This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

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?

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.