#dave sim

Cerebus Meets Sugar And Spike

I love how little of a shit Harlan Ellison gives while hosting this documentary. He clearly loves comics, and idolises some of the figures being covered, but others—including Moebius—he just could not care less about. He's makes this painfully obvious by holding the script on camera and passionlessly reading it off when he has to introduce these guys. It's very funny, if a bit cruel. Ellison also repeatedly refers to White Americans as 'Native Americans'. Was this normal in the mid-80s or is this just Ellison being his weird belligerent self?

Also he makes the claim at one point that there are only five 'Native American' art forms: the banjo, Jazz, the musical comedy, the mystery story, and comic books. All of those, except maybe Jazz, are highly contentious. I think a more accurate five would be: Abstract Expressionism, Jazz, school shootings, movies, and conspiracy theories.

The biggest takeaway from this film is just how much more intelligent, educated, and well spoken the comics artists in this documentary are compared to their modern equivalents. Is everyone getting less intelligent? Would Bernie Wrightson or Will Eisner have seemed as tedious as modern comic book creatives if they too had Twitter accounts? Or was there something fundamentally different about these guys compared to the artists of today? Has connectivity made us idiots? Or maybe it's microplastics? Alienation? I'm not sure, but the differences are stark. Any comic book artist today who talked even half as coherently and with even half as much depth as any of these interview subjects (with the exception of the Mad Magazine guy) would be all over every podcast in the world. It reminds me of how everyone talks about John Carmack. Compared to modern public intellectuals, Carmack does stand out as genuinely interesting and intelligent guy—and his achievements are undeniable. Compared to these guys, though—guys who are ultimately just comic book artists—he no longer seems like an outlier so much as the what the baseline standard should be for a creative speaking about his craft and his interests.

Also, while it feels like there are more artists working in comics today, each with their own idiosyncrasies, the styles available feel homogenous and uninteresting—everything is either in-house superhero aesthetics with Tumblr characteristics, or pink-nosed Tumblr art with in-house superhero characteristics; that said, Image does mix things up a bit by also having some artists that fit neither of these distinctions and are instead just terrible. If you're in the mood to have a depressing experience, I recommend taking a look at the current month's solicitations page on your favourite comic book retailer's website.

With this in mind, It's insane to think that that there was a time when Steve Ditko, Bernie Wrightson, Neal Adams, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Frank Miller, Art Spiegelman, and Dave Sim were all on mainstream comic book stands at the same time—and this isn't even getting into artists who didn't appear in the documentary, but were also around at the time, like Mike Grell, Klaus Janson, Paul Gulacy, Eddie Campbell, Harvey Pekar, John Byrne, John Romita Jr., George Perez, Dan Clowes, Bill Sienkiewicz, Matt Wagner, Walt Simonson, Brendan McCarthy, Howard Chaykin, Paul Chadwick, Terry Beatty, James O'Barr... I can't even imagine what that must have been like.

There's definitely more to say on this topic—Will Eisner and Steve Ditko's segments each deserve an entire review of their own—but I'm sick as a cat with the flu so I think I'm just going to abruptly end my review here without really concluding any of my thoughts.

Thanks for reading!