The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / In Which Kid Dynamite, Bingo Little And A Cast Of Thousands Reread Cerebus

In Which Kid Dynamite, Bingo Little And A Cast Of Thousands Reread Cerebus

by 121 Comments

Bingo and I discussed rereading Cerebus at the beginning of the month in the Resolutions thread. Well, here goes.

For the majority of AWers out there scratching their heads and wondering what Cerebus is, some background is in order. I”m going to cheat and copy the description from Page 45’s website (www.page45.com – Britain’s finest comic shop):

CEREBUS was written and drawn by Canadian Dave Sim from start to finish over the course of 23 years. He was joined halfway through CHURCH & STATE on backgrounds and colour covers by landscape artist Gerhard, a man whose meticulous crosshatching puts him right up there with Bernie Wrightson (FRANKENSTEIN), Franklin Booth and even Gustav Doré, and whose architecture is as extraordinary in its own way as Schuiten’s.

“What’s CEREBUS about?” is the usual question.

It’s about 6,000 pages, 300 issues and 16 graphic novels long, plus extras.

It’s about life, death and the bits in between: war, greed, faith and religion, exchange rates, politics, love, freedom of artistic expression, the repression of artistic expression, the war of the sexes, sickness, friendship, loyalty and betrayal, idolatry, adultery, delusion and old age. On reflection I guess it’s also about the bits before and after. On one notable instance it was about the often illusory relationship between the reader, the creator and the printed page, especially in a periodical comic with a letters column (see CEREBUS: READS).

It’s also a parody, caricature and satire. At one point it parodies SANDMAN (Neil Gaiman is an enormous fan), it parodies SPAWN (Todd McFarlane is an enormous fan – though that’s less than a ringing endorsement, I grant you), it incorporates Bacchus (Eddie Campbell loves JAKA’s STORY), it caricatures Margaret Thatcher (who has never even heard of it), and it caricatures Oscar Wilde (who is dead). But that doesn’t mean it’s comedic from start to finish. Rarely have I seen old age and death being addressed at length and so profoundly in comics outside of CEREBUS. Old age in particular seems almost taboo.

As I’ve said, it contains page after page of comicbook innovation: new devices invented by Dave unique to the medium of comics. The lettering itself, once he really gets going, becomes the visual equivalent of onomatopoeia.

But this is the first book and there’s little of that happening here. Around the 10th issue in this reprint of #1-25 – and certainly with the introduction of Lord Julius (Groucho Marx) – the wit really kicks in, but I’ve known this volume’s first few issues put people off the series for life. Understandably so: it starts off as little more than a parody of CONAN THE BARBARIAN, the artwork is comparatively primitive with nods to Barry Windsor-Smith, but you will see the artist in him grow on the printed page.

Instead we recommend you begin either with CEREBUS ZERO which contains the three short stories not included in the books, CEREBUS VOL 2: HIGH SOCIETY if you enjoy riotously funny satire or CEREBUS VOL 5: JAKA’S STORY, if you prefer profoundly moving straight fiction.

Which is odd when you consider that the trappings of CEREBUS are far from straight fiction. For a start its star is an anthropomorphic aardvark in a world full of humans. He is, if you like, the ultimate outsider; a nuisance to some, a deity to others. Also, the world they all inhabit is an anachronistic mix of rifles, swords, sorcery, old Tudor houses and Georgian hotels. There are rocking horses in genteel park playgrounds, and there’s a thriving publishing industry for prose at the same time that barbarians are running amok in loin cloths. The extraordinary thing is that it’s seamless: that it works.

So anyway, CEREBUS VOLUME ONE.

Cerebus is a greedy, belligerent and bellicose barbarian. He’s a nomad. He wanders around from tavern to tavern, drinking whatever he can and pocketing whatever he can lay his four-fingered hands on. Drugged one evening, he falls in love with a dancer called Jaka then barely remembers he met her. Later, without realising it, he starts work as a bodyguard for her uncle Lord Julius (Groucho Marx) whose stranglehold over the local economy is maintained by baffling the opposition. Cerebus also discovers an enormous statue of himself, worshipped by a tribe called the Picts, and in a fit of rage he destroys it. There will be… repercussions.

In addition there’s the first of his out-of-body experiences called Mind Games: if you take all the pages apart and past them together they form a single image which you can view Dave holding aloft in our photo gallery of the Cerebus UK Tour ’93.

So there you are. Cerebus. There is much more that could be said – it’s 6000 pages long after all (laughs at the lightweights over in the War And Peace thread). That summary barely touches on the cosmology throughout the work, the literary biography, the experiments with form, the sheer technical brilliance, or just that the run of nine graphic novels from High Society through to Minds is as good as comics get. This book literally redefined what the medium was capable of. There’s controversy as well. Some of Sim’s views on society are not, shall we say, compatible with modern liberal beliefs. But we’ll save that until we get to Reads.

In many ways, Dave Sim reminds me of his fellow Canadian Neil Young, not least in his fierce determination to do things his own way regardless of critical orthodoxy or fan appreciation (every single issue of Cerebus was self published). They both have large bodies of work with pockets that are alienating, but when they are on their game, there is no one to match them.

All of that notwithstanding, that Page 45 review does touch on one of the major problems with starting Cerebus – the first book just isn’t that good. If we are looking at a reread with the aim of drawing other people along, I’d suggest we start with the second volume, High Society, which can easily be read as a standalone, and is a quantum leap on from the first. HS is a genuine graphic novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, as opposed to the first collections bundling of unlargely unrelated small story arcs, and the art is far better, if not a patch on the brilliance to come.

http://i1058.photobucket.com/albums/t407/maggieloveshopey/Cerebus20Wallpaper20Church20and20State20I_zpsunsetyes.jpg
http://www.page45.com/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?PR=-1&TB=A&page=search&SS=cerebus&S_1_66057_0=No&ACTION=Go%21

1

Comments

    • Ooh – excellent. I’ve some thoughts, but will jot them down properly at work tomorrow.

      What I will say is that Project Cerebus has met its first hitch: a couple of weeks ago I dug back into my comic collection and realised that I gave my copy of High Society to my A-level history teacher back in 1997 (probably on the premise that it would, like, change his life, yeah?).

      Not to worry, thought I, and headed to Forbidden Planet. Where I learned that the book is out of print.

      So I ordered a used copy online – needs must, and, at a tenner, superlative value. Until the useless bastards delivered me an unacceptably dog-eared copy of Jaka’s Story.

      The quest continues. I will not be denied.

  2. I came across Cerebus round about the time of “Church & State”, and was hooked immediately. I bought all the preceding collections, caught up, and bought (and devoured) each subsequent collection as they were published. I stayed with it, boggling at how good it was, right up to the point where the interminable misogynist rants began. Despite accepting that these were a reaction to events in his own life, I found I just couldn’t stay on the ride with what I found a relentlessly bitter and anti-woman worldview being endlessly reiterated. I gave up on it. Maybe my loss, but frankly I felt it was Sim who’d lost the plot, and life was too short. A pity – I’d been looking forward to completing that epic 500-part journey.

    • Join us on our epic quest and try again, Paul. Misery loves company, so if those latter books prove as painful as I think we’re all anticipating there will at least be a team of us braving the summit together.

      I’m not selling this very well, am I?

      • The final third is not as bad as you fear. The plot slows down dramatically, and the Latter Days book especially gets hideously bogged down in Dave’s theology, but even when nothing is happening, it’s still incredible to look at.

  3. I have the first four books (a couple signed by Sim himself) and have to disagree about the dismissal of the first book. That’s where I get the most joy and it’s the one I go back to. It’s a bit like when the X Files vanished into a sea of back story: all I wanted were the monster of the week episodes.

  4. Okay, @Kid-Dynamite, here goes…

    So, I discovered Cerebus the Aardvark when I was about 13 years old. It was the early 90s, and I was just hitting that stage where the luster of superhero comics was beginning to flag a little, and I was ready for something a little more challenging.

    I think I first heard about Sim’s opus via an article in a fanzine. I’d been a long-time fan of Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as the explosion of anthropomorphic titles which followed in its wake (Pre-Teen Dirty Gene Kung Fu Kangaroos? Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters? I bought ’em all), so the idea of an Earth Pig in a world of men was automatically cat-nip to me, and when I read about the scope of the series, which I think was heading into Mothers & Daughters at the time, I was more than willing to give it a go.

    I started off buying new issues as they came out. I loved the art style, and the weird intensity that the comic seemed to have about it, but the story was virtually impossible to make out from such a vantage point. So I started attacking the back issues. Long hours were spent trekking to various comic shops in the South East and beyond, always with the intent of raiding the bins for as many old Cerebus issues as I could lay my mitts on. Somewhere along the line, I learned of the phone books, and that was all she wrote. I consumed them as quickly as I could afford them (i.e. not that quickly), and Cerebus became, and remains, my all time favourite comic.

    Obviously, Sim borrowed as much as he created, both in terms of character archetypes and plots. Cerebus was my point of entry for a lot of the stuff he referenced – I certainly knew little or nothing of the Marx Bros before I laid eyes on Lord Julius, but at 16 years old I was scrambling to lay my hands on any books or movies which could educate me further as to where all this stuff had come from. That was always a real strong point of comics, for me – at 15 or 16, I was getting an education in all sorts of crazy reference points dropped in by writers who were free to indulge their own passions, whether that was Sim and Oscar Wilde, Grant Morrison and nanotechnology, or Alan Moore’s love of mysticism. Comics like this brought me in touch with a world of interesting, seemingly informed adults (or at least they felt like adults to me at the time), whether via the texts themselves, or conversations with the owners of the comic shops I frequented – shout out here to Jon Browne, owner of Richmond’s seminal They Walk Among Us, brother of Cass Browne of the Senseless Things and Delakota, and all round righteous dude, who always had time to talk to his patrons on a level and gave some of the best life guidance I ever heard. If a love of pop culture is characterised by finding a point of interest and pursuing it rabidly to its furthest extension (inspirations/precursors/spiritual successors), then Cerebus was one of the places I got my start.

    Cerebus opened my eyes as to what comics could do. It was mad, and clunky at times, but it was also beautiful, and uplifting and vast. It flowed from the imagination of a single human being, and it reflected his loves and hates, and all the best of worst of his various selves. That, in turn, brought a kind of intimacy to the whole thing, which seemed to make people want to open up. I’ve written in here before about how the letters page of Cerebus was seminal reading to my teenage self; adults (or at least older people) writing in to Sim about their lives: their hopes and fears, their relationship troubles, their struggles to find some sort of balance with the world around them. I was living in a small, commuter belt town with no real alternative scene and a smothering sense of conformity and insularity. I’d never heard grown ups talk about these things, and it felt like a real lifeline at the time, a connection to “my” people – the people I couldn’t seem to fully locate in my immediate environs, but whom I was sure existed out there somewhere.

    I must confess that I dropped out on Cerebus before Sim reached the end of the story. I hit my mid to late teens and the trips to Gosh and Forbidden Planet began to tail off, in favour of other sport. I escaped that small town, and perhaps needed the solace of comics and comic shops a little less than I had. Frankly, I’d also been turned off by the increasing misogyny and the walls of text Sim was sending our way. In retrospect, all that stuff is now sort of what interests me the most – the guy was clearly going through some sort of mini-breakdown, and I kind of find his frankness and lack of self-censorship weirdly admirable, in the same way I used to feel the same about the work of Robert Crumb.

    All of which brings us on to this project, and the intention to spend just North of a year giving Cerebus the full read through it clearly deserves.

    I must admit, I approached this first volume with some trepidation. In my memory, this was the rocky and scorched terrain which had to be crossed to reach the land of milk and honey that is High Society. I was surprised to find that wasn’t entirely the case; this book is a hell of a lot better than I’d remembered it, and you can feel the quality scaling up throughout. Sim dispenses with the series’ original mission statement (shitty Barry Windsor-Smith meets Eastman/Laird hybrid) far more quickly than I’d recalled – I’d actually say that it reaches its nadir in issue 3 (the god awful Red Sophia issue), and everything improves from there.

    You can feel Sim scratching his way towards what the book would eventually become. He keeps maneuvering Cerebus into positions of power and influence, and then whipping him away again, and by the time Lord Julius arrives, it’s clear where the true interests of the book have come to lie, and the satire becomes far more biting. There are some truly great one liners in this comic.

    The art style also evolves more quickly than I’d anticipated. The early issues are, of course, patchy, but it’s striking how quickly Sim’s composition and line work develop, and by the time we get to the issue with the Picts he’s doing some really great stuff. Obviously, it’s nowhere near the heights he’d later hit, and it’s impossible to read pre-Church & State Cerebus without longing for Gerhard, but even so – much better than I’d expected.

    Another surprise was the presence of “Mind Games” in this book. In my (clearly malfunctioning) memory, this recurring story didn’t start until High Society, so I was glad to see it here, and it marks a real quantum leap in everything Sim is doing. It plants seeds which will reverberate throughout the series, and marks a step change in Sim’s confidence and willingness to experiment with form. It’s kind of the first issue in which it feels like all the classic elements of Cerebus fall into place, and it’s immediately followed by the excellent “The Beguiling”, which demonstrates that things were really cooking.

    Very much looking forward to High Society, which I’ll be ordering later today. Grand to know that we have several months ahead of some of the very best comics that have ever been committed to print.

    • That’s a good summary. I’m only half a dozen or so issues into the first phonebook this time round so I will bear your points in mind. The thing that has struck me so far is just how much of this early stuff, where Sim was very much feeling his way, comes back into play later on. Minds (the last book of the Mothers & Daughters arc) is effectively the climax of the series, with the last hundred issues as epilogue, and so much of it harks back to this book. I’m sure a lot of it was Dave retrofitting after the fact, but I do wonder how much he had planned from the outset.

  5. One final thought – I’m sure it’s the intention, but can I suggest we restrict ourselves to this thread?

    I don’t anticipate millions of comments here, and it would be cool to keep all our thoughts in one place, rather than spread across 16 mini-threads.

  6. You’ve certainly piqued my curiosity, Kid. I’ll see how easily available it is in Stockholm.

    I don’t expect that I’ll last the whole journey, but who knows?

    This seems to the month for AWers to take on epic tasks.

    We’ve also got Ruff Diamond taking on War and Peace.

    What next?

    Tiggerlion and H.P. tackling the entire Ring Cycle? Beany and Moose getting their teeth into Paradise Lost?

    I await with great curiosity…..

  8. Okay, @Kid-Dynamite…. here we go again….

    I finished High Society over the weekend, slightly behind schedule.

    I was slightly daunted on my way into this one. In my memory, this is basically the greatest graphic novel of all time, but I’ve not actually read it since my late teens, so the potential for disappointment was fairly enormous.

    It turns out, I needn’t have worried. It’s absolutely blooming marvelous.

    When we discussed “Cerebus” above, I was surprised by the extent to which it felt like that volume paved the way for High Society; both in terms of Sim starting to organise his own ideas and toy with the idea of Cerebus in positions of authority, and also the multi-issue arcs which begin to crop up towards the back end. In my memory, there had been a chasm between volume 1 and High Society, and in my reading of the former, I was somewhat surprised not to find it so. It took about ten pages of actually reading High Society for my memory to (in an unprecedented development) be proved correct. I was wrong: the leap is quantum.

    I would love to understand a bit more about how Sim made the transition across these two books. Some of it is seeded early on; we have Jaka (albeit a massively under developed version of the character), Lord Julius and the Roach. But it’s not clear the extent to which Sim always knew where he was going with these characters vs simply feeling like including a dancing girl, a Groucho pastiche and a superhero parody in a given issue. What’s for sure is that the second Cerebus sets foot on the property of the Regency Hotel, he sets in course a chain of events which feel utterly pre-planned from the start, and both Sim’s writing and artwork ratchet up two or three notches apiece. The book is a quite brilliant political satire, aspects of which utterly passed me by on the original reading but seem hugely prescient and insightful with the benefit of a few additional years on the clock. How Sim produced this at the tender age of 25, I have no idea.

    What’s really striking is how much funnier this is than the first volume. Sim really starts to nail Cerebus as a character, and to figure out the type of personalities which will bounce off him best. Astoria remains an astoundingly well-realised female character, by the standards of the medium, a perfect foil for the Aardvark, and it’s a great shame that she starts to drop out of the story from about halfway through.

    In terms of the actual content, my overriding feeling is that the sequence from the start of the book up to Cerebus’ eventual ascent to Prime Minister is just about as good as comics get, peaking on or around the election night sequence, which is just wonderful. Thereafter, I think there are some pacing issues – Sim had already announced that High Society would run for a 25 issue block, and I think he left himself a lot of ground to cover, post-election, to move the story to where it needed to be for Church & State. The story fairly whizzes along in those latter stages, and it’s noticeable that less attention is paid to the background art; I found myself wondering if the (then quite shocking) move to turn the panels sideways was in part a mechanic to disguise this issue. I also wondered if this wasn’t the root of the next book being 50 issues long, and the subsequent decision to bring Gerhard on board. It’s certainly the only time I can ever really recall Cerebus feeling genuinely rushed – too much story to tell, and too little time to tell it, which should never have been so in a work which would take the best part of 30 years to produce.

    It’s hard not to read High Society and feel that it’s a great shame that Sim couldn’t simply have carried on producing more of the same. I know that (if memory serves) Church & State will sort of scratch that itch, and that it’s admirable that he wanted to go (much much) broader, but at the same time when you’re enjoying something of this level of quality the temptation is to simply wish it could go on forever.

