[Reposted from my blog 72 Pins]

Though I ultimately gave issue 6 its own post, I decided I could reclaim a little of my buffer zone by combining issues 7 and 8 today. However, I’m not simply forcing two unrelated issues into a single post. The events of Cerebus 6-8 are the closest thing to a multi-part story arc so far in the series, and at least in this case spreading the discussion of them over multiple posts feels more arbitrary than combining them.

Cerebus #7 almost reads like a recap of the series’s major themes so far. Cerebus travels to the Temple of the Black Sun, whose treasures he learned about from Jaka in the previous issue. Along the way, he runs into Elrod again, and drags him along in the vain hope of keeping him quiet

Meanwhile, the Black Sun priest Mit has hatched a plan to disguise himself as “one of the revered nameless ones”, who just happens to look like Cerebus. There’s no mention of whether this is the same god worshiped by the Pigts (whose idol Cerebus destroyed in issue 5), or whether Dave Sim just found the notion of aardvark-shaped gods really funny.

Of course Elrod and Cerebus get separated, allowing for some fun with Elrod mistaking the disguised priest for the real Cerebus. Meanwhile, in a scene that strongly recalls the climax of issue 2, Cerebus once again finds himself facing off against a monstrous enemy (this time a giant spider rather than a succubus) that tries, unsuccessfully, to find his soul. And once again, he finds himself saved by a mostly unexplained deus ex machina, once again leaving us to wonder if this is all going to mean something at some point in the future.

We pick up in Cerebus #8 with Cerebus hallucinating (another callback, to issues 1 and 6) that he is still fighting the giant spider underneath the Temple of the Black Sun. However, we quickly learn that he has been captured by the Conniptin army, who are desperate and on the verge of revolting against their supposed leader, a foppish prince suffering from cocaine-induced delusions of grandeur.If the recursive nature of Cerebus up to this point weren’t already clear, these two issues would make it so. I mentioned all the way back in my post on Cerebus #2 that it felt like a “do-over” of the first issue, a way to try out the same themes but with a slightly different tone. There’s a lot of that in 6-8, as well, so much so that it actually feels like it should be the ending of Cerebus’s story.

In a way, I suppose it is. Issue 8 looks like the transition from the self-contained stories of the first few issue to the longer form story arcs that eventually take over the series, with the Conniptin general trying to persuade Cerebus to lead their military campaign until such time as the prince can safely be assassinated, and Cerebus can be installed as the new Conniptin emperor.

The political intrigue here is well done, and has me really looking forward to reading the next few issues. However, I remain just as fascinated by the treatment of religion in these early stories, especially the recurring theme of humans (or aardvarks) as gods. Bran Mak Mufin in issue 5, Mit in issue 7, and the Conniptin prince in issue 8 are, to varying degrees, comfortable with being deified by their peers or followers. However, each has faced some sort of punishment for their presumptions. Cerebus rejected the Pigts’ religion and destroyed their idol; Mit was spared the destruction of the other Black Sun priests, but forced to travel with Elrod; and the Conniptin prince faces disgrace and assassination for his ridiculous behavior and self-deifying pronouncements.

There’s an undercurrent there that could just be a reliable storytelling mechanic, a way to portray the largely amoral Cerebus as a hero by giving him a relatively down-to-earth perspective on himself and the world; or it could be a hint that the ultra-conservative religious beliefs that Dave Sim eventually embraced were always hiding just below the surface, manifesting themselves in the recurring image of Cerebus as a fuzzy Yahweh, destroying would-be idols wherever they arise.

While I lean toward the former explanation (for now), I don’t think speculation on the latter is completely misguided.

[Reposted from my blog 72 Pins]

A couple of longer than usual shifts at work this weekend left me too tired to write or think much about anything other than eating and sleeping. So having burned a few more of the 65 “buffer” days in my year of posting aboutCerebus, I considered doubling up and doing issues 6 and 7 today. However, for reasons that will become clear, it seemed wrong to skim over issue 6.Depending on your taste for the hopelessly romantic,Cerebus #6 can be quite good. Some will find it sickeningly cute, but as a standalone story, it lets us see a different (if drug-induced) side of Cerebus in which his usual gruffness and violence is replaced with fawning love-sickness. More importantly, though, this issue introduces one of the series’s main supporting characters, Jaka, who will serve as Cerebus’s unattainable love interest from here on.

