Random Thoughts

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.

Cerebus (1998) #232-239 by Dave Sim & Gerhard

What’s this then? Only eight issues covered in this blog post? Isn’t Going Home a longer epic?

Yes, indeed, as you can see from the inside front cover down here. But the first eight issues are the first book, “Sudden Moves”. And! When doing the collections, the first two books were published under the name Going Home, and the third book, “Form & Void”, was published under the name, er, Form & Void.

Confused yet?

As we recall from the last blog post — Rick’s Story ended with Cerebus and Jaka meeting up (randomly) and they decided to go off together, totally in love with each other. And I’m actually kinda excited about re-reading these comics, because I have no recollection whatsoever about what happens in these issues. (I do recall Form & Void being a Hemingway parody, and the second book is perhaps the F. Stop Fitzgerald parody?

(Also note that Sim has stopped doing artwork for the covers, and is instead running indifferent landscape photos. Less work, eh?)

OK, let’s read “Sudden Moves”, and let’s all just be thankful that this is going to be a shorter blog post than normally. But on the other hand, there’s gonna be more Cerebus blog posts than I had anticipated, so it’s all eh

“… I spiked one back that drilled a hole in her metaphorical paddle” “Ding. Round One for me” Christ what an asshole.

Cerebus had been featuring various comics people for quite a while now, but Greg Hyland? That’s kinda obscure. And it’s a pretty nasty caricature. I mean, I assume it is; I’m not quite sure who he is… Let’s see… Oh, he did Lethargic Lad? Well, OK.

So — Jaka and Cerebus are travelling in Cirinist country — but apparently the Cirinists are really ensuring her passage in a kind of obsessive manner.

Wow, that’s a happy-looking Cerebus. Also a bit deranged-looking? Sim’s graphical depiction of both Cerebus and Jaka throughout this book is very engrossing.

Drama! Kevin Eastman said (in the Comics Journal) that Sim put his foot down on further reprints of the eight Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles issue (which features Cerebus).

(Also note “my preliminary scan for Comics Journal ‘Dave Sim slams’. Sort of a hobby with me.” Heh heh.)

Sim explains that it has more to do with getting a work-for-hire contract from Eastman’s people, and that he’s worried about firms reprinting the issue and then claiming the Cerebus trademark for themselves. Now, I’m not a lawyer, but that just seems pretty weird? I mean, I guess they could, and if it ends up in the courts — Marvel vs. Dave Sim — that’d be a drag… OK, perhaps Sim has a point.

Meanwhile, 20 years later, Sim reprinted the issue himself (in collaboration with Waverly Press). And there are… *counts on fingers* *counts on toes* *gives up and guesstimates instead* 34 different cover variations? And a bunch of other effluvia and more etc etc.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s nice that Eastman allowed that to happen, eh?

Sim starts including maps showing their travels, and I really like that — one thing that vexed me as a teenager was that I didn’t really have a feeling for the geography of Estarcion. I know, there was a map in early Cerebus issues, but I was too late to the party to see that, so I always felt at a loss when different invasions/etc were being discussed.

Probably not Lord Julius — probably one of his doubles, but that’s what Lord Julius would want us to think, eh?

I have to agree with Cerebus — that’s not a particularly beautiful mountain.

“The story line is done.” “Mothers & Daughters […] is really the end of the formal Cerebus story line.” So Sim wasn’t quite lying back in issue er 182? when he said that Cerebus was ending with issue #200.

I’ve been pondering (since yesterday!) doing a blog series about self publishers — that movement in the 90s was quite fascinating, and I think now mostly forgotten (except for Bone and… Bone). It might make for an entertaining (re-)read — starting about (say) 1991 and going up until the new millennium… We’ll see.

After being stuck in the tavern for 30 issues, this must have been a relief to draw. That is, the graphics become more playful again, and more interesting.

Oh yeah, the storyline — up until now, Jaka has seemed like a pretty smart cookie, carrying most of the dialogue and saying interesting stuff. The major crisis here is that (on their way back to Cerebus’ hometown), there are no more clothes stores, and Jaka just can’t stand wearing the same outfit two days in a row. She has a complete breakdown over that.

It just seems… you know… like total bullshit? I mean, character building wise? This was the best Sim was able to come up with?

On the other hand, my guess is that Sim meant to paint her as a complete ditz throughout this story, but it doesn’t really come off that way. I’ve talked before about the disconnect between Sim means to convey and how people read his work… The entire thing could be Sim going “see!? you morons! Jaka was never worth even thinking about! she’s a woman for God’s (may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) sake!”

One thing I have to say in Sim’s defence, though, is that he’s really good at actually depicting them together in a way that allows us to understand why they’d want to be together. I’m reading The Talented Mr. Ripley at the moment (only up to page 100 — NO SPOILERS), and Highsmith definitely isn’t good at this sort of stuff. Tom Ripley is able to charm his way into their lives, but Highsmith doesn’t give us even an inkling of why they’d want him in their lives: It’s stated that he’s charming, but he’s never shown to say anything even vaguely funny, or interesting, or well anything — so we have to take it on faith that when he’s not on the page, he’s just charming as all out. It’s like when an author writes “and then he told a joke that made everybody laugh” (I’ve seen sentences just like that in books), you know that the author wasn’t able to come up with an actual joke…

ANYWAYS. Sim’s better than that. Much better.

I think “Sudden Moves” is the best thing Sim has done since Church & State, really. It’s witty, but it’s filled with dread: Both Cerebus’ constant worry about losing Jaka, but also these little weird things that happen that we’re not quite sure have a meaning or not.

It’s tense, it’s a bit bewildering, and it is (dare I say it) exciting. This probably means that the next book is going to defuse everything and have it all mean nothing, so I’m keeping my enthusiasm curbed a bit.

Hey! Now I know who Trump reminds me of!

Sad.

Sim’s storytelling here really is gripping — they way the speech balloons start becoming annihilated when Jaka really can’t talk about this any more.

And then randomly, Alan Moore and Rick Veitch show up — and I’m not sure they actually bring anything to the storyline, but what the hey.

The dread. And what does it all mean! (Since this is Cerebus, probably not a lot.)

And then the book ends on an up note, I guess, but a qualified one.

It’s good! It’s actually good. So now I’m dreading the next book, because I just can’t believe that Sim kept it up.

Sim announces that he’s going to stop printing letters again for the duration of the next book, because he has so much to info to spew onto the readers (I’m paraphrasing) and he can’t afford to bump the size of the book back up to 32 pages (I’m guessing).

