This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

My most glaring omission though is from Latter Days. Koningsberg's comes to Cerebus because he has brought Cerebus a book(e) passed down since the days of Rick(e). It is the Torah, the Pentateuch and Cerebus proceeds to interpret it as an argument between God (male) and YHWH (female). Over many pages. Many, many pages. In very small type.

Thanks Dave.

I would love to read the actual essay / description behind this: "Somewhere immediately before #200, Dave points out he was only joking, and Cerebus is going to be 300 issues after all. He says it's to make you see how you would feel if something you loved was taken away before you were ready." I tried getting into Cerebus back around #151, but can't remember any talk about the series ending at #200.

He says round the time of #200 that he had made the decision I attribute to him to finish early and just hadn't told anybody, but that he had changed his mind.

Bollocks. Will look tonight and try and find the detail.

Flash of inspiration - he may cover this during the Viktor Davis sections in Reads now I think about it. Sorry, I'm trying to do all this from memory, and it's a complicated storyline... will confirm later.

It came up here You'll also note this is a post-C&S question, hence I've been light on all but the main points in pre-#111 accordingly.

Anyway, the full story on the #200 story is indeed in the Viktor Davis bit in Reads.

December 8, 1980, at approximately 11:20pm, Viktor Davis had been sitting at his drawing board, hard at work on the twenty-fourth issue of Cerebus. Less than a year before, he had announced for the first time that the story line would run three hundred issues. He was in the middle of lettering 'Blinky Boar and the Strawberry Patch' and humming 'Strawberry Fields Forever' to himself when the local radio station interrupted its programming for a news bulletin.

'Possibilities for a Beatles reunion were dashed at eleven o'clock tonight when John Lennon was shot to death outside his Manhattan apartment building...'

That night, Viktor Davis decided that Cerebus would not run for three hundred issues. He decided that Cerebus would run for two hundred issues. Viktor Davis decided to keep this a secret, telling no one for fourteen years.

He would not announce it until issue one hundred and eighty-three, a year and five months before the end: November 1995.

Dave then continues for a bit about how the reader takes this news.

'I was just kidding,' he said. 'Cerebus goes to issue three hundred. Just like I've always said. March 2004.'

The reader and Viktor Davis regarded one another for several minutes, without speaking, across the strange, lighted rectangle. Calmly, Viktor Davis withdrew his pack of cigarettes from his hip pocket and selected one. Rasing the lighter in his right hand, he lit the cigarette in a quick, easy motion.

'What's the matter?' he asked, still smiling through a dissipating cloud of smoke.

'Don't you trust me?'

In many ways this is the best and worst of Dave. He has admitted in private conversation to me that it's entirely possible - that the way the final third sits is consistent with Dave having no real plan and having to come up with it as he went along, to a degree.

btw Andrew, Dave turned the Cerebus copyright over to the readers in #300 so this is free for reproduction.

"Heheh. Watta maroon." Dave is talking about Cerebus. Or is he? Dave is talking about us. It's our desire to know what happens next that brings Cerebus back to the bar. It's us that choose for him not to die.

This accounts for the jarring jump in story (mainly because there are no outstanding plotlines - everything that needs tying up, has been), and almost retreading of previous work. Old characters are reintroduced, sometimes (as in Mick 'n' Keef) for no real overall plot advancement,and the level of injokery (Seth, Eddie Campbell, Marc Hempel) is possibly even higher. Having said that, by the time Guys is over, the final books are at least roughly plotted - there are pieces very early in Rick's Story that don't pay off till Latter Days, for example.

Despite all this, the Jaka from the later books is entirely consistent with the earlier Jaka, and re-reading Jaka's Story in light of what came later if Dave planned it all from the beginning it's hard to see how it ever became hailed as a feminist epic (it actually reads in exactly the same way as some of the later post-breakdown light/void books).

There are some good essays out there on which chunks you can break the 300 issue plot into (personally, I favour the interpretation which says it's the same 100 issue story told 3 times but with variances in the main themes. 1-100 - Cerebus is manipulated in a male-dominated society, the reader is externalised and voyeuristic, an observer. 101-200 - the transition: Cerebus is manipulated as much as he manipulates others in a society fighting a gender war, the reader is a companion and participatory. 201-300 - Cerebus is stuck trying to manipulate other people to win minor victories in a female-dominated society, the reader is empathic and is Cerebus.), I recommend a good one I read which says the split is in fact at 150, and there's a 'light' half and a 'void' half. Also, Dave's answers to questions on individual books on the Cerebus newsgroup show that there were some constructs he introduced very early on that have very real and far-reaching consequences for much, much later (it can be argued, of course, that this is not necessarily inconsistent with plans for finishing at 200).

some constructs he introduced very early on that have very real and far-reaching consequences for much, much later

what are these, btw, for the benefit of someone who skimmed the later stuff?

also: acc. to dave, it's definitely hell (I think).

Personally, I think it works better if it's left open to interpretation, but obv it's hard to stop Dave overexplaining about things.

To cover some earlier points:

I suspect at 200 Cerebus would just have died on the ice planet. alone, unloved and unmourned.

As to some of the stuff which is introduced very early - I think the most obvious one is in issue #2, where Cerebus goes after the "Eye of Terim" which is protected by a succubus. And what do succubi do? They are the 'void' into which the souls of the male warriors are sucked.

Q1 continued: Also, the female succubus Khem is hiding out in "The Eye of Terim." Terim, of course, is later depicted as the female deity. Was the later use of the name Terim deliberately linked to the earlier use?

DAVE: I can't say with 100% certainty that that was the case. As I recall, the two different spellings of Terim and Tarim were accidental at first, in the same was that I had trouble bearing in mind that Cerebus was supposed to refer to himself in the third person and would later cover for it by saying that he referred to himself as "I" when he had been around the civilized areas too long. I was covering for not remembering how to spell Tarim by making it the masculine version of the deity's name.

Q1 continued: Similarly, is the demon Female (Void) sucking the souls out of the Male warriors, who at the end when released are depicted as Lights flying off into the night an intentional direct parallel to the similar description of the Void and Light that you presented in i186?

DAVE: I went back and reread the section and it seems clear to me in retrospect that this was me unconsciously documenting what would have been, at the time, my overwhelming and all-encompassing connection to the female half of reality which resulted from my first non-familial exposure to it as a result of being in my first boyfriend/girlfriend relationship for about a year by this time.

Certainly all of the central YHWHist female realities are there: the living thing in the middle of the earth that's a bright light, the rarest jewel, blah, blah, blah. And it certainly anticipates the ultimate conclusions I came to about the devouring, ensnaring nature of the light as presented in i's289/290 (is that the plural form?) about which, in my view, men would do well to remain always and centrally vigilant if they intend to shilly-shally on the romantic borderlands or (God forbid) plunge joyously headlong,as I did,into the Alice in Wonderland environs of the members opposite.

[Relative to 186, I think it's safe to say that my best amended perception of Reality is that males and females are both light and void. That is, that masculinity is represented in the light by the Spirit of God which "went in unto the light" and the "true light which lighteth every man that commeth into the world" (John's Gospel). Femininity is represented in the light by the empty facade of radiance (un-true light, if you will). Masculinity is represented in the void by the fact that it is the medium in which God exists.

I mean, that's my best guess,that the void is universally conscious and aware for the most part across untold trillions of light years interrupted here and there by pinpricks of empty facade radiance and that the void also constitutes the space between atoms and molecules. It's all one awareness which allows for the literal definition of God as an omnipresent Being. He is literally everywhere around you and inside of you. Boo!

Femininity is represented in the void as a vaginal nature, desirous of things to ensnare and transform. That is, apart from the facade of radiance, with the seminal light there was, literally (to quote Dorothy Parker) "no 'there' there." One of the descriptions of goddess nature is "everything she touches she changes." Well, true enough. All the Spirit of God wanted was to have a co-equal existence with the light and we see what that's led to. YHWH the transformative tar baby. Enter at your own risk.]

It seems to me that I was telling myself that very basic story as well, even way back at issue 2. Notice that all Cerebus has to do is pick up the Eye of Tarim and walk in a straight line to the exit. The thing is there are no straight lines in the female half of reality. They are,physically, mentally and spiritually,all curves which lead nowhere. Fun house mirrors and roller coasters. I was surprised that no one picked up on the analogous usage of "The path suddenly drops and the aardvark stumbles�" segment and the same trick that Viktor Davis played on the reader in i183, where the path suddenly drops away and then comes back when he announces that Cerebus is going to end at issue 200 instead of 300.

In both case, the one unconscious and the other conscious,I was attempting to demonstrate (first to myself and then to the reader) what reality is like once you enter the opposing camp where everything is made up of curves that lead nowhere. On the way in, it all looks perfectly straightforward. That's the trick.

Of course, this is Dave's retconning in full effect, but there are some interesting examples. You can find the Q&A sessions here.

i really need to read the stuff i haven't, which is mostly mothers and daughters, but also, hum, lots of the rest. well.

Urgh, yeah. I finally tried to start following the monthly around the time he was doing the "Chasing YHWH" bit and it was an impossible task. Three months worth of text pieces detailing Dave's highly idiosyncratic, not to say schizoid, reinterpretation of the Bible? Yuck.

Did you flag a bit in carrying out your Cerebus project, tom?

Which he believes is the only correct interperatation that has ever been made. And the only reason its not front page news around the world is because of those nasty women and gays keeping it supressed. You really have to laugh. (It's the Torah, BTW)

I would be interested to read that article too.

(And yes, Cerebus farts right before he hits the ground. About 60 pages earlier he'd prayed to God for one good fart. Which is why he thinks "Oh! Thank you God" as he expires...)

It's definitely worth checking out Douglas' article in the original, because you get a Charles Burns Cerebus on the cover and a Tony Millionaire spot illo with the article! That said, I wouldn't mind the PDF too, 'cos I didn't want to pay $24 for an 80-page magazine and read it in a bookshop...

I'd love someone to write a book-length analysis of Cerebus one day, but I wouldn't envy the fucker.

http://briancotts.tripod.com/cottsweb/thirty/thirtyep73w.html

It's rather solipsistic and repetetive, but I don't know how one could write about Cerebus in any depth without this being the case. Anyway, I found it interesting.

Can someone do me a favour and point me to a good - ideally fairly small (like 200-250 pixels max either way) pic of Prince Mick and Prince Keef from Cerebus - my copies of Church and State are in France so I can't scan it. I need it to illustrate a blog post tomorrow (attentive FT readers will be able to work out which).

How chi-chi!

I have read huge chunks of this but have some gaps (haven't read anything after Rick's Story, for ex.) I have two random questions:

1) does Astoria ever appear again post-Minds? At the end of the four-way dialogue between Suenteus Po, Cerebus, Cirin, and herself, does she just leave and exit the narrative altogether?
2) when Cerebus returns to Estarcion after Minds, how come the Cirinists don't just kill him. Given how much trouble Cerebus caused her, I don't get why Cirin would just let him live out his days.

maybe I should just read Minds...

i think the answer to 2) is that she's terrified of him.

1) Astoria's last appearance is in Reads, except for in hallucinations and possibly flashbacks.

You should check out Latter Days, the first two thirds are surprisingly good fun for late period Cerebus, and you don't really have to have read the generally interminable stuff between it and guys to understand it. The last third of the book is fucking batshit and really boring, natch.

good to know... so far I've avoided Reads and I'm conflicted about powering through the entire series, even though I seem to return to the ones I like the most (High Society/Church & State/Guys/Rick's Story) on a regular basis (like, once every couple years). this series is really kinda a tragedy, could've been so much bigger/better...

btw, I watched about 45 minutes of Cerebus TV yesterday (I don't know how much content he has up...it runs in a continuous loop), and my only reaction is o_O

Cerebus TV?

^ The Real Dirty Tuomas

DV, Cerebus TV is some new thing of Sim's, with a little involvement from Jim Steranko I believe. It's basically a rambling video fanzine -- segments include him talking about the development of a piece of art he donated to a charity auction (while he holds a camcorder on the art and bits of photo reference he used, trying to get it to focus), phone conversations between him and Todd Macfarlane about them agreeing to allow each other to reprint Spawn #10 (writting by Sim, featuring Cerebus), a phone conversation/interview with Russ Heath, a video love letter to a bookstore in his hometown, an announcement that he won't offer Cerebus Archives through Diamond Distribution because it didn't meet their minimum order numbers (even though they offered to bend the rules for him, because he's a man of principle etc etc). There are a couple of commercials for local comic shops in between segments; he seems to be hoping to at least break even selling ads, if not make huge profits.

Mmmm.

I wish I could somehow blend with Tuomas.

Man, this new comic he made of pinup girls with him rambling is just woof.

I think he made another one simultaneously that was pictures of Holocaust victims with him rambling.

Yeah, both those are manic and difficult to even leaf through.

haha waht?!

I like the comics-history portions of Glamourpuss, but the fashion-model parts are alternately creepy and boring.

even the comics history parts are a chore to read, as the greatest, most creative and artful hand-letterer of all time has been replaced by a clod-handed typist who fills square boxes with left-justified text.

I find the comics-history parts very interesting in their crackpot sort of way. Those sections of the first three issues can be read at http://www.cerebusfangirl.com/uploads/glamourpuss/glamourpusshistoricalcommentary.pdf , by the way...

"Judenhass," on the other hand, really is a trainwreck--I laid into it at some length at http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/995/reality-check/ .

thank you for linking to that glamourpuss material, which i'd not read before - the sequence where he analyses the photo of caniff and raymond is insane! i mean, im glad that ppl like raymond and williamson and prentice are still being talked abt, in any context, but because sim so plainly doesn't have the brush skills to match the ppl he's 'reproducing', if you have any kind of familiarity at all with the originals the glamourpuss stuff just comes across as a bad cover version, and it doesn't seem to playing to sim's strengths at all - humour, satire, caricature, etc.

Yeah, I got about two pages into that before deciding it was a big waste of time. Like Ward says, he's an extremely talented artist, but his strengths are characterisation and action, not pretty pictures.

Also the subject matter is just obtusely niche. I'm a comics fan, and I'm not particularly interested.

christ what a complete waste of time and energy

wow terrible

Starting in the late '90s, Dave's writing increasingly assumes that the reader shares his particular political/religious views, which he claims are unique. For obvious reasons, this causes much of his later humor to fall flat.

Because the Internet is a worldwide medium, in the last few years he has found a handful of people to confirm even his most outrageous ideas.

I've learned that the work is best appreciated at a distance.

Pretty much. There are still scattered moments of astounding perceptiveness and beauty even in his full-on batshit phase though, which is what is so frustrating.

Sure, agreed. As a whole, it's still my favorite work in the medium.

the other day I told my daughter she was going to learn an important lesson, that you could get what you want and still not be very happy. unfortunately, this turned out to be true.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.comicsalliance.com/media/2010/02/cerebus-58.jpg

Cerebus valentines

wonderful!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/18/comics-grow-up-graphic-novels-harvey-pekar

Is this the most mainstream press attention Cerebus has ever got?

pretty sure it's had a two-sentence mention 9 pars down on a blog before

Tom Spurgeon pretty nails it on the Comics Reporter:

These articles are dumb when comics bloggers who barely have two adjectives to rub together write them and they're dumb when writers for the Guardian with a full armory of verbiage at their disposal write them. Despite the fact that a number of examples in his own article repeatedly counter the notion that there's a narrowing of tone or theme in non-mainstream US comic books -- it made me smile to see Cerebus sneak in there -- there's all sorts of convenient examples out there of the range of alt-comics that get passed over that I think it's very fair for him to know about. While I wouldn't expect the writer to be familiar with publishing houses like PictureBox and AdHouse, it's worth noting that his primary examples come from cartoonists associated with Drawn and Quarterly and the big hit for D+Q before its big hit with Dan Clowes' Wilson was Lynda Barry's exuberant and entirely cheerful What It Is. Fantagraphics' big release of the moment is from Jim Woodring, whose work doesn't have much in common at all with Adrian Tomine. I personally think Seth's George Sprott exists in a land far, far away from what, say, Jordan Crane is doing in Uptight, but if you don't, that doesn't mean that in making your point you should get to drop the comics that provided a cleaner break with the "mopey" stereotype.

