This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

It came up here You'll also note this is a post-C&S question, hence I've been light on all but the main points in pre-#111 accordingly.

Anyway, the full story on the #200 story is indeed in the Viktor Davis bit in Reads.

December 8, 1980, at approximately 11:20pm, Viktor Davis had been sitting at his drawing board, hard at work on the twenty-fourth issue of Cerebus. Less than a year before, he had announced for the first time that the story line would run three hundred issues. He was in the middle of lettering 'Blinky Boar and the Strawberry Patch' and humming 'Strawberry Fields Forever' to himself when the local radio station interrupted its programming for a news bulletin.

'Possibilities for a Beatles reunion were dashed at eleven o'clock tonight when John Lennon was shot to death outside his Manhattan apartment building...'

That night, Viktor Davis decided that Cerebus would not run for three hundred issues. He decided that Cerebus would run for two hundred issues. Viktor Davis decided to keep this a secret, telling no one for fourteen years.

He would not announce it until issue one hundred and eighty-three, a year and five months before the end: November 1995.

Dave then continues for a bit about how the reader takes this news.

'I was just kidding,' he said. 'Cerebus goes to issue three hundred. Just like I've always said. March 2004.'

The reader and Viktor Davis regarded one another for several minutes, without speaking, across the strange, lighted rectangle. Calmly, Viktor Davis withdrew his pack of cigarettes from his hip pocket and selected one. Rasing the lighter in his right hand, he lit the cigarette in a quick, easy motion.

'What's the matter?' he asked, still smiling through a dissipating cloud of smoke.

'Don't you trust me?'

In many ways this is the best and worst of Dave. He has admitted in private conversation to me that it's entirely possible - that the way the final third sits is consistent with Dave having no real plan and having to come up with it as he went along, to a degree.

btw Andrew, Dave turned the Cerebus copyright over to the readers in #300 so this is free for reproduction.

"Heheh. Watta maroon." Dave is talking about Cerebus. Or is he? Dave is talking about us. It's our desire to know what happens next that brings Cerebus back to the bar. It's us that choose for him not to die.

This accounts for the jarring jump in story (mainly because there are no outstanding plotlines - everything that needs tying up, has been), and almost retreading of previous work. Old characters are reintroduced, sometimes (as in Mick 'n' Keef) for no real overall plot advancement,and the level of injokery (Seth, Eddie Campbell, Marc Hempel) is possibly even higher. Having said that, by the time Guys is over, the final books are at least roughly plotted - there are pieces very early in Rick's Story that don't pay off till Latter Days, for example.

Despite all this, the Jaka from the later books is entirely consistent with the earlier Jaka, and re-reading Jaka's Story in light of what came later if Dave planned it all from the beginning it's hard to see how it ever became hailed as a feminist epic (it actually reads in exactly the same way as some of the later post-breakdown light/void books).

There are some good essays out there on which chunks you can break the 300 issue plot into (personally, I favour the interpretation which says it's the same 100 issue story told 3 times but with variances in the main themes. 1-100 - Cerebus is manipulated in a male-dominated society, the reader is externalised and voyeuristic, an observer. 101-200 - the transition: Cerebus is manipulated as much as he manipulates others in a society fighting a gender war, the reader is a companion and participatory. 201-300 - Cerebus is stuck trying to manipulate other people to win minor victories in a female-dominated society, the reader is empathic and is Cerebus.), I recommend a good one I read which says the split is in fact at 150, and there's a 'light' half and a 'void' half. Also, Dave's answers to questions on individual books on the Cerebus newsgroup show that there were some constructs he introduced very early on that have very real and far-reaching consequences for much, much later (it can be argued, of course, that this is not necessarily inconsistent with plans for finishing at 200).

some constructs he introduced very early on that have very real and far-reaching consequences for much, much later

what are these, btw, for the benefit of someone who skimmed the later stuff?

also: acc. to dave, it's definitely hell (I think).

Personally, I think it works better if it's left open to interpretation, but obv it's hard to stop Dave overexplaining about things.

To cover some earlier points:

I suspect at 200 Cerebus would just have died on the ice planet. alone, unloved and unmourned.

As to some of the stuff which is introduced very early - I think the most obvious one is in issue #2, where Cerebus goes after the "Eye of Terim" which is protected by a succubus. And what do succubi do? They are the 'void' into which the souls of the male warriors are sucked.

Q1 continued: Also, the female succubus Khem is hiding out in "The Eye of Terim." Terim, of course, is later depicted as the female deity. Was the later use of the name Terim deliberately linked to the earlier use?

DAVE: I can't say with 100% certainty that that was the case. As I recall, the two different spellings of Terim and Tarim were accidental at first, in the same was that I had trouble bearing in mind that Cerebus was supposed to refer to himself in the third person and would later cover for it by saying that he referred to himself as "I" when he had been around the civilized areas too long. I was covering for not remembering how to spell Tarim by making it the masculine version of the deity's name.

