Random Thoughts

Cerebus (1981) #26-50
by Dave Sim

We (that is, I) continue our (that is, my) (re-)reading of Renegade/Aardvark-Vanaheim with the second batch of Cerebus comics — the High Society sequence. (Hopefully with fewer parentheses per paragraph than this one (right).)

I started reading Cerebus with issue #49 (when I was 14), which is the 24th issue in a 25 issue story: I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but it seemed very intriguing. I finally got caught up three years later, when the High Society “phonebook” (as Sim called it) was published, collecting all these 25 issues.

Look! First printing! I must have ordered this from Aardvark-Vanaheim directly? Sim famously withheld the book from comic shop distribution, which made Diamond so angry that they… threatened to not distribute Puma Blues, the other book Sim was publishing at the time.

Such principles. Fortunately Diamond didn’t then later become the only distributor of comics in the US… right? Right?

Sim relented, but I think I got my copy before all this drama.

So I’ve certainly read these stories before, and I’ve also got a smattering of the High Society re-print series, but I haven’t read the actual #25-48 before now.

I’m excited!

Let’s start.

So that’s the first three pages, and we’ve come far since Cerebus #1 — Sim can really draw by now.

The printing is worse than ever, though.

The first 25 issues were extremely episodic to start with, but we’d gotten longer story arcs over the last dozen issues, and here Sim is going for a 25 issue epic, which means that he can pace things very differently. These aren’t really what you’d call “decompressed storytelling”, though: Sim still shovels a lot of stuff into each issue.

So: The story is that Cerebus is in Iest, and people think that he’s got serious pull with Palnu (the economic super-power in the area) and the bossmang there, Lord Julius. Everything spins out from there, really: Intrigue, elections, war.

The guy that runs the fan club, Fred Patten, asks what happened at the end of the previous Cerebus-led war. He asks whether Sim just wrote himself into a corner and didn’t know what to do?

Sim answers at length, and I’m paraphrasing: “Yes.” Or, rather, he passive-aggressively poop-poos Patten’s intelligence, and explains that of course the invasion was doomed to fail: How could a bunch of barbarians hope to take over a major city like Palnu? They’d be swatted! That’s just stupid!

(Sim had previously written in a letters column that that was pretty much what he’d planned on happening.)

Sim swears to never reveal what’s going to happen in a letters column ever again. (Presumably so that people can’t tell how little he thinks these things out?)

A new series is announced! Very mysterious!

Anyway, back to the story… So, people were offering Cerebus money hand over foot (during one dinner, he was offered 800 crowns) to have Cerebus whisper things into Lord Julius’ ear. So, naturally Cerebus arranges to have himself kidnapped… with a random of… 12K crowns? Which takes him a week to get? Which sounds way less than what he’d be getting if he’d just continue sitting at that restaurant table.

This is the main point of frustration with reading this comic: Cerebus whip-saws between being really smart and being downright moronic. Sure, Cerebus finds it more fun cheating people out of money instead of just being offered it… I guess… but it just doesn’t make sense: No dramatic sense, and it’s not really in character — Cerebus would be fine getting drunk while people are giving him money, surely.

But it’s a fun caper, and I guess that’s what was on Sim’s mind this week.

*gasp* Mike Bannon! He pops up a lot in the letters pages after High Society is over, and teams up with other wiseguys to give them a rather surreal feeling.

The second Mind Games issue isn’t as much fun as the first — it’s mostly an occasion to infodump at the reader some stuff about Estarcion society. From Suentus Po’s point of view, of course, so it’s not necessarily reliable information, but it’s pretty interesting.

The Regency Elf. And speaking of characters — Sim is getting really good at making them. In the early issues, they’re one-dimensional parodies, and they’re pretty interchangeable except for what kind of schtick they’re doing. In High Society, the characters feel like they’ve got a lot more depth — even older characters that are reintroduced, like Bran Mak Muffin.

More Mike Bannon. Unfortunately this is the last we see of him during the High Society run?

The Unique Stories plot becomes clearer: It’s an anthology series, and Neil The Horse is supposed to feature in it.

Speaking of ads: I sure hope Bud Plant paid well, because that’s just really really ugly.

