The Simplest Thing In The World: Modifying Keymaps in Wayland

To remap the PrtSc key to the Hyper modifier key under Wayland with Gnome Shell on Ubuntu/Debian on the 28th of April 2024 (around noon) with a us keyboard mapping (I’m hedging my bets here), put the following in the ~/.config/xkb/symbol/us file:

partial alphanumeric_keys modifier_keys
xkb_symbols "hyper" {
    name[Group1]= "Hyper (US)";
    include "us(basic)"
    key <PRSC> { [ Hyper_L ] };
    modifier_map Mod3 { <PRSC> };
};

And then log out and back in again.

That’s it. That’s definitely all I had to say. Or perhaps…

Yes, it’s bitching and moaning time again, but I feel like I’m entitled — because I’ve been struggling with this for (and I’m not exaggerating) years. That is, I’ve taken stabs at making this work going back at least a decade. In total, I’ve probably spent more than a dozen hours pulling my hair and swearing at the computer. So:

In the Olden Days Of Yore, the first thing that happened when you used a computer for the first time was getting really annoyed with the keyboard because nothing was ever exactly like you wanted. (Especially with the national varieties of different keyboards from different companies — the horror!) I remember back at the university in the 90s, people had all kinds of fancy and amusing layouts, making it impossible for anybody to use anybody elses keyboards — keyboard encryption as a security feature, eh? And these shenanigans were possible because it was trivial to modify keyboard definitions. If you wanted to have a Hyper key on PrtSc (if that key did indeed exist back then; probably not on most keyboards), you put this in ~/.Xmodmap and went on with your life:

keycode 107 = Hyper_L
add Mod3 = Hyper_L

This still works to this day, three decades later — sort of. Any changes to the HID device hierarchy these days and the OS is likely to blank the setting and then you have to xmodmap it “manually”. And this only works if you’re still running X, of course, which is getting to be more and more difficult.

I got a new Lenovo Yoga X1 Gen 8, which is a nice laptop — I like a Yoga while travelling, because you can flip it around and watch movies on it without having the keyboard in front of you.

See? It’s nice.

And it has a built-in WWAN/5G modem, so I can use the laptop when there’s no WIFI and without tethering and stuff.

But the modem didn’t work in Debian/stable, so I installed Ubuntu. The modem works fine there, but:

I opened the Settings app, and there were all these horizontal stripes and glitches and stuff? I mean… what? This is a totally normal laptop with built-in normal Intel graphics:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake-P [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 04)

And still, just opening the Settings apps displays oodles of glitches in the default configuration? So they’ve obviously stopped even testing in Xorg — everything is moving to Wayland anyway, right?

And then I tried watching a video with mpv! My god!

Googling showed a lot of people having problems in this area, and the solutions were along the lines of:

i915.enable_dc=0
intel_idle.max_cstate=2

And other boot parameters, none of which had any effect for me. So after trying that for a few hours, the writing’s on the wall, even if I’ve resisted for years: I have to switch to Wayland before I get so old that there’s no chance of me ever figuring out any computer stuff ever again: I have to finally make The Configuration For The Future.

So how do you do something as trivial as assigning Hyper_L to the PrtSc key? As the keyboard(5) man page says:

The specification of the keyboard layout in the keyboard file is based on the XKB options XkbModel, XkbLayout, XkbVariant and XkbOptions. Un- fortunately, there is little documentation how to use them.

The keyboard definition in an Ubuntu/Debian machine is in /etc/default/keyboard:

cat /etc/default/keyboard
# KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE

# Consult the keyboard(5) manual page.

XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us"
XKBVARIANT=""
XKBOPTIONS=""

BACKSPACE="guess"

OK. And Wayland is using the xkb stuff? Confusing, but OK. So I google how to redefine things in this system, and… there’s a million people as confused as I am. Because surely things can’t be as bad as this, fifteen years on since Wayland was created?

