Glamourpuss #1

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  Journalista - the news weblog of The Comics Journal » Blog Archive » Jan. 30, 2008: Emily Litella said,

  [...] Adam Prosser on the first issue of Dave Sim’s new series, Glamourpuss. (Link via Melissa [...]

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  THe Copacetic Comics Company said,

  You state in your review: “Sim has once again taken a bold step as a self-publisher by sending out preview copies to retailers, in order to help them decide how many copies to pre-order—a pretty straightforward idea, but one that’s oddly rare these days” You are obviously not a retailer and therefore are in no position to make a comment on this, but we can assure you that this is a wildly incorrect statement. We receive preview copies from independent creators and publishers AT LEAST once a week, and sometimes as many as several on the same day, all sent to us precisely to help us decide how many to order — well, really, to encourage us to order more than we might otherwise — in the forthcoming Previews.

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  JEM said,

  I’m looking forward to Glamourpuss. Sim is a very confusing (confused?) creator, but Cerebus was such an amazing book (for the first 200 issues, at any rate) that I’m willing to give anything Sim publishes a chance.

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  Michael Grabowski said,

  It’s unnecessary to call into question Sim’s mental health in the lead to your review. The content of the book seems to offer plenty of material worthy of comment, independent of what you think of his state of being. You do a good job of describing what you find fascinating and perplexing about Glamourpuss. That it’s a new Dave Sim serial comic book at all is enough of a hook for your review; you don’t need to sensationalize it.

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  Clint H said,

  Nothing sensational about it.

  Sim’s a brilliant creator and just a few bubbles off the plumb.

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  THe Copacetic Comics Company said,

  Upon reflection, we’d like to ammend our comment above. While we certainly stand by our comment that the practice of creators and publishers sending preview copies out to retailers is far from rare, it IS relatively unusual for a creator and publisher of Sim’s stature to engage in it.

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  Adam said,

  TCCC, glad to hear it. I have to admit I may have been suckered in by Sim himself, who makes a big deal about it in the foreword. It seems like a pretty logical idea to me, so you have to wonder why it’s not common practice.

  Mike, Sim himself has been open about his mental problems; I was actually fairly circumspect about it in the review, but he’s described himself, in interviews and in the text of his comics, as a “borderline schizophrenic” (and not in a metaphorical way). To me, it’s not being honest not to mention it, as the whole project seems to stem from Sim’s own defiantly eccentric worldview, and his ability to indulge it without having to answer to anyone else.

  You’ll note I rattled off a list of comics writers and artists at the beginning, all of whom have, in one way or another, seemed to be mentally out of step with the rest of society. There’s nothing wrong with that, and indeed, I admire the hell out of everyone listed (yes, Frank Miller included). Anyway, Sim does a pretty good job of sensationalizing himself; I don’t think my commenting on it changes anything.

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  Michael Grabowski said,

  Adam, I don’t dispute the eccentric nature of Sim’s views or that he’s publicly discussed their origins in his own mental experiences. (He doesn’t characterize them as “problems,” though.) It’s also easy to dismiss his views on feminism when that’s related to “speculation about his mental health.” In any event, I’m not suggesting that that shouldn’t be a topic for discussion, and your extension of that to other artists is certainly valid and probably applies to a great many artists in all fields.

  However, it isn’t *necessarily* pertinent to reviewing the content of Glamourpuss #1. Your review seems to be the first one out there about this new book and venture, but your commentary, well-written as it is, about the book itself is “below the fold” for most busy internet readers. Your initial paragraphs may do more to make the book seem worthy of casual dismissal by the mildly curious than your main analysis suggests.

  (More interesting and valid, based on your comments, would be a discussion of “his extremely controversial remarks about feminism,” his “famed” misogyny (”Cerebus” is a misogynist; that doesn’t mean Dave Sim is), and the “little or no trace” of said tendencies in this particular work. Granted, a short review doesn’t give much space to discuss these, but at least these aspects seem a little more pertinent to this book.)

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  Pam said,

  Hey, thanks for this, because I have been wondering. However, just for clarification .. does the book have a story, as in a traditional narrative of some kind, or is it mostly illustrated essays? My take on your review leans toward the latter, but I could be wrong.