Jaka is only the second female character to appear in Cerebus, and the first sympathetic one. She works as an erotic dancer, and clearly has ties to the seedier elements who frequent her tavern. That she falls so quickly for anyone, even an aardvark, who seems to show her genuine affection suggests that her life has not been a happy one. Red Sophia had pretensions of worldliness, but sounded like she picked up her knowledge secondhand from the sort of magazines you find in supermarket checkout lines; Jaka is the real deal, with all the baggage that entails. But she’s the one that we feel Dave Sim is holding up as the better person.

That dichotomy doesn’t justify the sexist caricature that is Red Sophia, but it does hint at Sim turning the “virgin-whore” complex on its ear in an interesting, maybe even admirable, way. Whatever Jaka’s sexual past may be, it’s clear that she’s become as comfortable in her position as one could be without losing one’s humanity. The running gag of the Red Sophia character is that she (and her father) accuse others of besmirching her honor at the slightest hint of offense. But we can safely assume that Jaka’s honor has had to endure far greater blows than Sophia’s ever has.

At one point, it seems that Jaka may simply be manipulating Cerebus to get her out of trouble with the thugs E’lass and Turg, but Sim quickly makes it clear that that’s not the case. Too quickly, I think. Keeping Jaka’s motivations hidden for longer would have added some tension to what is otherwise a fairly light issue. It would also have made the last page much more powerful. When Jaka has already said that she wants to escape with Cerebus, her pledge to wait for his return is just sentimental. If we weren’t already sure that she had fallen for him, it would be a far more potent revelation.

Aside from introducing Jaka, issue 6 also starts to hint at more continuity from issue to issue. The shadowy priests lurking in the corners of this story are the focus of issue 7, and it looks like the events of that book will play a more important role in what follows. While the sprawling story arcs that eventually became Cerebus‘s trademark are still a ways away, I’m keen on anything that will make these early issues easier to write about on a (semi-) daily basis.

[Reposted from my blog 72 Pins]

Boom! Town recently announced that they would be publishing Dave Sim’s Last Girlfriend, a book collecting correspondences between Dave Sim and, as the title states, his last girlfriend Susan Alston. At the link above, you’ll find a quote from Alston (originally posted to the comments on a great essay on Sim by Heidi MacDonald) that popped back into my head as I was reading Cerebus #5:

His oratory did change after he started reading the King James’ version of the bible. But not at the beginning. At first he would read me passages in complete jest, his inflections and emphasis on certain words and phrases (taken out of the intended context) would have laughing so hard I had to wipe back my tears! Then, suddenly, he stopped reading to me from the bible, even though I asked him to. The bible traveled with him everywhere after that, never far from his eyes. We broke up within a year or so from the start of his relationship with the bible, when his love affair with god began. Was I dumped for god?

I bring this up because here in issue 5 we see Sim’s first commentary on religion inCerebus, and it’s pretty well in line with the satirical attitude Alston describes in that comment. In fact, by the end, it’s downright atheistic.

As I hope I’ve made clear in previous posts, I think it’s very easy to do writers a disservice by projecting their characters’ beliefs or behaviors onto them (or vice versa). However, I also think that context can make it very difficult to avoid such projection. Sim has clearly had a long and complicated relationship with religion, and (hopefully without projecting too much) I think this is where we start to see that working itself out in the pages of Cerebus.

After two issues of fairly light-hearted comedy, issue 5 once again delves into more serious satire. Cerebus encounters a barbarian tribe whose members describe their leader, Bran Mak Mufin, in terms that make him sound like a cross between Conan and Jesus.

(And remember, would-be writers: “penultimate” means “next to last,” not “extra-ultimate”.)

There’s a clear element of parody there, though, similar to Monty Python’s treatments of Biblical hyperbole in The Life of Brian and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. That carries over to Cerebus’s first encounter with Bran Mak Mufin himself, who turns out to be something of an anti-imperialist rebel without a cause. “Any empire,” he tells Cerebus, “you name it and we’ve toppled it.”