The story told on a thousand web sites is that to alter the keyboard layout, you “just” alter the layout definition file, which is in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols. (In my case, it’s /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us, since I’m using a US layout.) But this is absurd! That’s a file that’s updated when the OS updates, so either your changes will be overwritten, or updating won’t touch the file at all, so you won’t get updates from the OS. (Which can be important — keyboards rarely change, but they do evolve slowly over time, and you want a solution you can use for decades, right?)

There’s official-looking pages like this that tries to tell you how to add new layout files:

OK, ignoring the empty “writing a symbol file” entry, they suggest creating a new file /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/test, which is nice, because it won’t be overwritten by the OS… but then you have to register that file in two other files, /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst and /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.xml, which will be overwritten by the OS! This shit is infuriating!

But I did take a stab at it — created the new file and changed /etc/default/keyboard to point to it… and it had absolutely no effect in Gnome Shell, because it doesn’t really rely on it? Only slightly? (Did I mention that none of this is really documented well?)

xkb has specific options for swapping around certain modifiers:

setxkbmap -option caps:hyper

So you can presumably put that into XKBOPTIONS in /etc/default/keyboard if you wanted to map Caps Lock to Hyper… but these options only exist for certain combinations of keys! How insane is that? I mean, it’s nice that the XKB developers thought it would be handy to swap certain keys around, but it’s absurd that they thought they could enumerate them all? Instead of making a handy general utility that allowed people to do whatever they wanted, they hard-coded a few possibilities and called it a day.

But some suggest you do something like this:

cd /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols
mv us us-real
cp hyper us

And then you have

/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols

be just:

xkb_symbols "basic" {
    name[Group1]= "Hyper (US)";
    include "us-real"
    key <PRSC> { [ Hyper_L ] };
    modifier_map Mod3 { <PRSC> };
};

And this works, and it has the advantage of you being able to actually make sense of whatever changes you’ve made to the layout. But still, it has the problem of not being updated when the OS updates (or conversely, being overwritten). (And in any case, keeping personal configuration under /usr is a horrible long term solution, anyway — you want your config to follow you around as you upgrade laptops, and that ideally means just copying your home directory.)

So many people are trying to make sense of this system — like this guy, who has been through my entire journey, and amusingly enough, he’s also trying to rebind PrtSc to Hyper!

This sounds excellent! Just what I need! This should be the official documentation for when you google “how do I rebind a key”, right? Except that it doesn’t work — at least not under Gnome Shell (the default in Ubuntu), which just seems to ignore the XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT variable. I’m guessing the “before starting my compositor” means that he runs Sway or something…

*sigh*

And one more deeply infuriating thing about this whole mess: Whenever you’re testing something, you can never know whether logging out and then in again, or a full reboot is necessary, because it’s never clear whether the changes are applied on login, or by the OS (probably in systemd somewhere nasty) when booting up. What used to be a priority in Unix — being able to try things out iteratively and interactively (with informative error messages when you screw something up) has been replaced by mysterious systems that nobody can tell exactly how interact. So while Wayland uses the XKB files, you can’t use setxkbmap to try out the changes you’re making.

(Instead, if you make a syntax error and log out/in again, the OS will just display the White Screen of Death saying that something’s wrong (but not what, of course.). ssh to the rescue.)

And people are desperately trying to make things work:

I didn’t find any well-working solutions in 2024, so I’ve made one. Search for the “Shyriiwook” extension in the GNOME Shell Extensions store.

I applaud their efforts, but surely this shouldn’t have to be necessary!

But there are other ways to remap key in Linux, surely? OK, let’s take a look at a guide. It lists four different applications that work under Wayland: keyd, kbct, kmonad and interception. These keyboard remapper things all rely on daemons that talk to the evdev layer in the Linux kernel, and should work no matter whether you use Wayland or X.

keyd looks nice, and is available on Ubuntu by default. But:

It doesn’t support a Hyper key.

kbct, kmonad and interception aren’t in Ubuntu, and I didn’t test them, because most guides on the Googles seem to suggest that the generically named input-remapper (which was previously called key-remapper) is the bee’s knees. And it’s in Ubuntu! But when I started it, it didn’t look anything like what people were talking about, and doesn’t match the documentation. Were there several of these?