    Highlights? Petuniacon, A Night In Iest, the bag of flour gag. I laughed out loud more than a few times. The artwork, and panel construction – utterly gorgeous.

    Fun fact: when a dear friend of mine (and fellow teenhood Cerebus fan) turned 30 a few years back I had this image blown up and framed. It’s still on his wall to this day:

    View post on imgur.com

      • -ent. I’ve been waiting for you to source a copy. I’ll get stuck in tonight (once I’ve sorted out Vicar Amelia).

        Interesting that you see HS as a peak. From memory, I much prefer Church & State, Jaka’s Story and Mothers & Daughters. I wonder what a reread will reveal.

        • Oh, awesome. I’d advise doing Hemwick Charnel Lane before Amelia if you’ve not already been there – it gets tougher once she’s gone.

          In terms of HS, it’s possibly just that I came to it before Church & State, and that it absolutely blew my mind as to what could be done with comics. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn on this read-through that Church & State is the better book, particularly as Gerhard comes on board during that run.

    • You can actually order a print of the Regency direct from Gerhard, who it appears needs the money, for as little as $20 plus postage. (I don’t mean he is out on the street, he just appears to have little income)

      http://gerhardart.com/home-2/01-regency/

      And I think he is astonishing. The fact that Sim (amongst other things probably the greatest creator of sound effects in comics) fairly randomly fell in with probably the greatest background artist is amazing. (Sim no doubt sees it as a sign from God. He sees everything as a sign)

  11. Finished last night. @Bingo-Little is right, this is still great stuff. It’s funny, sharp and switched on, an amazing jump from the first collection. I don’t think we see another quantum leap in skill like this in the rest of the series, or indeed in any other artistic endeavours I can think of off the top of my head.*
    That said, the beginning is still raw Cerebus. The issue breaks are very obvious and there are far too many narrative captions (they finally drop out maybe a third of the way through the book, and Dave’s storytelling skill has increased so much that you don’t even notice their absence). The kidnapping and the Fleagle brothers are great fun, but it’s when Astoria enters and starts manipulating Cerebus that it kicks up a whole another level. The economic and political detail is still far ahead of anything else I’ve seen in comics (apart from non-fiction works like Darryl Richardson’s Supercrash), but it’s also very funny. Some of my favourite sequences are the campaign trail encounters, where Dave’s gifts for mimicry and revealing character through dialogue shine. It may be a fantasy world, but these sketches are so recognisably from our shared cultural understanding. John Cleese, misanthropic depressed Jewish comedians, That Farmer Guy From The Wuffa Wuffa issue, all so vivid in just a couple of panels. Election night itself is memorably tense, an excellently orchestrated issue. After that, we’re into Cerebus’ premiership, such as it is. I take mild issue with Bingo’s comments on the pacing here. It might well be that Bingo is right and Dave had written himself into a corner (if so, not the last time it will happen. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the size of the work – there was no going back and revising what was already in the public domain), but I always thought it was deliberate, and, along with the page design literally knocking Cerebus’ world sideways, supposed to emphasise how overwhelmed he was by events. Maybe, maybe not.

    A few other random observations:

    The very last page is, considering it was created by a twentysomething, an astonishingly acute take on the tendency of the idealistic young to believe in pointless doomed causes.

    On this reread, I was completely floored by a particular stupid comment of Elrod’s. Innocuous in itself, it takes on a whole new meaning once you’ve read Minds, which wouldn’t be published for another twelve years or so. That’s some pretty hefty foreshadowing.

    All those words about how it’s much better than the first book and how this is the best starting point notwithstanding, it’s surprising how many elements of what I’d consider to be “Core Cerebus” are still waiting to be introduced at the end of the book. The Cirinists have been an absolutely minimal presence, if they’ve featured at all, the Tarim / Terim dichotomy has barely been mentioned, and any information about the nature and number of aardvarks is missing – at this point, Cerebus is still basically just a funny looking character. Lots to come… I am itching to crack on with Church & State now. How are you fixed for a copy?

    (FWIW, I reckon Sim’s talent continues to build, albeit at a more incremental level, all the way through to issue 220 or thereabouts. After that, his technical ability soars – the lettering, page composition and character art in the final few books are all tremendous – but his narrative ability pretty much deserts him, until a late flourish with The Last Day).

    • This is great stuff.

      It’s been really surprising to me how well this has stood up. Most of the comics I’ve gone back to in adult life (including Watchmen) have proved to be far less smart and sophisticated than I remembered them. If anything, Cerebus has grown with age – there are things that went way over my head as a teenager that make far more sense now (particularly regarding the workings of bureaucracy and, as you say, youthful idealism). Sim’s talent is just staggering – for one man to be able to conjure a whole universe like this, and commit it to the page with such skill and eloquence, learning and self-teaching as he goes…. it really is a credit to the medium.

      Re: Church & State, I still had my old copy from back in the day, and I’m about a hundred pages from the end now, with book two scheduled to be delivered this week. We’re doing thoughts on book one, and then later book two, right?

      • oh, very good. I’ll start tonight. Just picked it off the shelf, and even the chapter titles are giving me a little buzz of memory – Anything Done For The First Time Unleashes A Demon?
        I think the separate thought on volume one and then two is the right way to. They’re quite distinct, and pretty hefty.

        As an aside, do you have the Cerebus Zero miscellany? It reprints a few individual issues that aren’t in the phonebooks, the first of which is #51, ie the issue between the end of High Society and the beginning of Church & State. It is not essential to understanding the story at all, but it is one of the funniest individual issues of the entire run. It’s basically Cerebus, Lord Julius, Elrond and Duke Leonardi in a locked room, and as much fun as that sounds. Cerebus Zero also has the double issue (112/113?) that serves as an epilogue to Church & State II, and I’d say that is a very useful thing to get the full impact of the end of C&S II on Cerebus. (I just checked and Page 45 have it in stock for less than the price of a takeaway coffee – http://www.page45.com/store/Cerebus-Zero.html#SID=159)

        • I did have Cerebus Zero at one point, but I can’t seem to locate it, so I’ve gone ahead and ordered from the splendid Page 45 – who will now be selling me all the remaining phone books I still need (which, from here on in, is most of them). Great tip!

        • You might want to find a copy of something that has “what happened between issues 20 and 21”, which is in Swords of Cerebus #3 and the World Tour book 1995 amongst other places.

          High Society is available in digital format on Comixology (for which Sim is complaining he has not been paid). The whole thing is available at http://www.cerebusdownloads.com/ I’ve not tried it myself, but comixology was fine.

          Sim is trying to get funds to reprint the whole lot going back to original art where possible. The images look great. I think Cerebus and High Society are available – Church and State I&II are next then Reads? In the order they have gone out of print basically.

  12. Contrary to my previous post, I’ve read both volumes of Church & State now. There was just no way I could stop after one. So be warned, spoilers for volume two will abound.

    Short review – it’s amazing. This is the longest sub-story in the whole Cerebus project (unless you count Mothers & Daughters as one book instead of four). It starts with Cerebus as houseguest and ends with, well, everything.

    I mentioned in my High Society review that a lot of core Cerebus was still waiting to be introduced at that book’s end. This is where it all happens. We finally see the military force of the matriarchal Cirinists, and learn exactly what Cirin is (ahem). Cerebus’ magical nature comes into focus, things like the tiny Cerebus appearing to Astoria, or the sneezing fire (and how good is the sequence where he picks up the one coin supposedly minted by Tarim, and the other coins start ripping their way out of the sacks and flying towards him?), and the preoccupation with cosmology starts. If I remember right, Dave has three attempts at explaining the beginnings of the universe throughout the 300 issues, and I’m not sure any of them have the impact of the amazing double page “that’s what left of her” spread here.
    It’s a running theme of the book that Cerebus is his own worst enemy and Church & State makes that clear. He is twice told valuable information about aardvarks that he ignores. His vanity and greed ruin his chances again and again, not least with the sphere that melts while he is distracted by the artists. It’s this vanity and greed that make him so manipulable as well. As in High Society, he is set on his path through the book by the actions of others. For someone who doesn’t have a huge amount of screentime, Weisshaupt is perhaps the most influential character in the series thus far. I love that Dave is confident enough in his worldbuilding to show us the consequences of actions we didn’t see, without the overexplanation and infodumping of lesser works.

    There is more foreshadowing scattered throughout the book. Dave must have planned this (the first 200 issues at least) down to the smallest details. I am constantly amazed at this laying of groundwork for things that wouldn’t be fully explained for another six or seven years. Once again, Elrod’s first appearance contains a seemingly throwaway line that means an awful lot more once you’ve read a few books on, as does one of the sequences in Cerebus’ dreams shortly afterwards. Even little things like Boobah thinking something fell in the pantry resonate with knowledge of what’s to come. Possibly the most extreme is the way one illustration in the first volume suggests that Dave had a pretty good idea of the way he was going to draw the key moments of issue 300 even back at this point. And as for “You live only a few more years. You die alone. Unmourned. And unloved.” – well, we’ll see, won’t we?

    I could sit and pick out highlight after highlight (“Oy should wont to boy drogs wif moy ‘alf”, “Sounds like my ex-wife” “It is”), but my favourite part of the whole book is the Astoria’s trial sequence. The rising tension and sense of something hugely disruptive approaching is expertly handled, and the way the page layout forces you to read quicker and quicker is masterful. In fact, the rhythms of the storytelling throughout are phenomenal, and then Gerhard’s appearance partway through the first volume is the final piece of the jigsaw. His backgrounds – hotel, tower, moonscape – are just exquisite.

    Almost everything here is wonderful. There’s philosophy, comedy, cosmology, drama, a sharp understanding of power and institutions, plus the sheer quality of the characterization, the dialogue, the art, the structure – this is quite possibly as good as comics get. Not bad for a funny animal book.

    • Exactly the same boat; felt ridiculous to comment at the end of part one – even the page numbering simply continues.

      I’m about halfway through volume 2, so will respond with my thoughts shortly, but it’s basically a work of genius, isn’t it? Utterly without boundaries.

    • Right – I’m all done with Church & State I and II now, so can finally comment on the above.

      I agree with absolutely every word you’ve written.

      I was shocked at how much of this I’d forgotten, particularly in Book II. There’s a massive jump again from High Society in terms of what Sim is doing here; you can almost sense him coming to realise that his is his circus, and he can take it in any direction he pleases as far as he likes.

      The closing sequence, in particular, is a thing of absolute wonder – it simultaneously brings a sort of closure to the immediate storyline, while opening up all sorts of fascinating doors as to what might lie ahead. In an age where we’ve become so used to “high concept”, and stories simply tailing off, it’s really striking to read something like this, where the end is the absolute peak, and which manages to be satistfying and exciting, while not tying everything up in a neat bow. It also gives us the lead character being informed that he will die shortly, “alone, unmourned and unloved”. What a brilliant literary device that is, and the same can be said for the revelation re: the other aardvarks, and the identity of Cirin herself. Oh, and the fact that the Judge is clearly based on Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall is just the icing on the cake.

      I would agree that the Astoria trail sequence is the high point. His panel composition therein is just crazily good, and the mood it sets is perfect. I also think the sequence between Cerebus and Astoria in the latter’s cell is superb; it does a great job of setting out the stakes and tells you so much about each character. Watching them battle back and forth over who is in control; Astoria tricking Cerebus into giving her a drink of water, etc, it’s all so cleverly played.

      I’d forgotten the rape sequence, and was a little uncomfortable with the way it’s sort of played slightly for laughs, but then there’s that great pay-off later on, where the Judge tells Cerebus that if she should ever feel sorry for himself in all his suffering he need only recall his second marriage – absolutely wonderful, not least in that it also brings home the parallel in the “rape” of Terim by Tarim.

      Beyond the above, I loved the scene about halfway through where Jaka returns to warn Cerebus. The exchange between the two is absolutely wonderful, and that sense when he watches her leave, that feeling that everyone is deserting him. It brilliantly conveys that this gruff, sometimes brutalist character is desperately in need of affection of some description. It gives Cerebus a vulnerability which is endearing and almost childlike, and which ultimately outweighs many of his flaws. It’s also striking just how little actual talking Cerebus does in this book – so much is communicated via his facial expressions, yet the character is far better developed than previously.

      Completely agree re: the impact of Gerhard. Visually, this is stunning – it’s at least two levels above what went before, and you can see that Sim used the time he was being spared on backgrounds to really focus on his figure work, but also on his lettering, which undergoes a real evolution across the course of the book.

      Overall, I think I still prefer High Society. It’s nowhere near as complete a work, far more limited in scope and, in many ways, quite primitive compared to Church & State. But it has a certain charm to it, almost an innocence, and it’s gloriously self-contained, in a way that C&S is not. If a stranger were to tell me they were planning to read just one of these phone books, it would most certainly be High Society.

      But, still: “While you were gone, the deadline you set for the end of the world came and went without incident. All of your followers have deserted you. Cirin has attacked and seized, with her mercenary forces…Lower Felda and all of Iest. Including all of the gold you had in your hotel. You live only a few more years. You die alone. Unmourned. And unloved. Suffering…suffering you’ll have no trouble doing. And if you are tempted–ever–to consider your suffering unjustified. Just remember your second marriage.” THAT’S how you end a book.

  13. Okay, I’m conscious that I’m accelerating a bit too rapidly for our schedule here, but I’ve now read Jaka’s Story and Melmoth. I can wait to talk about the latter, but I really, really need to talk about Jaka’s Story. (SPOILERS – on the off-chance anyone else is planning on reading this book).

    In my memory, this was where it all began to tail off. Boy, was my memory wrong. I think I may actually have enjoyed JS more than Church & State – it’s so much more personal, and the slower pace means Sim is able to really stretch out and do some interesting stuff with his story-telling. I also love the fact that Sim followed up all the sturm und drang at the end of the last book by simply taking his foot off the pedal and delving deeper into a character who, until this point, we’d seen in no more than half a dozen issues (central to the story as she may have become).

    This is a book about Jaka. Cerebus is in it, but he barely speaks, and eventually recedes to become a kind of lurking background presence, before disappearing entirely for the grand denouement.

    Jaka is now living in a mountain village with her feckless husband Rick, dancing in a local tavern and trying to keep it all together. There are five sides to the story; Jaka’s own, and then the visions of Jaka provided by the gaze of four male onlookers; Cerebus, Rick, Pud Withers and Oscar, each of whom, out of need as much as anything else, projects a character of his own upon her.

    To Cerebus, she’s the grand love of his life, in his sight, but out of his reach, weighed down by her useless husband. To Rick, she’s a ball and chain, always nagging, always demanding more. To Pud, she’s a fantasy object – and what an unpleasant fantasy it turns out to be, and to Oscar, she’s a muse, and a saintly innocent. None of these narratives are the real Jaka, and all of them are entirely self-serving – there are a lot of hearts in the typography, but no actual love on the page.

    Oscar… well, what an extraordinary decision to simply insert Oscar Wilde into the story wholesale at this juncture, and what a fantastic job Sim makes, and then expands upon in Melmoth, of doing so.

    View post on imgur.com

    For the first four fifths of the book, the story proceeds at a stately pace. Cerebus arrives to live with Jaka and Rick. He eavesdrops on their marriage and fantasizes about reclaiming Jaka. Rick pals around with Oscar, and the seemingly harmless and affable Pud (Jaka’s employer at the tavern and main benefactor) spends page after page engaged in fantasy as to how he will finally reclaim from her what he believes is now owed. The whole thing simmers beautifully, and would make a fantastic stage play. But this isn’t a play, it’s a comic, and one of the best examples of the form I’ve ever read; it does things that only this medium can do. A domestic argument rendered entirely in sound effects? Absolutely no problem at all, and all the more powerful for it.

    Running alongside the main story throughout, we have long text-based pieces, written by Oscar, about Jaka’s childhood, spent in the midst of what is effectively local royalty. We learn of her overbearing nurse (whose face is always, quite brilliantly, covered by that of Jaka’s childhood doll), of her desire to escape and run free, and of her humiliation at the hands of her Uncle – and what a humiliation it is, taken in context. These sections are beautifully written, but they’re yet another confection – Oscar is funneling what he knows of Jaka’s real life through the lens of a classic Victorian child narrative, and it’s impossible to determine where the fiction ends and the fact begins. Just another vision of Jaka.

    Eventually, Sim takes the tinder box he’s painstakingly built and simply applies a naked flame – the arrival in the mountainside village of Cirinist troops, who immediately execute or incarcerate everyone, bar the missing Cerebus. The violence and speed of events is jarring; it has the resonance of being woken from a light slumber and finding oneself in a burning house. Jaka is separated from Rick and hauled off to prison for the “crime” of dancing in front of men.

    This is probably a good moment to talk about misogyny, because – if memory serves – it was at this point that Sim began to face accusations of the same. I believe that’s largely because of the Cirinists, who are essentially a nightmare amalgamation of militant feminism and what we might nowadays recognise as hard Islamism. Their appearance certainly does not help Sim’s cause: butch, berobed and utterly unfeminine.

