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Try not to pay too much attention to the idiotic and silly cover to Glamourpuss #1. I half think Dave Sim put up a cover that’s trying to emulate a fashion magazine so he’d keep out those comic fans who are too “cool” and “hip” to read a silly comic about women’s fashion. I know that’s an odd thing to think of, especially if Sim wants this book to be successful enough but it takes a bit not to judge this book by the cover. Heck, even the artwork on the cover isn’t that good. The cover and the fashion content are a road block to the book, a way to keep out the riff-raff while Sim prepares to tell us why he really brought us all together under the cover of Glamourpuss.

You see, it is all about fashion and beautiful women. Well, that and the men who were perfectly able to capture them in ink during the fifties and sixties. Dave Sim’s first major published work since Cerebus isn’t about politics, religion or the sexes but about Alex Raymond, All Williamson, Neal Adams and John Prentice, the photo-realist comic strip artists who are Sim’s idols and inspiration. One part history lesson and one part art lesson, Glamourpuss is Dave Sim’s very public attempt to define elements of these artists’ work and to learn how to become on of them. And what better way to do that than by trying to draw beautiful, fashionable and glamorous women in their photo-realistic style.

Dave Sim has always put himself out there. Cerebus eventually became as much about Sim as it was about the earth aardvark as his own thoughts on religion and the sexes explicitly crept into the the latter half of the series. Those elements had always been there and had been what made Cerebus a truly fascinating read, learning about Sim through the letter pages but when the Dave Sim persona (complete with its charges of sexism and misogyny) became increasingly the focus of the actual Cerebus narrative, the book became more and more uncomfortable and Sim himself became more and more difficult to reconcile.

In Glamourpuss Sim remains as much up and center, hijacking the narrative by the second page to turn the book to be about himself and about his artistic heroes. Dave Sim ruminating on his favorite artists is a lot easier to accept and digest than his ruminating on gender roles ever was. And as he’s writing about these artists, he’s recreating panels of theirs. The book is filled with Sim’s attempts to recreate and learn from some great artwork of the photo realists. Sim admits that they’re tracings of Prentice’s or Williamson’s work but he’s trying to pull them apart and put them back together. He’s attempting to learn from them. He then applies those lessons to his own artwork through recreating photographs out of fashion magazines in pen, brush and ink.

It’s early in Sim’s attempt at self-education in the photo-realist process so it is easy to understand his tracing and taking images from photos even if that’s what we accuse artists like Greg Land of. When Land does it, it’s a crime. So how can we accept it when Sim does it and denounce it when Land does it? Sim explains it perfectly toward the beginning of this issue and explains how and when photo-realism is just more than tracing or copying photographs: “And I move across a spectrum of photo-realism styles… depending on the look of the pencil tracing once I’ve tranferred it [from the original picture] to the art board, ‘translating’it into comics form… and it is really a process of ‘translation’: simplifying facial features and clothing details while retaining as many of them as possible.” Art is about choices and Glamourpuss is about what choices artists make and how they make them. Sim is learning how his heroes made those choices and learning how to make those choices on his own.

Glamourpuss #1

Written and Drawn by: Dave Sim

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