"you Gene are no better than a 12 year old girl."

Like, totally rad. Where's my debate on Nietzsche, indy poser boy?

"But Gene, if you "respectfully" disagree with me, that's not gonna make a very interesting reminiscence about you for my upcoming book, COMIC BOOK FANS WHO DON'T SHARE MY SENSE OF HUMOR."

Sorry, couldn't reply at length as it would've upset the burn on Snoid.

Now I can't reply because I'm reeling from Snoid's formidable wit.

Maybe later.

Scott, are you sure that you dressed up during the 1972 Worldcon? I a remember a turd-monster just as you describe, leaving a trail at the 1973 WorldCon in Toronto? Was that you or an imitator? I also recall a "no peanut butter" rule at Worldcon costume show there after. And belated congratulations. That remains one of the funniest things I ever saw.

One of the problems with freedom of the press is that it implies freedom only for people who have access to presses. Dave has access to a press. He could say whatever he wanted in Cerebus and today to whoever goes to his "blog and mail". If I had cause to interact regularly or meaningfully with Dave, I would fear him, not knowing if my inadequacies and foibles would be spread throughout the land at his whim. I could not respond to him in kind. I have no outlet other than ones like this, and not that many people read this.

It really doesn't bother me that someone else has retaliated in kind. Dave lives by the sword.

Uh....yeah?


Seriously, if that's your takeaway from my post, that's fine, but it was not my intent. Could it have happened as Sim said? Yes. Could it have happened as Smith said? Yes. Is Talbot's retelling--which we are all apparently presuming comes from Smith--inherently deserving of scorn, because he wasn't there? Well, that probably depends. If Sim's version is complete bullshit and not a reflection of what happened, and Smith's version is not complete bullshit, but is in fact a faithful account, and Talbot has retold the Smith version accurately, then I would say no.

If you're saying that you have to automatically discount what someone says because (1) they are friendly with someone or (2) they weren't present at an event, then I have to disagree with you there. Is it hearsay? Sure. Is Talbot submitting a brief to the court? Nope.

And Scott has made a great point. I don't see why people would just blithely be taking Talbot's word as the gold standard, especially in the context of the book. As you point out, his anti-Sim slant is obvious to anyone who reads it--I have only a superficial knowledge of the events, and I picked up on it right away. It's one person's version of it, a person who wasn't there, and a person who clearly has a bias. Why is his retelling of it more egregious than you or me retelling the story on a message board?


Jake

All I know is I ordered a stack of these as it looks to be a funny book and funny books that are actually funny are to be praised, whether they are total bullshit or not. Was that Dave who said "All stories are true?"

That doesn't even make sense, unless you intend to present yourself as a complete and total victim against anyone who can go to a printer (which Dave was able to do back in 1977) or anyone who can use the internet (which, well, everybody can do today, even Dave who doesn't have internet access). The whole point of Dave's stance on self-publishing (that "access to a press" thing you mentioned) was that anybody can do it, and compete against anybody else. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird could do it, Wendy and Richard Pini could do it, and they could compete against Marvel and DC.

And considering how many bloggers are becoming celebrities these days, I don't have a clue what point you actually think you're making.

[Afterthought, Jeff Smith had access to a press as well, and for all I know he has a blog, but in the first public airing of this argument, he didn't even use his own press, it was provided for him by Gary Groth and Kim Thompson.]
How many negative inferences have you made? Let's count them.
1) "Belittling and insulting the hostess."

Jeff's version:
SMITH: He was writing [it] about the time he came out to California to stay with us during the first APE show. The night he arrived, Dave sat down on the couch opposite usand said, "Let me tell you what color the sky is in my world." Then he proceeded to lay out this horrible, upside-down, conspiracy-theory view of the world. Vijaya and I sat there, and at first we talked with him about it. We were like, "Wow. You almost have a point, sort of, but it's upside down there at the end." And he goes on for hours! Droning on and on…

SPURGEON: Dave can talk.

SMITH: Now I knew what it must've been like to be trapped in Waco listening to David Koresh! Vijaya and I were rocking back and forth, going, "Can we please go to the bathroom now?" I'm making light of it but it was really offensive stuff, and there was no arguing with him. Finally I said, "Dave, if you don't shut up right now, I'm going to take you outside and deck you."

Where is this "belittling and insulting the hostess" that you refer to multiple times? In the Gospel According to Jeff Smith, even Vijaya agreed that Dave almost had a point, except at the end where it was upside-down. Far from being the target of incessant verbal abuse, her husband's account makes it sound like she was a willing intellectual participant in the discussion.

2) "Requesting several times that you desist in such behavior". Where were these multiple entreaties from Jeff Smith to Dave Sim for silence on the matter?

3) The idea of the guest leaving the premises if he doesn't comply with the host's wishes is fine, and even Dave Sim thinks so. Had Smith actually threatened him right then and there, there would have been no way Sim could have or should have continued to be a guest in their house. That's not the way to treat a guest and that's not the way to accept someone else's hospitality, so actual violent threats should have ended the visit right there.

Dave's version:
What I was doing was responding to Jeff's conversational question when we had arrived at their A-frame house atop the San Andreas fault – he had picked me up in a limousine at the San Francisco airport -- "So what are you working on?" What the hell. I had nothing to hide. Literally. I described the structure of READS, with the fictionalized comic book first half and then, in the second half, moving into a more literal "here's what's going on in my life right now," and I explained some of the anecdotes that I was working with, newspaper stories I had been accumulating that had been getting weirder and weirder as soon as I began collecting them: particularly a recent one that I had found about some environmental group which had spent an unearthly amount of money cleaning spilled oil off of a seal and had then had this ceremony releasing it back into the wild where it was promptly eaten by a killer whale.