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  Jeff Seiler said,

  Like Mike, I am dismayed that Adam felt it necessary to lead off his review with a discussion of mental health among comic creators and in Dave Sim in particular. I have received an advance copy of “glamourpuss” and I was extremely impressed by it. I think that the primary concept that jumps off the page is that fashion models, by their very nature, don’t make very good subjects for an ongoing comic book story (let alone a superheroine comic).

  So, Sim wanted to draw pretty girls, but he couldn’t think of what to have them “say”. “Hey! I know, why don’t I talk about how I got interested in photorealistic drawing in the first place and who I emulated,” he might have said. (In point of fact, he told me in an interview that will be published in “Cerebus Readers in Crisis #3″–to be released at SPACE on March 1st–that his decision about what pictures to select for the source material of his photorealistic drawing was whether they looked like something Alex Raymond could have drawn.

  And then, he expands on the above by discussing and demonstrating the artistic techniques that Raymond and, later, the artists of the Raymond School used to do their comic strips.

  I think it is a fascinating approach to doing a comic book and will keep anyone who seriously reads it hooked for a good long while. He has already stated that his business plan is to do six bi-monthly issues of “glamourpuss” and than assess his interest and the overall sales of the book in order to decide whether or not to continue it past six issues.

  As an aside, there will be an announcement made at SPACE, on March 1st, about the May release of his one-shot comic, now titled Secret Project One (not its real title). So look for info about that in the March issue of Previews.

  Thanks,

  Jeff Seiler

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  Jeff Seiler said,

  Let me amend my previous post by saying that Adam is wrong when he writes that Sim has publicly identified or referred to himself as “a borderline schizophrenic”. That misconception has been floating around the Internet for far too long and will, undoubtedly continue to. Nevertheless, as someone who has an advanced degree in psychology, who has made official psychological diagnoses, and who has spent time publicly and privately with Dave, I want to unequivocally state that Dave is not “a borderline schizophrenic”.

  He was misdiagnosed as having borderline schizophrenia once in his early twenties, when his mother and his girlfriend (later wife, Deni Loubert) made him go to the hospital following a very bad reaction to taking LSD.

  I have written extensively about this at the Cerebus Yahoo group and will continue to stand up for Dave on this issue whenever and wherever I find out about it.

  Jeff Seiler

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  Max said,

  First off, solid review, as per usual. As to Mr. Grabowski’s point (and forgive me if I’m reading this wrong), about the meat of your review being deeper than most people care to read, I fail to see how that’s your problem. If people want a superficial summary of a book’s merit, they should just look at the bottom score. If they want a deeper insight into the work, they should read the whole review. Simple as that. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this isn’t a book for people with short attention spans.

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  Jeff Seiler said,

  First–yes, Max, this is not a book for people with short attention spans *who wish to READ the book*. On the other hand, if they want to just look at pictures of pretty girls, well, then, it could be taken in 5 second increments or they could stare at one girl for half an hour. All depends on one’s approach.

  I also want to amend an earlier statement: I said that Dave has already said that he would be doing six issues and then seeing where things stand, orders and dollars and interest-wise. That was true, but apparently Dave has changed that, because he said today on the comic.con site that he would be doing somewhere between 20 and 25 issues. He expects to collect them in a phone book in the year 2012.

  Jeff Seiler

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  David Cooler said,

  Michael Grabowski, I’d advise you to take a closer look at Sims’ Tangent essays if you need evidence of his own outright misogyny. If memory serves there were 5 of them on the subject, somewhere between 150-60. That’s neither hear nor there, as in my opinion, any review of a work involving a spoiled female fashion model leave from a man with infamous distaste for male-female equality requires a mention of such, either to warn potential buyers or (in this case) as a lead in to discussing the notable absence of an anti-woman undercurrent in the work for people like me who may already have been wary. What’s more, it serves to point out that deeply skewed world views aren’t uncommon among the comic book greats.

