Cerebus Would Tour Book (1995) by Dave Sim and others
OK, just (I think) three more posts to go, and we can put this Renegade Press/Aardvark-Vanaheim blog post series to bed (again).
Cerebus is saying what we’re all thinking.
This book is a sort of promotional tool for the self-publishers tour Sim was arranging around this time, and I’m guessing he also sold it at the tour?
The book basically just reprints the extras from the Swords of Cerebus series, which is nice, I guess. I mean, Cerebus fans no longer had to pick up that series just to get the extras. But it also illustrates the slightly odd situation Cerebus readers were in (and still are in, I guess, if there still are any Cerebus readers): It’s rather hard to read the complete Cerebus odyssey. The collected editions collect almost the entire main series, but then the… four? missing issues are collected in Cerebus Zero, and then there’s this. And there’s more Cerebus stories by Sim floating around out there.
But I guess it didn’t seem urgent to issue a nice fat collection of this material (it must be 150-200 pages?) at the time, and now there’s no interest.
Most of the extras from Swords of Cerebus were collaborations, but this one’s drawn fully by Barry Windsor Smith.
But! Then there’s new material! 19 pages of it. And it’s a jam strip by Dave Sim and Chester Brown. 19 pages!
I’m not sure what storyline there is here, but it looks kinda interesting, at least.
And you can play the “which panel is by Sim and which by Brown” game.
And this is how it ends.
I don’t think this has been reprinted anywhere…
And as expected, there’s a text from Sim at the end where he gives some credits, and as usual, there’s some unexpected gossip: Marshall Rogers was Deni Sim’s lover for a time?
Sim explains how the Chester Brown jam came to be, and they apparently did it one panel at a time, mostly via mail? Huh.
Hero Illustrated reckons that the book is a good buy.
This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.