Dave Sim's Letters: China, Scripture & Chester Brown

Yummy Fur #21 (Vortex Comics Inc, 1990)
by Chester Brown

28 January 06

Billy Beach
Porterccannti MC
ITALY

Dear Billy,

Thanks for your letter of 04/01/06. I appreciate it especially with your present schedule. China seems to be cropping up everywhere in microcosm and macrocosm these days and it makes sense that as an English speaker you would find a spot as intermediary. Sandeep Atwal recently got a job writing speeches for the president of the University of Waterloo and I asked him if there were any areas where he was uncomfortable -- writing words that he didn't agree with. "China" was his answer. The university is developing more links all the time with China at various levels and Sandeep counts himself in the "deeply ambivalent" camp given what China self-evidently is. Any thoughts on this score on your part?

Thank you very, very much for the Loreto material which I speed-read the day they came in (Election Day here, as a matter of fact -- yes, another one) and will be going back to read more thoroughly as soon as I finish the copy of the oral biography of Harry Truman, Plain Speaking, that D.B. Little sent me (among other books). On this first go-through what jumped out at me was the fact that there is no tradition in Nazareth of there having been a holy house but that rather the "mother of God" lived in a cave. I defy anyone to speed-read past on observation like that. Say WHAT?! Seems to conform to my YHWHist theories. Where else would the "mother of God" live but inside the earth? I figured that the most interesting part of the story would be buried somewhere in all of the literature and that seems to be the case so, again I can't thank you enough for shipping all this ore over here so I could find my nugget. More as I read the material more thoroughly.

My belief that the Jews hold The Writings as unscriptural and not just lesser Scripture enters in because of the demarcation. The fact that there's the Law and the Prophets and then there's The Writings means that they are different things, ergo one is superior to the other and when you weigh Genesis and Isaiah against Ruth and Esther it seems obvious to me which is which. In my own view there is no such thing as Scripture and Lesser Scripture. There is only Scripture and Non-Scripture. This is our same disagreement shaded slightly differently on the distinction between the Gospels and the Christian commentaries of Paul, both of which you consider Scriptural and only one of which I consider Scriptural. Likewise in Islam. There is the Koran which is Scriptural and the Hadith -- the sayings of the Prophet -- which are non-Scriptural. Most of the Islamic fundamentalists who call for the eradication of Israel are those who include the Hadith with the Koran as Scripture (Muhammad was a virulent Jew hater which I assume he got from those parts of the Koran which were dictated to him by YHWH who seems never to have gotten over the fact that the Chosen People chose to disobey him/her/it so relentlessly: "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"). The Jews, I think, would be very wary of calling The Writings scriptural since the Book of Esther has been pretty definitively proven to be a Babylonian myth adapted during the Diaspora with the names changed from pagan names to Jewish names. Not quite as "over the top" as say the Apocryphal Book of Judith (which reads like Red Sonja) -- and edifying in its own archetypal way -- but quite a ways off the beaten track from what I think any sensible student of the Jewish scriptures would consider to be sound observance. My own suspicion is that the success of Christianity with the purity of the four Gospels compelled the Jews to amputate the chronology somewhere less self-evidently diluted (and deluded) than II Maccabees and Malachi was elected. I might take issue with their pick, but not the self-evident need to make a clear cut.

On the subject of "It was then that men began to call on the name of the YHWH" I enclose the relevant footnoted passage from Westerman's Genesis 1-11 26a, b and c -- which I think make the case pretty irrefutably given the perfect tense means that the action has already taken place. I also enclose Westerman's own dissembling and twisting and back-flips and contentions to try to make the passage mean something else which is, evidently a popular pastime. Obviously I would maintain that my own views -- which developed from what the text says rather than what I wanted the text to say (something of a universal theological vice from what I can see) -- are the more accurate. Time will tell.