The article was actually in the print copy of The Guardian.

I know for sure it's had a two-line mention in a major metro "Comics are for grown-ups?!" filler with up-page art pull before ;)

I think that's a decent enough bit of blog filler, and the Todd Solondz line is pretty good.

The argument is pretty old hat though. Apparently SL is a huge comic nerd (according to a friend who knows him), I'm sure he must have heard of Joann Sfar or Tezuka or whatever. They're quite easy to buy in the UK, too.

Posting here to get rid of the phantom bookmark.

But i do have something to say about the article too: I kinda hate in when someone talks about "comics" in general, when he really means "American comics, maybe Canadian and British ones too". Even if the scope of "serious" American comics may see narrow, that isn't the case with comics worldwide, which should be obvious by just reading the non-Anglo stuff that's been translated to English.

which is kinda difficult in America tbh, depending on what yr talking about. sure we can get Tintin and Asterix or Milo Minara books, but try finding a copy of Arzach for example. tons of Manga never make it to English, etc.

The Guardian is not in America tbh

hey Tuomas brought up the America angle, not me

he was talking about a writer in England who discussed American comics

Maybe he's British, but the article falls into the long tradition of texts where the word "comics" is equated with "comics made in the English-speaking countries". If he'd bother to go beyond that (and lot of this stuff is available in English translations, though obviously a lot of it isn't), he'd notice that there's plenty of non-genre and art comics that have little to do with mopey navel-gazing. Just to take the example of French comics, the recent translations of works by various l'Association artists and the stuff released in English by Cinebooks should provide him with a wide array of "serious" comics that are not in the Harvey Pekar tradition.

Mega interview with Gerhard: part 1, part 2, part 3, and a follow-up from the interviewer.

Fantastic interview, thanks for the links. When they were talking (part 2, page 1) about the 2-page spread of the foundry for the golden sphere, I remembered that I had the chance to buy the original art for that for $150 and passed. I could just stab my brain out with a screwdriver when I think about it.

Like.

That Gerhart interview was fantastic!

Dave's right hand has stopped working properly. He says he's just "ill" but he can't hold a pen or use it effectively.

that sounds like a stroke or slow-developing brain hemmorage to me

Aldo, where did he post that?

Having just gone and read the relevant posts on his site i totally take that back, it sounds like arthritis or nerve damage.

there are a couple of posts on the moment of cerebus site

I have to admit the idea of this terrible asshole croaking is deeply upsetting to me. does not sound like it's come to that.

I assume it's just God striking him down

Ugh. He lost me at "I don't believe in medical science."

Eccch. I've had severe nerve damage in my left hand for a few years. He's being an idiot.

(Not that I should be surprised that Dave is taking an oddball, self-destructive angle on something)

Me too, damage in my right elbow affecting my drawing hand. It's mostly better now... except when I try to do things like draw.

Sorry, had been afk. Yeah, there are some posts on AMoC and he faxed a letter which he typed left-handed to the backers of the current Portfolio Kickstarter.

The anti-science bit is where he loses all the sympathy and, you know, sometimes you just need to not do the fucking thing that makes you Ill. I get that he feels a responsibility to the backers, and I'm part of that problem, but I honestly think skipping sigs on CAN3 would alleviate a huge problem for him.

I always forget how irritating Sim's editorial style is, and that he appears to be unaware what quotation marks are for.

Quotation marks a Cirinist plot.

that sounds like a stroke or slow-developing brain hemmorage to me

he had TIA-like symptoms affecting his arm eight years or so ago that lasted several months, which he "successfully" prayed away - his speech was slow and ponderous for several years afterwards.

Sim in hospital.

oh gosh

Bearing in mind his relationship with medicine, I think it must be fairly serious to make him go. He's still refusing pain relief there, apparently.

how old is he?

he didn't check in for the hand thing either, rather for abdominal pain...

xp 58

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Hut7FmavBa8/VQfETGN3UsI/AAAAAAAAOGk/zmxtaQmAWlI/s1600/sim_hospital_march_2015.jpg

Goes into surgery in the next 10 minutes.

Moment of Cerebus site says surgical intervention to clear a blockage. Intestinal blockage is totally ungodly excruciating. I can see that driving even the most bloody-minded antimedicinist to the ER. IDK if they have to do a resection or what.

They updated again-- it's volvulus of the colon (essentially, a twist in the intestine creating an impassible point). That is some agony right there. They're doing a bowel resection surgery. I've had that. It sucks, and i'm guessing they will have to do it in two stages, with a temporary colostomy bag in between the two procedures.

I'm not real clear on how the hell these twists occur in someone's guts...

Well, if G-d is paying attention, Dave certainly showed Him how tough he is.

goddamn, that's terrible.

a little part of me hopes he has some kind of epiphany from this... but I'm not getting my hopes up. It bothers me that someone who did something great which was v important to young me is more than likely going to grow old and die a sad figure of folly with their work swept out of the canon as a result

he is a v curious figure, I think it's really hard to predict how his work will be viewed once he's gone

on its own merit, I hope

I admittedly own all of Cerebus but have been procrastinating reading it for way too long.

I've never finished it and don't intend to tbh (I stopped at Rick's Story, which is great and feels like enough of an ending for my purposes).

Sim's contributions to the medium are hard to gauge - dude was certainly groundbreaking, just from a business standpoint, but also in form and content. And I can't really fathom how any fan of comics could look at peak period Cerebus and not concede that it's the result of a master of the medium working in top form. But (as has been pointed out here before iirc) there's a lot of elements of his work that limit its appeal and impact - the constant industry in-jokes, his personality/politics bleeding into the material in such a literal way, the impenetrability of long stretches of text etc. You can point to other self-published b&w comics that came out in his wake, you can point to various (mostly parodic) comics that took Cerebus as some kind of inspiration, you can point to other people tackling similar long-form storytelling, but I dunno he just doesn't seem like one of those universally revered figures to me that everybody in the industry acknowledges as a giant. Maybe that's because he just burned so many bridges, maybe it's because his signature opus is such an outlier in so many ways, or some combination thereof.

Yeah, I can't really imagine people caring about all of Cerebus, but maybe eventually one or two of the phonebooks will settle into "classic" status. Like I can imagine "Jaka's Story" taught in some kind of graphic novels undergrad class. Especially if Cerebus somewhow ends up reprinted by another (bigger?) publisher...which of course would probably only happen after Dave dies...Right now is all of it even properly in print?

Dave talked about a deal with Kim Thompson to republish but that died when Kim did I guess. There's probably too much water under the bridge with Gary Groth - I have memories of TCJ being a real bone of contention because of an interview? - for it to happen with Fanta without Kim.

I think Dave's legacy will be as maybe the greatest letter that wasn't Eisner, and maybe even better than him. I think the problem with Cerebus itself is that it's a sustained narrative. It needs commitment from the buyer and I just don't see that happening in Archive editions or whatever outside of existing fans; and then runs the problem that Vol 1 is very patchy and wouldn't necessarily sell well enough to make a company think it's a viable idea. Maybe if you started with HS and then did a prequel volume like they've done with Walt & Skeezix? To overcome aversion to Reads and the... slightness... of Women you might want to do all of Mothers & Daughters as one volume.

So there's a way to package it, and a way to sell it, but unfortunately I don't think either have the commercial return. I think Dave could well end up like Ditko - admired, but dismissed as going wacko and all work after a certain period just forgotten.

i would guess dave puts the whole thing up on the web for free when he dies, the end.

Sim's argument to Kim that the first volume that should be separately collected/published was the Hemingway one was so smdh stupid

agree w aldo that there's definitely a barrier-to-entry thing w new readers - there's no obvious, easy entry point, which is something I can recall people remarking on as far back as Church and State (ie that you had to go back and read all the much inferior/clumsy early satire stuff in the first book to understand who half the cast of Church and State even was). Which was true for me, I started buying issues midway through Church and State I and then went back to High Society (the first "phone book" I purchased) and then went back to the beginning.

Cerebus will move into the public domain after Dave's death (or Dave & Gerhard's deaths, by another account). I wonder if any publisher will take a stab at republishing any of it then. Access to the (surviving) Preney film will be a big question mark.

i think his legacy lies mainly in (as noted by aldo) his amazing lettering technique and his (closely related) exquisite use of time/panel meter whatever you want to call it.

that painstaking metric quality i can only think of ware mastering to the same extent (but I'm kind of out of the loop)

what is the Preney film?

original printing press negatives

It'll go on the web. And it absolutely won't (and shouldn't) be forgotten. It's too unique. Too exciting. Too problematic. It's the perfect book for the cannon.

Moreover, there's too much meta-information for it now to be studied. Ditko won't leave behind a commentary.

Preney Print & Litho was the printing company that printed the comic for most of its lifetime, and went out of business pretty soon after Cerebus was done iirc. I seem to recall somewhere reading that Dave got the archive of film from which the issues & phone books were printed after Preney closed. The film from the High Society issues was destroyed in a fire in 2012. xxxp

thx

According to AMOC Dave has to go back for more surgery and the diagnosis won't be known until they've removed parts of his colon, but he looks chirpy enough.

I originally found out about this from a Tom Spurgeon blog post this morning. Looks like among the other comics news sites, only Rich Johnston has posted about it. I'll be interested to see if and how the other sites report this, or if Dave is so non grata that they just won't bother.

It's definitely a major surgery, but I feel like it's not an immediately life-threatening one that people would feel the need to cover, unless it was something putting him into financial hardship? Maybe that'd be different in the current news cycle panopticon, but I can imagine a lot of people in comics have had surgery without press coverage.

Iirc you can die from a volvulus? Dogs certainly do all the time.

I didn't mean to say it wasn't serious, just that I can imagine a lot of people in comics have had serious medical issues without it making it to the press.

Quite true

Sim is quite the self-publicist, in his own strange way, and tends to provoke fascination in those who know about him.

People always way overstate the unreadability of the first phonebook imo. It's a hell of a lot cruder than what's to come, but it's fun! I started with it, and it worked out fine for me. In fact I like it better than quite a lot of the post Jaka's Story stuff.

Yep, agreed re: the first book. And I find High Society kind of overrated -- too many insider jokes, too much dull slastick. Church & State through Jaka is the imperial phase for me.

Church and State is just so dramatic! Bran's suicide has to be one of the best Shocking Twists in all comics.

Yeah, Jaka's story is the peak of his abilities. More or less a perfect comic.

It's the only book where Dave applies the right levels of Dave to the story.

I prefer both volumes of Church and State. the "punchline" of Jaka's story is a bit much

I'll take High Society and Church & State over Jaka's Story. I appreciate it as a peak of technique but never particularly liked it.

fwiw I don't think the first volume is bad or anything - it's enjoyable and absolutely gets better as it goes along, feel like it really hits its stride when Lord Julius enters the picture. But if you aren't familiar with 70s sword n sorcery tropes or have any idea where the book is headed a new reader might be befuddled at what the fuss is all about.

The old "Swords of Cerebus" version of the first volume is cool with Sim's original commentary from then (and before he went down that path). The Beguiled knock-off is great.

Right now is all of it even properly in print?

Nope, several volumes are out of print. Sim has been Kickstarting limited edition prints of original art to fund restoration work on High Society and Church & State.

Dave talked about a deal with Kim Thompson to republish but that died when Kim did I guess.

No, Dave publicly dicked Kim around for weeks, making him jump through ridiculous hoops and negotiate in public (while also ignoring Eric Reynold’s upfront offer to publish the Death Of Alex Raymond book), at the same time that he was privately negotiating with Ted Adams to reprint the work that Kim was pitching to print. The IDW deal was announced 8 months before Kim’s death.

There's probably too much water under the bridge with Gary Groth - I have memories of TCJ being a real bone of contention because of an interview? - for it to happen with Fanta without Kim.

Sim always noted how he and Groth enjoyed each other’s company while they were tearing strips off each other in public; if Groth was interested in publishing Cerebus, I don’t think that would be an issue. He’s not, though.

The last Sim interview in the Journal was by Tom Spurgeon in 1996; this was some months after the “Dave Sim: Our Hitler?” op-ed under a Bill Willingham painting of Sim that Sim purchased and framed.

I think Dave's legacy will be as maybe the greatest letter that wasn't Eisner, and maybe even better than him.

Eisner or Kanegson?

Maybe if you started with HS and then did a prequel volume like they've done with Walt & Skeezix?

This is exactly what Kim Thompson was pitching; Sim instead, partway through the weeks of negotiations, insisted they start with Going Home, and get it a good review in the New York Times*, before he would allow them to reprint another volume of his choosing.

*or get it on the NYT bestseller list and displayed in a NYC gallery, or something – Shakey may remember better.

i would guess dave puts the whole thing up on the web for free when he dies, the end.

a) Considering how badly the “putting High Society in digital / on the web” went, there is no possibility Sim will develop a plan for this in the next few years.

b) Anyone in the world will be able to reprint it, because:

Cerebus will move into the public domain after Dave's death (or Dave & Gerhard's deaths, by another account).

Gerhard sold his entire interest in Cerebus back to Sim several years ago, in order to not have to deal with him in business again.

Access to the (surviving) Preney film will be a big question mark.

The digital restoration project that’s been going over the past year will obviously supersede this. Maybe the guy that owns most of the original art but won’t allow it to be scanned will open a gallery in his house, to compete with the one in Sim’s house.

It'll go on the web. And it absolutely won't (and shouldn't) be forgotten. It's too unique. Too exciting. Too problematic. It's the perfect book for the cannon.

http://www.umich.edu/~csie/comicart/Cerebus61p18.jpg

Gerhard sold his entire interest in Cerebus back to Sim several years ago, in order to not have to deal with him in business again.

Did he relinquish his copyright in the work or just sell back his half of A-V? Dave's wiki page says public domain after his death; the Cerebus wiki page says after Dave AND Ger's deaths (citing a 2004 Village Voice story, which may have been sloppily fact-checked).

Well, 2004 was before they split, anyway. Not certain if they now pay each other a royalty-like share of C&S -> Last Day trade sales (for Ger from Dave) and art prints with characters, not backgrounds, in them (for Dave from Ger), but AIUI the intellectual property is 100% Sim’s now. (Hence him building a museum in his house, setting up trusts for his lawyer to get fans to run it when he dies, etc etc.)

Dave Sim Responds to Expressed Publishing Interest from Fantagraphics

Mea culpa sic, I had forgotten how one sided the 'deal' negotiations had been. That said, as that link shows, a lot of it is Dave indulging in Dave Classic Whataboutery - "Based on what I think about Fanta I think they'd only be looking for this market, and if they're looking for this market then this is the most obvious book if they're only willing to do a one book 'suck it and see' deal based on sales, which I assume they are, because why wouldn't you, right? And then if that was their logic, here's some other books published in that same ball park by other people and here's what I think is wrong with them; and I'd probably get treated the same way, so I don't think this is something I'll go along with."

Yeah, Ger sold everything to Dave. AIUI there aren't any royalty payments.

The Sim kickstarters aren't about funding reprints, they're about him living hand to mouth. The targets for income from each one were set on what he needs to get by and the extra raised has gone on other 'needs' - the first one paid for him fixing the foundations to the Off-White House, for example. The restoration is being done as a favour by fans with one exception thus far; some special prints were sold as part of the most recent one (CAN3) to fund some of the most time consuming work for 9(?) pages in very poor condition.

It's one fan and one person who's never read Cerebus, and they're being paid.

They had to raise the very cheap rate for those 9(?) pages, hence the additional specific funding.

lol at whataboutery summary.

haha yes

which volumes are out of print? feel like I still see new copies of a bunch of these at the shop

re-reading these from the beginning (I'm such a sucker) I never really noticed the implication that Bran becomes a Cirinist after he disappears in High Society.

