Cerebus creator Dave Sim has demonstrated an ability to generate a new controversy every couple of months, the latest being his cheerful admission in Cerebus #274 to appropriating without permission passages of dialogue from another writer's work.

In an open letter reproduced inside the front cover of the comic and addressed to his unwitting collaborator, Nicholas Zivkovic, Sim wrote:

"I'm not sure if I ever wrote back to you about the comic strip samples that you sent me for comment back in 1993. ... The reason that I am writing to you now is that I hung onto the strips at the time because -- although the artwork was amateurish, certainly too amateurish for a newspaper syndicate (even assuming that they might have an interest in historical fantasy) -- the writing had just the right note of authenticity in the dialogue for a Dark Ages battle scene. Knowing that I had a Dark Ages battle scene coming up in Cerebus (a hundred or so issues down the road), I put your samples in with my "way off up ahead" file of reference material. Having arrived at "way off up ahead," I pulled your samples out to retread for the first time in eight years. And realized -- pretty much right away that I couldn't improve on what you had written. So I just extracted those lines which most impressed me and best suited the tone I was looking for -- and then whittled them down from there (I wish I had more pages to work with, but that proved not to be the case)."

Sim went on to say that a check for $100 and the tracing paper drawings used in producing the sequence were enclosed and that royalty checks would be sent to Zivkovic in the future whenever the story was reprinted. The letter and the check had been mailed to Zivkovic at his last known address.

Sim told the Journal, "The art was bad, but when I read it, there was some good material. I realized there's stuff that's jumping out at me that's pretty damn good."

Having incorporated the lines into his comic, Sim, in an above-board fashion proceeded to make every effort to acknowledge and compensate Zivkovic for the contribution the writer had made to Cerebus #274.

The trouble, potentially at least, was that Zivkovic had never contributed his writing to Cerebus. The material had been submitted only for Sim's opinion and possible endorsement. Not only did Sim not acknowledge this sticky point, he seemed to regret only that there hadn't been more script there for him to strip-mine. Threads on message boards were soon launched with leads like "Ethical Dave Sim?" and "I hope Nicholas Zivkovic finds out about this and sues the pants off of Dave Sim." A Distant Soil creator Colleen Doran lead the bashing with a thread on the Warren Ellis Forum, saying, "This is clearly a copyright violation. Copyright can't be transferred without permission of the copyright holder. Dave Sim's appropriation exceeds fair use, despite Dave's payment of $100. The appropriation is, in Dave's own words, 'unauthorized.' Using Dave logic, anyone who has sent in samples to a publisher could find their work picked for the good bits with the publisher determining for you what a fair price for your work happens to be. With no say from you whatsoever. Enjoy your $100 Siegel and Shuster."

This was the latest in a string of idiosyncracies on Sim's part that had already made him the talk of the message boards for the past year. Recent Simisms had included Sim challenging Bone creator Jeff Smith to a manly three rounds with boxing gloves in order to establish which of them was the most truthful and a series of Cerebus editorials railing against 'homosexualist" conspiracies and concluding that women were by and large conniving sentimentalists in need of a good spanking.

When the Journal called about his latest offense to propriety, Sim was, as usual, unrepentant if not oblivious to the outrage he'd provoked. His determinedly offline lifestyle shields him from most online gossip, though his partner Gerhard passes some of it along. Asked if he'd considered for a moment that it might not be ethical to use another writer's work without permission, he said he hadn't.

"I figured there were two possibilities," he told the Journal. "Either this was one of the legion of former Cerebus fans or this was a current Cerebus fan." A former fan who had moved might not get the check, but was also unlikely to even find out about the use of his script. In any case, Sim reasoned that a Cerebus fan, even lapsed, would be only too happy to learn they had become part of the Cerebus oeuvre, not to mention $100 richer. On top of that, Sim said, Zivkovic might get work as a result of exposure in Cerebus.

The Journal could think of some other possibilities. For instance, the writer, whose work had so "popped out" at Sim, might have gone on to a successful writing career and might regard an offer of $100 as adding insult to injury. Or the former Cerebus fan might have been converted to a feminist-homosexualist point of view in the intervening years and prefer to be struck mute than to have Sim benefit from his writing.

Sim acknowledged that there were more possibilities than the two he had considered but didn't seem unduly worried or sorry about what he'd done.

As it turns out, Possibility #2 was pretty much on the money. "I thought it was cool," Zivkovic said, when the Journal called him at his parents' house to ask how he felt about his work being snatched without permission. "I've been a Cerebus fan for a long time. He does some cool things."

The strip he had sent Sim remains unpublshed. "It's not a project I'm pursuing to any degree. For a fanboy to be included in this, that's a cool tip of the hat."

Besides, Zivkovic said, Sim had made changes in the script. Asked what sort of changes, the writer said, "He changed the order of some of the words."

Zivokic, who was just out of high school at the time he sent the script to Sim, is now 28. He is following the interest in history evidenced in his script by pursuing a history major. He told the Journal he felt guilty for not having found the time yet to send a thank-you letter to Sim.

When the Journal, disheartened, expressed the opinion to Sim that this seemed to be shaping up as one of the smaller Sim controversies, he responded, reassuringly, "When it comes to Dave Sim, there are no small controversies."