David Groenewegen writes in The Comics Journal #223, page 37:

When I read this story over 18 months as a part of Cerebus, I found it to
be, well, a bit dull. Fascinating in parts, but I did think more than once
“Jeez, Dave, why can’t we have a few issues where something actually hap-
pens?” In the past, the collected Cerebus phone books have been more
readable than the monthly issues, but I was convinced that Going Home
was not going to cut it.
After three years Of stories set in and
around the same pub, I was hoping that we
would see a return to the free-wheeling, fast-
paced Cerebus Of the past, where Dave Sim was
dealing with a thou-
sand things at once,
taking on the whole
world. Instead we got
a six-month walking
featuring
tour,
domestic arguments,
followed by a lengthy
boat trip, featuring
domestic arguments.
Great.
So my first read-
ing of Going Home, as
a monthly serial, was
a letdown. Having
finally freed himself
from the pub where
he had spent the pre-
Vious three years, talk-
ing to caricatures of
Dave Sim’s friends
and acquaintances,
Cerebus then spends “Sudden Moves” (the first
part of Going Home) traveling to other pubs
which are also run by caricatures of some of
Sim’s friends and acquaintances. Cenbus has
been criticized in the past for including too
many specific satires of various comic book
characters (largely manifested in the person of
the Roach), the argument being that this
deters the casual reader. I would argue that any
casual reader of the comic Who was not familiar
with the specific characters would still get the
general point: superheroes and their motiva-
tions generally make little or no sense.
However, Sim’s fondness for lampooning
his friends in print (a trend which has become
much more pronounced since the Roach was
sent on his “ray) seems to be a far more trou-
bling aspect of the book. partly, it is distracting
in the way that the procession of celebrity
cameos in The Player was distracting — you
spend more time worrying about “missing” a
celebrity (or in this case, a creator) than paying
attention to the plot. It almost becomes a test
Of the readeös indie credentials. While it’s a
cute game (and satisfying when you know the
answer), you have to question what it adds to
the work.
More worrying is the sense of insularity it
evokes. The early Cerebus books (High Society,
Church & State) dealt with “big” issues: politics,
sex, religion. Now Sim seems more concerned
With peering only at
his own little corner
of the world, just as
he seems to have
totally
withdrawn
from trying to sell his
book
anymore.
Increasingly Cerebus
seemed to be about
the process of creat-
ing Cerebus, in much
the same way as ’70s
rock stars wrote a lot
Of songs about how
tough life was when
you were a rock star.
Equally, I was
annoyed by what
seemed to be Sim
repeating himself.

[…]

The fact is, Going Home reads much better
as a continuous story than 18 individual issues.
In fact, it reads as a damn good Story.

[…]

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.

Tim Kreider writes in The Comics Journal #301, page 354:

This wildly
inconsistent quality is in evidence even within single volumes: Going Home is
composed oftwo distinct halves, one ofwhich is an account ofCerebus and
Jaka’s relationship deteriorating as Jaka sulks in bed, shops compulsively,
and retards their progress, careless of the dangers encroaching on them
Just Like a Woman — but the other, Time and the River (an F. Scott Fitzgerald
pastiche), is as good as anything Sim ever wrote. When I lent it to a friend I
advised her to skip the first half and start with Part II.

!!!

OK, I can’t find any more reviews specifically about “Sudden Moves”, so I think I’ll hold off quoting reviews until I’ve re-read the second book (i.e., tomorrow).

*phew*

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

Cerebus (1997) #220-231 by Dave Sim & Gerhard

OK, Rick’s Story.

Guys ended with Rick (Jaka’s ex husband) showing up randomly at Cerebus’ tavern, and Rick’s Story continues on from that. And yes, Rick’s appearance there seems to be “at random”, i.e., guided by god, as is usually the case in Cerebus. Sim’s not very good at manoeuvring his characters around in manner that makes much sense — it all happens because it happens.

Rick comes off as being yet another version of Sim — this time the funny storytelling one…

… that drinks way too much, has lots of female fans (Rick is a writer, of course)…

… and has mystical visions all of the time. Sounds very much like Sim himself, eh?

The dialogue with Alan Moore comes to an end (without any acrimony, which is pretty unusual for these things involving Sim), and Sim lets Moore get the last word. (Except for nothing that he thinks the Christian gospels are “regrettable Judaic corruptions”.)

Rick talks a lot, and he gets on Cerebus’ nerves, and…

… Cerebus has his little revenge by beating him in some game or other. It’s all kinda amiable? That is, Rick’s Story does have conflict, but it’s all kept on a lower level than we’ve seen before in Cerebus.

Rick is having visions constantly, apparently.

And he (amusingly) interprets everything as divine actions. Cerebus tells him (once again) that his arm isn’t broken, but this time he believes him, and thinks that Cerebus has healed him. If Rick is a Sim stand-in, Sim is being rather critical of himself? Gently poking fun of himself?

Sim receives a letter praising him, and he talks about the thought process that went into having Gerhard ink the lettering of a sign at the tavern and how nice it is that somebody noticed it. I did notice it, too — the sign was obviously written by Cerebus, and I just thought that it was a bit out of character for Cerebus to make the effort to write a sign like that, but then again — Cerebus’ character is malleable.

This reminds me of a thing I was thinking about the other day while reading some Cerebus discussion about Cerebus in a comment section. One person was wondering whether Sim’s early seemingly positive female characters had always been meant to be horrible people (as Sim would insist later), or whether Sim just changed his mind. And I’m honestly not sure. Things like this (with the sign) shows that Sim puts thought into things that are difficult to actually pick up on as a reader. So if you have a woman making a nice sandwich, the reader thinks “she’s making a nice sandwich”. While Sim may have been thinking “I’m depicting her with a knife, cutting bread, clearly emasculating men, and in particular with regards to the meanings attributed to bread in the Bible, so what I’m really depicting here is how Feminism is usurping Christianity, see?” *insert nice drawing of nice woman making a sandwich here*

Or he just made up that stuff later, and he was just drawing a nice woman making a nice sandwich. Hard to say.

And:

Even Joanne thinks that Rick might be Dave.

Sim can still bring the funny. Here we have Cerebus trying to suavely wash a window so that Rick and Joanne won’t think he’s spying on them (but he forgot to bring a rag).

Sim was up for “Best Letterer” at many, many Eisner awards.

Hm… these snaps are coming off too yellow. I mean, the newsprint has yellowed, but not this much. Lemme futz with the white balance a bit…

OK, that’s too blue — the pages aren’t this white — but let’s go with this anyway.

And… hoo boy. I hate reading cod King James’s Bible.