Sim still can't draw, and writing even is a struggle. He's just pulled out of doing anything other than signatures - which will take an unbounded length of time and some of which may be left-handed - on CAN3.

OTOH (no pun intended) if he didn't have to find someone who could do an MRI without a doctor's referral then maybe he'd make some progress.

does he not have a doctor's referral because he has eschewed the advice of all general practitioners?

Yes, that's why he doesn't have a doctor's referral.

sigh

Whoa crazy http://www.momentofcerebus.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/weekly-update-93-fan-bequeaths-500000.html

1. make a complex and flawed monolithic masterpiece
2. wait a decade for insane fanbase to metastasize
3. profit or maybe don't

that is insane

tbh every time this thread is bumped I expect it to be because Dave has died

If there is going to be a museum rather than the off-white house it should be a Ghibli Museum-style reproduction of the hotel/house Cerebus occupied while Pope. With a statue of him on the roof speechifying

tbh every time this thread is bumped I expect it to be because Dave has died

― Οὖτις, Friday, July 31, 2015 5:52 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same

Thirded

https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/760564344232882176

surprised he didn't make the Hillary:Cirin connection (and given the state of things recently I would be inclined to throw in Putin:Lord Julius as well)

Well, Hilary is Cirin if you're Dave Sim. Not sure otherwise.

Did Sim ever reference the Clintons in Cerebus?

In the comic, I don't think so, in text pieces, yes.

Well, Hilary is Cirin if you're Dave Sim. Not sure otherwise.

well, yeah. this is all in the context of the comic. I'm confident Sim would equate Hillary with a vindictive, ideology-bound grandma in charge of a nanny/police state

I just finally got around to reading "Reads" (thx to a certain unnamed online resource), which I had avoided for years, and man this really was the point of schism wasn't it. Although I think not so much the raging misogynistic content (though that is definitely unappealing) as for the injection of Dave Sim Omnipotent Author into the narrative. As parodic and self-referential as the series may have been up to that point, it was still functioning within an established, consistent storytelling framework - and the whole abrupt breaking of the fourth wall that extends into "Minds" and reappears periodically not only seems totally unnecessary it actually derails a huge part of what was interesting and appealing about the book. Just.... why. Such a terrible aesthetic decision. And reading these issues with all of the "Letter from the President" and other marginalia included really does make the comic content feel like just a small part of a picture of a guy losing his mind than a coherent piece of artwork. Such a bummer.

feel more like a small part

that should say

also afaik Dave Sim is not dead yet

Incidentally, I think introducing himself as a character was the biggest mistake of the series, and probably heralds the start of the "I'll just make this shit up as I go along, plot resolutions are for voids" era of Cerebus -- altho' as Aldo sez, Guys is still quite fun.

lol aldo otm 10 years ago

er Chuck Tatum I mean

Am tempted to buy the first couple digital phonebooks, the early art looks so beautiful here: http://cerebusonline.tumblr.com/archive

I picked up a phonebook at my folks' house a few weeks ago and forgot how annoying Roach and the two moustache brothers are (I tended to skip over their panels). Though Astoria is still an incredible character, even if the idea of Dave writing an interesting female character now seems mindblowing.

"SMASHIE BASHIE BAF BAM" from when the brothers are getting pummeled by sacred wars roach is still funny to me, idk why

All the Kitchen Staff Supervisor stuff is still classic (Sewage, sewage, sewage)

I'll probably recommend HS and both C&S volumes for a while to come

And I always liked the stupid accents, especially "smartaguy aardawark"

Such a terrible aesthetic decision.

Inclined to agree in hindsight, though at the time I really really enjoyed Minds - maybe because his smaller-scale aesthetic decision making was about as good as it had ever been at that point. A really technically accomplished, beautifully rendered book, whatever the shortcomings of the storyline/themes.

the artwork/lettering/everything is certainly incredible

"SMASHIE BASHIE BAF BAM" from when the brothers are getting pummeled by sacred wars roach is still funny to me, idk why

FONFLIF

builds character

Did his smaller-scale aesthetic decision making ever dip? Even during the unbearable Koningsberg stuff it was well drawn and lettered (you could argue that walls of text meant less space for his amazing Big Letters...)

Eh I think in later books his layouts can be too busy and he can sometimes overdo it a bit with the wacky lettering.

When else am I going to get this much uninterrupted time for a re-read?

Just finished the first phonebook and I think I enjoyed it more than I ever have. The characters are solid, the dialogue pretty taut, the stories have momentum and the art improves markedly until it's pretty much as good as it gets pre-Ger. A really unexpected surprise and now don't know how going to react to what's coming.

in a fortnight you’re going to be posting about how the concept of the feminine void is a good one, actually

I'm definitely going to do the text in Reads and g_d help me to try and read the Torah commentary for the first time ever (it was just too small in the floppies, and DO I LOOK CRAZY?).

I may do a running commentary on that bit because I don't think any of us ever read it?

best of luck to you and may g_d have mercy on yr soul

i reread this when i got the torrents maybe five years ago; i was shocked by how generally badly written and well crafted it was.
good luck

High Society definitely feels like a warm-up and Dave still hasn't found his feet yet either in his art or storytelling. Lord Julius is still a bit too much of a parody and the return of Elrond and the Roach seem like an attempt to use familiarity to get readers onside.

But.

The McGrews are Dave's first great self-created side characters. And Astoria - although better is yet to come from her - is thoroughly developed from the outset as the manipulative, scheming equal (superior?) of any other character in the series. It's the Elf that is the master manipulator though and Cerebus starts on his lifelong quest of trying to get things he doesn't want in the forlorn hope it will make him happy.

I again enjoyed this more than I expected and it's hard not to see parallels for the current political climate here, with a buffoon propped up by a Machiavellian idiot who isn't as clever as he thinks he is, elected only because the alternative is even less palatable to the public.

C&S Volume 1

Gerhard joins and it's the missing piece. Everything suddenly gets 10x better through Dave concentrating on the important stuff. Cerebus gets to be the shape and form we know later. The actual main plot is a bit of a duffer if I'm honest, and the Countess is probably the least vital of all the Cerebus Women (which is probably why she doesn't really - at all? - come up again).

Plot be damned though, there are brilliant moments throughout this.

On page 59 there is a panel which is just an eye but between that and a speech bubble you're exactly with it.
Mind Game IV is as good a study of a depressed alcoholic as there is.
Odd Transformations near the end is a 40 page dream sequence with 4 pages of taking a piss in the middle, but we also get Young Cerebus looking exactly like his later portrayals. And this is the first time I've noticed the first time we see Young Cerebus he's up to his ankles in water, like in the stream with the knife.

Then amid all this we get the unheralded introduction of Bear, arguably the love of Cerebus' life.

I keep waiting to be let down by this re-read but it looks like the time I spent since the last read was long enough.

nothing that's happened in the last 3 decades has diminished my desire to do a reread of High Society through Rick's Story. I just keep putting it off.

I had been putting this off for at least 5. I just realised exactly what I had at the moment was time.

The actual main plot is a bit of a duffer if I'm honest

Yeah Sim's not very good at actual main plot on reflection, definitely more of a moments guy.

C&S V2 is ok I guess but very wordy and fond of infodumps to advance the plot (which it does at a frightening pace in order to de-escalate for the calm of the next few books). The Astoria sequences are immense though.

Re-reading the Judge/George material, having got to the end, it seems clear that large chunks of it are #289/290 through the lens of Chasing YHWH.

i am curious to find out how WOMEN holds up

The Cerebus blog has published the official "The Bizarre Autopsy of The Strange Death of Alex Raymond: What went wrong, AND HOW!" explanation of Sim's latest abandoning of a long-term publishing project.

In keeping with Dave's, and his blog guy's, keen understanding of how to disseminate both information and comics in 2020, this consists of fifteen separate embedded youtubes of audio of the blog guy talking to Sim on speakerphone (Dave's handset is broken so he will only use speakerphone), with himself sitting by the microphone and Dave's echoing voice in the distance.

C&S V2 is ok I guess

I remember the eventual confrontation with false pope being pretty darn exciting. Also a hilarious bit where Cerebus accidentally takes the Rolling Stones' drugs?

In keeping with Dave's, and his blog guy's, keen understanding of how to disseminate both information and comics in 2020

Love how bad at this Sim, and anybody who will still work with him, are at The Present Day.

I remember the eventual confrontation with false pope being pretty darn exciting. Also a hilarious bit where Cerebus accidentally takes the Rolling Stones' drugs?

The false pope confrontation is one of the excessively wordy bits I thought. It mainly involves Fred, Ethel and The Fellow With The Hair telling Cerebus how inevitable their victory is and why he should just jump off.

The Stones bit is the worst part of the book, in retrospect. Haha Keith Richards is always stoned. Haha Cerebus says I LOVE YOU to Mick Jagger. I can see why the Dave of the time thought it was him being a genius, but I just thought it was a one-joke part of the story.

I'm thinking of cool bit where he blows up the stone pope with a canon? I could check, the book's right there on my shelf.

Willing to concede Cerebus on drugs might not be as funny as when I was 17 or whatever.

Oh that bit. Yeah, that's pretty great - mainly because of the Weisshaupt reprise.

Sorry, I thought you meant the Final Acension, none of which I enjoyed much (sorry Carrot fans).

Really curious to reread these. I still have the phonebooks up to Flight (my cutoff point) at my parents’ house.

What an putting me off is the amount of Roach/Drew/Fleagle material, always found them totally exhausting after the first book

I read C&S2 when I was 14 and always assumed I would “get it” when I was an adult, lol

The intro of Gerhard is pretty immense though

*What’s putting me off

I've really enjoyed Drew and Fleagle this time round, Roach is (as you suggest) a comics in-joke that Dave plays a bit too hard on whatever but of Marvel mythology is in his head at the time.

Sim definitely way too fond of extended in-jokes.

at least he's still great at them

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3v5WKVeH4Rw/XvSRmaZuA0I/AAAAAAAADOA/abdP2q3HEwEo837zSPJEMZxkPG9LwRocQCLcBGAsYHQ/s640/80%2BThursday%2BJuly%2B16%252C%2B2020.jpg

jeeeeeeeezus

And that's not to mention the forthcoming 'woke comic store clerk' 48 page one-shot by the one that's actually doing the art on SDoAR.

All the CiH? covers have been pretty spicy this year, there were the three C-19 themed ones, the one about cousins fucking each other...

^^ said one-shot written by Sim has been successfully kickstartered by the guy that drew for free for him for years, now that Sim dumped him; $15 for a 48-page comic, or for $200 you also get one of 100 available already-printed promo copies of the first volume of Strange Death Of Alex Raymond, which will probably be the only printing of the book ever.

Some of us may be in to get SDoAR (which felt pretty good in Glamourpuss, will see how it holds up as a long read).

two

hundred

dollars

Well apart from the fact it's $125, less the lower pledges brings it to $105. Which is still kind of ridiculous but, as you say, last/only chance to buy and cheaper (I think, I'm not a subscriber) than the last 50 Patreon editions.

I've got a month to talk myself out of it.

I guess shipping is higher to Canada

Thinking of doing the re-read, I certainly have the time these days, when the kid’s asleep. Which of the books after Melmoth are still worth reading? I’m going to learn a lesson from my 14-year-old self and avoid reading anything too text-y this time

I've only got as far as Jaka's Story this time round so can't help, but I'm guessing Guys still holds up.

I remember being startled by how good Rick’s Story was given its place in the trajectory

The cartooning is amazing, the text is bonkers

I read it month-by-month as Sim analysing why self-proclaimed messianic figures are deluded, and handed-down texts are an impossible method of crafting a moral code. Instead it turned out he was writing himself into a messianic prophet who proclaimed himself to be the one true interpreter of at minimum one of the three core handed-down religious texts in history.

I think, as I get older, bonkers start to sound more appealing than conventional narrative closure.

Like, I’m gladder that Dave got to go out the way he wanted, even if literally no one else, not even Gerhard, wanted it to go that way

i'm less than thrilled myself

Fair

I just think that, by now, I’ve seen so many longform fantasy & sci-fi narratives (especially on tv) wiggle themselves into tidy but very boring places when they finish, that Sim’s complete collapse starts to seem heartwarming somehow

Also I visited Kitchener once and felt like I could forgive anyone who managed to make something even 2% good from Kitchener

i've seen so many people collapse in a similar way to dave

so many

i'm tired of seeing it happen to people i care about :(

Collapse of narrative, I meant. Dave’s health problems are obviously awful.

The cartooning is amazing, the text is bonkers

― bat ain't Thad (sic)

This is just about all of later Cerebus? I remember the non texty parts of Latter Days being quite fun. Going Home is a mammoth slog with a scattering of masterful sequences.

i sometimes wonder if committing to write and draw and sell a comic book a month, every month, for 25 years, while on paper an admirable career goal, might perhaps have had certain downsides sim may not have been aware of at the time

i sometimes wonder to what extent sim's advocacy of creator-owned comics prefigures today's influencers, wherein everybody is not just a creator but a personal brand

particularly when i see the stress and strain influencers are under, and yes yes we're all under stress and strain, Things Are Fucked right now, and yet

do you think any amount of money, any amount of money at all, could induce me to trade my current career for a career consisting, really, of playing video games on the internet?

no, not at all, because "playing video games on the internet" is so fucking much _harder_ than some people seem to give it credit for.

thinking about dave sim makes me very sad.

Dave, who refused to consult a doctor when he damaged his wrist and became unable to draw*, is now concocting his own COVID-truther conspiracies in his daily strips. eg: the numbers of cases are unreliable because they are tallied by university undergraduates who are too distracted by having friends or using the internet to count accurately, and also simultaneously it's all been made up by American medical schools to get all those huge government research grants that are going around.

* (instead going to the US to get a private X-ray, then posting it on a blogspot and asking if his commenters had any ideas)

Why do people keep giving this arsehole money?

tbf it's only 133 people who keep giving him money, as of his latest kickstarter.

Why do people keep giving this arsehole money?

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison)

i nominate this sentence for the "capitalism in 2020 summarized in one sentence" award

Finished Jaka's Story which, it turns out, is still pretty amazing.

Jaka is shown to be absolutely vile and self-centred, there's one bit I hadn't quite picked up on before that shows she knew all along Pud was bankrupting himself over her and Rick, and was happily letting him do it - only ultimately acknowledging it when it appears not to matter any more.

Mrs Thatcher is incredible when she shows up, she's the most successful and convincing use of lettering to create a voice in the book up to that point. I swear you can HEAR the dialogue.

Jaka's Story was always my favourite.

Melmoth is quite fun, or at least the Oscar Wilde parts are (something which I suspect will be repeated when we get into Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. The rest is inconsequential, except for marking the start of the Roach becoming an incoherent mess that confounds rather than entertains.

This decline continues across Flight and Women which are very much These Are My Gender Politics interspersed with the most boring Roach yet. Cerebus is finally a fully fledged alcoholic (for a short period at least) but it's sparse moments that hold the attention such as the revelation that Sir Gerrick is Cirin's son, which shows just how much of Astoria's life has been playing the game.

It's Reads next. Pray for me.

I started buying new issues right around Melmoth. Women was where I realized the book was no longer for me.

I remember Flight being incredibly exciting after the slow pace of the preceding two books.

The Hemmingway/Fitzgerald stuff, otoh, I remember as tedious and pointless.

yeah, the magic is not repeated from Oscar

(partly because iirc Sim had read and admired Wilde, and just decided that Hemingway and Fitzgerald were the two Big American Writers he needed to give the same treatment to, but did not actually read Hemingway until he started writing a planned 400pp book about him)

I read it month-by-month as Sim analysing why self-proclaimed messianic figures are deluded, and handed-down texts are an impossible method of crafting a moral code. Instead it turned out he was writing himself into a messianic prophet who proclaimed himself to be the one true interpreter of at minimum one of the three core handed-down religious texts in history.

