Random Thoughts

Cerebus (2001) #266-288 by Dave Sim & Gerhard

OK, we’re finally getting towards the end of this blog series. Well, OK, after we finish with Cerebus, we still have some Aardvard-Vanaheim books to go — Judenhass, Cerebus Archives (oops) and Glamourpuss… er… OK, there may be like ten more posts because I forgot to do some other earlier books, too. Sorry! But at least it’s the end of the main Cerebus sequence!

When doing these blog posts, I usually read all the comics that go into one post in the morning, and then I write the post. But I find that I just can’t do that with this one, so I’m doing it over three days, reading about eight issues per days, because c’mon. I think some would call reading these issues cruel and unusual punishment, and as much as I want to be done with this blog series, I have to pace myself. Yes, yes, I have only myself to blame…

This blog post covers the prologue and book one of Latter Days (which was collected under the name “Latter Days”; book two was collected as “The Last Day”). Strap in; it’s one of those scrolling-for-days kind of posts…

The prologue (over two issues) aren’t typical “this takes you from one book to the next” issues (like issue 51). Like those other in-between issues, not a lot happens to the “plot”, but a lot of time passes.

One way Sim makes this happen is that Cerebus blanks out for years at a time when something horrible happens to him, like that woman taking a dump on him. While that’s pretty funny, it (as is often the case with Cerebus) doesn’t really make much sense for a character like Cerebus, who has a background as a hardened mercenary and stuff — you’d think that worse things had happened to him.

But these two issues are pretty entertaining.

And after getting rid of the letters pages for most of Going Home, here they are back again. And the first thing we get is a continuation of the Dave Sim/Jeff Smith beef. “‘My wife and me‘, Jeff.” “Capice?” Christ what an asshole.

Gary Groth writes in. See? This is how you do humour.

The second of the prologue issues is about that time Cerebus was a hockey champion in Canada I mean Isshuria. It’s amusing, but it’s really… superfluous. The one relevant bit is that Cerebus has become a fan of Garth Ennis’ Preacher, thinking that it’s even better than Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Yes! It becomes important later on!

It turns out that Sim wanted Groth to send that letter — it’s all part of Sim’s Machiavellian deep time planning, eh? Sure, sure, we all believe you…

But the interesting thing in this issue is that Sim comes clean with his “gung ho everybody self publish” thing — it was all a cynical plan to see whether he could get a movement up and going, and he didn’t really believe in it. (And he didn’t even like Bone and Strangers in Paradise.)

Sure sure, we believe you… Doesn’t sound like something you’d write not to seem like an idiot after the entire thing had crashed and burned at all.

And! It seems like Sim was fed up with all the accusations on whether he’d really planned all the 300 issues, so he tries boring the reader to death to convince them.

Sim complains once more that people just didn’t get that Jaka was a “self-important harlot princess”, but doesn’t then go to the logical conclusion that perhaps he didn’t convey that very well. In a later issue, somebody asks why Jaka took off her left glove, and that turns out to be because she wanted to flaunt her unmarried status at Cerebus’ home town, harlot that she is — and it doesn’t seem like anybody guessed at that… because we’re not mind readers, Sim.

I think that’s, like, Cerebus summed up — readers were enjoying reading Cerebus because we weren’t psychics and didn’t pick up on all the stuff Sim intended us to read. Is there a German word for this condition? It seems like there should be…

Anyway, the prologue over, and we start Latter Days proper.

The first few pages aren’t that bad, but then Cerebus encounters the Three Wise Guys.

And there the tedium sets in. I don’t know from the Three Stooges — I’ve seen them, tops, like under one minute, so I know their schtick, but…

They kidnap Cerebus to (effectively) brain-wash him into believing in The Booke Of Rickee.

Perhaps this is hilarious to a Three Stooges fan? I have no idea.

When these issues were published back in 2001, I mostly just skimmed them. I did (mostly) read them now, and…

… I had the right idea back then. It’s tedious as fuck.

This thing won the first Gene Day award (that Sim dreamt up, I guess). It’s not very good.

Did I mention that this is kinda boring reading?

Cerebus starts having dreams/visions/etc about being Preacher, I mean, Rabbi (as Sim’s version is called).

The brain-washing works — Cerebus is kept trussed and tied for months while they read him from the Bible/Booke of Rickee — and Cerebus comes to realise/imagine that he’s god’s favoured, and that’s why all these things keep happening around him.

Now, this is played for laughs, I think? Sim is showing Cerebus being delusional, possibly? But as Sim had recently become to believe many of the things that he’s portraying here, I’m not at all sure whether he’s poking fun at himself, of saying “well, my revelations are real, but that Cerebus guy sure is delusional”…

Sim’s various approaches to having to draw less seem to become counter productive, because this probably took some time.

Somebody called Dave Brady published a pamphlet called Reading Cerebus, which apparently contains an essay called “Going Homo”, which (from Sim’s review of it over many pages) seems to have as the central thesis that Dave Sim is obviously gay. I’m guessing that Brady wrote it all as a way to poke fun at Sim, but Sim seems oblivious to that possibility, and he rails against it sincerely. So: Mission accomplished, Dave Brady! Take a bow!

OK, that’s more than enough for today. I’ll continue tomorrow, I guess.

OK, next day… let’s get going. Sim explains that he’s taken some dialogue from an old comic he got several years earlier. I guess he may be talking about what the dead Cirinist is saying? I’m not sure.

Latter Days is (sort of) easily divided into three parts. The first six issues (covered yesterday) are slow moving, and is all about Cerebus being brain-washed by the Three Stooges. The next six issues are dense — filled with action and plot developments, and about 60 years pass.

First of all, the Cirinists lose the battle — which is a surprise to Cerebus, who thought they were pretty much impossible to beat on the battlefield. (And is this the dialogue Sim took from that strip?)

And… we’re not really given a good explanation as to how it was so easy for the guys from the hunting lodges to kill them, but it’s apparently because Todd McFarlane (here seen in a Miracleman hockey shirt) is a really good general or something. Or perhaps they had better guns than Cirinists? Which seems odd, but… er…

Cerebus explains what Charlie Brown’s sweater expresses.

Sim prints his entry for the Comics Journal “2002 Comics Preview” here, so that we can see what those nefarious, evil people at TCJ do with it! (And… “love you lots, ‘ladies'”. Christ what an asshole.)

I was unable to find anything resembling a 2002 Comics Preview in the Comics Journal, so perhaps it didn’t happen? I also tried searching for phrases from Sim’s er missive, and didn’t find anything…

These six issues sometimes feels like an exercise in seeing how many ways Sim can annoy his readers — this time not only writing in speakethese, but also with a Frakturish typeface?

Cerebus takes back the leadership of the forces by sowing a really elaborate Spawn-referencing super-hero outfit. It’s a really absurd outfit, and I’m guessing Sim made it that weird to poke fun at the impracticality of Spawn’s cape or something? I don’t know — I’ve probably read only half an issue of Spawn in my life, so perhaps it’s really referential…

I’m guessing Sim is doing Todd McFarlane’s dialect here, but it tends towards the illegible (another way to annoy readers (at least this reader)).

But this…

… is pretty amusing, even if it’s a totally non sequitur within the story. But I guess Sim had to get another dig in at McFarlane and his toys.

Sim starts an essay called “Islam, My Islam” that runs for many, many issues. He starts off at four pages per issue, and then nine, and then 21… I think perhaps it might be 100 pages in total? I don’t know — I skimmed here and there to see whether there was anything of interest, but the only bit I could see that was even vaguely amusing was this at the start, where Sim says he started going to various services, but he was put off by the cannibalism rituals at christian churches. So he started going to mosques instead.

The guy Sim borrowed some dialogue wrote back and says that the Comics Journal rang up and tried to make him bitch (about plagiarism, presumably).

If anybody had still been reading Cerebus at this point, the bits here would probably have raised some eyebrows — much more so than #186 or the “Tangent” essay, probably? Anyway, Cerebus took over leadership from the Toddster, and his first act (mainly to root out all semblances of Cirinism forever in the region he controls) is to go around instituting a new yearly ritual:

Every year, every women in a community is presented, and the men vote over whether she’s a bitch. (I’m paraphrasing.) If more than 50% raise their hands, she’s killed.

At this point, Cerebus reads like some psychotic fever dream.

And a pretty nasty one at that. Sim even puts Julie Doucet on the stage to be voted over whether to live or die. (We’re not told the results of this vote.)

As an encore, Cerebus has all lawyers killed, too.

And belatedly, he institutes a law that allows men who are total dicks to be executed, too, after which everything is peaceful in the land, and the decades pass without any further problems.

Except that some overly polite Canadians take issue with some new hockey rules instituted by Rick’s Book.

Like I said, these issues are pretty dense.

50c per copy? Pretty cheap.

For an issue, we take a detour into Three Stooges minutiae (the way the other stooges were replaced as they got old or ill), and again it feels like a total non sequitur. But I guess it does sort of tie into Sim’s whole dislike for contracts and stuff, so perhaps it’s not totally random.

And the Preacher/Rabbi thing makes a bit more sense — Cerebus is bored and has nothing to do, so he collects all the issues and then he’s bored again (sounds very familiar!). But:

Sim’s parody of Gary Groth feels pretty lame. I mean, of course Groth is proud of publishing the Hernandez Bros — you’d have to be brain dead to not be — but this just doesn’t read much like Groth.

And it turns out that Garth Ennis did this interview just to make Cerebus go catatonic — but why? Why would Ennis want that? (It worked.)

