Gail Simone's Blog, page 931

petervnguyen:Sorry this is my 50th batgirl on my tumblr, she...

petervnguyen:

Sorry this is my 50th batgirl on my tumblr, she just too fun to draw

… way too fun

a precommission done for #Nycc

That’s gorgeous, Peter!

Gail, is there any chance that the Welcome To Tranquility characters could appear in the New DCU?

Sigh!  I would love that, but I don’t see how. There have only been superheroes for five years, as I understand it, in the new52. Most of the heroes of Tranquility have been around since WWII.  I can’t see them getting an alternate Earth, so I am not sure how they could ever be part of the new continuity. :(

Hello Mrs. Simone! I'm working on a kickstarter proposal for an independent comic and I wanted to know how did you and Mr. Calafiore decide which rewards to do for "Leaving Megalopolis"? I have tons of ideas, but I'm not sure which ones are feasible. (Also

I wish I had a better answer for this…our kickstarter has been hugely successful, bigger than we could have dreamed, but I think it was entirely the readers who made that happen. Not us, at all.

Jim and I did a lot of looking at other Kickstarters, but we mainly ended up learning what we DIDN’T want to do. Some had made a ton of pledges by offering swag that had nothing to do with the book. We had no interest in making stickers or whatever, we wanted the stretch goals to enhance the book.

So you want to know what your philosophy is…are you trying to make the best book possible, or are you going for a broader approach?

Other than that, all I can say is thinking up rewards is tricky—you need to think of things that are fair, and as you add new ones, you have to make sure that the early backers aren’t forgotten. You don’t want to add new rewards that make their early support irrelevant.

That’s about all I have. Good luck!

Hello Mrs. Simone! I'm working on a kickstarter proposal for an independent comic and I wanted to know how did you and Mr. Calafiore decide which rewards to do for "Leaving Megalopolis"? I have tons of ideas, but I'm not sure which ones are feasible. (Also

I wish I had a better answer for this…our kickstarter has been hugely successful, bigger than we could have dreamed, but I think it was entirely the readers who made that happen. Not us, at all.

Jim and I did a lot of looking at other Kickstarters, but we mainly ended up learning what we DIDN’T want to do. Some had made a ton of pledges by offering swag that had nothing to do with the book. We had no interest in making stickers or whatever, we wanted the stretch goals to enhance the book.

So you want to know what your philosophy is…are you trying to make the best book possible, or are you going for a broader approach?

Other than that, all I can say is thinking up rewards is tricky—you need to think of things that are fair, and as you add new ones, you have to make sure that the early backers aren’t forgotten. You don’t want to add new rewards that make their early support irrelevant.

That’s about all I have. Good luck!

deantrippe:Dude photoshop’d up my dang tweet!(via The Steel...

deantrippe:

Dude photoshop’d up my dang tweet!

(via The Steel Shark)

Heh.

Seriously. Even if you are a Republican, this is completely how it seemed last night!

keaneoncomics:DC Comics Gotham City Photo Shoot 40 - Batgirl...

keaneoncomics:

DC Comics Gotham City Photo Shoot 40 - Batgirl (by Once Upon a Geek)

Wow!

GO TEAM BATGIRL!

You look fantastic!

So you've mentioned on Twitter before that you're a fan of Dave Sim. I'm over halfway through my first-ever reading of Cerebus, and I'm finding his views...unsettling. Could you talk a little bit about your relationship with his work?

Well, this is a bit complicated. I wouldn’t say I am a ‘fan of Dave Sim,’ sadly.  But I am a huge fan of much of his work.

Dave Sim wrote and drew what was for years my favorite comic book, a book called ‘Cerebus,’ which started out as a parody of the barbarian comics genre, as typified by the Barry Windsor Smith issues of Conan, which I had never read.

For those who don’t know, he decided to write and draw three hundred monthly issues of that book, broken up into several huge stories, which are sold in large paperback editions that he used to call ‘phonebooks.’

In the earlier days, this book was funny, but not astounding. The storytelling was often mostly pastiche, like good fanfic, and the art was not yet quite finding itself, in my opinion.

But that changed with the second volume, HIGH SOCIETY, which is not only funny, but a masterpiece of comics storytelling. The next two volumes of CHURCH AND STATE continue that upward climb, and at that point, I think Dave was making pretty much the best comics anywhere. I was a huge fan. I’d missed all the early issues, and went back and bought as many as I could even though I was putting myself through college and was dirt poor.