Someone asked why he was wearing a bit of rubber on his finger in a recent youtube:

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VLoDJ0Y73fI/Xx2K4a_MYzI/AAAAAAAAPwA/MNqlIGSj26Q0UzuEN-0CSLcjpuEvD-0XwCLcBGAsYHQ/d/16%2Bmarriage.JPG

Also, here's a minute of Mick and Keef from a feature-length animated Cerebus movie being created on spec, that Dave will either approve or decline only after the entire thing is completed, and will not look at any test footage or excerpts.

did not actually read Hemingway until he started writing a planned 400pp book about him

Yes, and decided he hated him when he did.

Dave Sim otm on that, at least.

Finding a small piece of rubber in a taxi is a personal sign from God specifically telling you that you were right about everything and should keep doing the same things you're already doing.

The handful of fans obsessed enough to not only read your inept third-hand blogspot, but to read the cut-and-paste RWNJ satire strips on it, are "Online Trolls" if they think you used to be an admirably talented artist.

Also, if they don't want their google account linked to their comments on a weirdo anti-science blog, even to say "this is a bad post," then they are one person pretending to argue with themself by also posting comments in defence of Dave.

If Dave knew how to work a computer properly (or maybe he does - he mentioned a laptop somewhere?) then I'd suspect it was actually him.

I bailed on the current Kickstarter - because, let's face it, it's going to be worse than we can even imagine - but will admit to being tempted by the hardcover High Society depending on price.

that Dave will either approve or decline only after the entire thing is completed,

I'm going to predict decline.

I'm going to predict that it's never completed tbf.

then I'd suspect it was actually him.

He used to post in the comments occasionally, but he certainly doesn't have the self-awareness to criticise himself for not understanding science or maths.

I think it will be completed, but Dave will be in no state to make a decision by then (dead or complete mental collapse).

Science or "science" or science or 'science' or science or science? (Yes, I am most of the way through Reads thanks for asking.)

Reads is really a book of two halves. The comic and the text. The comic has Suenteus Po and Astoria explaining why they're bored with how the storyline has turned out and are leaving, and the good bit which is the comics version of the fight in They Live. Make no mistake, it's a masterpiece as it records the small gains of evenly matched opponents cut by cut, punch by punch.

The text though. Whooo boy.

It's clearly after a breakdown. Dave spends the first half at least of it alienating himself from the comics community, calling them all liars. He then throws Deni Loubert into the pile - and I'm sure it's no coincidence that the first mention of her allegory is opposite a detail from the rape of Astoria. Real people flit in and out; Neil Gaiman is presented as an arch snob, the Jeff Smith incident is alluded to several times, and he (possibly) blames Alan Moore (and therefore massive amounts of doobage, in the closest to reality he gets anywhere here) for opening his eyes to how nothing he's ever been told is true and he needs to make his own reality. So he does.

He tells us he has done for a long time, since High Society even, and he has hidden it because he knows there will be a backlash. He retells the story George tells us in C&S, and he will retell us in both his Torah commentary and in 289/290. He then just goes into a rant which he himself basically agrees is misogynistic, it's just the 'evil' part of "Dave Sim is an evil misogynist" he disagrees with.

He says Cerebus will finish at #200, then on the other side of a lecture about objective reality that he's kidding. But I'm not so sure. This feels like hurtling towards an end, and to put all your cards on the table about what you think - particularly when you admit it's going to make you unpopular - feels like a final confession rather than a statement of intent. (More on this after Minds). Then there's the deniability aspect Dave creates between Victor Reid, Victor Davis, Dave and Cerebus himself - a luxury he only affords himself - to create doubt on the objective reality of anything written in the pages and who actually has said it or believes it.

It's surprising actually how little controversial material there actually is, it's effectively all in the final text section and it's nothing we haven't seen before or will see again. That said, having paid attention to it, there's nothing on the text that impacts the story and you can read Reads the comic on its own (actually there's probably an argument that if the meta-continuity is important enough then you should also be reading Notes From The President and the letters pages responses but I'm not going there yet).

In the end it was pretty interesting but not something I'm sure I'll repeat.

Minds plays out like a prettier version of C&S2. Big infodumps (including 'the potted history of pretty much everything that happened up until Dave started "explaining") but where it gets interesting - bearing in mind that in Reads Dave at least entertains the idea that Cerebus is him, or one of the versions of him - is the navel-gazing about exactly why you're alone and unloved. At this point it's still a negative as far as Dave is concerned so he does care that he seems to sabotage his own life so much although by the same token this could be the turning point, this is where he realises he's always going to be like he is and no SUCKING VOID will ever change that.

This definitely feels like the END end though and my guess this time round is that Dave realised at about 190 (and had the suspicion around 185) that he didn't have enough for a round 200 and was going to be a couple of issues short. This stopped it from being perfect and flawless therefore he could never complete his ascension - so having had to cobble together a couple of issues of content the only way to resolve his problem is to go back to Estarcion. In the context of the day, Cerebus is still making money and he's not a complete pariah yet so it makes more sense to continue with an existing property (and the chance to make it perfect and flawless at 300 after all). I also think this is at the heart of why he and Ger get so far behind.

nah, he was trolling.

(and they didn't get behind until one hundred issues later (seven years!), significantly because Gerhard walks out on Dave for a couple of months before being persuaded to return for the final year.)

{walks out on as in quits the book - he'd stopped working in the same room, or socialising, with Sim years before.}

I was thinking more of the time Sim and Ger were away somewhere (Bahamas?) and the reality of how far behind they were kicked in and they worked all day in the sun. Wasn't that about the 220s?

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NdEMGNOeYo4/VzCxX5YR-NI/AAAAAAAAQFo/7J5kGTn5LJUWSQlRkxZRPsnkYzkl2wNLwCLcB/s1600/hawaii_sim_1987.jpg

(There might have been a Bahamas excursion in the 220s that I don't recall, but since Dave was reading the Koran, the Bible & the Talmud, and consequently adopting an ascetic lifestyle at that time, I'd be mildly surprised.)

Maybe I'm misremembering.

Wait so what is this comic about

the Koran, the Bible & the Talmud.

Definitely not the kind of things that are causing a clusterfuck on other boards. No siree Bob, no.

My recollection is that they went and holed up in an American hotel somewhere, if not Hawaii, specifically in order to catch up when they were months behind at the end of Church & State btw. Getting away from distractions of regular life and belting out issues in 2-3 weeks until they were back on schedule.

You're probably right. My recollection was that they thought they could take a break - something about Ger discovering yachting as well? - and pretty soon realised they had to work like crazy the whole time they were away That Hawaii shot looks like a hotel and I'm sure I remember photos of a cabana. But my memory isn't what it was and I can digging out floppies.

After spending five years on Church & State, Sim and Gerhard took a few weeks off. Sim decided they would do a double issue between Church & State and Jaka's Story, as they would only have to do one front and back cover, and one letters page.[18]

That was for a breather, yeah - but they were shipping late for months at one stage.

(The Big Bang double-issue at 289/290 was also so Sim could catch up when Gerhard had quit both drawing and his part of the business paperwork - it's the only solo issue after #64.)

Absolutely nothing anyone has said in this thread has made this book sound remotely appealing.

i dont really think thats what theyre going for

why its good: sim and gerhard had, between them, an ability to present action, conversation, and world on the page unmatched in comics

why its bad: see above

it's a conan pastiche where the lead character is an aardvark and then, for a decade or two, it's about how women eat your brains
simple as that

Am nearly certain the Honlulu pic was from issue 98, first issue of Cerebus I ever bought.

And the editorial was about quitting smoking weed.

Absolutely nothing anyone has said in this thread has made this book sound remotely appealing.

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison)

I'm very attached to it, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone without a mountain of caveats.

Wait: I thought Cerebus did end in one sense in #200, insofar as it spelled the end of the "grand narrative" and all the conspiracies and mysteries and subplots. I could've sworn Sim said something to this effect in response to a letter writer's question: don't expect any answers to lingering questions like why did Elrod just pop out of existence etc., that part of the story is over.

While I don't have the fortitude to re-read the thing, I remember loving Minds: replaying the tragedy of Walking on the Moon as farce, the Duck Amuck homage, the audacity of ending the entire thing with a coming attraction for the *next* installment. Plus the whole Cerebus talking to Sim thing felt like a callback to that oh-so-80s trend of having characters talk back to/meet their creators; seriously it was really a thing back then.

Following his recent tantrum about how not enough people are supporting him online or financially so he's not going to bother finishing his graphic novel, or bother paying the guy that's been drawing it on spec for years, Dave is now vlogging about how he's spending hundreds of dollars on CGC-slabbed comics "for the Cerebus Archive" (his house, which his will states is to become a research museum after his death).

He takes a seven-minute video to communicate the information that he recently bought Thor #337, because he reads out Beta Ray Bill's wikipedia over a video of the slabbed comic sitting immobile on a table, while commenting "I did not know that either" after each fact.

Someone should burn that house down.

what does "slabbed" mean

Slabbed comic books are books that have been “professionally graded” by one of the three grading companies. After being graded, they are encapsulated in an airtight plastic holder.

NB to JCLC: they are sealed in a hard plastic case that cannot be opened. This ostensibly makes them more valuable than comics which can be read.

https://www.myslabbedcomics.com/Images/Category_509/subcat_852/3006201200271.jpg

it's genuinely astounding that Diamond are still accepting his solicitations

https://i.imgur.com/SvZNz9m.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ydgg4NU.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/0ubwnEc.jpg

Seems ugly and unhinged even by late Sim standards.

they are sealed in a hard plastic case that cannot be opened.

I didn't realise the cases cannot be opened (presumably you could smash the case but that might well reduce yr grade a bit...). That's sick, sic

thanks for the explication sic!

all this stuff is sort of the most destroys-your-innocence stuff for me because when I was super-into comics (not by modern standards, but the standards of '78-ish), none of this was anywhere near my radar. I was a kid, we read Marvel books and they were great stories, we bought back issues and of course preferred comics in good condition but me & the friend with whom I obsessed over titles would have laughed for days at the idea of preserving a comic in a hard case you can't open & if you'd told us "this will be something people take super seriously in the future",...well we just would have laughed some more

I accept the need for some kind of preservation/protection for cheaply manufactured paper products that are 50+ years old, increasingly expensive and hard to find in high grade condition, and that if you really do fancy reading the first Superman story you're not going to be cracking open your original copy of Action Comics #1 to do so. But sealing them up forever turns them into expensive fetish objects only, which is always a shame.

I always wanted to keep my comics in good enough condition that my (theoretical, eventual) kid could read them, but I didn't want to be obsessive about it, so I just chucked them all in a longboxes, unprotected, and left them in a cupboard in my parents' house for several decades.

Now I actually do have a kid, I'm like, do I **actually** want my daughter to read Give Me Liberty, or Cerebus, Justice League Antartica, or my complete set of yellowed Dan Jurgens Triangle-era Superman issues, when she could just read Bone or Nimona instead?

(Am keeping my Doom Patrols and Sandmans though.)

slabbing reduces comics to the objet d'art that's necessary for them to be taken seriously as economically viable collectible art; otherwise they're mass produced publications and only generate meaningful worth in bulk.

https://www.sothebys.com/en/series/dc-complete-the-ian-levine-collection
^ i know COVID didn't help but has this just been hanging out for the past five months without a serious offer?

COVID could be a big part of it - there aren't likely to be many buyers wealthy and interested in London, and nobody else can go get the collection

Then again, the catalogue has been removed so maybe it did sell

hm, you may be right!

Even without covid, who would want to touch something Ian Levine had touched?

i know this guy by general reputation as a collector and a producer; what has he done that makes his touch poisonous?

You might have heard of a television show called Doctor Who.

i mean, if we're gonna pillory everyone who has done bad work on Doctor Who...

Levine used to introduce teenage boys whom he met in his capacity as a DJ at Heaven to the floor manager of Dr Who, so that the latter and his partner (the producer of Dr Who) could go "two up you" on them, in exchange for Levine getting tapes of the first assembly edits of Dr Who episodes.

He tells this story in the producer's biography as an example of the terrible moral character of the producer.

i am having a hard time parsing that but i also really don't want to think about what it means either

That sort of story is also how the badge for mathematical excellence got its wearer.

Love & Monsters from the modern Who era is a very, very thinly veiled attack on gatekeeping of fandom and the 'right' way to like something featuring a very, very thinly veiled unofficial continuity adviser.

I believe the young man in question has denied that he was cast via a couch, and as he already worked at the BBC as a tea-boy, Levine probably didn't make the introduction, but we've veered quite a distance from summarising Cerebus.

Well he's not going to admit it is he. Much like the stories about a certain someone pegging out while pegging a fan and dressed in their costume, it's been too many times round the world for far too long to go away.

But yes, we should get back to Cerebus.

One comes from known events, direct reportage, had witnesses in the immediate aftermath, and has never been denied by the surviving participant. The other is the sort of thing that both jealous and homophobic straight fans and jealous or catty gay fans would come up by themselves to explain the casting of a notably ungifted cutiepie, whether there were any degree of validity.

(For the passersby, a male star of Dr Who died underneath a female fan in a convention hotel room; as far as I know, no female star has ever expired from a heart attack while banging a male fan with a strap-on.)

jeeeez, i'm sorry i asked

(I know, I was too fond of the pegging usage for my own readability.)

Who was the one who died? I don't know this story.

god forbid sic ever communicate anything without implying special knowledge that only sic knows

Much like the stories about a certain someone pegging out while pegging a fan and dressed in their costume, it's been too many times round the world for far too long to go away.

But yes, we should get back to Cerebus.

― Mud... jam... failure (sic, not aldo), Tuesday, August 25, 2020 5:29 AM (yesterday)

Checks out.

SOMEBODY ANSWER THE QUESTION

The one who looks like Duke Leonardi

Great (and accurate) recovery to topic.

So I read Guys and Rick's Story probably about the last time I posted to the thread and am just about to start Going Home (having finally finished the 'to read' piles of other stuff) so figured I'd best write them up.

Inexplicably, and freed from the constraints of a narrative direction (if we stick to 'only really 200 issues' theory), layout and lettering kick into a whole new gear and this is where Dave is elevated to GOAT. We get parodies of real people from comics and literature, the fan-service return of some minor characters, but most importantly for maybe the first time we find out some stuff about Cerebus himself.

How the hermaphroditism manifests in the present is demonstrated, with Cerebus' desire to surround himself with manly men shown as part of his unresolved hormonal churn. His self-sabotaging comes to the fore, and it's questionable whether he is only involved with women because he feels society demands he be.

As we will see later, Rick's Story is actually him giving Cerebus a heartfelt belief system and succeeding where Cirin failed.

I'm almost sure you could read these - Guys at least - in isolation and, assuming you knew nothing of Dave Sim The Evil Misogynist, have a good time.

Now onto the two big literary character parodies.

Due to the as-inexplicable-as-any-other-Sim-strategy policy of preparing the monthly Cerebus issues a year in advance, his daily strips of a few months ago have now found their way into the print publishing schedule. Make sure to reserve the following five timely issues at your local store now, while the satire is still warm!

August 2021: CRISIS IN INFINITE QUARANTINE #1

September 2021: BATVARK: CORONAVIRUS

October 2021: SUPER-CEREBUS VS COVID-19

November 2021: THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY CORONA

December 2021: CORONAVIRUS BOOK

In other Cerebus news, there's a Kickstarter currently running for a new edition of Spawn #10, with Sim redrawing all the Cerebus figures throughout, and redrawing the entire pages for the scenes where Spawn and Cerebus wander around Sim's haunts in downtown Kitchener.

Elsewhere, there's a limit of 25 per customer on these commemorative Cerebus Trump vs Biden facemasks:

https://i.imgur.com/4gtYMZL.jpg

The Kickstarter offers the opportunity to add copies of the original Spawn #10 for only $15. That's the same Spawn #10 there are multiple copies of on eBay for $5.

