It had been a number of years since Cerebus creator Dave Sim's last sociological outburst in Cerebus #186 ("Reads"), and he had slipped back into being a mere struggling comics self-publisher with a cult following, when a pair of new public statements in Cerebus #264 and #265 reminded everyone that he is much more than that. Exactly what is open to debate, with theories ranging from gynophobic lunatic, to Machiavellian manipulator of publicity to ingenious Swiftian trickster to brave champion of manly virtues.

This time, he effortlessly summoned the industry's attention by challenging Bone creator Jeff Smith to a fistfight in Cerebus #264 -- a strutting macho gesture that drove his longtime proofreader, Diana Schutz to resign. He followed that in #265 with "Tangents," an essay-length attack on feminism, which continues some of the themes of "Reads" and branches out to such issues as abortion, celibacy, the "feminist-homosexualist axis," spanking adult women, and Elian Gonzalez. Midway through typing this screed, the last of Sim's female employees, administrative assistant Carol West, abandoned him. When the Journal called to ask if he was crazy, Sim politely commented on the response he has provoked, as well as on his betrayers, Smith and Schutz. We also spoke with Smith, who felt it was wiser to keep his mouth shut, and with Schutz, who explained why she resigned and why it took her so long.

Sim published his salvo to Smith in March, with an editorial entitled "Dear Jeff Smith." He was responding to comments made by Smith in an interview in The Comics Journal #218 (December, 1999), in which Smith disputed Sim's characterization of a conversation between the two men and Vijaya, Smith's wife, that was part of Sim's "[infamous] little 'tract' about women sucking the life blood out of men, and how they can't 'think', they can only 'feel'." Smith said that after listening to Sim (who was visiting the couple over a weekend) expound on his theories about women, "finally I said, 'Dave, if you don't shut up right now, I'm going to take you outside and I'm going to deck you.' Well, he shut up.... He wrote about it in Cerebus #186. But, in his version, instead of me threatening to give him a fat lip, he has me fawning and begging him not to reveal the true secrets of women in front of Vijaya."

This description set Sim's masculine blood boiling -- or at least simmering, since it took him more than a year to publicly respond, due in part, he stated, to his pledge not to write anything in the back of Cerebus unrelated to an ongoing narrative until the story was completed. Sim further explained (to Smith), "Considering that it took you nearly five years to 'go public' with your side of our disagreement(s)... I didn't think that time was of the essence." Having accounted for his slowness in taking up the gauntlet of Smith's insult, Sim wrote, "You are lying.... I'm not sure what my reaction would've been had you, indeed, threatened to give me a fat lip.... [I suspect] I would've taken you up on your little 'challenge' once I was sure that I wasn't staying under your roof any longer. But of course, there was no 'challenge.'" He then offered to fly out to Smith's hometown of Columbus, Ohio, "on any date" for three rounds of boxing according to Smith's specifications ("I'll let you pick the venue and the time keeper and the referee... If you prefer headgear, just let me know").

"Jeff, I am saying flat-out, that you have lied," concluded Sim. "In lying, you have made a mess -- a non-masculine mess.... Let's you and me, man-to-man, clean up the mess that you have made."

The editorial in #264 prompted Dark Horse editor Diana Schutz, who has served as the proofreader on Cerebus for seven years, to end her freelance arrangement with Sim. "I simply did not in any way wish to be associated with the boxing challenge. I drew the line there," she told the Journal, adding that she couldn't continue proofing Cerebus if she intended to ignore an offensive portion. She sent Sim a letter of resignation, which he printed in #265.

"I'm sorry to say that after seven years, current circumstances make it impossible for me to continue proofreading Cerebus text pieces," wrote Schutz in the letter, dated Jan. 18. "Following are six pages of proofs from Cerebus #264. I am far too uncomfortable with the remaining pages to offer my proofreading services on them."

In addition to printing Schutz's letter of resignation, Sim remarked in a prologue to "Tangents" that Carol West, his administrative assistant ("a very fancy feminist name for a very plain secretarial position"), had quit her job in the midst of inputting the "Tangents" essay. "Her resignation, far from being either a surprise or a disheartening event, to me, seemed just the latest example of feminism undermining its own 30-year-long campaign to be taken seriously..." he wrote. "Carol West can get offended and leave, but the hard questions remain. My feminist readers can roll their eyes theatrically, but the hard questions remain..." Sim then fell into a rhetorically rhythmic groove in which one event after another led back to the ominous refrain: "...but the hard questions remain." Would Sim have had more respect for West if she had stayed on and said nothing? "Yeah. Just do your job," he told the Journal. "Accept the fact that there are other points of view... the world is more complicated than three flavors of feminism." He added that West had phoned his collaborator Gerhard to announce her resignation -- "She didn't want to have a conversation with me."

In the essay that followed the discussion of West, Sim proceeded to attack what he proclaims as feminism's intellectual bankruptcy, and its pervasive and insidious influence on the whole of society. "Tangents" is divided into five sections that run 20 pages in total. The topics discussed include: what he sees as the contradictory logic of alimony and affirmative action; the emotion-based nature of women; the unfairness and irresponsibility of "Government-Funded Daycare;" the universal undesirability of being a woman; why women need a good spanking, "given that reason cannnot prevail in any argument with emotion;" the "feminist" opinion that children should be treated as adults; and the inability of women to distinguish themselves from animals. Sim also complained that women are only able to communicate ideas by telling allegorical stories, often involving animals -- apparently unalarmed that he has made a living doing exactly that for the last 30 years. The last section describes how Martin Luther King Jr.'s hold on the civil rights movement was overtaken by a secular-humanist-feminist ethic that transformed the noble aims of the civil rights movement into a contradictory morass of a coalition that views blacks, women, "homosexualists," babies and animals as interchangeable. Because Sim has waived the copyright considerations for "Tangents," the full essay can be read online at www.tcj.com.

