I got a free issue of Glamourpuss in the mail when I bought a sketch off him. My first reaction was "What the hell is this?" and my second was "I can't believe this has ran for so many issues!"

I really didn't get it at all.

Sim's characters might be one of the best angles from which to discuss Sim, because even though he made certain characters to expouse his beliefs, they're not limited to giving speeches about What the Author Thinks.

For instance, Sim's take on Jaka evolves over time. She was a favorite with Cerebus-fans for many years, and though Sim puts her through the wringer in the late volumes, there is a sense that her character keeps a certain "je ne sais quoi" despite the author's conscious concerns.

I'll hypothesize that Sim kept it going as a labor of love until the numbers got so low that Diamond wouldn't carry it any more.

I'd have said that until i read a little about the sculptor and designer Eric Gill...

For me, I guess, part of it is that I have no interest in reading anything by people whose beliefs I find generally abhorrent (Sim, Card & Frank Miller, for instance), so I couldn't care less about how they got that way. Lovecraft is an obvious exception, considering his racist beliefs (though at least he never sent money to the Klan or the like, which is pretty much the equivalent of what Card has done & what the people who buy his stuff helped make sure, however inadvertantly, that he was in a position to do ... of course, HPL was too impoverished to ever have considered such a thing, anyway), but then there are always exceptions.

As for the truth being depressing, it almost always is, whether it involves a creator's life or not. You've mentioned, IIRC, your own religiously restricted upbringing -- sounds depressing to me, but also fascinating. And I've mentioned my own ridiculously straight-outta-Faulkner background as well -- manic-depressive, ultimately institutionalized mother, PTSD-afflicted father who died at 34, Down syndrome sister, etc. ... also depressing, but (I venture to say) offbeat enough to, I hope, be interesting, at least for fans of Southern gothic.

To me, people's lives tend to be intriguing, assuming they didn't grow up in a purely Leave It to Beaver setting ... & I suspect hardly anyone ever did, once one looks beneath the surface.

Again, though, we're all different, & so of course are our interests. My academic training is as a historian, my professional experience as a journalist, so I'm almost certainly more inclined to be interested in real life (for lack of a better term) than a lot of others, I suppose.