A Day with Dave Sim
or to be more precise 14 hours minus his prayer times when he let me peruse the mockup pages for Volumes 1 and most of 2 of the Strange Death of Alex Raymond.
Originally I was supposed to meet Dave at his Off White House at 10 am but there was a 9 o clock meeting about Safe Injection Areas which we thought was at Kitchener Town Hall but actually took place somewhere else so I got to spend an extra hour with him.
Dave is like a camel. Even though he hadn't had anything to drink since about 5 am and I kept offering to get him some water when we went out for lunch he didn't eat or drink anything from then until just after his 10 pm prayer time.
He reminds me of one of those aesthetic monks living in the desert living off minimum food and drink. He has no kitchen in his house as none of the food that he eats at home needs to be cooked. He has no radio so the only sound you would hear whilst he works is the air conditioning and the ticking clock. If he hadn't meet me this day he would have spent it filling research for Strange Death of Alex Raymond into various different envelopes so I wasn't preventing him from doing any major work or drawing by visiting him today.
I asked him if he'd seen any of the Marvel movies and the only one was when he took a friends children to see the second Avengers film which he couldn't even remember the subtitle of (Age of Ultron)
I work in a library so the first item in the house that caught my eye and also the first photo I took that day was ...
After showing me all around his house and letting me take lots of photos he let me look over about 200 pages worth of his new work the Strange Death of Alex Raymond sitting on a chair at Camp David which is the name he gives to the huge storage house in his back yard, whenever he left me alone to conduct his prayers throughout the day. We went for a walk around all the places he lived whilst working on Cerebus and then on the spur of the moment he decided to take a taxi ride to where he grew up and went to school around Kitchener. The taxi driver was an old friend who often brings him back from grocery shopping and we happily listened to old hits from the '80's on his radio as we toured around his old stamping ground.
I was wearing my Beatles Rubber Soul album cover T shirt and Dave made several references to the Beatles and fame throughout the day and amongst other rareties he showed me a sketch of George Harrison he'd done for Deni after she told him that he had eyes just like George
At his house he has many Cerebus related images framed on the walls including two License Plates people have sent him
I especially liked this signed image from Charles Schultz Dave has on his wall
Here are a very young George Carlin and Helen Reddy signed photos from the 80s
We discussed Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo Movement as well as Bill Cosby (If you drug someone and then date rape them then it's just one step removed from necrophilia) and I mentioned that this sort of stuff even affected Aussie born entertainers like Rolf Harris. He wasn't sure who that was but he had heard of Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport.
We talked about the difference between happiness and contentment and he said he was happiest just after Cerebus finished and he didn't have to come up with stories and plots but could just draw illustrations of attractive girls when he was working on Glamourpuss.
One of the highlights of the day was listening to Dave recite 3 different monologue from Jules Feiffer's play Little Murders which we were both familiar with from the film adaptation made in 1971. He did Lou Jacobi's Judges speech, Donald Sutherland's sermon from the wedding ceremony and Alan Arkin's extremely nervous explanation of all the unsolved murders there are in New York.
Dave mentioned that the favourite place in the world he and Ger went to whilst working on Cerebus was Hawaii and that the strangest place was Australia.
He told me about how someone gave him and Ger tickets for Bruce Springsteen and since neither of them were big fans they traded them for George Thorogood tickets instead.
Dave reads from the Bible , the Koran and the Torah but not Buddhist texts as he is a monotheist.
Dave gets on well with both his neighbours on either side of him and will often greet people by name as he walks along in this town he has grown up in and lived in all his life. That reminds me of Alan Moore who similarly lives in Northampton and does not venture very far from his house and does not make a big deal about being a famous comic book creator who is adored by thousands of comic books fanatics.
In Camp David I got to see all the boxes of correspondence that Dave keeps including two labelled Steve Ditko which are not to be shown to anyone as per the late Mr. Ditko's instructions.
We packaged up and sent the Kickstarter rewards #s 5 through 7 which I had not been able to afford at the time to my home address and when I return to the land of Oz I will pay him for them.
I got him to sign a few of his publications I had brought with me ....
All in all I took maybe about a hundred photos or so but I'm only posting the ones you see here. If you want to see any more of the goodies that David has on display at his house I suggest you take him up on his Kickstarter Rewards options and do your own Off White House tour and spend the day with Dave Sim. You only live once. What the hell else are you gonna do with your time and money?
For full details of the photos above read I was Lenny Henry's 40th Birthday Present
The day ended rather strangely with a dinner at Pizza Pizza interrupted by someone begging for money from us. Dave didn't have any on him and I was all set to give him $10 but he insisted very vehemently that he really needed $20 and eventually I gave him that amount as he was extremely agitated about it. Dave prayed over the food before we ate it.
PS My 15 Seconds of Fame occured at the start of Dave's 24th of August, 2018 Weekly update.