Dave Sim is a mad, mad bastard.

Now, let me reassure you right from the outset. This column is not going to be a point-by-point rebuttal of Sim's increasingly bizarre public statements. That could be a complete waste of my time and yours. I am not interested in Sim's ramblings. Not in that way, anyway.

But what interests me is the number of people who still are interested. Sim has been cultivating a reputation as a seriously warped mind for a few years now, but in recent months he's excelled himself. Nobody much seems to care about the stories he publishes in CEREBUS any more. Attention on that book focuses almost exclusively on Sim's lengthy and perverse text pieces in the back. In recent months, readers watched with amazement as Sim publicly challenged loveable Jeff Smith to a boxing match on the grounds that this was how real Men resolved their differences.

This was impressively demented, but nothing compared to the now notorious issue #265. That issue opens with Sim reprinting a letter of resignation from his proofreader Diana Schutz, who was declining to continue working for him on the basis that she was uncomfortable with the material. There follows a twenty page Cerebus story, which nobody has paid any attention to at all.

There then follows a dissertation on Sim's views on gender, entitled "On gender: Tangent", and clocking in at twenty pages. Much of the content is already familiar to regular readers of CEREBUS. Sim identifies men with reason, logic and creativity, and women with emotion, stupidity and emptiness. He then goes on to bemoan the feminisation of western culture. Recent elaborations on this include a distinction between males and Men (so as to explain why it is that Sim's definition of maleness bears no resemblance to the real world), and the expansion of his attack to include "homosexualists."

Spreading himself widely, Sim goes on to attack the concepts of alimony, Gay Pride, animal rights and child poverty (Sim insists that no such thing exists) before building to a climax with a five page history of the career of Martin Luther King. The issue ends with a disclaimer waiving copyright to the Tangent article and allowing it to be reproduced in its entirety by anyone who feels the urge.

Now, you might think that not many people would feel the urge to reproduce such an obvious pile of nonsense. Borderline maniacs are rarely taken up on this kind of offer, unless they've written the Unabomber Manifesto. But you would be wrong. "Tangent" has spawned lengthy discussions on comics forums across the Internet. The Comics Journal immediately put the entire thing up on their website, and announced their intention to reprint it in their next issue.

And this is the bit that interests me. Why is a journal of serious comics criticism bothering to reprint this junk? It's not even about comics. For that matter, why are reasonable people bothering to discuss it at all?

'It reads like the rambling screeds that paranoids scrawl with crayons.' It's certainly not because anyone takes "Tangent" seriously as a subject for discussion. Opinion has basically divided into two camps. The majority maintains that "Tangent" is the product of a diseased mind. That's certainly my view. It reads exactly like the sort of rambling screeds that paranoids scrawl in capitals with crayons, accusing the CIA of planting radio transmitters in their heads. Sim has a history of mental illness, into which "Tangent" fits rather neatly. The minority view is that "Tangent" is some kind of situationist stunt and that he doesn't really mean it. This theory would be nice to believe, but Sim's public behaviour seems to be along the same lines. It's just no longer credible that he's taking the piss, unless he's trying to turn his entire life into some kind of artistic statement. Which wouldn't exactly be the sign of a stable mind either, come to think of it.

The point is, though: nobody takes this nonsense seriously. So why do we care what nonsense Dave Sim runs in his own comic? Of course, there's a certain element of "let's gawp at the loony", but that doesn't feel like the whole story. Plenty of loonies out there if you like that sort of thing.

A part of it, undoubtedly, is that Sim's viewed as an important creator. But really, it's been a while since CEREBUS was considered essential reading for all comics fans. The stories that tend to be recommended to newcomers cover the span from 'High Society' to 'Jaka's Story' or, at a push, 'Melmoth'.

Sim is still an extremely imaginative storyteller, and his books contain a wealth of unusual storytelling techniques you won't often see elsewhere. On that technical level, CEREBUS remains a highly impressive book that is well worth looking into. But the soul of the stories has drifted further and further away into Sim's curious obsessions, leaving the series increasingly as a technical masterclass devoted to highly esoteric subject matter of limited interest to anyone that isn't Dave Sim. 'Guys' bordered on unreadable, and the recent Hemingway storyline devoted a painfully extended period of months to regaling us in mind-numbing detail with an anecdote about lion-hunting that Sim had read in a book he didn't even like. The relative success of "Going Home" probably has a lot to do with Sim focusing again on his two central characters and getting on with the breakdown of their relationship, which is at least of some interest to his readers.

'Is Sim still a particularly important creator?' But creatively, is Sim still a particularly important creator? Certainly not as much as he was; the contribution that CEREBUS was going to make has probably been made by now. It remains an interesting book for those who want to see what you can do with the medium, but for a wider audience it's nothing to write home about.

I think a large part of the reason why people still care is that Sim spent years as the most prominent voice promoting self-publishing. He's a lot quieter about it now, but in the eyes of the comics community, Sim's still strongly associated with the self-publishing movement and the whole field of creators' rights. These are deeply fashionable causes, for a variety of extremely good reasons. And Sim was a leading figure in that movement.

This, after all, is the man who could always be held up as a towering example of what you could do if you put your mind to it. A self-publisher, with only Gerhard to assist him. Total creative control. A wildly ambitious project that looks like commercial suicide - three hundred monthly issues following the life of a pseudo-medieval aardvark. Twenty-five years of glacially paced biography. Nobody in their right mind would try to make a living at that.

But Sim has tried and succeeded. He has kept his back catalogue in print through trade paperbacks (another deeply fashionable idea right now). He has kept his financial independence. He has somehow managed to make a living at a project that all common sense tells us should be economically disastrous. He appears to live in some kind of pocket dimension where the normal laws of business have been suspended.

All of this is genuinely impressive, and by rights Sim ought now to be coasting through the last few years of CEREBUS as a respected elder statesman of comics. We want him to be the hero. We want him to be the man who defeated overwhelming commercial adversity to realise his artistic vision. Sim's business model represents everything that we're meant to be in favour of. He's meant to be the good guy.

'Sim ought to be a respected elder statesman of comics.' But Sim, damn him, is refusing to play along. He's crossing the line from charmingly eccentric to socially unacceptable. This is deeply inconvenient. It sits very uneasily with the myth of the artist as somebody who has dazzling insights into the big issues. It needs explaining. When all conventional wisdom says he's meant to be the conquering hero, Sim has reinvented himself as a maniac who you'd cross the street to avoid. It wasn't meant to happen like this.

So far, even though it's passed its creative peak, the quality of the actual stories hasn't suffered too badly. I genuinely hope it stays that way, because it would be tragic if Sim got this close to completing his life's work, twenty-five years of effort, and then blew it at the last moment. Even if we're not really reading CEREBUS any more, we'd all like Sim to make it to the end. But when you read Sim's ravings, you get the sinking feeling that it's all going to go horribly wrong.

And what have we had recently? A crashingly dull, extended story about Mary Hemingway eating lions, apparently to illustrate the failings of womankind. Then, 'Going Home', which focussed on the relationship between Cerebus and Jaka. The depiction of Jaka has wavered from the reasonable to the downright odd. The spoilt princess character seen here isn't impossible to reconcile with the barroom dancer from 'Jaka's Story', but it seems a curiously negative shift in her depiction.

Still, thirty-five issues to go. Three years. All he has to do is keep this kind of thing to a minimum, ride it out to a competent ending, complete what's now doomed to be a badly flawed work, but at least get the recognition for having made it to the end. He deserves to make it.

But I've got a sinking feeling he won't.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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