    And yet… I’m not sure I see misogyny in this book. For one thing, it’s unusual (or at least, it was unusual at the time of publication) to see such a sensitive treatment of a lead female character. For another, the book strikes me as a really damning condemnation of the male gaze, and all the detritus that men sometimes project onto women (I think there’s an interesting essay to be written on the Jaka character and the more contemporary Hollywood trend of “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manic_Pixie_Dream_Girl)). But, most of all, I think the Cirinists are intended to represent extremism in general, and how extremism ultimately damages us all. As radical feminists, you expect them to be of some benefit to the women who live under their rule, but the reality couldn’t be further from the truth – instead they police their appearances and behaviour, and limit their freedoms. It’s a caricature of the manner in which all ideology, pushed far enough, eventually congeals into something fundamentally anti-human. Hence Jaka’s punishment for dancing, hence the bone chilling conversation in which Oscar is asked if he has a permit (“Oh no, my publisher handles all of that” “Not a permit to publish. A permit to write”). I’ve no doubt Sim has his issues with women, and that his divorce did not help matters, but I did not emerge from reading this text with the sense that he’d allowed it to cloud his work, at this point anyway.

    On then, to the story’s end. Jaka winds up in prison, in a cell next door to a broken down old woman who reveals herself to be Jaka’s childhood nurse. Captor and captive, now both imprisoned together, equally helpless in the face of forces far greater than they can hope to comprehend. Eventually, Jaka is dragged from her cell to an anteroom, in which she meets…. Mrs Thatcher, a matronly bureacrat charged with extracting from Jaka a confession that her dancing, and the male gaze which it encouraged, were morally wrong.

    It’s perhaps a little on the nose that Sim casts Margaret Thatcher in this role (and again, it’s a brilliant, brilliant caricature of the Iron Lady – nobody has done this stuff better than Sim), but what a character she is – the physical embodiment of a truly banal evil. Even her speech patterns and pronunciation are just utterly fucking hateful. Her “discussion” with Jaka is an absolutely nailed on demonstration of an individual being violated and debased by an impersonal system; she has her dignity and power torn away in strips in the most calculated and exacting manner.

    Eventually, the sequence concludes with the Cirinists dragging in a seemingly dazed Rick, to whom – in one final cruelty – it is revealed that Jaka bore and aborted his son. He strikes Jaka, and immediately has his thumb broken as punishment for doing so. The phrase “Orwellian” is dramatically over-used, but really quite inevitable in this instance.

    View post on imgur.com

    Rick is released to his mother, Jaka is returned to the court from which she fled as a child (a nightmare scenario – she’s delivered back to the very situation from which she has spent her whole life running), and Cerebus returns to find the tavern burned to the ground, and the love of his life vanished into thin air, presumed dead.

    I honestly think this is the best of the five books of Cerebus I’ve read so far. It’s wonderfully self-contained, beautifully paced and full of insight and clever characterisation which would have raised an eyebrow in any medium, but which positively sets off fireworks when found in a comic.

    More than anything, it’s a tremendous tragedy – the story of a young girl who seeks her independence and self-determination, and who is trapped, first by the self-interested gaze of those who surround her, then by actual incarceration, and finally by quasi-incarceration in the gilded cage from which she has been fleeing. She’s punished for having the temerity to be both female and free, and that punishment is delivered first by men, then by women, and eventually by her own family.

    I feel like I could rave about this for pages more, but I’ll stop there. Suffice it to say, this was far, far, far better than I remembered it, and Sim’s art and writing reach a new maturity which I certainly did not appreciate as a callow teen. His confidence in his own abilities at this point is just staggering, and I can think of no precedent in comics for work of this quality. Mind well and truly blown.

    I loved Melmoth very nearly as much, but we’ll get to that later….

      • Paged. I finished it just yesterday, so I’m letting it settle for a moment but I’ll be back with my thoughts later.

        Spoiler: they won’t be that different from yours. It’s brilliant.

      • oh, alright then. An excellent synopsis there, @bingo-little. I also went into this one with a bit of trepidation. C&S was so good to revisit, I was afraid that what I remembered as an emotionally involving drama might come off as dull and parochial. I was wrong, of course.

        This is the first book in the series that appears to have been composed as a novel rather than a serial. Unless you’re counting the page numbers you’d have no way of knowing where one individual issue ends and another begins. The care and depth of thought that has gone into the creation of these characters and their interactions with one another is tremendous. The thinking through of structure is evident in the way, to pick a few examples at random, adult Jaka’s imprisonment mirrors her younger self’s anticipation of emancipation, or the repetition of the gardeners sheltering the younger saplings. The whole thing just oozes craft, not least in the visuals. The character art has completely left behind caricature (well, apart from Thatch, who is not so much a character as shorthand for the smiling and solicitous machinery of repression). Gerhard shines again, of course (he actually built a model of the whole “set” and used it constantly as reference to ensure that his drawings of the apartment interior were consistent from one scene to the next).

        I disagree that Jaka is a nagging ball and chain to Rick. Feckless idiot that he may be, he is completely devoted to her (best bit of dialogue in the whole book – Cerebus: Listen, kid. Cerebus is in love with your wife. Rick: I know. She’s great, isn’t she?). He is so amiable and guileless that until, the very end, it’s hard to imagine him feeling anything more than passing annoyance at things like Jaka not waking him up when she returns. Pud is brilliantly drawn. Sim nails the seething pit of resentment, thwarted desire, hate and self loathing that boils away in the heart of a less than alpha male. There’s an Alice Donut album called ‘Revenge Fantasies Of The Impotent’ that I think of whenever I remember Pud Withers. But it’s hard not to feel some sympathy towards him as Sim deftly sketches in a cowering childhood at the hands of a domineering mother. That’s another sign of the quality of characterisation at work here. In a medium that’s more readily associated with men in different primary coloured tights hitting each other, this is a work with endless shades of gray. No one is completely good, no one is completely bad. Even Jaka dances knowing she is endangering everyone else in her life. From one angle, that’s extreme selfishness. From another, it’s a compulsion, a need to create Art. There are clues to Dave’s take on this in the foreword, where he likens her dancing to his own work, trying to create something of quality in a field that is well below the critical radar. Later in that foreword, he says something along the lines of “I can’t see the fate that befell [Oscar Wilde] as anything other than Society vs The Artist”. This is the core theme of the book for me, and another dimension to Jaka’s tragedy. What do you do when you are compelled to do something, but that something can land you and your loved ones in the direst of straits?

        • (regarding the tail off – I think we’re still a few books away from that. In my memory at least, it stays pretty much untouchable through to the end of Minds. Rereading this far, though, has made me remember just how good Cerebus was in its prime, and I’m looking forward to the final third with a heavy heart. I know I made lukewarm efforts to defend it upthread, and it’s by no means terrible, but the storytelling is just nowhere near this level. Technically, it’s brilliant, and if you liked the idea of a dead author appearing in Iest you can fill your boots here, but whatever it was Sim had that made you keep flipping the pages faster and faster deserts him. )

          • I’m sort of feeling the same way. Having positively glowed over the last few books, and knowing Melmoth is still to come, it made me wonder what this thread will look like come the dark days of September and October.

            My only consolation is that the stuff I’ve already read has been so much better than I recalled that maybe the stuff still ahead isn’t as bad as I remember it? Maybe? Please?

            Worst case scenario, I can live with 100 or so issues that don’t live up to the peak. What’s already been is so damn good that it’s validated this whole exercise, and rekindled the old dream of a bookshelf with that full foot or so of phone books stretched across it.

        • Love it. I had never heard the bit about Gerhard’s model, but I can well believe it. The whole thing is so gloriously self-contained; I think there’s something of Ibsen about it all.

          You’re quite right re: Rick; I was adopting a short-hand that doesn’t fully explain the character’s feelings. He clearly loves Jaka, but he’s off in a fantasy world from which she’s constantly imploring him to return – I suspect regular readers of this site may well find that aspect familiar.

          Totally agree re: the way the “issues” format goes out the window and it becomes one long narrative – you really can’t see the joins. I could be wrong, but I also think Sim begins to experiment more with the panels, not in terms of the flashy stuff we get in High Society and C&S, but to slow and speed the pace of the story. There seem to be far more full-page panels in this one, and it gives the whole thing a very different tone – there’s less story to tell, and less of a rush to cram it all in.

          You’re spot on re: Sim’s observations re: the “artist”, and the parallels he no doubt saw between himself and Oscar, and to a lesser extent Jaka. The stuff about dancing and the fear of nobody showing up is painfully on the nose for a man in the process of spending 30 years self-publishing a monthly comic, and I would guess that those issues appeared just after Cerebus’ commercial peak. I also wonder in retrospect how much of that “I must dance, no matter the cost” stuff was Sim girding his loins, knowing that sooner or later he was going to speak openly re: his thoughts on women….

    • You two did inspire me to get as far as digging out my phonebooks the other week, but haven’t actually started re-reading any of them as yet. I’ve got more of them than I remembered (I thought I’d given up after “Minds”, but actually bought – and presumably read – up as far as “Rick’s Story”) and I think I remember that I actually stopped reading more in response to Sim’s online comments on rec.arts.comics rather than anything that’d appeared in the books by that stage.

      Mrs D is away for the weekend fairly soon, maybe I’ll take a run-up and make a start then…

    • I am rather stonkingly busy, but I re-read High Society last year, and intend sometime to get round to the whole thing again.
      You can keep up with what is happening with Sim at http://momentofcerebus.blogspot.com. Basically, unlikely to draw again after hand problems, and some major illnesses – he is preparing to meet his maker and trying to curate his legacy.

      Now you might think he has become a paranoid religious nutter, but that does not stop Cerebus being an amazing piece of art.

      • Great link, I’ll check that out.

        Re: Sim – quite right: as with all things, enjoying and appreciating a work doesn’t mean you have to agree with the author on anything/everything. Very sad to hear he’s unwell.

  15. Melmoth, then.

    Throughout Jaka’s Story, Dave Sim had faced a barrage of complaints that there wasn’t enough Cerebus / action / advancement of the overall storyline / mystical woo (delete as appropiate). So, ever cognisant of the needs of his audience, he gave them twelve issues of Cerebus clutching Jaka’s doll and sitting almost catatonic outside a cafe while, up the hill, Oscar Wilde is slowly and painfully dying. That’s it. There are cameos for passing characters from Church & State while Cerebus is occasionally dusted, but Oscar’s death is the focus of this one. It’s told in the same text panel and image style as the “Daughter Of Palnu” extracts in Jaka’s Story, using actual letters from Robert Ross and Reginald Turner describing the last days of the real Oscar Wilde. The mood of the book is stately and sombre. It is a study of a man on the edge of the abyss, unflinching without being graphic or voyeuristic. As you might expect, it is dark and disturbing, with all the emotional heft a serious consideration of the subject deserves. That’s not to say there is no light relief. Mick and Keef are back for a few pages, and the Roach’s latest incarnation as normalroach is an hilarious study in repressed anger, but you won’t be closing this one with many chuckles.

    Given that this story takes us up to the exact halfway point of the saga, it’s easy to draw comparisons with what we know about Cerebus’ death, which at this point Dave had been promising for several years would occur in the very last issue. In his final days, Oscar is far from alone, unmourned and unloved. A great deal of the emotional power of the book is in the sadness and confusion of Robbie and Reggie, and their helplessness in the face of the inevitable. With the text taken from other sources, Dave can concentrate on the art, which is just wonderful. The character sketches are superb, and Gerhard has upped his game even further on the backgrounds. For such a slow, small story, there is a real cinematic feel, a sense that the events on the street are being viewed through a camera which simply records what it sees, sometimes panning up and down the hill, from Dino’s Cafe to Oscar’s hotel and back. A powerful, haunting work.

    This is, believe it or not, where I started reading Cerebus. Probably not the best jumping on point, but even with little knowledge of the background, the quality of the work was evident. It was autumn 1990, and I’d just started at Nottingham University. There was a basement in the Virgin Megastore with a comics concession in, and I eagerly fell on it, as exactly the sort of thing I’d been starved of growing up in the deep South West. After I’d been in a few times buying pretty much whatever DC put out with a Mature Readers tag, the bearded guy behind the counter said “you might like this”, and slipped a random issue of Jaka’s Story into my bag, explaining that the new storyline, Melmoth, was starting imminently. I read it, didn’t really understand what was going on, but liked what I saw, and started buying the monthly issues regularly. That was Mark Simpson. Over the next few years, he, and his co-worker Stephen Holland, introduced me to so many great comics. After that, Mark and Stephen went on to open Page 45, and blew me away with their vision of what a comic shop could and should be. I kept in touch once I’d left the East Midlands (Mark and Stephen both ended up coming along on my stag night), and I’ve bought my comics from them for quarter of a century now. Well, only Stephen for the last ten years or so. One night in 2005, Mark went to sleep and just didn’t wake up. There’s a nice piece about him on the Page 45 website: http://www.page45.com/world/about/mark-simpson-1968-2005/ . As if this book wasn’t suffused enough with death, I’ll always associate it with Mark, just for that simple act of kindness (which, let’s face it, was also a pretty good business decision, as it led directly to me spending hundreds and hundreds of pounds on the rest of Cerebus). Rest in peace.

    My usual random observations

    – Something that struck me this time is the sequence where Cerebus sees the chained Astoria in the middle of the road, and then seems to swap places with her again, as happened in C&S. This is a pivot, and it’s after this vision that he starts to (slowly!) emerge from his catatonia. It also seems to have affected things in the outside world – it’s after this, for instance, that the waitresses change, which I don’t think is otherwise explained or commented on. I’m not entirely sure what is going on with this swapping. Any ideas, @bingo-little?

    – those are some very pigeony pigeons.

    – what an epilogue. After almost forty issues of Cerebus doing very little, this explosion into action kickstarts the second half. The next couple of books are Cerebus back in high gear, and it starts here.

    – In the afterword, Dave talks about having to excise one of Oscar’s comments, as he could find no workable equivalent for “Jew” and didn’t want to face a deluge of mail questioning the existence of Judaism in ancient Estarcion. Just remember that when we get to Latter Days.

    • Superb stuff, @Kid-Dynamite.

      One of the great sadnesses of my adult life is that I no longer get to spend time in comic shops. A good comic shop used to fulfil much the same role that an online community such as this now occupies: a space to meet and enthuse about common passions, to be handed incredible recommendations, to speak to people from different generations, to discover new movies and books, and to hear great music for the very first time. All of the foregoing is readily available at the touch of a button in 2016, but it was in incredibly short supply back in the days of my own teenhood.

      Melmoth is the Cerebus book I enjoyed the least as a kid. It’s slow and meditative and all the things I wasn’t looking for at that stage; not enough sturm und certainly too little drang. It’s Sim essentially staging an interval, during which he indulges one of his passions.

      As an adult…. well, it’s fantastic, isn’t it? I’m not sure I have all that much to say about the content, beyond superlatives and given that you’ve already offered an excellent summary above, but I’ll try.

      First off, this was somehow the first time I’d ever noticed that this isn’t actually the same Oscar as the one in Jaka’s Story. Not only do the timings not match up, there’s a scene where he actually refers to the other Oscar. I’m torn between thinking this is something quite revolutionary that I don’t think I can recall seeing in a narrative medium previously, and suspecting that Sim realised he couldn’t match the time period of Oscar’s incarceration with Cerebus’ catatonia, and simply decided to bend the rules. It’s probably the latter, isn’t it?

      What I DO think is revolutionary is the handling of Oscar’s death. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a detailed examination of the practicalities of a person leaving this Earth. The emotion of it is swept to one side: there is no time for tear, or rage at the cruelty of it all, because there is simply too much to do in providing care. The sequence where Oscar finally dies is incredibly moving – the art style, the description of the death rattle. I really don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it.

      While Sim finds a way to weave the story into his wider narrative (the slowness and calm of the piece are brilliantly deployed to contrast the call to action on which the book ends), the entire Oscar episode is basically nothing more than an aside; something Sim felt like doing and therefore did. It’s one of the most powerful example of one of Sim’s central themes – that self publishing, and the resultant freedom from outside interference, was his greatest power. Sadly, as is often the way of these things, it later became his biggest weakness. The whole thing does make you wonder if there’s an alternative reality somewhere out there where Sim capped Cerebus at 200 issues, finished it off and then went off to become the greatest author of biographical comics the world has ever seen. On this evidence, he was well capable of it.

      Beyond all that, the book has some lovely touches that I’d forgotten – the value of a single gold coin, the Roach attempting to suppress his rage (those early panels are a real masterclass in what Sim could do with a bit of creative lettering and a facial expression), etc.

      I’d somehow forgotten the ending, and what an ending it is. Readers at this stage had presumably spent somewhere in the region of 3-4 years waiting for Cerebus to – y’know – actually do something. I’d say this comfortably justifies that wait, and then some. It’s one of the most exciting endings to any chapter of just about anything I can think of.

      Firstly, it’s a brilliant idea: the Cirinists are all psychically linked, and if you hurt one of them, the others come swarming. Secondly, it’s brilliantly, brilliantly executed. The Cirinists looking down, seeing blood and then switching her gaze to Cerebus, sword drawn, blood-stained and still clutching the doll. Then we get the flashback: Bear sat at a camp fire telling Cerebus (fantastically: Cerebus drawn the way he was when the series first started, long nose and all) about having witnessed the Cirinists take their grim revenge on some poor unfortunate soul way back when. The writing here is great: Sim really sells the bleak forecast for anyone who makes the mistake of crossing one of these people. Then we get Cerebus back in the present, with his sword at his own throat, ready to kill himself and be spared the ordeal that is to come. Until the judge’s words return to him and he relents – he’s not ready to die yet – and we get that final panel of him streaked in blood, doll in one hand, sword in the other, beginning to run. Shivers down the spine, it’s so damn good.

