The Superhero

TOM SPURGEON: There's two larger elements of your work that play big roles in High Society. You reintroduced the element of superhero parody outright with Moon Roach, and then you also do comics industry parody with Petuniacon. Now that you've decided to do this kind of wider storyline, was there any thought on your part that these avenues were now inappropriate?

DAVE SIM:: I never saw them as inappropriate. I can understand reading between the lines of all the criticism of that, that on the one hand people are saying, "If this is a sernt to call it... you intend to fry a large fish, let's say. As soon as you bring in a superhero, you make this ridiculous. You become a party to the ridiculousness of the superhero." The other concern is that if you don't know the comic books that are being parodied, you're not going to get the point of it. My answer to that is that I'm doing a comic book for the comic book environment because that seems and has seemed sensible to me. You put all of your efforts into comic books, and you deal with the language the people in that environment know. I take it as a given that that environment will get larger. The environment was small when I started doing Cerebus, it got larger and larger and larger and larger up until about -- oh, let's say '92-'93 -- and now it's going through a severe contraction. I take it as an article of faith that it's just breathing. It got really, really big, breathing in. Now it's exhaling. Over the course of let's say 40 or 50 years, the comic book environment will go from a size eight down to a size two up to a size 10 down to a size five, up to a size 12, and over the long term it will be large enough to sustain the creative works that are part of its community: the Watchmens, the Dark Knights, the Velvet Glove Cast in Irons; there'll be good times and there'll be bad times.

I'm interested in addressing that. I'm interested in... I set out with Cerebus to do a comic book that was a comic book, that was not raw material for film, or something to court The New York Times Book Review, or something to get a gallery show at the Louvre. I gradually whittled away all of those things as "just not of interest." I don't live over there. I live here. So to me it was an interesting counterpoint. To me it was necessary to have this one really ridiculous superhero character in the story who just recurred. This is what my life is like. I function in a real world. I think I'm developing a world view. I think most of what I see hangs together to my satisfaction, but I still have to deal with these guys in long underwear. The context that I'm in, and certainly the context that Cerebus evolved in, you had to bring in a guy with long underwear or it wouldn't have the proper resonance in whatever you want to call it -- the comic book nation -- the worldwide comic book nation I live within. Just when things get rolling, here comes the guy in the long underwear who expects to be taken seriously, who really thinks he's the center of everybody's attention and who's really just a pitiful slob. That was about superhero fans and superhero stores and superhero comic book companies and the weight it exerts in my life. I'm not happy about it, but it's there. I'm not sure it's going to come back in after #200. I have sort of a one-panel Fan Roach in #203 [Spurgeon laughs] and as far as I know that's the last time that the Roach shows up. Who would I do a Roach parody of after I've done Sandman? That already took it away from the superhero end of things into far more depth to the Roach character than had ever been there. It had always been completely shallow, and suddenly there were a few more levels of meaning to his last appearance. I had to deal with this superhero problem, this unsolvable superhero impediment that always re-emerged, but I think we've maybe gotten beyond that.

SPURGEON: You think that's a good thing?

SIM: Yeah, I think it is. It's a natural schism: the relationship of the "comic-book-as-medium" faction of the comic book nation and "comic-book-as-superhero-vehicle" comic book nation sensibility is probably pretty close to the relationship between Canada and Quebec. Do we really want to separate completely and make two different countries here? It's really looking implausible that we can keep these two things together in some sort of context. We've sort of glared at each other and snapped at each other and had our resentments and our squabbles and our fights and now we've managed to edge past each other and the superhero environment's going where it's going and we're going where we're going. I was just reading Mike Carlin and who's the other guy, it might have been Bob Harras -- Mark Gruenwald! -- doing an interview in Wizard magazine. It's just perfect. I mean it really is one of those things you can either look at it and go "My God. Look at this horrible face that comic books are getting again." Because they're talking about the Marvel vs. DC books the same way commentators on television would talk about a wrestling extravaganza. "This guy's going to clean that guy's clock." "Ahhh... he doesn't have a prayer. Batman can't beat Captain America. He had his back broken." At the same time I'm thinking, "That really is the way they should be. That really is what should be occupying their attention." Not trying how to figure out how to introduce Superman comics to a more literate audience, but to get right down there with that thing that appeals to the 12 to 14-year-old audience that they're looking for. "This guy can beat that guy." "Ahh, you're full of shit. He couldn't beat that guy." The reason all these kids love Todd McFarlane is that he's very tied in with their sensibility. That boat is drifting away. I would not spend the energy to do a lengthy essay about this deplorable approach that Marvel and DC are taking to this most magical medium that I can imagine. It's like, "No." It's time for them to go over there and do that. And it's time for us to stay over here or go over another place and do what we're doing.

