The Sim/Fetch Dialogue

Part One: "Further In and Further Up"

3/6/04. Letter #3. Dave's response to Toc's letter of 2/4/04

Dear Toc:

Thank you for your letter and enclosures, both for the kindness itself and for the fact that it gives me another kick at the can't, since obviously a great deal more needs be said. It is indeed interesting that you would have lived so close by Barry Windsor-Smith for ten years and that you saw him maybe twice in those ten years and never spoke a word with him. It seems a story superbly told for all our benefits and then on reconsideration for my benefit alone. I'm not sure either of you would get it or maybe both of you do (or will, I'm enclosing Barry's address and you can send him this letter as an introduction. Hi, Barry!) and I don't or won't. How much does proximity count towards your final grade in best-two-out-of-three (and as Jack Lemmon once famously remarked, "No fair guessing.")?

A few Cerebus readers have remarked on the fact that there have been issues and sequences that have seemed to speak to them specifically-as if I had been a fly on the wall while some part of their lif(v)es was unfolding and had rushed it into print before the blood was dry on the metaphorical linoleum. When you began sending me your work, just in photocopy form, I definitely had the same reaction. In fact it was so fully developed a syndrome that I thought you had been sent specifically to comment on what I myself was doing/had done/intended to do. Otherworldly in the larger sense: both for the fact that you were so much further into the page than I was, technically (way, way in) and that you were even more obscure/precise in your metaphors than I was. In that sense it doesn't surprise me that you're an atheist (for now, anyway) (wink) because that seemed to be an essential part of the equation. It was as if the other side of the coin where I used to reside (hello to all you tails) needed some language to question my movement onto the heads-up side of reality. It had been too sudden (it had been to sudden I suspect and -ed) and potentially opened such a wound that protocols needed to be abandoned and nothing less than the most obscurely lucid and beautifully rendered "What th' -" in comic-book history was called for. Which you provide and -ed in spades. The answer is still no, but I can't remember a more admirable, collectible and study-able series of questions. As I sat, sit, will sit paging through your work I can't imagine ever losing interest in all these questions whose answer will always be no (at least on my account). And many of the questions are darned clever. "The human body contains electrical energy along these lines, always has and always will. Isn't this pertinent?" Do you mean does it have applications? So do all forms of decal, but that's just the sticker. If you mean "pertinent" in the sense of "central" that's why that system is nervous by name. The answer is still no (but don't go away mad on my account).

He says: "So.. .you dead?"
Snake says: "Yeah."

I don't know how many of them you want me to answer but, then, I never did/will. From the sublime to the specific. Back to your letter. "I believe that I'll always be outside (my niche, my habitual habitat), I didn't imagine there was anything but an imaginary audience for the kind of psychological landscaping l'm interested in (not yet at least). " What is this grievous part of our natures tI (as you put it) that leads us into "Spewdom! Tootem! Pissy-Bitsy!" The "not yet at least" is in the wrong place and appears to refer to your own interest. Hah! Brownie point!

Okay, something a little larger in a touche? Pour M'sieu: psychological takes you away from where you clearly are (in a real sense, sure, but also as adjective). Caveman break open head. Ugh. Gray stuff. Halfway between that and you is Carl Jung. No?

Your remembrance of your gallery opening 13 September 01 (quick quiz: if the President had called for a National Week of Prayer and Fasting) (yes, I know you wouldn't) (would you have cancelled the opening?) (I'm not casting stones, I went to the theatre the same night): "Beside that city-sized weight of sadness that coated every salty burnt smelling particle of ash still drifting down 2 days later, besides that the city had become a militarized zone below Houston, besides that everyone on the street spoke softly with larger eyes and a cringed listening, 3 people out of the expected 300 showed up at my opening, and each with a strange hat on. We peeked at them from the back room while getting pissed on Harps. Beside the reciprocating shock waves of holy hatred and confused sadness and people beautifully reduced to their un-constructed selves, there was
for me in all of it a mythic scale... wink. "

Yes. I now know more than I did about 9/11 (and thank you). The difference between the mythic and the Deistic is the exact distance between us. (Snake say: "Whatever.") Distance. Not elevation.