Joanne is the largest mystery in Guys/Rick’s Story — what is her deal, anyway? Is the a Cirinist spy?

Rick has had another revelation: Tarim’s real name is “God”.

Sim starts a four part essay: “Mama’s boys”. And it’s pretty interesting, actually! His analysis of the dynamics of being chosen last for sportsball, and how that ties up into super hero comics worship sounds cogent.

I’m never sure whether Sim is trying to make Joanne’s many, many hairdos as ridiculous as possible, or whether Sim just isn’t very good at doing hairdos.

As is usually the case in Cerebus, when things finally happen, they’re a bit on the “well that was abrupt” side: Rick doesn’t give Cerebus a chance to explain anything, but just casts a spell (!?) on him, and then leaves.

And then Dave shows up! What are the odds!

And he is telling Cerebus to leave, because we’re all tired of the tavern by now.

So how does that happen? Yes! Jaka! And as is Sim’s wont, she also seems to drop in — at random, without any planning — at Cerebus’ tavern. See? It’s much easier to make a story if you don’t have to have it make sense — Dave wanted Cerebus to get out of the tavern, so he sent Jaka there. (Or perhaps God did; you never know with Sim.)

And… Dave has turned wine into Coors. Nice touch!

Sim leans really hard into romance movie tropes for the meeting, and I have to admit that it works. These couple issues with Jaka at the end here are really, really cute. Almost makes up for the rather tedious King James bits.

And of course, to heighten the drama, Bear finally comes back. Cerebus had been waiting for him for months? years? And finally when he does, he has to choose between Bear and Jaka.

The choice really is no choice.

So that’s Rick’s Story — one of the shortest Cerebus books. It’s a pretty snappy read, too — the text bits are limited. But is it good? Like Sim, I felt we’d spent too much time at the tavern, but Rick’s Story isn’t as boring as Guys was.

David Groenewegen writes in The Comics Journal #263, page 121:

The strength of agendas are illustrated
in the stories told about Cerebus during
the story. Many are just single lines about
various perceptions of Cerebus the charac-
ter. Others are more substantial because
they show something being written about
Cerebus, while demonstrating him doing
something quite different. This happens
to a certain extent in Going Home, where
E Stop Kennedy interprets all of Cerebus’
actions in ways quite opposed to what hc
is actually doing, but is more visible in
Rick’s Story, in which Rick bases a bible on
Cerebus for no apparently logical reason
(although some ofit seems to be hero wor-
ship, and some revenge for Cerebus’ love
Of Jaka).
This can be read as a critique Of bibles
in general — that they are written by
humans, whose thoughts and prejudices
influence what they are writing, and
which create something quite different to
that which actually occurred.
Interestingly, Rick’s bible actually creates
an environment in which Cerebus can
become a messiah-like figure, despite the
fact chat much of it seems to be a particu-
larly nasty joke at his expense. So it serves
the purposes of moving the story along,
showing the power of words, while simul-
taneously inviting the reader, yet again, to
question what they are told and read.

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

Rick’s story
This is When I thought that I should
give it all up. I couldn’t soldier on. I could-
read it any more. If Jakd$ Story was the
pinnacle, this was my personal nadir. I
may never read these issues again, and I
sometimes wonder if I’ll ever read the
series again. Why put myself through it
all? To relive my sense of youthful wonder?
Don’t they have drugs for that?

I get the feeling that people didn’t really like Rick’s Story:

Who else never expected to see Rick again? I’d have to think that most people thought he was gone for good after the events in Jaka’s Story. Honestly, it might have been for the best if he had stayed gone, because this ends up being the most forgettable of all the books so far.

Oh, Sim wanted to point out that he isn’t Rick?

Sim prefaces the book by saying he isn’t Rick and was unsure if this was true or not when began reading this. Because Rick, like Sims, has gotten into this religious interpretation of the things that happen in his life that are annoying to misogynist. But the key difference is that Rick lets go of the bar eventually whereas Sims is still so charmed with his barfly life he consecrated two books to his drinking days.

Heh:

Except that while researching Rick’s Story by reading the Bible and the Koran, Sim realised what he was reading was, in his eyes, the Actual Truth, and was born again to a syncretic and highly individual religion which we’ll all learn more about in later books. But this, obviously, coloured what he’s doing in Rick’s Story – it’s no longer a lifelong atheist parodying religious texts, but a devout new believer in those texts parodying them.

Well, that’s an unusual take:

Melmoth is almost unreadable, but that is ok as you can skip it and go straight to Flight. The next few are hit and miss, with Rick’s Story being the last good book. Best just to stop there.

Is this Dave Sim?

Jeff – That essay was definitely written a) to try and find a positive spin on my mother and b) before my mother retired and both she and my Dad went seriously, alcoholically, “wonky” which made what few positive things I had said about my mother in the essay REALLY REALLY pointless.

The account says “Unknown”… This is in response to the final part of “Mama’s Boys”, which was a pretty weird one: It was all about how perfect his mother was. It didn’t seem to have anything much to do with the previous parts, and it turns out that they had a pretty strained relationship — and both parents were alcoholics? (This is if “Unknown” is Sim, which seems to be the case from the responses, but I dunno.)

Right:

This is the volume that changed Dave’s life fairly drastically. As I recall, he had mostly put his partying days behind him, but was still what he would call an athiest and fornicator. Rick’s Story was originally meant to be a parody of the bible, and indeed, it still is, especially in the context of the ridiculous origins of religion (I wonder if Jesus was also 3 feet tall and gray). In doing research for the text sections of the book, Dave was reading the bible itself to understand its tone, and in doing so, came away with the belief that the bible really is the word of god. His personal religion has since come to combine Judaism and Islam, but at the time he was apparently rocked pretty hard by Christianity, and that set him on the path that he’s on now—a pretty religiously dedicated fellow who prays multiple times a day and fasts on (I think) Sundays.

And I note that this is the final blog post from this guy’s Cerebus Re-Read — about a decade ago, there was a spate of blogs about people re-reading Cerebus, and most of them stopped way before reaching the end. That almost happened with this blog series, too, I guess. :-/

OK, only four more blog posts to go for me, and I’m home free.

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

Cerebus (1995) #201-219 by Dave Sim & Gerhard

In this blog series, we’ve kinda sorta reached new territory for me. As a teenager, I read the first 50 issues many times — let’s say er seven times. And then I read the issues up to about #80 a handful of times. And now I’ve read the issues between #80 and #200 three times in total. (I did a re-read of all the issues up until #200 in 1995, because I bought the Mothers & Daughters issues in non-sequential order on account of me being a poor student.)