SPURGEON: If the effectiveness of the superhero comics is undermined by their attempt to inject serious elements into them, how is it that the serious themes undertaken in your book aren't undermined by the secondary allegories introduced?

SIM: Well, again, that's an individual assessment. It's of great entertainment value to me to see the different assessments, to see which things bang a gong for this person and which things hit a sour note. But that in no way makes me think "Well, I have to change this." Or "I really should go back fix this. If I can just go back to High Society and take Moon Roach out and find another way to kill Holland M. Hadden and eliminate all the rest of that by-play, well by God then I'll have a serious work of political satire." It's partly a work of political satire. But it's also introducing the politics at a comic book convention. It's not as goal-oriented as the Democratic National Convention, but it's rife with politics. Rife with people politics. "Who's in charge? Who's connected? Who are the sheep just being herded from one place to another?" That's interesting to me. I see the superhero as a specific personality which is not dependent on the cosmetics of the tights and whatnot. It's the complete outsider who adjusts to his "outsiderness" by developing an over-inflated self-opinion. To me, that's the way the Roach character works. It's interesting to bring someone in who is completely clueless but thinks everything is related to them. The world revolves around them.

SPURGEON: Is that how Moon Roach works for you in High Society?

SIM: Oh sure. And it also helped herald the intrusion of the female element. The fact that the Moon Roach who is called Artemis, which is the name of a female goddess, and then you find out that Astoria is really behind whatever misapprehensions he's laboring under now. I tried to bring those kinds of things to bear. When it came time to do a Roach character that had the ambiance of religious fervor surrounding him, it had to be Wolverine. The fact that Marvel got so upset about me putting Wolveroach on the successive covers. "It's not a parody; you are now stealing the central icon of our church," was to me revelatory. "Well, there you go. Yes, I picked the right one." I didn't realize I was going to be putting my foot in it this badly. I thought parody's parody, but you can take that chalice called Captain America and do a parody of that, you can take this subaltern and do Moon Knight, but by God don't you touch our Wolverine. That's the center of our church.

SPURGEON: You said you probably won't use the Roach anymore. Does that mean that that subtext is a complete work in and of itself for you now?

SIM: Yeah. Each time that I did a parody starting with Batman -- the original Cockroach was a parody of Batman -- the subconscious hope that I had was that the superhero's on his way out. Surprise, surprise. Look how long it took to get to the point where you say, "Yeah, God, I think he's finally put his hat and coat on and left the building." And it also has to do with Cerebus #1-200 being the completion of the story. The yin and yang. The ultra-female reading. The ultra-male reading. I'm attaching an allegory to the Big Bang. You make up your mind which one's the pit and which one's the top of the mountain. I certainly hope that it is possible to confine the superhero presence to the yin and yang ends of this large story. I'm not sure that that's true. A year from now, I may have to come back with another one, just because it's an inescapable presence again. Now if something had come along and replaced Spawn, you know, and was now starting to pick up momentum, obviously that would have to be a Somethingroach at some point. Spawnroach wouldn't make a great deal of sense now. It might have made sense two years ago. Now Spawn is well on its way to being like The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It wouldn't be a fitting commentary in the context of what I am trying to do to do a Turtleroach, because that thing had already left the building before [laughs] anybody was really aware that it has been here and now it was gone.

SPURGEON: You're working in layers of subtext; why does the superhero one become such an overt presence?

SIM: Because I woke up and here I am. I was born in 1956 in this place called North America. I start to have a bit of an awareness around age 11 or 12. "It's the late 20th Century, I'm in North America, here's what it's made up of." Here's the field of interest that is your field. And hey! I don't know what these superheroes are. I gotta go back and assess this. This is a very large presence. One could almost say a disturbingly large presence. They've so dominated the medium for 50 years. I wasn't here for the first 18 years that Superman was around. And that's well worth looking back at. Why did that endure? Why did something that's so... if you look at the seminal point, ÔSuperman' was used extensively in the popular vocabulary because of the Nazis. Jerry Siegel grabbed this word and said "Yes! A comic book about Superman." And then his next trip to the well is to do the Spectre. And it's like "Yeah, that's another word going around; the spectre of war. Superman. Geez. That's kind of scary when you start to think of it." This environment where that endured in its context and in its own subtext without any kind of purge. It's one of the things that I don't think people look at with the 1954 clampdown on comics. Yeah, it was about horror and terror comics. But they were talking about superhero comics, too. "Let's not have these God-like guys. It's a little disturbing that it's 1950 and my kid's still talking about Superman. The only time I heard about Superman was when Adolf Hitler was talking about Supermen." Captain America! We'll make our own Superman. "America's Superman can beat Nazi Superman." No, we fought this war to put the idea of Superman into retirement.