No, it just turns out that there’s a new version out, and it looks totally different, and has a different configuration hierarchy:

Thanks, thanks. So I downloaded that from Github, managed to get it installed and the daemon running, and

# input-remapper-control --symbol-names | grep -i hyper
#

It doesn’t support remapping a key to Hyper.

*sigh*

This excellent page is what finally pointed me in the right direction. The recipe given there doesn’t work for me, and as he says:

Now, I fully agree that this is cumbersome, clunky and feels outdated.

But after testing a number of variations on this theme, I ended up with the solution I posted above. Which works. Today.

Who knows what these Gnome/Wayland people will come up with tomorrow. It would be nice if it were something that, you know, works, but I’m not really holding my breath.

So now that the first hurdle is out of the way, I just have to fix all the other things that don’t quite work under Wayland. I mean, it’s only fifteen years old; one can’t expect everything to work yet…

Comics Daze

I had planned on going to London today, but then I didn’t, so now I’m reading comics instead. And for music… only albums from 1977-78. Just because.

But before I start reading, I just wanted to mention this book I’ve been slowly working my way through over the past few weeks: Marvel February 1964. And I remember thinking a few years back “it sure would be cool if Marvel just released a series of books reprinting all their comics in chronological order”. Well, this isn’t that…

… but this book reprints all of the comics Marvel published in February 1964, which is pretty cool. And it’s the fourth book in the series, but I missed the 1961-1963 books (which also do one month each).

Now, somebody should make a book to reprint all comics published in the US in a particular month, right? So we could experience what it’d be like at a newsstand in the US in, say, August 1963 or something… The book would probably be thick as a longbox, though.

Here we get some of Marvel’s fantastic creations like The Human Top.

Four out of the 17 comics here are Patsy Walker related.

Yes, 17 comics, and they all bear the credit “Written by Stan Lee”, which seems in-credible. But while it’s popular to contest that when it comes to, say, Fantastic Four, I haven’t really seen many people fight to get Stan Goldberg given greater credit on these comics. Such ironic.

Still, even if Lee didn’t actually write any of these comics, he presumably scripted them all, which means that he had less than two days to script each book, which is a pretty good clip. I mean, while doing everything else at the same time…

And I have to say that I enjoyed reading this volume — there’s a lot of fun stuff.

And also experience the mix of comics at Marvel — it’s all super-heroes, romance or westerns at this point. So I think I’ll go and buy the previous volumes.

Anyway! It’s readerin’ time!

Talking Heads: 77 (Sire)

13:42: Ruins by Peter Kuper (Selfmadehero)

Oh, this book is almost a decade old? This is a new edition, which is why it showed up in Previews, I guess. But how odd — I mean, I’m a huge Kuper fan, but I was totally unaware that this book existed. And it’s such a hefty book, too — I think it has to be Kuper’s largest work? And the book won an Eisner award? I must have been asleep in 2015 or something.

Heh.

Anyway, this book seems very thoroughly worked through — we follow a monarch butterfly on its journey from Canada to Mexico, observing things along the way…

… while the main story here is about these two people who are spending a year in Oaxaca.

She’s writing a book, and we get excerpts from that book, and then there’s a demonstration, and corrupt Mexican politicians, and then there’s a stray dog that the guy fights with and eventually becomes friends with, and then there’s a recurring scorpion, and then there’s the plot bit where she wants to get pregnant, and he doesn’t want a child, and there’s an artist she’s getting involved with, and then there’s a photo journalist friend…

Devo: Satisfaction (I Can’t Get Me No)

I’m just saying that this feels like a book that Kuper has worked a lot at. It’s not that it feels overstuffed particularly, but Kuper had a lot he wanted to fit in here — sort of making his Grand Opus or something? It has that feeling.

