mechanicallyseparatedoctopu-blog asked: So out of curiosity, I decided to reread TNC while self-medicating severe depression with weed and amphetamines, from roughly midnight to 3 AM (with the lights out, naturally). Turns out doing leaves you in a state from which the separation as describe at least is visible, if quite far away. Made for an interesting time, though IMO more of the post-separation narrative and TNC quotes would have been fun, to see what happens to me, but oh well.

Huh, interesting!

I hope you are doing all right, or at least as close to all right as is possible under the circumstances.

kaaarst asked: After forgetting to take my medication for a few days I had a terrible vivid nightmare in which I was staring through an iron gate at a broad-shouldered bald male figure as it slowly raised its head to stare at me and then I woke up to find I'd been moaning in horror "CLEANTH... CLEANTH... CLETE... OLEAD... CLEANTH...". Looking forward to meeting the Solenoid Entity next.

I’m honored to have an unwitting co-writer credit on your horrific visions, but also, Please Take Your Meds John

Anonymous asked: Cerebus in Hell?

andrewhickeywriter:

deathchrist2000:

bowiesongs:

eruditorumpress:

Never actually read Cerebus.

i wonder: does anyone under 30 or 35 give a toss about Cerebus anymore? Once upon a time, if you were into “serious” (cough) comics, it was just something you had to contend with, along with Moore, Gaiman, Miller, the Hernandez Bros, Spiegelman/RAW, etc. But have a feeling that Dave Sim’s descent into apparent madness in the latter half of that book poisoned the well, and the impenetrability of the storyline didn’t help matters. To draw a weak parallel, it would be like a rock band that was huge in the 70s that now doesn’t even merit mention upon their unexpected reunion.

I assume @andrewhickeywriter is excited, or at least I hope it would make him excited. Tomorrow’s vote seems terrifying.

I’m… cautiously excited (though I’m 37, so not in the “under 35″ group).

Cerebus is, to my mind, the single greatest achievement in comics history. Yes, even the stuff after the effect of Sim’s mental illness became apparent. (That’s not me misusing mental illness pejoratively – Sim has talked in the past about being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and often discussed symptoms which match psychosis, and those symptoms have affected his writing over the years). Yes, even the (extremely small proportion) parts that advocate the inhuman, obscene, political views he later developed.

Sim is clearly still capable of moments of greatness – Glamourpuss is a complete mess, but a fascinating, often glorious, one – and possibly the constraint of trying to do something properly commercial will let him harness that greatness. Or possibly not.

Would I recommend anyone read Cerebus now? I honestly don’t know. There are enough good comics out there that it’s impossible to keep up with the good ones anyway, so why give money to someone who’s somewhere around the Vox Day area in political terms? But then again, it’s very, very hard to disentangle Sim’s politics from his illness. Does that make a difference? I don’t know.

But what I will say is that even at its worst, Cerebus (apart from the first twenty or so issues, which are crap – but that leaves 280 or so issues that aren’t) does things with the art-form that no other comic has ever done. Even the handful of issues that I find utterly reprehensible are utterly astonishing artistic achievements. And at its best (roughly Jaka’s Story through Minds, with the exception of Reads which is where Sim’s views infect the book for the first time) it’s work that has affected me more than almost any other art, in any medium, ever.

And that’s not the normal privileged-person-defending-problematic-fave thing, either. I am a privileged person, Cerebus is problematic, no question on both those counts, but… it’s not a Talons of Weng-Chiang style “if you can get past the racism it’s fun” thing. The good aspects are so good, and Sim’s worldview is so evil, it’s like… what if Hitler had become a painter instead, but had had Leonardo’s level of artistic genius? It’s the edge case to end all edge cases, the problematic fave to end all problematic faves…

I’ve only read bits of Cerebus here and there – tried to read linearly from #26 on a while back, got tired of it somewhere in Church and State, then dipped around a great deal in the later parts when I was writing/planning TNC, for obvious (?) reasons.

Anyway, the reason I’m reblogging this (besides being a good interesting post) is that people usually treat the long essays in the later Cerebus issues as merely a product of Sim’s decline, but I actually think a lot of that material is really good when he’s not writing about gender or contemporary politics.

The essays on Hemingway and Fitzgerald, for instance, are fascinating and display a level of passionate interest in the material that would be impressive on its own (i.e., if Sim was framing it as “I am a critic who writes about these authors” rather than “I am a cartoonist, and if I read and obsessively analyze an author’s entire oeuvre it’s just so I can poke fun at a caricature of him in my comic”).

(IIRC he read the Bible cover-to-cover, then converted, just because he’d originally wanted to write a Cerebus arc poking fun at Christianity and wanted to make sure he “did it right.”  His essays on religion are … well, they’re definitely interesting, at least)

Anyway, I’d love to see some of the less political Sim essays rescued from the obscurity they currently languish in.  If he were in the same frame of mind today, he’d have a well-known (in some circles) blog and there would be lots of recurring arguments over whether it was OK to link one of his legitimately good posts given things he wrote in other, not-good posts

mendelpalace asked: If you don't mind me asking, how did you go from not having done creative writing since your teenage years to producing two 50-60k word novels? I wanted to be writer when I was younger, but gave up due to self consciousness and depression. I'd like to get back into it, but I'm just unsure: unsure how to get started, unsure where my aesthetic and intellectual interests lie and how to take that and create a story. It just feels very daunting. Do you have any advice?

Sure, glad you asked – although no guarantees that what worked for me will also work for you.

When I first started writing the thing I eventually called “Floornight,” it was a deliberate experiment in writing a story on the fly, with no expectations or goals except enjoying myself, and with carte blanche to self-indulgently throw in any idea or element I thought was cool or aesthetically appealing.  The first 20 chapters or so (22, I think?) were just posted on tumblr under readmores and jokingly tagged as “#nostalgebraist’s badfic,” and it was only after I’d written quite a lot that I decided to give it a title and put it somewhere besides tumblr.  (I originally considered doing it for NaNoWriMo, and while I’m glad I didn’t because I can’t write that fast, it was still written in a NaNo-like spirit.)

It ended up being a lot better and more coherent than I had originally expected, but I don’t think I ever could have produced something like that if I had gone in trying to write something “good” or “coherent” (!).  So my main bit of advice would be something like “write something self-indulgent with no specific expectations or standards for yourself, and see where it goes.”

I think the main reason that my attempts worked out so much better this time than they did as a teenager was just that I’d read so much stuff in the interim.  My ability to quickly produce decent prose and plot/characterization was so much higher as a result, and I also had a much better sense of what expectations a typical reader might be bringing in.  If this is true of you, it’s promising; if it isn’t, you should try anyway, but also I recommend just reading as much written fiction as you can.

Re: “unsure where my aesthetic and intellectual interests lie” – this may just work itself out as you write, although ofc it might not.  I found I had a whole stock built up of “stuff I’d love to see in a story” which I just hadn’t thought of as “writing ideas” because I hadn’t thought I would write fiction again.