When Cerebus learns that he bears an uncanny resemblance to the idol the tribe worships, he begins to consider abusing this coincidence to lead Mak Mufin’s supremely capable group of warriors on quests that will be of less benefit to the oppressed than to himself. But this turns out to be a pretext for a more transparent, decidedly anti-theistic bit of religious commentary. Despite his greed, Cerebus is appalled when he comes face to face with the tribe’s clay idol. In a fit of existential rage, he smashes the pale imitation to bits with his bare hands.

Or maybe there’s nothing atheistic or anti-theistic about this at all. Maybe we’re meant to look at Cerebus as a poor, blinkered fool, rejecting his best chance at redemption in the name of a deeply misguided sense of pride. Maybe the preceding satire was meant not to mock religion, but to lull us secularists into a false sense of security before getting to the real punch-line: that our rejection of God dooms us to wander alone through a hostile world with only that misplaced pride for company.

So is this issue about Dave Sim confidently attacking religion, or starting down the long road to his own conversion? More importantly, is such speculation about the creator more interesting than the creation? At least in this case, I would say it’s not.

[Reposted from my blog 72 Pins]

Turns out I was away just a bit longer than I expected to be, and not quite for the reasons I expected. While I planned to spend most of the Thanksgiving holiday playing tabletop games, two things prevented that. First, our DM had to leave town sooner than usual. Two, I picked up Skyrim on Friday, and played it almost nonstop through Monday morning, repeatedly telling myself “Just one more quest” only to find that four more hours had slipped away without my noticing. Fortunately we did get in one session with Pathfinder on Friday night, which turned out to be pretty fun.

But at some point, I had to return for another date with the Earth-Pig Born, so here we are with Cerebus #4. As it turns out, this is a nice, low-impact book to ease me back into the routine of writing about the series because, frankly, nothing much happens. Instead, we get the introduction of Dave Sim’s Elric of Melnibone parody, Elrod of Melvinbone. In an odd choice, Elrod has much less in common with Elric than Foghorn Leghorn. As a result, most of this issue is taken up with an extended monologue in place of a plot.

That’s actually not a knock on the issue, though. As a life-long resident of the southern U.S., I’ve always had a fondness for the pompous southern gentleman character. Even though I suspect it originated as a northern joke about southerners’ misplaced presumptions of refinement, it’s still a far nobler stereotype than those perpetrated on us by Hee-Haw and Deliverance. Sadly, it’s also a dying breed. The real southern gentleman is far less prominent today than he was even in my childhood, largely replaced by the kind of insecure redneck idiot that Larry the Cable Guy both portrays and panders to (the “I don’t care who you are, that’s funny” catchphrase has always struck me as a desperate plea for acceptance).

My grandfather isn’t a wealthy man, but when he was younger he did share some of the speech patterns popularized (at least for my generation) by the Foghorn Leghorn character, especially the propensity to repeat the punchlines to jokes that didn’t go over well, as if the audience’s failure to laugh could only result from having not heard what he said. Looking back, this probably played no small part in the conviction I eventually developed, that a groaningly bad joke gets exponentially better if you repeat it several times within a small time-frame.

All this is a long way of saying that while the Elrod character makes even less sense within the Cerebus universe than Red Sophia, I’m far happier to see him.

[Reposted from my blog 72 Pins]

It’s unfortunate that by the time its planned 300 issue run reached its conclusion, the image of Cerebus had been tarnished by what many perceived as Dave Sim’s misogynistic beliefs. Part of my reason for undertaking a reading of the entire series is to draw my own conclusions about Sim’s attitude toward feminism and women in general.

Here in issue #3, we get our first taste of sexism, though it could hardly be called systematic. It’s not that Red Sophia exists in part to satirize the trope of the warrior woman who vows to become a servant to the man (or aardvark) who can defeat her in battle. If the character were no more than that, she would be completely defensible. No, it’s that the first woman we see in the pages of Cerebus is a stereotypical nag and motormouth, and her status as a brave warrior comes only from the fact that none of the men in her town could fight their way out of a room full of kittens.