It's probably better that you don't celebrate Christmas given the content of Chester [Brown]'s Christmas card this year. A statue of Seth sitting on the commode is along ways from "O Holy Night" for those of us who lean more in the direction of "O Holy Night" as I'm sure you'll agree. As to picking up more of his work, well, it's all good. He's presently working on a new printing of The Little Man which you should be able to find in late spring, early summer (his deadline is the end of January) in the better stores in the UK on your next visit. Of particular interest is the individual issues of Yummy Fur and Underwater (which you'll have to go schlepping for in the back issue bins) long out of print that contain his adaptations of the Gospels of Mark (completed) and Matthew (still to be completed). His angry Jesus of his Matthew adaptations is the one that I picture in my head now. A lot of his work has scatological and unattractive elements so you might want to read I Never Liked You before The Playboy and The Playboy before The Little Man and The Little Man before Ed the Happy Clown in descending order of -- in my view -- potential offensiveness to a Jehoah's Witness. The new book he's starting on is about his sex life which is exclusively with prostitutes which he sincerely doesn't think of as a bad idea or anything that is jeopardizing his soul. We've had many interesting discussions on the subject and neither of us has budged an inch in all the time I've known him. The Liberals have been floating trial balloons in this country about legalising prostitution for a few years. I hope we turn back from the brink and Chet would like to see its plunge over that particular falls. Stay tuned.

Thanks again for the Loreto material. Hope this letter finds you and Francesca and Kevin and Emily well.

The Three Wise Fellows

Cerebus #270 (September 2001)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

DAVE SIM:
(from Notes On Latter Days, Cerebus Vol 15, 2003)

I made the decision a long, long time ago (relatively speaking) that The Three Stooges were going to be the link between Rick and Cerebus and the "coming to fruition" of the religious text first developed in Rick's Story, basing them loosely on the "Wise Men" of Matthew's Gospel (2:1-1:12)... Anyway, I remember coming in from a night of drinking late Friday (which is to say, early Saturday) and Channel 29, the Fox outlet out of Buffalo was running the latest Three Stooges syndicated package (their packaging has always been horrible and the new one hit a new low), so I just hit record and went to bed. When I got up the next morning and went through them, I thought, Whoa, boy. This is not going to be easy. I put the tape away on the top shelf of my linen closet and thought, I really don't envy me two years or so from now.

Well, I was right...

...It was tough. It was the toughest drawing and writing job that I had ever attempted, so it became a kind of multi-layered house-of-mirrors joke. It's hard to describe what I mean by that, but let me give it a try: what I had chosen to do was a grinding, arduous task knowing that virtually everyone would look down on the result. Sweating bullets for days and weeks on end to get it right and I knew that virtually everyone's reaction would be, "Oh, the Three Stooges, they're stupid." But, then, my work had been completely ignored since the notorious issue 186, so it became very funny to do two "highbrow" graphic novels, Going Home and Form & Void, about "highbrow" subjects, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, knowing that they would both just be ignored and then to have the Three Stooges as the apex of the pyramid.

And they were. They were several magnitudes of difficulty above Fitzgerald and Hemingway. At that point from an artistic credibility standpoint, it didn't make any difference. Artistic credibility? What artistic credibility? All I hear are crickets chirping. Seth relayed word through Chester [Brown] that I had done an amazing job capturing their body language (Chester had only vaguest idea who the Three Stooges were) and Bruce Costa, a columnist for Comics Retailer thanked me for doing right by his beloved Stooges (I sent him several Stooges tracing paper drawings as a sincere thank you).

Silverspoon

Cerebus: Silverspoon #1 of 11
(Buyers Guide For Comic Fandon, 1980)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from the Q&A at Cerebus Yahoo Group)

...Joe Matt... suggested that he and Chester Brown should re-read all of Cerebus because I was coming down to visit reasonably often and, basically, Joe's just like that. Pull out a chessboard at lunch. "Let's play chess." Uh, I'd really rather just talk, Joe. "No, let's play chess. C'mon. I'll let you be white." Most of the time you just give in because it's easier than discussing it for an hour or something. So, they both re-read Cerebus. And one of the things Chet wanted to know about was "Why aren't the Silverspoon strips reprinted in the Cerebus volume?" And I said, they are. And he said, mm, not in my copy. Really? And I went home and checked and sure enough, he was right. They weren't in there. One of those "I must've dreamed that last part" moments (apologies to Fat Freddy's Cat).

So, I made a note to put them into the next reprinting, having wrestled with whether or not to promote it as such, since that would seem like I was conniving to find a way to get everyone to buy another copy even though I was aware that a certain number of people would buy another copy. The Silverspoon strips I tend to see as being in a different category because without them Lord Julius just suddenly appears in the story with no explanation...