But then we’re into the next section of Latter Days, and we forget all about the Ennis stuff:

And these final nine issues start off heavily referencing Woody Allen movies. And, yes, it’s funny that Allen has a cymbal sound going off after he does a funny line, but this style only lasts a couple of issues.

And… Sim’s a somewhat limited artist — he’s able to nail caricatures by exaggerating them into grotesques (like his great Margaret Thatcher), but by this point, he’s going for a more naturalistic look, and he’s failing pretty badly. The first Allen could be anybody. The second looks pretty good. The third doesn’t look anything like the first two. And so on.

And here we start the bible exegesis, which (if I remember correctly) take up most of the remaining issues. And, I’m sorry, I’m not going to read them this time around either. Only a couple of notes: It seems like Sim is depicting Cerebus as a total moron on this page, right?

He’s even cutting things out of the Torah that he thinks are wrong. So he’s like a one man idiotic synod.

But Cerebus is basically saying things that Sim has said himself outside of Cerebus (about there being two gods (the LORD and Yoowhoo) depicted in the bible, and one of the gods being a wilful liar), which makes it all so odd. Cerebus is a moron? But he’s basically right? Perhaps this is about Cerebus being inspired by the LORD or something…

But like I said, I just don’t have the stamina to read all this shit. Sorry!

OK, that’s enough for today. Tomorrow is either going to be gruelling, or I’ll just be able to skim all the remaining issues and it’ll be a breeze. Join me tomorrow, or, for you, after this colon:

OK, I took yesterday off, so this blog post is even later than originally planned. (Not that it matters, but I’m going on a holiday and I had hoped to be done with this blog series completely before that time, but that’s not gonna happen. So there’ll be at least a two week pause and then I’ll pick up the Renegades & Aardvarks series again…)

ANYWAY. Sim writes in to the New Yorker to defend Will Eisner from a Bernie Kriegstein dis, apparently.

The pages in Cerebus are mostly like this at this point, and I’m not reading them, so these last seven issues are a breeze to get through. I had forgotten how devoid of interest these issues are. (It’s all Cerebus doing his interpretations of the Old Testament.)

Cerebus is talking it over with Konigsberg, the Woody Allen character, so we also get a lot of film references…

… that mostly look like Sim is tracing shots from different films. Well, not tracing, actually — he’s putting Allen into a bunch of different artier movies. And then we get another text which is probably meant as a comedic counterpoint to the bible stuff? Unfortunately, this text isn’t very entertaining, either. I mean, there are occasional jokes that work, but overall it’s not worth your time.

Having finished his “Islam, My Islam” essay, Sim starts another multi parter: “Why Canada Slept”. It’s about how shameful it is that Canada didn’t go all gung ho in on the US’s side after 9/11. They should bomb Afghanistan more or something?

Sim’s interest in doing more photo-realistic drawing comes more to the fore in the few comics sequences in these issues, something he’d develop more in Glamourpuss. I.e., he’s drawing women from various fashion magazines, I guess?

It turns out that there was a problem with Cerebus’ edict that all evil women were to be killed by vote — some evil women were just to pretty to be killed, and they’re all sequestered in special gardens (seen above).

The rest of the issue is like this.

That’s a pretty good Jules Feiffer, eh?

And while Sim doesn’t quite get Crumb right here and lands somewhere veering towards Herriman, it’s a nice drawing.

Sim takes a break from the Canada thing and presents the second Gene Day Memorial Prize… and spends virtually all of the introduction to talk about his own history and self publishing and stuff, and not much about the award winner. Makes sense.

He talks about the self publishing get togethers he used to do at cons. “I can’t say I liked any of the individuas I came in contact with. Liking them as people wasn’t the point. I wanted to assist self-publishing.” That’s nice, I guess.

There’s a few pages of moderately funny stuff in between the non-moderately boring stuff.

The winds up by having Woody Allen getting together with Mia Farrow, and then Allen ditching her for her adopted daughter. I guess that’s unusually “current affairs” as far as Cerebus goes? Hm.

The Canada essay seems to devolve into being mostly quotations from various newspapers and magazines?

Sim is (as always) annoyed by what he perceives as snubs by the Comics Journal.

Then! The final issue! Both the bible thing and the Konigsberg thing are over, so we get one issue of comics, which is taken up in whole by Cerebus “wooing” a journalist (or was it the stenographer? I’ve forgotten already), who…

… it turns out is the exact double of Jaka! I think! Sim has always been very limited in his range of pretty women — Astoria, Jaka, Joanne all look very similar, but with different hairdos, and that’s Jaka’s hairdo. (Sim is great when he can go grotesque with women — they all look very distinctive.)

How’s that for a mystery! Is she Jaka’s great great great grand child or something? I lost count, but Cerebus must be like 200 years old by this point, so everybody we knew from #1-200 are long dead… I mean, it sounds like it’s a mystery, but since this is Cerebus, it’s probably not going to be very interesting, but we’ll find out tomorrow, when I finally (re-)read The Last Day, the final Cerebus book!

But what did the critics think of Latter Days?

R. Fiore writes in The Comics Journal #263, page 108:

In Latter Days you’ll find Sim at his
best and worst. It’s reminiscent to Milton
CanifPs farewell to Terry and the Pirates,
not in the sense of revisiting his cast of
characters but in revisiting his themes and
motifs. You have pure comedy as Cerebus
undertakes careers as a sheep herder and a
good-but-not-quite-good-enough profes-
sional athlete (marred by an extremely
strained pun on the name of Kofi Annan
— U.N. General Secretaries are not quite
the laugh riot youd think); a wicked but
sympathetic satire of the phenomenon
that is Todd MacFarlane; a parody of r he
Comics Journal that, in the course Of
demonstrating the boxing principle that if
you leave yourself open you will get hit, is
creditably free of rancor; and One of Sim’s
patented culture hero interpolations (this
time of The Three Stooges) that lacks
impact I think only because he’s pulled the
gag so many times before.
There is also a sequence which will
undoubtedly be Exhibit A in the case
against the Evil Beliefs Of Dave Sim, in
which the men Of Cerebusland are given
the privilege of deciding by vote which Of
the women of the community will be
allowed to live and which Will be summar-
ily executed. Whar ought to be said on
Sinü defense is that there’s an awful lot of
context going on here.
This sequence comes after the men-
folk have been Oppressed for over a hun-
dred issues by a matriarchal dictatorship.
When the matriarchy is overthrown the
matriarchs doff their chadors, and the vot-
ing process is meant co identify them;
The sequence also comes in the con-
text of a parody of Spaum, with all the
good taste and deep human sensitivity
that implies;
There is an element of satire here, as
the men set aside political concerns in
favor Of saving the pretty ones and elimi-
nating the ugly;
There is also the ambivalence Of
Cerebus as a character, who is sometimes
WAS
Sim’s mouthpiece, sometimes a negative
counterexample, and always the reader
identification character. His actions are
not alunays endorsed by the management,
which can be a convenient evasion.
The problem for Sim is that by now so
few people are actually reading the comic
that they’re not going to be in a position
to see the context. The thing is, when you
actually analyze Sim’s argument, as for
instance in Cerebus’s proposed utopia
(which, Sim assures us, “worked,” as
utopias always do in their natural habitat,
the minds of their creators), it’s really just
a standard argument of social conserva-
rives, i.e., that women as well as men were
happier under the male-dominated social
order. It takes a very special sensibility to
take a commonplace idea and make it
sound like Mein Kampf Where it crosses
a boundary is When he makes the first
woman executed the self-caricature Of
Julie Doucet. Suggesting violence against
an actual living person, even in effgy, and
even When that person is a character in a
work Of art subject to satire, is really a vio-
lation Of any kind of civilized norm. Sim’s
reasons as far as can figure are that he’s
revolted by the title Dirty Platte and she
draws herself ugly. (It’s an emotional self-
portrait and not a physical one; she’s actu-
ally quite attractive and rather buxom.)
My guess is that she represents to Sim the
sort of cartoonist who gets the acclaim
that he’s entitled to.

Well, thank god we have R. Fiore’s testimony that Julie Doucet has big boobs (and therefore didn’t deserve to be executed? (Sim didn’t actually say how the vote went, though)).

The episode is, Of course, covered by
that same theory of absolute freedom of
expression that protects shit-fetish videos
and things Of that nature.
As for the worst, there is the Cerebus
Stretch. One of the plot points is that
Cerebus has become the messiah figure in
an underground religion, and When the
cultists find him he is subjected an
ordeal to prove he is truly What he pur-
ports to be. The trial-by-ordeal goes on
for 60 pages. I can only imagine how ago-
nizing this must have been for the hardy
few who still bought Cerebus monthly.
You imagine them hanging on to the end
of the bandwagon as Sim stamps on their
fingers yelling “STOP! READING! MY!
COMIC!” And it’s the result Of his total-
ly arbitrary decision to fill 300 issues, even
if he doesn’t have the Story to fill them. It’s
the reason Why the matriarchal dystopia
went on and on and on.
In its last 200 pages Latter Days turns
into a Big Little Book, juxtaposing pages
of teeny tiny type with drawings of movie
stills incorporating Woody Allen for rea-
sons you’d have to read the text to find
out. After a couple of pages my conclu-
Sion was that if Sim thinks I’m going to
read this crap — if he thinks I’m going to
skim this crap — he’s nuttier than anyone
thinks he is. If he’s right on the God
proposition they’ll be plenty Of time to
read it during my eternity in Hell: I’m Sure
they’ll have a COPY there. Most Of it is
taken up with Dave Simk interpretation of
the TO rah in Cerebus-ese. You can only
get away With this stuff if you’re William
Blake. and even there I’d like to meet rhe
man Who ever finished The Four Loas.
Sim is that strangest sort of hybrid, a free-
thinking fundamentalist. What I gather
from the parts I dipped into is that Dave
Sim’s personal religion is a Hinduized ver-
Sion of Judaism With Moslem sauce that in
any age Of faith he’d surrender on the rack.
It’s going to be a hell of a day in Heaven
when Sim gets there, trumpets blaring,
angel choruses bellowing, St. Peter open-
ing the gate without even bothering to
open the book, God and YHWH (two
different entities, according to Sinn) lead-
ing a parade of the great theologians of all
time in honor of the one man in all of his-
tory to understand the Bible properly.
Gaily they lead him to his permanently
reserved seat in the grandstand where you
watch the sinners being tormented.
The rest Of the verbiage is taken up by
Sim’s critique Of Sigmund Freud, which
goes to show that when Sim isn’t trying to
fight battles that have already been lost
(gender egalitarianism) he’s fighting bat-
ties that have already been won. You flip
through the pages in hopes that in all that
agate type a comic book might break out.
It does in the end, and you are treated to
an exchange that I think is the best sum-
mation of Woody/Soon-Yi affair•.
“And he’s really, really really
and truly, in love With [her]?
Ol_et’s put it this way — he
BEVEER be.”

