad that socializing went by the boards for me through the ostracism and vilification for not being a feminist. I know how valuable it is to just keep to yourself. I never would’ve discovered it otherwise.

Q3a: What was up with the Countess? Who is she? What was her role in the larger story intended to be vs. what her role actually was? My intention with the Countess was to document a female who really just wanted to be a regular female and ended up in this idealized Kevillist circumstance owing to inherited wealth or having Weisshaupt for a sugar daddy. I’ll leave those two as open questions—as a reader (I didn’t remember hinting at Weisshaupt as sugar daddy, but that seems to me to be what I had the Countess talking around in her second appearance).
Why was she there?

Dave: What I was trying to pose for the reader was the problem which results when you feminist-ize society (feminist-ize, not feminize). Essentially you make being female into a political role and a set of political decisions. As an example, in our society, every woman is expected to be in the “pro-choice” or “pro-life” camp and to be willing to denounce the other side and defend her own side at the drop of a hat. Which side are you on? Historically, a lady’s—as opposed to a woman’s—reaction to the question would be that it seems like a very unpleasant subject. And then she would change it or evade it gracefully. Because good breeding and good manners would dictate that she do so. Femininity was the custodian of those natures. Good breeding and good manners were passed down because mother had good breeding and good manners and her mother before her had good breeding and good manners. And suddenly, you not only don’t have good breeding and good manners, you consider the whole idea of good breeding and good manners ridiculous. Everything is open for discussion. Air your dirty laundry. Let’s talk turkey on the subject of mutilating foetuses.

The genuine female interest in romance remains, even as romance itself goes by the wayside. Even at the time I saw this as a societal problem. There was the same impetus to create strong, independent (usually wealthy) female characters that there is today—they’re less characters in the literary sense than they are role models in the Feminist propaganda campaign but as I did so—Astoria being the first major example—I thought, these women are not going to be very happy being like this. Where’s the courtship and the courtliness? Where are the stolen kisses and the “loves me, loves me not”?

Q3b: Why the change from her first appearance to her second appearance?

Dave: I’ve heard that before, but, personally, I don’t see there being a big difference between the Countess’ two appearances. It’s just a little later on and Weisshaupt—her self-appointed Henry Higgins—is dead. She’s taking care of Secret Sacred Wars Roach and the two McGrew Brothers. Men are still drifting in and out of her orbit but structurally it’s unsound. She realizes that they’re just going to drift in and out of her life in fewer and fewer numbers because she’s going to be an old woman soon. She’s a born housekeeper, as I think most if not all women are, which is why I portrayed her doing all of the chores in her second appearance. There is, in both of her appearances, a forced air of feministic superiority—that is, fundamentally bad writing— which, as I recall, was pioneered by Sonny Bono on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. He would portray himself as a buffoon and Cher would portray herself as his dominant superior. That would be the schtick. Which was the complete opposite of the situation. He was the brains and the ambition of the operation. I don’t wince as much today as I used to when I read myself partaking of that poisoned apple—it was twelve years into the Feminist propaganda age and twenty years later on, I can pat myself on the back for at least recognizing that these lives were not going to end happily and that most strong, independent women were going to be getting most of their romance from fiction—the “reads” Michelle continues perversely to read while Weisshaupt is trying to get her to read complicated economic tracts—rather than from their relationships or their marriage(s). It was clear to me in re-reading the material that this was, ultimately, Weisshaupt’s weak spot that, through all of his machinations and manipulations, he still thought that a female needed to be worked into the mix. Not the more natural and sensible “and of course I’ll need a good wife,” but “I need a woman as amazing as myself to install in that position adjacent to me if I am going to make all of this work properly.” If you’ve ever read the litany of attributes that Conrad Black was looking for when he picked Barbara Amiel, it seems cut from the same cloth. On paper, for a woman to see herself in just so heroic and significant a role on the portion of the world stage occupied by her husband must be flattering indeed. But it seems to me that it owes a good deal more to Frank Miller’s Batman and Robin than it does to, say, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. I see it as an implicitly unhappy circumstance for women because it means there is always greener grass on the other side of the fence. A feminized Robin is always going to long to be someone’s Juliet. A Juliet is always going to long to be someone’s Robin. And, as a direct result of their implicit dissatisfaction, they’re going to drive Batman and Romeo around the bend with their whining about their unmet needs in their respective categories nine times out of ten—where they don’t choose to oscillate between the two role models: I’ll be this fellow’s Robin until that proves unsatisfying and then I’ll be this fellow’s Juliet until that becomes unsatisfying. It’s no wonder Botox and other longevity treatments are coming into fashion. Courtship and nesting are sequential and consume decades in and around career decisions. I really do think, as men, writers need to be more aware of this and to stop creating these really unlikely fictional female hybrids and mutations. As I reread the Countess’ dialogue, she has too many “snappy rejoinders”. There are a number of notable instances of Dorothy Parkers and the late Anita Loos—women who are genuinely that bright and that quick—but they are the exception that very much proves the rule. Katherine Hepburn wasn’t nearly as sharp as the woman she portrayed in Adam’s Rib and the Katherine Hepburn of legend was more a creation of a succession of male screenwriters than she was of herself.