Balls & Talent

Yummy Fur (1986-1994)
by Chester Brown

DAVE SIM:
(from Comics Interview #107, 1992)

...Chester Brown does amazing stuff. He comes at things from several different approaches. Just watching somebody who isn't locked into something is a treat. He'll get back to Ed The Happy Clown when he's ready to get back to Ed The Happy Clown. When he's ready to get back to Matthew, he'll get back to Matthew. It doesn't matter what people say. If that's not what he wants to do that month, well, you're going to see what he did want to do that month. That takes a lot of balls and to get to the end of an unpredicictable issue and not feel too let down, that takes a lot of talent - balls and talent together, that's usually pretty rare to find.

32-issues of Chester Brown's comic-book Yummy Fur were published by Vortex Comics and Drawn & Quarterly ran between 1986 and 1994, and featured diverse content such as the first serialised versions of Ed The Happy Clown, The Playboy and I Never Liked You.

Photorealism: "Why Would You Even Bother Doing This?"

Glamourpuss #20 (July 2011)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from the 100 Hour Tour: Comics Village, 21 February 2008)

...Even as I was conceiving of glamourpuss, talking it over with Chester Brown particularly, there was a definite sense of "Why would you even bother doing this? Go with the flow. Do a cartoony Dave Sim autobio graphic novel." And I don't mean just from Chester, Joe Matt said basically the same thing about the COLLECTED LETTERS 2 cover when he was up from LA for TCAF and I showed it to him at The Beguiling. He couldn't have hated it more if it was a guy's face in one of his dubbed porno tapes. But when he saw the Kirby Monster I did as a benefit for the Doug Wright Awards? "See, you're really good at this...you should do more stuff like this." I had talked to Chester about it on the phone ("I told Seth I'm doing a Kirby Monster and he's doing one, too") so I got off the phone and three hours later I had a full colour 11x17 Kirby Monster. Coming off all the photorealism stuff I was doing it was like leaving the NHL and playing road hockey for the night. No precision necessary. Going from a situation where a few microns difference in placement of a model's eye can be the difference between "Sweet!" and "Dude, yechh -- what's up with her left eye" to "This is roughly where the eye goes -- could be off by an eighth of an inch but, hey, it's a Kirby Monster. If it's too symmetrical, if the ink line is too clean or sharply defined, if the feathering all goes the same way it's going to look like an illustrator trying to "fix" Kirby.

Louis Riel

Louis Riel (Drawn & Quartely, 2000)
Art by Chester Brown

DAVE SIM:
(from the 'Getting Riel' discussion with Chester Brown, Cerebus #295, October 2003)

I remember talking to Seth at the Now & Then Books anniversary party, enthusing about how [Chester Brown's new book, Louis Riel] was coming along and saying, you know, this could be sold in huge quantities in schools, libraries, universities and Seth saying to me in his characteristic dry-as-dust fashion, "Yeah, if everyone can just keep their pants on, it could be a real breakout, mainstream success." And I laughed, because it was such a Seth thing to say. His belief that you're this inherently contrary, inherently perverse being who will actively undermine his own chance at success by exposing a character's penis just for the sake of it. And then I mentioned the comment to you the next time you and I and Joe [Matt] and Seth were at Sushi on Bloor. And Seth was stricken. Absolutely stricken! He slumped over, grabbing his forehead. Seth! What! What is it, man? And Seth said that everyone had taken a vow of silence (practically) not saying a word to you and that, being Chester Brown, now you would have to expose someones penis because someone had mentioned what a bad idea it would be. And to me, this is nonsense! And the handling of the swearing scene, to me, exemplifies what nonsense that is. Eights pages of swearing and vile racial epithets, louder and louder and worse and worse. And how does Chet handle it? X's! You show him saying, "Imprisoned by a bunch of XXXXX XXXX XXXXX" (and indicate in a footnote that "these X's indicate racist comments and profanity.") which is fairly innocuous, followed by"I'm not scared of your XXXXX XXX guards!" You sort of go over the "PG" line with "They're too busy XXXX XXXXXXX each other to bother shooting me!" I mean, anyone can and will mentally fill in those particular XX's and I can picture any number of school librarians getting their noses out of joint over something like that. But then, you retreat back across the line to safety with "Riel, you XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX." And that's it for any recognisable word. Over four pages of mostly XXXXXXX. Not even a X@#$%&. Now me, I would have gotten to that part and thought, hm What insults would he be letting fly with? And I'd lean into it. When Cerebus was trying to improve to please God, I'd letter "no swearing" over a swear-word - indicating his own self-censorship - but most of the time, if its called for, I'll just use "fuck" or "shit" where I think its needed. Or even worse as far as most people, I think, would be concerned in this day and age, I'll use "faggy" or something like that which is probably a closer analogy to the "racist comments" you edged around. But it seems obvious to me that anyone who is being that careful is hardly a born provocateur.