Q1 continued: Similarly, is the demon Female (Void) sucking the souls out of the Male warriors, who at the end when released are depicted as Lights flying off into the night an intentional direct parallel to the similar description of the Void and Light that you presented in i186?

DAVE: I went back and reread the section and it seems clear to me in retrospect that this was me unconsciously documenting what would have been, at the time, my overwhelming and all-encompassing connection to the female half of reality which resulted from my first non-familial exposure to it as a result of being in my first boyfriend/girlfriend relationship for about a year by this time.

Certainly all of the central YHWHist female realities are there: the living thing in the middle of the earth that's a bright light, the rarest jewel, blah, blah, blah. And it certainly anticipates the ultimate conclusions I came to about the devouring, ensnaring nature of the light as presented in i's289/290 (is that the plural form?) about which, in my view, men would do well to remain always and centrally vigilant if they intend to shilly-shally on the romantic borderlands or (God forbid) plunge joyously headlong,as I did,into the Alice in Wonderland environs of the members opposite.

[Relative to 186, I think it's safe to say that my best amended perception of Reality is that males and females are both light and void. That is, that masculinity is represented in the light by the Spirit of God which "went in unto the light" and the "true light which lighteth every man that commeth into the world" (John's Gospel). Femininity is represented in the light by the empty facade of radiance (un-true light, if you will). Masculinity is represented in the void by the fact that it is the medium in which God exists.

I mean, that's my best guess,that the void is universally conscious and aware for the most part across untold trillions of light years interrupted here and there by pinpricks of empty facade radiance and that the void also constitutes the space between atoms and molecules. It's all one awareness which allows for the literal definition of God as an omnipresent Being. He is literally everywhere around you and inside of you. Boo!

Femininity is represented in the void as a vaginal nature, desirous of things to ensnare and transform. That is, apart from the facade of radiance, with the seminal light there was, literally (to quote Dorothy Parker) "no 'there' there." One of the descriptions of goddess nature is "everything she touches she changes." Well, true enough. All the Spirit of God wanted was to have a co-equal existence with the light and we see what that's led to. YHWH the transformative tar baby. Enter at your own risk.]

It seems to me that I was telling myself that very basic story as well, even way back at issue 2. Notice that all Cerebus has to do is pick up the Eye of Tarim and walk in a straight line to the exit. The thing is there are no straight lines in the female half of reality. They are,physically, mentally and spiritually,all curves which lead nowhere. Fun house mirrors and roller coasters. I was surprised that no one picked up on the analogous usage of "The path suddenly drops and the aardvark stumbles�" segment and the same trick that Viktor Davis played on the reader in i183, where the path suddenly drops away and then comes back when he announces that Cerebus is going to end at issue 200 instead of 300.

In both case, the one unconscious and the other conscious,I was attempting to demonstrate (first to myself and then to the reader) what reality is like once you enter the opposing camp where everything is made up of curves that lead nowhere. On the way in, it all looks perfectly straightforward. That's the trick.

Of course, this is Dave's retconning in full effect, but there are some interesting examples. You can find the Q&A sessions here.

i really need to read the stuff i haven't, which is mostly mothers and daughters, but also, hum, lots of the rest. well.

Urgh, yeah. I finally tried to start following the monthly around the time he was doing the "Chasing YHWH" bit and it was an impossible task. Three months worth of text pieces detailing Dave's highly idiosyncratic, not to say schizoid, reinterpretation of the Bible? Yuck.

Did you flag a bit in carrying out your Cerebus project, tom?

Which he believes is the only correct interperatation that has ever been made. And the only reason its not front page news around the world is because of those nasty women and gays keeping it supressed. You really have to laugh. (It's the Torah, BTW)

I would be interested to read that article too.

(And yes, Cerebus farts right before he hits the ground. About 60 pages earlier he'd prayed to God for one good fart. Which is why he thinks "Oh! Thank you God" as he expires...)

It's definitely worth checking out Douglas' article in the original, because you get a Charles Burns Cerebus on the cover and a Tony Millionaire spot illo with the article! That said, I wouldn't mind the PDF too, 'cos I didn't want to pay $24 for an 80-page magazine and read it in a bookshop...

I'd love someone to write a book-length analysis of Cerebus one day, but I wouldn't envy the fucker.

http://briancotts.tripod.com/cottsweb/thirty/thirtyep73w.html

It's rather solipsistic and repetetive, but I don't know how one could write about Cerebus in any depth without this being the case. Anyway, I found it interesting.

Can someone do me a favour and point me to a good - ideally fairly small (like 200-250 pixels max either way) pic of Prince Mick and Prince Keef from Cerebus - my copies of Church and State are in France so I can't scan it. I need it to illustrate a blog post tomorrow (attentive FT readers will be able to work out which).

How chi-chi!