The smart/dumb thing again: Here’s more political intrigue, where the prime minister, for some reason, has decided to have a heart to heart with Cerebus… kinda out of the blue? Because… he wants Cerebus to be furnish a pretty piddling amount of money through a too-complicated scheme? So it’s a heist, but this time without breaking and entering, so that’s up Cerebus’ alley (sort of)… but why would the prime minister actually imagine that the Palnu representative would be up for this sort of thing?

I love reading stuff that’s got many layers and things aren’t spelled out, but the problem here is that there really isn’t that much to figure out: The reason the plot doesn’t make sense (on the surface) isn’t because of some deep structures we can’t see, but we can tease out if we put our hearts into it. It’s because it’s kinda dumb.

But it’s entertaining! It’s fun! And Sim comes up with all these little exciting storytelling touches.

What I’m saying is that there’s less to High Society than meets the eye.

Another mayor player in this storyline: Astoria. Who introduces herself to Cerebus (and the reader) by claiming to have been raped by the Roach. I’m guessing that Sim mean for us to read this as her embellishing (or just lying outright)… but then again, Astoria is raped for sure (by Cerebus) later in the series.

This is supposed to be a riff on Neal Adams via Bill Sienkiewicz, I think? Not just a straight Neal Adams riff? Or is it?

It’s very funny, whatever it is.

And then Unique Stories is cancelled before it even starts. Along with something called Out of the Depths, which I hadn’t even noticed had been announced.

Astoria is a ingenious manipulator and schemer. And Sim has found an effective way to avoid drawing so many backgrounds: Just have everything happen in very very dark hotel rooms. Sim had tried to do issues in caves and stuff before, but I think it works a lot better now — Sim uses the black backgrounds to his advantage, in a way that allows him to be really clever with layouts that are super-efficient at telling the story he’s doing.

The page count is increase from 24 to 32, which leaves room for ads and backup stories (which were originally slated for the Unique Stories anthology). Here’s Brent Alan Richardson with a story that’s, frankly, incomprehensible.

Oooh! That’s the way to shame a barbarian: Grammer.

Intrigue and mystery!

William Messner Loebs does a five-part thing about whatsisname in heaven. It’s OK, I guess, but…

Fashion: 81.

OK, I really wasn’t going to do this… I think I’ve kvetched enough about how High Society doesn’t really make much sense when you think about it… but the bit where the people of Iest get to vote who the “leading diplomatic representative” of Palnu is… it’s… This thing, which is totally utterly different than an “ambassador” (somehow, Sim doesn’t explain how), allows the person to set a lot of policy on behalf of Palnu… so… er… how…

OK, just let it go. Just let it go an enjoy the funny drawings.

That rendering technique (on Astoria’s face) isn’t one that Sim uses a lot…

The merchandising continues with the stuffed Cerebus toy (sword not included). Hm… Where have I seen that before…

Oh yeah! On the shelf in the TV room.

I’ve had that since I was fourteen.

Jaka returns a couple times, and begs Cerebus to abandon whatever he’s planning. It’s a big emotional thing, and it works really well.

So, while campaigning, in Iest, to be elected a Palnuan diplomat (yes), he attends a convention to meed the voters. So it’s basically a parody of a comics convention for a few issues, where Cerebus signs autographs and… draws sketches…

It’s funny.

Ah, yes, the infamous counterfeit Cerebus #1 issue. Has it even been revealed who was behind it?

I have my suspicions as to who did the counterfeit but, no, the FBI never managed to catch the guys who were selling them-the “mules” folded their operation as soon as word started to spread-and therefore there was no route to anyone who was behind the scam. I certainly wasn’t about to accuse anyone publicly without evidence to support it but, yes, I’m pretty sure I knew who did it.

The FBI!

Well, OK, I can’t keep nattering on about High Society… there’s like a gazillion articles about it out there, I think? So I’ll just note that when it’s funny, it’s very funny. And Sim is endlessly inventive with his storytelling, and it all works.

Even stuff like this. (Four extra pages of Cerebus in an issue disguised as a Unique Story.)

Hey! Have I ever seen that ad for Love & Rockets before? It’s nice.

Ooo! A tour! Like real rock stars!