Reply To Roberta Gregory

'Reply To Roberta Gregory' in Following Cerebus #10 (2007)

Art by Dave Sim

Chester Brown: Back & Forth

The following extract is taken from an interview with graphic novelist Chester Brown (Ed The Happy Clown, Louis Riel, Paying For It) posted at TCJ.com in May 2011 in which Chester discusses the end of his friendship with Dave Sim. This is followed by a response from Dave Sim.

=========================

TCJ.Com

I wanted to ask about another cartoonist. I was reading your back-and-forth with Dave Sim in the Cerebus issues.

Chester Brown:
Oh my. [laughs]

And there was one part where you say that Cerebus 186 was an influence on your thinking about romantic relationships. Can you say to what extent, or how?

Let me see. Up until that point, I just kind of accepted [that] everyone’s supposed to have a girlfriend and that’s the natural order. If you don’t have a girlfriend, you’re a loser. That’s what men do, they either have girlfriends or they marry - well, as long as you’re heterosexual. So, reading Cerebus 186, even though I didn’t agree with all the misogynistic views - I didn’t agree that women are inferior, all that stuff - still, here was a guy who was looking at male-female relationships in a different way. It kind of showed me, you don’t have to think like everyone else thinks about these things. Part of it was that I respected Dave a whole lot, and I knew him, and I thought he was very intelligent. That issue of Cerebus was a bombshell in a lot of ways. Like a lot of people at the time, I wasn’t sure, “Is he kidding? Is this a joke? Is he serious?” But it got me re-evaluating the whole male-female dynamic, and thinking about it in a different way, even if my conclusions are different from Dave’s. At that point I was right in the middle of my boyfriend-girlfriend relationship with Sook-Yin. Up until that point, if Sook-Yin had broken up with me, I probably would have been totally depressed and despondent. But when Sook-Yin did break up with me - even though I didn’t want to break up with her, I was totally happy in that relationship - because that [Cerebus issue] changed my thinking about relationships, I think that’s one of the reasons why when she did break up with me, I was able to accept it without being emotionally upset about it. At one point, when I was originally starting to do this book, I was going to go through my whole sex life: losing my virginity, and my girlfriends, and everything. And of course I’m still good friends with two of those girlfriends, Kris and Sook-Yin. So I started to write this script and I thought, “I should probably get permission from them.” [laughs] So I asked them, “Can I do this book?” And neither of them wanted me to do the book. They were like, “Well, you can’t write about our relationship, definitely not.”

So did that take you aback for a little while?

Well, that meant I had to rethink the book. “Okay, I can’t do stuff about the girlfriends. It’ll have to just focus on the prostitution stuff.” But if I had done the book about my whole sex life, then all that stuff about reading Cerebus 186 and how that changed my thinking, all that would’ve been in that book. And I still could’ve put that in, to some degree, in [Paying for It]. I was considering, at a certain point, having Dave as a character in the book, in the way that Seth and Joe are, because Dave and I had lots of discussions about prostitution, and he was very disapproving.

He would want you to conserve your energy or something, right?

Well, he disapproved of paying for sex. He thinks women shouldn’t have jobs. He wants them at home getting pregnant and raising children, not out in the world having jobs. And so prostitution, for him, is just another job that keeps them away from their real role in life. That’s why he disapproves of it. So I was considering having us talk about all that kind of stuff. But at a certain point I decided not to put him in there, which turned out to be a good idea once our friendship fell through. Then I would have felt funny about getting his permission for depicting him in the book.

If you’re okay with it, we should clarify why your friendship fell through. I don’t know if it’s something you’re comfortable talking about, or…