Reading this issue, you’d be excused for thinking that it was published in the early ’60s and not the late ’70s. Within minutes of meeting Red Sophia, Cerebus finds himself being forced to carry all of her traveling gear (like a cartoonish pile of shopping bags) and endure her constant stream of inane small talk. When the two finally come to blows, Cerebus defeats her in seconds, and spends the rest of the story being nagged to accept sexual favors from the now-servile warrior. The plot revolves around Cerebus being hired by Sophia’s father to torture to death a man who has “besmirched” the honor of his daughter. When he meets the lovestruck man, though, Cerebus “cleverly” decides that the best torture would be to leave him with Sophia.

Despite all I’ve just said, the sexism on display here comes across as more quaint than malicious. That doesn’t excuse it, of course, but the overall effect is one of cluelessness more than anything. And when Cerebus and Sophia camp for the night, there’s something almost cute about the way the two of them argue, which is instantly subverted by the series’s funniest moment so far.

Despite that great line, though, issue #3 is the series’s first real misstep. As a parody of Red Sonja, it isn’t particularly imaginative, and taken on its own merits, it was behind the times even when it was originally published. From what I gather, though, the casual sexism on display here is like a day at Lillith Fair compared to what comes later. Stay strong.

Even though I never planned for “My Year With Cerebus” to be a daily feature here (after all, there are only 300 issues, which astute readers will note is less than the number of days in a year), I’m surprised at how quickly writing these posts has become a part of my morning routine. But since the members of my tabletop gaming group got a bit more scattered around the tri-state area, the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years holidays have all become binges of dice, paper and beer as everyone comes back to town again. Which is just a long way of saying not to expect any more activity here until Monday.

[Reposted from my blog 72 Pins]

In 1981′s Swords of Cerebus collection, Dave Sim wrote this about the creative process behind Cerebus #2:

The Writer panicked when he realized he was going to have to come up with some more ha-ha. The Writer wasn’t really enthusiastic about getting stuck with a job that entailed making up twenty-two pages of ha-ha every other month. His was a neat solution. Drop the ha-ha for the last thirteen pages of the second issue.

Really, though, Sim dropped the “ha-ha” from more of the issue than that. Outside of a couple of sight gags as Cerebus squares off in a traditional knife duel with a barbarian, this is far less of a parody than the first issue. It opens with the group Cerebus is traveling with being attacked and slaughtered by a gang of Borealan marauders. While in the first issue Sim traded on the absurdity of an aardvark mercenary for comic effect, here Cerebus comes off as truly amoral for the first time, saving himself by selling his services to the group who just slaughtered his companions.

From that point forward, though, this is more or less a repeat of the first issue’s plot. During a battle, Cerebus is isolated and soon finds himself traversing a cavern which he becomes convinced holds a great treasure. He eventually finds the treasure, and with it a powerful magical enemy. Cerebus bests this new foe (though it’s not clear how), but in the end discovers that the treasure for which he fought is actually a worthless object. The only substantial difference from issue #1 is that this time it’s Cerebus getting fooled rather than the thieves who hired him for protection.

There is something of a revelation here, though I’m not sure whether it will ever come up again. The creature Cerebus faces in the issue’s climactic battle attempts to steal his soul, but is unable to find it. I have no idea if this becomes important later, but in light of Cerebus’s “selling out” earlier in the issue, it’s a nice way to tie-up another self-contained story while giving readers something to speculate about going forward.

Cerebus #2 is probably better than its predecessor, but it’s hard to say since it’s essentially the same story with less humor and slightly more polished art. It feels like a do-over, with Sim working out a version of Cerebus he’ll feel comfortable writing in the long term. That’s understandable given that Sim was kind of blazing a trail for DIY comics publishing here, but it still leaves me looking forward to next issue, which introduces another of the series’s regular characters, Red Sophia.

[Reposted from my blog 72 Pins, where you can view this post with more images and better formatting.]

The first issue of Cerebus was published in 1977; part sword and sorcery parody, part funny animal comic, it contains no hint of what the series would ultimately become.