Remember them? They were these creatures that used to tour and then you could go to big halls and look at them up on something called “a stage”, while loud sounds would come out of “speakers” while “the audience” would drink “beer”.

True story!

Finally! Neil the Horse by the incomparable Arn Saba. We get a couple of these shorts…

*gasp* An ad from DC Comics? They were really pushing Camelot 3000, I guess?

Did I mention that Sim is really funny when he’s funny?

And the entire election sequence is quite masterful — it’s funny and tense and exciting, all at the same time.

Michael T. Gilbert, who I’ll be talking more about in the next blog post — he’s the first non-Sim person Aardvark-Vanaheim will be publishing a book from. (Did that make grammertiqly sense? Whatevs.)

A very mysterious ad! Three issues later, we’re told that this is an ad for a portfolio.

Then! Suddenly! Sim starts doing Cerebus sideways. Printing-wise, that is.

Did Sim or John Byrne do it first? A December 1982 on-sale date… This issue has a November 1982 date… So they both came up with the same idea at the same time?

Well, OK.

Anyway, it’s fun, but it’s kinda inconvenient when reading the phonebook.

And as we see above, Astoria and the Roach gets locked in… and then gets sloshed immediately… which is rather out of character for Astoria. I mean, she’s living a life of luxury in a luxury hotel, so why would she immediately got “oooh” at the sign of some booze?

But it’s a funny sequence. They get really drunk.

So, Cerebus becomes prime minister (oops SPOILERS), and he’s ruthless and kinda psychotic, as you’d expect. The narrative is totally on his side, though — he’s not just the protagonist, but the hero. And Sim has switched his character from being an ineffectual Astoria hang-around to hyper-competent 4D chess-playing genius … again.

Sim’s also dropping in another viewpoint — a history written by one of Cerebus’ gullible followers (and speech writer): A true believer in the “republican” ideals that were set out by Astoria.

Barb Rausch! I didn’t remember that she was working with Arn Saba already.

They start running the circulation numbers on the inside front cover in each issue: This unprecedented openness was very helpful to other prospective self-publishers, I think.

Michael Cherkas (of later Silent Invasion fame) does the artwork on this strip… in a very different style than he’d use later. And it’s funny how many of the people Deni Loubert later would publish under the Renegade Press banner showed up on her radar this early.

After Cerebus becomes, we seldom see Astoria doing anything — she’s his secretary, so she’s around… but again, the shift in character seems odd and unbelievable: From being totally in control, and being totally controlling, she’s now content to just sit back and let Cerebus do whatever thing he’s decided to do. It’s just… odd.

On the other hand, there’s a lot going on, so perhaps Sim just ran out of room if he’d already decided to end the storyline at issue 50.

The first Journey piece by William Messner Loebs, I think? Love the artwork; the story isn’t much to write about, so I’ll stop there.

The historically momentous issue #49! Of historical interest because it was the first Cerebus issue I ever read as a 14-year-old. Above is the very first page. Doesn’t seem like the right place to start to read something you’re gonna read for the next 20 years, does it?

But I was immediately fascinated.

Especially when Sim started doing stuff like this, with a drunken Cerebus and the orientation of the book changing gradually, so you sit there slowly turning the book around.

It’s fun and clever.

I think this is the first time Sim experiments with using xeroxing for comedic effect (or anything else, really). Also note the nice borders.

And then it’s over. It’s a very emotional ending — in one way, it feels unearned (as we learn the fate of the guy who wrote the history book), but you can’t really argue with it: It works, and it packs a wallop.

Or if you want to pick nits: Once again, Cerebus’ dreams of money and wealth is foiled by a deux ex machina: In the final issue, somebody who’s been passive for the preceding 24 issues decides to give a damn, and takes over everything. And then there’s an ironic coda. It’s very much like what happened with the Palnu invasion plan and the Conniptin thing before that again.

Another person pops up who’d later have a series or two with Renegade Press: Valentino.

Anyway. That’s it: This Cerebi batch is really good, and if I remember correctly, the highpoint of the series, really. Some people preferred the later Jaka’s Story for a while, but it seems like most people have changed their minds and are back to rating High Society the highest.