But it’s good! It’s good stuff. Lovely artwork; solid storytelling. It builds on his charming travel comics — they are very freewheeling, and he’s taken bits of pieces from that and jigsawed it into a major work.

I wonder what the critical reaction was:

This is a story that shows a lot of respect and affection toward Oaxaca (verging on but never crossing the line into exoticization), but it’s an ex-pat story nonetheless. That respect is made manifest in Kuper’s astonishing facility with his watercolors and colored pencils.

Really?:

The butterfly is more sympathetic than either of the self-absorbed pair, whose early adventures – fleeing local dogs and mooching around the colourful streets – feel like the hackneyed stuff of an expat romcom.

Insufferable?:

Choosing to tell the story of Oaxaca and the 2006 teachers’ strike massacre through the POV of two insufferable white New Yorkers puts Kuper at an incredible disadvantage, and he digs himself deeper by failing to effectively develop any characters except for George, one half of his ex-pat couple.

Well, that’s just not true:

Ruins isn’t the kind of book you can take in over the course of an afternoon. Even its wordless sequences are packed with moment, inviting the reader to stay and linger a while (even if you’d rather look away). But it’s also anything but obtuse, illuminating the realities of a disintegrating relationship in ways that will be familiar to almost anyone. Much like Oaxaca itself, Ruins is a work that’s worth getting lost in.

Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel 1

14:47: Nuie by Nuie (2d cloud)

This is a lovely little book.

It feels like it’s narrative in a way, even though I don’t really know what’s happening. Very cool.

14:54: Of Thunder & Lightning by Kimberley Wang (Silver Sprocket)

This is very video game influenced, I guess. (As well as the obligatory Japanese comics influence.)

But it’s an intriguing book. There’s a lot going on, and the cartooning is on point.

Pink Floyd: Animals

15:06: Mini Kuš (Kuš)

Kuš had found a lot of older minis that I didn’t have, so I bought a little stack of them. Let’s read these five at random.

Aidan Koch’s mini starts out very abstract and then it turns out to be a therapy session.

Ernest Kjavins & Andrej Klavins do an amusing story about diving and performance enhancing drugs.

Akvile Miseviciute does a story about fighting back.

Emmi Valve does an autobio thing about friendship and stuff.

Finally, Amanda Baeza does a stylish thing about… er… I don’t know, but it’s cool.

Joni Mitchell: Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter

15:28: Mors dag by Klara Wiksten (Galago)

Man, this book is the saddest book ever.

And I mean that in a good way. It has thirteen short stories, and they are all about the same thing: People whose mothers have died when they were children.

Kraftwerk: Trans-Europe Express

So it’s a book about boundless grief and how to deal with that, and it’s super duper affecting — it’s a seven hanky book, at least. It’s amazing how well Wiksten tells these small stories — she avoids clichés and easy solutions, and just goes straight for the jugular.

It’s fantastic, and the artwork is perfect in its rawness for these stories.

And as you can imagine, it’s an absolutely exhausting book to read, so I think I’ll go for a little walk.

David Bowie: Low

17:49: M: skrattens ridder gjenfødes by Mads Eriksen (Strand forlag)

Eriksen was doing a very popular daily strip in Norway, but apparently burned out (at least a decade ago) doing that (which isn’t unusual). But he hasn’t done much since that, so this is kind of a comeback event.

We start off with a sort of Dark Knight Returns parody/reference thing, and it’s pretty funny.

But why did they print the strips so large? And with the middle of panels disappearing into the spine?

Anyway, it’s good stuff.

Alice Coltrane: Transcendence

18:34: First There Was Chaos by Joel Priddy (Uncivilized Books)

OK, this isn’t my kind of thing — it’s not that I mind Greek myths and stuff, but this is all spiritual and stuff, which just makes my eyes glaze over.