Okay, you’re all getting angry and sad and irritated again, so, let me shift gears a bit.

The Countess, visually, was based on Karen McKiel, the Aardvark-Vanaheim secretary from 1982 to 1988 (?). She was an interesting character and very much a first generation feminist in the strong, independent woman mold. Nothing particularly new or interesting then or now. It was really at one step remove from the situation (being a married man at the time) that I began to remark upon the societal change that was taking place with most girls/women having jobs and either taking it as a given that that was always going to be the case or that the job could be the lifestyle choice while they tracked down a husband whereupon they would either chuck it in (the vast minority) in favour of marriage and children or (the vast majority) put it on hold until the marriage and the children had been accomplished, whereupon it would be resumed in earnest. Boyfriends and husbands would be expected to fit themselves in and around the margins of the career wherever they could find a spot (cooking dinner, cleaning the apartment, doing laundry and shopping for groceries seeming like some valuable places they could occupy in their largely orbital existence around their strong, independent woman). Karen was kind of interesting in that she had a predilection for other women’s boyfriends and husbands. She liked to test the bonds of other people’s matrimony and usually found it wanting. Which seemed to both satisfy and frustrate her since she was also in search of a husband of her own. In her own terms, she liked to “cause shit”. She was a big fan of the TV show Dynasty (the Prince song—“Kiss”?—with the line “You don’t have to watch Dynasty/to have an attitude” was certainly bang-on for the time period) where causing shit seemed to be a major female preoccupation. I didn’t really interest her for the longest time because I was in an open marriage. Having sex with someone you were allowed to have sex with was no challenge and, therefore, no fun. There needed to be the possibility of fireworks not only in bed but in the resulting soap opera. This many years later on, I can see in reading the Countess’ dialogue my attempt to sort of wed Karen McKiel to that Dynasty brand of high-stakes relationship power fantasies that she liked. But, in a literary sense, it really just rings false. Even contriving Weisshaupt’s overblown infatuation with Michelle which blinded him to who she actually was and compelled him to try and make her into someone she could never be (and, in rereading these sections that does seem to be my subtext: Pygmalion gone seriously awry at any number of levels. Not the least of which is that My Fair Lady was concerned with turning a flower girl/guttersnipe into a lady, not turning an average girl into Donald Trump) just seems a transparent literary device to cover for the implausibility of the plot point, the tip of the playing card is showing between my fingers when it’s supposed to have vanished.
I started having an affair that was off-again, on-again through the ensuing year with Karen about five months after Deni and I officially split up, having an affair with your boss’ ex-husband having an illicit tinge that having sex with your girlfriend’s open-marriage husband just didn’t have. My dedication in Church & State Vol. 1 to Jessica—Karen’s own euphemism for her vagina—and that “somewhere it is always January 23, 1984” (the night we first had sex) certainly indicates that it was worth waiting for. Ultimately, of course, I ran afoul of the Holiday Rule which is a centerpiece of most women’s on-again, off-again relationships. As a guy, if you want to stay in the game, you had better time your “on-again’s” to coincide with Christmas, Thanksgiving and her birthday and, in this case, agree to drive home to New Brunswick with her sister and brother-in-law for Christmas. I declined and she came back with news of her new boyfriend that she had met while down there. That really wasn’t the end of things
She stayed the secretary for a couple of more years until the Bank of Montreal called asking for me and she tearfully showed up at the studio door to tell me that she knew what it was about: she had been paying her personal Mastercard from the company’s account we had opened for depositing our Mastercard phone orders. I guess she had figured since it was all one big happy Mastercard family, no one would notice. If it wasn’t quite a Dynasty flourish worthy of whatever-her-name-was-who-was-the-Queen-Bitch-on-Dynasty, it wasn’t through lack of effort on Karen’s part. To add insult to injury, several years later we had to pay tax penalties on her clothing purchases on her company Visa (evidently it was important to me that she look good in the office, thus justifying a clothing allowance of several thousand dollars) when the charges were, naturally, disqualified.

You know, Neil Gaiman chided me a while back saying that no one is entitled to know these sorts of personal details. I appreciated his very human concern and evident compassion, but I’m in a very different situation from Neil. It’s still standing policy in the comic-book field that “Dave Sim is crazy.” And, as far as I can see, no one seems to have any need to substantiate the charge. Everyone just takes it as a given. “Dave Sim is crazy.” So, as much as possible, I think it’s necessary for me to establish for posterity that a) I’m pretty sure I wasn’t crazy and b) I had very good reasons for believing the things that I believed about gender relations, feminism and the post-70s hallucination in which I see most people living. Unless I cite actual experiences, I think I’m leaving myself open to the charge of evasiveness. I think if there were to exist at some point a groundswell of support for the view that Dave Sim is NOT crazy, I could probably see my way clear to “easing up” a little bit on the subject. But, as I don’t see that to be the case, I’m going to continue to be as honest and thorough as I can be in answering questions posed to me in this forum and e