One of the best pieces of literature I’ve ever read – never mind one of the best comics – was Art Spiegelman’s Maus, his touching tale of Jewish oppression in Nazi Germany that presented Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.
Dave Sim has now emerged from the hiatus he imposed on himself after completing the monumental Cerebus, and is telling the world that his next work, Judenhass, will be about the Holocaust.
Or rather, he’s getting other people to tell the world for him, in order to avoid trivialising the death of six million people.
And that’s just one thing about Sim’s Judenhass that is pissing off Brendan McCarthy.
The artist also takes Sim to task in this thread at Mark Millar’s MillarWorld for saying that every creator should write a story about the Holocaust at some point in his career.
McCarthy says: “I’m not sure I follow the logic: ‘In order to avoid trivializing the Holocaust, Dave Sim will be doing almost no active promotion for Judenhass.’ Of course I understand that Mr Sim wants to create a suitable atmosphere of reverential gravitas around his comic book, but his reasoning, ie – that to ‘promote’ a book on the holocaust is to ‘trivialize’ it, seems bizarre. So instead, he asks some other people to promote it, which, apparently isn’t trivialising the holocaust! OK, got it. Perhaps he’ll have a have a word with the publicists for Schindler’s List… Or even Maus.
“Well, I had a quick look at the online preview… Mr Sim reckons that every creative person should at some point, create a work that addresses the holocaust. I’m not Jewish myself, but obviously I think it was a terrible historical event. Through the random biological process of fertilization, I happen come from Irish DNA: Personally, I don’t think that makes me ‘chosen’ by God or any other tribal supernatural entity, but I do think that every creative person should do a work that examines the shocking crime of the Irish Famine, where horrific, deliberate actions by the British led to decades of death, poverty, hardship and mass emigration. And every creative person in the USA should produce a graphic novel on the utterly intentional ethnic cleansing of their own Native American peoples. Twenty million white slavic Russians estimated killed under the Soviet Communists may be worth a mini-series or two.
“In the Second World War, 60 million people were killed, the vast majority of them civilians. An examination of totalitarian systems, whether of the right or the left and how ’soft’ fascism rises and hardens in democratic societies may be the more urgent subject matter.
“I find Mr Sim’s idea that hatred of Jews (’judenhass’) is somehow a sort of innate psychological disorder in non-jews ( y’know, 99.999% of the Earth’s population) to be a deeply insulting and wackily racist idea. Tell that to the millions of ordinary working people who gave their lives liberating the camps: They were all a bunch of latent ‘anti-semites’, but just didn’t know it.
“I think I’ll give Mr Sim’s graphic guilt-trip a pass.”
Right on Brendan! Tell it like it is! I’ve seen Steven Spielberg give interviews about Schindler’s List and that didn’t seem to trivialise the Holocaust. And it does come across as a bit, well, daft, to let people like Neil Gaiman and Joe Kubert gush about your comic, but then go onto a message board and tell people you won’t be promoting it.
Still no sign of a reply from Sim…
2 Comments
April 3, 2008 at 8:02 am
“I know how the media mind operates. What the media mind wants to do is to ignore what JUDENHASS is saying and shift the focus from The Shoah to Dave Sim. When it has accomplished that, it will then accuse Dave Sim of thinking himself more important than The Shoah. I have said all that I have to say in Jeff Seiler’s magazine (Cerebus Readers in Crisis #3) and on the website (www.Judenhass.com). No matter how long an article anyone intends to write they will never use all that I have written so it is useless to write anything further.”
“I have promoted glamourpuss and I’m now waiting to see how it does. I have released JUDENHASS and now I’m waiting to see how it does. As far as I know I will have nothing to say about either.”
-Dave Sim
August 25, 2008 at 1:32 pm
I don’t know what to say about this. It seems that the Dave Sim hate machine is so far out of control that it is even attacking a beautiful and compassionate book like “Judenhass”.
If Dave had promoted it as you suggest he should’ve all of you that fill your empty days with slashing Sim would have thrashed him for going on a media rampage so as to “cash in” on the Holocaust.
This constant marginalizing of Sim is just becoming ridiculous.
It’s no wonder Sim doesn’t own a computer and asks for people to sign an online petition. You are so far out of control that no matter what the man does from this point on it will be targetted for derision.
Laughable and transparent.
Take up golf, it requires less energy than upholding all this silly vehemence.
Unbelievable.