All Careers End In Failure

...This isn’t a good time to be putting the boot in to Dave Sim. Aged 60, he's in an increasingly desperate situation. Cerebus has gone out of print leaving him with no income from his life's work. He's remastering and reprinting that, volume by volume with the help of Kickstarters, but it's a costly process and the costs are all upfront. He's also preparing for his death by packaging his house, his original art, his notebooks and all the rest of his archives up as a trust, so it can be open to the public after he's gone. And he was continuing to work on SDOAR, which IDW were publishing as a OGN. That's on the rational side. But he's injured his hand so can no longer draw or even sign his name cutting off his only remaining income stream, and rather than accept medical opinion about how to fix it he's had an MRI scan and is crowdsourcing opinion about what to do next. Through a mix of misfortune, principled decisions and irrational, harmful decisions, he's in big trouble. The Strange Death of Alex Raymond, a story about wealthy, successful comic-strip illustrators with their big houses and sports cars and younger wives, may never be finished. Much of Cerebus could become unavailable, perhaps permanently. The idiosyncratic story of a comic-book artist who broke all the rules, who pioneered a model of publishing that arguably changed and saved the industry, could end like all the other stories of comic book artists. Life imprisonment at hard labour in solitary confinement, as Wally Wood called it, ending with your work being forgotten and your money all gone. I'd perhaps heard of Alex Raymond because of Flash Gordon, before I read Glamourpuss, but none of the others were familiar until I realised Al Williamson was the inker on the superb Ann Nocenti-John Romita Jr Daredevil run. He was in his 60s at the time, and that run was printed on toilet paper and largely remains uncollected. All political careers end in failure, they say, and really all careers end in failure but the failure at the end of careers in comics is more acute than most...