How do you begin to describe Dave Sim, and Cerebus, the comic that he put out 300 monthly issues of? A middling sword and sorcery parody when it started, within a year or so Cerebus started to find its feet and became a hugely accomplished and ambitious tale taking in politics, religion, relationships and gender.

Cerebus is an amazing, frustrating, complex piece of work, sometimes magnificent, other times wildly self-absorbed. For the first 200 issues at least though, it was following a clear course, and its sometimes obscure subsequent waywardness can be forgiven: no one else has tackled something as ambitious as Cerebus in the world of comics, at least in terms of scope, and perhaps they never will.

Sim’s lettering portrays personality beautifully, and after a while he was joined by collaborator Gerhard, whose input ensured that the comic’s backgrounds were as striking as Sim’s rapidly improving character work. And if that weren’t enough, Cerebus became the focal point of the small press revolution, inspiring countless people to self-publish their own comics. Many failed, but those that survived helped redefine what comics were capable of. Bone, Strangers in Paradise, Kane, A Distant Soil, Bacchus: all undeniably influenced by the success of Cerebus and its creator.

I interviewed Sim and Gerhard in 1993, and found them hospitable, intelligent, and fascinating company. This was before Sim’s infamous anti-woman outburst in issue 186 of his comic, and it may be that the interview would have taken a different tack had it been published before we met. That said, it’s arguable that his views have been stereotyped by people eager to shout misogyny but silent when it comes to putting them in the context of Sim’s historic mental health problems (I say this based on experience of working with people with mental health issues). It’s also the case that his beliefs didn’t get in the way of Sim creating some of the most compelling and three-dimensional female characters to be found on the comics page.

One issue of particular concern was the balance of left and right brain, of the linear and non-linear, in creating a project as vast as Cerebus. I asked what the blend of planning and spontaneity was in the comic:

Sim It’s a nice mix. As Neil Gaiman put it, it’s as if you’re building a bridge, but you’re not building a bridge sequentially, the way you have to do it in the physical world. The moment you start building it on this side, it starts growing from the other side. And you just start trying to predict where all the curlicues and whatnot are going to be, and all of a sudden one of them shows up, and you’ve got a chunk of the bridge about 30 feet out in mid-air that’s about 15 feet higher than you thought it was supposed to be.

AR And you don’t know how the hell it’s going to work.

Sim You don’t let that trouble you. You just start building the rest of it, and eventually some dramatic curve comes in and you go ‘Oh, alright, it’s going to rise up in some way and hook up with this side. And I can see now looking at all this stuff that’s getting built on the other side in my unconscious mind that yeah, this could be quite attractive when it’s done. You know, it could be quite symmetrical.’

Which is as good an answer as you’re likely to get, and accords with my own experience of planning and writing scripts. However much you plan them – and you need to if you’re going to feasibly bring in a workable story within however many pages you’re working to – there are and always will be elements that find a place in the script without you having intended them to be there. And quite often they’re the ones that make the whole thing shine. But that magic doesn’t happen without planning: you have to prepare the ground carefully before something unexpected will grow from it, fly over it, or tapdance in the centre of it all.

If you’d like a copy of the interview I did with Sim and Gerhard, please get in touch: it runs to 20 pages and hasn’t been published. And keep an eye out for Judenhass, Sim’s forthcoming solo story about the Jewish Holocaust, which advance reports are saying is very good indeed: see www.judenhass.com. There’s also Glamourpuss, just starting, an ongoing series that’s a curious hybrid of homage to womens’ fashion and photorealistic cartooning: www.glamourpusscomic.com.