My thesis was that life was out of balance and these ludicrous excesses of Life Uber Alles (now pretty well swept under the rug beneath the label of "politically correct" – as if that justifies them) were becoming more the rule than the exception. But I was aware that most people saw the killer whale eating the seal as a Profound Tragedy instead of seeing it for what it was: what killer whales, you know, do. This is, presumably, what Jeff meant by "upside down there at the end". I was viewing a Profound Tragedy and seeing it as a Weird Burlesque.

So, I attempted to tackle the question from another angle: For the first time in human history birth was exceeding death by a wide margin but we were still behaving as if death was this near-universal condition and that birth was barely able to stay ahead of it. Essentially, we were still selling ourselves (as a society) on the view that we live in a tragic, death-based patriarchy. My view was that it was a lunatic, out-of-control birth-based matriarchy and had been for some time. At that point, Jeff and Vijaya became part of the point of my story I was working on. As I wrote:

"Oh, NO! No way. Uh-uh." Jeff smith is shaking his head violently from side to side. He has lunged forward in his seat, his hands waving in the air, as if shooing away a large insect. All of his movements are agitated. At the other end of the couch, his wife sits, her feet tucked beneath her, calmly smoking a Marlboro Light. Her features are inscrutable. Viktor Davis takes another sip of his beer.

[a Heineken, and not only a Heineken but a bottle Heineken: Jeff and Vijaya definitely had good taste in beer, unless they had bought it specifically for me]

"You'd agree that Death is Male?" he asks.

"Yes."

"You'd agree that Birth is Female?"

"Yes."

"Which one is winning?"

"No. No, no way. It's just not true." He stares straight ahead for a moment or two and then looks at Viktor Davis. "I just don't think that way, man. I just can't see that at all."

Vijaya grinds out her cigarette in a small glass ashtray.

At Jeff's insistence, the discussion ends. They agree to disagree. Viktor Davis isn't certain what the disagreement is, but clearly an impasse has been reached.

They begin to discuss animation instead.

[Deciding to do READS the way I did it, was really a matter of my saying to myself, "I really have to start documenting some of this stuff that keeps happening to me, because it is really getting to be too weird for words and everyone is acting as if their reactions are normal and my observations are weird." And Jeff's extreme and agitated reaction to a simple discussion about the balance between life and death in the world – coupled with Vijaya's complete non-reaction – was definitely in that category. "This is so weird. What IS he so upset about?" I was a guest in their home and I think I'm a very accommodating guest. You don't want to talk about a subject, boom, subject dropped. You asked me what I was working on and I started to tell you and then you freaked out. No problem. Let's – very calmly and rationally, so I hopefully don't upset you that badly again -- talk about your background in animation.]

Vijaya doesn't get involved, Jeff makes no threats of violence, Dave drops the subject and they talk about something else.

4) Jeff Smith didn't sound like he was joshing. "Dave, if you don't shut up right now, I'm going to take you outside and deck you." That's not a joshing thing to say, and that's how it was presented in Bryan Talbot's book, much less in the initial public dispute broached by Tom Spurgeon.

SPURGEON: Really? Wow!

SMITH: It was that serious. Well, he shut up. There was dead silence, and he squinted his eyes. He took a drag off his cigarette, and that was it. We went on with our weekend and forgot about it. At least I did.

If you want to take Jeff Smith's side for whatever reason, that's one thing, but you could at least try to keep from reading your own version of events that none of the principals who were actually there have even implied into what happened.

He may've said it once, but I don't think he believes it now.

Alan Moore still seems to believe it, if PROMETHEA is any measure.

Chris W answered Granfaloon & Cincinnatus as well as I could.

I'm not denying the very real possibility that Dave could have been a dick. Indeed, in the same 1999 interview Smith accuses Sim of trying to hijack the Trilogy Tour for the purpose of promoting self-publishing, and I can imagine Dave doing that very well. I'm not sure what if anything he said about the matter, but it sounds like something Dave Sim might do. But what gripes me about Smith's 1999 recollection is that he says Dave's speechifyin' was "offensive," but never specifies as to what was SO offensive that a physical threat was necessary.

I may as well address Scott Shaw! in this space as well. One major objection to the "tall tale defense" is that, unlike the Peanut Butter Solution, it isn't particularly funny as such, except maybe to readers who already don't like Dave Sim.

Of course there are a lot of apocryphal stories floating around, and some even change names and dates like urban legends. I think I've heard three-four different sets of names inserted for the famed tale: [WRITER A] gets cheesed at [EDITOR B] withholding his check and holds him out a window until Editor B surrenders same." That too is kind of a funny story that "travels" well as different tellers imagine different actors in the "roles."

Talbot's version isn't funny, and isn't a tall tale. It's a "get Dave Sim" tale, period, but it doesn't even have the honesty to say straight out, "I don't like Dave Sim because he's pretentious, so I tend to believe what Jeff Smith told me."

Or perhaps it's the tale as Bryan has heard it repeated a number of times, as it has become an oft repeated and somewhat legendary story about the comic industry. Some might even say that it's morphed into a tall tale.

For someone who seems to be objecting to Talbot's negativity and bias, you sure are quick to impute negative motives and intent. As for it not being funny, my guess (based on reading a large number of the posts you've made on this site) is that despite having a large number of other strong abilities and skills, your sense of humor is not one of your strongest character traits.