      Re: the Astoria vision, I must admit to having completely missed the significance. I thought it was just another in a long line of the same, stressing the cyclical nature of the whole story. I’ll go back and take a proper look: the waitresses thing is a great spot.

      I must admit to having already devoured Flight over the weekend. I’m getting through these in a single sitting now, which throws off our schedule somewhat, but also builds some buffer for the later stages, when I suspect we may begin to find this all a bit of a grind.

      Are we doing Mothers & Daughters as one big book, or in its components? I vote for the latter.

  16. Meanwhile in other news, based on recommendations (firstly here then some piece in the Guardian website more recently) I have just ordered the first Love & Rockets retrospective compilation Maggie The Mechanic. Perhaps I’ll start a thread on that in due course….

      • yep, me also. Anyone who remembers my pre-hack username will know I am quite partial to a bit of Amor Y Cohetes. More of a Jaime man than a Gilbert, but it’s all good.

        Two words of warning – much like Cerebus, the first volume is only an indication of the greatness to come. Don’t be put off by the dinosaurs and rocketships*, when it hits its stride it’s great. Also, it has been reprinted so many times in so many different formats syncing up a reread might be a pain in the logistics.

        *my eight year old self cannot believe a future version of him could ever write such a thing

  18. Flight

    After three years of slow paced storylines exploring character without a tremendous amount of action, Flight virtually explodes off the page. For a short book there is an awful lot going on here. Cerebus’ bloody retribution from the Melmoth epilogue inspires a short lived uprising. The Roach becomes Punisherroach and mows down Cirinists until Elrod turns up and spoils everything. We see far more of the inner workings of Cirinism than we have before, and we learn just how obsessed Cirin herself is with planning her Ascension. Cerebus himself disappears out of the world and returns to the abstraction of Mind Game. Throughout it all the voices of anonymous townsfolk offer commentary and confusion. Cerebus’s reawakening has consequences far beyond his own person, a magnifying effect that we will learn more about in the rest of Mothers & Daughters. His return to action is mirrored in many tiny ways across Estarcion, all building the huge sense of rising action that runs through this one, until it finishes poised on the confrontation between Cirin and Astoria that slingshots us into the second part, Women.
    Being only the first part of Mothers & Daughters, there’s no narrative resolution here, which makes it a bit harder to write about themes and subtext and so on, but there are a couple of things worth talking about. I’m pretty sure that part of the idea behind splitting M&D into four books was a conscious attempt to mirror the first four Cerebus storylines. It’s most explicit here in the parade of characters and settings from the first volume that reappear, but also in mood – this is the closest the series ever comes to the sword and sorcery adventures of the first book. Comparing the two shows just how far Dave’s talent has developed. The panelling is absolutely miles ahead of the first volume, and plays no small part in the freneticism of the story, and as I seem to say about every book, the art and character observation just gets better all the time. There are other little nods, like the return of the text captions narrating the action in the Pigt sections. (For the record, I reckon Women reflects High Society’s depiction of political intrigue and squabbling, Reads is an attempt at an origin story of the universe like Church & State and Minds is a sustained interrogation of one character as was Jaka’s Story. But it’s been a long time since I’ve read them…we shall see.)

    Over to you, @bingo-little

    My patented random observations:

    This is the second time we’ve seen a depiction of Cerebus lose an ear. Hmm, I wonder if that’ll pay off in later books?

    The Cirinist suppression of Cerebus’s reappearance is heartbreaking and chilling. And speaking of heartbreaking…poor Bishop Posey. At least he died happy, proving to us that the Oscar in Jaka’s Story was not the same Oscar in Melmoth.

    As I said about Melmoth, this was when I was buying Cerebus issue by issue, and I can still vividly remember the thrill of realising exactly who and what Suenteus Po was. Just superb storytelling.

    • Excellent stuff. Let me briefly remind myself what happens in Flight (I find it really hard to keep track of the book separations in Mothers & Daughters, and I’m just finishing off Women at the moment), and then I’ll try to write something coherent about it all.

      I must admit to being a little daunted – the previous books were all fairly simply to discuss in an orderly fashion. This one is wildly chaotic and quite unlike what went before.

    • So, Flight then.

      This is just about where I came in. I had absolutely no idea what was happening, or what this book was supposed to be, but something about a man leaning out of a window shouting “The Pope is back! And he’s killing all the Cirinists”, while down below a strange grey anthropomorph, covered in blood and clasping a child’s doll hacks his way through an army of warriors in Burqas…. well, suffice it to say I was intrigued enough to want to know more.

      Seen now in proper context, Flight is a weird old book. There’s a hell of a lot going on, much of it to do with mopping up old threads left hanging in earlier stories. It has a really strange pacing to it – hard to identify one central narrative thread, more a generalised swirl of ideas and tall tales.

      What can be said with confidence is that we get a much more fleshed out look at Cirin and the Cirinists. Their goals, their methods (bleccch) and their awesome, awesome telepathic abilities. Sim has tremendous fun with the latter, and really sells them as a bunch of people with whom one does not fuck. We get the latest manifestation of the Roach (for my money perhaps the best Roach there ever was), we get the short lived rebellion, and then we get to watch the Cirinists mop it all up, in their own uniquely unpleasant manner.

      The story of the Pigts is also fantastic, and Sim is doing great stuff with form here – the jump back and forward between text and image is becoming much more fluid, his lettering has reached new heights, his page composition is audacious. He’s totally in command of the two or three forms he’s juggling.

      We also get the ascension of Cerebus, via perhaps the best Mind Games story yet. We get the grand Suenteus Po entrance – and well worth waiting for it was. We get the slightly less exciting game of celestial chess. We get the return of Astoria, and all sorts of fun and games with doppelgangers.

      I’ll be honest, I found this book harder to love than the ones that went before. Obviously, the gender politics are already heading into uneasy territory, but I can live with that. It’s more that this feels like the sort of work I’d have expected to precede one of the earlier masterpieces – it’s full of great ideas, but it’s like reading freeform jazz; there’s an air of wild improvisation, and far less evidence of judicious self-editing than previously. I can live without interludes like the stuff about the rise of death from “a demon of a mouse-fraternity in Pre-Sepran totemistic Estarcion”, and a lot of the business with Elrod in drag. It’s odd to read the work of someone who is so clearly in total command of his craft, but who then decides to loosen, rather than tighten – this is certainly the first book in a while where you feel like there’s more space than story.

      All of the above said, I still enjoyed it immensely. The art is just wonderful, the narrative is beautifully propulsive and there’s a feeling of crescendo after crescendo being reached and surpassed.

      On, then, to Women, which I recall being stronger than this.

  21. Women

    It’s taken me a while to get to writing this one up, maybe because it’s the first volume of this reread that I’ve come away from with a slight feeling of disappointment. In memory it was really exciting, as the four main characters (Cerebus, Cirin, Astoria and Po) embark on individual courses that finally bring them to the great throne room, and the promise of confrontation and the Final Ascension. That does all happen, and the convergence in the final pages is expertly handled, but it’s only about the final twenty per cent or so of the book. Most of the rest is taken up with lengthy dream sequences. While this fits well with the Roach’s latest incarnation as a Sandman parody, such sequences have never been my favourite part of Cerebus. Of course, without the dreams we wouldn’t have as many wanking jokes – the bit where dream Cirin is chastising Swoon / the Roach is laugh out loud funny – so I guess you pays your money and you takes your choice.

    As befits a book called Women, the main focus characters here are Astoria and Cirin. This is where Dave really expounds on their political movements. Throughout the book there are facing text pages from each’s manifesto, spelling out the Cirinist and Kevillist viewpoints on all kinds of subjects. Up to now we’ve seen Astoria as a very clever arch manipulator, but we’ve never really known what such manipulation was in aid of. It’s interesting to learn in and of itself, but it also indicates just how much effort Dave had put into the building of Estarcion, and how much work lies under the surface of the story, like an iceberg of fictional history and politics.

    While it’s still brilliantly done (really, at this point I’m taking the fantastic art, lettering, dialogue, page construction, etc as a given, which is probably unfair), I don’t think there’s enough differentiation from Flight to merit it being a separate volume. The next two parts of Mothers & Daughters have very individual and distinct feel and this just doesn’t. Furthermore, it doesn’t do enough to advance the storyline – by the end, essentially all that’s happened is that some characters already in Iest have gone somewhere else in Iest. I wouldn’t be complaining if this had been substantially trimmed and rolled into Flight at the planning stage (although that would break the nice correspondence of the four volumes of M&D to the first four storylines).

    So, as I say, a slight disappointment. It’s in no way bad, I just don’t think it sustains the achievements of the previous books as well as it could. Oh well, onwards to Reads. That’ll put the cat amongst the pigeons.

    The usual random observations:

    Astoria’s “go away” is exactly what Cerebus did to her in C&S, likewise just before an ascension. More recurrences and echoes.

    I was also sure that this book had the reveal of exactly who the old woman in the cottage that Cerebus crashes into is, but I was wrong about that as well. Trust me, it’s worth waiting for. A comment of hers (“Trust me, all women read minds, with very few exceptions”) also contributes to the title – I just don’t think Dave could resist the idea of four consecutive spines spelling out Women Read(s) Minds(,) Guys(!).

    • Well played, sir!

      Sorry for the delayed response – it’s been a busy Summer of holidays and work travel, and I’ve been having a bit of a drift away from the blog for one reason or another, but obviously the bones and incense were impossible to ignore.

      First off, I agree that this shouldn’t be a separate book from Flight. It makes no sense at all. They’re telling the same story, tonally incredible similar and there isn’t really a clear break in proceedings to merit the separate volumes. I kind of feel that way about Mothers & Daughters as a whole, to be honest. Sim has spoken about how he left himself too little time and space to wrap up some of the earlier volumes (specifically High Society), but this feels like the first occasion on which there’s maybe been more space allotted than actual material. We’re only halfway through, but already M&D feels a bit like the Sandinista of the Cerebus library, and I’m left wondering if maybe there wasn’t a great single album in here fighting to get out (and with a lot of the excess fat to be located in Women, if you’ll excuse a pun of which I’m sure Sim would approve).

      There’s some stuff I like in here. I really like the end cliffhanger – all three Aardvarks and Astoria about to confront one another in a suitably grand setting. I like the detail of how the bars operate, and some of the stuff about how the Cirinist telepathy works. I like the interplay of Cirinist and Kevillist philosophies in the text extracts. I love the sequence where Astoria goes to bed, anything involving Red Sophia’s mother, and – as you rightly call out – Cirin’s intervention in Swoon’s dream sequence, which is indeed laugh out loud funny.

      But there’s also a lot that I don’t. I don’t like the way that the story feels both rushed and slack at the same time. I don’t like the sudden preponderance of toilet humour – it had always been there, but yeesh. I don’t like the Swoon character, who feels a parody too far. And I don’t much care for the first real blossoming of the sort of ugly misogynist quasi-philosophy for which Sim would become infamous.

      To quote specifically; “It’s a little more complicated than that. “Woman’s intuition” is a nice way of putting it. “Women are more sensitive” is another way of putting it. A not-so-nice way of putting it is that women rape men’s minds the way men rape women’s bodies. It’s not an exact analogy, of course, because rape is invasion and invasion is the man’s way, not the woman’s way; absorption and consumption are the woman’s way; what they’re built for.”

      I actually think Sim is touching on some vaguely interesting areas in that quote. But the framing of those ideas is so crass, so sophomoric, that it’s hard to do any more than just roll your eyes at the sheer childishness of it all.

      I agree entirely about Sim’s mastery of lettering, and page construction at this stage – it’s all quite gorgeous to look at. But my overriding thought on returning to this volume is that, for all that Sim blew the bugle for independence and self-publishing, what this all really smacks of is a man badly in need of a decent editor, because there are the components of some great stuff here, but it’s all so jumbled that it simply asks too much of the reader.

      Bit of a low point so far, then. The good news is that I’m about halfway through Reads, and it’s much, much better. I’ve found I’m enjoying Cirin as a character way more this time around.

      The thought occurs that it’s now September, and we’ve a long way to go to reach the end of the saga by New Year, so I intend to pick up the pace a bit – no more three month gaps between postings, onwards and upwards!

      Aha – and a chance to use this newfangled edit function, because I nearly forgot to @Kid-Dynamite.

  22. READS
    Remember back in my very first post on this thread, I mentioned that some of Dave Sim’s views on society are a little out of step with modern liberal beliefs? Oh boy, here we go!

    Reads is three stories. The one most germane to the overall storyline is the continuation of the confrontation between Cerebus, Cirin, Po and Astoria that closed out the last volume. Po is firmly in control here, keeping the other aardvarks on a firm leash as he expounds on the emptiness of power. He is humble, measured, certain and wise. Once he has said his piece, he walks out of the throne room and indeed out of the story. The only one who takes any heed of his words is Astoria. She renounces the chase for power, and seeks a quieter, meditative life amongst nature. Her decision is beautiful, one I’m envious of. Of course, Astoria being Astoria, she can’t resist one last quip. That final pause, smile, and suggestion are one of my favourite things in the whole book. And then she’s gone as well, leaving Cerebus and Cirin to duke it out in an epic, gruelling, very physical fight scene that lasts for dozens of pages. They take chunks out of each other, Cirin cuts off Cerebus’ ear, both are drenched in blood. It seems clear that the fight can end in nothing but death for one of them, until – something fell – the walls of the throne room fall away, and the throne itself, with the two rival aardvarks clinging on, starts rising and accelerating away from Iest and out into space. The end. This whole section is amazingly choreographed and drawn, with Gerhard once again excelling at creating a solid three dimensional space for the characters to move around. Paired with the dialogue and four way interaction in the earlier part of the book, this is some of the best Cerebus yet. But it’s only a third of the book.

    There are two long text pieces running alongside the comics action. Throughout the first half we learn about the misadventures of Victor Reid, a writer of “reads”, penny dreadfuls of the kind we previously saw Oscar writing about Jaka. It’s a roman a clef based on the early 90s comics scene with plenty of recognisable characters. This of course means that it is hopelessly dated, but it’s interesting in as much as it is a robust defence of Sim’s attitude to publishing and creativity – do it yourself, maintain control, be beholden to no one. Cerebus was of course a self published work throughout its entire run, and this is basically Dave explaining why. But if that wasn’t metafictional enough for you, the second text segment (I say segment, these are more like long essays), opens with a drawing of someone who looks an awful lot like Dave turning from a drawing board on which we can see the pages we’ve just read being created. It’s time to meet Victor Davis. He wants to talk to you.

    And talk he does. From here, we are off into something very like the Mind Games from earlier volumes. Victor Davis is addressing someone labelled “the reader”, leading them on, tricking them (I vividly remember my reaction to the issue 200 fakeout when I read it for the first time), and controlling them. It’s interesting stuff, with cameos from Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. Davis then switches to telling the reader how (he believes) the world works, an arrangement of Lights, strong, creative, dynamic leaders, and Voids, empty leeches that feed off them and pull them down. Not so controversial in itself – I’ve met plenty of Voids and Lights in my own life – but Davis goes on to divide these qualities along gender lines. Women are Voids, who literally eat the brains of their male partners. Unsurprisingly, this is where a large chunk of the audience got off the bus. This is the part of the series that has led to Cerebus being excoriated online and Dave Sim dismissed as a wacko nutjob (mind you, as far as Dave’s unusual beliefs go, you ain’t seen nothing yet), and that’s before you get onto the Death vs Life spiel after the attacks on feminism. Per Bingo’s comments on Women, there are points that might be interesting in here, but the presentation of the ideas is let down by hamfisted hyperbole. The writing is incredibly verbose – the Merged Permanence argument Dave spends pages and pages outlining is far better described in Cyril Connolly’s famous one sentence quote about the pram in the hall. Once you wade through it, there is however much to chew on throughout this whole piece. To what degree are we supposed to equate Victor Davis with Dave Sim? The repeated refrain of “all stories are true” stacked against the way the Big Bang here is exactly the opposite of what Dave showed us at the end of Church & State? How the idea of Merged Permanence is given dramatic life in the hermaphrodite Cerebus, constantly chasing power, wealth, sex, respect but never finding satisfaction? But the burning question, of course, is is Cerebus misogynist?.

    I can’t answer that. I’ve turned it over in my head for years, and I’ve never definitively come down on one side of the fence or the other. Bingo has already pointed to some of the contentious statements in Women. Victor Davis’ screeds don’t make for pleasant or sensible reading. And yet, and yet…in just this volume, we’ve seen Milieu’s diligence and passion in the Victor Reid story being thwarted by a lazy indolent man too weak to stand up for himself. We’ve had Astoria, the prototypical modern feminist, as the most sympathetic character in this volume, the only one who can recognise wisdom when it is shared with her, and one of the few characters in the whole work who is given a satisfactory character arc (and she has a great exit). Elsewhere in the series, the relationship between the workshy parasite Rick and the artistically committed Jaka is exactly that of a Void and a Light, yet the genders are opposite to Davis’ proclamations.

    So, did I enjoy Reads? Pfffft. The Victor Reid section is superfluous and forgettable. The Cerebus stuff is brilliant. The Victor Davis part is alternatively intriguing and infuriating, thought provoking and ridiculous. Ultimately, Reads is what it is. To a significant proportion of that part of the public which cares about comics, it’s come to define Cerebus, although of all the volumes in the series it’s the one that has least to do with Cerebus the character or Cerebus the story. Reads is what you get when you turn away from the Victor Reid route. It’s not edited, it’s not focus grouped, it’s not smoothed down or made palatable. I’m not sure if I like it, but I admire the tenacity, the unyielding vision, the individualism that forced it into being.