Going Home is not necessarily the right book for reading in lockdown. I overheard a pub conversation a couple of months ago and one of the pair was asking the other how their relationship was going since their girlfriend had only moved in to bubble because of COVID. It then led to a quite interesting observation about how COVID was making or breaking relationships as couples were having to spend more time with each other than they ever might have expected to before retirement.

And that's what the first part of this is about. Cerebus and Jaka have to spend every waking second together , and it's not really what they thought it would be. Aided by booze and company the evenings are tolerable but the rest is about fighting your thoughts and second guessing feelings having nothing but time to think about them. What's not completely clear is whether this Jaka - before FStop and Ham - ever actually intended going to Sands Creek. It's a slow painful journey, but a well-observed one for all Sim's other faults.

The extended Fitzgerald section seems like an indulgence of sorts, but reading it in conjunction with Dave's notes (which he claims Alan Moore made him do, by obscure means) is accidentally illuminating. While explaining how women are too stupid to understand literary techniques and unable to think of things outside their own experience, it's not out of the question that Sim sees himself as the successor to Fitzgerald and reuses his 'Word, word or word ' motif to celebrate - in fact he draws direct parallels by attributing innovations in literature and comics to themselves.

(Actually Dave's notes are a car crash start to finish, with diatribes about homosexualists and how men are only attracted to 17/18 year old girls even if they don't like them, and how this hormonal/emotional reaction is better than women's reactions which are only based on hormones and emotions.)

More next time on my sudden revelation about the three lengthy author appropriation sections.

reading the alex raymond book now; it's doused in batshit but he's also making great points about brush styles

a well-observed one for all Sim's other faults.

Sim is (was?) often an extremely keen observer of the minutiae of human behaviour, for all his other faults.

Definitely was.

Fucking hell, Form & Void.

Ok, so let's do the easy bits. Sand Hills Creek, as developed through this book, is an ultra-orthodox religious community. The 'women should shut the fuck up and do what they're told' type. Unsurprisingly, given where he is by this stage, 'Cerebus as substitute for Dave' thinks all this is not only ok but admirable. That said, the build of every new rule is very well done and the rejection of Cerebus (and his - as foretold - rejection of Jaka is as affecting and wonderfully written as it felt the first time I read it.

But the Hemingway bit. Jesus.

Dave is quite clear in the text he only uses him because everyone thinks he's good but he's really shit. And in the text he expands on this, adding that fucking his cats might have been the final straw.

Mind you, at least he's only a sexually abnormal, drunken, talentless braggard. It could be worse - he could be a woman who wants to be a sexually abnormal, drunken, talentless braggard MAN but is as bad at pretending as a women would undoubtedly be...

The African scenery and animals are lovely to look atthough and I could maybe have gone a book of them.

The interesting part is Sim wondering why he had to use Hemingway and he wonders himself but the problem was he already had Bear. Bear was exactly the character he wanted - I've commented before on the weird sexual attraction Cerebus has for the manliest man he can think of - and unfortunately because of this Hemingway makes no real sense and has a limited place except for one thing - the transplanted author in Cerebus.

Each time we have an author, one of the main cast learns something fundamental about their relationship with Jaka. Oscar Wilde shows Rick(e) she doesn't love him. Fitzgerald shows Jaka she doesn't love Cerebus enough to be with him. Hemingway shows Cerebus he doesn't love Jaka the way she wants and Mary shows Jaka Cerebus doesn't love her.

I have no interest in reading the text section of this ever again.

Talking of which, next month it's Chasing YooWhoo. Oh fuck.

The African scenery and animals are lovely to look atthough and I could maybe have gone a book of them.

Gerhard lives off commissions, you could make this happen!

For mine, the only good issue after Guys is in the two parter you're about to hit (iirc), where Ger draws his only character of the entire run, a nice sheepdog

The interesting part is Sim wondering why he had to use Hemingway and he wonders himself but the problem was he already had Bear. Bear was exactly the character he wanted - I've commented before on the weird sexual attraction Cerebus has for the manliest man he can think of - and unfortunately because of this Hemingway makes no real sense and has a limited place except for one thing - the transplanted author in Cerebus.

Excellent observation. If Sim had ever read Hemingway, instead of just deciding 15 years earlier that he would make a book about him and then nor bother to read him until he got there, he could have folded his reactions into the Cer/Bear dynamic of Guys.

(Or even had Bear become a writer and work as a direct analogue, also sparing us Rick's Story, and thus Dave's last two decades of auto-religious obsession.)

Fuck, Bear as writer would make even more narrative sense - especially given the dismissive opinion Sim has of Hemingway. Bear could easily sit down for four hours every day and write and assume something would come out of the other end.

"Courage is waddyacall... grace under pressure."

And especially

"Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee."

We did it, we fixed Cerebus.

I think it's Form & Void which has a very well done issue with minimal drawings where Cerebus and Jaka are trapped in a tent in a snowstorm? Stuck in my mind anyway.

also sparing us Rick's Story, and thus Dave's last two decades of auto-religious obsession.

I'm confident he would've got there by another path.

Yes, stuck in the tent is in F&V. One of the few images is the stitching straining and starting to tear, and that's one of the ones that's stayed with me.

Anyway, I can't take credit for Hemingway = Bear as Dave himself includes it in his notes, but does so for the wrong reasons. His version is because he'd created such a great character and he wasn't going to change what F&V was going to be (so, for obvious reasons, he could make offensive comments about Ernest and Mary, as well as Gore Vidal and Gertrude Stein vice 'homosexualists' period), so he had to relegate Ham to the vegetative lump he appears as even though it makes Cerebus' hero worship - which, remember, has never vaguely been touched on and we have never even seen him with a READS until after Ham is dead plus is contrary to the forthcoming RABBI plotline iirc - even more incongruous.

as-inexplicable-as-any-other-Sim-strategy policy

The guy who recently kickstarted a deluxe reprint of Cerebus #1 and is currently running the KS for the superdeluxe Spawn #10 had a special one-day Halloween-only promo for an exclusive variant cover, limited to 50 copies.

So Dave did a competing one-day Halloween-only promo for a different one-day Halloween-only exclusive variant edition that he will Print On Demand through ComiXPress. And marketed it by sending a dozen or more updates throughout the day to the guy that runs his blogspot, several of them complaining at length about how badly he had hurt his non-working arm by trying to draw the variant cover for the guy that is actively trying to support / publish him. He appears to have sold a couple of dozen copies, mainly to the blogspot guy and the four or five other fans that attempt to do all his promo and production work and co-write and paste up the monthly Cerebus fumetti comic.

Dave says that the future of collectible high-$ comics is going to be individally-numbered printings, so he'll be proved right after he's dead.

Scott Adams has come up with his own equivalent of Dave's Five Impossible Things To Believe Before Breakfast

To believe Biden will be sworn in as president in January, one must believe at least one unlikely thing:

1. Despite being brainwashed to believe Trump is Hitler, Democrats in key cities did NOT attempt a large-scale voter fraud to save the country.

or. . .

2. Democrats did commit major voting fraud to remove "Hitler" but for some strange reason all the geniuses looking for indications of it can't find any confirmed evidence and there are no whistleblowers.

or. . .

3. Democrats WANTED to commit major fraud to get rid of "Hitler" but there is no practical way to do such a thing and hope to get away with it.

or. . .

4. Democrats didn't REALLY think Trump was so bad that it was worth cheating to remove him.

Remember, it's still #2020.

Seeing the recent Dave Sim "humorous" covers make me think he needs to be beaten with a metal bar.

He has insightful opinions about the electoral process that he can express coherently and humourously, though;

https://i.imgur.com/6uh4Q9k.jpg

btw

I was thinking more of the time Sim and Ger were away somewhere (Bahamas?) and the reality of how far behind they were kicked in and they worked all day in the sun. Wasn't that about the 220s?

My recollection is that they went and holed up in an American hotel somewhere, if not Hawaii, specifically in order to catch up when they were months behind at the end of Church & State btw. Getting away from distractions of regular life and belting out issues in 2-3 weeks until they were back on schedule.

They went to Hawaii for three months in late 1992 and did five issues.

Latter Days.

Ok, this is not going to be short.

The first part of the epilogue is the funniest Cerebus has been in well over a decade at time of publication. The second not so much - and a lot of the goodwill built up is destroyed by Dave's notes where he pretty much says he was deliberately being racist because he thought it was funny - but the central idea (that Cerebus is actually really good but unlucky enough to be competing at the same time of the GOAT) is solid and entertaining enough to carry the plot through.

And then we get to the Stooges. Dave the Genius has assumed that his parodies were what made him a genius and pushes on regardless with this one no matter how weak it is and it adds nothing. So for a year we get Dave pushing some photorealistic portraiture and complaining about how utterly boring biblical study is, or rather listening to someone reciting at length the results of their biblical study and expecting you to say OMIGOD YOU ARE SUCH A GENIUS YOU HAVE BLOWN MY MIND. If only he heeded his own words, eh readers? And if you liked these parodies, I have others! Let's explore why Todd McFarlane is a closeted homosexualist mind controlled by the feminists! And let's do it really subtly by rehashing plots and set pieces from the best part of 20 years before!

More than anything, this is Dave's Breakdown writ large.

He actually has Cerebus go through Dave's Breakdown without (because he doesn't acknowledge it in his notes) apparently realising what he's done but Cerebus skips from fairly normal (by his own standards) to WOMEN MUST DIE in relatively short order, via revelations about celibacy and the Jews not being clever enough to get things right. And the notes make it clear that Dave actually is completely on board with all the words on the page, that this is the divinely communicated Voice of Dave.

Does any of the Rabbi stuff really make any sense? I get the Stooges period stuff suggesting that Cerebus is still a child mentally in part and prone to magical thinking, but the Garth Ennis breakdown inducing stuff? I've re-read it several times and I still don't see how it works. Because he thinks of himself as Rabbi there have been lots of subliminal mental ticks added which instantly get triggered by pointing out they're there? For a payoff that lasts a total of SEVEN PANELS this seems like a whole load of overthinking just to indulge in abusing Gary Groth.

And now we come to Woody Allen and the Journal of the Smallest Type.

I think I zoned out during the notes, if I'm honest, but Dave appears to be being honest when he says this was an early idea he had for a straight biblical parody which then became something else as Dave's character and beliefs changed in the interim. Although he doesn't say the last part of that obviously and encourages us to believe it's still a parody even when making small text notes in his own notes about Christianity and biblical rectitude.

The main book Small Type arguably has a single debatable idea behind it in a stoner WOOOOOAAHH way, that the Pentateuch is a schizophrenic conversation between God and the Earth but it's drenched in such waffling drivel that it's as unreadable as you always thought it was. Relatively early, that idea gets seduced by "women are stupid and think they're smarter than men but that's just stupid thought because they're stupid." And there's a hundred pages of it. With Woody Allen as a stand-in for you, the reader, having his mind blown by how smart this all is.

There are some singularly strange ideas though. An obsession with the idea that "moved" is a euphemism for God having an actual literal wank and creating things with his Godspunk. Cows aren't animals, they're fruit. The earth is presumably hollow because it's full of the souls of humans and birds. Abel tries to fuck Cain which is why he gets killed (and deserves to die). Countries have souls. Everybody who doesn't see through the fake woman God like Dave does is gay, or loves incest, or is a paedophile or a woman. Tough to know which one he thinks is worse at times. And all of these ideas are correct, of course, because God has chosen to let Dave, and only Dave over the millennia, know the real truth.

It all just began to wash over after 40 pages. Women all secretly want FGM because they're fucked in the head? It's ridiculous to think "sure, why not" but by then "sure, why not, Dave probably believes that" is very nearly a rational response at this stage. And never, ever read Dave's take on the story of Abraham & Isaac where Dave confuses even himself as he's writing in his desperate need to make everything for his theory.

The funniest part is that Dave himself gets bored with publishing it BEFORE HE GETS DONE WITH GENESIS. Does the rest exist or just the bits that he prints? If the latter, how did he choose what bits to print? Dumb luck or God's hand? It is it just that nothing else supports his argument? Nobody, not even the most ardent fan, cares by this point.

The Woody Allen stuff is Dave's least successful parody by some margin. And following the Stooges, that's saying something.

Actually, the interesting thing that never properly gets explored is Cerebus' complete lack of attachment to material things. He ruins the sheep owner's Reads just by reading them himself. He destroys a complete set of Rabbi in the quest to understand. And he takes the priceless artefact of Konigsberg's Pentateuch and in the quest to explain, improve and bend to his understanding obliterates it. Each man kills the thing he loves indeed.

You know the thing that really annoys me about this the most? The issue breaks are in the wrong place throughout the Stooges section. Every one, a couple of pages misplaced. It could have been fixed by making one issue longer, but instead over a year of pauses mid-sentence.

I am a comics reader.

I think (from memory of the final book) you can read the first two issues (266/267 or pages 1-40) and the last one (288 or 441-460) and not really lose anything that can't be replaced by "Cerebus eventually overcomes the Cirinists again and lives for a long time afterwards ruling an empire" with a side for the final issue of "ignore what's going on with these film titles, Dave was doing a parody". You could read the Stooges stuff if you wanted but in all conscience I can't recommend putting yourself through it.

I tried to move on to The Last Day and had to give up 2 pages into the prologue. I might be a while, I think it's just proximity.

All I can say is better you than me.

Does (work-life balance) even exist any more(...) since the COVID Reality Shift hit? Which, personally I think is permanent. Finger of God stuff. In the same sense that we dialled 911 to report an emergency for decades and then 9/11 happened, the adjectival short form for visual acuity has been 20/20 since(...) the mid-19th century. God was telling us what the year 2020 was going to mean -- profound change based on multiple levels of visual acuity (Seeing, "seeing" and seeing) -- over a hundred years before it got here.

mindblown.gif

If you're tempted to try and parse any of the small-print theological stuff in the coming three years, just remind yourself that this ^ is the standard of it.

Also as best I can tell, the Spawn #10 reprint is now up to 23 or more variant covers in different degrees of limitedness, spread across four different crowdfunders. 16 of them are the same group of four drawings, but with different colour schemes.

One of the covers contains a "behind-the-scenes" book instead of the comic, at an additional $15 for 24pp of the new cover drawings and sketches plus Dave's rough notes from 1993. Except if the third and current crowdfunder gets another $111,057 in pledges (on top of its current $8,943), it will have 32pp and "extra rarities".

The minimum number of different variants you can currently buy in one order is 4, but you can buy one of each of the "main" 20 of 'em today for US$375, reduced from $475.

Nah the small print stuff is worse than that, that's 289/290 standard.

The reprint stuff is just a giant clusterfuck. I could maybe have been persuaded to trade up to a really nice version of High Society but not for what they were charging.

Thing is, the Archive prints with background notes were lovely and - although they weren't bringing in the cash - were actually something you could pay attention to and get something new from. But then the wrist injury reduced the profitability (because the extra for headshots etc bumped up the margins) and falling out with three lots of guys in the course of producing them basically killed them as a concept which is a massive shame.

Apropos of that, Aldo seems to have glossed over the interminable section I vaguely recall in Latter Days in which Cerebus defeats the Cirinist Empire by cosplaying as Spawn. Or I might have dreamt it.

he touched on it:

Let's explore why Todd McFarlane is a closeted homosexualist mind controlled by the feminists!

It was glazed over, like my eyes.

Given that Dave (or whoever*) is pushing Spawn #10 hard at the moment, it's ironic he attacks it hard here as something on the blindest, dumbest, mind-controlled homosexualists would fall for and uses it as a prop to rehash old routines i.e. selling the same old story with slightly different art to gullible fools.

* I mean, wouldn't it make more sense for a Britney style intervention to take place? Dave can keep sending faxes to AMOC while somebody else works out how to keep him in rice and water.

