Of course, then Sim couldn’t finish the book. He puts himself in the book, “talking” to the audience and he goes through all this stuff, and then he invents the comic book store employee, who is presumably fictional, although it’s clear someone modeled for her (she says as much), and then she finds out she’s in a comic, and then, and then, and then … it’s a lot. Sim talk about the “metaphysics” of the comics, and that takes on several new layers with the way he tells the story. This book is just over 300 pages, and it is stuffed with weird stuff. Sim finds connections (like that one) to Raymond and almost everyone in comics (Kirby, for instance, has a small but crucial role in this book) and goes down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, going backward in time to George Harriman and Krazy Kat and all over the world, linking the tiniest details in the artwork of the newspaper strips with … well, to tell you what he links them to would be spoiling things, and I really don’t want to, because it’s something, all right. It’s very hard to describe it without getting into the minutiae that Sim himself gets into, but it involves Margaret Mitchell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gone With the Wind, who was killed in 1949 when she was struck by a car. It’s extremely interesting if you’re into the comics creating process, which I am, but even if you’re not, Sim makes it much more soap operatic than you might expect.
Sim does a lot on how Raymond worked, clever tricks he used to make his art so good, and how he evolved over the years. He does this with a framing device in which an employee at a comic book store in Ontario, who had not heard of Raymond, reads each “issue” (the story originally was a back-up in glamourpuss before Sim expanded it) as it mysteriously arrives on her counter. Sim goes into the ways they stole from each other (consciously and unconsciously) and how they took shots at each other in their strips. Raymond created Flash Gordon, then did Rip Kirby before his death Foster is famous for Prince Valiant Caniff created Terry and the Pirates and then Steve Canyon, and they were all very popular and jealous of the others. Raymond, Hal Foster, and Milton Caniff are regarded as the three pillars of comic art, creating “schools” that most modern cartoonists fit into in one way or another, and they were rivals for the audience in a time when having your own newspaper strip was the pinnacle of the field. Raymond is widely regarded as the best comics artist of all time, and Sim wanted to bring his work to a modern audience while examining his death and the odd circumstances surrounding it. He also became interested in the death of Alex Raymond, who slammed a car into a tree on 6 September 1956 – a car that belonged to Stan Drake, who did not die in the accident and continued working for decades afterward.
Sim began the story of Alex Raymond in glamourpuss, his fashion comic of 2008-2012, when he became fascinated by photorealistic artwork. It is truly and unabashedly unique, and we will probably never see anything like it again. I love it as an exercise, I’m a bit horrified by it as an exegesis, and I’m saddened by it as an unfinished project that goes off on so many weird tangents that it feels like it could be double the length and still not be finished. It certainly seemed to drive both Sim and Grubaugh mad, as they appear in the book, and even if you don’t get into the weeds that they do, it’s still a profoundly weird reading experience. It’s also perhaps the most insane thing you will ever read, and I’m not sure it hasn’t driven me mad. There’s no doubt that this is a masterpiece, a work of staggering genius by a creator who knows a thing or two about creating great comics. And into this polarized comics community comes The Strange Death of Alex Raymond, which Sim started and Carson Grubaugh finished and which, after several years of stops and starts, has been published by Living the Line. Sim is far more talented than, say, Ethan van Sciver, so people can feel fine about abandoning van Sciver despite liking his work than they do about abandoning Sim. He’s undoubtedly an amazing creator, but his personal statements have made him a bit of a pariah, even if they’re not so bad that people abandon him completely (like, say, Gerard Jones, who’s not polarizing because everyone – rightly – has turned against him). “One too many cold beers one night, wrapped himself around a telephone pole”ĭave Sim is, perhaps, one of the most polarizing comics creators ever, if not in the pole position for that dubious title.