    Shine on, you crazy diamond.

    • Great summation.

      I have to say, I thought “Reads” was absolutely magnificent. At times misguided, deeply flawed and a little hateful, but magnificent nonetheless.

      After the relative low point of “Women”, where things seemed to meander and there was a sense of a way being lost, the lazer focus of this book was spectacularly jarring. Sim has messily and painfully maneuvered his four main characters onto the same stage, creating a platform he’s obviously been waiting years for. What he delivers here is spectacular.

      I’d say there are four main sections to the book; Po’s speech, and the departure of Astoria, the Viktor Reid sections (on which I have absolutely nothing to say – you cover it well above, they’re insubstantial and painfully of their time – they really add nothing but drag factor), the Cirin/Cerebus fight, and the Viktor Davis sections (hooo boy).

      Taking each in turn, then….

      Po/Astoria – a bit of philosophy and a butt-load of exposition. It’s very hard not to read Po as a proxy for Sim here; the “there’s not been one single day you’ve not surprised me” line to Cerebus is fairly telling. You do get the impression that Sim regards these characters as somehow independent from him; he created them, sure, but now he’s really just seeing where they’ll go and what they can do. There are some lovely moments – as you say, that final Astoria quip, the great hermaphrodite reveal, and Cerebus’ eyes as he reacts, etc. I really enjoyed the musings on power, and Astoria – one of the few characters thus far who has enjoyed a genuine arc – gets an unexpected happy ending, which was great.

      Cirin/Cerebus – well, it’s magnificent, isn’t it? After all that chat, we get this; surely one of the all time great comic book dust ups. Sim’s mastery of page composition and lettering is really to the fore, and the way he slows it all down with those massive panels lends an epic quality to proceedings that really befits the scene. I remember reading it in issue form as it came out, and the gaps between editions only increase the sense of time stretching nearly to a standstill.

      I love the strategy in it all; Cirin offering her wounded shoulder to Cerebus’ blade, keeping her good hand free. Cerebus staring at said hand intently, and offering blows to that shoulder. The scramble for the sword. It really is high drama, and the severing of the ear, already heavily foreshadowed in earlier volumes, gives a sense of the stakes – this is not the cartoon swordplay of that first volume reviewed above. This is life and death, with blood in the eyes and mouth, and an absolute brutality of intent.

      I adore the way it all ends, as well. “Bang, bang, bang” says Viktor Davis, and the walls and floor duly give way, the throne elevating up into the heavens, past the moon and onward into space. The two combatants are frozen in their tracks, hanging on for dear life. Only in comic books can you do this sort of thing, hit this kind of scale.

      Viktor Davis – it really is hard to know where to begin. What I would say is that I’d somewhat disagree that the reveal of Sim’s misogyny (and it really IS misogyny) is ham-fisted. On the contrary, it’s absolutely beautiful in places.

      Sim really takes his time and draws you in, full of wit and charm. He lays the groundwork, and only at the very end does he snap the trap shut and reveal to you what is a fairly malevolent intent. That’s not to dismiss what he’s saying – there’s a lot of wisdom in there, and I kind of take my hat off to him for having the balls (if you’ll pardon the pun) to speak his mind – but weighed against that it’s obviously hard to take it all completely seriously when he repeatedly deploys imagery of women more or less literally eating men’s brains!

      In the interests of time, I’m going to go to bullet points here, as I could easily be here all day trying to pick through it all…

      * Before we even get on to men/women, let’s talk about the truth, and about reason. I find it incredible that Sim wrote this in the mid 90s, because he’s diagnosing issues that have only become more prevalent and more worrying in the interim. A few quotes:

      “Even as it became obvious that Nothing Was Certain, a corollary belief had arisen that Everything Must Be Accommodated”.

      “It’s a free country, isn’t it? That means you can do whatever you want. Doesn’t it?”

      “Emotion…. is not a more exalted state than is thought.”

      “There are no rules to Emotional Argument. You simply wander around in rhetorical circles until you feel Happy again, and then the argument is over”.

      Post-truth politics. The age of social media. Generation Snowflake.

      It’s very difficult to read the above, absent the gender politics, and not feel that Sim is onto something here. Postmodernism destroyed truth, and in the absence of truth, reason withered on the vine, and without reason, what were we left with? Feelings. So now where are we? My feelings outweigh your knowledge, my free speech entitles me to an opinion, and all opinions are equal, only moreso if they’re based on an abundance of feeling and maybe stated in all caps. I can argue forever if I reject reason and evidence, and simply feel that I’m still correct.

      Look at the world we live in now, look at half the arguments that flare on the politics threads on here; what are they really about? Feelings. What’s the central currency of the day? Feelings. You can’t win an argument with logic, because logic, correctly deployed, only makes stupid people feel stupid, and that only makes them more determined.

      Where Sim goes too far (one of the places he goes too far, anyway) is that he overcompensates. Because his diagnosis is a surfeit of feeling, he concludes that feeling is negative, that it only clouds judgement, and that we’d all be better off without it – the fact that he also identifies it as a female trait only adding grist to the mill. He’s a classic “Left Brain” type, who instead of addressing his own imbalance, is extolling the universe to adopt a form more favourable to him, free from all the inexplicable, irrational mess.

      * Sim also gets into some interesting areas on the life/death balance. Once again, he raises some really fascinating questions, before undermining them with a slavish determination to link everything back to his central thesis on gender. His argument is that we’ve developed a devotion to life, to the idea that all human death or peril is deplorable, because what if it were you and your family off starving somewhere (how would you “feel”)? In reality, death is simply a natural part of the universe, and you may just as well deplore the incoming tides. Perhaps I’m being callous, but I think this is a really interesting minefield he’s just wandered into. It’s certainly not something you often hear expressed anywhere, and – with my own left brain hat on – it’s probably a bit true, isn’t it? At least, if we back ourselves out to the macro level and suspend our own “humanity”?

      * Interestingly, I think Sim is not entirely averse to a little POMO slipperiness himself. All the stuff about how all stories are true, how scientists are really just story-tellers with competing narratives, etc…. It feels slightly against the grain of what he’s arguing elsewhere (a product of Void, not Light) and he deploys it extremely carefully as he’s first setting the stage. What it seems to amount to is a “hey guys, this is just my take, don’t burn me at the stake for it”, before he really gets brave and decides to go for broke.

      “What concerns him is that his portrayal of the events makes a good story. He wants to stir feelings within his audience. He wants to hold their attention… Why? Because that is what a storyteller does.”

      Hey – I’m just stirring the feelings here, which is what it’s all about, huh? Yes, Dave – but elsewhere you’re telling us to reject the nonsense of emotion, and embrace reason and truth, so which is it?

      Far, far more than I remembered, there’s a sense that Sim knows what he’s about to say will clear the room, and he’s trying to take the edge off it. All the stuff about how he’s backing over and abyss and away from solid ground, following the story off into the dark – it’s almost as if there are moments where he completely deprives himself of all agency, as if this had to be, and the impending screed was somehow unavoidable. There are also the sections where he assert his right to a voice; would you sit in the audience and ask if Clapton thinks he’s better than you? He’s clearly nervous, and rightly so. Perhaps most tellingly, right near the end of it all, we get this:

      “All it would take is for one woman to be disturbed enough by Reads to file a lawsuit, or a women’s group to file a class action suit, in this Fascistic Feminist country, and that would be the ball game, wouldn’t it”?

      For an exponent of the male Light, you do find yourself wondering if he couldn’t just have had the stones to drop all the sleight of hand, the “am I Viktor Davis/Reid/Sim” stuff, the This Is My Truth, Don’t Tell Me Yours mealy-mouthedness, and just own his bullshit. Particularly given how vehemently said bullshit is expressed in those latter stages. Yes, it’s dangerous. Yes, it will get you hate mail. But if you really believe it, then just lay it on us….

      I get the sense throughout that Sim’s greatest fear is that he won’t be allowed to finish Cerebus. That he falls under a bus, that events occur to take him out of the game. It feels like that’s the risk he’s weighing against his need to tell us all just how awful women really are.

      * I really enjoyed the sense of Sim first welcoming and then facing down the Reader. It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to – I’ll remove all heat and light from the room, and leave you suspended in nothingness if that’s what I feel like doing, and – hey – you can leave any time you like. But a few of you won’t. It’s quite courageous, in it’s own way. He’s about to lose half his audience, and he knows it. I always have a perverse respect for people who act against their own commercial self-interest.

      Oh, and I loved the stuff about Niagara Falls, Picasso and da Vinci. What a superb raconteur Sim was/is – you really could listen to/read him all day.

      * The stuff on women… is it misogynist? Yeah, of course it is.

      I’m actually quite up for the idea of Sim telling us what he thinks about women from a male/female relationship perspective. No problem with that at all. I don’t agree with it, but lord knows there are enough places you can go to find endless positive generalisations about women (just try the Guardian comment pieces on any given day); it doesn’t strike me as so harmful that every now and then someone goes in the opposite direction. Many of the more formidable people I’ve met in my life have been women; relatives, girlfriends, colleagues. I’m fairly sure their gender can handle the blow of Dave Sim not being a major fan of their work. Lord knows, I’m sure they wouldn’t be fans of his.

      But Sim goes beyond that.

      “This was the fundamental reason, I believe, that women were (rightly) denied the vote for so long. In order to move a civilization forward, an overview is required. You have to be able to step back and examine the structure of a problem”.

      These are thoughts so batshit crazy, so unpleasant that they’d get heads shaking in a YouTube comments section. Tinfoil hat thoughts.

      * On Sim’s actual assertions about women… let’s attempt a quick summary. Men are rational. Women are emotional. Men want to achieve great things. Women want to sidetrack them into domesticity (“Merged Permanence”). Women are expert manipulators who trick men into acting against their own best interests, and who have acted as knowing agents to turn the tide of civilization away from thought and towards feeling. Fair reading?

      You know what? I don’t have a strong view on the above. Obviously I don’t agree with it – I don’t regard thought and emotion as being entirely binary constructs, let alone constructs which apply quite that neatly across the gender divide, and I think “Merged Permanence” offers many of the same challenges to women that it does to men, particularly in this day and age.

      But I also think Sim’s free to believe it, and to speak it out loud. It’s not a hate crime, and he shouldn’t be vilified for it; particularly as you could just as easily generalise in the opposite direction (let’s try “there would be no war without men”) and get a round of applause in civilized company.

      As specified above; I kind of agree with him on the issues of a more emotional society. I just don’t think it’s being caused by women, let alone some sort of grand feminine hive mind hi-jacking male consciousness. I also agree that – obviously – domesticity will in all likelihood prevent you from some of the grand projects you might otherwise have had in mind. But that falls into the “no shit” bucket, doesn’t it? And someone somewhere needs to be having and raising kids.

      The whole bit brings to mind the classic quote from Sam Kinison:

      “Hey, do me a favor – if you see me outside, painting the house, working in the yard… KILL ME! Shoot me in the head, run me over with the car – I live in hell I LIVE IN HELL!!!!! AUUUUUUUUGHHHHH!”

      That always gets a laugh from me, because it’s kind of true, isn’t it? Who wants to work the yard when they could be off doing whatever the hell they want to do? That’s certainly how I thought when I was young. But then, at some point, you learn that doing whatever the hell you want to do only gets you so far, and that some of life’s greater rewards can only be obtained by acting against your own immediate self interest. I don’t propose one path as being superior to the other, I just note that they each have their moments.

      * Does he mean it? This is the big one, isn’t it?

      For me, it’s really, really simple. If you don’t think that women are horrible life force vampires who shouldn’t be allowed to vote, then maybe don’t write and publish those words in a medium where you’ve repeatedly trumpeted your own ability to say and do what you want, coming from the mouth of a character you’ve recently identified as almost existing almost entirely as a proxy version of yourself. Alternatively, if you really must do so, because the story demands it, maybe clarify afterwards that those aren’t your views. It’s not rocket science; in a context where you can suck all the heat and light from the room, you can probably also disabuse the audience as to any notions they may have as to your true thoughts.

      What Sim is doing here is basically chickenshit. He’s saying some really brave stuff – stuff he obviously believes deeply and knows he’ll be crucified for. That’s (largely) great. But he’s also hiding behind the mask of irony and authorial voice, and that’s a trick I have always, always loathed, because it allows the artist to have it all ways; to court the “right on, brother – finally someone tells it like it is” dickheads, while also retaining the “he can’t possibly mean it” sensitive types. The “Fight Club Stratagem”, as I like to think of it.

      While I’ve condemned above a lot of what Sim has to say, I still found Reads enormously impressive and enjoyable.

      It’s packed full of artistry, tremendous rhetoric and painful, visceral honesty. I genuinely love Sim’s writing in the Viktor Davis sections, and I got a huge amount from watching him build up to that final, awful splurge of bile. He speaks a lot of truth, talks a lot of bollocks and is generally fantastic company over a few dozen pages. If he was a pal, I’d look forward to going out with him again, albeit with the heavy caveat that I’d skip what he was smoking, and a vague concern that he might need a bit of looking after going forward.

      Right, the above is far too long, far too garbled and almost entirely lacking in structure, but it’ll have to do as there’s work to be done. I feel like one post really wasn’t enough to pick apart everything that’s going on in Reads.

      Service returned, @Kid-Dynamite, and I’ll order Minds later today.

  23. Minds

    Okay, so this is the book I originally checked out on. Not because of anything to do with Cerebus, but because I’d hit my late teens, and began to drift away from comics a bit. I remembered virtually nothing of this section of the story, and everything from here on will be entirely new to me.

    I really, really, really enjoyed this.

    As I understand it, Sim’s original plot-line for Cerebus extended only as far as the end of Minds, which took us to issue 200. This is sort of the peak of his original plan, and everything hereafter involves a bit of improvisation. So, what does that peak look like?

    We left Cirin and Cerebus soaring through space on a small patch of masonry which lifted off from the throne room at the end of the last book.

    The first section of Minds is great fun; the two characters essentially argue back and forth about the supremacy of their respective deities, as the planets go whizzing past in the background. We get lots of of grandiose gesturing here, and a burnishing pomposity which brings forth fantastic lines such as “Behold! The Sea of Sadness” and “O merciless Tarim! Unleash your power! Crush your ancient foe!”. Two shameless ideologues trapped together in isolation, competing as to whose divinity will appear first. Beckett with aardvarks.

    Eventually, the throne shatters, the masonry divides and the pair are separated, each floating off, still bellowing threats and aphorisms at one another. And that’s when Cerebus’ god shows up.

    Cerebus’ god, of course, being Dave Sim, although he takes a short while to introduce himself as such. What follows is an extended back and forth between creator and creation. Sim admits to having created Cerebus in the hopes of being made rich and famous, expresses some disappointment in him and shines a spotlight on his many, many weaknesses. It’s explained that Cerebus will never conquer the world (although he had a chance to do so previously), that he lost the ability to reproduce way back in childhood, that Jaka will never love him, and that he never really loved Jaka.

    On the latter point, the sequence in which Sim shows Cerebus several of his possible futures with Jaka is incredibly affecting. In some ways, it bursts the bubble of Jaka’s Story, but it’s also an insightful (and fairly damning) view of a failing, toxic relationship, and the utter hollowness of the concept of a “love interest” in most modern story-telling. This isn’t real love; it’s just a desire to acquire, and it’s as transient and ephemeral as all such consumerism.

    At this stage, Sim also gives us Cirin’s own back-story, and what an absolute doozy it is. I’ve come to develop a real appreciation for this character; on my first run through she felt like a preposterous cartoon feminazi, but this time round she’s seemed a lot more effective; it’s as if Darth Vader found god and politics at the same time. The sequence where Sim tries to talk to her and is quickly chased off (no male deities for Cirin) is brilliant, and recalls her interaction with Dream Roach in an earlier volume.

    Eventually, Sim loses patience with Cerebus’ obnoxious refusal to listen or learn, and punishes him two-fold; first with a spot of wanton eye torture (seemingly provoked by an incident in the author’s own life), and then by marooning him on Pluto for a spell of several weeks. I really loved this sequence; particularly the idea of Pluto as representative of Cerebus true nature, with its unusual axis and consequent cycle of freeze and thaw.

    What seems to me to be happening here is an attempt by Sim to give actual life to his lead character. He’s written him for about 20 years at this point, and presumably feels as if he’s imbued him with enough animus that he can stand alone. So that’s what he lets him do. He engineers an opportunity for the pair of them to meet face to – well, not face, but near enough – and then simply allows the conversation to unspool as he imagines it probably would. He attempts to deliver insight unto Cerebus, is rebuffed and eventually resorts to slapping him around in sheer frustration. Towards the end, he offers to take Cerebus anywhere he wants, in the blink of an eye, if only Cerebus will just choose his own destination. He’s sick of being the puppet master, it’s high time for the puppet to exercise some goddam free will of its own. Choose your path, I’m done holding the compass.

    I’m genuinely not sure I’ve ever seen anything like this in fiction. The obvious comparison that jumps to mind is Vonnegut’s conversation with Kilgore Trout in Breakfast of Champions, but that’s nowhere near as extended, nowhere near as fulsome, and nowhere near as mental as this. It’s as if Sim has come to believe that Cerebus really is a separate entity entirely, and one he can commune with, given the right circumstances.