  I take it you’re a big Sim fan (yes, Cerebus was mostly very good) and are a little sensitive about the things that get said about him. It might make you feel better then to know that I’m now going to pick up Glamourpuss #1, having been assured by someone who is aware of Sims’ whacky tendencies that the more dangerous and personally offensive of his crackpot theories aren’t represented in his book. I’ve always held Sim up as an extremely talented creator, just one whose personal beliefs kept me from being a fan.

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  Adam said,

  Pam: the book is, in essence, a series of (mostly) character drawings of (mostly) fashion models, with an essay by Sim in the speech bubbles. It’s quite interesting, but there’s no real narrative.

  Mike and Jeff, I’m sorry if a discussion of Sim’s mindset seems “sensationalist” to you, but as a longtime follower of his work, it’s a natural point that Sim himself invites. His work has become more and more about himself, and the fact that he has, essentially, complete creative freedom, means that picking up a Dave Sim comic or other project means you’re going to get a healthy dose of Sim’s musings on whatever subject comes into his head. For instance, the “Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing” is full of wildly tangental ramblings, many of them interesting, a lot of them completely out of left field and unrelated in any way to the topic at hand. This was a feature of Cerebus, too, in the form of the letter columns and, of course, the lengthy text features. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, of course, and indeed, I welcome it–but if Sim’s going to keep making himself the star of his comics, then he himself is fair game for review.

  Frankly I thought I was being pretty restrained, given the utter looniness of much of what Sim has had to say in the past. If you read through a random page of his blog, you’ll read a lot of thoughtful discursions mixed in with talk about how demons are posessing everyone, masturbation is evil, and feminists are destroying society. Now, Sim’s always been a bit of a provocateur–he’s said elsewhere that he wasn’t above lying in order to make his points–so it could be that he doesn’t take this stuff seriously. But either way I think I’m justified in being critical of him for it.

  I haven’t been writing for Rack Raids for very long, so I don’t have a huge archive of reviews to make a representative sample. But believe me when I say I’m not picking on Sim. I have no objection to stating my thoughts on any comic creator when I feel it’s relevant to the book under discussion, as, again, the opening paragraphs of my review should indicate. (And I find it very interesting that no one is saying, “Hey, don’t drag Moore/Morrison/Miller/Hanks/Wood into this!” which would be a much more reasonable complaint in my opinion.) At any rate, I think that, due to the nature of the internet, articles and reviews tend to grow in complexity as people comment on them, and the fact that this interesting discussion has evolved out of it shows that this is far from a perfunctory dismissal of the comic.

  Here’s a livejournal article from a woman who interviewed him for the Onion AV Club, which is where I started to feel like Sim and I were not only no longer on the same page, but reading entirely different books. (My favourite part being just how they couldn’t possibly do justice to the brilliance of his ideas without a special 10-part series, because the news media is just so ADD-afflicted and superficial. Lord knows conciseness isn’t a quality of good writers, or anything.)

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  Adam said,

  Check out this thread at the Comics Journal Forum–Sim himself is there, commenting on Glamourpuss and everything else. Some very thoughtful discussion, and surprisingly little crimoniousness (almost too little, really). And yes, they link to this review, though sadly Sim himself doesn’t give his opinion. Dangit!

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  Adam said,

  Uh, that should say “acrimoniousness”.

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  Pam said,

  Thank you, Adam

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  Michael Grabowski said,

  Adam: Thanks for spending far more time writing about this book and these comments than you probably meant to. I agree with you whole-heartedly about the rambling nature of Sim’s prose. It’s maddening… but not necessarily mad. It’s fun to speculate about the apparent mental health of artists of all stripes–name one working in any medium that seems truly well-adjusted; it’ll probably be because you don’t know enough about that person, whereas with Sim we probably know far too much. I just don’t agree that speculation about a creator’s mental health (including the others you brought up) is a relevant lead to a review of his work.

  Max: I think you did misread my comment but I forgive you.

  David: I’m not quite sure what you were saying in your first paragraph, but in my second comment I did state that I thought the brief discussion of Sim’s outspoken stance against feminism in the review was in fact far more interesting and relevant (than comments about Sim’s mental health) when dealing with a book that shows “little or no trace” of Sim’s “famed” attitude.

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