But #201 to #300 — I’ve only read these issues once, as they were published. And some I didn’t so much read as skim, as I’d already grown pretty tired of it all. So I haven’t looked at these issues in 20-30 years, and I remember virtually nothing of what happens in them, except… er… I think the Three Stooges show up at one point? And Todd McFarlane leads a revolution? And then there’s bible stuff, and then Cerebus dies and goes to hell.

Ooops spoilers.

Well, OK, I remembered more than I thought I did? But I don’t remember what’s happening in Guys at all, so despite being less than enthused by Cerebus now, I’m rather looking forward to reading these issues.

I do remember there being discussions on alt.comics at the time about whether Sim really had been serious about Cerebus ending with #200 after all, because Sim tied up all the loose ends, and explained just about everything that anybody had ever wondered about Estarcion during Mothers & Daughters. (As well as killing off a number of central characters, and removing others from the playing field.) So the talk was that the last third of Cerebus was an epilogue where nothing much happens — it’d be Sim’s way of showing what happens after a “The End” in a traditional novel. I remember not being very taken with that theory, but we’ll see…

The first issue of this carries on the “rah rah self publishers” thing that so dominated the last quarter of the Mothers & Daughters comics.

OK, that thing ended with Dave sending Cerebus back to Estarcion, and he now seems to be ensconced in a rural tavern. Kinda like what was happening in Eddie Campbell’s Bacchus at the time?

Eep! I swear, when I had that thought, I didn’t remember that Bacchus was in this, too. And… I had also repressed that Sim was going to feature his most dialect heavy characters (Prince Mick and The Beatles) in this, too. I vaguely remember back then being exasperated, because some of these speech balloons are rather tedious to try to work out. But if you read them out loud, it’s OK. Still, not my favourite way to read comics.

The Beatles are nice matriarchal boys while the Rolling Stones boys are real rebels, see? See?

Well, that’s an efficient infodump, eh?

Sim continues the memoir he started back in issue #200…

And we get a preview of some self published comic, so things are basically as usual, ey?

Friends of Jilly… did Sim have a beef with Friends of Lulu, which was getting started around the time?

Then! With the second issue of Guys, Sim announces that he’s going to stop his campaigning for various comics issues (where “various” is defined as “self publishing”) and just concentrate on doing the comics. Like his peers. What he’s not saying, though, is that around this time, most of the self publishers stopped. Self publishing, that is — most of the most popular ones went and signed up with Image, Dark Horse, Sirius or the like, so I guess the general air of depression is easy to explain.

Bear is angry at Cerebus — for good reasons.

Sim drops the letters pages, and also drops the previews. He says that it’s because of reasons, but this also means that the page count drops from the previous norms of 40-48 pages to 24 pages. Which has to help with the printing bills. He doesn’t mention what the circulation is at this point: It had dropped to 15K at the end of Melmoth, and then gone up to 25K during the early, fun parts of Mothers & Daughters. Meanwhile, the comics market had undergone another meltdown, and I don’t think many people were enthused by the last half of Mothers & Daughters, so I’m curious what the circulation was now…

Oh yeah, I didn’t really mention what Guys is about: It’s about Cerebus being exiled to a tavern (by Cirin), and he spends his time being drunk and talking to Bear (his only friend) and other people at the tavern. And passing out drunk a lot, and being incoherent. I’m guessing Sim had a lot of first hand experiences with being a black-out drunk?

Sim manages to squeeze in a comics convention in the tavern while Cerebus is semi conscious. Here we get some dialogue from Daniel Clowes, presumably (based on the lettering). “Something worthy of being next to my work.”

Cerebus isn’t happy.

Sim writes a mystifying er essay to Friends of Lulu, asking them to… er… allow men to be members? And to stand by the first amendment? It’s a bizarre letter, anyway.

For the first time in Cerebus (I think!), Sim starts the story on the inside front cover. I guess these bits are done in a way that doesn’t necessitate including them in the reprint books — it’d be pretty awkward…

Lots of people involved in self publishing turns up for a few pages each. Here’s Rick Veitch, looking dreamy.

Sim’s memoirs continue, but he says that he has some difficulties with the entire thins… and “Next: Final Chapter” — that doesn’t happen.

That’s a lovely drawing. Did Gerhard do it all? Hm… I’m guessing Sim did the birds, at least — they look like Sim birds. But I’m not sure at all. The wall looks very Gerhardian.

Friends of Lulu write back and say “eh? no”.

And then Sim wants to include something in their newsletter as an exchange for carrying something from Friends of Lulu in Cerebus, and their response is, and I paraphrase exactly: “Fuck off, asshole”.

No, we’re not spared text pieces in Guys, either. This guy seems particularly irrelevant, but I guess Sim wanted to show that there was some resistance to Cirin in the wider populace…

After having hurt Bear’s feelings one to many times, Cerebus decides to stop drinking…

… and then Cerebus has to suffer being the sober guy in a room full of drunk guys. The horror. The horror.

Sim is devoid of feelings, as always.

Cerebus’ sobriety is shattered when he becomes too horny.

In Estarcion, they had periodicals (like pulps), but Don Simpson arrives with a new invention: Comic books! Cerebus is an immediate fan.

Oh, I didn’t know about that one. I guess sales picked up again, and Sim had the first four issues of Guys collected?

The others in the tavern aren’t fans of Wanker Man, the new comic book, and Cerebus throws a hissy fit, and…

… Bear reads him the riot act. And… it’s not that this seems out of character for Bear, exactly, or that it’s not… “interesting”… but god, it’s pretty tedious, isn’t it? I think Guys is the first Cerebus book where I’m just kinda bored? Nothing much happens, and there aren’t really many interesting characters, and most of the jokes fall flat.

The Comics Journal sure takes up a lot of mind space in Sim’s head…

On some of the issues, the action starts on the cover…

… and continues over the inside front cover. But again, I guess these are designed to work so that they can be elided in the reprint books.

We do get some letters pages, and sometimes the page count creeps up to 32 again, but Cerebus is a lot more… quiet? than it used to be, filled with different voices as it were.

Bear’s ex returns, and Bear turns to mush. His girlfriend seems nice?

Which reminds me of this interview I found while doing research yesterday:

O: Much of your commentary on feminism has centered on how inherently illogical, irrational, and emotional women are. At the same time, Cerebus, your central male character, seems more emotional, irrational, and illogical than just about anyone in the series. Is that because he’s a hermaphrodite, and has female elements? Or because he allows himself to be controlled by women? Or is there more to it?