I’m not one of those: I loved High Society when I read it as a sixteen-year-old, and reading it again now was hugely enjoyable.

Next: Not Cerebus.

This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.

Cerebus (1977) #1-25
by Dave Sim

I started reading Cerebus with issue 49, in 1983, and I was 14, and I read Cerebus until it ended some decades later. At first I thought Sim sounded like a pretty smart cookie, but by the time I was 16, I realised that he was just a bundle of inchoate emotions wrapped in a tortilla covering of denial, and that basically everything he was writing was, well, loopy and kinda stupid. So after reading every issue I would think about how moronic he was and carry on discussions in my head where I demolished all his ideas, which is, you know, fun, but not very productive.

(It’s somehow much easier winning discussions if you’re doing both the sides in your head. Odd, isn’t it.)

I did read the first ~100 issues multiple times as a teenager, and it’s funny and interesting until about… what… issue 80? 90? And when Cerebus reached issue #200, I sat down and read them all — I had lapsed in my Cerebus-ness and hadn’t bought all the issues as they came out, and…

There’s a lot of… boring stuff? Tucked in between the fun stuff? Sim is not a convincing prose writer, is what I’m saying.

So I really didn’t want to put myself through that again, but…

Anyway: here we go. I’m gonna do Cerebus in batches of 25, because that’s how many I can comfortably read in a day, while still doing other things, and I’m going to slot in the other Aardvark Vanaheim/Renegade comics in between, kinda sorta chronological.

OK?

OK.

I think this is the first time I’ve bought slabbed comics.

So I had to consult youtube to find out how to unslab them so that I can read the comics.

*gasp* I did it! Without cutting myself and bleeding out!

While preparing for this blog series, I was trolling Ebay a lot, and I got lower grades of all the early Cerebus issues. I was amused to see this scammer trying to get $8K for Cerebus Archive 1B — probably trying to confuse somebody looking for the read Cerebus #1? They have similar covers if you don’t squint too much.

I mean, it could happen, but it does sound rather unlikely. And it’s always the most expensive Cerebus thing available… but the price varies? SHENANIGANS.

But let’s get started with actually reading Cerebus.

I’ve read these issues before, of course — mostly in the form of Swords of Cerebus…

… and a smattering of bi-weeklies…

But this is the first time I’ve actually held the original comics in my non-sweaty hands. Let’s read the first four pages together:

First of all… it’s signed! To somebody named Ken! Hi, Ken! Does that mean that it’s worth less? But at least it’s an authenticated non-counterfeit issue. (This issue was famously bootlegged, and I don’t think it’s ever been revealed who was behind the operation?)

Anyway, this starts off… everybody says it’s a Conan parody? It’s not actually “ha ha” funny, though: It’s more a retelling of Conan the Barbarian issue #3 by Roy Thomas and Barry (Windsor) Smith.

Here’s Conan and a thief breaking into a sorcerer’s castle.

Here’s Cerebus and two thieves doing the same thing (which obviously makes it different).

Here’s the denouement, where it turns out that the magic McGuffin isn’t real.

Here’s the same in Cerebus, only here Cerebus is kinda smart and cunning, and the joke’s on the thieves.

So is “parody” the right word to use here? “Lazy rip-off” is perhaps more accurate?

I mean, the Cerebus version is written way better than the Roy Thomas version (way way), and the artwork is way worse than the Barry Smith version (way way), so I guess it’s kinda a toss-up?

However, Sim’s artwork would improve from here, and Thomas never did, so…

Huh! The Terim/Tarim stuff started in the first issue? I’d forgotten that. (It’s a religious schism thing that becomes important later in the series.

Did I mention that Sim’s artwork isn’t very good here? I did?

And then we round out the issue with what would become a less-than-normal amount of verbiage from Sim. And an oddly printed ad for a Gene Day portfolio. (It’s oddly printed because the innards were printed too wide, so the cover had to be adjusted, and stuff. There’s a gazillion historical articles about Cerebus you can consult for the details.)

So was that an auspicious start to a 300 issue series? Was it fuck.

But it’s… it’s OK? It’s OK.

The next issue has more actual laughs…

… and a lot of verbiage.

Hey! Stone faces already? They become something of a major feature in later issues.