But it’s an inventive book.

And I’m sure if you’re into this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’d be into.

And! It has a very extensive fold out page thing.

David Bowie: “Heroes”

18:57: What’s Fear Got To Do With It? by Ivana Filipovich (Conundrum Press)

Ivana Filipovich! I absolutely adored the last book of hers that I read, if I remember correctly.

Hm, this looks familiar… oh! It’s an expanded version of a strip that ran in that self published collection? Sure, I’m on board for that.

The artwork here is just amazing. It’s so fluid and exciting — very 70s Italian, I guess? The story, on the other hand didn’t really gain all that much from being expanded, I think — it’s more meandering now? That’s fine, though, because it’s a pretty exiting milieu to be in for a while.

The end notes says that this has been languishing in a drawer for quite a while until Conundrum expressed an interest in publishing it. Hopefully there’s more in that drawer (or Filipovich does new comics).

Supertramp: Even in the Quietest Moments

20:06: Sensible Footwear by Kate Charlesworth (Myriad Editions)

This is a sort of history gay life in Britain (done in a collage-ey style)…

Sandy Denny: Rendezvous

… but also an autobio book that covers the same years (done in a wide variety of styles).

Aksak Maboul: Onze danses pour combattre la migraine

It’s a fun book — the artwork is often amazing, and the storytelling moves in strange and amusing ways. It can be pretty difficult to keep track of who’s going out with whom at times, but it’s both affecting and funny.

OK, I’m fading now, but just one more comic book…

Kate & Anna McGarrigle: Dancer With Bruised Knees

22:37: You Will Own Nothing And You Will Be Happy #2 by Simon Hanselmann

I got this from here, and… it’s not sold out yet!? The first issue was sold out almost immediately, I think? Hm… Oh, there’s a second printing of #1, so get on that, then.

So this continues on straight from the first issue. (Nice touch with the Cybertrucks.)

And… I wasn’t totally on board with the first issue, mostly because I was just “eh? zombies? really?”, but now I’ve gotten used to the idea, I guess. Because I was really into this issue! Or perhaps there’s just more going on in this issue… I think. I mean, the previous issue was a year ago, so I may be misremembering.

Anyway, Hanselmann says in a text at the end of the issue that he’s doing TV deals at the moment, so he’s unsure when he’ll be able to do the next “proper” Megg & Mogg book… and when the next issue of this is going to be out. *crosses fingers*

Throbbing Gristle: The Second Annual Report Of Throbbing Gristle (2)

22:58: The End

And now I’m exhausted, so it’s time to call it a night.

My New Career as a Lenovo Laptop Repair Guy

Some years back I accidentally broke the keyboard of a Lenovo Thinkpad 25th Anniversary Edition.

The attraction of this laptop is, of course, that it’s got an actual almost proper keyboard — I think it’s the last one ever without a chiclet keyboard? And it was done as a retro thing. But I was using it as my main programming laptop, while I was using a Carbon X1 for travelling etc. It has a much worse keyboard; here, let me show you:

See? It’s a “modern” chiclet keyboard, which is much thinner, but not as pleasant to type on. In any case, since I already had a laptop, I rather forgot about having the 25th Anniversary laptop fixed.

Until now, and I wondered whether it was still possible to fix it. I mean by myself — it’s a laptop from 2017, and I bought it in a different country, so…
Anyway, Lenovo is still selling spare parts for this! I’m amazed! I bought one…

… pried the old one out (you can slightly spot the place I broke the it if you look closely)…

… and put the new keyboard in! And it works! I’m amazed! At how easy it was. Because Lenovo puts nice service manual out there for anyone to peruse.

Even if some of it is slightly gnomic — like, what do the screws have to do with that plastic thing? (Nothing, as it turns out — you just have to do both (in any order).)

It turned out to be really easy — I didn’t need any special tools or anything, and I did it while slightly incredibly drunk, and while watching Fallout s1e3 (it’s not that good).