Tim Kreider writes in The Comics Journal #301, page 364:

In fact, for all Sim’s yammering about women’s superficiality, irrationality
and intellectual dishonesty, the book’s most fully realized characters are all fe-
male. The women he writes offas bimbos or harridans have more dimensions
than he gives them credit for. And despite his insistence on men’s intellectual
and ethical superiority, we don’t see much evidence in Cerebus ofmen behav-
ing rationally or morally. The patriarchal utopia that Cerebus commands for
a time in Latter Days is a Draconian horror, involving the annual execution
by blunderbuss ofany woman judged by mob rule to be a bitch. What little
Cerebus learns in his life comes too late to save him. Most of the other men
we see are either Machiavellian schemers like Julius and Weisshaupt or feck-
less drunkards and goofballs. Rick, whom Sim intends to be the epitome of
genuine goodness, his Prince Myshkin, is more naifthan saint. When we see
him in Guys he’s become an alcoholic, and the phantasmagoric visions he suf-
fers suggest not divine revelation but psychosis. I suspect that (despite Sim’s
insistent disclaimers) Rick is how Sim would like to imagine himself— a
lonely, misunderstood prophet who’s regarded by others as touched in the
head but is in sole possession of the word of God. But Rick only seems, to
the reader, to be a pitiful or tragic figure; it is, for better or worse, with the
selfish and imperfect Cerebus that we identify. Despite Sim’s agenda, these
characters all keep behaving like human beings — erratically, idiosyncrati-
cally not allegorical figures acting out agitprop or a morality play.
In other words, Cerebus is often a much better book than Dave Sim seems to
realize, or intended it to be. As D.H. Lawrence wrote of Herman Melville:
“The artist is so much greater than the man.”

What’s striking is how much space The Comics Journal has spent on Cerebus over the years. One long think piece after another.

Bart Beaty writes in The Comics Journal #263, page 119:

Latter Days
Where does this leave us? Where does
it leave me? With the last issue of Cerebus
some small part Of me is passing away as
well. Once a month, once every month,
for 20 years I have been going into a
comic book store somewhere in the world
and buying an issue Of Cerebus. I have
bought my monthly issues in New York,
Washington, IOS Angeles, London, Paris,
Amsterdam, Berlin and points in between.
I have loved them, and I have hated them,
but they have always defined a very small
part Of Who I am. Cerebus is the one book
that I read as a child that I continued to
read as an adult. Everything else from that
age has fallen away — the songs, the
movies, the books, the friends. It is all
gone, and now Cerebus is gone too.
In many ways I Outgrew Cereous a
long time ago. My interests in comics
these days run more towqurds Europe than
towards America. In some ways this has
been a transition from comic books as COI-
lectible pamphlets to comics books as
books, a transition, ironically, that Sim
had more to do with than probably any
single player in the American comics mar-
ket Of the past 20 years. Sim demonstrat-
ed more clearly than most that it was pos-
Sible to live off past work if one kept it in
print, and that a solid back catalogue paid
dividends Over a long period that might in
the end prove more lucrative even than
the most aggressively-marketed flash in
the pan. Whose royalty statements would
you prefer today? Sim’s or Liefeld’s? I
noted all Of this in an essay for this maga-
zine several years ago, and called it “the
Cerebus Effect.” That was, up to now, my
Only real comment on Corbus in these
pages, the only real connection that I
forged between my first comics lifeline
and my second.

Gerhard is interviewed in Following Cerebus #1, page 29:

FC In an infeniew afewyears ago, yog said that what
you wanted most affer ibe completion oJCerebuswas sleep,
sleep, andmoresleep. Haeyog beengemng dyou wanted?
GER: I slept a lot for the first couple of weeks
after finishing the book. Major Down Time. Now,
the trick is to be able to take a nap as required
without feeling guilty about it. I figure I’ll just
keep practicing until I get it right.
FG In the notes for theLatterDaystrade, Dave talks
about bowyog almost left the series with coøelve is.cges toga
How serious weryog i” intending to leave, and how mgth
work was it to get yog to stick it outfor anotheryear?
GER: I was at the end of my rope. I was very
serious in my intent to leave. I didn’t care what the
consequences were going to be. I wanted out. My
health, both mental and physical, was deteriorat-
inge My stomach hurt all the time but became ex-
cruciating while I was laboring on a page, espe-
cially during inking. Inking is always the stage
where I feel that I’m completely ruining the page,
which is why it drove me nuts when I got nomi-
nated for best inker awards.
I was also very disconnected from the book,
from the story. And the Three Stooges—-well, I
just never g ‘got” the Three Stooges. As soon as I
saw the pages with Cerebus bound and gagged in
the sanctuary, I thought, “Ohs no.” I mean, in Ggys
and Rick ‘s Stoty, he was stuck in that bar for years,
but now he’s actually tied down to one spot. “Shoot
me now!” Then, doing that two-page spread of
the sanctuary, all I could think ofwhile I was work-
tng on it was, “I’m going to have to draw this from
fifty-seven different angles for months, I just know
it!” The idea was to use that two-page spread as a
“master” shot and photocopy sections of it for
use behind the characters, but it never works out
that way. I tried using photocopies on previous
pages. It’s terribly tedious. I have to cut the pho-
tocopy from around the word balloons and sound
effects, glue the copy to the page, and then touch
up Vith a pen around the word balloons and sound
effects where the photocopy doesn’t meet the edge
of the word balloons and sound effects, and then
when the issue comes in from the printer, the pho-
tocopy has broken up or filled in, and it looks like
crap. So the only alternative is to draw the same
stupid background over and over twenty times.
And that’s just for this issue. I don’t know how
long he’s going to be tied up, I don’t know where
the story is going, I don’t know if I can do this
anymore.
Then of course a page comes along, like the
page where Rabbi is flying above the earth, or
where Cerebus is on the reviewing stand in front
of the farmhouse, or the Sporemobile, or the ex-
terior of the Community Centre, where I think,
“Hey, I can do this.” And then I come hard up
against the page with the little Spore marching over
the landscape, and I’m stumped. Can’tdo it. Dave
did the page this way because he thought I’d like
the aerial shot. Can’t picture it, can’t do it, and my
stomach starts to hurt now just thinking about it.
So anyway, this goes on ’till the long pan shot
at the end of Latter Days. I feel sick. I’m tired. I
have trouble eating. I have trouble sleeping. It’s
just notworth it. I should have left the book after
Minds, when the Story was over. I bring in the rest
of the pages to Dave and tell him I can’t do this
anymore. He talks me out ofit (again). The thing
is, there are only nine pages to go, and thenLaffer
Days is done. We decide that I will do as much
work on the page as I can, until I just can’t stand it
anymore, and Dave will finish it up. Like I said,
it’s mostly the inking that drives me nuts. So I did
my usual pencilling, paste on photocopies, outline
stuff, and fill in solid blacks. Then I would ink in
details and shading as much as I could and hand
’em over to Dave. He added some detail to cer-
tain areas and sometimes another level of cross-
hatching to increase contrast, and I managed to
limp through to the end.

Interesting to see that Gerhard was having as much problems staying with the book as most readers had…

It’s the lowest rated Cerebus book on Goodreads, I think.

Heh heh:

Seriously, for eight issues (160 pages) the comic is composed of some silly bits about Woody Allen in the world of Woody, Bergman, and Fellini (making fun of Freud and Jung), and the
rest is text, with Cerebus/Sim quoting the Torah and then interpreting it so that it fits in with his concept that the Bible is a battle between the stupid female YHWH (called “YooWhoo”) and God. Sim decides from sentence to sentence whether it’s God saying something or YHWH based on whether it fits his characterization. If I were devout, I’d be really really upset at this manhandling of Holy Scripture. And the reasoning he uses is honestly crackpot. He devises logical explanations that he can discard or reinterpret as necessary. A lot of “I’m guessing” and “probably” and similar crazy leaps of logic. I’m also studying Scientology (objectively), and L. Ron Hubbard’s “scientific logic” is very similar. In that it is ludicrous. If you wanted to skip this part, you could certainly substitute the sentence “Cerebus studies the Torah and completes his transformation into a devout Jew” and move on.

Oh, really?

