The Beat strikes again: Dave Sim and women

Today, though, Heidi MacDonald, a.k.a., “The Beat” of Publishers Weekly, took on the issue of Dave Sim’s views on women and came to roughly the same nuanced conclusion that I have: Dave Sim is both great and he has a noxious (misogynistic) worldview (I don’t know that Heidi actually accused him of misogyny, but I am happy to — he is a misogynist).

Dave Sim finished his epic masterpiece, CEREBUS, in 2004, and now he’s promote two new books. One, Glamourpuss, that parodies the women’s fashion magazine industry (I predict this is really going to suck, but who knows?) and Judenhass, a cartoon history of anti-semitism that some pretty laudable folks have already called breathtaking. So he’s out promoting his wares online and elsewhere and it’s raised all the old questions about Dave Sim’s philosophy.

So then Heidi MacDonald weighed in.

As she put it: “And the bottom line is that, just as the anti-Semitism of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Richard Wagner will always be an asterisk to their great artistry, so will Dave Sim’s narrow-minded philosophical concerns always provide the asterisk to a great career.”

Very well.

It’s one thing for me to think Sim both great and crazy, but it’s a whole other thing for one of comics leading critics, prominent female cheerleader of the form and founding board member of Friends of Lulu to come out swinging and call the guy great. “Great!” It takes a lot of guts. She’s known as one of the feminists of comics, and among the feminists of comics Sim has few friends. Get me?

Moreover, MacDonald is not a comics creator herself. Her notoriety and credibility comes from being a respected commentator and journalist of the form, with some professional experience in it as an editor. She can’t fall back on her artwork to retain cred in our little sub-culture, like a Trina Robbins or a Jessica Abel can. She has to keep saying smart stuff about it to keep getting attention paid to her. That’s why, in my opinion, it makes it even braver for her to say something like this.

So. Check it out. Ultimately, this is an essay (a long one), that’s about more than Sim. It’s about the question of whether or not an artist is still good if some of the feelings driving his work are very, very bad. Well? What do you think?

I think MacDonald sums it up very well in her last paragraph, but I won’t spoil it for you. Get there. If I had one criticism to make it’s that you can’t really appreciate what Heidi’s saying unless you’ve read a volume or two from the CEREBUS story. Still, you can get her point even without it, and it’s an important point and its much bigger than the funnies.

[Note from 2020: This post originally opened with a note from me linking to an old blog post on the same topic but that one seems to be lost.]