And look at all the parts you can still buy!

Etc etc. Almost makes me want to rebuild it from scratch, just because I like Lego.

I’m not sure I’m actually going to use this laptop for anything, but, er, you know.

(Disclaimer: Even though I like the repairability of the Lenovo laptops, I can’t really recommend them. I’ve had several that just stopped working at random, and more where the Trackpoint just goes wonky. But I hate using a trackpad, so my choices are limited to Thinkpads, so…)

But! There was one thing in this laptop that didn’t work, and that was the “built-in” battery — this thing has two batteries, one you can switch out easily and one that’s under the cover. And the latter one had died while the laptop was in storage, apparently, so…

… I bought a new one! And it arrived today, so let’s get swapparooing, because this it pretty fun. For me, I mean.

So this is what it looks like at the bottom.

And see? There’s that swappable battery I was talking about at the top there.

Err… and after unscrewing some screws I’m now supposed to… Oh, push and pull and wiggle?

And then finger the corner there aggressively until it comes off?

And then… just… pull it from all sides at once, sort of? OK, I tried, but my fingers aren’t strong enough for this sort of thing…

… so I resorted to using tools. Like an animal!

Et voila! Easy peasy. Somebody should tell Lenovo that tools exist and make things easier than trying to pull these things apart with your fingers.

But it’s really fun working on the innards here — everything is so precise and so easy to work with.

And then the new battery just slots in without any bother. Nice.

Huh. Why is the cover spray painted with coppery paint, apparently?

Anyway, it slots right back on again without any problems. Thank you, Lenovo.

It even boots! Whoho! And the battery charges! It’s alive! But I should wash that screen.

And here’s my professional Repair Guy setup: A footstool with a 40W lamp. It’s what every doctor recommends for maximum ergonomics.

So there you are — Lenovo laptops are really very repairable, and that’s nice.

A&R2009: Cerebus Archive

Cerebus Archive (2009) #1-18 by Dave Sim

This is the next-to-last post in this blog series, but the final post will have to wait a couple weeks while I wait for some missing issues to arrive…

Not that this (re-)reading is complete: I apparently forgot to buy issues #4-6 while the series was new, and these issues are impossible to find now. Issue #5 was apparently when the series went to Print On Demand (because of low sales), and the POD company used by Sim, Comixpress shut down in 2013. Sim didn’t take the series over to some other POD service for reasons unknown to me, so I’m guessing I’ll never be able to read #4-6. Which is fine.

(Googling for the issues aren’t easy, either, since Sim reused the name “Cerebus Archive” for a later portfolio series…)

But let’s have a look at the 15 issues I do have.

The series is called “Cerebus Archives”, but it’s really the story of Sim’s attempts at becoming a comics pro — and we start when he’s 16 and has apparently convinced Harry Kremer to publish a fanzine. This is how the first issue starts — there’s no explanation what this fanzine is, or what Sim’s role in it is (editor?), or anything.

And as we can see, Sim’s art chops are pretty typical for a sixteen-year-old. And like many teenagers, he’d worked out some pretty complex visions of how he was going to become famous — this was apparently a take on Uncle Sam, and what he envisioned as becoming the new Canadian symbol — a beaver.

Is “How’s Your Beaver?” really that over the top? Hm…

Er… no? That David Frum’s mother was liberal isn’t even ironic in the Alanis Morisette meaning of the word. As is often the case with Sim, stuff like this leaves you scratching your head — he’s going for “sage speaker of truths” and ends up as “nonsensical but smarmy”.

Sim was submitting stories to lots of places (Warren, Charlton, etc), and some of these were illustrated by others — we get them all here (well, the ones Sim still have). This seems like a very thorough archive project… but a Sim archive, not a Cerebus archive.

Gene Day was Sim’s idol, so we get a lot of mail from Day to Sim (annotated for this publication).