It becomes nothing but tiny, incoherent text about The Torah. A literally insane interpretation of it when YHWH, who Dave refers to as Yoohwhoo, is actually different from capital G God, and is a stupid female being who thinks she is actually God but too stupid to know she isn’t. Also everyone has a spirit walking upside-down inside the Earth?

They didn’t even like the Spawn bits:

The Torah sections are borderline impossible to read and hateful when you do, but on some important level they aren’t actually comics. I’m not expecting Dave Sim to be a competent rabbinical exegesist. I am expecting him to be a competent cartoonist, and in the middle parts of Latter Days even that falls away. The Spawn parody is inane; the McFarlane character is incomprehensible (ironic that Sim’s worst phonetic speech is him writing a Canadian!); the plot makes so sense; Sim’s choices of what to show on and off page are bizarre (perhaps he was rushing through his original plan to fit the Torah material in).

Makes as much sense as any other interpretation, I guess:

Sim’s reading is so riddled with ridiculous assumptions and assertions (and failures of understanding even of what words mean, let alone historical context), not to mention Sim’s certainty that sometimes character X speaks in propria persona, sometimes is possessed (I guess) as a mouthpiece by Yoowhoo, and sometimes possessed by God as a mouthpiece. How does Sim know which is which? Well, basically by determining whether he thinks what the person is saying sounds like God, Yoohwhoo, or just the guy. So, yeah. It’s entirely subjective, and unsupported by anything more than the most flimsy of evidence. And it leads Sim to some astonishing and repugnant conclusions–e.g. that the Holocaust was payback against the Jews for all the animals sacrificed in the Torah, or that evil shit that happens was thought up by Yoowhoo, who therefore is to blame for it, but actually done by God, because Yoowhoo actually has no real power. So God actually does all the terrible shit, Yoowhoo just thought of it; God does it as part of his apparently endless attempt to make her see the error of her ways. Well, there’s a lovely image of humans, existing merely to function as puppets and sacrifices in God’s ongoing “dialogue” with his feminine demi-urge, not to mention of God, as willing to inflict immeasurable suffering on humanity not for their own faults but for Yoowhoo’s.

People sure have a lot to say about this volume, at least.

Right:

A chunk of the book featuring the thinly disguised Three Stooges captures their body language almost miraculously, which makes a sequence about their declining years heartbreaking.

Hey, I found a kinda positive review!

Sim is an artist of genius and, after the amazing run he’d had so far, one is hard-pressed to look away. Not all of Latter Days shines nearly as brightly as earlier volumes of Cerebus, but it still has its moments. While the rest of Cerebus isn’t exactly like being stuck in total darkness, it is disorienting. Fortunately, the artwork and the various parodies save the day. Dave Sim the artist lives on. I’d just never want him as a rabbi, though.

Right:

It sounds like a joke, and it could maybe pass for one…if it didn’t go on for page after page after page after page. And if Sim weren’t 100% serious about it. He also goes into great detail about how the female human characters in the Bible are completely evil, and the male characters are, of course, generally without fault.

Indeed:

The point of all of this is, this time around I have absolutely no stake in Sim’s interpretations of the Bible. Honestly all of the theology and metaphysics that interested me when I was twenty-five appear to me now to be a young-man’s worries. Ten years later my interests now lie in the here-and-now, in wisdom rather than knowledge. This has led to a reversal in my opinions about many of the volumes of Cerebus. During my first read it was always the metaphysical stuff, the Mind Games, Flight, the meta-narrative stuff, that I loved. This time it was the down to earth stuff, Jaka’s Story, Melmoth, Guys, that resonated with me. Bravo to Sim for being able to run the gamut.

However, if you are not interested in experimental biblical-exegesis, well, Latter Days is a torturous book to read.

Dave Sim on his interpretations:

I have no idea how much of it (if any) I got right (and won’t know until Judgement Day) but I do think it makes more sense that the Torah is a sequential narrative rather than a series of disconnected anecdotes. In which case it seems to me, self-evidently necessary, to find an interpretation that reads as a sequential narrative (as mine does).

If I do turn out to have been right, I think it’s going to be very funny 100 or 200 years from now when people look back at the time when the most widely-accepted reading of the Torah was just seen as “WORST. CEREBUS comic books EVER!!!”

It definitely makes ME laugh to think of that day.

Sounds very amusing indeed! But perhaps not very likely?

Damian T. Lloyd, Esq.:

I think that the intellectual, philosophical, spiritual, or even logical content of Cerebus generally, and of the Torah “commentaries” is nearly if not entirely nil. I think that Dave is wrong if he thinks posterity will acclaim Cerebus as the first-ever correct reading of the Torah, or the first-ever correct critique of (his straw-woman) feminism, or the first-ever correct postulation of a unified field theory. I think that Dave is not that smart.

Heh heh.

Or take the “intellectual” content of Cerebus: When I say that Dave doesn’t know how to think, that’s precisely and all that I’m saying; I’m not saying he’s stupid or anything like that (he’s nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is, but he’s a pretty clever guy). I can read his writing and find on the same page a piece of stone-cold logic right beside some misconstrued anecdote right next to a blatant factual error — and Dave can’t tell the difference between them. He doesn’t have the intellectual tools to construct or analyze an argument. That doesn’t mean he’s dumb, but it does say certain things about his thinking (or “thinking”).

OK, tomorrow: The End.

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

Cerebus (2000) #251-265 by Dave Sim & Gerhard

My incredible math skills tells me that I’ve got 15 issues to read today — the longest “book” since, I guess, Jaka’s Story or something? And I’m not looking forward to this one, which is “Form & Void”, which is the third book of Going Home.

Amusingly, this starts off with Sim explaining to Gerhard what’s going on on page four.

Here’s two and three… yes, this book is all about Ham Ernestway, which I always going to say wasn’t as good a name as F. Stop Kennedy, but while I’m typing this, I’m blanking on what Ham’s real name is… er.. er… Ernest Hemingway! *phew* I got there! So I guess it’s a pretty good name if it manages to swap into my brain and push out the real name.

OK, here’s the page Sim was talking about. Get it? Mary Ernestway supplies Ham’s answers in her head, so they’re not actually there. Would you have gotten that without the explanation? Would anybody? Sim has this borderline insane tendency to read a lot into what he’s reading, and he’s hoping that people will be able to do the same with his own stuff, I think…

Sim hates Mary Ernestway (modelled after Hemingway’s fourth wife, er, Mary) sincerely and with all his heart.

In yet another “well, that doesn’t seem much like something Cerebus would do” twist, in this book, Cerebus is a rabid Ham Ernestway fan. This is apparently because Bear was a fan — it’s alluded to in one panel, but you really have to read the backmatter to get how any of this book makes sense. Because Cerebus suddenly being a rabid fan of any Reads author seems pretty weird.

This bit is pretty hilarious. Sim explains how he’s not really read much actual literature (No! We’re All Shocked, I Tells You!) because he was afraid that he’d like them so much that he’d binge-read them all (like with Dostoyevsky) and run out of good books to read. Sure, sure, Sim; sure.

His hatred for Hemingway seems to be immediate and deeply felt. He calls Hemingway a typist (or Typist) and not an author, just like Picasso isn’t an artist. And extra fun thing about all this is that the backmatter for the first few issues of this book is a lot more readable than Sim’s usual leaden and smarmy prose — and that’s because he’s trying to parody Hemingway’s style (which is just Typing and not Writing).

Sim then forgets what he was doing, and he’s back to his usual style (which should come with an “Severe Eye Roll Danger” warning).

Anyway, I’m no Hemingway fan myself — I read a couple of his books as a teenager, and I thought they were pretty mid. (Yes! It’s true! I came up with “mid” in the 1980s.) But I haven’t read him since, and I take my aesthetics as a teenager with a grain of salt — for all I know, he’s fantastic. (But I doubt it!)

From the first Cerebus issue, Sim has always been very interested in how to make a comic book with as little work as possible. He’s tried everything — having people in pitch black caves, snowed out on white pages, rained out with just vertical lines everywhere… and I guess here he’s mostly xeroxing (unless he got Gerhard to pitch in).

Ernestway doesn’t really appreciate Cerebus’ company. And! Sim introduces two Black characters! That actually speak! But in Swahili, so you have to read the backmatter to get the translations.

Eddie Campbell writes in to call Sim a Philistine, and Sim doubles down by calling Norman Rockwell a better artist than Picasso because Rockwell’s paintings are harder to copy.

Speaking of artwork… are these nature pages all done by Sim? I’m not at all sure, but the proportions on that pretty bird seem just a biiit off, don’t they? Too big eyes, too small beak…

The world-building in Estarcion is “eh whatevs”. Cerebus was out of circulation for a few years (but not more than ten years, surely), but he’s totally flabbergasted at seeing airships. I think Dave returned him to Estarcion five years later, and then he spent some years in a tavern — which was filled with nerds, so you’d think they’d mention of suddenly aircraft was a thing?

But that’s Cerebus for you — Estarcion doesn’t really make that much sense.

Heh heh.

*gasp* Africa! I guess this means that Estarcion is Europe? Bit with Italy missing for some reason? Has any of this ever been established?

Ah, yeah, here’s the explanation for Cerebus’ Ernestway obsession: Sim just couldn’t come up with anything better in the couple months he had to come up with the setup for Form & Void. Sim has a tendency when asked about how much he had planned of the 300 Cerebus issues to say something like “well everything! except some details!” and, well, some of the details aren’t that small, really. I think Sim fibs a bit, personally.

