Pleased to meet you, Reverend, your cousin is insane
I’m working on a longer account of my time in Wemindji, but this is neat enough that I have to get it out there ASAP:
It was Winter Carnival week in Wemindji, and the return of the Expedition Walkers (as stated, long version of all of this coming soon) was being celebrated with a traditional feast, which equated to about 200 people in the community hall having a dinner of caribou, goose, beaver stew, and about a dozen other things. And I wound up sitting next to Chris Davis, the Anglican minister in Wemindji (he and his wife in the photo above), a very straightlaced, pretty rightish (Anglican ministers range from pretty left-wing to pretty right-wing, and he drifted towards that side of the spectrum) fella. We had a good conversation about all sorts of things, including what it’s like to live up north long-term, his job, the state of the nation, and so on.
The conversation drifted to what I did when I wasn’t in Wemindji, so I talked a bit about translating and, naturally, moved on to the fact that I write comics. I described Man-Man a bit, but didn’t really get into details on Dead Eyes Open — again, conservative Anglican minister, and I didn’t want to freak him out too much.
“Chris’ cousin does some sort of comic strip,” his wife said.
“Oh really?” said I. Figuring that maybe this was an Internet comic strip or something, or maybe he did a comic for his local paper, or whatever. Because, y’know, I’m sitting next to an Anglican minister in Wemindji. “What’s his name?”
“You probably haven’t heard of him,” Chris said.
“Try me,” I said. “I read a lot of comics.”
“David Sim,” Chris said.
I came 90% of the way to doing a spit-take, but caught the apple juice in my mouth. Swallowed hard. “Dave Sim? Your cousin is Dave Sim?!?”
“You’ve heard of him?” Chris seemed sort of surprised that I had.
“Gah,” I said. And collected my thoughts. “That’s so amazing I could vomit,” I said. Hell, I was stunned. I’m lucky a torrent of expletives didn’t volcano out of my mouth.
Chris and his wife stared at me for a few seconds. “He’s a pretty big deal,” I said.
“I’ve never really read his comic strip,” Chris said. “It doesn’t seem like something I’d be interested in.”
“I mean, it’s named after that… oh, in Hell, what’s it called…” his wife said.
“Cerebus.” I said. “The comic is called Cerebus.”
“That’s it,” his wife said. “The dog in Hell.”
“I’m not really interested in that sort of thing,” Chris said.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t think you’d really enjoy it, to be honest. He has some pretty harsh opinions of organized religion.”
“We’re not really in touch,” Chris said. “Is he popular?”
“That’s kind of hard to answer,” I said. Your cousin is a total freakin’ genius but he’s batshit insane and did a 300-issue comic story about an aardvark with a sword crossed my mind. Thankfully, my brain had spooled back up to speed.
“Uh,” I said. And thought for a minute. “From a musical perspective, imagine that you sat down next to someone at a community banquet in Wemindji and found out he was Neil Young’s cousin,” was what I came up with. “Not the top star in the stratosphere, and a lot of people haven’t really heard of him, but if you love that sort of music, it’s really impressive to meet his cousin.”
“Oh,” Chris said.
“But… ah… a lot of his work is sort of … controversial,” I offered.
“He’s not really in touch with the family,” Chris said.
I had a sudden vision of a family gathering in the park, 150+ members of the Davis extended family eating chicken wings and talking about God, when Dave Sim jumps up on the bandstand and starts screaming about Tarim and holy lights and rapacious voids. A chicken wing falls on the grass. Auntie Myrtle faints. Dave Sim starts leaping from picnic table to picnic table, kicking over glasses of lemonade and screaming epithets at both the women present and those accursed, foolish un-men that married them. Eventually the family gathering ends and Dave Sim is left alone under the rented tent, baying at the moon.
“That’s not really surprising,” I said. “He’s kind of known for being a bit reclusive. He has some pretty unusual ideas about male-female relationships.”
“Hmm,” Chris said. “I remember his girlfriend left him in the Eighties and he really took that hard.”
“Yes,” I said, “if you read his comics, you can sort of get that impression.”
Pause. Am I offending Chris? “But he’s very highly regarded as a creator and a trailblazer,” says I. “He did 300 issues of his comic as one complete story that ran over 20 years, and nothing like that’s ever been done before in comics. And he really set some standards for layout and comic design. But around the midpoint of the series, he sort of … got off on a lot of tangents. About … religion and … women … and … stuff.”
Hey, you try to summarize Dave Sim for his cousin, a conservative Anglican minister, at a community feast in a 1200-person Cree community in northern Quebec.
“I see,” Chris said.
Then the conversation drifted onto something else, and eventually I wound up going over to their house to help reconnect the cable from the antenna to the TV in their living room, which had been taken out when the siding on the house was redone last year.
And that is how I met Dave Sim’s cousin.
Nice guy.
Doesn’t really read comics.
I think it’s better that way.