DS: Well, yes, each of those aspects figure into it. Like in Guys, when Bear finally blows up at him and says it’s like he’s… part chick… or something. Married guys, boyfriends, newly divorced guys, and guys—like Cerebus—who are permanently stuck on a chick that they might never even have slept with, or they might have broken up with 10 years before, are like that. Part chick. That was my joke with Bear. He had broken up with Ziggy long enough ago that he could see clearly again, and could come up with the observation that Cerebus was part chick. But as soon as Ziggy came back, POW. Bye-bye Bear. And, when he turns up again after their next inevitable breakup, he’s 50 pounds overweight and his hair has turned white. I finally stopped hanging around with guys when I realized that they were all just waiting for the next one to come along and stick an ice-pick in their brain.

So Sim eventually discovered that guys were kinda lame, too — not just women. I guess Guys is somewhat autobiographical?

Cerebus gets in touch with his emotions — so he’s really changed by his encounter with Dave…

Still, his character changes at the drop of a hat. Not a lot happens in Guys, but on this page, Cerebus is back to being hyper effective and perceptive, and challenges Cirin directly. It’s not really that convincing, storytelling wise, but it’s at least… something.

And it is fun when Joanne shows up, and Cerebus earnestly tries to explain that they’re all fictional and stuff.

*gasp*

As always, some sequences are somewhat inscrutable. Cerebus is throwing a piece of chalk, and… uhm… is he allergic to chalk or something?

Sim starts a long correspondence with Alan Moore. From Hell had just wrapped, so I guess Moore had some time on his hands.

Sim runs excerpts from different mid century modern male novelists on the inside front covers — but he only says in the succeeding issue who he’s quoting. Why not? But I guess this means that he’s giving himself an education in what’s considered “good literature” to see who he’s going to do next and try to get some attention from The New York Times or something. So he’s reading Mailer, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc etc::

Let’s take Fantagraphics as an example. What do they bring to the table that attracts my interest? This is difficult to condense, but basically, Gary and Kim have worked very hard to make Fantagraphics and all of its material “New York Times-worthy” and they’ve been very successful. Very successful, which is no small trick. So, I look at my catalogue and I go, “What have I got that’s New York Times-worthy?” My best guess would be Form & Void, the Hemingway book, or Going Home, the Fitzgerald book.

On the other hand, perhaps this occurred to him only afterwards… but the grumblings about Daniel Clowes in these issues seem to indicate otherwise.

I have to admit it: I didn’t real the Alan Moore/Dave Sim letters this time around, either. Sorry!

OK, back to Guys: Cerebus has a bad dream and tells Joanne to get out.

And Rick, Jaka’s ex husband, shows up, and Guys ends.

I guess Guys functions like Melmoth — it gives the reader a breather between more momentous storylines. But at 19 issues, it’s a bit of a slog: Sim’s insights into the World Of Guys aren’t that interesting, and we only get a smattering of interesting things about Estarcion. And especially ending the book on this note feels like a depressed move.

The Comics Journal #192, page 82:

Does being brought face tofate with all these
turns change the character at all?
SIM: eah, I think it does. The evidence in the early
parts of Guys would indicate that he’s made progress
just in being polite, “Please and thank you.” A lot of
people — myself included — get to a point in their
lives where it is well worth taking a refresher course in
“please and thank you” as a first on the road back
to real progress. Drunk, Ofcourse, erebus is a differ-
ent fella. That would indicate he’s using alcohol to
escape what he’s leamed about “please and thankyou.”
When the alcohol is free and ids really all there is to do
[laughs] that can make for quite an impediment.
Which is what I intended it to be.

The Comics Journal #192, page 84:

SAJRGEON: Do you get reaction from your fellow profes-
sionals ? Doyou seek it out at alluhen you complete a major
uvrk?
Slk No, I don’t really seek it out. There are social
occasions and things like that. [laughs] Creators have
great skills at avoiding saying anything bad on social
occasions. “Saw Y)ur last issue. “What did you think?”
“It was interesting.” The ones I’ve talked to love Guys.
n ey admired the guts behind doing Reads and [laughs]
the relief Of Minds. “Finally, an issue I won’t have to
fight about over the dinner table.” Everyone loves to
laugh, though, so Guys tends to generate real affection.
I do get Gerhard’s reaction just by watching him read
the pages and what he’ll say — or not say— after. But
mostly reaction is, naturally enough, an after-the-fact
curiosity. I know what I think Of it. I put it on the page
so that, in as much as I’m capable Of doing that, it
reflects what I wanted it to reflect. And then after that
comes the reaction. And that can be a comment from
somebody, it can be a re&iew, it can be a letter. any of
those kinds ofthings. And those all tend to, for me, just
stay in the mental box tucked over in the corner. Good,
bad, or indifferent, it’s just an item ofcuriosity. “What
are people going to think of this?” is a natural question
when you’re working on something. And then six
months later, you find out. “Oh, tha/s what they made
of it.” And thaes very different from “Did this accom-
plish what I wanted it to.”

The Comics Journal #192, page 89:

SAnGEON: Has your drinking informed the portrayal Of
drinking in Cerebus?
SIN: Oh, definitely. The nature of social activity that
surrounds drinking, the effect that drinking has on
that social activity, ids a fascinating subject to me. I’m
not sure drinking could be viewed as Guys’ primary
theme, but it is certainly one of the themes of Guys.
Each theme lye introduced into the various volumes
has represented a large societal force with a multi-
layered examination of it: “Whaes funny about it?
What’s tragic about it? What’s the good side and
whaes the bad side of this double edged sword?”
Whether it’s love or religion or politics or death or any
of those things or motherhood, there’s always a good
side and a bad side. It’s, “Isn’t this interesting, isn’t this
something that is certainly worth the treatment?”
SAJAGEON: Cerebus’ overdrinking bar aluuys been a big
comedic you, particularly early on.
Yeah, yeah; that’s always been there — as it has
always been there in our culture. We’ve just come
through 20 years of regressive political correctness so
that somebody like Foster Brooks who did a really
good drunk character or the foundation of Dean
Martin’s stand-up act, all of those things became “Oh,
thaes not funny” and i€s like, “Fuck you, I think it’s
funny.” I like it; it’s interesting doing something that
is at odds with 1990s society. les interesting in devel-
oping it in Guys because obviously I’m writing dialogue
and the first requirement is, “Okay, think of the guys
thatyou know, how would they say this? Ifit’s a specific
character like Harrison Starkey, okay, what are the
exact vocals rhythms or what not?” It’s only after I get
it all in place and it satisfies my critical faculties: “Yes.
this is the way guys talk. This is accurate.” Only at that
point do I look at it relative to what is allowed and what
isn’t allowed in the 1990s. And then “Whoa!” [laughs]
“People just don’t say stuff like this anymore.” Well,
yeah, they do. They just don’t Say it in front ofwomen
or on television.