Oh, yeah, I remember this back from when I read the book back in 2000: Sim had read something so incredible, so fantastic, in Mary Hemingway’s autobiography that he went “Did I just read what I thought I just read?” So naturally, I wondered what incredible thing that was. This is how the backmatter ends in this issue, so we’ll have to wait a bit… (This is Sim’s go to move to create interest: Just withhold some information, promising that it’s going to be very interesting.)

I think those are Gerhard zebras? That’s my guess.

So this is what I assumed the Horribly Interesting Thing referred to: Ernest and Mary eating lion tartar, which apparently was taboo around those parts. And I have to say, I think that sounds really yucky, but then again, so would eating a house cat or a dog — it just really sounds yucky. But it’s clear that to Sim the fact that this is “taboo” is very, very important…

Mary is a very bad shot, and flubs several shots on the safari in Africa. This reads like a pretty sympathetic take on Mary, but the backmatter sets us straight right away: This is meant to illustrate how fucking annoying women are who don’t know their place (I’m paraphrasing Sim). It’s yet another case of Sim not actually managing to put what he intends on the actual page, so he has to spell it out later.

Wow, that is a horribly bad drawing of a lion. But nice touch that they only have four toes in this universe (Cerebus himself only has four fingers).

OK, here we continue the Saga of the Horribly Interesting Thing That Sim Found — he calls up the Presidential Library and has seven kilos of copies of Mary Hemingway’s papers sent over so that he can Figure Out The Mystery.

The first time I read Form & Void, I started skimming the backmatter around this time, so I never found out what The Mysterious Thing was — I remember asking on a Cerebus message board, even, and *radio silence*. But this time around I’m going to find out! Even if it kills me!

Sim says he’ll let us know when we get there. I hope he’ll add some sort of LOOK HERE! THIS IS WHAT YOU”RE LOOKING FOR! thing, so that it’ll be obvious.

Oh, could this be it? Mary tells Jaka and Cerebus (she’s reading from her diary, as one does) about how she and Ernest are kinda kinky. Sim is scandalised! Shocked! I mean, Cerebus and Jaka! They’re shocked!

The dirigible … er… crashes… because “hit the wire”? What wire? And why would a dirigible hitting a wire make it crash? I mean, if it tears it would fall, but… Again, the world building is razor thing — this happens here because the Hemingways suffered a plane crash, which makes more sense.

(Sim seems to allude to all Hemingway accidents that happen on the trip, and there’s a lot, is because they broke the taboo against eating lion meat, so I guess it’s a taboo instituted by god or something. Or — perhaps all taboos are from god? Sim isn’t really clear on the point…)

I still have no idea what Sim is trying to express with these sounds, and he uses them all the time when talking about Mary Hemingway.

OK, Sim thinks that Hemingway thought eating lion meat was some kind of magical thing, over interpreting as usual without any basis, as far as I can see.

Mary encounters a guy (based on Edward Scott) who gets really huffy about the lion meat thing.

And then Mary kills Ham all of a sudden, and Cerebus runs away, dragging Jaka into a snowstorm. And as usual with Sim, there’s not real reason for this to happen: Just Cerebus Being Cerebus. (Cerebus is all magic and stuff, remember?)

But Sim does insanely dramatic very well, eh?

Sim spends way, way, way too many pages speculating about Hemingway’s sex life, while tut tut-ing “gossip” and stuff.

HERE IT IS! THE INCREDIBLY MYSTERIOUS THING THAT SIM CALLED THE LIBRARY ABOUT! HERE:

He wondered what those two “–est” words were. It was all about two adjectives Mary had elided because they seemed like she was bragging (she’s quoting Ernest talking about herself). And what were they?

So it was all a big nothingburger — and this rather The Cerebus Reading Experience in a nutshell: Sim teases a lot of mysteries; important things; things connecting in unexpected ways. And then we get the solution and it’s all *fart noise*.

Well, once again Jaka seems pretty smart, eh? Don’t worry, it only lasts a couple pages.

Oh, women from where Cerebus came from wears veils and walks two steps behind the men? Are Cerebus’ people moslems?

Well, that’s a funny sequence, but would you take Cerebus on his word whether these walls have magnificent poetry or not? No? Thought so, so once again I don’t think Sim’s work quite conveys what Sim wants, because I think Sim wants to say (once again) how terribly annoying Jaka is (and therefore all women are).

The aforementioned Edward Scott challenges Hemingway to a duel. So not only does he get really huffy about the lion eating thing, he’s also obviously off his rocker? Shouldn’t that be a hint to Sim that perhaps Scott isn’t much of an authority on anything?

This all made me wonder whether eating lion meat is a thing… And:

Well, all you taco lovers, for $35 dollars you can try lion as in the king of the jungle.

There you go. It’s in Florida, so it must be normal.

And speaking of “off his rocker”… Sim disliked an interview with Jeff Smith in The Comics Journal #218, a couple years earlier, so he invites him to a duel.

The reactions are swift — longtime friend Diana Schutz withdraws from the proofreading job immediately. I wondered about the timeline, because there’s a couple months lead time… but of course, she proofread that duel challenge, right? Or resigned as soon as she saw it.

Anyway, this is the final issue of Form & Void, and Cerebus and Jaka finally makes it back home to Cerebus’ home village, and there are no people there! It’s a wonderful sequence, and Sim really milks all the tension he can out of it — even with the small lettering and verbiage to really keep the reader in suspense.

It turns out that Cerebus’ parents have just died…

… and they didn’t make it in time because Jaka dawdled, so Cerebus tells Jaka to fuck off. (And somehow there’s a carriage waiting there to take her back home, so presumably Lord Julius had her under surveillance the entire time?)

Of course, there’s no way she could have known that they were in a hurry — Cerebus himself didn’t know, I think? That is, I don’t think we’ve been told (in the book) that the story was anything but a whim of Cerebus’? I mean, the trip started when Jaka was the one to force Cerebus to leave the tavern, after all…

So once again, I’m not sure whether Sim is saying that Cerebus screwed up once again, or that this is supposed to show the readers for the final time what a horrible person Jaka is.

The issue ends with a 24 page treatise on how horrible women are, though, called “Tangent”.

But of note is that Carol West, Sim’s longtime administrative assistant, quit halfway through typing it in, because she’d just had enough.

I have to admit I didn’t even skim it, because there’s a limit to how far I’m willing to go for this blog series. But Sim has kindly placed it in the public domain (tee hee), so you can probably find it on the Women Haters’ Club pages.

Michael Dean and Staff writes in The Comics Journal #234, page 12:

It had been a number of years since Cerebus creator Dave
Sim’s last sociological outburst in Cerebus #186 (“Reads”), and
he had slipped back into being a mere struggling comics self-
publisher with a cult following, when a pair of new public
statements in Cerebus #264 and #265 reminded everyone that
he is much more than that. Exactly what is open to debate,
with theories ranging from gynophobic lunatic, to
Machiavellian manipulator of publicity to ingenious Swiftian
trickster to brave champion of manly virtues.