I think there is a great deal of value in your "Why-a-duck" essay, particularly for someone like myself who is so gobsmacked by your work that I often wonder if you even think in terms of the term "comics". And I suspect that I might not be alone in this. The fact that you come much closer to speaking in a more conventional voice in this essay leads me to believe that such writings might be beneficial if grafted onto the publications themselves. I'm not sure if my saying this makes you Toc Flinch. Clearly one of the differences between us was that I didn't think an ancillary piece of writing, a letters page or writings about the form and medium itself constituted a frontal assault on the principle canvas in the front of the book. Which isn't to say that I can't see how someone would see it that way. These pretty pristine tapestries that you're presenting and there is much to recommend keeping the execution as close to immaculate as the conception (Snake say: "Hisss"). But, at the same time, when you're breaking genuinely new ground anything and everything you can do to help the reader understand is going to contribute to your success. Particularly in the DVD age. If movies and TV shows are now annotated, anything that dares go forth unto the marketplace with no part of its "behind the scenes" showing is apt to find its onstage passing as unnoticed as its backstage. It is so startling to read the creator of Pope Joey using the name "Diamond" in an essay that an air of super-reality tends to result. "My poverty is not a disguise or an affectation. I'm not obscure because I don't know where I am or what I'm doing. I'm pursuing something that I hope (on a minor scale of my hierarchical hopes) proves to be lucrative, but all that can be hoped is that financial viability proves to be the lucky accident up ahead. I have to follow my quarry and hope that there's money at various locations along its migratory route. It isn't Marxism. I'm not opposed to how the capitalistic sleight-of hand is accomplished or opposed to the illusion itself. I'll take my doves from any sleeve that's offering them." But that's still a little too obscure. I mean, I like it. But someone reading the back of your comic wants to make sure that you aren't writing what you're writing and drawing what you're drawing because you're convinced that the CIA has been putting telepathic organisms in your peanut butter and YOU MUST WARN EVERYONE! That you have no idea what any of what you are writing and drawing means, but this is how it was dictated to you by the team of miniature Ben Affleck clones who live in your sock drawer and unless you get every symbol and word and pseudo word down letter perfect, THEY'RE GOING TO MAKE THE RED SOX LOSE AGAIN! I know whereof I speak. If you're going to tell them the things you suspect and that, so far as you know, no one else knows, you have to assure them in as many ways as possible that you know the difference between a Smurf and garden gnome, a garden gnome and a hobbit, a dwarf and a hobbit, a baby and a dwarf. After all, you're attempting to make a livelihood in an environment where those distinctions would all be subject to real debate. Try getting together a rousing discussion of them in a Lord of the Rings chat room and you'll soon see what I mean. The borderland between reality and fantasy, classic schizophrenia, are us, in a manner of speaking. As an example, I think feminism is in the hobbit category. It's entirely fictional. A number of Cerebus readers now believe it is a garden gnome, a real-world representation of something most would agree contains fictional elements or is largely, partly or mostly mythic. Even to get people to that point requires a hammer and tongs. The vast majority of the world believes feminism is a baby: a real functioning, breathing valuable living entity which must be valued above ALL ELSE and preserved and nurtured and cared for. Well, you're in a lot the same situation. What you are selling is a very obscure and rarified narrative that looks as alien from the Lord of the Rings side of things as it would in an IBM boardroom. If your work looks crazy to the average person, they're going to shy away. Most people are very much afraid of crazy because they secretly don't think they have a particularly solid hand-hold on reality themselves. For all they know you're trying to make them crazy. Alan Moore is proof positive that that is not a permanent hindrance to commerciality. If they like the way you make them crazy, they'll be happy to go along with you and pay for the ride ("All stories are true" how valuable is that to people with a slippery grip on reality?). But, I really think it's better to just say, here. This is what I intended here. There's a certain embarrassment you have to get past. There is a sense that you're closing doors: If you tell them what you intended then they won't see something in it themselves that is idiosyncratically them. I don't think that's the case. It's human nature to read things into creativity. All telling them what you intended by your creativity does is to drive their own interpretation further underground within them. And that's where you want them to go, anyway, right?

This is the least obscure piece of your writing that I have read. As Mike Kaluta said to me when I showed him a page of my artwork back in 1973: "You're on the right track. Keep going." And, if possible find a way to incorporate it into your creative "package". To me, it's the only thing missing.

Okay, that's it for this time around. See you in the funny papers.

Sincerely
Dave