LUDIC LOG

Dave Sim writes comic books for a living.

Not that there's anything wrong with this, of course; those familiar with yours cruelly are more than familiar with my endless appeals for funnybooks to be treated as real live literature. And Dave Sim's are better than most; his "Cerebus" comic -- a self-published book that's been going strong for over 15 years now -- is truly a wonder, one of the finest books in the history of the medium that, until getting bogged down under Sim's misapprehension that he's a literary biographer, was endlessly inventive, astonishingly well-written, unafraid to address the great themes, artistically interesting, and often very, very funny.

However, Sim has another misapprehension. A more, well, difficult one. Sim thinks he's a philosopher, an important social critic. And while his delusion that he's an arts hagiographer is merely dull, his delusion that he's a Great Thinker is rather offensive, both ethically and intellectually.

Dave Sim, you see, has come to free us all from the Conspiracy of the Dark Female Void. Yes, this Canadian funnybook writer has discovered a Great Truth: that there is a massive conspiracy -- led by women (who are emotion-based beings, naturally inferior, and who can only survive by leeching off the far more prodigious talents of creative and brilliant reason-based men) and aided and abetted by the sometimes-clownish, sometimes-sinister cabal of "homosexualists" and "males" (as distinguished from "men" -- like his idol, Norman Mailer, Sim revels in celebrating the macho and tough-guyish, perhaps because he is a comic book writer and not, say, a construction worker, and feels the need to loudy assert his masculinity) who mindlessly puppet the vile lies that evil women propigate in order to emasculate and sissify Creative Male Lights.

Those familiar with his work have seen inklings of this before; in an infamous issue of "Cerebus" (back when Sim was considered merely an eccentric, woman-hating crank rather than an outright lunatic), he first set out his theory of the Suffocating Female Void, but somewhat hedged his bets by speaking through a rather clumsy fictional stand-in. No such equivocation this time: in the latest issues of the book (which have the added lack of no interesting front-story, but a dull, rambling quasi-bio of Ernest Hemingway, another macho lit-hero of his), Sim uses plain speaking ("I firmly believe that feminism is a misguided attempt to raise women above their place, which I firmly believe is inferior to men's") to reveal his deranged thoughts on the Feminist Conspiracy. And it's not just the bitches who get Dave's goat; Dave doesn't care for homos, either, and wastes no time in saying so, blaming them for aiding and abetting the Conspiracy of Women to feminize people like him and Norman Mailer. And, in a rather intriguing development, it turns out that he's a commie-basher too: the dirty Reds get a share of his rancor in the final chapter of "Tangents" (the title of his torturous 20-page screed), where he launches into a very historically confused tirade concerning how the civil rights movement was wrested away from Martin Luther King by a sinister cabal of feminists and socialists, who he blames for the continuing oppression of black men.

Sim takes great pains to imply, as do all ideologues, that his position is the only rational and logical one; that it stems from the pure light of reason, not from any personal prejudice on his part; and that to anyone who is not entirely consumed by muddle-headed womanly emotion, his arguments are right and true and utterly irrefutable. Since responding to his charges one by one would take up at least twice as much space as his already interminable manifesto, I will forego a point-by-point refutation of this ridiculous claim. However, even a casual glance at his writings reveals a veritable catalog of logical errors. For someone who claims to worship reason and detest emotion (and said preference, along with his rather bizarre claim that writers are inherently rational creatures, is another topic altogether), he presents an amazing catalog of paranoid, baseless stereotyping and an absolute clinic in informal logical errors. In the very first sections, in addition to the false premises upon which his entire philosophy is based, I noticed the following logical fallacies: the black-and-white fallacy, argumentum ad ignorantiam, a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid, the fallacy of complex question, a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter, the fallacy of many questions, the fallacy of slanting, and nearly innumerable examples of the falacies of division, begging the question and special pleading. So much for reason-based males; his claim to the throne of pure reason aside, Dave Sim is no more logical or rational than Ben Klassen, whose "RAHOWA" oevure would fit nicely alongside these hateful ravings.

It has been suggested that Sim's motivation in this matter is simply to sell more comic books, as sales have been flagging dramatically of late. This would seem an odd choice, since he has agreed to distribute it copyright-free, and one imagines that the readers he'll gain from such a demented project would be severely outnumbered by the ones he loses. Additionally, many friends and collaborators have posted on many message boards and letter columns that these truly are Sim's views, which he is more than happy to share with anyone who will listen. He also claims to have given up sex (a decision I'm sure many women had already made for him), and to have given up masturbation -- the reason being that by denying himself any sexual outlet, he will eventually sublimate his sexual desires, and thus (not making this up, folks) he will never have to talk to women again, since all they are good for is servicing him sexually, and the joy of sex is no longer worth the high price of having to convene with lesser beings. Worst of all -- this is never a good sign for a creative person -- he has discovered, late in life, that he believes in the outdated strictures of the Sky-God. Sadder still: ALL the Sky-Gods! Yes, Sim has declared himself a "Judeao-Islamic Christian", allowing himself to be intellectually bullied by not one but three imaginary daddies in the sky, and combing through Old and New Testaments and the Koran to justify his misogynist rantings. It is a poor path for a dynamic, mature artist to choose late in life, reminding one less of Burgess or Shakespeare than Dos Passos or the Heaven's Gate cult.

Dave Sim writes comic books for a living. And whether inspired by reason or invoked by dementia, his entry into the world of politics, biography and philosophy will forever stand as a testament to the desirability of sticking with what you know.