This time, he
summoned the industrys
attention by challenging Bone
creator Jeff Smith to a fistfight
in Cerebus #264 — a strutting
macho gesture that drove his
longtime proofreader, Diana
Schutz to resign. He followed
that in #265 with “Tangents,”
an essay-length attack on fem-
inism, which continues some
of the themes of “Reads” and
branches out to such issues as
abortion, celibacy, the “femi-
nist-homosexualist axis,
spanking adult women, and
Elian Gonzalez. Midway
through typing this screed, the
last of Sim’s female employees,
administrative assistant Carol
West, abandoned him.
When the Journal called to
ask if he was crazy, Sim politely
commented on the response he
has provoked, as well as on his
betrayers, Smith and Schutz. We
also spoke with Smith, who felt it
was wiser to keep his mouth
shut, and with Schutz, who
explained why she resigned and
Why it took her so long.
Sim published his salvo to
Smith in March, With an editori-
al entitled “Dear Jeff Smith.” He
was responding to comments
made by Smith in an interview in
The Comics Journal #218
(December, 1999), in which
Smith disputed Sim’s characteri-
zation of a conversation between
the two men and Vijaya, Smith’s
Wife, that was part Of Sim’s
“[infamous] little ‘tract’ about
women sucking the life blood
out Of men, and how they
‘think’, they can only ‘feel’. ”
Smith said that after listening to
Sim (who was visiting the couple
over a weekend) expound on his
theories about women, “finally I
said, ‘Dave, if you don’t shut up
right now, I’m going to take you
outside and I’m going to deck
you.’ Well, he shut up. He
wrote about it in Cerebus #186.
But, in his version, instead of me
threatening to give him a fat lip,
he has me fawning and begging
him not to reveal the true secrets
Of women in front ”
This description set Sin*
masculine blood boiling — or at
least simmering, since it took
him more than a year to publicly
respond, due in part, he stated,
to his pledge not to write any-
thing in the back Of Cerebus
unrelated to an ongoing narrative
until the Story was completed.
Sim further explained (to Smith),
“Considering that it took you
nearly five years to ‘go public’
with your side of our disagree-
ment(s) I didn’t think that
time was Of the essence. ” Having
accounted for his slowness in
taking up the gauntlet of Smith’s
insult, Sim wrote, “You are lying.
.. I’m not sure what my reaction
would’ve been had you, indeed,
threatened to give me a fat lip..
[l suspect) I wouldWe taken you
up on your little ‘challenge’ once
I was sure that I wasn’t staying
under your roof any longer. But
Of course, there was no ‘chal-
leng& He then offered to fly
out to Smith’s hometown of
Columbus, Ohio, “on any date”
for three rounds of boxing
according to Smith’s specifica-
tions (“I’ll let you pick the venue
and the time keeper and the ref-
eree … If you prefer headgear,
just let me know”).
“Jeff, I am saying flat-out,
that you have lied,” concluded
Sim. “In lying, you have made a
— a non-masculine mess.
Let’s you and me, man-to-
man, clean up the mess that you
have made.”
The editorial in #264
prompted Dark Horse editor
Diana Schutz, who has sewed as
the proofreader on Cerebus for
seven years, to end her freelance
arrangement with Sim. simply
did not in any way wish to be
associated with the boxing chal-
lenge. I drew the line there,” she
told the Journal, adding that she
couldn’t continue proofing
Cerebus if she intended to ignore
an offensive portion. She sent
Sim a letter of resignation, which
he printed in #265.
“I’m sorry to say that after
seven years, current cucum-
stances make it impossible for me
to continue proofreading Cerebus
text pieces,” wrote Schutz in the
letter, dated Jan. 18. “Following
are six pages of proofs from
Cerebus #264. I am far too
uncomfortable with the remain-
ing pages to offer my proofread-
ing services on them. ”
In addition to printing
Schutis letter ofresignation, Sim
remarked in a prologue to
“Tangents” that Carol West, his
administrative assistant (“a very
fancy feminist name for a very
plain secretarial position”), had
quit her job in the midst of
inputting the “Tangents” essay.
“Her resignation, far from being
either a surprise or a dishearten-
ing event, to me, seemed just the
latest example of feminism
undermining its own 30-year-
long campaign to be taken seri-
ously…” he wrote. “Carol West
can get offended and leave, but
the hard questions remain. My
feminist readers can roll their
eyes theatrically, but the hard
questions remain…” Sim then
fell into a rhetorically rhythmic
groove in which one event after
another led back to the ominous
refrain ” but the hard ques-
tions remain.”
Would Sim have had more
respect for West if she had stayed
on and said nothing? “Yeah. Just
do your job,” he told the Journal.
“Accept the fact that there are
other points of view… the world
is more complicated than three
flavors of feminism.” He added
that West had phoned his collab-
orator Gerhard to announce her
resignation — “She didn’t want
to have a conversation With me.
In the essay that followed the
discussion of West, Sim proceed-
ed to attack what he proclaims as
feminism’s intellectual bankrupt-
q, and its pervasive and insidi-
ous influence on the Whole Of
society. “Tangents” is divided
into five sections that run 20
pages in total. The topics dis-
cussed include: what he sees as
the contradictory logic Of alimo-
ny and affirmative action; the
emotion-based nature of women;
the unfairness and irresponsibili-
ty of “Government-Funded
Daycare; ” the universal undesir-
ability of being a woman; why
women need a good spanking,
“given that reason cannnot pre-
vail in any argument with emo-
tion;” the “feminist” opinion
that children should be treated as
adults; and the inability of
women to distinguish themselves
from animals. Sim also com-
plained that women are only able
to communicate ideas by telling
allegorical stories, Often involv-
ing animals
apparently
unalarmed that he has made a
living doing exactly that for the
last 30 years. The last section
describes how Martin Luther
King Jr.’s hold on the civil rights
movement was overtaken by a
secular-humanist-feminist ethic
that transformed the noble aims
of the civil rights movement into
a contradictory morass of a coali-
tion that views blacks, women,
“homosexualists,” babies and
animals as interchangeable.
Because Sim has waived the
copyright considerations for
“Tangents,” the full essay can be
read online at www.tcj.corn.
In discussing the recent
events with the Journal, Schutz
stated that she was most cha-
grined about the “Dear Jeff
Smith” editorial and by the mis-
perception by some people that
she had quit over the Tangents”
essay. “Dave should have the
right to express an argument for
his position, no matter how
faulty that argument may be… I
probably would have had less ofa
problem with the “Tangents”
essay (than with “Dear Jeff
Smith”]. Maybe that’s just an
example of my fuzzy, emotion-
based logic.” She added that
Sim’s positions are “so ludicrous
that it’s difficult to take seriously.
Whereas a personal attack on a
friend, I do take seriously.”
Schurz, Who has known Sim
for several years and described
herself as having been “in love
With him for a year and a half,”
would seem to be in a good posi-
tion to judge whether Sim’s essay
is sincere or an elaborate hoax.
This is not a prank,” she told
the Journal without hesitation.
“Dave absolutely believes every
word that he wrote.”
Asked if Sim’s beliefs about
women made it difficult
for her to maintain a relationship
With him, she said, “As a proof-
reader, I really have much
contact with him. I haven’t had
much contact with him for a few
years. Dave’s attitudes on gender
were most provocative When we
were dating. But that was eight
years ago and his attitudes were
not really so narrow then as
theyve become Over time. Is he a
difficult personality? I don’t
know. He’s a creative personality,
and I deal With them every day.”
Additionally, Schutz said she
believed that Sim “purposely and
cleverly printed my letter of res-
ignation with the “Tangents”
issue, and not #264, in order to
lay me open to same kind of
ridicule” that Carol West
received in Sim’s prologue. After
receiving several e-mails from
people under the impression
that she had quit in response to
“Tangents,” she submitted a let-
ter to Sim which provided her
clarification of the events, but
the letter was returned to her
With no response.

Heh heh, this is good stuf.

When asked by the Journal,
Sim comfirmed that he returned
Schutz’s letter, but disputed
Schutz’s claim that he was delib-
erately attempting to mislead his
readers. “It’s an interesting idea.
[But) I think so, because
the [resignation] letter [specifi-
callyl talks about 264. There’s
nothing that any of us can do
about stupid people.” As for
returning Schurz’s letter, Sim
simply replied, “she quit.” But
doesn’t she still have the option
of writing a letter to be printed
in Cerebus? “She can always do
her own comic” and print the
letter in there, Sim stated.
In general, Sim said that he
had not gotten much feedback
from “Tangents, ” especially
compared to ” Reads” — “maybe
a half dozen letters, equally split
between feminists and people
Who can think for themselves.”

Christ what an asshole.

The Comics Journal #236, page 5:

Dave Sim
Ontario. CAN
A couple Of corrections to your cover—
age in the Journal #234: “In the Company
of I did not challenge Jeff Smith to a
fistfight as your correspondent alleges and
I did not challenge him to a boxing match
as my former proofreader alleges. What I
did was Offer him the chance to give me a
fat lip as he alleges he threatened to do in
his Journal interview. Three 3-minute
rounds seemed more than sufficient for the
task: i.e. not a fistfight, not a boxing
match, but the only way I could conceive
to maintain at least a veneer Of civilintion
While accommodating an uncivilized
threat. Would I or will I hit Jeff? Up until
the present article thought that unlikely. I
have never threatened anyone with physical
violence. It was Jeff who manufactured a
physical threat out of thin air. What I tried
to do was accommodate What was (Obvi-
ously) a desire on his part to do me physi-
cal harm while limiting the extent ofpoten-
tial physical harm to myself (insofar as it
was possible to do so) to a fat lip (thus, the
brevity Of the contest and the use of IO-
ounce gloves). I novice in his latest salvo he
has (retroactively) escalated that level of
violence from a fat lip to (quote) “Dave, if
you don’t shut up right now, going to
take you Outside and deck you” (Italics
mine). An altogether new realm ofviolence
has been entered upon solely on Jeff’s part. If
(and when) he fit to make good on this
latest piece of revisionism, I would assume
that — rather than just allowing him to
give me a fat lip — it will now be a case of
“Who Will ‘deck’ whom.” An unfortunate
escalation, but entirely Jefrs own doing.

[…]

Michael Dean responds:
Therek a lesson to be learned here probably
about how easily information that passes
from person to person can be distorted into
misinformation. For example, your invita-
tion to Jeff Smith that the two Of you meet
for three rounds of hitting each other with
boxing gloves with the mutual goal of
achieving for yourself a fat lip was some-
how construed by myself and many other
inattentive people as an invitation to a box-
ing match. Thanks for clarifying whatever
distinction you have clarified, though you
still seem undecided as to whether you plan
to hit back or simply stand there With your
gloves on and your lip stuck out.

Heh heh. Now that’s snarky.

Sim writes a ten page letter in in The Comics Journal #258, page 21:

I’m not surprised that the
current Marxist-feminist spin is that
my calling his bluff on his big talk
is described as “boorish, pathetic
and frankly insane.”

Etc etc — read it yourself if you want to.

Bart Beaty writes in The Comics Journal #263, page 119:

Form & Void
If Sim had kept his mouth shut he’d
be respected a lot more, that’s for sure. By
the end only the hardest Of the hardcore
could read the actual issues any more,
because all that superfluous baggage beck-
oned to you, and if you didn’t turn away,
youd be horrified. In the last years Of the
comic, Sim over-analyzed his own work
with extensive notations on his research
into Hemingway and Fitzgerald, launched
outlandish screeds on “feminism” and
“homosexualism”, wrote at length about
his personal religion in the wake of
September I I , and lamented that sad State
Of the Canadian military (forgetting, one
supposes, that the last time this country
was invaded was in 1812 — and that was
by the Americans, Who are largely now on
our side). These essays are primarily built
on quotes from the National Post, a sort Of
Canadian print version Of the Fox News
Network. The image that it portrayed was
Of an isolated, bitter man — although Sim
denied this image in interviews. The long,
rambling essays — an example Of Which
was found recently in the letters pages Of
this magazine — seemed to mark a keen
mind in decline. Sim seems, in his writ-
ing, like a Street-corner religious zealot,
endlessly reiterating the same point. He
challenges his readers to engage with him,
but hc seems just sort Of scary, So no one
does. This, he thinks, is a sign Of weak-
ness.
always wanted to tell Dave some-
thing that I’m not sure he knows. When
he was doing the Fltzgerald
commen-
taries, I wanted to bring it up, drop him a
note, but I never did. Maybe heu have
found it interesting — maybe hed find it
irrelevant. But it seemed sort of relevant to
What hc was doing. so, since I’m guessing
that he’s reading this, I just wanted to say:
Zelda psychiatrist was Fredric
Wertham. In case you were wondering.