This has reminded me that the latter half of the small text stuff has Cerebus do lisping limp wrist camp stereotype gay mannerisms every time he comes across an idea that doesn't fall into Dave's worldview.

Which is basically all of it, given Dave's interpretation is only really about the first parts of Genesis.

Nah the small print stuff is worse than that, that's 289/290 standard.

I meant the standard of intellectual analysis: even from before the religion stuff, Dave was keen on reading numerological-style significance into homonyms or spelling oddities, and doing his Thing, "thing" or thing riff*. Since the conversion, he's just added a belief that these are signs from God that Dave's the only person perspicacious enough to read.


* this was fun when his big thesis was that human nature was silly and art was a good way of coping with it. it was creepier in glamourpuss when he would take three lines of third-hand reported conversation between two long-dead people, and extrapolate that the evil spirit of femaleness was corrupting weak artists by giving them attractive underage secretaries so that they manslaughter their rivals, or whatever was going on in there.

I mean, wouldn't it make more sense for a Britney style intervention to take place? Dave can keep sending faxes to AMOC while somebody else works out how to keep him in rice and water.

He does consistently manage to drive the most competent enablers away, or end up in active fights with them: Gerhard quietly and efficiently ran half the office for years even after he'd made the comic come out at all, AND looking great, for decades. Dave recruited a great cartoonist to draw for him once his wrist went, but communicated so weirdly the guy ghosted rather than ghost for him. He recruited an underemployed nobody to draw for him for years afterward, then when the guy got a day job teaching art at a university, suddenly decided that the book they'd worked on would never come out and therefore he didn't have to pay the guy fpr his years of work. All those kickstarter-running and shipping-fulfilment blokes evaporated. The fellow that started and ran his daily blog for five years couldn't hack dealing with him anymore and turned over the login to the first rando that volunteered. One art collector was the or a prime source of Dave's income for many years, until he chose not to loan his decades of personal purchases to the bloke that was doing the digital restorations, after which Dave seemed to stop selling original art...

As it was foretold, 289/290 is a complete nightmare so I'm going to deal with it outside the Last Day so it doesn't pollute it.

Dave starts with an introduction where he bluntly states his is the only ever correct interpretation of the Bible and the only correct ever Unified Theory - which of course Einstein couldn't solve because he was only a scientist - which God has chosen to reveal to Dave because he's pretty much the only person to have got religion right, ever. And these facts are kept from the world because of some proto-QAnon conspiracy.

(Actually an interesting sideline - is QAnon a Dave Sim parody act? Same obsessions.)

Then the comic itself has serious acid casualty/italianspiderman.gif FACTS such as:

• Two events which happened separately INVENTED TIME by happening one after the other.
• Gravity always existed, it's just that you can't see it when the things it affects are too small for you to think it's happening. TAKE THAT, "SCIENCE". This is also why women have periods.
• Planets don't have a circular orbit because God sometimes gets things wrong and he meant to make a circle.
• It's easy to confuse heat with light.

• The Earth is the result of a lesbian wedding between the anthropomorphic entity that is Light and YooWhoo (see Latter Days, I haven't the strength) and is a lesson by God to show that homosexualists are inherently wrong.
• Human souls try to escape back at the zygote stage but are forced to go through the misery of life because YooWhoo is a woman.
• Helium makes your voice squeaky, proving it is a female element. It is also the Devil.

Just skip it, you'll feel better. Although I will say this - of the 40 pages of his Unified Theory so clever Einstein could never have come up with it, a whole page is devoted to descriptions of boobs. And the whole page of footnotes explain how a woman is essentially an enlarged penis, only not as good. And you'll thank me for not enlarging on "collapsed sacs".

And of course Dave has 10 pages of annotations to 40 pages of comics that already have annotations/footnotes on every page, that on some pages are longer than the text content of the page. This is mainly about his voluntary estrangement from any kind of personal relationship and, in effect, society; also included is how all medicine is hokum and illness is a combination of demonic possession and, possibly worse, Marxism; how his mother died of being offended by anti-feminism; and how he always assumed Gerhard was going to die after completing #236 just for the purpose of cosmic symmetry .

Sheesh. Getta loada this guy. Whatta maroon.

What in the holy motherloving fuck.

Like I knew the dude slowly became looney tunes but...wow.

how he always assumed Gerhard was going to die after completing #236 just for the purpose of cosmic symmetry

...because it would mean Dave would have to do the first 64 and last 64 issues alone?

This thing sounds like time cube the comic

...because it would mean Dave would have to do the first 64 and last 64 issues alone?

Exactly this.

Does he ever suggest that religious conversion made him realise that thinking of himself as the centre of the universe, to such a degree that The Universe would kill his closest companion for the sake of the issue numbers on a barbarian aardvark comic book, was kinda bonkers?

No, because it's the feminist conspiracy making you think that.

fuck! they got me again

The reason I wanted to separate out The Last Day is that it's actually if not good, then at least worth your while.

Over 50 years from when we last checked in, Cerebus is now at the end of times. The Sanctuary is a prison as those who oppose him have taken over again, by taking his (and Rick's and Moshe's) own words and reinterpreting them to their own ends. Everything is painful, and he can't do anything that gives him any pleasure without suffering afterwards. His memory is shot and death is the only release.

Cerebus' son arrives and is a betrayal of all Cerebus holds true. He has aligned with his mother and formed an incestuous union alongside a revived Cirin to perform genetic experiments - they've created a human/lion hybrid which they intend to make giant - and conquer the world.

Cerebus farts and dies, and seeing all his friends is dragged off into the light. Alone, unmourned and unloved.

Dave's final physical model of Cerebus is a little too cartoony rather than authentically aged, and the staging and backgrounds are very static, but through a combination of visual effects, lettering and text the pain, repetition and excruciatingly slow passage of time at that age are convincingly and realistically portrayed. He also gets to redraw a number of old characters and ages of Cerebus which you'd think brought him pleasure (but doesn't seem to have).

Dave also manages one last great insight/truism - Sheshep, drunk on power, pictures himself taking over only for Cerebus to point out the folly of his argument: "you're not inside it, are you? Can you feel your hands holding you up?" (Yes, this is him referring to his own Torah commentaries here but it's a really good sequence nonetheless.)

Cerebus As Dave is in full effect. Isolated from the real world, which is as disgusted with him as he is in it, and with only a go-between to pass on second hand conversations. His closest allies have betrayed him and he is left alone with just God to talk to. His temple of his past achievements is meaningless to any but him and, having shown his enemies exactly how he does it he has been rendered completely impotent. All that remains is to surrender to God and await the sweet release of death that he might become closer to Him.

In lots of ways this might even be the best book of the final third in that it has a purpose and plot, and some actual (not that funny but take what you can get) jokes.

The(e) End(e)

oh man iirc the human / lion hybrid stuff came with sleevenotes by Dave explaining that this was literally what scientists were up to now IRL and this is why we can't trust doctors, or something

Except it's not because of Dave's annotations which, again, I wanted to keep separate from the main book.

They're mainly just Dave explaining why he thought numerous jokes were much funnier than anyone else did, and why, but it's genuinely fascinating to hear how much of the final artwork is down to choices made because of the disintegration of his relationship with Ger and the deal he made to get him to finish. And of course there are some final Dave Doozies.

• The story of the old woman with gangrene is the real life version of events that happened to his mother as he told in the annotations to 289/290 but it wasn't humiliating enough there so he put it in the main body instead.
• His mother tried to curse him with a magic birthday card which was disrupted/destroyed by Dave's personal altar
• The United Nations was doomed to failure because it let people who weren't America join
• Dave admits statuary rape and says that was why he became celibate. He did it because all the Marxist-feminists are paedophiles.
• Believing abortion is ok inevitably leads to believing incest is admirable.
• France is a woman and the UK is a man. The EU is a Marxist-feminist scam to ensnare the UK which it must get out of. SIM INVENTS BREXIT

Dave shuts up, finally. Goodbye goodwill.

the human / lion hybrid stuff came with sleevenotes by Dave explaining that this was literally what scientists were up to now IRL

Yeah this is one of the other things which is an obvious consequence of agreeing with abortion and this is what Marxist-feminists and scientists are conspiring to do irl.

Also all the hybrids we see in Egyptian art were actually real because they were a degenerate society and something something Alan Moore.

I don't know if it's worse that I remembered part of it at all, or forgot that Ancient Egypt fell because their DNA scientists got too good at making giant living sphinxes and Anubisesses.

We do see him in the bastardisation of a Holy Trinity

Haha the Marxist-feminists got to me fourteen years ago near the top of this thread.

I want to end on a positive note.

Cerebus 1-300 is a masterpiece of single-minded exploration of a character's life. It is at times hilarious, moving and frightening and contains some excellent cartooning and arguably the greatest lettering in the history of comics. I genuinely commend it to everyone to borrow and read.

Just don't touch any of the bits that are text.

I remember some of the text parts in Jaka's Story being good?

Anyway, thanks for doing that Aldo, I enjoyed your analysis. Overall it's probably made me less keen for a re-read of Cerebus - but enforced my feeling that there's a great book waiting to be written one day with Sim/Cerebus as its subject.

Sounds like this is a whole hell of a something or other

i think a comics-only re-read of Cerebus would be reasonably painless but there is zero (0) chance i will ever read Sim's long-form copy ever again.

I will never read this terrible comic, if only to deprive Sim of money.

Seeing the recent Dave Sim "humorous" covers make me think he needs to be beaten with a metal bar.

you can't argue with this level of comedy

I can't really begin to parse that.

I think it got discussed further up but once you relate it back to the source image it just gets (unbelievably) worse.

try parsing this one: per Dave's weekly Bible commentary, the droughts and fires in California are the God's punishment for the malignant and rebellious free will choices made by the citizens there (Dave does not explain why God is madder at the conservative inhabitants of Northern California than the fornicators and homosexualists of West Hollywood), but God's wrath cannot impact upon his female rival YHWH because dirt and stone and rocks and sand are the embodiment of the vagina. In conclusion, this is why John The Baptist had a thin neck.

He explains (or "explains" or Explains) the lack of vegetation associated with YHWH somewhere in the Torah commentary. Something to do with YHWH not actually being able to create (because of her inferior female brane) but just make limited copies of God's ideas and since her useless female brane is filled with making cows (which are fruit, remember) she can't remember to make plants in many places except the Garden.

You can cure this by shouting at the ground, telling it to listen to you and grow plants, alongside the occasional beating with a belt to let it know who's boss.

I can't remember if that last is an actual thing or just a joke about dirt and sand being female, but I do remember that his rule about beating women was that it = wrong if you used a rod thicker than your thumb. So a belt would be right out, probably.

also I assume Sim has never been to a desert nor to a working farm nor to a local economy impacted by drought, and his cartoonist instinct is sketching the most basic Ernie Bushmiller version of dry weather for him: three rocks of different sizes, and... dirt? that's something that's outside, right?

It's all about scale and the earth is much bigger than a woman so a belt is fine.

If you read the pages it seems like it's just a joke but Dave says in the annotations the only joke is shouting "O YOOWHOO BELIEVE!" is a pun on "oh, you who believe" which is a frequent salutation in the Koran. What a ribtickler. Apparently it says in the Torah men are supposed to "subdue the Earth".

Since I went and got Latter Days out for that I should really check why YHWH just has dirt.

Had an initial look, couldn't find it but realised there was no way I was doing any in-depth searching in that mess.

I like dunking on Dave but think it’s worth distinguishing between Dave Sim (a very unfamous comic book artist with mental health issues, who struggles to even influence even his minuscule devout fan base) and, say, Scott Adams (a genuine asshole with hundreds and thousands of followers who’s been to the White House)

Not to whattabout

Dave's greatest achievements may have been hiding his Kaczynski-level issues* from the general public for so long, and maintaining his focus and getting the book to the finish line ~on schedule after his issues* became apparent.

*really would like to use the word "madness" here but not sure it's appropriate

I would happily consign both sim and adams to the flames

https://i.imgflip.com/1xvnfi.jpg

This was on the outbreak! thread but it's actually a clearer summary than I can give on Dave's theory regarding God, YHWH and The Earth. (Or men, women and every idea ever, if you like)

Dave elaborates on the thinking behind his COVID skepticism:

Everyone else has now been forced to live the ascetic, hermitic life that Dave has lived since 2003. Dave has spent twenty years trying to live in a way that shows he does not deserve to die, or at least to die in excruciating, extended pain. However, every single person who dies in excruciating extended pain from it is suffering by God's choice, therefore it would be defying God for Dave to wear a mask or wash his hands to avoid transmitting the virus. Nowhere in the entire world has had professional sports, concerts, cinemas, restaurants, vacations or airline travel since March - meanwhile Dave has eschewed all of these things for seventeen years because "they're all feminists," not even providing his usual account that when he does fly on airlines or go on vacations, he talks to people about God. In the 12 months of studying the virus and multiple vaccines being developed, nobody has been able to identify the type of virus or observe how it behaves. When a vaccine is found (nb: no explanation of how this will happen when we are yet to even identify it as a novel coronavirus, or why the three vaccines that already exist are imaginary but only Dave can tell), society will tear itself apart because weed will be made legal and people will fornicate.

Also, anyone who stopped reading Cerebus at any point after its sales peak did so because they could tell Dave knew the immutable secrets of the universe, but wouldn't allow themselves to acknowledge it.

Since it's about to come off pre-sale and go on to actual sale, the new slipcase edition of High Society appears not to have sold that well. An edition of 200, and only the most expensive tier (edition of 20) has sold out.

Colour me sceptical, but I'm not that sure there's going to be a sudden influx of customers when it starts getting advertised to... the people who have been getting adverts up to now. And people like, say, me would need convincing that a $60-70 book is worth $200.

It's entirely possible we're down to double digits for people willing to give Dave money.

I guess it’s too late for him to get on Parler

can you post to Parler via fax

I bet you could rig that up.

start up the fash machine I have thoughts to share

I can’t see reading 300 issues of cerebus being a very enticing project for a new reader, not just because of the ending but because so much of it depends on 70s/80s superhero comic parodies, which were often oblique even for me, a child who grew up in the eighties reading superhero comics. I dunno, maybe chan board types could dig it

I flipped through some recently and really enjoyed the dumb stories in the first volume, and found high society realllly hard work

reminder that Sim currently posts to his blogspot by faxing a page or two of bible commentary to a dude who then uploads it as a 600x900px jpg per page

and that he replies to comments on his 31-posts-a-month blog by having the dude fax him some of the comments once a month, then phoning dude on a landline, and reading out the comments and replying to them, as duder puts him on speaker and films the desk with his mobile phone while holding up comics and postcards Dave has sent him, then uploads (eg) a 41 minute 34 second youtube video of Dave plugging upcoming publications, followed by a 12:42 video, a 20:15 video, a 35:48 video, a 41:52 video, a 22:10 video and a 15:28 video of Dave's individual replies to comments

while I'm all for the fa slowing their own communications down to this pace, I dunno that Dave will make much impact on Parl2r even if the blog guy figures out how to cross-post Dave's thought

I listened to a few minutes of the 41:52 answer while typing, which was about an anonymous female donor who sent Dave $10,000 for his work on Strange Death Of Alex Raymond

- (the book Dave abandoned five years ago when he fucked his wrist and refused to get medical advice because he lives in Canada and therefore medicine is communist) (instead he went to the US months later to pay full price for an x-ray, then posted it to the blogspot to ask his fans to diagnose him) (then had a fan draw it in Sim's style for 4.5 years before deciding a few months ago that he wasn't going to finish it or pay the guy) -

to which Dave asked what she wanted him to do to earn the $. She said "no, this is in appreciation of the work you already did." Dave's lawyer

- (who recently retired, and has signed and is selling his complete collection of Aardvark-Vanaheim comics, 1982-2014, at $10 ((+$5 shipping)) each to fund his retirement) -

advised him that this would leave him liable for something or other, so Dave has decided that he has to do 2 or 3 half-days a week or reading through his own extensive typed commentaries on old Rip Kirby strips and rating them out of three, in case his wrist ever heals and he starts cartooning again, so he'll know which ones to re-read again, to point him to Alex Raymond drawings that he should carefully copy with his God-healed hand. Perhaps he explains in the remaining 35 minutes why the taxman will care about this.