SPURGEON: One thing I want to follow up on: I look at the character of Pud Withers in Jaka's Story and I see him as a commentary on fanboy mentality.

SIM: Oh, yeah.

SPURGEON: But that seems more seamlessly placed within that work than, say, Moon Roach in High Society.

SIM: Well, yeah. There was a level of maturity that Cerebus as a character had achieved in the course of Church and State that I wanted to portray in that story. Not very much of what the Judge told him had stuck, but enough hat that he really wasn't back to Square One. That's the surface impression that he has because he's mostly "conscious-minded," There's very little "unconscious mind" to Cerebus. So he comes back and maturity is possibly around the corner. Let's present him with a situation that requires maturity and see if maturity is possible. Consequently there is no Roach in Jaka's Story. You're exactly right: Pud Withers was the comic book presence in that story. Cerebus has moved -- however temporarily -- from having a superhero serve as an allegory of his state of mind, the state of his existence, to having a superhero fanboy type serve as the appropriate allegory of his state of mind, state of existence. The next allegory is normalroach, signifying an intermediary step between the "real" world Pud Withers and the next Roach incarnation, Punisherroach -- my way of indicating that Cerebus has slipped back from the potential of maturity to a situation where maturity is very much removed from him.

Mothers vs. Daughters

SPURGEON:You've written about how the Cirinist/Kevillist debate and the wider debate later on have been issues of interest of you for some time, and that you've written on these issues as you've been working on the entire book.

SIM: Not as seriously as around the end of Jaka's Story and the beginning of Melmoth where Mothers and Daughters was on the horizon. I knew that that was what that story was going to be called. And the same as with Oscar Wilde, "Time to do the research." You go out and find out as much as you can and distill all of it the same as Anthony Hopkins portraying Nixon. You just absorb volumes and volumes and volumes and videotapes and everything else and then just hope that it coalesces into an effective performance. That's what I wanted to do with Mothers and Daughters.

Essentially, I went from having conversations with women to, basically, interrogating women -- and having to keep it from sounding in any way like an interrogation. One of the biggest things that I learned early on in doing the research is "Don't allow anything judgmental to enter your voice. Or into your reactions." I would never ask them, "Why?" or "Why not?" or anything that implied that they were not on a correct track. "Why?" or "Why not?" made them withdraw -- as if they had gotten the answer wrong and were about to fail an oral exam. The questions were all directed towards, "Well, that's very interesting. Do you mean to say that it was such-and-such or such-and-such?" All of those conversations went off in the most extraordinary directions. It was extremely hard to keep the sequential, logical male thinking out of the equation. Because I realized early on most of what they were saying in trying to explain who they were -- and that changed as well; the Daughter interviews were very different from the Mother interviews -- didn't follow a logical progression. And yet, at the same time, it did. It was through absorbing them in their... what am looking for here? ... in their optimally conducive and -- to use of their own terms -- enabling environment that I finally got a glimmering of what they were all about: emotion-based collectivism, for want of a better term. Then it started to make an extraordinary sense. Watching something like The Oprah Winfrey Show, before I was doing the formal research I was just going, "These people are mad. I have no idea what the world looks like to them. These are just completely capricious, strange directions that these shows progress in." After I'd been doing a fair amount of the research, it was, "No, it's not based on logic. It's based on emotion." It's based on the roller coaster of emotion. The thing that was being discussed got translated into an emotional proposition -- you can see how difficult it is to discuss sensibly since "proposition" is a logic-based term -- was "put forward" and then you could literally watch that "put-forward emotion" rolling in a kind of psychic wave motion through the collective structure creating pleasure or disapprobation or wariness or anxiety as it went.

The "put-forward emotion" was there to create repercussions of emotion, with the goal of arriving at the closest-to-universal state of "happy, real happy" in the group. What was said, the words themselves, went from secondary importance to complete unimportance to a state verging on complete meaninglessness. Something was "accomplished" if everyone got "happier." When you say something to a woman that makes her happier and follow it with something that makes her sad, she'll say "you're mean." To the logical mind, a causal link between A and B has value. To the emotion-based sensibility there's no value -- just the opposite since it led in the "wrong" direction. This thing will find its course through the collective will represented by the audience and reflected by the applause and that thing carries it forward. It carries up to specific peaks and specific valleys and strange 90 degree turns. But if you follow the emotion... This emotion was introduced at this point. That emotion had to go through the collective awareness simultaneously and find its direction; it's being sorted out in other places. It's not being sorted out as much through the words. The words are sort of a trigger for what is actually going on, the communication that is actually going on.