But the artwork’s kinda rough, eh? Look at the face of that Red Sophia. I don’t think Sim did while drawing this…

Anyway, I remember Sim floating the suggestion of having somebody else redo the first 12 (?) issues of Cerebus a couple years ago. Of course, he’s suggested a lot of stuff, but that’s something I’ve been wondering about ever since I got hold of the Sword of Cerebus volumes: Cerebus the comic book becomes something very different after the first dozen issues, which means that people who want to get into Cerebus first has to … well, not “suffer through” exactly, but read something that doesn’t much resemble the rest of the 288 issues.

So rewriting the first dozen makes sense in that way.

At the same time, there’s not a single throw-away line or character in these issues that Sim hasn’t mined for all they’re worth. I mean, for much more than they were originally worth: It all ends up mattering, which makes redoing the issues somewhat tricky.

Deni Loubert writes the Note From The Publisher, and as usual, she writes that she’s got nothing to write about… and then writes about something anyway. It’s kinda charming? It gives the issue a… community feel, even more than the letters pages do?

Red Sophia (the Red Sonja parody with the chafing chain mail) is funny, and pretty much on point (as a character from barbarian novels written for boys):

And she seems like a throwaway character (and probably was), but she returns … a bunch of times? throughout the series. (I think? It’s been a while since Cerebus ended.)

Michael Loubert draws a map of the lands Cerebus is moving around in. It’s very helpful, because Sim hand-waves this stuff a lot, and being able to refer to the map made things a lot easier to understand this read-through. Print it out and refer to it often! (I don’t think it’s included in any of the reprints?)

Elrod, another parody character that stayed with the series for quite a while… and Sim is landing more and more jokes.

This sort of stuff is something Sim would abandon pretty soon: Death appears here as a character, which doesn’t fit into later Cerebi stories at all.

A reader questions what direction the humour in Cerebus is going, and Sim says that he’ll decide as he goes along.

*gasp* THE CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY! From Lone Star Comics. I feel so honoured.

Oh, and another signature. Sim sure likes scribbling in people’s books.

Sim decides that Cerebus getting really whiffy when wet is a funny joke… and it is! I think he abandons the idea after a while, though? I guess we’ll see. I mean, I’ll see.

And this is also one of those early issues where Sim is clearly trying to spend as little time possible actually drawing, but wants to fill the pages with something… so here we have a lot of straight lines denoting rain.

And when he wears out the ruler, Cerebus goes down into a cave, and then all the backgrounds are solid black.

Backgrounds! Solved!

This is also the first time Sim uses a storytelling tic that would become very common as Cerebus progresses: We’re told something that hints at something bigger; a mystery; things connecting. And then it’s not really explained or explicated upon for many issues: Cerebus really is 26, it’s revealed a handful of issues later, but these mysteries can linger for hundreds of issues without getting an explanation.

Which is what I think is among those things that have made Cerebus so enduring: That paranoid feeling of things being connected; that things make sense if you just try to puzzle out how it all fits.

The disappointing thing is that there’s little reason to believe that there really was much thought behind this: Sim (at this point) probably didn’t know either.

Michael T. Gilbert writes a fan letter (and draws a really horrid Cerebus)… which is fun, because Gilbert would be the second artist Aardvark-Vanaheim would publish, but that’s still four years off at this point.

Phil Seuling, the distributor, runs ads on the back cover of most of the early Cerebus issues.

Jaka became the most popular character in Cerebus… but it’s not quite clear why. She isn’t that well-delineated as a character here — but perhaps that’s the reason? I mean, she seems very nice? So people can write fan fiction about how she’ll straighten out that Cerebus rascal.

Sim would start telling people that he’d drop her off a clip if they didn’t stop asking him to bring her back (at one point). But then he did. And, of course, pretty much retconned her appearance here.

Ah… the 70s…

We get another hint that there’s something very special about Cerebus (or about aarvarks in general in this universe)…

The storytelling in the first few issues is pretty traditional. Sim would later be quite innovative, and you see him trying something new here, and… it doesn’t quite work?

4K copies.

