Thursday 17 May 2012

Big Words From Alan Moore

The Comics Journal #138 (October 1990)
Art by Bill Sienkiewicz


ALAN MOORE:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #138, October 1990)
Dave Sim and Gerhard. There you've got some consummate storytelling. It's always possible to learn from Dave... His sense of timing. Comics in Dave's hands comes closest to music in some respects, in that he's got such a perfect sense of comic timing. And he's also got - like I say, the thing that's very important to me - the desire to push forward and experiment and move into untested ground. What Dave has managed to do with an aardvark barbarian character that started off as a Barry Smith Conan parody, what he's managed to say in the context of that strip is staggering. I could never do that. I would feel so limited by the restrictions of the character and the world that I would never attempt to do a book as long as Cerebus, but what Dave's done is he's come up and met that challenge. It's difficult to imagine something that Dave couldn't address in Cerebus. Despite the fact that it superficially looks like a limited world, he manages to be able to talk about anything people can talk about in other books. There's not a lot of people who you can learn from in terms of storytelling, but Dave's always one of them.

1 comment:

Eric Hoffman said...

Moore is on the money (as usual) about the narrative flexibility Sim instilled in Cerebus and how this greatly benefited the comic and made it a viable story over so many years. Sim's genius touch was to utilize unreliable narrators and varying perspectives to keep the story fresh and also compensate for any unintentional errors in continuity, an inevitable occurrence in a book of such page length and time in completion. Sim said he never read the issues again after publishing them, but depended on memory, almost reveling in its fallibility - its inaccuracy - which is, ironically, also its strength, as it results in a creative reaction to "what happened", i.e. my version of the truth, the inevitable colorings of perspective, what filters through . . . Great post, Tim!