    I also wonder if there’s a bit of self-loathing going on in all of this. It certainly feels like Cerebus IS Sim, or an aspect of him at least. Certainly a means to channel his own “Barbarian” side, and to enable a spot of introspection. This showdown really does feel like a creator wrestling with the dark side(s) of his own personality, and I wonder if the ending represents some sort of attempt to exorcise the Cerebus element, banish it to the page and leave it to roam free in captivity. I doubt Sim would see it this way, but it’s the sense I got on this read-through.

    As I say at the top; I don’t know where the story goes from here. I’m kind of desperate to find out, because I sense that this will mark a definite left turn in proceedings, and a new means of creative output for Sim.

    What else? Well, I think this is a really, really beautiful book. I’m a sucker for space stuff, but the art and composition are just absolutely gorgeous. From the in-panel flashbacks to the wonderful drawings of the planets (the Great Red Spot being a particular highlight), I could happily stare at it all day, and the leap in quality from all the way back in book one is just mind bending.

    The whole thing is a big, glorious mind-fuck. It’s witty, and cosmic and full of imagination (not to mention a pretty solid pie-in-the-kisser gag). It feels like a worthy climax to all that’s gone before, and it’s definitely the strongest section of Mothers & Daughters.

    Very excited to see what comes next in Guys, although I know by reputation that these later books probably won’t come close to the quality we’ve seen so far.

    • That’s a great review, @bingo-little, of a great book. Minds has turned out to be one of my favourite volumes on this reread. Not sure what I can add to your commentary, so I’ll just chip in with a few random thoughts.

      Dave’s appearance here is set up well by the Victor Davis segment of Reads. Reading my Reads piece back, I sound harsher on this than I really am. The finale (the infamous issue 186) is clearly pretty daft, and drowns a potentially interesting argument in grand guignol hyperbole, but the text leading up to that is very readable, even charming. Looking back from the plateau of issue 200, you can see it was necessary to the climax, baffling as it may have seemed at the time. It establishes Dave as a voice within the book, and prepares us for his (auditory) appearance, which could easily have been a jarring, break the suspension of disbelief, moment. Nicely done.

      In my Reads review, I noted that while what Dave tells us is misogynist, what he shows us is often the opposite. There’s more fodder for that here, with Jaka and Joanne both coming to grief thanks to Cerebus. They are presented as the decent and sympathetic characters, and Dave doesn’t pull any punches putting this across to his “obnoxious grey creation” (the masturbation bit stuck with me for years). There’s no Male Light / Female Void dynamic in these relationships, just Cerebus basically being a dick.

      Agree that the art of the journey through the solar system is terrific. Some of the covers during this period were tremendous as well – you can see all 300 on this link http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/cerebus/4 , which is as good a way as any to see just how Cerebus evolved over the whole run.

      On to the last third, then. As you say, the Cerebus story is effectively over now, and we are into a sustained epilogue. Remember that everything we’ve seen up to now, from Oscar Wilde turning up to Victor Davis’ lecture, was Dave reining himself in because he had a plan to follow. For the next hundred issues he’s going wherever his muse leads him. Ulp. But the good news is I’m about three quarters of the way through Guys, and I’m enjoying it a lot. (no spoilers).

      • Wow. Those covers brought back some memories.

        This was the period when I was buying Cerebus monthly, desperately trying to work out what I’d missed and where it was all going. The one of Cerebus in front of Jupiter, in particular, is an absolute doozy.

        I totally agree with what you say above re: the manner of the introduction of Victor Davis – we’re given plenty of time to get used to the idea that he’s going to feature, so the effect isn’t too jarring when it eventually arrives.

        On the misogyny, you’re absolutely right, of course. Take out those long text sections in Reads, and what have we got? The Cirinists can obviously be read as a fairly damning indictment of feminism, but that’s only one way of reading them, there are numerous others. The core female characters (Jaka, Astoria) are given plenty of depth and balance. The men are generally portrayed as total jackasses, not least the lead. The Bechdel test is comprehensively passed, time and again.

        I think it’s important to keep these things in perspective. Sim perpetuates some fairly vile misogyny in Cerebus, as discussed above, but it is what it is. I’m not proposing to ask him round for dinner, or elect him to high office. He’s a guy writing a comic I love. I can enjoy the rest of the work for what it is, I don’t need to run screaming from the room, or disassociate myself from it. There’s no risk of contamination.

        Moreover, as I noted above, his observations on women are largely from a personal perspective – only once (that I noticed, anyway) does he appear to suggest that women should be actively discriminated against on a societal level. The rest just reads like your standard dude whose marriage didn’t work out and who now has a massive chip on his shoulder about the ladies. His loss, his entitlement; the world still turns and he’s not hurting anyone.

        I’m steaming my way through Guys. I’m enjoying it, and it really shows off Sim’s skills nicely, but it lacks that cosmic sturm und drang we’d seen from some of the earlier books, or even the grace and beauty of others. It’s certainly made me laugh out loud a few times though. I’ll look forward to discussing it here.

        Stepping back from it all, I must admit to having my mind blown a little on this re-read. I didn’t think it would hold up as well as it has, I thought it would be more of a chore than it’s been and I didn’t expect to find myself so wowed by Sim’s writing and art, given the benefit of 20 years additional life experience. This is proper, grown up art; it has things to say (albeit some of them ugly) and it constantly provokes, stretches, expands and prickles. It also does a lovely job of playing with the form, and the possibilities that arrive with spending two decades (and the rest) of your life on a single artistic undertaking. It made me laugh, it made me sigh, it made me think. You can’t ask an awful lot more than that.

        For me, Minds has been the absolute pinnacle so far, which is perhaps surprising, because I didn’t have the same love for it when experienced in real time, way back when. But then, I also didn’t have a scooby what was actually going on, or why.

        I’m going to put the books so far in order of preference, because that’s the kind of thing I like to do.

        Minds
        Jaka’s Story
        High Society
        Church and State II
        Church and State I
        Melmoth
        Reads
        Flight
        Cerebus
        Women

        Those first 200 issues certainly feel like the best comic I’ve ever read, and it’s a huge shame that the self imposed limits of Cerebus prevent it finding a wider audience or garnering more mainstream coverage.

        I am definitely going to be buying the book of analysis at the end of it all, because there’s so much going on that it’s almost too hard to take it all in, and I still feel like I need someone out there to tell me what to think. It really is the most singular achievement, and I’m very, very glad that it exists. It also looks bloody wonderful on my bookshelf.

        Guys next, then – @Kid-Dynamite

        • Guys thoughts are below, @bingo-little. I am in total agreement with your closing thoughts in that last post. I am surprised, and even more pleased, that Cerebus stands up as well as it does. This is superb stuff, and even the hiccups are well above what anyone else was doing. It’s a real shame that so few people are even aware of it, or if they are, dismiss it as crazy misogynist ramblings. It’s in a ghetto of a ghetto, and it deserves so much more than that.

          This being the Afterword though, I am duty bound to point out that your list is wrong. The correct version is

          Church & State (treating them as one book – if you force me to split them, then you are a monster, but II probably edges I)
          Jaka’s Story
          Minds
          High Society
          Reads
          Melmoth
          Flight
          Women
          Cerebus

        • also, speaking of bookshelves, it has always annoyed me that my C&S II is an earlier printing, with no text on the spine. It breaks the flow horribly. When the remastered edition comes out I might buy it just to right that particular wrong. (And have you seen the remastered version of C&S I? It’s printed on proper paper, is as thick as my copies of I & II together, and the art reproduction is amazing. I saw it on the shelf in a comic shop in Brighton recently and was sorely tempted to buy it. Yes, it would be thirty quid on something I’d literally just finished reading a week or so beforehand, and probably wouldn’t read again for years, but I still nearly did it)

  24. GUYS

    There’s a job. It’s a big job. You’ve had it planned for years, decades. You’ve been labouring at it day in day out for all that time, patiently putting one brick on top of another, building bit by bit, always keeping the end goal in mind. What do you do when you’ve finished?

    I reckon you’d fancy a drink. That’s what Dave does here, as Cerebus’ wish from the end of Minds is granted and he finds himself back in that little tavern near the wall of Tsi. We saw these pubs back in Women, places where single men can go and be accommodated, fed and sheltered until they see the light and are ready to become responsible members of society, to get married, settle down and live quietly under Cirinist rule. Oh, and the booze is free. Unsurprisingly, they draw a certain element, and these are the people we spend the book with. There’s Cerebus’ old companion Bear, Prince Mick, Marty Feldman, the moptopped Harrison Starkey behind the bar, and a succession of cameos from indie comics and creators of the day – Genital Ben, Bacchus, Alec Campbell himself, Rick Veitch… It’s a shame the word ‘banter’ has become so devalued in recent years, because that’s pretty much exactly what Guys is. A bunch of, well, guys shooting the shit in a bar, Cheers in a fascist matriarchy. There’s jokes, tall stories, arguments and drinking far too much, all impervious to the march of time and the (gloriously drawn) passing seasons. It can’t last, of course. Bear’s on /off relationship flips back to on, and he wanders out of the bar, hastily followed by the rest of the crowd, leaving Cerebus as sole occupant and de facto bartender. After some lonely philosophising, he receives an unexpected visitor, and then a short while later, an even more unexpected one…

    Guys lacks the cosmic scale and political intrigue of the earlier books, but it has its own smaller dramas. The five bar gate game between Cerebus and Bear is as tense and exciting as any Ascension. At the same time there are laugh out loud funny moments. The Cerebus’ buggid sequence is a gem, and the whole “Graphic Read” subplot had me guffawing. Yes, it’s aimless but enjoyably so, nowhere more so than the pages leading up to the “remember…jobs?” punchline. Living the dream!

    I liked Guys a lot, more on rereading than I did first time around. It may be inconsequential, but it’s a necessary breather after the high drama and revelation of the last few years. The cartooning of the characters is tremendous, Gerhard’s backgrounds and sense of place are as exquisite as ever, and Dave’s talent for lettering reaches new heights. There’s a palpable sense of relief, of kicking back and relaxing. Cerebus (the book) will never be this funny or loose again, and that’s kind of a shame. Yes, I like the philosophical enquiry and intrigue of the other books, but a life without jokes about wanking is no kind of life at all.

    Oh, and it has probably the greatest last line of all the phonebooks. Tell me you saw that one coming!

    • Really good summary; hard to add too much to it.

      I don’t really know what to make of this book. I’ve given it a little while since polishing it off, trying to let it settle, but I still find it hard to come to any real sort of conclusion.

      Technically, it’s sensationally good. The art, the lettering, the panel composition, the caricatures. This is cartooning on the absolute highest level.

      In terms of the actual use that all that artistry is being put to… well, it’s perhaps a little less noble than you might like, but probably deserved after what went before – god knows how you follow Minds without some sort of sense of anti-climax, so may as well lean in.

      I do sort of love the whole Cheers vibe. It’s not particularly fashionable these days, but there’s something worth celebrating in dudes just hanging around and being dudes, with all the juvenilia that entails. It kind of reminds me of that great Seinfeld bit about how only men could go up to the moon and use the opportunity to drive a little car around the place. Both five bar gate games, in particular, are fantastic, and I really love the concept of this group simply being left by society to fester amidst their whiskey and their rice cakes in a relatively safe place.

      Oh, and “remember… jobs” – what a great moment that is. The passing of the seasons; all beautiful.

      Then we get the hinge, and the whole Joanne sequence. Again, it’s beautifully played, great art, great pacing, superlative inner dialogues, etc.

      But, again – it’s all a bit… small, isn’t it? I get that that’s the point, but what are we being told? That men like to drink, and speak as men do? That eventually all your buddies get spirited away into relationships by evil harpies (albeit brilliantly cartooned harpies), leaving you alone and forced to choose between perpetual loneliness/enforced abstinence and – hisssss – your own merged permanence? That women talk too much, and (god damn it) want to know what you’re thinking?

      It’s all handled just about well enough that, taken in isolation, it’s possible to read the whole thing as Sim skewering his own mindset, his own cycle of misery, disassembling it piece by piece and mocking it. But, read in the full context of the Reads rant, it’s a bit dank and unpleasant, isn’t it? What a miserable place to find yourself, what a crappy way to see the world.

      I think the question hovering over this book, as with so many others of the books which preceded it, is to what extent Cerebus is intended to be Sim’s proxy. The meeting between the characters in the previous book complicates this mater a little, as does the fact that Cerebus spends much of Guys in fear of the wrath of Dave. But then, he’s so clearly going through a version of what Sim went through after his marriage broke up – the foreword alone makes that clear. And if that’s the case, then what does it all mean when Bear calls Cerebus out for his bullshit, and for acting and thinking “like a chick”? Is Sim contemplating that maybe there’s a little of that female “Void” in him too? Or is that simply a facet of Cerebus because of his dual-gender status? It isn’t really clear, but I think you need to turn a couple of somersaults to truly read this as a work of true self-awareness, less alone self-criticism.

      I had never read any of this before, so it was great to arrive at some totally fresh Cerebus. Part of me really loved it, and I can easily imagine going back to it – I’m totally glad it exists, and it probably wasn’t the worst way to reset the story a little. Weighed against that, it also made me feel sorry for Sim, and I’m not sure that was the intention. The man was (is?) clearly adept at poisoning his own well, and then patting himself on the back for doing so, and that’s a little hard to celebrate. On my Cerebus scale, this lands just below Reads, but above Flight. On a purely technical level, it maybe tops the pile outright.

      Looking forward to seeing what comes next; a great cliffhanger indeed.

  25. RICK’S STORY (playing catch up, now @bingo-little!)

    More bar.

    Rick’s break up with Jaka and treatment at the hands of the Cirinists has obviously unbalanced him (check his reaction to Mrs Thatcher’s reappearance for proof). He latches onto Cerebus as some kind of numinous figure, alternately seeing him as a flaming demon or divine savior. This starts to inform the book he has been writing, and “Rick’s Story” turns from a relationship memoir of kinds into a quasi-religious prophetic text. This means more blocks of text, laid out and written in a pastiche of the King James Bible. It’s mildly amusing to see the kind of pub talk we had in Guys recast in this way, and there’s not so much of it that it outstays its welcome.

    Joanne reappears, and we see the beginnings of attraction between her and Rick, which Cerebus is very unhappy about, despite a) wanting rid of Rick and b) wanting nothing further to do with Joanne. The middle section of the book is taken up with observing the interactions between the three of them. Rick takes a knock to the head, after which his religious mania becomes more acute, and he is vouchsafed a vision from a burning bush (well, tree) in which he is told that the deity’s name is no longer Tarim, but that He should henceforth be known as “God”. This has major impact on the story a couple of phonebooks down the line. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide if it’s a positive one when we get there (clue: it isn’t).

    Ultimately Rick and Joanne get together, but Joanne makes the mistake of letting on to Rick that Cerebus had claimed to have been married to Jaka. Rick does not take this at all well. He dismisses Joanne, and uses a broken branch to perform some kind of binding spell on Cerebus, trapping him in the tavern that he had been planning to leave that day. Rick leaves, not before informing Cerebus that they will only see each other once more. Cerebus is left stuck in the bar.

    And then Dave shows up again, in person this time. He’s having to step in to push Cerebus’ life back on track. Cerebus doesn’t really twig what’s going on, but the intervention pays off when Cerebus finally unwraps the parcel Dave left behind. It’s Missy, Jaka’s doll, and her owner is not far behind her. Jaka breaks the container spell, and her and Cerebus settle into a happy relationship. Has the little grey bastard learnt his lesson from Minds? Will this relationship work? We’ll learn more about that in the next book. For now, there’s one final obstacle to overcome as Bear, Marty and Richard George reappear and tempt Cerebus back into bar life. For once, the perpetually self defeating aardvark makes the right call, turns his back on the drunken wrecks, and sets off down the road with Jaka. If you want a happy ending to the Cerebus saga, this would be a great place to stop reading it.

    The general level of graphical invention here is staggering, as Dave effortlessly solves the problem of exactly what third person character’s viewpoint we are sharing at any particular moment. There is loads of Cerebus’ internal dialogue, giving Dave free rein with word balloons and lettering, which are once again second to none. Gerhard has a bit less to do, and it’s hard not to think of him in particular when Dave is talking about how many people Cerebus has bored by staying in the same pub for years. For one panel – just one panel – he snaps, and draws Cerebus inside a submarine instead of in the bar. It’s a blink and you’ll miss it moment, but it adds another element to the metatextual shenanigans that have been invading the book since Reads.

    If Guys is an epilogue to Mothers & Daughters, this is an epilogue to Guys. In the larger scheme of the work, it feels a bit mechanical. It does what it has to do to bridge Guys and Going Home and beyond, getting Cerebus out of the bar and setting up the religion we will see more of in the last two books, but it’s not especially entertaining in and of itself. The broad humour of Guys is missing (although the bit where Cerebus realises where he should have been sleeping is priceless), and there’s little of the cosmic metaphysical mystery of the pre-Guys storylines (from memory, we can pretty much wave goodbye to that altogether), although the visions of Cirin are intriguing, and I really can’t remember if or how they pay off. Ultimately it’s a solid, but unexceptional entry in the Cerebus canon.

    • Blimey – you’re setting quite a pace.