Oh, I’m completely comfortable talking about it. Well, he believes, apparently, that he’s not a misogynist, and I think it’s pretty clear that he is one. That didn’t bother me - I’m totally willing to be his friend despite the fact that, you know, he’s a misogynist. But at a certain point in time he decided he was fed up with people considering him to be a misogynist, and that he didn’t want to deal with people who thought he was one, so he set up that petition on the internet. I think it reads, “Dave Sim is not a misogynist,” and if you agree with that then you sign that petition. So he sent me a fax asking if I could sign that, and I sent back a relatively long letter by fax - I think it was maybe a page and a half or so - where I explained why I wasn’t and how I hoped we could still be friends anyways, that it didn’t influence or affect my thinking, I still liked him as a person and respected his work as a creator and all that sort of stuff. And that upset him apparently. I think he would deny that he was upset by that. I mean, he claims that he very rarely feels emotion. But we had a fax exchange back and forth - I don’t know if you’ve read those. He sent them to someone and they were put up online, so it’s documented. So there was this fax exchange back and forth, and I realized this was getting us nowhere, and a friend - the cinematographer John Tran, another friend of Dave’s, who I know here in Toronto - we were talking on the phone. I was asking him if he was going to sign this petition, and he said he didn’t feel like he could sign it either. But we thought, rather than dealing with him on the phone, or sending faxes or whatever, it would be better if we just dealt with him in person. We were like, “Well, okay, let’s drive up to Kitchener and get together with him.” And it seemed pretty clear from the tone of his faxes that if we phoned ahead, he would just say, no, don’t come. So we decided we would just drive up to Kitchener and knock on his door, which we did. I had been so used to dealing with Dave - with the Dave that I knew, a friendly, affable guy - and that’s who I was expecting to deal with when he opened the door. And although he agreed to come out with us and have a coffee with us, he seemed very angry. I mean, like I said, he claims to not feel emotion, but he seemed angry. He wasn’t yelling or anything, but he had a scowl on his face. John was making small talk - he had a film that was opening around that time, Daddy Tran. So I think he was talking about the opening night of the film or something, and Dave just cut him short and was like, “John, that has nothing to do with me,” or “What does that have to do with me?” [Rogers laughs.] In a very angry tone. The whole conversation was kind of like that: confrontational, and angry on his side. He just wanted to deal with this issue - whether or not we considered him to be a misogynist. So it was unpleasant and basically confirmed that we were no longer friends.

So there’s been no contact since?

No. I was even wondering - because I send out these Christmas cards every year - should I send him a Christmas card? He sends out those form letters to people who try to write to him, and I think it says in there, “If you’re not willing to sign my petition, please don’t bother me with trying to get in contact further.” So I was like, “Okay, if he says that, I should respect his wishes.” With this book coming out, I do mention him in the afterword to the book - I was wondering, should I send him a copy of the book? I haven’t decided one way or the other on it. But, yeah, that’s where things stand with me and Dave.

DAVE SIM:
(from a fax, 4 March 2013)

Chester leaves out the fact that he called me to invite me to help judge the Doug Wright Awards that year, at Seth and Brad McKay's behest. This happened right after I had gotten Margaret Liss, Cerebus Fangirl, to put the I don't Believe Dave Sim is a Misogynist petition together. I told him that I couldn't go to the ceremony because even though I don't think I'm a misogynist, you have to respect a 99% consensus in a democracy. I also said I would give a "bye" on signing the petition to whom ever would be the "civilian" -- i.e. non-comics judge -- that year. But, as comic-book people, I would need to have Seth and Brad and Chester all sign the petition. Chet said that he would check with them and called me back shortly thereafter and said the answer from all three was definitely no. Okay, no problem. But it did make me wonder, if you think I'm a misogynist why would you ask me to help judge a prestigious award like the Doug Wright Awards?

I wasn't angry when Chester and John Tran came to Kitchener, but I was VERY uncomfortable since I didn't want to invite two people into my home who think I'm a misogynist. Chet's quite right. If they had phoned, I would have said, "Don't come". Actually, because I don't answer the phone, I would have just deleted the message. No offence intended, I just misunderstood. I would never have had anything to do with either of you if I thought you believed I was a misogynist. Sincere apologies for the misunderstanding.

Also, I have never required anyone to ask my permission to use me or my work as a raw material in another creative work. It's on the indicia page of every trade paperback and has been for some years.

I would have offered my own recollection of Chet's and my conversation sooner if I had been made aware of the interview previous to this. Unfortunately in the political climate that dominates the comic-book field that doesn't happen. People just read what someone writes about me and don't ask for my version of the story. That's really sad, but it's just how the comic-book field is, I've discovered. I didn't know about the interview until I read the footnote in COMICS JOURNAL No. 302.