Form & Void seems to be one of the least liked books:

Sigh. Here’s where it all kind of comes to an end. Ernest Hemingway and his wife Mary are featured. I don’t want to go too far into the plot to avoid spoilers, but it’s really the last severing of the core Cerebus story. Now, you will only get Cerebus and his interior world, which is fighting against the evil Woman, and God.

Again, Jaka’s character is tweaked a little bit more, it seems, to more perfectly fit Sim’s idea of how women are bad.

[…]

The last 68 page of the book is text, in which Sim talks (as he did in the last book) about the cameo’d character he has researched. In this case it’s an all-out attack on Mary Hemingway and women in general. He doesn’t spare Papa himself (referring to him as a typist rather than a writer), but the majority of the vitriol is saved for Mary. He makes a LOT of guesses about reasons and intentions, and then bases other arguments on these guesses, which makes the whole thing shaky.

Yes, Sim included the entirety of the backmatter into the collected edition, which I think is a first? I guess he was just so proud of doing the research into “–est”, eh?

Carson Grubaugh:

Form and Void did not offer me much to care about in the ideas department. I have zero interest in literary classics. There are very few I have read that I gave two shits about. I think prose fiction is a dead story-telling medium.

Okidoke.

Had I not read the notes I would not have gotten any of the metaphor out of the lion hunt that Sim puts into it.

[…]

It is possible that the whole volume was a purposeful exercise in enduring both disinterest and disdain.

Heh heh. I’m not actually sure it’s the worst book? I think if you read it without reading the backmatter, it might have been somewhat entertaining. But it’s certainly one of the worst.

Well I dunno:

You are correct that “It’s a blog called ‘A moment of Cerebus’.” A problem some people have (I’m looking at you, Jeff S.) is that they think it’s called “A Moment of Drooling Dave Sim Sychophancy” — which it is not.

Oh yeah, it gets worse, I guess:

When they get there, everything goes wrong for Cerebus, as usual. He loses everything, including driving Jaka away (and out of the story for good). The book ends with Cerebus alone and in despair. The fate that was foretold to him at the end of Church and State, that he would die within a few years, alone, unmourned and unloved, seems to be coming true.

This might not seem like a good place to end the story, but I almost wish I had just stopped here and never bought the last two books.

Wow:

Dave recently gave some sales figures on Form and Void. Apparently he only sold about 250 copies.

But it’s been remastered by Waverly PressIf you want to be amongst the 88 people who has a deluxe hardcover:

DELUXE HARDCOVER

$195
Get the Deluxe hardcover book package, hand signed and numbered by Dave Sim & Gerhard, along with all of the exclusive extras!

You’ll be out of $195. It’s up to you. The cheapest edition is $85, though, and apparently sold even less: 34 copies. But there’s holo foil stickers! Oh, there’s also a really cheap $70 direct market edition…

OK, now I only have two more posts to go. I know I’ve said this before, but this time I’ve actually counted. So in three day’s time, I’ll be free! Free! Uhm… except that the next book is 24 issues long, I think? Oh, I can’t face doing that — I may have to do it over several days. So the next post may be a couple days late.

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

Cerebus (1999) #240-250 by Dave Sim & Gerhard

This blog post is about Going Home book two: “Fall and the River”, and I have to admit to being pretty fed up with doing these posts (yet again). I should probably take a break, but at this point I’d rather power through. But you’ve been warned! If writing this is a slog, then reading it is probably going to be to, hein?

This book is mostly about F. Scott Fitzgerald (as well as Cerebus and Jaka taking a boat ride).

This entails Sim writing pastiches of Fitzgerald’s texts, and boy are they painful to read. Sim calls the texts “parodies”, but they aren’t really very funny: They’re just a bit on the bad side. Sim goes on (in the backmatter) about how to achieve what he thinks of as Fitzgerald’s overwriting, but the final result he ends up with sounds (more or less) like Sim writing like Sim usually writes: Pompous and smug.

And I remember reading this the first time around (in 1999). That is, I hit this page and I went “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT UGLY TYPEFACE”. And I guessed that Sim wanted something that looked like a 20s typeface, but didn’t find one, and as Sim has extremely bad taste, he ended up with this monstrosity.

(Yes, I was a typeface nerd in the 90s.)

Jaka continues to grow ever more annoying.

The schtick in this book is that F. Stop Kennedy (the Fitzgerald character) writes a book about this boat trip, and he imagines what Jaka and Cerebus are doing most of the time: So we get to see what they really do, and then read a “fictitious” account that’s sometimes illuminating, and sometimes not. I didn’t really find this particularly fascinating.

Sim dispenses of the letters pages completely, and instead devotes the final four pages of each 24 page issue to writing notes (on a page to page basis) of what’s going on in the storyline, and his research into Fitzgerald. So… in a way we get the action three times: Jaka/Cerebus does something, and then F. Stop Kennedy writes what he thought they did, and then Sim explains what Jaka/Cerebus did and why Kennedy wrote what he did.

If you’re into text analysis, this is the book for you! The problem is, though, that not much of interest happens, so it’s a bit eh.

Oh, here Sim even mentions the typeface: “Footlight Light”. Hm… looks like this one? It’s a free font? No, it’s designed by Ong Chong Wah…

Doesn’t say when it was designed, but it sounds new, which I suspected:

Footlight is a highly distinctive face which began life as an italic. The designer then went on to produce the roman weights. It is unusual to draw the italic version first but this was done to impose a calligraphic influence on the face, and the slightly hand drawn feel remains evident in FootlightÆs roman version. The Footlight font family is of considerable versatility and charm, its originality makes it the perfect choice for advertising and magazine typography.

Right:

Ong Chong Wah was born in Malaysia, and studied graphic design in England. He worked as a designer in advertising for several years, and started designing type in 1984.

Hah! I wuz right back in 1999! Vindication! Or something!

Oh yeah, we were talking about Cerebus… Gerhard created a model that he took a lot of pics of to be able to draw it accurately, apparently.

The world Sim has set up doesn’t really make much sense: The Cirinists are rewarding three people by… allowing them to sit behind those screens and catch all The Exciting Action Happening When Jaka Is On A Boat. I’m guessing this is a comment on celebrity magazines and stuff — but flipping through People Magazine to read about Princess Diana isn’t quite the same commitment as being locked up in a cabin for weeks in the hope of seeing Jaka do something interesting, is it? I mean, exaggeration in satire is, you know, fine, but this is just kinda stupid.

F. Stop Kennedy functions as a kind of satanic figure — tempting Jaka away from he journey to Cerebus’ home town (and become a patron of an artists’ colony instead). But this also rather fails to carry all that much weight, because… she could just go up there for a month, and then go to the colony afterwards? She has all the time in the world.

Not a lot of mysterious things happen (less than in the previous book), but Rick appears to Cerebus, and apparently he’s now gone Full Bible, baptising people and shit.

I found this part interesting — over a couple of pages, we’ve seen F. Stop talk to Jaka about an introduction to a book she wrote. And here we have Sim’s explanation about what he apparently wanted to convey over those two pages. And I have to say, exactly… nothing… of what he writes here came over. I guess it’s nice that he’s got all this subtext, but he’s seriously off his rocker if he imagined he was successful in that sequence.

Some of the text excerpts are so (sorry for using hate speech) tedious that it’s hard not to just start skipping the text bits, and…

… it’s a parody of a sequence that Sim thought was particularly awful. Thank you, Sim! *rolls eyes*

Sim mostly keeps each issue to 24 pages, but for one issue he has to many notes that he expands the issue to 32 pages.

The Cirinists were (of course) extremely taken with the stupid and incoherent bit (which F. Stop improvised while fantastically drunk).

Hm… I thought Sim said that Cirinists had absolutely free speech? Did he change his mind?

And here we learn that, yes, men get more attractive as they get older, but women are always most attractive at seventeen. Oh wise one! Oh, by the way, this reminds me of today’s scandal, of which I have to say that as someone who has read detestable Red Room and the execrable X-Men Grand Design — I’m not surprised in the least.

(And perhaps I should stop writing about old comics, anyway.)

Gerhard innovates further — he doesn’t just have a physical model of the boat, but he’s also using 3D software? (Note the lamp standing in for Cerebus.)

You know, one major attraction in Cerebus used to be mysterious things happening, and then pondering What It All Means. But I have to say that at this point I don’t give a shit, because I know from experience with previous Cerebus things that it’s going to turn out to be something lame.

And this time around, we first get some silent pages with mysterious things, and then straight away we get some text pages explaining that it was lame.

This bit where we get a callback to what Dave told Cerebus at the end of Mothers & Daughters is a nice touch, though.

And this is kinda amusing — Sim muses on the common impulse to skip text pages when reading comics, and explains that this silent page/text page juxtaposition was a way to see whether he could entice readers to actually read the text pages.

Gerhard explains using computers and RU-486 to make the perspective less incorrect.

I know I’ve been bitching a lot during this blog post, and sure, Fall and the River is pretty boring, but it’s not the worst Cerebus book, really. It’s got sequences like the above (we’re seeing F. Stop’s delusions about his attractiveness contrasted with Jaka and Cerebus) which are really fun to read.