      I’m almost through Guys, so will respond on that very soon. Rick’s Story is on order. In terms of the next few phone books, I may hit some sourcing issues – Page 45 is out of both Going Home and Form & Void, so I’m going to need to do a bit of scouting around.Worryingly, the best offer I’ve found on these books so far is a used copy for over £30 – new ones will set you back £150+.

    • Okay, finally getting round to writing something about this.

      I think your summary really hits the nail on the head, and I’ll probably struggle to add much of value. For me, this was a sort of Guys-lite; a weird little addendum to a book I didn’t particularly love to start with. I could really have done with being out of the bar and on the move by this stage, and I’m not sure what any of it really added.

      Of course, technically it’s absolutely wonderful, and you can kind of just enjoy that aspect of it. I also really like the idea of a narrative that shows the central characters ageing and changing, and Rick, Cerebus and (to a lesser extent) Jaka all give a lovely sense of that shift and drift that comes with the years.

      Beyond that…. I really struggled to believe that this was the same Rick. He just feels like an entirely different character, introduced to meet a narrative need. Perhaps because of that, I really didn’t care about him too much, which basically means being left with Cerebus and his delusions for company. The book certainly doesn’t meet the expectations lined up in that final page of Guys, and it also pales in comparison to Melmoth, which is probably the book it has most in common with; a little aside to take a deeper dive into the life and psyche of a supporting character.

      More than anything, it probably marks the point at which – for me, at least – Sim’s (*ahem*) unconventional views begin to lose whatever little charm they first had. The shock value has worn off, and the overall sensation is of being deep into the second hour of being lectured by a barfly on the evils of women, and consequently of being bored somewhat shitless.

      I did quite like the end, although even that seemed to cut across the great truth unveiled to Cerebus in Minds (that he never really loved Jaka), and I kind of dug that truth. I also really loved the section where Cerebus has a nightmare that Cirin is coming to finish him off – a handful of panels which remind you that this could all be so much more interesting and engaging.

      The weakest book so far, from where I’m sat, albeit technically one of the strongest.

      I should take delivery of Going Home by the end of the week, and I have all the remaining books beyond that now in my possession. The home strait beckons…

  26. GOING HOME

    (Going Home is really three books. This volume contains the first two, the short-ish “Sudden Moves” and “Fall And The River”, while the third part “Form & Void” gets the next phonebook to itself.)

    “Sudden Moves” picks up where Rick’s Story left off. Cerebus and Jaka are heading north to Cerebus’ home of Sand Hills Creek to start a life together there. They are in the first flush of love, the giddy, exhilarated, laughing part, as they walk from tavern to tavern. Jaka appears to have a kind of celebrity, engendered by her ‘royal’ background in Palnu and the success of Oscar’s Read, and thus the journey is facilitated by the Cirinists, who keep a watchful eye on them throughout. This section shows us what Cirinist-controlled Estarcion looks like from outside the pubs of Guys. We don’t really know how long Cerebus spent in that pub, but this is a settled revolution now. Society has remodelled itself, or been remodelled, and, in these parts at least, it looks like a fairly peaceful agrarian lifestyle. Unless you step out of line, as one unfortunate finds out in Jaka’s wake. There are other clouds on the horizon. Jaka says early on “Of course this is the ‘beginning’ part. The ‘beginning’ part is easy. We’ll have to see how ‘lucky’ either of us feels after we’ve had a chance to really get on each other’s nerves”. These chances soon begin to pile up. Cerebus is exasperated at their slow progress, while Jaka struggles with not being able to buy new clothes daily (this is one thing in the book which never really rang true to me – the girl who turned her back on aristocratic privilege to become a tavern dancer with a no mark husband is now stressing about her outfits? Nah. I’m prepared to concede that her experiences at the end of Jaka’s Story and beyond would have had a huge effect on her, but I’m still not buying that).

    They end up taking a barge upriver, which leads to part two, “Fall And The River”. Our travelling companion is Dave Sim’s next literary steal – F. Scott Fitzgerald, here rendered as F. Stop. Kennedy. We are now treated to 220 pages of Cerebus and Jaka travelling slowly upriver and having mealtime conversations with Kennedy, interspersed with Dave’s versions of Fitzgerald’s prose presented as Kennedy’s work in progress, an obvious roman a clef about Cerebus, Jaka and himself. This is where I remember Cerebus beginning to nosedive, as Dave jammed whatever had caught his attention at the moment into the story, relevant to the aardvark or not. It’s what I was talking about upthread when I suggested the quality of the book falls away dramatically after issue 220 or thereabouts.

    You know what? I was wrong. I really enjoyed “Fall And The River”. There’s a great deal of pleasure to be had observing the ebb and flow of attraction and the cut and thrust of dialogue between the three principals. The restricted setting and the limited number of characters give it the feeling of a play, watching these characters circle each other until the ultimate collision (this is, of course, much of the reason Jaka’s Story worked so well). Kennedy is clearly making a play for Jaka, and he dangles the promise of a role as patroness of his putative artists’ colony in front of her. This is so appealing to Jaka’s vision of herself, especially when stacked up against sharing a house in the back of beyond with Cerebus’ parents and being expected to do nothing beyond cooking and cleaning, which is what the aardvark has to offer.

    It’s sad, really. Cerebus knows he doesn’t have a clue what makes Jaka tick. He’s just smart enough to know that something is going wrong, not smart enough to know what it is, and certainly not smart enough to either fix it or walk away. He clings to Rick’s “you have to be happy enough for two” mantra throughout the book, but it doesn’t – can’t- work. Matters come to a head when Kennedy reads aloud a passage clearly based on the fragile relationship we saw Jaka embark on back in Mothers & Daughters. It’s a seismic event in the relationship, cleverly communicated on the page by an irruption of the Juno landscape into the idyllic river setting. It’s a point of no return, and it certainly looks like the end of the road for Jaka and Cerebus.

    Earlier in the book, one of the Cirinists had intimated to Jaka that Cerebus could easily be got rid of if that was what she wanted, and this comes back into play as the boat prepares to dock for the last time and Jaka rehearses her break up speech. There are dozens of armed troops waiting with the obvious intention of capturing or killing Cerebus. The aardvark, oblivious, heads down the gangplank to his fate…until Jaka realises what is happening, runs after him in a panic and walks him through the garrison as if they are still very much together, leaving Kennedy and her dreams of patronage behind. This is the very reverse of Jaka’s Story. In that book, Jaka’s wilful selfishness endangers all around her, but here she turns her back on her dream and sacrifices her hopes in the name of saving Cerebus, impossibly bleak future with him or not.

    I’m honestly surprised at how much I liked this book, especially the second part. As I’ve said, this is where I thought Cerebus began to tail off badly, at least in a narrative sense. It is, of course, technically stunning. The draughtmanship and cartooning throughout is top notch. Dave and Ger expand the vocabulary of comics on almost every page, and some of the sequences (the vista of post-catastrophe Iest, the 360 degree pan around the dinner table) are mindblowingly good. And yet, this time round, I also found a lot more to enjoy in the story. There’s no cosmic mystery, no grand political scheming, but there is a terrifically well observed relationship drama. It’s a chamber piece instead of the widescreen epics we were offered up to #200, but it’s a really good chamber piece.

    (It’s also worth noting that this is the first Cerebus volume to feature annotations at the back. How much you get out of them will depend on how keen you are on Fitzgerald, but once you get past the weight of the research Dave dumps onto the page, there are some interesting insights to be had, and some valuable context for Kennedy’s words and actions in the story. I’ve always wished that Dave would go back and do this for all the earlier books, a kind of director’s commentary, but I don’t think it will ever happen.)

      • Fantastic – thank you so much for the tip-off!

        Per the above, I’ve sourced the rest of the books and was about to resign myself to paying £65 for a second hand copy of Going Home.

        A quick look on Forbidden Planet suggests that the remastered version will arrive mid-November, which means it’ll be a bit of a sprint to get these all wrapped up by year end (and nearly a month until I can read your post above, so as to avoid spoilers), but it should all be doable.

        Onwards!

        • Okay, so Forbidden Planet never shipped the order. I got fed up, cancelled and bought Going Home from Page45, as I should have done in the first place. It arrived this morning. I have 26 days to read the last four books.

          Bring. It. On.

    • Right. I’m finally back on the road with all this and ready to rumble. Chalked off Going Home late last week, and have necked the entirety of Form and Void in the last 24 hours.

      Going Home, then.

      I’ll be honest: I really didn’t care for Guys that much, and I thought Rick’s Story was probably the absolute nadir of Cerebus thus far. It left me a little pensive about what another four phone books of this stuff might end up doing to both my psyche and my patience.

      Thankfully, Going Home is a return to form. I’d never read this before, so it really was a pleasant surprise.

      Your write up above covers pretty much all I’d want to say. I think the craft of it all is wonderful, I love the pacing, and Fall and the River is sort of magnificent. I really enjoyed seeing the output of the Cirinist revolution, the way society is bedding back down, and order being resumed. I dug the sense that time has really moved on, to the point where we seem to have evolved beyond a medieval, feudal society into something a little more 17th century (hey, we even get guns fairly soon). It’s a worthy pay off for all that time (years of it, we learn in Form and Void) spent in bars.

      It’s quite hard to talk about Going Home without also talking about Form and Void. I found that the latter enriched my enjoyment of the former. On first reading, I thought the opening sections of Going Home laid it on a little too thick with the lovey-dovey stuff between Jaka and Cerebus, but over the course of the two books we really get to see the full arc of the relationship, beautifully and poignantly expressed in a medium that is perfect for this sort of thing. In Sim’s hands, the intermingling of thought, word and action is gloriously handled, and it gives us a real window into what’s going on with and between these two doomed people and their half arsed fantasies of a happy ending.

      I loved that he went back to the “Just be happy enough for two people, all the time” thing. So much of what Cerebus encounters with Jaka here rang true to me from past experiences; that feeling of being with someone who has a dark pit inside them that you will never be able to illuminate, the storing up of grievances and excuses, and most of all the wonderfully drawn scenes wherein Jaka simply lies motionless on a bed as the relationship becomes bogged down into a kind of desperate, slow motion disintegration. These moments, where you’re all argued out, and you know the whole enterprise is doomed, but it’s still too early to leave… so totally on the money, he really does nail it.

      Once they hit the river, things improve even further. I liked the F.Stop Kennedy character, and I enjoyed the slow burn of his interference in what is already an increasingly fractured and fragile pairing. The ending is, of course, quite brilliant – a moment of high drama to bring things to a head.

      I think Sim does a great job of exploring the mechanics of relationships in this book. The flaws in the foundation that are there from the start and can never be fully repaired, only mitigated. The sinking in your gut as you watch the cracks spread. The outside agents who apply increasing pressure to the whole. For all the misogyny that’s gone before, it’s all surprisingly nuanced, and I think that really carries over into the next book; particularly as we increasingly come to understand that Cerebus and Jaka are essentially fleeing a matriarchal theocracy for an equally malevolent, if less centralised, patriarchal tyranny. It’s as if gender is nothing more than a barrier to their happiness, and they’d both be better off without it entirely. It makes you wonder whether it’s really women that Sim dislikes, or simply the natural and cultural barriers he perceives between women and men.

      I was really surprised by how good this all is. It’s nowhere near as focused and comprehensive as the absolute peak that was Jaka’s Story, but it’s still a really interesting example of an artist flexing his muscles, following his muse and demonstrating just what can be done. If it isn’t the most cogent of the Cerebus books, it’s certainly one of the more nuanced, and there’s a feeling that, just as Cerebus, Sim has done his time in the bar, and is now returning to some semblance of his old self; a little frazzled, a little careworn, but still finally able to move forward once again.

  27. FORM AND VOID

    We’ve jumped on from the end of ‘Fall And The River’. Cerebus and Jaka are now travelling with Ham Ernestway and his wife Mary. Ham is of course a Hemingway pastiche, and Cerebus, who we shouldn’t forget is still a little gender confused after Astoria’s revelation back in Reads, hero worships this manliest of men. It’s nor reciprocated though. Ham is taciturn and uncommunicative at the best of times, and it is left to Mary to do most of the talking.

    And that’s where things go wrong for this book. What Mary largely chooses to talk about it is a journey she and Ham took to a continent that doesn’t half look like our Africa , whereupon Dave embarks on his reinterpretation of the real Mary Hemingway’s African journals. It is, of course, brilliantly composed and drawn, but it has no connection at all to the Cerebus story, not even the tangential brushed kiss of Melmoth.
    For a good chunk of this book, it feels as though Cerebus has become an encumbrance to Dave, and he is telling the story he wants to tell while inwardly cursing his 300 issue promise. It’s a hint of how Dave’s post-Cerebus career could have turned out – I think Bingo says something upthread about how Dave could have become a master of biographical comics, and this is more evidence for that. The sequence goes on for dozens and dozens of pages. It’s very well done, but it’s not particularly interesting, and it tells us nothing about Cerebus, nothing about Jaka, and nothing about their relationship.

    After the tale is told, the party retire. Later that night, Cerebus hears a gunshot, and finds Ham dead from a shot to the head. It is strongly implied that Mary has, at the very least, facilitated his suicide. This sends Cerebus into deep shock, and he blinks in and out of coherent thought for a while. When he regains his balance, we find him and Jaka in a raging snowstorm, trapped in a flimsy tent with dwindling supplies. Things are looking bleak, until Cerebus dreams of Rick, looking like he did back in Jaka’s Story but with wounds to his hands that suggest the Cirinists have crucified him (I’m pretty sure this was hinted at earlier in Going Home, but I can’t remember where). Dream Rick tells Cerebus how to reach safety, and also tells him that someone will come to him with a book. Oh my, will they. Will they ever.

    Cerebus follows the advice, and, buoyed by the miracle, the couple progress through an increasingly desolate northern landscape until they reach Sand Hills Creek. Cerebus does not get the welcome he expected. His parents have died during his long absence, and his not being there to attend them makes him anathema to a small town rooted in old ways. An angry Cerebus drives Jaka away, back into the arms of the Cirinists who have been shadowing them all the way. A solicitous Mother hands her Missy (who had been left behind in the tent), Jaka clutches her to her breast and is driven off, inconsolably weeping. And that is the last we ever see of her.
    Goodbye, Jaka. Wherever you ended up, I’m sure you came to like it more than you would have Sand Hills Creek. It was never going to work out with you and Cerebus, and I think both of you knew it. All the little nags and needles you threw at each other over the last two books showed that, no matter how good a game you both talked. That’s the story of these last two phonebooks, really. A doomed romance, with both parties telling each other it’s working. I don’t know if Dave is writing from experience, but it feels painfully true. We always talk about his technical artistic skills, but he’s not too shabby as a writer either.

    Cerebus, meanwhile, is overcome with rage and grief. He rends his clothes, he prostates himself in the dirt, he howls. Aaaand that’s where we end this book. It’s interesting that there are a number of natural endpoints built into this last third of the storyline. You could choose to finish at the end of Minds. If you want a happy ending, then stop when Cerebus and Jaka walk off into the sunset at the end of Rick’s Story. Or finish here, with Cerebus alone, broken and bereft. It’s certainly the end of the storyline in some ways, with the next volumes moving us well away from the Estarcion we have known so far. But I’ve been promised Cerebus dying alone, unmourned and unloved, godammit, and I’m sticking around to see it.

    The first half of Going Home was pleasantly better than I remembered. I can’t say the same about this one. For me, it’s the tipping point where Dave’s magpie tendency to put whatever caught his fancy at a particular moment into the book finally overwhelms the story, exquisitely produced as it may be.
    His decision to add an appendix detailing all his research into Mary Hemingway and her journals doesn’t add to my enjoyment. He uses it to launch a sustained attack on Ernest’s literary merit, and Mary’s – well, everything. It comes off as nasty, a vituperative character assassination, and is exactly the sort of thing that gets him labelled as Dave The Crazy Evil Misogynist. Once again, it’s also not reflected in the book itself. In the appendices, Dave is clear that he considers Mary domineering, self important and almost totally lacking in self awareness, while in the book she comes over as a strong woman, with good advice for Jaka on gender equality, dealing with a depressed and useless man. I don’t know how he does it, but it’s a hell of a trick.

    (There are nuggets in the appendices, especially the translation of the guides’ Swahili. Worth wading through the other stuff for)

    On to Latter Days, then. In memory, it is by some distance the worst of all the phonebooks. Ulp.

    • FORM AND VOID

      I’m really quite torn on this one. I absolutely agree with all your points above; clearly, Dave goes for a long wander here. Clearly, there are sections that have very little to do with Cerebus at all… and yet…

      I have to confess that I really, really enjoyed this book. In fact, I think it’s potentially as good as (say) Melmoth, and maybe even better.

      I love what Sim does with his art style, and in terms of layout and pacing I honestly think this might be his best work so far. Clearly, he’s a little bored and wanting to mix things up, but I say fair play to that. I thought the “Mary in Africa” stuff was all quite lovely; you could tell he’s done his homework, it’s gorgeously drafted, and it played nicely into the by now molten uncertainty of Cerebus’ own gender identity.

      I also really liked the way he handled the ongoing collapse of the Cerebus/Jaka relationship. By midway through the book it’s essentially an empty husk – two people bound together only by the past and a future that one of them doesn’t want and the other is coming to suspect isn’t even available. The bargaining they go through over what will happen when they reach Cerebus’ home town is superb, and Jaka emerges as such a tragic character. She has her foibles, but she’s doing all she realistically can to make the whole thing work.

