Monday, June 09, 2008

Head. Wall. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Been trying to think of some witty and ironic comment to make about this. But words really, really fail me.

14 comments:

Gavin Burrows said...

The obligation to agree with someone else is now a "courtesy."

Rich Puchalsky said...

Dude. He's crazy. Why are you surprised that he's acting crazy?

Of course, he's also a nasty person underneath the crazy. Some day someone will be able to explain to me how a long-running parody strip, full of tired misogynist bits from day one, drawn in cramped little panels, makes someone an enfant terrible whose crazy missives have to be head-banged over.

Andrew Hickey said...

Rich - reading it is the only explanation one can give. And I'm glad you feel able to judge someone you've presumably never met, and to separate out his mental illness and underlying personality so thoroughly...

The situation's actually worse than the fax makes it look. He actually ordered Jeff Tundis (who runs his websites like glamourpuss.com ) and Chester Brown (who he's called his biggest supporter in comics) not to sign because he didn't think they were ideologically pure enough - he's turned into Colonel Cathcart with loyalty oaths Yossarian can't sign even if he wants to.

What I find sickening is the way so many people on the Cerebus Yahoo group are signing the thing, validating the poor man's mental illness...

I. Dall said...

Because he is a genius.
That bit in "Going Home"? Ehere he contrasts F. Stop & Cerebus with the Cirinist sermonists? Wonderfull illustration of a point.
An unfair & delusional one, obviously, but then, he is an artist, not a philosopher: he even remembers that himself, sometimes.

Greg G said...

The Tundis thing was bizarre - Eddie Campbell is right to call this Sim's Humpty Dumpty phase - words meaning just what he chooses them to mean. Sim has extended the pledge of allegiance to include the term "sexist", because he "knows" that his supposed enemies mean misogynist when they say sexist.

Never mind that misogynist itself has never had the inflexible meaning that Sim wants it to have.

"When some one told Sophocles that Euripides was a woman-hater, 'He may be,' said he, 'in his tragedies, but in his bed he is very fond of women.'

Rich Puchalsky said...

Andrew, as far as I can tell, the Unified Theory of Sim Nuttery says that he was just a bit odd during his early to middle work, then slowly went off the rails into what pretty much has to be characterized as actual craziness. If that's the case, then I think that it's fair to point out that his early work was just as mysogynistic as he later work was. It was less theoretically developed in that it didn't have religious theories, but it traded on all the standard mysogynist tropes.

Gavin Burrows said...

rich puchalsky said...
Andrew, as far as I can tell, the Unified Theory of Sim Nuttery says that he was just a bit odd during his early to middle work, then slowly went off the rails into what pretty much has to be characterized as actual craziness.

Yup. And of course 'a bit odd' is an almost compulsory trait of a half-decent artist.

If that's the case, then I think that it's fair to point out that his early work was just as mysogynistic as he later work was.

Somewhat ironically, in his early days everyone used to praise Sim for writing strong female characters. Admittedly this was by the standards of the comics industry of the day, but Jaka et al seemed a cut above the ordinary.

There was even a kind of rivalry between Sim and the Hernandez brothers, which that was partly responsible for.

It was less theoretically developed in that it didn't have religious theories, but it traded on all the standard mysogynist tropes.

I suspect a fair proportion of guys share many of Sim's feelings at a gut level, but baulk at him taking such notions to their logical conclusions.

I. Dall said...

Burrows:
At a concious level, at least, I disagree about as strongly with Sims views as one can, short of Godess - worship.
Wich makes his craftmanship even more evident to me; dont have to worry about ideological bias.

But yes, he seemed a nasty piece of work before tangent, as well, regardless of his rather mutable view of women (Judges speech on the Moon, for example). His "wipe out most of humanity so artist can get peace to work" phase comes to mind.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Given that it is pretty well established that Mr. Sim is, in fact, mentally ill (suffering from schizophrenia?) then I think that the "mad" epithet is probably in bad taste.

Cygnus said...

Hi, Andrew.

This is not the best place to say what I’m going to say, but I’m not sure you receive comments by email and, if you don’t, you’ll probably never find my comment if I post in the right, uh, post. Anyway.

Thing is, I recced your essay “Lipstick in My Scholar” in a Brazilian Orkut community, and people were very interested (thanks to the movie, everybody is extremely worried about Susan). But we have many members who don’t speak English. Would you mind if we translated and re-posted you work? We’d give you full credit, of course, and make very clear that the original is your. And that the weird phrasing is ours. Would you mind?

Andrew Rilstone said...

Hi,

Yes, you are quite welcome to publish a translation of my essay (assuming, of course, that you aren't charging anyone money to look at it.)

Thanks for taking the trouble to ask first.

Andrew

Andrew Rilstone said...

p.s

the title "lipstick on my scholar" is a play on a song-title (also used for a TV drama) called "lipstick on my collar".

There are probably other non-bilingual puns...

Andrew

Cygnus said...

Thank you very much. I’m working on it now.

Also, thank you for explaining the title. I knew there was something more, but I couldn’t figure it out what it was… most of time I catch the double meaning, but this one was completely over my head. I think it will have to go in a footnote, because I can’t come up with anything that works like that in Portuguese…

Cygnus said...

Yay, finished. Curiously, the only thing that required the help of Wikipedia was the reference to Tory. And I admit I needed some help to translate your “game, set and match”, but that turned out fine.

Just one more thing: a friend of mine did the translation, and I just revised and fixed a few things here and there. Since he is a teenager (fifteen, I think… you never know in the internet), and most of the people in the forum are teens too, I accepted a few, say, editorial cuts he did in the translation. In other words, he decided to cut the second note, and I agreed because they might be too shocked by it (I have a hard time convincing him not to italicize the word “pleasure”. Kids today…)

So I added a note in the beginning explaining that one paragraph had been cut and suggesting people who could to check the original. That’s the only change we made. Oh, and the reference to painted lips looking like a vagina. Those are the only ones. Nothing that will change the meaning of the text, I think, so I hope this is ok with you.

Thank you again.

(one more thing… the bit about Harry Potter compared to Narnia because there are seven books? I love that. It always makes me smile)