Sim includes the John Byrne-penned cover for a fanzine as an illustration of just how bad the aesthetics of some editors are (the pink/green is indeed pretty bizarre). “Your one-stop shopping outlet for Dave Sim self-degradation” is a good tag line, though, but it makes me wonder — is Sim really so ashamed of these old things, or is he hamming it up?

Some of these old strips aren’t that bad, really. But mostly when Sim manages to come up with a story to match his limited rendering skills.

But I guess things like this are really, really embarrassing — he was submitting covers to Marvel, and jokes to Playgirl, all of them rejected, of course. But hey, teenagers are teenagers.

Even Charlton was rejecting him. That must have hurt.

Like I said, I don’t have issues #4-6, so we skip ahead to #7 — and this (and the rest) are Print On Demand issues, because sales had slipped so low that Diamond no longer wanted to carry the book. I’m guessing that’s why Sim stopped doing Cerebus on the covers, even though there was no Cerebus material inside — he no longer had to trick people into buying the book on the stands.

It also means that these books don’t lie flat, which is sooo annoying (Note To Editor: Insert Homer Picture Here). Even after spending a decade in a shortbox, the issues still bulge.

The printing from Comixpress seems fine, though…

And Sim’s artwork improves by leaps and bounds (but he’s 20 by now, I think).

Sim tries his best at doing editorial cartoons, and he really nails it. By that I mean that’s it’s dreadfully tedious, just like professional editorial cartoons.

And that’s rather a thing with all of Sim’s comics here — they just aren’t actually funny. Which is surprising for a teenager — they’re usually brimming with gags and bits, and some of them are sometimes even funny. But he’s doing all of this stuff like he’s an old man, which is pretty odd.

Sim reprints the Oktoberfest comic he managed to get Kremer to finance in full. It’s a riff on a Carl Barks story, and as Sim notes, it was badly thought out as a concept. (And it’s not very good.)

And it didn’t sell.

Uhm… why is it creepy moving into an apt previously occupied by your sister’s boyfriend?

We finally get something that’s tangentially related to Cerebus! It’s Sim’s Ali Baba story, and Sim notes how much he unconsciously recirculated from this story in the first Cerebus issue.

Sim, of course, finds a lot of portents in what he’s written, since it involves Christian/Muslim/Judaic stuff (and he would make his own syncretic religion some decades later).

“And ‘The Fire Jewels of Shem… … are now just ‘The Fire Gems’. Like I say, interesting.” Er… is this a reference to Shemp in the three Stooges? Sheshep, Cerebus’ son? It can be hard to tell whatever weird things Sim is making connections — Sim really uses that smarmy tone so well.

This bit was moderately interesting — Sim prints two versions of the same strip, one drawn by himself, and one by Gene Day.

Sim touches on one of his beliefs — that writing a comic book about something can make it come true, I think?

Eh… uhm… Yes, Anne Rice created goths, not Siouxsie Sioux, Bauhaus, The Cure or anybody… Very few people know this!

As the series progresses, the texts become more digressive — here Sim goes on about how horrific it is to demand a certain percentage of women in the Afghanistan parliament, because that would mean that you dictate the outcome of elections. Sim is apparently unaware that in many countries you vote for a party, and not specific people, so the mix of people you end up with depends on the mix of people nominated by the parties.

Finally! An aardvark! Sim seems to be saying that drawing this aardvark (from a T. Casey Brennan) later led Deni Loubert’s brother (I think) to come up with “aardvark” as half of the “Aardvark-Vanaheim” company name through mystical means? A simpler explanation might be that the brother had seen this strip, or that Sim had mentioned it, perhaps.

Anyway.

Brennan sure lays it on thickly.

Sim continues his “comics sure are dangerous” thing:

Er, OK. I’m guessing T. Casey Brennan only had himself to thank for whatever happened to him.

But we’re getting closer to Dave meeting Deni!

It’s such a momentous meeting that Sim actually draws it. Nice!