At least he’s his own boss

Meanwhile, the dude who he stiffed on drawing the book is going to self-publish the completed work as a 350-page paperback, including 46 pages of his own comics about how the project fell apart after years of trying to massage Sim's ego and delusions. He believes that the best / most ironic way of marketing it is to buy a cover ad on Diamond's monthly distribution catalogue, for $6000. To raise this, he is auctioning a page of his artwork in the comments section of one day's blog post from a week or three ago. There is currently one bid, of $100, by the founder of IDW Books, who made his first ever internet post in order to place said bid.

Before the pandemic, Dave (from Kitchener, Ontario) was planning on marketing this book by catching Greyhound buses on a road trip to every single comic shop in the California phonebook and giving them a mockup of the first volume. This road trip would end in the offices of IDW, where he would wait until the founder showed up, and give him the last copy of the mockup. Then, per Sim's plan, which he had not told to said founder, the two of them would strategise on how to leverage the enormous internet buzz that Dave would have generated via this comic shop tour into a rush-release.

going to self-publish the un-completed work as a 350-page paperback

Finding myself very compelled by these summaries of recent posts on a strange man’s blog tbqh.

Trying to think of all of this waves hands makes more or less sense than the Wikipedia summaries of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series I was skimming earlier.

At least he’s his own boss

In 1986, DC spent a year negotiating to buy the publishing rights to Cerebus. Eventually, Dave bent over the contract in P4ul L3vitz' New York office with pen in hand, and asked the publisher to give him a reason not to sign it. L3vitz asked "can you think of an easier way to make $100,000?"

Sim sat back, thought briefly, put the cap back on the pen and flew home to Canada, where he then invented the entire trade paperback comic collection / perennial reprint market from scratch. Single-handedly.

He then spent a decade proselytising and campaigning and marketing (and sometimes financially assisting) for every single comics author to be their own boss via self-publishing. All while writing and co-drawing and publishing and marketing a monthly book, publishing the odd bit of other work, having a major marketplace war with the largest distributor, and smoking weed daily, drinking weekly, "partying" on the road every month or three, pursuing fornication regularly, or being a diligent, communicative, supportive monogamous partner to his long-distance womanfriends. In 1994-95 he even built a network of international author-owned small press arts festivals from scratch, and toured once a month to help found or expand them, all while only making the monthly comic larger, rather than slowing down.

Then he stopped doing drugs or chasing women and started reading the Torah and the bible and the Koran, and consistently reduced his personal worldview, influence and audience for 25 years and counting. makes u think.

the completed work as a 350-page paperback

Not going to lie, I will buy this if it's a reasonable price and not his $300 'limited edition' bullshit.

(The California promo wasn't printed by Grubagh, and was only limited to 100 copies because the guy that had printed 400 copies for Sim gave Grubagh the last 100 copies (plus was a mere $105 for 132pp).)



Finding myself very compelled by these summaries of recent posts on a strange man’s blog tbqh.

A dude who was transcribing Dave's videos a few years back pops up in the comments to say that he's back at it. But instead of, say, condensing salient points in the comments of the latest post, he's still diligently getting every um and uhh and repetition from years-ago videos. Another dude posts to say he'd rather have a printed version of the videos to read, like the old Aardvark Comment, than click and sit through dozens of hours of audio at a computer. The blog dude leaps in to object that if this happened, he would want the comics he draws to accompany each monthly call with Sim to be included, so they would have to either pay for colour printing, or pay him to redraw them in black and white.

Here is an example of one of these.

Darkness

Sweet suffering fuck

That covers all of this, not just the inept zombie penis thing

Dave has just read New Mutants for the first time, on the urging of a fifty-something fan so obsessive (he posts multiple times a week in the blog comments about how often he has spoken to Dave on the phone, or how he just sits next to Gerhard at Gerhard's convention table for hours and talks to him instead of walking around discovering new work) that Sim has iiirc logged on himself to caution people not to believe half of what the guy says.

He has thus learnt for the first time what an extensive impact the demon character S'ym actually had on the Marvel Universe, and that as an agent of YHWH, Chris Claremont therefore created the association that would lead to Sim being demonised within the comic-book field a decade later. "All of it predestined." This is underscored by Claremont having written 185 issues of X-Men: therefore Sim's revelations of the true evils of feminism came in Cerebus #186.

Also, it was the "newly minted online mob" of the Comics Journal Message Board that "eradicated" Sim from the field in 1994, even though he continued to publish Cerebus until 2004, and the message board did not exist until 1999.

You don't have to read this stuff, sic.

Sometimes I go for six or eight months without looking in. But then it'll occur to me to wonder if Dave Sim has managed to develop a completely counterfactual opinion about something, or to devise a confoundingly elaborate method to keep himself from publishing simply or from creating work that connects with the genuine artist inside him, or uncovered new evidence that he is the central figure of the metaphysical universe. And by gum, he'll always be deep in at least one of the three.

I'm very happy for you to carry on reading and summarising it for us, TBH.

Dave believes that the duration of his seven-year relationship with a 14-year-old girl, beginning when he was about 29, is "metaphysically pertinent" now that he's reading Claremont and Sienkiewicz' New Mutants, because he read on S'ym's wikipedia that

During Illyana's seven years in Limbo, Belasco takes her as his heir and apprentice. She ultimately defeats him, becoming Limbo's new ruler, and S'ym's master, before returning to the X-Men. S'ym challenges Illyana's newfound status as Limbo's ruler. Illyana defeats S'ym, leaving S'ym to agree to serve Illyana whenever she visits Limbo.[

Because the seven years represent a limbo period where the metaphysical forces of feminism were trying to neutralise Sim's mind by placing him under female control before he could reveal the truth about their voidly agenda in his four-year Mothers & Daughters graphic novel, that followed the end of the relationship.

The fan who has sent the comics to Dave to read thinks that the "Colossus' kid sister" character became one-dimensional and her development went "off the rails;" Sim infers that this is because Claremont is a feminist and tried to frame the plot positively in that direction.


The personality "Jack Wayne" manifested by the character Legion in New Mutants #27 also ties in to Dave: he infers that the character is named for Jack Kennedy (who was the most successful playboy alive in 1963 because Marilyn Monroe fucked him, which also proves he was as attractive as a human male could be at that time) and Bruce Wayne, and Dave was perceived as a playboy-like-figure within the comics field in the 1980s because he fucked so much. Proof that this personality is metaphysically connected to Dave? "My Inner Jack Kennedy would wane," fourteen (7 + 7) years later when he gave up sex and masturbation .

In the 1980s, Sim would write angrily about his friend and mentor Gene Day's death after Day's travelling to NYC to deliver a job to Marvel, being given a rush job to draw in the office, and left to sleep in an unheated Manhattan office lobby in winter, catching (iirc) a pneumonia that Sim believed weakened his health leading to him dropping dead months later.

Now, seeing that the character S'ym first appeared in August 1982 (probably May, actually, but Dave is evidently forgetting how cover dates work), Day died in September, and Dave & Deni Sim went on their first US tour in October/November, Dave "infers" that by leaving his wife and becoming a fornicator in 1983, he "forced" God or the universe or something to send him a message by killing his only friend.


Lest anyone think that Sim is somehow reaching, or exhibiting some kind of weird narcissism by going beyond the S'ym character to read metaphysical connections between his own life and other characters in the comic: another one of Legion's manifested personalities is called Cyndi. And Dave has been told that his parents would have named him Cindy if he'd been a girl. And Claremont writes Cyndi saying "

..."They say they love you. But when it's their life and yours, they'll dump you every time." And that is the sort of thing that Dave's parents might have said to him, or vice versa, when they still spoke! AND he did dump his parents when they remained atheists after he invented, then converted to, his own religion! QED.

Dave found those details on the S'ym wikipedia because he phoned his research assistant and asked him to print out the page and bring it to the house.

He has since taken a break from reading the New Mutants comics from 1982 to watch the New Mutants film from 2017, released in 2020, and pausing to transcribe all the bits about religion. Sim had noticed it on two Worst Movies Of 2020 lists in Canada, despite it containing "LGBTQ propaganda," so he concludes that this is a result of the "sharp shift in Trump-era Identity Politics". (He thinks it's bad too, but not because it happens to be a bad movie. It's because every single film made today is just filler between CGI effects - Dave can tell this, unlike professional nationally-published film critics, presumably because he watches one movie every five years and thus knows better.)

He is noting his reactions by watching fifteen minutes every two days, typing up two pages of analysis addressed to the fan that asked him what he thinks of the comic, and faxing these to his blogspot dude.

starting to think there may be reason to be concerned about dave sim’s mental well-being tbh

"dave sic" press submit

Sim had a sexual relationship with a 14 year old girl when he was 29? Or am I reading that wrong.

*phones research assistant*

*checks voicemail*

They only met a few times in those seven years, rarely corresponded, didn't have sex until a few days before her 21st birthday, and have not seen each other since three months after her 22nd. Sim regards the association as unequivocally morally wrong, legally criminal, and the handful of days they spent in each others' company as the only times he has ever experienced happiness in his life.

I checked back and Dave has faxed another 18 pages of daily commentary on the New Mutants movie in the last week

I really need a fax machine

it's the internet of paper

Dave believes that the concept of teenagers making out in a cemetery is something that The New Mutants movie invented as gay propaganda to undermine religion, and not something that teenagers have been doing since approx. 12 hours after cemeteries were invented.

https://i.imgur.com/qFe8s13.jpg



Dave believes that Marvel Movies, which he has not seen, developed a recognisable template, that this film, not made by Marvel Studios, deviates from. He also believes that 20th Century Fox delayed its release five times because of poor audience reaction when it was released three years later.

https://i.imgur.com/Od875KL.jpg

Also, he thinks it's a bad movie because it's bad, but the audience thought it was bad because they are too dumb to appreciate that it is interesting and creative.

Also, a global pandemic forcing cinemas closed in most of the planet, and nearly all of North America, had no impact on the box office in 2020.

Dave Sim, who has been self-employed since 1977, is very familiar with HR Departments, and how feminists infiltrating the otherwise sensible institution of HR departments created the COVID hoax.

https://i.imgur.com/AfI3dyq.jpg

If any span of time between two events in Dave Sim's life can be measured between two events in other people's lives, or in world events, then it means that the Sim span of time influenced or outright controlled the other events.

https://i.imgur.com/zgcpcRX.jpg

Any genuinely open-minded person reading Sim's anti-feminist essay from 1994 will conclude that this time-span theory is correct. If they don't? QED, they are not genuinely open-minded.

McCarthyism was bad because he made people paranoid about communists in the US State Department, but the US State Department really was and is permeated with communists, and that's bad.

https://i.imgur.com/hMF0LTS.jpg

God is prolonging the COVID-19 pandemic because people have not learnt enough from their suffering so far, and still want to have sex. New Zealand's feminist and socialist Prime Minister, whose partner stays home to raise their child, absolutely did not halt the pandemic, and everyone in New Zealand died a year ago.

https://i.imgur.com/tw3aiWK.jpg

you could also not pay attention to this drivel though

I think you're missing that it has been 26 years and three months since Cerebus #191 came out, including a preview of Jason Lutes' Jar Of Fools. Metaphysics thus dictate that we are all fools, and only by scrying these runes do we have any hope of escaping the jar. Thus, until my free will can affect my actions, I am bound to continue.

better you than me man; it seems somewhere between a waste of your time and a sort of unhealthy interest in a clearly damaged man from out here

and i say that as a marked obsessive with clearly unhealthy interests, so i know whereof i speak!

If any span of time between two events in Dave Sim's life can be measured between two events in other people's lives, or in world events, then it means that the Sim span of time influenced or outright controlled the other events.

I'm just going to speak generally here but I've typically found that when these lines are crossed (or inverted perhaps?) there's an effect on yourself that's kind of like a psychic second law of thermodynamics in that you don't get out without losing a little bit of yourself.

*removes bookmark from thread*

Pretty glad now I didn't drop $$$ on SDoAR.

How’s this guy doing

Ew.

he's got his finger on the pulse

lmao

yikes

Can’t someone just put him down, for fuck’s sake?

I got given the Alex Raymond book for Christmas. Wish me luck.

it's a good thing he has a posse of younger people mostly writing and drawing these for him, or he might accidentally come off vaguely out of touch

On top of everything else what is going on with those fonts

I guess you set off to do 300 issues of a comic book about a barabarian aardvark, there is a pretty decent chance you are going to lose your f'n mind.

I was a steady reader of Cerebus from High Society onward to somewhere in the 140s when there was more text than art and seeing this all go down in real time is something. I seem to recall that Deni Loubert saying something to that effect: 300 issues about an aardvark in the wilds of Kitchner will drive him mad.

I was given a self-drawn comic this Christmas by someone who appeared as a character in Cerebus many years ago.

Hempel?

it's just such a fucking insult how good this guy is at page & panel design, and such a blessing that he's so far over the bend that nobody'll ever put his talents to use for, like, viable political candidates who'd make things even worse

As an equally epic, well-drawn and well-written comic without the baggage of its creator, let me humbly sugggest Finder by Carla Speed McNeil.

I'm about halfway through the Sim content of SDOAR and it's... something.

I hadn't realised until I read Eddie Campbell's intro that Sim had abandoned completely all the work he had included in glamourpuss (for, frankly, Sim-based reasons) and instead appears to be creating a revenge narrative where Alex Raymond is the only true artist and Caniff had him killed so the extent of his rip-off wasn't exposed.

Of course, Dave being Dave, this is only revealed when you compare King Features published funny pages vs the original art and they are in on the conspiracy. And in an even more Dave move, this is a multi-dimensional conspiracy achieved using an as-yet undiscovered school of metaphysics revealed to (possibly only) him.

The most ridiculous part so far though is obliquely comparing Rob Liefeld to Alex Raymond. Even the staunchest defenders have to acknowledge that's fucking crazy talk.

I might have to find my glamourpusses after this because I recognise NONE of this.

Is it an interesting something or a “go away Dave” something (or both!)

It's both, to be honest.

At the moment it's all mystic visionary Dave and very little sexual politics Dave - he touches on it once and backs the fuck away VERY quickly - and if it was anybody else (e.g. Scott McCloud) it'd be getting discussed very seriously.

Even if you don't agree with his central premise (and I'm not sure who else does apart from Dave) some of his Tangents are really engaging no matter how implausible (for example, Raymond's affair physically manifested a parallel Earth in another dimension which Oskar Lebeck had his ideas for Twin Earths psychically beamed from which is why they're so technologically accurate to the modern day).

Also Dave's art is, for the first 100 pages or so, absolutely undiminished and his layouts are great. Lettering sucks though.

I'm at about page 150 and Dave's last is 209 before it becomes nearly all Carson.

it's hard to think of someone else in this field whose skills have remained so high and who have stayed so prolific and yet i have no interest in anything they're making

Xpost
What is SDOAR?

Strange Death Of Alex Raymond

whose skills have remained so high and who have stayed so prolific

His past skills at comedy, dialogue, pacing, design and lettering are not at all evidenced by the work he is prolifically publishing

Can't disagree.

The Dave stuff in SDoAR is somewhere between 15 and 8 years old, depending on reuse. Haven't got to him just doing layouts yet.

I can't remember how I got them (might have been the Diamondback deck reprint?) but I have some of the early Swords of CiH and they're pretty much as bad as you think they are.

I obviously meant his visual skills, which seem pretty strong yet.

Got to the end of Dave's art life and it's losing its way a bit, meandering around the Margaret Mitchell revelation it promised earlier without actually getting anywhere near revealing.

Scott and Zelda turn up about now so I can see Dave folding himself into the metaphysics soon.