SPURGEON: How much of the work was done in response to or because of the truth that the Judge gives at the end of Church and State? You mentioned that that was an ultra-feminist reading of the Big Bang. Was Mothers and Daughters in mind when doing that?

SIM: No, no. Mothers and Daughters was more of a reaction to what I didn't cover. The reason that the ultra-feminist label stuck with me on that one was because it did seem to encapsulate a lot of the things I was getting across. Like there's something vulgar about just walking around the moon for the sake of walking around on the moon. Here's something that existed in this exact form; it looked exactly like that for tens of thousands of years. And all of the sudden because the ability exists, "Hey, I gotta great idea: let's put some foot prints on it."

What was interesting was that I was doing all of the research on that and reading as much as I could about the moon and the whole Apollo program and whatnot and one of the things that I did pick up was Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon. I got about 30-40 pages into it, and went, "This is an interesting book, but it's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about here. It's not going to help me to understand the moon. I want to find out as much as I can about the moon." Well, I actually got around to reading the book three or four months ago. And it's extraordinary. Because it's all in there. It's a different coloration, I would suspect having to do with Norman Mailer's particular circumstances at the time, but so much of what I was trying to talk about in Church and State and failed to say, and then tried again to say filling in the other half of the sphere that those two stories make up -- Church and State and Mothers and Daughters -- is there. Frustrating as hell as it may be, Mailer was there first. And he had just about everything on paper that I was trying to get across. Very irritating, [laughter] considering that he did it in about six weeks. It's a gig: "Life Magazine is going to give you a wad of money, you've got all these ex-wives to take care of, what the fuck? Fly down to Houston and we'll see if we can make a story out of it."

SPURGEON: Do you see Church and State and Mothers and Daughters as the halves of a whole? Was Church and State incomplete?

SIM: Yeah. To me.

SPURGEON: Together now, they're two poles around which to argue?

SIM: They're both centered on the Big Bang. Cerebus #181 to #185 has as its basis the best current scientific thought on the seminal point of existence's incarnation. Our perception of what we know of how the universe came to be. We have a lot of stuff carved in stone: stories, origin stories, "how the universe came to be" stories in the various world religions that took shape before we really had any hard information to go on regarding the beginning of time. Interestingly enough, "Let there be light" seems to cut very close to the bone despite -- or I would suspect, because of -- its origins in antiquity. What was there first, before there was anything else? What I saw as the failure, and what I was trying to step in and do in my own inimitable way, was to say, "Okay, what if you took all of this information that we know about how everything began and wrote a story that suited it? Let's cast these seminal entities as characters. I'm not sure that we would call them 'God' and 'Goddess,' but okay, that's a working term. Let's throw quotation marks around them. Let's use capital letters on both of them, but let's put quotation marks around them. And that was the underpinning of Church and State and of Mothers and Daughters. The point of Church and State when you get to the end of it was "Poor little seminal female light. She didn't stand a chance. This giant male void beat up on her." When you get to the end of Mothers and Daughters, it's, "That poor little peckerhead male light. It didn't have a chance against that all-consuming female void."

SPURGEON: Was there response to the end of Church and State along the lines of #186 -- maybe not the degree but picking up on the same kind of issues?

SIM: Of course not. Ultra-feminism was... "in vogue" underrates it considerably at the time. [laughs] Just one more trifle offered up to Graves' White Goddess. "That's nice, dear, just put it with all the other junk."

The reaction? Let me sing a little song of sympathy for the long-suffering Cerebus reader. Having arrived at issue #111, I still had a constituency mostly made up of people going "Well, is he going to be a barbarian now? I suffered through this whole society thing, and now I've been following this weird religion trip that Dave seems to be on. Is he wondering about becoming a born-again Christian? What is he putting us through here? And now Cerebus is going to the moon? And this guy's on the moon and he's talking about all of this stuff? What is this shit? Can we just get rid of this and get back to something as entertaining as those first 12 issues?" So yeah. I think it becomes easy to see why the reaction became very quickly a minor point to me. What are people reacting to? Is it positive, negative? I couldn't even have begun at the time -- Church and State would have been '87 or '88 -- to get across the scope of what I was trying to do. The only thing to do was just to do it. Sit down and do it, and hope that a percentage of the audience would take the longer view and say, "No, the thing to do is wait until issue #300 and decide whether it hangs together as a story or whether it's just a series of disconnected exercises in masturbation."

