A&R1990: Cerebus: High Society

Cerebus: High Society (1990) #1-25 by Dave Sim

As with Cerebus Bi-Weekly, I found my copies dirt cheap at a sale, and I don’t have a complete set. But let’s have a quick look at them anyway.

The design on these books is a lot more considered than on Cerebus Bi-Weekly — it looks more classy, which befits High Society, I guess. But it’s not as “facsimile-ey” — it doesn’t include the ads and stuff.

But on the other hand, we get four pages of notebook material (with short comments from Sim underneath).

And we get upwards of three Single Page strips per issue. And since Sim paid $150 a pop, the $450 spent on this must have cut the profits substantially?

But the point of these issues is perhaps to act as an ad for the big reprint collections.

The sketchbook entries are fun, but unfortunately the reproduction is pretty lacking. The printing process they used back then on these books didn’t allow for good reproduction of pencils, really, so it all looks pretty clunky.

But there’s interesting bits.

Sim doesn’t really say who did these Single Page things — many of them are signed, but this is by… “ES”?

Man, Sim had gotten good at drawing by this time…

Perhaps it was the acid.

Most of the Single Page contributors are pretty unknown, but here’s a couple of early Ivan Brunetti pages.

Heh heh. Some of these are pretty good.

Well, that’s nice… but on the other hand, it was probably pretty scared?

Anyway, that’s it for this very quick look at the High Society bi-weekly reprint series. After it ended, Sim started doing a Church & State bi-weekly reprint series, but it “only” ran for 30 issues. I don’t have any copies of that, though, so I have to skip doing a blog post about that.

You don’t have to sound so relieved about it!

Dude.

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