So, the first year is basically Cerebus going out on one adventure after another, and he usually comes out the loser in an ironic twist. Here he teams up with the Conniptins, which seems like it’ll lead to a bigger story (and they return at the end of High Society, of course)…

… but then we just get a huge fight sequence, and then the fat guy tells him that he’s lost, once again.

The rhythms are getting kinda annoying now: Even if each individual issue is both entertaining and interesting, the repetetive nature is getting to me.

The book is mostly pretty well printed, but there’s the occasional page like this where you can’t read the text very well.

*gasp* An empty letters page! The Cerebus letters pages would, infamously, grow into monstrous proportions as Cerebus progressed, so it’s almost shocking to see something like this…

How smart Cerebus is seems to vary a bit… he starts off being clever, but limited, and then he grows more and more cunning… I don’t object at all, because that means a greater range of fun stuff.

Hm… perhaps I should find a different methodology to do these snaps… kinda out of focus on the top there… I think I need a higher chair to get a more even distance…

Anyway! First appearance of The Roach, which Sim uses to parody various super-hero characters. This is Batman. Hiss!

And then Sim had a nervous breakdown, and was committed for a few days. (Well, “nervous breakdown” is what they’re calling it, but reading Sim’s descriptions of it later, it seems more like a psychotic break. (He thinks he was touched by god and saw the secrets of comics, and the universe, I think? He’s gone on to create his own syncretic religion now, but that’s still decades off.)

And… here Sim is experimenting with Craftint paper, I think? (It’s got patterns embedded in it, and you use two different chemicals to bring it out — you just paint the chemicals onto the paper and the patterns appear as if by magic.) It’s not a successful experiment.

And once again, Cerebus loses all his gold in an ironic twist. By now, even Sim had to grow tired of this schtick.

It’s announced that there’ll be a reprint series (the original plan was the first three issues, instead of the first four, which it ended up as), and that Deni was going to write a story that Marshall Rogers would illustrate? I don’t think that happened?

Deni announces that she’s going back to school… but this apparently didn’t last long, presumably for economical reasons?

The Cerebus merchandising starts — a Cerebus hologram?

And then… the start of Cerebus is over! We’ve arrived at the book as it would then be for the next couple hundred issues: Political intrigue, Groucho Marx jokes, and a whole lot of interiors.

After two years of bi-monthly issues, Cerebus is now monthly, and the Adventure Of The Issue format is gone: Instead it all pretty much connects, and it’s more or less a continuous story from now on.

It’s not just that the jokes are funnier, but Sim is also starting to nail body language and stuff, so that Cerebus scowling at Lord Julius’ hand on his shoulder reads easily and naturally without Sim having to put in a caption saying “Cerebus scowled at the hand being put on his shoulder”, which Sim would 100% have done earlier, to make sure we noticed.

When going monthly, Sim also cuts back to 20 story pages per month (from 22), which leaves room for some ads.

It’s a penis.

These two jokers appeared in Cerebus #6, too (as the caption helpfully tells us), and I wonder whether Sim was planning on bringing them back as comedy relief on a regular basis. But did he? I can’t reacall.

He cruelly teases the fan base with a “ships in the night” thing with Jaka… but also makes more connections between the characters by casually letting us know that Jaka is Lord Julius’ niece. It’s all connected!

We get a bunch of background on Estracion from Michael Loubert… I don’t know if this is canon, though. It’s not… very thrilling to read.

I said that Cerebus was getting slyer? By now he’s one of those hyper-competent characters that gets everything right and carries out missions against all odds.

But the plot, while leaning hard into how smart Cerebus is, doesn’t make that much sense. Cerebus has joined up with some barbarians, and they’ve killed everybody in an entire city. (Either this is Sim just not thinking things through, or he’s signalling that Cerebus is a bit of an asshole… which he hasn’t really been up till now, and he still isn’t, so I’m leaning towards the first.) Then a little band of merchants show up, and Cerebus hyper-competently sets up a heist to rob them… when they could just have killed them all, surely.

The heist is fun and all, but it’s… the plot is a bit on the stupid side.

Marvel sends over a contract, and Sim decides that perhaps he doesn’t want to sign it.

Cerebus learns a lesson about sex workers, and… that’s kinda a sit-com joke?

