The New Canadian Right
Much has been written about Dave Sim, one-half (with Gerhard) of the creative team that completed the three hundred issue monthly comic book series Cerebus in March, 2004. Beginning in the year 2000, continuing in 2003 and stretching on into late 2004, I carried out a lengthy correspondence with Mr. Sim, in which we discussed many issues external to comic books, including gender, religion and politics.
In early 2004, Dave announced the forthcoming publication of a seventeenth volume in the trade paperback series, to be called: Collected Letters 2004. This would consist of his answers to all the letters received after the publication of Cerebus #300. I had originally misunderstood and thought that he aimed to print both the letters he received as well as the ones he sent out, creating a consistent record of various ongoing dialogues, but as it turns out he was able to fill five hundred pages quite nicely on his own with just the letters he'd answered by June of last year.
With that in mind, I've decided to make the full correspondence between him and myself available here, in a series of .pdf files (broken up into smaller chunks, as it runs to quite a few pages). First off is a nineteen page file containing the bulk of our 2003 correspondence. The balance of this first burst of letters leans quite heavily towards my own writing, as Dave was still in the thick of completing the final issues of his comic book, and apparently having some difficulty staying on schedule. Once Cerebus was finished, he was able to pick up the slack (and then some!). Both our responses typically ran to more than ten pages.
If you've been curious about whatever became of Dave Sim, he makes his current religious and political views strikingly clear in these letters. I'm glad he's publishing this new collection -- as he says, it will prove a definitive record of what he really meant to get across with the last one hundred fourteen issues of Cerebus, and just how seriously you should take his seemingly antagonistic public image.
A Public Correspondence, pt. 1, .pdf format
Once Collected Letters has been released, I will begin converting my part of our 2004 correspondence to .pdf and post them on this journal.