Those early books were my favorite comics ever, probably. They are funny, literate, intelligent, and full of interesting story-telling ideas. They are great fun to read, but also compelling dramatically and the storytelling is immaculate. Misfit’s ‘Dark Vengeance’ is a direct tribute to those books.

Unfortunately, the individual issues started to lose their appeal for me sometime after that. Each issue became more of an obligation than a book I looked forward to, at least that was my feeling at the time. 

During that time, Dave had become a fierce advocate for creator’s rights, and for self-publishing. His wife, Deni, had been the publisher of their company, and published some other really enjoyable books. Then the divorced and split the company up and it was just Cerebus.

Sometime after I quit reading, and I wasn’t around to read any of this at the time, Dave’s editorials and comics started to show a genuine contempt for women. I’ve seen this tarted up and parsed to make it more palatable…the retcon for some of his fans seems to be that he doesn’t hate women, but that he hates feminism.

But even if that was true, which doesn’t seem to be the case, it made the book very unpleasant reading for some. He published a long, not-particularly-well-written screed in the book itself, about how women are to blame for everything (really, you have to read it, it’s remarkably tin-eared in its hysteria). He literally blames women for everything, the breakdown of men, the misbehavior of children, even, and I swear to god this is true, the behavior of spoiled pets. All women’s fault.

Not a big deal to me, I wasn’t reading the book, and I don’t know Dave, and it’s not like more people thought his ideas were anything but pigeon droppings. But it was sad to read of one of the grand masters of the form writing these oddly-reasoned and really venomous statements.

Dave is a master of telling you what you REALLY think, but unfortunately, not all that good at actually being correct in those assumptions. Most fringe thinkers are convinced that they alone are possessed of a grand perception that trumps all others. Sometimes it leads to greatness, much more often, the opposite is true.

Quite a few people I really respect say Dave did heroic things for them in times of struggle, with financial support. I don’t think those things should be forgotten just because he hates my gender, which he so clearly does. I had a conversation with Bill Willingham, a very Conservative dude indeed, and someone I really admire as an artist, and Bill tried to tell me it was just strident feminists that Dave hated.

I pointed out that Dave had said just recently that women were a gender that had, “no ethics, no scruples, and no sense of right and wrong.”  Further, he had a lot of unkind things to say about gays, likening gay sex to a ‘puddle of vomit.’

Bill was surprised, didn’t believe me, but I had my iphone with me and produced the exact quotes.  My goal wasn’t to cause Bill to separate with Dave at all…it’s just facts are facts, and it’s tiresome to hear people parse out this stuff. Gender hate is what it is. And what it is is ugly and mean.

Anyway, Dave’s books got, in the opinions of a lot of former fans, less rewarding to follow and sales dropped off a lot, apparently. Forgive me if I have any of this wrong. Dave blames this on women and the men who are somehow magically controlled by women.

He started saying really virulent stuff. His defenders would become increasingly less credible as they tried to parse this stuff into palatability. For years and years, he was claiming that he had all this ‘documented evidence’ that proved all his opinions, and he berated women for not looking at his ‘documented evidence.’ We were too afraid to face the blinding truth of Dave Sim, you see.

Dave finished his epic, and decided to do a couple new projects, including the very odd book, GLAMOURPUSS. To promote this book, he did a tour of various websites, allowing readers to ask questions.

I decided to ask Dave some questions on the Sequential Tart message board. My respect for Dave’s talent and my love for those early books was in a bit of conflict with the Dave who seemed to actually be there answering questions, tossing out bizarre theories as fact. So I asked him what I thought were pretty fair questions, regarding the things he had been saying for over a decade now.  It was mostly polite, although some people jumped in on both sides of the issue who were not helpful at all, muddying the issue, I felt.

The shocking thing was, and you can still go read it to see if you disagree, there was just nothing there. Dave had made up all his ‘facts.’ There WAS no ‘documented evidence.’ None.

You have to understand, I thought of Dave, still do, as a towering genius. I’ve said this many times, and I think he thinks I am belittling him, but I am not, I mean it unironically.  I expected something, some sort of factual basis for his views, but it was purely anecdotal, just stuff he’d observed before he became a hermit.  He repeatedly threw out facts he had completely invented, they had absolutely no basis in reality.

He would say, “Feminism is the reason more marriages are failing!” and he would throw out numbers, and ten seconds looking at the actual statistics from the BLM would prove these theories wrong, conclusively. He never cited a source, he could never back these numbers up when the real ones were produced, and even when his theories were completely disproven, he just couldn’t acknowledge it.