      More than anything, I adored the section where they’re caught up in the midst of Winter and waiting to die. The composition is just absolutely brilliant, there’s wonderful use of negative space and the way the horror of it all unfolds is toe clenchingly believable. Likewise, the bitter, bitter ending to the entire tale.

      It’s a bleak book. There are a few laughs, but they’re mixed in amongst a great deal of internalised torment and physical suffering. There’s a deep misanthropy here that I never truly detected in earlier books, and by the time Rick arrived to inform Cerebus that he’d been executed six days previously I was starting to wonder if there wasn’t a bit of Cormac McCarthy about the whole endeavour.

      Really surprised by how good this was. It’s leagues ahead of the Guys and Rick’s Story books from where I’m sat, and I think the inclusion of the “Ham” character is handled with a little more surety than the equivalent Kennedy in the previous book.

      Right. Even as I type this, I know that this will probably be as good as it gets between now and the end. I know the fearsome reputation of which Latter Days is possessed, and that it’s foolish to hold out too much hope. And yet, I’m also sort of excited to see where this is all heading. I’ll start the next volume later this evening, and I think we’re back on track for a 31 December finish.

  29. LATTER DAYS

    (due to tedious broadband shenanigans I am posting this from my phone, so please excuse the inevitable typos and infelicities)

    I didn’t want it to end like this.

    Truth be told, that’s a lie. It implies that I could possibly have predicted where the last long storyline in Cerebus goes, but I’m not sure anyone could have seen the last 200 pages of this one coming.

    It starts promisingly enough. After Cerebus’ trauma at the end of Form & Void, his life goes off the rails, he blinks in and out, and finds himself as a shepherd, and then a professional five bar gate player. This brief prologue serves to jump us forward to the point where Dave wishes Latter Days to kick off, with Cerebus returning south in order to get himself killed by the Cirinists. Opening a strip club to provoke their wrath, he ends up kidnapped by The Three Wise Fellows, and bound in their Sanctuary. The Fellows are religious fanatics, inspired by the teachings of Rick. They’re also the Three Stooges. These Fellows believe that Cerebus is the One True Cerebus whose coming was foretold by the Prophet Rick, but to prove it, they must test him. There’s some great slapstick stuff here, which is really difficult to pull off in a static medium like comics, and some strong visual gags.
    I said earlier in this thread that I remembered Latter Days being the worst of the Cerebus books. For the first hundred pages or so, I was revising that opinion. The prologue is funny and entertaining. I’ve always been more of a Marx Brothers man than I am a Three Stooges fan, and in memory I disliked this section. On rereading I enjoyed it a lot. Their characters and shtick are bought across brilliantly, and the end to their story is properly heartbreaking.
    But things soon take a turn for the worse, as Cerebus becomes a fascist dictator and instigates a policy of shooting women who are too ugly and / or annoying to live which he then extends to lawyers and “complete dicks” (uh, Dave, we know you don’t really mean it, but this isn’t exactly going to help with those misogyny allegations, you know). Along the way he has overthrown the Cirinists. This should have been a huge event, a focal point of the last third of the saga, but it’s handled as a silly throwaway, that doesn’t even make any internal sense, let alone provide any satisfying drama. That said, the sequence where a dying Cirinist is briefly animated by Cerebus’ magnifier quality is great. It indicates what could have been done here, and that’s really the story of the first part of the book. There are marvellous little moments, but they are stand outs in a big mess that only serve to cruelly highlight how deficient the rest of it is. It just doesn’t feel like Cerebus anymore. It’s rambling and disjointed, the storytelling discipline that has previously served Sim in such good stead has gone, and the leaps forward in time mean we’ve shucked off the previous supporting cast, and even the landscape they inhabited. The Spawn parody is awful. Not only does it feel dated in 2016, it doesn’t sit right against the rest of the book. This is the sort of thing we expect from Elrod or the Roach, not Cerebus himself. I’d much prefer it if Dave had laid the superhero parodies to rest along with those two characters.
    Battles over, Cerebus is ensconced as the head of a religion bearing his name. He fills his days with birdwatching and collecting issues of the Rabbi comic book. An old interview with Rabbi’s creator fries his brain once more, and he takes to shuffling around in a dressing gown, his only words “darr, pretty sunsets”. And then there’s a knock at the door, and the message that Rick had promised would come all those years ago in Cerebus’ dream back at the end of Form & Void is delivered. This is a great example of the way Dave can pull the reader’s strings and get you excited to see what comes next, just like the last sentence of Guys. The rest of the book emphatically is not.

    The promised visitor is Woody Allen, and the book he brings is the Torah. And so the scene is set for almost two hundred pages of buttock clenching boredom as Cerebus treats us to an interminable sequence of Biblical commentary. In really really small type. And of course, this being Cerebus, it isn’t your normal Bible commentary. Cerebus (or Dave, the two being interchangeable at this point) has discovered the hidden truth of the Bible and recast it as a struggle between God and the upstart entity YHWH (or Yoohwhoo). It really is terribly hard going and I’m not ashamed to say I skipped large chunks this time round (hey, I read it all in the serialised issues and then the first time I read Latter Days. Life’s too short to do that again). The side story is the Woody Allen character’s struggle with Freud, accompanied by illustrations lifted from the films of Fellini and Bergman. I promise you I am not making this up. The usual Cerebus caveats about artistic excellence apply, but they can’t save this from being a tedious self indulgent mess. Latter Days was already a bit wobbly before the epic exegesis, but this sends it plummeting. Almost half the book is unreadable. In the addenda to Melmoth, Dave noted that he couldn’t find a workable equivalent to “Jew” in Estarcion and so skipped those elements of the historical record. I wish he’d remembered that.

    So yeah, I still reckon this is the worst of all the phonebooks. Not to worry, there’s only one left, and it gets a lot better

    • LATTER DAYS

      I hated this. Really, properly hated it.

      I have to admit that Form and Void really raised my expectations; I enjoyed it so much more than I’d expected I would, and it ends at such a moment of high drama, full of promise as to what might follow. I was imagining a return to Cerebus’ barbarian roots, maybe a showdown with the Cirinists. Or even just another flight of fancy from Dave. What I got was probably best described as a hot mess.

      I don’t really want to write too much here, because you’ve already described the book and its problems, and also because there’s precious little profit in finding lots of ways to say “I hated this”.

      I could kind of live with the sheep farming. Maybe the interlude in competitive Five Bar Gate, which was at least offbeat and amusing. I positively loathed the spinning past of years and decades off camera. You’re meant to be chronicling Cerebus life, and at no other point has this technique been deployed. I thought it smacked of laziness and was cheap – the Aardvark goes from comparative youth to old age in the space of a single book, right at the end of the narrative.

      I hated the Stooges. I hated the return with a vengeance of the misogyny (way to remove any reasonable doubt). I hated the Spawn parody. I positively loathed the Torah stuff. Honestly!

      All the usual caveats apply – it’s beautifully drawn and lettered, etc. The Woody Allen sections are positively gorgeous to look at. But the book takes a steaming dump on the rest of the storyline and is, quite simply, a tangent so far. There were tons of interesting loose threads he could have tugged on to close this all out; Cirin, Astoria, Po, Joanne, Jaka. The previous book shows his draftsmanship at an all time high and that he could weave in his outside interests in a relatively bearable fashion. Here, he just goes so far off road, and in such an uninteresting direction, that I find it hard to believe he took a single reader with him. Ugh.

      Well, at least it’s out of the way, and will not blight the rest of my Xmas. Intrigued to see how the final book plays out, and will start in ASAP. Should be no problem finishing on schedule.

      I propose we reconvene properly in January to trade thoughts on the work as a whole. “Cerebus: The Barbarian Messiah” is on my Christmas list, so I will hopefully be arriving armed with the slightly more lucid thoughts of others, which is generally how I prefer to travel.

    • Cripes – OK, I finished Going Home this morning, so will have something up on that soon.

      Friday is my last day at work for the year, so I’m still aiming to get this wrapped up by the 31st. It’s going to be an extremely misogynistic Xmas at Casa Little (even more so than usual)…

      • I’m aiming to finish on Saturday. The addenda to The Last Day state that Dave finished his work on Cerebus on December 17th 2003, so that would be a nice little echo. I’ll do a review and then in another week or so I think I’ll need to do some kind of overview post. I’m really eking out The Last Day. I don’t want this to finish….

  31. THE LAST DAY

    Something fell.

    I’m conflicted about this one. I remembered it being pretty strong, but on rereading I’m not so sure. It starts with more of Dave’s highly individual theology, as a dreaming Cerebus is vouchsafed the secrets of the universe and the answer to Einstein’s Grand Unified Theory. It is preposterous cobblers, of course, but in stark contrast to the Cerebexegesis, it is beautifully crafted cobblers, fantastically drawn and written in an authentic King James style style (well, authentic to this heathen’s ears, anyway). It also scores over the last part of Latter Days by being published as a single issue (289/290 were published together as one 40 page comic). Do you have any idea how agonising it was to go through that Torah stuff in twenty page instalments a month apart for the best part of a year? Unfortunately, where it comes off second best is in comparison to Dave’s earlier attempts at cosmology. “That’s what’s left of her” is one of my very favourite moments in the whole work, and this is nowhere near that.

    Once Cerebus wakes, it’s clear we’ve jumped on again from the end of Latter Days. He is terrifically aged, confined to one room, mumbling and rambling to himself. His body is one long catalogue of aches. The church he leads is splintered and at war with itself. His life is dwindling away, and all his dreams of power, gold and glory have been replaced by the hope that his estranged son will visit him.
    This is what I liked about the book. The aged, the lonely, the infirm, these are people who don’t get much screentime in our pop culture. The portrayal of the ancient Cerebus, wracked with pain and wandering in and out of coherence, is handled with terrific empathy, and no little artistic skill. The panel where he’s sat in his chair, wrapped in a blanket, staring vacantly at the rain against the window, lost in his own heartbreak is maybe the most moving image in the whole work.

    The plot, though…I’d largely forgotten the storyline of The Last Day, and with good reason. It’s frothing Daily Express tosh of the first order, one long incoherent tantrum about liberals. Compare the thud of this to the tender and moving portrait of the title character, and you’d struggle to believe they came from the same person. Sheshep finally arrives, and outlines his vision to Cerebus. This is excellently done, with a sense of rising tension engendered by the mysterious noises coming from his box. His final revelation, though…I’ve never really been sold on it. In the hands of a lesser artist, it would be silly and bathetic, but Dave just about pulls it off through sheer skill. I’m also inclined to give it a pass for the invocation of Yeats’ Second Coming, but it’s hard to avoid the impression that Dave wanted us all to be properly shocked and horrified, when I’m a bit more “hey, great technique!”.

    Anyway, enough of my yakking, we’re all waiting for issue 300. I think Dave steps up right at the last and knocks it out of the park on this one. The end of 299 saw an enraged Cerebus grabbing his sword and vowing to kill Sheshep and New Joanne. For a month we all awaited the return of Cerebus The Barbarian, going down in one last blaze of glory. Instead, the ancient aardvark stumbles, falls, and breaks his neck. At least he gets one final fart in. There’s a great sequence of his life flashing before his eyes, as he dies alone, unmourned and unloved, just as we were told all that time ago. A ghost Cerebus emerges from his body, and gingerly taps away from the corpse (I like that the spirit is depicted in classic costume). A shining light appears, the famous tunnel of light from near death experiences. Waiting for him at the other end is, well, everyone. It’s a lovely double spread, a thank you to the fans. Spirit Cerebus eagerly runs towards to the light (changing into his Rabbi costume along the way, which I did not welcome as much as the waistcoat and medallions) before realising that it’s not quite everyone. Rick, who he believes to have been the holiest man he knew, is not there. What does that mean? Is he right to go to the light? Is he going to Hell? No matter, he can’t escape, and the last we see of him is his hat falling and dwindling off into the distance.

    There’s a lot that’s good about The Last Day that has stuck with me over the years, and some less good stuff that I’d let slip. It is streets ahead of its dire predecessor, but it’s still a long way from the heights Cerebus previously reached. I think the last issue is tremendous, but I wish the preceding thirty or so had taken a very different tack. The decision to introduce a version of the Christian religion to a fantasy world was a massive mis-step. Not only is it handled in an extremely dull fashion, it robs us of so many other potentially much more interesting ways for the story to go. The last of Cerebus will always make me wonder what could have been, and that’s a crying shame.

    (There’s a good analysis of the issue at this link, worth five minutes of your time.
    http://www.rilstone.talktalk.net/cerebus-300-.htm)

      • Yeah, me too. It’s been such a lot of fun, and your knowledge and insight have really added to the whole experience. Plus, it focuses the mind when reading the phone books to know that you’ll have to think of something faintly articulate to say about them shortly.

        I finished The Last Day earlier on. I’ll get my thoughts together shortly, but I mainly agree with what you’ve already written above. To be honest, I want to read the 289/290 section again before I write anything.

        • Oh, you say the nicest things. Don’t go stinting on your own insight – Mrs Dynamite may possess many virtues, but a willingness to spend a year talking about a cartoon aardvark is not one of them. It’s been really good to talk and read about these books with someone else at length (even if after almost every book, I’ve felt that I’ve left so much go unsaid).

  32. THE LAST DAY

    Well, here we are. The final book completed, with a few days of 2016 to spare.

    I think it’s probably fair to call this one a mixed bag.

    The biblical exegesis and foray into astrophysics with which we open is really nothing short of stunning, both in its conception and execution. Obviously, it’s impossible to take Sim seriously when he suggests that he’s somehow succeeded where Einstein failed, and is only being kept from the full credit his masterstroke merits by the FemiNazis, but all the same – this is one hell of an opening gambit. Even more so after the damp squib of Latter Days.

    The main plot line of the book (such as it is) is also glorious. I loved the idea that the Aardvark’s perpetual quest for power and influence has lead him to this final pass: a locked room, a prison of his own making, with the enemy at the gates. If we’d somehow got from the marvellous end of Form and Void to this in slightly less trying and preposterous fashion then I’d have been a very satisfied man indeed.

    I still don’t love the huge jump in time that it’s taken to bring us to this point, or the way that great swathes of plotline (marriage! Kids!) are now taking place between phone books and off the page entirely, but there you go.

    The main thrust of the plotline recalls High Society. The ludicrous, labyrinthine bureaucracy. The daft factional politics. It’s a bit of a crowd pleaser, akin to playing the old hits, and it’s one of the things Sim is very very good at. Another thing he’s very good at is chronicling domestic minutiae in a manner that’s both engaging and amusing. Again, that skill set gets an airing, amidst a general feeling that he’s playing to his strengths. Really satisfying final chapter, exactly the way you wanted it to end. And the final few pages – the flashbacks and then the trip up into the light? All perfect. I’d quite have liked Dave the deity to make a return at this point, maybe one final dialogue with his greatest creation, but all the same – it’s a definite fan pleaser.

    That’s the good stuff.

    The bad stuff? Woooo, the politics. The conflating of homosexuality and paedophilia. The “barbarians at the gate” liberal caricatures. The rampant paranoia that riddles the entire thing. I really enjoyed reading the postscript at the end of the book, because Sim is always great value in these situations, but oh man the misogyny and misanthropy are off the charts. Reading through, it’s hard to avoid concluding that there are some serious “mommy” issues underpinning a lot of this – stuff.

    I also kind of loathed the big reveal of what’s in the box. The arrival of Shep Shep is subject to such a brilliant build up, and the dialogue between father and son so well handled that it was a real disappointment when it emerged that the whole thing had basically been the pretext for a slightly shit edition of Future Shocks. The lion with the baby’s head was just ludicrous, and I’d have preferred that virtually anything else had emerged from that box. It didn’t feel in keeping with the rest of the Cerebus story at all.

    With that, we’re done. It’s been a bit of a ride, all in all – issues 1 to 200 were a total joy, and 200-300 started badly, recovered nicely in the middle, headed off a cliff and then finished relatively strongly. There’s something of a bitter irony when you come to realise that Sim’s original forecast of a death “alone, unmourned and unloved” ended up applying largely not only to Cerebus the character, but to the book as well.

    In the final reckoning, I have the phone books in this order of quality:

    Minds
    Jaka’s Story
    High Society
    Church and State II
    Church and State I
    Melmoth
    Reads
    Form & Void
    Going Home
    The Last Day
    Flight
    Guys
    Cerebus
    Women
    Rick’s Story
    Latter Days

    Santa very generously brought me copies of the Cerebus cover Treasury (which is mind bendingly good – the covers are almost worth a thread of their own) and the essay collection “Cerebus, The Barbarian Messiah”. I’m ploughing my way through the latter, and it’s very good (multiple contributors, and essays on a variety of subjects including (gulp) gender).

    Because this is all too much fun to stop now, I propose we reconvene in January for final consideration of Cerebus as a whole, coupled with a detour into favourite covers.

    Until then, I wish you a very happy New Year!

  34. @Kid-Dynamite I actually re-read this whole thread a few months back; very glad we did it, although as you say cannot believe so much time has passed since. My Cerebus books are staring at me from their shelf right now – maybe I’ll go back to the good ones again soon (don’t think I could face all the lows of another full read).

    That blog is a tremendous find. He’s going into even more detail than we did, I absolutely love it. Full of facts that are new to me, and some great observations.

    What a weird legacy that comic has. How can something be so beautiful and yet so hateful?

Leave a Reply