But we’re now solidly into autobio territory, and not so much a “Cerebus Archive” or even a “Dave Sim Archive”. It’s pretty self indulgent. But on the other hand, this is a Print On Demand book with (I’m sure) tens and tens of readers, so why not? Not more self indulgent than writing a blog series about this series, you say?

Sim does his best to keep the tension up.

But like I said, it gets less and less… er… relevant.

And it grows uglier and more amateurish, so I flipped to the indicia, and it seems like Sandeep Atwal, who was doing the layouts, has now left, and Sim is doing the layouts himself, which explains a lot — nobody has ever accused Sim of having sensible aesthetics.

Anyway, Sim wanted to do some research into the place he had been living at the time, so Sim sends a letter to his old address and recounts the story of how he went to a party at his landlord’s place (the landlord was gay and also named “Dave”). In the letter he describes how his landlord was into S&M, apparently, and perhaps tried to come onto Sim (who made an exit instead).

Which is a totally normal thing to send to somebody unknown, I guess? Anyway, the letter was returned.

Then he says how the landlord killed himself the next day, but Sim reassures us that it probably wasn’t because he was too heartbroken over having been turned down by Sim.

That’s a relief!

This series is a whopping eighteen issues, so you’d think he’d reach Cerebus #1, but he keeps on yapping on about whatever is on his mind, so it’s not looking good.

Aargh! Sandeep! Come back! The book looks ever more amateurish…

Finally, some more comics — and they’re drawn by Fabio Gasbarri, and they look really interesting. The first story is about a rock star that gets killed at a concert, and the audience laps it up.

Sim seems to imply that this story was the reason John Lennon was killed? Or is he just Asking The Questions? I mean, the story was ‘”asking for trouble” on higher planes of existence’, and the timeline pans out, so I guess it’s an open and shut case.

We get a number of Beavers strips, and this is generally the level of funniness.

He did, of course, have well thought out reasons for doing jokes about Gordon Sinclair — it was an iron clad plan to become rich and famous.

Finally! Cerebus!

But it’s Cerebus the fanzine, and not Cerebus #1.

But this is kinda interesting — Sim tried to create a logo for “Aardvark-Vanaheim” and failed, so he did an Aardvark mascot instead.

Two interesting things here — at a party, he started making out with Deni’s 17 year old sister, but had no recollection of how that could have happened (and he notes how out of character for him forgetting was). But — on the same page here, he is continuing the story of how he sent a fake invoice to a newspaper for the Beavers strip. The newspaper sent back a letter saying “what the fuck is this?!”, and Sim can’t explain why he did that, either.

Kudos to Sim for including stuff like this, though.

In the final issue, we get a longer Beavers story that had been run by Star*Reach in Quack…

… and then the series ends like this: With a promise of more to come. The last issue says “February 2012”. Comixpress (who printed Cerebus Archive) went out of business in 2013, so I’m guessing that’s not the reason Sim cancelled Cerebus Archive. But Sim ended Glamourpuss in late 2012, so perhaps he stopped Cerebus Archive at the same time, because he was just fed up with everything?

Ah, yes:

Yes: this IS the last issue of glamourpuss… As soon as I saw the sales on the first issue – 16,000 – I knew that the title and my career were doomed.

[…]

I pulled the plug first on Cerebus Archive, then on Cerebus TV and then on glamourpuss. Not really saying anything to anyone, just walking away and starting my Doomsday Scenario — selling my Cerebus original artwork as slowly as possible, and looking at ways to liquidate the Cerebus Archive itself, up to and including just sending all of it to a landfill site or paying 1-800-GOT-JUNK to haul it all away, selling the house, liquidating the last of my RRSPs and my life insurance policy and just… disappearing.

Reader, he did not disappear.

But I’ve been unable to find any review of Cerebus Archive on the net? Am I the only one who’s read it?

And now I’m free! Free! For a couple of weeks, and then I have to read and post about Glamourpuss (which is *sigh* 26 issues). See you then.

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