Comments on: Meeting Dave Simons

By: Mark Ammerman

Mark Ammerman — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:34:49 +0000

Dave Simons’ middle name was Lloyd. It was his grandfather’s name…and his grandparents lived up the road from me in Seelyville, Pennsylvania. Dave and I connected somehow in our middle teens, one summer when he was visiting his name-sake. We drew comics together, swam in the river, rode horses, played golf (Dave couldn’t hit the doggone thing to save his life!)…and dreamed of becoming comic book pros. Dave’s dream came true. I have many wonderful memories from those years which now feel like fantasy.

Dave’s first printed comic work (that I’m aware of) was a comic strip in his school newspaper called Night Rider (I have photocopies of some of them). NR was a motorcycle character…and Dave revisited his love for such characters in his later professional work on Ghost Rider.

His first printed comic work in Fandom (to my knowledge) was in my own fanzine, Comic Courier…and later in a zine that he and I worked on together: The Wonderful World of the Wild and Wicked West. I have that artwork still (and stuff we hoped to publish but never did).

Dave wanted to go to art school after high school, but parental pressure pushed him into the Coast Guard. He was stationed on Governor’s Island off Manhatten…and fell in love with the Big Apple.

Scientology got a hold of him…and took all his money ( I wrote him a song during that time…reaching out to him when it seemed that he was so lost). He took classes under John Buscema. He lived in a roach-filled apartment in Greenwich Village. He lived in a warehouse at the lower end of Manhattan. He fell in love…wanted to marry… it didn’t happen. He was pencilling the first issue of Red Sonja during that time: beautiful pencils (ruined by Vince Coletta’s inks!) He lived lots of other places…made new friends…kept drawing. He made his mark in the real comic book world–and beyond.

He and I lost touch. I tracked him down in California. Then back on the East Coast. Then no word. A phone call. A letter. Where was this guy?

Then a couple of days ago I found him online! I saw pictures of him. I discovered that he’d been battling cancer. I saw that he had moved to Jersey City. I found his blog…an e-mail address…I sent him an e-mail…and then I revisited the site where I found his blog…and discovered my friend had passed from this planet two days earlier!

Dave and I were both born in 1954. I have missed him through the years—I miss him terribly just now.

“Life is a brief minute…eternity follows.”

Mark Ammerman

By: Pinoy Comics USA

Pinoy Comics USA — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:09:00 +0000

Gerry, JM,
And yet, I personally like to go to Wiki for anything I want to know about a person, hahaha. The thing is they’re fast and so accessible.
Never noticed Dave Simmons myself. The guy died so young. I like your story about him in Facebook. I stopped going to or adding any images to Facebook after I heard that they would own all intellectual rights to anything you send to them, which is in fine print when you signed an agreement the first time you joined.
Rod

By: Daniel Best

Daniel Best — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:06:15 +0000

Just a small thing – Dave was 54 years old. Mark E got it slightly wrong when he wrote his short piece on Dave.

It’s little things like that that help make entries such as the Wiki incorrect. I wrote that entry, BTW, in conjunction with Dave, and he encouraged me, quietly, to keep fighting both the Wiki and to fix any errors that came along.

I miss him already.

By: Eusebio Yu

Eusebio Yu — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:54:57 +0000

Yeah, I remember Dave Simons. He inked a few Spider-Man books, and issue #27 of The Hulk! black and white magazine. It was the last issue. I still have it.

By: Journalista - the news weblog of The Comics Journal » Blog Archive » June 11, 2009: Shorter Journalista 22

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:23:19 +0000

[...] comic-book artist and animator Dave Simons has died at the age of 55, after succumbing to cancer. Gerry Alanguilan offers a tribute to [...]

By: Gerry Alanguilan

Gerry Alanguilan — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:54:03 +0000

Yes, wikipedia is by nature an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It does open up the site to numerous inaccuracies. You have to register to make any changes and if you do, all changes to any particular entry is logged and attributed to whoever edited the page. The site does have main editors to check for spurious entries, but not enough I believe.

By: Jose Mari Lee

Jose Mari Lee — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:29:11 +0000

Whe-he-he.

Indeed, the world wide web is almost like a paradox: It is a well of truth, yet also a web of lies.

Who are these people running this Wikipedia site? There are so many inaccuracies in some of the entries. I went there after reading your comment here (my first visit), and a lot of things are guess work by the people who put the entries, especially details on well-known personalities. Is this a FREE-FOR-ALL type of site? The first few entries I checked out were all laden with inaccurate information. There should be some sort of QUALITY CONTROL over this site’s entries. Some of them are bordering on jokes and/or pranks by some sociopaths or simply irresponsible people who have too much idle time to waste.

The site should also have a DISCLAIMER because some people who are not discriminating – might believe everything that this site is saying. I don;t know. I might sound old fashioned, but Encyclopedia is still the most reliable for me.