OK, over to reviews on the web:

Maybe it’s the black & white art, but there are too many moments where I found myself bored.

Heh:

I know Dave meant the living situation depicted in this book to be negative, but I can’t help but read it thinking, “not too shabby.” Who wouldn’t want to live their days in leisure, with no employment obligations, and unlimited free time to socialize, read, play games, and get hammered? I guess it says something about my nature that I reacted this way—I hate obligation and live for absolute freedom from time. I’ll never get it, of course, which is why this book appeals to me. Life, eh?

Heh:

It’s all beautifully told, low-stakes stuff and Sim doubtless had a lot of fun kicking back after the fireworks (on-and off-page) of Mothers & Daughters. But he also had a higher concept for the storyline. Guys is drawn from a boozy stretch he spent as a single regular in a Candadian pub, and he claimed he wanted it to reflect how men really are when they’re on their own, away from female influence, shootin’ the shit, followin’ the bro code, doing (as Bear puts it) “guy shit” instead of “chick shit”.

And if so, man alive, Dave Sim needed better friends.

Sure:

Getting back to the artwork on display… The shot at Dan Clowes always annoyed me. Maybe Dave lumps everyone published by Fantagraphics together as an evil Grothian horde of snide pretentiousness, but while Gary actually has called people “meretricious philistines” in print, I really can’t imagine Clowes speaking like that.

This is the most insightful thing I’ve read about Guys:

Maybe it’s different in North America, maybe I don’t know the right sort of manly men, but the action in Guys is unrecognisable to me. It’s hard to enjoy the book in the bros-forever sense Sim apparently wants because not one interesting conversation happens, not one good joke is told. Mostly what we get is issue after issue of guys being dickheads to one another and laughing about it afterwards. He should have called it BANTZ.

Exactly.

Anyway: Tomorrow is Rick’s Story, I guess, and I remember that starting off well enough, and then turning to zzz-dom. We’ll see.

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

Cerebus (1994) #187-200 by Dave Sim & Gerhard

In today’s sermon, we’re doing the final book of Mothers & Daughters — “Minds”. And at 14 issues, it’s the longest book, but oddly enough, the most focused one.

Is that Sim? Or perhaps Astoria? Nah, she has a stronger jaw line, and she’d never wear that sort of earring.

This book could have been called Aaardvaaaarks… in Spaaaace, because it’s Yet Another Ascension, but this time it’s both Cirin and Cerebus who travel into space.

Cirin seems very knowledgeable about what’s going on, and Cerebus (despite having done this kind of thing before) is clueless as usual.

The reactions to “Reads” — where Sim explicated on depth that women are (and I paraphrase slightly) “doo doo heads” — start arriving in full. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, many of the readers weren’t really convinced by Sim’s arguments.

(One point here — Sim says that he’d drafted the text pages a few years earlier. And in a later letter column he says that he was a virtual recluse from 89-92, seldom leaving his neighbourhood — which brings certain visions of how it was written to mind…)

But I get the feeling that Sim is a bit distracted during these issues. Not only because of the “Reads” fallout, but because the US comics market was going through changes.

Not only was Sim trying (and succeeding) in getting a self publishing movement off the ground, but distributors were behaving oddly (and soon there’d be a serious implosion, leaving only a single distributor standing). So here he’s organising a travelling self publishing … festival? Centred around himself and Gerhard visiting cities, and inviting other self publishers to join him. It’s not clear how much of a cynical move this was (later pronouncements that he was using other self publisher as cannon fodder and the like can be take with some grains of salt, I think).

Oh yeah, Cerebus and Cirin fight a lot.

Fortunately Sim doesn’t move whatever he’s nattering on about here into the story pages of Cerebus, but he probably didn’t have room, anyway, since he’s very strict about sticking to the 20 story pages per issue format. (He varies the size of the issues a lot, though — I think the largest one in this batch is 48 pages long.)

And that’s because of the letters and essays and speeches, but also because of the previews. Remember Paul Pope? Everybody were super excited about him for about half a year (me included), and then not so much. Not just because his comics stopped being as interesting, but also because of his weirdo politics. It’s like Pope managed to speed run the Dave Sim Career Arc in a couple years.

Hey! I don’t have that book! Aargh. I mean, this is supposed to be a complete blog series about Renegade Press and Aardvark Vanaheim’s comics… OK, just bought it from ebay now, so I guess I’ll talk about it (out of sequence) in a couple weeks.

Sim doesn’t just spend a lot of attention on comics industry things — he starts running ads for the Cerebus World Tour on the front cover, also including covers from participating artists. That’s pretty unique.

And… he starts putting the comics industry essays at the start of the issues, which is perhaps going a bit overboard. That has to hurt sales, right? People picking up a random issue in a comics store would be even more befuddled than usual.

Also note how he’s expanded the credits in the left hand column — he’s being very explicit about who’s doing what, and he’s even started to list Diana Schutz as the proffreader; a job she’d been doing for many years.

Oh yeah, there’s a Cerebus storyline happening here in between all the essays, isn’t there? Yes, and it has some really great artwork, and very interesting storytelling choices… occasionally. There’s like a half a dozen striking sequences (like this one, where we see (well, we don’t see Cerebus) Cerebus as a child, running around in the garden with a kitchen fork, imagining himself conquering a city). It’s good stuff.

In the previous books, we’d gotten a lot of infodumps about What’s Really Happening in Cerebus’ world, but there’s less of that here. But we do learn that it seems like people there don’t see Cerebus as we do — they see him as an oddlooking human, and not as an aardvark.

The previews continue, with more or less known people. Here’s Stephen Blue.

Heh heh — that sounds like the genuine way religious people talk about their gods in their heads.

Looks like a real festival kinda thing.

Heh heh.

It seems like Sim was really successful at getting people all het up about getting rid of publishers. The US direct market was (for a bright, shiny moment) a place where that really could happen — because comics books are sold non-returnable, and the distributors would carry everything, you could feasibly do it all yourself (if by “yourself” you mean “have a girl/boyfriend that does the work for you”) and have a viable way to make a living. It didn’t really work out well for most of them, but a lot of interesting books were published during these years…

… including Eddie Campbell’s Bacchus. And up to the left we see the amazing Cerebus/Bacchus crossover! Whoho!