And here’s the thing: Cerebus is hiring more mercenaries to invade another city with his army… and is then convinced to do another heist to steal a gold trinket to get more money to hire more mercenaries…

It reads like Sim had no idea where to go with the whole “invade Palnu” storyline, so he fell back on something he could dash off without thinking too much about it. It’s funny, and the artwork keeps getting better all the time, but it makes no dramatic sense whatsoever.

*gasp* A T. M. Maple letter!

Also note that Sim is already finding magic significance in 288 + 12 = 300 (because he said he was going to do Cerebus for 26 years, and the first two were bimonthly)… “Did you ever get the feeling you were sharing the pilot’s seat with someone else?”

Ah, the first Mind Games issue. Cerebus plots himself out of a sticky situation, and it’s funny and exciting, but I found reading it this time a bit of a chore? Probably because it’s so memorable that there was no excitement in it for me this time over. So that’s a compliment.

But the Palnu invasion thing went nowhere, of course. Instead Cerebus gets talked at for an issue or two by President Weisshaupt, who explains his cleverly fiendish plot to take over the city of Beduin. I think it’s meant to sound ingenious, but it makes no sense, really: So he’s selling war bonds at six silver pieces, promising they were worth twelve silver pieces in any shop… but doesn’t explain why any shop would accept these worthless war bonds, or why anybody would buy them when it should become immediately clear that no shops accepted them?

Perhaps it’s all a fiendish plot by Sim: Write totally nonsensical plot elements to leave the reader with an intellectual frisson. Or perhaps it’s just kinda stupid? You decide.

The merchandising continues… Do people really buy stuff like that?

OOPS!

It’s the Graphitti Designs re-release, but I think I had the original t-shirt as a teenager?

Sim puts Chris Claremont into the story, as a headmaster who tried using men as wizardly tools, but then decided upon women instead, because it’s Chris Claremont.

Or as Sim put it in today’s Moment of Cerebus blog post:

“Absolutist gender-fluidity ideology”.

I recommend not following that link.

Anyway, that’s the first 25 issues of Cerebus: The first 12 are a bit repetetive, and the artwork is kinda rough, but they’re fun. The next 13 issues are funnier, and they’ve got a lot more intrigue going on, but Sim doesn’t quite seem to know where to go with it all.

Tomorrow (probably): The next 25 issues of Cerebus.

This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.

(For a list of all comics in this blog series, click here.)

I’ve been doing these blog series for the last few years where I’m re-reading comics from the 80s: First I did Fantagraphics, because I really wanted to re-read Love & Rockets one more time, and then the whole idea of setting up a challenge appealed to me: I was going to (re-)read all the pamphlets Fantagraphics had published, and just jot a few words as a reading log for each series.

That was a lot of fun, because Fantagraphics has published such a wide range of comics, and quite a few of them are brilliant. Even the abject failures are interesting in some way.

I did some other companies, too, because… well… I’m not quite sure. Some were more interesting than others.

But now I’m re-reading Renegade Comics. And Aardvark-Vanaheim.

*sigh*

The reason is pretty simple: I was looking at the shortboxes, and I realised that I had basically everything that Renegade had published. And if I were going to do Renegade, I might as well do Aardvark-Vanaheim, too. And if I do Aardvark-Vanaheim, I might as well re-read Cerebus, too, which is something I really hadn’t planned on ever doing again. Not because there isn’t good stuff in Cerebus: There’s a ton of it. But the sheer weight of the hare-brained sophistry Sim sprinkles over it all is hard to take.

So.

But on the other hand, Aardvark-Vanaheim’s other comics are all really good, and I do want to revisit them. The things Deni Loubert published after she started are… super strange. I remember some of them being so odd that I couldn’t fathom how anybody would publish them, but I was still fascinated by them at the time.

So I do want to re-read those comics, and then it’d kinda ruin the entire Exciting High Concept of this blog series if I didn’t reread Cerebus, the mothership, too, so I’m going to do that.

There’s really not that many series — just about sixty, and Cerebus is more than half the number of issues all by itself.

So this blog series shouldn’t take more than a couple of months, he said hopefully — I’ll be aiming for one post per day.

And by that time this whole corona thing is over, right, and I can go to Hawaii?

RIGHT?