Cartooning Talk, "Do the Math" - "This Time: It's Epic"

Let’s do a little compare and contrast...

Dave Sim, when he was young, began experimenting with drugs in his early years, at the age of 23, specifically with LSD in particular, which resulted in his being hospitalized in a psychiatric ward right around the same age. His stay in the hospital and his experience taking LSD inspired him to later go on to produce the ongoing, but ultimately finite series, Cerebus the Aardvark, which was 300 issues long. The Cerebus project of 300 issues and 6,000 pages of story (not counting all his pre-production sketch and notebooks) and artwork took Sim roughly around 27 years to complete.

I’m 28. Since I’m starting work on a literary Odyssey this year, in 2012, by the time I’m finished with it, if I invest the same amount of momentum Dave Sim, the irony of my potential success would be that I’d complete the same time span of work (27 years) at exactly the age of 55, 27 years from now, in the year 2067. That’s the exact age my biological father died of emphysema at, according to his death certificate. So I’d literally be working nonstop from now, this year till my dying year and day, for the sake of completing a book. But clearly it would not be an ordinary book. I would be inventing a whole new way of making comics and animation, and independent comics, and webcomics, and graphic novels, and cartooning, and storytelling, and graphic fiction. I don’t know if I want to finish my greatest work on the exact same year as my death. But 55 is apparently the magic number here, or at least double numbers are.

Parallax is not a mere comic book. It’s so much more of an investment than that for me. It’s a life project. An Epic Journey and Quest, with a beginning, middle, and end, which could very well span 27 years, to the very year of my own death potentially. Not intentionally so. Even if that does end up being the case it would not have been an intentional move for timing to be so life and death like that. But that just further proves that creativity storytelling is my Pathway to God. It’s my Pathway to Destiny. It goes beyond life and death. Not intentionally, But I’m so devoted to my work it almost feels like it’s turning into life and death. Cerebus to me is an unspeakably impressive achievement, one that is hard to trivialize, especially with the older and more historic Dave Sim’s achievement in comics gets. I have an almost religious devotion to the creative and narrative work ethic of Dave Sim: Unpopular with fans, but silently powerful.