Wednesday 30 April 2014

Emotions

Cerebus #198 (September 1995)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard
DAVE SIM:
(from Aardvark Comment in Cerebus #197, August 1995)
...Sure I use emotion in my work. My characters are not me. Various emotions are among the strongest colours on the palette and any observation of the human condition goes into the writer's repertoire [to mix a metaphor]. The mistake emotional people make is in feeling that, because I can document emotion accurately, I must be an active participant. To quote the Zulli character in 193, 'I have a speculative nature -- it posed no great difficulty.' I certainly try to communicate as much sensory stimuli as I can in three hundred issues. Like most emotional beings, you're mistaking the reaction to the sensory stimuli for the stimuli themselves. The book IS designed to make you -- and people like you -- FEEL. It is a common misapprehension that Reads was an emotional work because most people had an emotional reaction to it. Those are two very different things and one of the linchpins of my argument.

1 comment:

Tony Dunlop said...

Randy Newman has said much the same thing - he says he doesn't really experience much in the way of emotion, but he has figured out how to write songs that deeply affect those who do. Along the same lines, just because Alan Moore (say) can get into the head of Jack the Ripper doesn't mean he wants to go out and kill hookers...