For the last few issues, the backmatter goes on a detour from doing page by page commentaries to being more of a generic Sim lecture on… er… stuff. (I stopped reading.)

And I have to admit that I didn’t quite understand the point of this Terimite thing was (or Jaka saying this? it seems so out of character? just so that Cerebus had to tell her that the Terimite thing didn’t really catch on in his hometown?), but like I said, I don’t really give a shit, do I?

Here Sim explains that he’s just extrapolating: Since we now have women’s shelters, we’ll later get a matriarchal society where a woman can have any man killed on her say so. Yeah, sounds like… extrapolation.

The book ends with Jaka saving Cerebus from being killed, and Cerebus being unaware that he’s even in any danger — which mirrors how the previous book ended. (And there their roles were reversed.) It’s not a perfect reversal, though, since this time it’s Jaka who almost got Cerebus killed in the first place by having an ambiguous conversation with the Cirinists (if I interpret things correctly; at this point Sim stopped doing the page by page explanations, so it’s up to the reader to figure out what’s happening here)…

And! As Sim says in the backmatter: This is the first Black character to appear in Cerebus. For one panel.

David Groenewegen writes in The Comics Journal #223, page 38:

It’s hard to make a case that Sim is playing
with his audience based on the female charac-
ters introduced in recent years. Most of them
have been Cirinists who exist only as straw
women, set up so that Sim can knock them
down. There hasn’t been a memorable one in
years, most of them serving as functionaries
and examples of womanhood gone out of con-
trol, The three that appear in “Fall and the
River” don’t even have names. There are also
throwaway references to the degenerative
power of women over artists, such as the sight
of R. Crumb being led meekly through the
docks by his Wife and daughter (p. 169). In
Going Home, the only woman we can use
to judge Sim’s views isJaka, because she is
the only one who can realistically be
described as a character.
She is, in fact, one of the most fully
realized characters Sim has ever done,
having come a long way from her first
appearance as a tavern dancer in the late
’70s. In many ways, she behaves exactly as
you would expect her to after reading
#186 — she’s manipulative, vain, self-
obsessed, maddeningly inconsistent, con-
stantly trying to redirect Cerebus onto her
own path rather than his. She won •t listen
to reason, and she goes into a sulk when
she can’t get new clothes. But, to be fair,
there are women like that in the world.
She’s definitely a believable character,
but the absence of any character to
counter the negative female stereotype
leads the reader to believe that the Views
of #186 are firmly held by Sim.
It also seems that Jaka will be easily
swayed away from a life with Cerebus (and
a pretty crappy life it sounds too), by the
blandishments of F. Stop Kennedy. Sim
hints that Jaka is on the verge ofdumping
him for a better deal. That she doesn’t,
and saves Cerebus without his actually real-
izing that she hus done so, is an interesting
twist. Jaka is suddenly portrayed as both
more aware and less self-centered than
Cerebus (despite him lecturing her about
her lack of discretion earlier). Of course,
Jaka has never been under any illusions
about the nature and extent of her
power. She has flaunted it before, usually
for her own selfish ends, most notably in
Jaka’s Story where she is able to save her.
self and Rick from the Cirinists. Does the
fact that she does it here make her the
hero of this part of Cerebus’ life, and
therefore worthy of a measure of respect?
Or is it just another sign of the fickleness
and emotional reasoning of women?
Illat this ambiguity exists is a signifi-
cant dent in the “Dave Sim: Evil
Misogynist” argument. Jaka is not all
“bad” — she is just a person. For Dave Sim to
be the woman-hater he is often portrayed as,
she would have to be as one-dimensional as his
views on women are claimed to be.
Does this mean that #186 was a colossal
joke, or a cunning ploy to balance out the
Judge’s explanation of the universe in Church
& State? Or is Sim just setting us up for some
grand denouement in which the relationship
between Jaka and Cerebus results in Cerebus’
destruction, thus “proving” #186? Personally, I
don’t know. Which is one of the reasons I like
Cmebus, and will keep on reading it to the end.
Sim keeps throwing in enough to keep you
guessing, and while I’m hardly champing at the
bit to read another one of his literary parodies
in Going Home II (Ernest Hemingway this time),
I’m smart enough to wait until the end of it,
and of Carebus as a whole, before I judge it.

I think the reviewer here is misreading Sim, though… Here’s Tim Kreider in The Comics Journal #301, page 362:

Most glaring is his hostility toward his female characters, especially Jaka,
the beautiful blonde daughter of the aristocracy turned tavern dancer who
is the great love of Cerebus’s life. In a note in 1988 Sim writes, “I admire
Jaka more than any of the other characters in the book,” and goes on to
describe her common sense, self-confidence, directness and lack of ma-
terialism; in an interview 18 years later he tells us: “Jaka is a self-absorbed
artistocratic airhead. She always was.” It’s that “She always was,” that’s
a red flag; it sounds like someone trying to convince himself, after a
breakup, not only that he doesn’t love his ex but that he never loved her.
It’s not only his attitude toward the character that changes over time; his
depiction of her becomes broader, more unforgiving. In Jaka’s Story and
Minds Jaka is intelligent, self-aware and passionately devoted to her art,
with a complex and fraught history privileged and imprisoned, over-
protected and molested. But by the time of Going Home and Form & Void
she’s become a caricature of everybody’s bitchy ex-girlfriend a selfish,
pouty shopaholic. This is dishonest art, a distortion of the character to
conform to the author’s biases.

This same Soviet airbrushing of the history books is in evidence throughout
Cerebus, as when (usually female) characters suddenly reveal themselves not
to be who they’ve claimed to be all along (or, in some cases, turn out never
to have existed at all). This stripping away of layers of illusion and revela-
tion ofsome deeper, opposing tr’uth is an ongoing conceit throughout the
book. But I suspect Sim does this most often with women not only because
he believes they’re inherently duplicitous but because, more tellingly, he can
really only draw one attractive woman •—1 try telling Jaka, Astoria or Michele
apart without the visual cue oftheir hair and doesn’t want to have to intro-
duce new ones. (He does, however, command an endless repertoire of ugly,
hulking, hirsute, shrewish and bullying women. He draws a great Margaret
Thatcher.)

Bart Beaty writes in The Comics Journal #263, page 118:

Going Home
In I moved to Calgary, Where I
took a job as a university professor. I was
hired despite the fact that I made it clear
that I would be researching, among Other
things, comic books. They didn’t mind,
but no one really seemed excited by that
prospect. Theywe never let me teach a
course on the subject, for example, but, on
the other hand, never pushed that
hard for it either.
I continued to buy Cerebus every
month, but now at a clean, quiet, well-lit
Store near my new home. This was a
Cerebus store if there ever was one. They
had a Cereous shrine at the back, which
proudly displayed all the trades, surround-
ed by Cerebus posters (“the first half”) and
a few pieces Of Original art by Sim. It was
a nice set-up, and it convinced me that
this was a pretty decent store. The way a
store treats Cereous, it seems, is a sort Of
barometer for how well it Will treat inde-
pendent and art-minded projects general-
l”. If they don’t carry it, run. If they know
all about it, you’re probably in decent
enough hands.
I bought my last Cerebus at this Store
in March, stopping On a Wednesday night
as I walked With my wife to a movie
downtown. It was almost exactly 20 years
to the day since I had bought my first
issue, and in those intervening years I had
graduated high school and university
(three times), got a job, got married, and
bought a house. As we walked down the
street my Wife asked, “How does it feel not
be young any more?”
It felt odd.

The Comics Journal #301, page 367:

Although Sim’s dialogue is exemplary and his mimicry
perfect, his prose, I’m afraid, is not so great. I suspect that, like
Alan Moore, one reason he gravitates toward pastiches of Victorian
writers is because his own style naturally tends toward the purple end
of the spectrum. His imitation of Oscar Wilde is ornate and turgid to
the point of tedium. He’s tone-deaf to the austere beauty of
Hemingway’s prose, and his attempts to parody it only imitate the form
and miss its essence. In Going Home, when he presumes to rewrite
passages of F. Scott Fitzgerald to render them “more ethical,” his
insertion of flaccid qualifying phrases deprives the original of its
elegance and force —you could say he emasculates it.

Heh heh. Harsh but true.

There aren’t that many reviews of Going Home on the intertubes. Here’s Carson Grubaugh:

Going Home was my least favorite volume during this re-read. It felt like an unnecessarily long re-hash of a lot of things we already know by this point, primarily that Cerebus can be with Jaka and still be miserable.

[…]

This book also has the most god-awfully ugly art in the whole series. Immediately after reading the book, and determining that I hated Gerhard’s contribution to the volume, I started seeing people over on A Moment Of Cerebus comment that it is their favorite Gerhard volume. “Great,” I thought, “now I am really going to have to defend myself. So, bear with me as I explain my averse reaction to Gerhard’s art in Going Home.

That’s an interesting analysis of the book (and especially the shortcomings of the artwork which relies a lot more on Gerhard than in previous books).

Right:

The ending…and I kinda like this…the Cirinists are all set to make a move on Cerebus. Not Cirin herself (we never see her), but the thing is, the only thing keeping the Cirinists from moving in on Cerebus with a phalanx of female warriors is that he’s Jaka’s companion. And she seems much more aware of this than he is. It’s an interesting role reversal, in a lot of ways, because the last scene of the book has her saving Cerebus just by…being with him. Try as she might, Jaka can’t get away from being the “Princess of Palnu” – and now she’s the one that has the power. Kinda funny in a way.

OK, enough puttering around for today. Are there only three more blog posts to go? I hope so.

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