Astoria Has Left The Building

SPURGEON: The Kevillist/Cirinist debate becomes very formal with Mothers and Daughters in the form of opposing text pieces. Were these ideas that you had confirmed, or were they something you took away from that last big period of research?

SIM: Both. The rosetta stone proved to be how mothers and daughters regard each other and the friction that creates between them. It was easy to address any political or societal issue on those facing pages once the core bone of contention was located -- the mother viewing the daughter as the raw material for what she, the daughter, will become and the daughter viewing herself not as a raw material but as a finished product. Not altogether unlike how Cerebus has been seen in the comics market up until the last few years. As most comic books are viewed in the comic book market: it's raw material. It will make a great film someday. It will make a great toy line. It will make a great whatever. And me taking the dissenting view: "No, Cerebus is Cerebus." It's a finished commodity; it's not a raw material for something else.

SPURGEON: It seems to me like you lose the Kevillist argument when Astoria leaves the building.

SIM: Yeah, I can see that. Of course, those who view life as nothing more than a series of "wins" and "losses" by "winners" and "losers" will always see the decision not to engage in battle as a "loss."

SPURGEON: Going back, I'm kind of astonished that there's this long build-up and then such a dramatic shift away from it.

SIM: Yeah, that was resolved pretty late in the equation. I knew that the halfway point in Mothers and Daughters was going to be Suenteus Po, Cirin, Cerebus, and Astoria together. Although I was working on that through the course of Flight, it wasn't until I was partway through Women that I was going, "Okay, this is going to be a confrontation; what sort of a confrontation will it be?" I knew that Suenteus Po would leave already, for exactly the reasons that he stated: the explanation that "Hey, I'm trying to get through my life with as little effect or repercussion." "Can you walk through rain puddles without making waves?" is sort of the ambition of that viewpoint. It wasn't until I was developing Po's monologue that I was able to accurately consider its impact on the other three. Cerebus and Cirin -- well, for them, it was just a lot of words needlessly postponing the fight which would determine who "won" and who "lost." Of course, with Astoria, the monologue became something more sensible for her thoughts and emotions to coalesce around. The whole point of Kevillism, her movement, was radical individualizing and yet everything that has happened to her in the sequences leading up to the conversation was making a mockery of that intention. Her "followers" collectively gather around her. Heading for the confrontation with Cirin she's hailed as the messiah, everyone bows down and there's nothing individualized about it. Everything that happens, everything that is said to her, everything she says mocks her at a fundamental level. She struggles to maintain her facade -- her rhetorical and eloquent mind is clearly going a mile a minute. But she's too smart not to know that Po is "righter" than she is. Even she doesn't believe what she's saying and at that point she decides to pack it in. "No, Suenteus Po is right. This is not a good way to live your life. All I'm going to do is set in motion another thing that's not going to turn out the way that I intended it and I'm going to waste my life gluing everything back on that keeps falling off because it was never intended to be 'on' in the first place. And life's too short. I don't want to do this anymore."

SPURGEON: Considering that the whole book is called Mothers and Daughters, what does Astoria's decision say about the Daughters position?

SIM: What it says -- what it says to me, anyway -- is that collectivist thinking about the individual is a complete waste of time. As soon as you have a Politburo empowered to determine the nature and needs of the individual Worker, the implied fallacy brings the whole thing to crashing ruin. Or it limps along looking ridiculous to everyone -- not least of all itself. Astoria's realization was -- regarding her followers and her adversaries -- "I can beat them in debate. I am good enough at manipulating a group." Astoria's got enough of that Adolf Hitler/Winston Churchill quality to her. "I know how to play the caroms. I know how to stifle the rebelliousness and play up the 'Actually, she's right. Why don't we all follow Astoria?' thing." At that point, she's starting to have doubts. "The mere fact that I am able to do this, that doesn't make me right." The woman who does stand up and say, "Well, you know, I think you're full of shit. Aren't you running contrary to your own teaching?" -- if Astoria was being honest at that point, and not trying to hang onto "leadership," she would have said, "You're right. You caught me. Let's sit down and talk about it." But at that point, as will happen with any leader, it's "No. You're [not] right. You hit me in a soft spot, but now I'm going to bring out the bag of rhetorical tricks to get things back going the way I want them to."

SPURGEON: As she's emblematic of a certain position, though, does that say anything about the Daughters position's ability to transform itself?