In discussing the recent events with the Journal, Schutz stated that she was most chagrined about the "Dear Jeff Smith" editorial and by the misperception by some people that she had quit over the "Tangents" essay. "Dave should have the right to express an argument for his position, no matter how faulty that argument may be... I probably would have had less of a problem with the "Tangents" essay [than with "Dear Jeff Smith"]. Maybe that's just an example of my fuzzy, emotion-based logic." She added that Sim's positions are "so ludicrous that it's difficult to take seriously. Whereas a personal attack on a friend, I do take seriously."

Schutz, who has known Sim for several years and described herself as having been "in love with him for a year and a half," would seem to be in a good position to judge whether Sim's essay is sincere or an elaborate hoax. "This is not a prank," she told the Journal without hesitation. "Dave absolutely believes every word that he wrote." Asked if Sim's beliefs about women hadn't made it difficult for her to maintain a relationship with him, she said, "As a proofreader, I didn't really have much contact with him. I haven't had much contact with him for a few years. Dave's attitudes on gender were most provocative when we were dating. But that was eight years ago and his attitudes were not really so narrow then as they've become over time. Is he a difficult personality? I don't know. He's a creative personality, and I deal with them every day."

Additionally, Schutz said she believed that Sim "purposely and cleverly printed my letter of resignation with the "Tangents" issue, and not #264, in order to lay me open to same kind of ridicule" that Carol West received in Sim's prologue. After receiving several e-mails from people under the impression that she had quit in response to "Tangents," she submitted a letter to Sim which provided her clarification of the events, but the letter was returned to her with no response.

When asked by the Journal, Sim comfirmed that he returned Schutz's letter, but disputed Schutz's claim that he was deliberately attempting to mislead his readers. "It's an interesting idea. [But] I don't think so, because the [resignation] letter [specifically] talks about 264. There's nothing that any of us can do about stupid people." As for returning Schutz's letter, Sim simply replied, "she quit." But doesn't she still have the option of writing a letter to be printed in Cerebus? "She can always do her own comic" and print the letter in there, Sim stated.

In general, Sim said that he had not gotten much feedback from "Tangents," especially compared to "Reads" -- "maybe a half dozen letters, equally split between feminists and people who can think for themselves." The message boards at Comicon.com and TCJ.com, however, have featured several lengthy threads about Sim in recent weeks, with largely negative responses to the recent essays. In addition to the usual charges of misogyny, some postings on the boards have featured speculations from industry figures regarding Sim's mental fitness. In an April 12 post on Comicon.com, A Distant Soil creator Colleen Doran wrote that "Dave's latest rant confirms what I'd written previously: he's sick. He's not insane in the legal sense and has enough marbles to spin his hate lit into some free publicity, but he really does believe all this goofy stuff."

Artist Rick Veitch added this assessment on April 15: "As for the 'crazy' charge, Dave has been publicly open about being institutionalized for a nervous breakdown 20 years ago. His current extreme behavior does seem to raise questions about his motives and balance. This is, after all, a guy who doesn't see or talk to other human beings, drives his employees to quit, and publishes diatribes blaming one half of humanity for brainwashing the other half (except for himself and a couple of his favorite authors). And of course Cerebus himself exhibits a constant schizophrenic dialogue with voices in his head. While I stand in awe of Dave's achievement and goal of self-publishing 300 issues of Cerebus, I can only cringe at how he's wasted his life-long effort on furthering a crank philosophy."

When asked about the speculations on his state of mind, Sim said that "it's difficult to take seriously from people whose social life consists of talking to a typewriter." He added that although he is vehemently opposed to such Internet activity, "Gerhard followed one thread and said, 'Well, that's one hour of my time that I'll never get back.'" Without such message boards, Sim maintained, there is barely any controversy at all.

It appears unlikely that a Smith-Sim boxing match will take place anytime soon. Smith declined to discuss the matter with the Journal, but he told Sim to "get stuffed" in a brief letter that was printed in Cerebus #266. A phone call by Smith to Sim did not end in any resolution of the matter. Did Sim really expect Smith to take him up on his challenge? "He has to, if he's a man," Sim assured the Journal.

He added that his break with Smith was not surprising in light of the ongoing pattern he has observed in many of his relationships with artists he had once considered personal and professional allies. "I'm very leery of friendships, for exactly the reason you see before you... There's a backlash when you try to help autonomous people.... Unless it's completely simpatico, there's an overwhelming compulsion to prove Dave wrong." He added that with many of the self-publishers he has advised, "I knew that they'd come to resent Dave Sim." But he still thought it was more important to assist them even if he suspected that the relationship would eventually disintegrate. For Sim, the bottom line is that "I don't think there's any logical foundation to feminism. A lot of people will go ballistic when you point that out."

Cerebus is steadily marching toward the end of what Sim has stated will be a 300-issue run. Regardless of any personal or professional fallout, Schutz said she is "absolutely" committed to the book as a reader, and a silver lining of the episodes is that at least "Cerebus is a hot topic of discussion again, and in some ways I'm happy to see that... I definitely believe that Dave Sim is one of the most talented and innovative artists" in comics. She acknowledged that after reading Sim's latest response to Smith's letter in #266, "it did sour me a little on reading the actual story."

As he enters the final stretch of the series, Sim has been doing little else besides writing and drawing. He said that he works up to twelve hours a day as he sets the narrative - completely worked out in his mind - down on paper. As to what he will do when he finishes, "that's like asking someone who's 23 years into a 26-year prison sentence what they're going to do when they get out. There's still three years left to go."

As for Sim's sanity, the one thing that seems certain at this point is that the hard questions remain.