Halo halo

Onion: Once you made that decision, how far in advance did you plan out the story?

Dave Sim: I moved from the three- and four-issue story arcs to, first of all, High Society—the barbarian at the five-star hotel—and the unheard-of-at-the-time ambition of doing a 500-page graphic novel which swept Cerebus up into the world of politics, because I’ve always been a political junkie. I had no real interest in Conan, even to make fun of him, but by making him the exception in the environment, I could write and draw what I was actually interested in: an involved election parody, with electoral districts, voting patterns, campaigning. Of course, now Conan is the governor of California, so I guess I was just 20 years ahead of my time.

“I get into awful trouble where I’m sitting there going, ‘I can’t get the eye.’ It’s like of course you can’t, it’s like a sixty-fourth of an inch wide and it’s perfect. It’s a supermodel, so it’s an absolutely perfectly shaped eye. It gives you great reverence for God’s handiwork. It’s like, ‘Man oh man I can’t even draw that and God created that’ — it’s just absolutely amazing.”

— Dave Sim on copying pictures from fashion magazines

(illustration by Jillian Tamaki for O Magazine)