In short, everything he accused women of doing in the face of his great argument, he did exactly. It was disheartening, in a way. I started to feel like a bully pushing around the guy with no shoes who hangs out behind the 7-11. He proposed the ‘fact’ that families with women who work outside the home have a high, and growing, divorce rate. But the truth, that took maybe two minutes to find, straight from our own government, said the opposite.

So, he had made up his ‘documented facts.’ The same ones that women were so terrified of, refused to acknowledge, in his mind. And when his documented facts were proven to be hooey, he was immediately skeptical, and didn’t want to acknowledge them, despite the fact that they came directly from government figures. It was a bit surreal.

Anyway, I was shocked at what an empty suit the whole thing had been. I had built Dave up so much in my mind as a brilliant guy, that I figured this philosophy had to have some construct behind it. But it absolutely didn’t, he couldn’t muster even the flimsiest evidence. At the time, I did what I do, I made some fun of the situation, and I regret that, because it’s pretty clear Dave already feels the industry hates him. He has said many times that because people think he’s a misogynist, that they think he’s the lowest thing on Earth, which is another bizarre claim that has no basis in reality, but there you go.

I’ve gone at length here because I haven’t talked about this for a while. Dave went through a weird period where he came up with a loyalty oath for people he would speak to. He would only speak to people who signed a document saying that they believed Dave Sim was not a misogynist. I wish I were making this up. If you didn’t sign it, he cut you out of his life, which he did with even some of his staunchest defenders.

The reason I’m a little bummed right now is that Dave’s recent publishing efforts apparently did not sell well, and Dave now says he’s planning on quitting the industry and ‘disappearing.’ Literally, leaving everything behind and going away where he won’t be heard from again, if I understand this correctly.

And that makes me sad.

Because I still have a huge attachment to those early Cerebus books. I still love them. I read them recently again and found that I didn’t think of latter day Dave while reading them. The female characters were well-drawn and entertaining, and the wit as sharp as ever.

I know I’ve enjoyed a lot of art in my lifetime that was created by people I might actually find loathsome. I don’t have any hate for Dave Sim whatsoever…I think he’s a pretty sad figure, which I am sure he would hate to hear.  But those books meant a lot to me. I wouldn’t still be reading comics if not for them, for one thing, and comics have brought so much joy to my life, I can’t even say.

So what I was talking about on Twitter and Facebook was, I am sad that the industry isn’t able to support a grand master of comics. And I still get a lot of joy from those early books. I can’t say exactly why, with some work, it’s easier to separate the artist from the art for me, and sometimes it’s impossible, such as with films starring Mel Gibson. I can’t really say.  But for whatever reason, the early Cerebus volumes still read to me as the work of a fascinating, brilliant creator, who didn’t yet loathe my gender for a bunch of baloney reasons he’d completely made up in his head.

I encourage people to look up Dave’s own words, don’t go by my opinion.

Here’s the big manifesto, ostensibly written by a character in the book, that Dave somehow felt was going to split the world open:

http://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/sim.html

It’s pretty goofy. But maybe you disagree.

So my relationship with Dave’s work is, still love the early stuff, maybe because it’s the best way to remember the Dave Sim I really admired as a thinker and a storyteller. But his feminist theory is some of the gooniest horseshit I’ve ever read.

This Nonsense: Why I will not draw your comic for free

This Nonsense: Why I will not draw your comic for free:

faitherinhicks:

Sorry tumblrs, I didn’t know you couldn’t reblog questions, and also it’s probably mean of me, exposing that girl’s question like that. So here’s the whole blog post in reblogging format.

Long story short, someone (politely) inquired if I would do character design for them, and then draw their…

An artist who wants to be paid?

POPPYCOCK!

Though barred from combat, women in military service do have de...

Though barred from combat, women in military service do have de facto roles in combat. Tammy Duckworth, former assistant secretary of the US Department of Veterans Affairs lost her legs in combat while piloting a Black Hawk helicopter. “When I’m asked if the country is ready for women in combat, I look down at where my legs used to be and think, ‘Where do you think this happened, a bar fight?’“

Wow.

As much as I loved the other speakers, I am amazed more people aren’t talking about Tammy Duckworth. What an amazing woman.

What's your favorite animated tv show of all time?

Without question, the Simpsons. The Simpsons has informed my sense of humor, my contrarian nature, and my sense of story since the first time I ever saw it.

Other favorites include Futurama, Home Movies, Bob’s Burgers, the Brak Show, lots of others. For anime, I enjoyed MONSTER and DEATH NOTE quite a lot.

I know I’m forgetting a ton of stuff.