And finally…

… the “Dave” character appears explicitly. He’s Cerebus’ creator, and he wants to have a serious talk with Cerebus.

Unfortunately, he’s Sim’s most boring creation — he blathers on in a way that makes Suentus Po seem like a master of wit. I wonder why Sim kept the driest of the history lessons for the Dave character…

Seth writes in to roll his eyes at Sim, and Sim answers at a totally normal length.

There aren’t that many pages like this in Cerebus, which is perhaps a bit surprising? I mean, Sim spends so much time doing previews and shows, but none of these kinds of things (which might perhaps be more effective at selling books).

Those lovable scamps over at The Comics Journal take out an ad in Cerebus.

What Dave has to tell Cerebus is mostly about how Cirinism was started, and how it’s such a stable form of governance that it’ll never be toppled. I don’t quite remember what happens after issue #200 — doesn’t Cerebus finally conquer everything?

I guess we’ll find out over the next week or some… I may well misremember what happens in the last 100 issues.

But there are some revelations here — like how Cirin isn’t Cirin.

Sim gets into more totally normal things, like telling the distributors who they should hire and stuff.

It’s wartime! The distributors are in a flux, and Marvel starts self distributing, disrupting everything!

Cerebus, of course, wants to know why he can’t just be with Jaka.

Hey! Charles Vess!

And Dave shows Cerebus what would happen if he were to change their characters enough to get them together — it never ends happily, because Cerebus is who Cerebus is. Which is… somewhat risible, because Cerebus shifts around as Sim needs him to: Sometimes he’s super duper hyper competent and things are moving, but then Sim doesn’t know how plot further from that, so then suddenly Cerebus is a moron. But Dave isn’t necessarily Sim, so the question is whether this all makes sense and/or is compelling within the comic book? And… nope. The entire plot line of Mothers & Daughters is yet another retread, where we’re returned to where we were before we started, and it’s getting pretty tedious by this point.

But you do feel that Sim’s annoyance with the Cerebus character is genuine. (Also see: “Projection”.)

(Speaking of dictionaries, Sim’s doesn’t have “a recurring element” as one of the definitions, apparently.)

And so “Minds” end, and… eh. It didn’t feel like Sim’s heart was in it. It’s perhaps not the worst book in Mothers & Daughters, but it’s a runner up.

But there’s an epilogue in #200! Heh heh.

Is that Gerhard? It’d make more sense if it were Sim, but it looks nothing like Sim.

And… Sim starts writing a memoir?

Well, what can I say about Mothers & Daughters as a whole? “Flight” is pretty exciting. In “Women”, the plot doesn’t move forward, and instead Sim spends most of his time continuing to kill off his “fantasy” characters. Both books are really good reads, though — propulsive and we get to know a lot about Estarcion (and it’s interesting stuff to boot). “Reads” is a bore. And “Minds” is a wet fart.

It’s pretty much how all of Cerebus books go: They start off being really exciting, and then they run out of steam before returning us to some status quo.

Hero Illustrated #24, page 16:

THE INDEPENDENCE
TOUR ROLLS ON
Diminished turnout in Columbus and
Seattle can’t dampen Spirits
The Spirits of
Independence Tour rolls
on: after its first show in
Austin, TX, in mid-
February (an event
Hepcats publisher/cre-
ator Martin Wagner
dubbed “an anti-conven-
tion”), the Tour recently
stopped in Columbus,
OH and Seattle, WA.
According to all
reports, nearly 200
people came to the
Columbus show (held on
March 12) to see small-
press creators and self-
publishers, including
Dave Sim (publisher of
Cerebus and founder of
the Spirits Tour),
Gerhard, Stephen
Bissette ( Tyrant), Don
Simpson (Don
Simpson’s Bizarre
Heroes), Steve Conley
(Avant Guard) and con-
vention host Paul Pope
“l was really happy with
how many people
showed up,” Hayes said.
“It has to do with the way
I’ve seen Seattle cons go.
Generally, if there’s no
Marvel or DC interest run-
ning through the room,
not [many] people show
up. This was an impres-
Sive thing, and as far as
I’m concerned it did what
it was supposed to do:
inform people and ..
show ‘ern there’s more of
a world of independents
than you would be led to
believe.”
Sim noted that the pay-
ing attendance was down
from the initial Austin
show: “We could virtually
disappear by Kitchener
[Ontario, Canada] the
final stop of the tour,” he
laughed, “but I don’t think
that’s going to happen.
What was interesting is
(THB). Columbus’ Central City
Comics acted as the “retailer” for
the stop.

Bart Beaty writes in The Comics Journal #263, page 117:

Minds
I read Cerebus every month
while I was in grad school, which
started for me about the time that
Minds was published. After mov-
ing to Montreal I quickly found
the best (English) comic-book
store in the city (the now sadly
departed Nebula Books), and
picked up an issue a month for
the next six years.
My time in graduate school
was a period of rebirth for my
interest in comics. Despite the
fact (or because of the fact?) that
few of my fellow students took
notice of the form, I dove back in
head first. This was the early
“boom” period, and most
of what I saw left me cold. A few
streets over, however, French
bookstores were offering the
whole history of Franco-Belgian
comics, and within a few years I
stumbled across the emerging
French small-press. My interest in
American comics waxed and
waned, but Cerebus remained a
constant.
In my classes I increasingly
took to using comics as examples
of just about any point that I
wanted to make about mod-
ernism, post-modern ism, and
every u ism” in between. In the
end, I wrote my Masters thesis (in
part) about Classics Illustrated,
and my PhD dissertation was
about Fredric Wertham. My
interest in these subjects derived
from the ongoing connection to
the fortn that I felt as a Cerebus
reader. Not only had this comic
kept me within this obscure sub-
culture, but now it was expanding
to shape the direction Of my
scholarly and professional career.
I once thought that there
might be a good dissertation in
the pages Of Cereous, but now I’m
not sure. I still find myself won-
dering if Sim would grant the
rights to reproduce images from
his work to an academic press.