And in other cosmic alignment, a GoFundMe was launched while I've been reading to put online the TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY pages Dave has done outlines for since he stopped interacting with Carson Grubaugh (obviously including the Dave versions of the blue pages in SDOAR).

I am resisting, even at the $5 entry level, and looks like I'm not alone as two weeks in there are only 34 donations.

I obviously meant his visual skills, which seem pretty strong yet.

The work he is prolifically publishing is three older existing drawings of cerebus, cut-and-pasted by other people onto a 140-year-dead guy’s drawings! He’s only just started doing some variant covers again in the last year, after …seven years? of not drawing for publication, and mostly copying photos for about as many before that. It’s possible that the SDOAR 3.0 which aldo is resisting gofunding show that he still has a facility for original composition, page structure and visual storytelling, but it’s also possible it shows a significant deterioration — and I dunno that sketching layouts for one patron’s commission can be judged as prolific without seeing any of them.

ie yes one might argue his drawing has not deteriorated to the same degree as his comedy, dialogue, pacing, design and lettering; however, he is prolifically publishing all of those, and his drawings are published a couple of times a year, usually via POD to an audience of …dozens?

I am referring to what I have seen of strange death, which seems cleanly and well executed. Glamorpuss, the Dore stuff and Judenhass are varying levels of embarrassing, yes

With only 34 in for SDOAR3.0 dozens feels accurate at this point.

It's hard to tell just how far Dave's drawing has deteriorated from the limited stuff I've seen because once he moved to the tracing paper technique the 'good' is introduced at the inking stage and the trace drawing is quite literally a bit sketchy. So because all we see now is really the pencil we should be comparing it to something that looks unfinished - and if we do that then it looks fairly sustained. But the point is kind of moot because imo there's no way Dave will ever produce finished art again (not least because that would mean not falling out with a collaborator).

It's also fair to say though that going down the SDOAR route and reproducing other people's work, plus the reproducing photos stuff, has ruined his creative art abilities.

Based on SDOAR2.0 layouts are the only real strength he has at Cerebus levels but I haven't seen any of the SDOAR3.0 stuff and the SDOAR2.1 layouts are a drop off from the rest of the book.

CiH is absolutely dreadful.

Had a dig through the cereblog:

This is the sole image used to advertise the SDOAR 3.0 GoFundMe, that you can subscribe to see more of - I couldn't figure out how much more or for how much.

This is a recent actual drawing, which I couldn't figure out whether it's a cover printed like this or drawn on a "blank" cover.

These are the only art he is publishing regularly at the moment, and afaict the only time he has published art serially in about eight years?

Someone should tell him about the “cool S”

all the actual car crash stuff i've seen from sdoar is quite nice imo but it seems i am not keeping pace with his output and that's because i don't have much interest in him anymore

Kickstarter for Remastered TMNT #8, with 24 variant covers* at $20-$100 each, a behind-the-scenes book (collecting material from two previous BTS books promoting this Kickstarter, plus new material - presumably the two complete BTS books will also be offered as stretch goals) for $30, a comic book of TMNT/Cerebus convention sketches by unnamed artists, a collection of the 75 promo sketches by Sim^ for $30, a trading card set of the promo sketches for $95 and a trading card set of the variant covers for $20, an enamel pin of Cerebus' face, another enamel pin of Cerebus'face wearing a TMNT mask ($15 each or $25 for two), three variant cover versions of a November ashcan promoting this project (regular cover $100, green foil cover $150, platinum foil $300), and new editions of previously-kickstartered remasters of Cerebus #1 and #2 at $15 each, and a Dave Sim cover variant of a previously-kickstartered remaster of Spawn #10 for $50.

$45k raised from 308 backers so far, five days in. I think the cheapest you can get everything (via bundles) for is $1230

*(artists range from Simon Bisley and Brandon Graham to original Mirage artists Michael Dooney and Jim Lawson, to one of the guys that writes & photoshops Cerebus In Hell.)

Man, the Eastman/Sim combo is an unpleasant moneygrubbing two-headed monster.

Tom Ewing's deep Cerebus dive, started on Feb 1st and a post per phone book, is really really good. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/there-are-three-aardvarks starts it off, and there are links at the bottom of that post to each subsequent post. He's up to Rick's Story, posted today.

Thanks, this is great stuff.

Oh this should be fun!

Also tipped me off that he's actually been updating Popular haha

I just got the UPS saying my Minds portfolio is turning up tomorrow - these still remain value imo, full size reproductions of pages and yet more otherwise unavailable Dave commentary - and had forgotten that I had added the Akira Cerebus, which is the first full new Cerebus comic (i.e. writing and art) in 20 years and the first full issue Sim art since glamourpuss finished.

So I guess I will have to report back over the weekend. Pray for me.

"That's right! The first Aardvark-Mangaheim (Dave Sim's Manga parodies) begins here, and Manga will never be the same! AKIMBO! Hand drawn by Dave Sim, it's Manga vs. Photorealism in the battle of the century, with Cerebus caught in the middle! Who will win? Who will lose? "With Hands On Hips And Elbows Turned Outward!"

Dave Sim now only exists to make my brain hurt. Take one for the team, aldo.

They have failed to deliver it, presumably because of some kind of hate crime. Updates when, and if, it ever turns up.

Tom Ewing's deep Cerebus dive, started on Feb 1st and a post per phone book, is really really good. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/there-are-three-aardvarks🕸 starts it off, and there are links at the bottom of that post to each subsequent post. He's up to Rick's Story, posted today.

I commented on one of the posts that the whole thing needs to be collected and published, ideally illustrated by Gerhard. Tom mentions at one point a post-300 interview with Ger, who said that in the latter days (the book's, not the aardvark's) he had to work in silence because Dave refused to have music playing. Can anyone here provide a link to that interview?

A friend sent me a reco for this book in response to me sending the Ewing piece. Has anyone read it? https://www.clairedederer.com/monsters

intrigued, i tried it.

i like ewing's writing better. dederer seems to be reaching towards some kind of Grand Unified Theory, and for me, there isn't one. it's so full of _ideas_. chapter 3:

If you are a trans person, or love a trans person, or simply disagree with Rowling’s language, what then to do with that part of your childhood that had become intertwined with Harry Potter?

i'm not sure why she's asking the question. there are plenty of trans people who have had that experience. each of them deal with it in their own way. she deals with it, apparently, by writing punditry that considers these questions _intellectually_. not my bag.

perhaps there's some merit in dederer's book, but i didn't see on a cursory skim. perhaps i missed it. if someone's read her work more in-depth and believes it _does_ deserve further consideration, i'm all ears.

-

Here's what I like about Aard Labour: The first sentences. Starting with part 5:

This is the fifth in a series of posts on Cerebus The Aardvark, an often technically brilliant comic.
This is the sixth of my posts about Cerebus, the alternative comic that ran from 1978-2004.
This is the seventh in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a comic I used to read.
This is the 8th of my posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a controversial and long-running comic.
This is the 9th in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a controversial independent comic.
This is the 10th in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a 300-issue comic series of some notoriety.
This is the 11th in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a 300-issue comic by a troubled Canadian.
This is the 12th of my posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a 16-book graphic novel by a guy with serious issues.

There's no intent, as far as I can tell, in the changes in these lines. No metanarrative Tom is spinning out. I like the writing, though, the different ways of looking at the book.

Reading Ewing's work has given me lots of cause to reflect. I have had many thoughts. I don't know if there's... value in my sharing them. It's more to do with me than with anything else.

Tom mentions at one point a post-300 interview with Ger, who said that in the latter days (the book's, not the aardvark's) he had to work in silence because Dave refused to have music playing.

Correction, this was from a commenter, not from Tom.

Gerhard stopped drawing in the office years before the end, and would just come in every two weeks or so to pick up Dave's pages and do his part of the business admin. (After he quit altogether, leading to the catch-up double solo issue in the last year or so, he only returned as artist iirc.)

IDK. It's a really interesting topic for me to circle back around on, particularly now that I am, I suppose, at the center of the - what is it - "marxist-feminist-homosexualist axis" he goes on about? In some ways he's very much a proto-Scott-Adams, except that Sim is often brilliant and Adams... isn't, particularly. Whenever I read about Scott Adams, I almost immediately think of some epithet or another used to denigrate another's intelligence (though not the r-slur, at least). Then I say, oh, wait, I'm trying not to use that sort of language, and find that I have nothing to say about Scott Adams. Nothing whatsoever.

Sim, on the other hand... reading about him, I can think of a great deal of things to say in response. Nothing _about_ him. Nothing actually _to_ him. My understanding is that he regularly describes women like me as "devils, vipers, and scorpions". I'm sure he has some extremely logical explanation for why those are _his_ initials. That's the thing. I can say very _little_ about Sim himself beyond "Wow. What the fuck?" The only way I can understand him is through the lens of extreme mental illness - my own, not his. I don't know the man and am not qualified to make any judgement whatsoever on his sanity or lack thereof.

How do I "separate the art from the artist" when the artist, and his statements on his own art, are so bizarre as to be incomprehensible to me? The work certainly has _meaning_ to me. The artist, without particularly knowing me, has passed collective judgement on groups I belong to. In light of that it seems somewhat superfluous for me to form any sort of opinion on the man himself. Confronted with Dave Sim's opinions, all I can do is shrug and say "...OK." I guess it would be different if I could conceive of them as being any sort of credible threat to me, but he's just so _marginalized_. I understand marginalization. He has opinions, and he voices them, and basically nobody listens. A tiny minority. Nobody takes him seriously. "He's brilliant, but...". Some of the labels he bristles against are in fact fully accurate. I'm not sure why he argues so vociferously against being labelled a "misogynist" - it's, again, he has this worldview, this _language_, that just doesn't _correspond_ to other people's. To say that he's not a "misogynist" is to render the concept of misogyny itself meaningless.

Which, I mean. Misogyny isn't really the important thing to me anyway. I've kind of moved away from "misogyny" to a broader critique of patriarchy. Not sure what Sim thinks about patriarchy or whether he'd consider himself and advocate of it.

See, it's easy to get lost. In trying to _understand_ him. Which is impossible, for me, at least. The important part is that long ago, I related to his work a lot, found it brilliant, didn't quite understand it. I only ever read the first four phonebooks. That's where Cerebus ends for me - the end of Church and State II. I reread those phonebooks, particularly High Society through Church and State II, a number of times, and didn't quite ever understand it. It influenced me, though, at least in terms of giving voice to a lot of feelings I had about myself. The trajectory of my life thus far can be roughly summarized by the "gifted boy -> burnout girl with a praise kink pipeline" meme. I think I first read Cerebus post-boy, but pre-burnout. A troubled American with serious issues.

The thing is, at that time I saw myself fully as a man, and I read Cerebus, and it spoke to me on that level, informed how I thought about my own gender. And what I saw, at that time, was a work full of detestable men (and I guess a detestable aardvark). And the aardvark is apparently... intersex? All of the work I see about it describes Cerebus as a "hermaphrodite", which to my understanding is not the preferred nomenclature. All of this time I've been thinking of Cerebus the character as a cis male aardvark and it seems to be more complicated than that. Fuck if I know. Cerebus more than most works I know seems like a palimpsest, the author writing over it while it's still being published. It's sort of this ancient half-buried _thing_ in my past. I've written over myself so many times since then. Sim's written over his work so many times since then. There's some point of contact, some _important_ point of contact that I had with a prior version of that work, but G-d help me if I know how to put it into words.

Boggles me that it’s just a series of blog posts/Goodreads reviews and not something he’ll be paid for.

Indeed the opposite - he's got a Patreon but as far as I'm aware he's paused it until he gets Popular on a more regular schedule?

And yes, this stuff is amazing - I must have given away the earlier funnier stuff, and all I have is Flight-thru-Rick's Story, but now I even want to read Form & Void. I know I can probably get the torrents, but I want to actually hold the phonebooks (I got rid of the 120+ issues that I had, at some point), but where to source them ethically... - it took me a while to realise that what I didn't want to get my hands dirty, I did want to get my hands dirty

xxp I think it's simply that "hermaphrodite" is the word used in the comics? I think it would be the one used at the time, and even if it wasn't, I can imagine that the boy god + girl god would be a draw for Sim.

I met Sim at a signing at Comics Showcase when I was a teenager, not long after Flight came out. He seemed like a charming good storyteller. Weird to think he was probably in the middle of writing Minds at the time.

I got (and lost!) a sketch

In news that should surprise nobody, Akimbo is bad. Unreadably bad. But most interestingly it ably demonstrates the complete collapse as of Dave as a comics creator because there is no part of it executed even vaguely competently.

The "writing": in a style familiar to anyone who's ever looked at CiH?! or even just the covers, Dave has a single thought and shouts it multiple times, changing the words ever so slightly, in the hope that it sinks in. I think what he's attempting to do in this case is suggest the feminist/homosexualist axis is trying to normalise paedophilia by making "romance" all about underdeveloped bodies and that real women (specifically ones with boobs) should rise from their slumbers and reclaim their rightful place beside manly men (while executing the girly men that are enablers to this masterplan. If we thought Dave was capable of self-reflection, and pushing the 'Cerebus is Dave' angle, he might be assumed to be referencing the recent grooming stories and indicating that even he, the Diuine Cerebuss, is not immune from the tendrils of the axis and that, no matter how much it suits the narrative and might feel like the right thing, we should always be vigilant that the nest of vipers are permanently trying to undermine the forces of good.

If we're going to be very, very generous there's nearly a point being made about Cerebus (the comic) and how it took on a life of its own - it was supposed to be an adventure comic and instead turned into a romance comic. For girls. And it wouldn't be too much of a reach to think it's at least part of Dave's thought process; he explicitly says the adventure/romance/girls line twice as the internalised thoughts of Akimbo. But whose fault is that, and which periods is Dave referring to? Or which romance even, given I think I've said before that Cerebus/Bear is the love story at the heart of the second third. For a comic that exists now only as exegesis, or Baudrillardan critique, it would be tempting to explore this idea (and I yet might) but these short lines here are already more thought than Dave has given to the topic.

The "art": in total it's about half a dozen sketches. They're relaid on slightly different backgrounds, or in different configurations or magnifications/zooms, but there is very little here. It's also admitted in a thought bubble that these are 'just' tracings - again, this is not even vaguely unusual to anyone who's looked at any of the post-Cerebus/pre-injury work - but what's notable is just how inept they are. In a couple of the Akimbo frames you can see just how rough the trace is, and it looks like Dave can't manage more than a couple of mm of straight work before stopping because there's just no continuous work at all, it's just a series of small scrapes on the paper that just about look like a real thing at a macro enough level. That this even passed a basic editorial quality check is shocking enough but it shows a complete decline in abilities and raises the question of how much work whoever is doing the inking on the 'good' pieces reflects the output and how much of it is even Dave any more.

The "lettering": lOv3 thee qvIRky STYLINGS off gL4mOURpVss l3TTeRinG?!!??! Well it's here in spades. It's obviously supposed to be a specific way of speaking, but buggered if I can work it out or care enough to. It's just a lazy retread of previous work, which itself was a facsimile of late-era attempts to recapture what was once genuine innovation. 35 years of dilution have rendered the effect like homeopathy - a placebo for true believers but the home of cranks and rogues to the rest of us.

And with that, Defend The Indefensible: Dave Sim Current Edition is over. There's no part of his ability remaining that can be used to justify looking at any of the new material and his once numerous talents have deserted him. I'll most likely stay on board for the Archive project, at least until it's done the first pass through all the books, because they're actually very well done (although if i'm honest the quality reduces the later in the phonebooks we get to, as Dave's background is largely already published so he has less to say about them. It looks like facsimile editions of his notebooks is the new cash converter, although in classic Sim style they're only really affordable if you send cheques directly to the Off-White House. Any attempt to use modern technology like a website (that already exists) or electronic mail (that already exists) come with cost penalties that we all deserve, obviously, for daring to live in the current era.