Prostitution

Paying For It (Drawn & Quarterly, 2011)
by Chester Brown

CHESTER BROWN:
(from A John's Gospel interview, TCJ.com, 9 May 2011)

...I was considering, at a certain point, having Dave [Sim] as a character in [Paying For It], in the way that Seth and Joe [Matt] are, because Dave and I had lots of discussions about prostitution, and he was very disapproving... he disapproved of paying for sex. He thinks women shouldn't have jobs. He wants them at home getting pregnant and raising children, not out in the world having jobs. And so prostitution, for him, is just another job that keeps them away from their real role in life. That's why he disapproves of it. So I was considering having us talk about all that kind of stuff. But at a certain point I decided not to put him in there, which turned out to be a good idea once our friendship fell through. Then I would have felt funny about getting his permission for depicting him in the book.

THE COMICS JOURNAL:
(from the article 'Chester Brown's True Romance Comix', The Comics Journal #302, 2013 )

...In a Comics Journal interview Chester Brown says that Dave Sim disapproves of his whoremongering, which you would expect, but for reasons you wouldn't: It's not because he feels Brown's exploiting women or endangering his immortal soul but because he disapproves of women having jobs. You gotta love Dave Sim, sort of like you had to love Col. Muammar Qaddafi - anytime you think you've got him figured, he always proves to be even crazier than you could've imagined...

DAVE SIM:
(by fax, 25 February 2013)

Hi Tim: Sorry to bother you again. Just got in COMICS JOURNAL 302 from Fantagraphics and hit the footnote on page 513 of the article on Chester. If you get a chance can you run this? Ordinarily, I would suggest leaving out the actual footnote but comparing me to Muammar Qaddafi, to me, once more puts Fantagraphics beyond the pale of fair debate:

No. I disapproved of Chester's whoremongering because I think that prostitution is wrong. But I tend to think it's a masculine wrong primarily. If guys don't "pay for it", voila, no prostitution. And I think a world without prostitution -- and strippers -- would be an exponentially better world. I used to say to him at lunch, "You can't really believe that it's a GOOD thing." And yes he did. He really does believe if you're nice to your hooker and make it a positive experience that makes it okay. I just can't see how selling your body to a stranger can BE a positive experience. Or even a neutral experience. I used to say to him, believe me, if I thought it was a positive experience or even a neutral experience, I'd be right there. Go shopping on the internet and pick your make and model? No. I tried it a couple of times and it was like going to see strippers. I couldn't wait to go and see strippers when I was 13 or 14. Women who just take their clothes off in from of you because they HAVE to? Because that's their JOB? Which strip club will I live at? And when I tried going it was "Oh." Because, they -- I don't know how else to put it -- they're dead inside. Or if they've been doing it a while, they're dying inside. But it's far worse than that. Their insides aren't dead or dying from natural causes. They've been killed by men or are being killed by men. And that's what I was participating in. I'd TRY and tell myself that I was just imagining it or I was going on anecdotal evidence. But, once a thing is seen it can't be unseen.

I have no problem with women working. Female cops and female soldiers I only have a problem with if you're lowering your standards so you can have more women cops and more women soldiers. As long as everyone has to pass the same physical tests and hit the same standards, no problem. But I think it's obvious that it is structurally unsound to have -- whatever we have now -- 90% of women out working. Half the population is capable of producing 100% of the births. If 90% of those people are working, as a society you are committing suicide.

I do take the side of Erika Kitchen, stay-at-home full-time wife and mother (whose husband is Mike Kitchen, creator of the SPY GUY indy comic book when she says she wants to get 'Too Good For Daycare' t-shirts done for daughters Anika and Raina and sons Erikson, Marcus and Zack. The more women who think that way, the healthier your society is (in my opinion).

Going In Unto The Light

Cerebus #300 (March 2004)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

DAVE SIM:
(from a letter to Simon R. Green on 26 July 2004, Dave Sim's Collected Letters Vol 2)

...If you refer back to the prologue/dream sequence in the beginning of The Last Day, and the actual creation of the Light and what that meant for all and sundry innocent and semi-innocent bystanders I think it might be a little clearer. I expect that will be a difficult part of the story for some time to come since my own supposition is that the first creation of the light was no cause for celebration and that's very much at variance with most people's ideas of the light or of light in general. The fact that Cerebus had just been the recipient of the entire Origin of Everything dream sequence and suddenly found himself "going in vnto the light" less than a day later is intended to explain his attack of the heebie-jeebies as depicted. And, obviously, I don't have an answer for anyone here, just what I consider a better question. Assuming that this is something we all go through (judging by near-death experiences we have all read about), what's your best guess? Go into the light? Why do you think that's a good idea? Chester Brown told me that he read a story written by someone who had speculated that going into the light just meant that you were going to be reincarnated and who, therefore, cautioned against it....