Tom Spurgeon writes in The Comics Journal #179, page 129:

I admire the work of Dave Sim and Chester Brown.
But as comics, the kind you buy at the comic Store
to take home and read, Cerebus and Undenvater are
busts.
Tne recent addition
of Spirits Of Indepen-
dence tour dates to
the cover of Cerebus
was the symbolic
final nail in the cof-
fin for that comic’s
transition from Cere-
bus to The Dave Sim
Show starring Cembus,
Editorials now leap
off the inside front
cover and push the
comics back three Or
four pages. Add the
space for formal edi-
torials to that set aside for letters, transcripts, and
previews, and editorial content dominates the
magazine. I don’t presume to tell Sim what to pub-
1ish in his magazine; indeed, I envy the circulation
he enjoys with his forum. But I can’t help thinking
the serialized Cerebus chapters are the carrot Of-
fered the weekly comics shopper so they’ll enter
into Dave’S World. At worst, this may be the alter-
native comics’ version of the foil-embossed cover,
pandering to the desires of Cerebus fans to remain
up-to-date on the latest story in order to get them to
buy something which is at heart completely differ-
eat. At best, it’s an unbalanced read.

The Comics Journal #192, page 82:

SAJRGEON: While #186 seems to be a big moment of
transformationforyou and (potentially) your readersbi?,
it doem’t seem that Cerebus’ comes until the last book m
Mothers and Daughters. What exactly is the transfor-
mative moment that brings about the reflective moment in
Minds? Tbefigbt with Cirin? The loss ofJaka? Meeting
•Dave?’
All three. All three and the accumulation of his
experiences up to that point, some ofwhich registered
at a conscious level and some at the unconscious level.
How do you think your life should end, given who you
are and what you’ve done? What do you think you
deserve? It’s a valid question for anyone to ask them-
selves, in my view.
Does being brought face tofate with all these
turns change the character at all?
SIM: eah, I think it does. The evidence in the early
parts of Guys would indicate that he’s made progress
just in being polite, “Please and thank you.” A lot of
people — myself included — get to a point in their
lives where it is well worth taking a refresher course in
“please and thank you” as a first on the road back
to real progress. Drunk, Ofcourse, erebus is a differ-
ent fella. That would indicate he’s using alcohol to
escape what he’s leamed about “please and thankyou.”
When the alcohol is free and ids really all there is to do
[laughs] that can make for quite an impediment.
Which is what I intended it to be.
SNAGEON: In one ofourprevious sessions, you talkedabout
being surprised (andlaughingyour ass of) that all Cerebus
•wanted to knou about was
Yes. A great moment. One ofthose times when I
know that the 18 years of hard work was worth it.
SAJRGEON: How does this view ofmissedopportunities and
(perhaps) wrong turns work with your belief in
synchronicity? A lot of what Cerebus is told happened to
him as a child has echoes in what ends up happening, but
the point Of What tells him is that he missed some
major opportunities. These Seem mutually exclusive to me.
I don’t think you get disconnected from the
intricate web in which we all finction. If you miss an
opportunity, you will get echoes ofthe missed oppor-
tunity. Rick Veitch alluded to the same thing at the
end of The One — the rousing orgasmic conclusion
which is “just a bit Off One Ofmy fivorite jokes is the
guy dressed as Napoleon bursting into the psychiatrises
offce and saying “Doctor! You must help me! I think
I’m Jesus Christ. ” The doctor looks him up and down
and says, “But you’re dressed like Napoleon.” And the
guy says, “You don’t understand — I am Napleon —
but I think I’m Jesus Christ.” Cerebus was convinced
from an early age that he was destined for greatness.
And he achieved greatness of a kind — a so-so prime
minister who didn’t accomplish anything, a so-so pope
who didn’t accomplish anything. Political leaders tend
to have charmed lives and what impediments there are
in their lives tend to be temporary setbacks or minor
impediments that can be gotten rid Of. Most of them
have a sense of destiny that gets Rilfilled when they
reach that highest omce — prime minister or presi-
dent. At that point we all get to watch the offce
magnifr the flaws they didn’ t correct in themselves on
the way to their predestined summit. It makes great
theater.

Wizard Magazine #52, page 110:

AARDVARK-VANAHEIM A 300-issue plan might
sound pretty darn ambitious, but hey, when you’re on #200, it’s not
that big a deal. No, no, wait. Itis a big deal, but the whole 300 thing
is kinda… Aw, skip it. You know what we mean.
Considered the Rock of Gibraltar of the small press, Dave Sim’s
Cerebus is experiencing a rather drastic change in its status quo (as
you can probably tell with the art to the right of this). Yes, the short
ill-tempered aardvark known as Cerebus loses an eye. (Y ‘know,
that’s gotta hurt really, really, really, reeeeeally bad.)
Cerebus #200 ends the current Cerebus storyline titled “Minds,” and
also serves as the conclusion of the giant 50-issue “Mothers & Daugh-
ters” opus, as well as a journey of self-discovery for Cerebus. Sim says
of the issue, “I’m not sure if it’s going to represent a change in his char-
acter. We’ll have to wait for the last 100 issues to find that out. As
Cerebus’ creator, I’m certainly giving it the old college try to find some
sort of spark of life underneath that gray, obnoxious exterior, and see
if he can’t become a better character for it.”
This gala issue leads into the next Cerebus opus, titled “Guys,” and
sets up the rest of the Cerebus saga for the last 100 issues. (Geez, didn’t
it seem like the ha16Nay point, #150, just passed? We’re gettin’ old, man.)
—Big Picks written by Craig Shutt

Right:

I wish the exposition of the Serna/Cirin backstory had not come as a Deux Ex Machina moment in this book. “Dave” telling Cerebus this information feels to me a bit like grasping straws – “What do I fill the issue with now?” or alternately, “I don’t want any of the backstory I made up for the novel that no one may ever see going to waste – howabout inserting a little into the current issue?”. So we are treated to a great deal more exposition about how much of what Cerebus has experienced in the preceding issues fits into his life

Hm…:

I was really pissed off by this book the first time around. Thought the ending of the Mothers and Daughters saga was an incredible cop-out, that Dave had run out of good ideas and the rest of the run would be dull as hell. Having already read 60+ issues after this book, I can see it a bit differently now. It seems necessary for the being behind the whole Ascention to be… but that would be telling. It makes sense. Kind of takes some of the fun out of the presumed naivete of the series, but it had to be done.

Uhm…:

Minds puts the last nail in the coffin of role-playing, eliminating the need for the Viktor Davis proxy by having Dave reveal himself, as himself, to Cerebus. He freely speaks to Cerebus as Cerebus’ creator and in doing so sets the stage for Sim to understand his own relationship to God. Issue #200 was released in 1995. Sim leaves behind atheism for monotheism a few years later in 1998 (I think). It is almost like Sim forces God to reckon with Sim in the same way Sim forced his audience to cleave to him in Reads. Ballsy.

No, Sim says he believes in God during Minds.

Anyways! Hotcha! 23-skidoo, gramps! I’m outta here. Tomorrow: Guys.

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