Which is not to say this isn’t an enjoyable book. Given the undue emphasis mainstream comics have lately put on the end-of-issue cliffhanger, it’s refreshing to read a truly self-contained single issue story. Of course the idea behind cliffhangers is that if a story wraps up too neatly, people won’t come back for the next issue. But that’s the kind of rule of thumb that people concerned with the bottom line like to turn into an incontrovertible law. The tidy ending of this issue reveals that Cerebus is a character who knows more than he lets on, which made me look forward to more such revelations next time.

While the art in this issue will look primitive to anyone who thinks of Cerebus in terms of the collaboration between Dave Sim and Gerhard that it eventually became, there are still some really charming moments here. Sim is great at making Cerebus look unassuming until he springs into action, at which point the character design really starts to make sense. Sim gives Cerebus’s attacks a great sense of power by having his necklace swinging out in the opposite direction of his sword slashes, and rendering his helmet as being bounced around or completely thrown off. Then there’s the scene in which Cerebus recoils from an enemy and his long snout scrunches up like an accordion. It’s a subtle touch, but one that keeps the tone light and funny, but also rewards attentive reading.

Speaking of the art, I can’t be the only one who has noticed the (ironic, given the creators’ and characters’ sharply differing politics and personalities) similarities between the evolution of Cerebus and Bloom County’s Opus. Both characters started out relatively slender with long “noses”, and both became more stout (especially in the nose) over time. Or maybe I’m just fooled by the similarity of their eyes.

[Reposted from my blog 72 Pins]

When I was at the height of my comics fandom in the early '90s, there were three books whose covers consistently caught my eye, but which I rarely bought: Sandman, Shade the Changing Man, and Cerebus. In the first two cases, it was fear of my fundamentalist Christian parents coming across the books that kept me from bringing them home with me (though I still read both at a chain bookstore that carried them). My reasons for not buying Cerebus were much simpler, though: only one local comic shop carried it at all, and they seemed to get it only sporadically.

Still, I'll never forget the first Cerebus issue I saw, #107. The shop I frequented then, Rock Bottom (at the time the best place to buy comics in Northwest Arkansas, a status that sadly ended when it changed owners and moved from their dusty Dickson St. location), displayed interesting and expensive back issues on their wall, and I remember looking at that one with some fascination. Unlike the superhero comics that I collected, its cover wasn't overburdened with characters, or text proclaiming it the most shocking issue of all time. Instead, it was a stark picture of the lunar surface accompanied by the issue's title, "Walking On the Moon" in tasteful red lettering.From that point on, I took occasional, peripheral notice of Cerebus. Another local shop had a couple of the "phone book" collections, but I balked at jumping on in the middle of the story. I bought Cerebus #0 when it came out, but looking through my collection now, I seem to have sold it and can't remember anything about it. My interest in comics was already waning at that point, and shortly after, I stopped reading them entirely, save for the occasional manga.

Sometime in the last few years, though, I read an article online that mentioned, in passing, the controversy around Dave Sim's political views, and was reminded of Cerebus--though I have to admit that my first response to Sim's beliefs was so strongly negative that for a long time I decided that I wanted nothing to do with his work.

What finally changed that was the recent controversy around DC's treatment of female characters, especially Catwoman. When I decided to actually read the book in question, I thought that many of the negative reactions I read online were way over the top. That's not to say that DC has, on balance, done right by women in its New 52 books--I'm still smarting from their new renderings of Starfire, Harley Quinn and Amanda Waller. But the point is that one should always form one's own opinions. And so I decided to be consistent, and apply that to Cerebus (and by extension Dave Sim) by attempting to read all 300 issues over the course of a year with as few preconceptions as possible.

The idea to also blog about the experience came from two places. The first and less interesting is that I'm always looking for new subjects to write about here. The second is my love of Slacktivist's ongoing critique of the Left Behind novels, which tends to branch out into all sorts of edifying tangents. I have no pretensions of being as interesting as Slacktivist, nor do I intend any comparison between Cerebus and Left Behind; but hopefully something useful will come up as I delve into what I understand to be one of the densest narratives in the history of comics.

Of course I also realize that there are a lot of people who have thought a lot more about these comics than I probably ever will. I doubt I'll be able to say much that those folks haven't heard or thought before. But as with everything I write, I'm writing it for myself first, and if anyone else gets something out of it, so much the better.