This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

Mega interview with Gerhard: part 1, part 2, part 3, and a follow-up from the interviewer.

Fantastic interview, thanks for the links. When they were talking (part 2, page 1) about the 2-page spread of the foundry for the golden sphere, I remembered that I had the chance to buy the original art for that for $150 and passed. I could just stab my brain out with a screwdriver when I think about it.

Like.

That Gerhart interview was fantastic!

Dave's right hand has stopped working properly. He says he's just "ill" but he can't hold a pen or use it effectively.

that sounds like a stroke or slow-developing brain hemmorage to me

Aldo, where did he post that?

Having just gone and read the relevant posts on his site i totally take that back, it sounds like arthritis or nerve damage.

there are a couple of posts on the moment of cerebus site

I have to admit the idea of this terrible asshole croaking is deeply upsetting to me. does not sound like it's come to that.

I assume it's just God striking him down

Ugh. He lost me at "I don't believe in medical science."

Eccch. I've had severe nerve damage in my left hand for a few years. He's being an idiot.

(Not that I should be surprised that Dave is taking an oddball, self-destructive angle on something)

Me too, damage in my right elbow affecting my drawing hand. It's mostly better now... except when I try to do things like draw.

Sorry, had been afk. Yeah, there are some posts on AMoC and he faxed a letter which he typed left-handed to the backers of the current Portfolio Kickstarter.

The anti-science bit is where he loses all the sympathy and, you know, sometimes you just need to not do the fucking thing that makes you Ill. I get that he feels a responsibility to the backers, and I'm part of that problem, but I honestly think skipping sigs on CAN3 would alleviate a huge problem for him.

I always forget how irritating Sim's editorial style is, and that he appears to be unaware what quotation marks are for.

Quotation marks a Cirinist plot.

that sounds like a stroke or slow-developing brain hemmorage to me

he had TIA-like symptoms affecting his arm eight years or so ago that lasted several months, which he "successfully" prayed away - his speech was slow and ponderous for several years afterwards.

Sim in hospital.

oh gosh

Bearing in mind his relationship with medicine, I think it must be fairly serious to make him go. He's still refusing pain relief there, apparently.

how old is he?

he didn't check in for the hand thing either, rather for abdominal pain...

xp 58

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Hut7FmavBa8/VQfETGN3UsI/AAAAAAAAOGk/zmxtaQmAWlI/s1600/sim_hospital_march_2015.jpg

Goes into surgery in the next 10 minutes.

Moment of Cerebus site says surgical intervention to clear a blockage. Intestinal blockage is totally ungodly excruciating. I can see that driving even the most bloody-minded antimedicinist to the ER. IDK if they have to do a resection or what.

They updated again-- it's volvulus of the colon (essentially, a twist in the intestine creating an impassible point). That is some agony right there. They're doing a bowel resection surgery. I've had that. It sucks, and i'm guessing they will have to do it in two stages, with a temporary colostomy bag in between the two procedures.

I'm not real clear on how the hell these twists occur in someone's guts...

Well, if G-d is paying attention, Dave certainly showed Him how tough he is.

goddamn, that's terrible.

a little part of me hopes he has some kind of epiphany from this... but I'm not getting my hopes up. It bothers me that someone who did something great which was v important to young me is more than likely going to grow old and die a sad figure of folly with their work swept out of the canon as a result

he is a v curious figure, I think it's really hard to predict how his work will be viewed once he's gone

on its own merit, I hope

I admittedly own all of Cerebus but have been procrastinating reading it for way too long.

I've never finished it and don't intend to tbh (I stopped at Rick's Story, which is great and feels like enough of an ending for my purposes).

Sim's contributions to the medium are hard to gauge - dude was certainly groundbreaking, just from a business standpoint, but also in form and content. And I can't really fathom how any fan of comics could look at peak period Cerebus and not concede that it's the result of a master of the medium working in top form. But (as has been pointed out here before iirc) there's a lot of elements of his work that limit its appeal and impact - the constant industry in-jokes, his personality/politics bleeding into the material in such a literal way, the impenetrability of long stretches of text etc. You can point to other self-published b&w comics that came out in his wake, you can point to various (mostly parodic) comics that took Cerebus as some kind of inspiration, you can point to other people tackling similar long-form storytelling, but I dunno he just doesn't seem like one of those universally revered figures to me that everybody in the industry acknowledges as a giant. Maybe that's because he just burned so many bridges, maybe it's because his signature opus is such an outlier in so many ways, or some combination thereof.

Yeah, I can't really imagine people caring about all of Cerebus, but maybe eventually one or two of the phonebooks will settle into "classic" status. Like I can imagine "Jaka's Story" taught in some kind of graphic novels undergrad class. Especially if Cerebus somewhow ends up reprinted by another (bigger?) publisher...which of course would probably only happen after Dave dies...Right now is all of it even properly in print?

Dave talked about a deal with Kim Thompson to republish but that died when Kim did I guess. There's probably too much water under the bridge with Gary Groth - I have memories of TCJ being a real bone of contention because of an interview? - for it to happen with Fanta without Kim.

I think Dave's legacy will be as maybe the greatest letter that wasn't Eisner, and maybe even better than him. I think the problem with Cerebus itself is that it's a sustained narrative. It needs commitment from the buyer and I just don't see that happening in Archive editions or whatever outside of existing fans; and then runs the problem that Vol 1 is very patchy and wouldn't necessarily sell well enough to make a company think it's a viable idea. Maybe if you started with HS and then did a prequel volume like they've done with Walt & Skeezix? To overcome aversion to Reads and the... slightness... of Women you might want to do all of Mothers & Daughters as one volume.

So there's a way to package it, and a way to sell it, but unfortunately I don't think either have the commercial return. I think Dave could well end up like Ditko - admired, but dismissed as going wacko and all work after a certain period just forgotten.

i would guess dave puts the whole thing up on the web for free when he dies, the end.

Sim's argument to Kim that the first volume that should be separately collected/published was the Hemingway one was so smdh stupid

agree w aldo that there's definitely a barrier-to-entry thing w new readers - there's no obvious, easy entry point, which is something I can recall people remarking on as far back as Church and State (ie that you had to go back and read all the much inferior/clumsy early satire stuff in the first book to understand who half the cast of Church and State even was). Which was true for me, I started buying issues midway through Church and State I and then went back to High Society (the first "phone book" I purchased) and then went back to the beginning.

Cerebus will move into the public domain after Dave's death (or Dave & Gerhard's deaths, by another account). I wonder if any publisher will take a stab at republishing any of it then. Access to the (surviving) Preney film will be a big question mark.

i think his legacy lies mainly in (as noted by aldo) his amazing lettering technique and his (closely related) exquisite use of time/panel meter whatever you want to call it.

that painstaking metric quality i can only think of ware mastering to the same extent (but I'm kind of out of the loop)

what is the Preney film?

original printing press negatives

It'll go on the web. And it absolutely won't (and shouldn't) be forgotten. It's too unique. Too exciting. Too problematic. It's the perfect book for the cannon.

Moreover, there's too much meta-information for it now to be studied. Ditko won't leave behind a commentary.

Preney Print & Litho was the printing company that printed the comic for most of its lifetime, and went out of business pretty soon after Cerebus was done iirc. I seem to recall somewhere reading that Dave got the archive of film from which the issues & phone books were printed after Preney closed. The film from the High Society issues was destroyed in a fire in 2012. xxxp

thx

According to AMOC Dave has to go back for more surgery and the diagnosis won't be known until they've removed parts of his colon, but he looks chirpy enough.