I have read huge chunks of this but have some gaps (haven't read anything after Rick's Story, for ex.) I have two random questions:

1) does Astoria ever appear again post-Minds? At the end of the four-way dialogue between Suenteus Po, Cerebus, Cirin, and herself, does she just leave and exit the narrative altogether?
2) when Cerebus returns to Estarcion after Minds, how come the Cirinists don't just kill him. Given how much trouble Cerebus caused her, I don't get why Cirin would just let him live out his days.

maybe I should just read Minds...

i think the answer to 2) is that she's terrified of him.

1) Astoria's last appearance is in Reads, except for in hallucinations and possibly flashbacks.

You should check out Latter Days, the first two thirds are surprisingly good fun for late period Cerebus, and you don't really have to have read the generally interminable stuff between it and guys to understand it. The last third of the book is fucking batshit and really boring, natch.

good to know... so far I've avoided Reads and I'm conflicted about powering through the entire series, even though I seem to return to the ones I like the most (High Society/Church & State/Guys/Rick's Story) on a regular basis (like, once every couple years). this series is really kinda a tragedy, could've been so much bigger/better...

btw, I watched about 45 minutes of Cerebus TV yesterday (I don't know how much content he has up...it runs in a continuous loop), and my only reaction is o_O

Cerebus TV?

^ The Real Dirty Tuomas

DV, Cerebus TV is some new thing of Sim's, with a little involvement from Jim Steranko I believe. It's basically a rambling video fanzine -- segments include him talking about the development of a piece of art he donated to a charity auction (while he holds a camcorder on the art and bits of photo reference he used, trying to get it to focus), phone conversations between him and Todd Macfarlane about them agreeing to allow each other to reprint Spawn #10 (writting by Sim, featuring Cerebus), a phone conversation/interview with Russ Heath, a video love letter to a bookstore in his hometown, an announcement that he won't offer Cerebus Archives through Diamond Distribution because it didn't meet their minimum order numbers (even though they offered to bend the rules for him, because he's a man of principle etc etc). There are a couple of commercials for local comic shops in between segments; he seems to be hoping to at least break even selling ads, if not make huge profits.

Mmmm.

I wish I could somehow blend with Tuomas.

Man, this new comic he made of pinup girls with him rambling is just woof.

I was a steady reader of Cerebus from High Society onward to somewhere in the 140s when there was more text than art and seeing this all go down in real time is something. I seem to recall that Deni Loubert saying something to that effect: 300 issues about an aardvark in the wilds of Kitchner will drive him mad.

I was given a self-drawn comic this Christmas by someone who appeared as a character in Cerebus many years ago.

Hempel?

it's just such a fucking insult how good this guy is at page & panel design, and such a blessing that he's so far over the bend that nobody'll ever put his talents to use for, like, viable political candidates who'd make things even worse

As an equally epic, well-drawn and well-written comic without the baggage of its creator, let me humbly sugggest Finder by Carla Speed McNeil.

I'm about halfway through the Sim content of SDOAR and it's... something.

I hadn't realised until I read Eddie Campbell's intro that Sim had abandoned completely all the work he had included in glamourpuss (for, frankly, Sim-based reasons) and instead appears to be creating a revenge narrative where Alex Raymond is the only true artist and Caniff had him killed so the extent of his rip-off wasn't exposed.

Of course, Dave being Dave, this is only revealed when you compare King Features published funny pages vs the original art and they are in on the conspiracy. And in an even more Dave move, this is a multi-dimensional conspiracy achieved using an as-yet undiscovered school of metaphysics revealed to (possibly only) him.

The most ridiculous part so far though is obliquely comparing Rob Liefeld to Alex Raymond. Even the staunchest defenders have to acknowledge that's fucking crazy talk.

I might have to find my glamourpusses after this because I recognise NONE of this.

Is it an interesting something or a “go away Dave” something (or both!)

It's both, to be honest.

At the moment it's all mystic visionary Dave and very little sexual politics Dave - he touches on it once and backs the fuck away VERY quickly - and if it was anybody else (e.g. Scott McCloud) it'd be getting discussed very seriously.

Even if you don't agree with his central premise (and I'm not sure who else does apart from Dave) some of his Tangents are really engaging no matter how implausible (for example, Raymond's affair physically manifested a parallel Earth in another dimension which Oskar Lebeck had his ideas for Twin Earths psychically beamed from which is why they're so technologically accurate to the modern day).

Also Dave's art is, for the first 100 pages or so, absolutely undiminished and his layouts are great. Lettering sucks though.

I'm at about page 150 and Dave's last is 209 before it becomes nearly all Carson.

it's hard to think of someone else in this field whose skills have remained so high and who have stayed so prolific and yet i have no interest in anything they're making

Xpost
What is SDOAR?

Strange Death Of Alex Raymond

whose skills have remained so high and who have stayed so prolific

His past skills at comedy, dialogue, pacing, design and lettering are not at all evidenced by the work he is prolifically publishing

Can't disagree.

The Dave stuff in SDoAR is somewhere between 15 and 8 years old, depending on reuse. Haven't got to him just doing layouts yet.

I can't remember how I got them (might have been the Diamondback deck reprint?) but I have some of the early Swords of CiH and they're pretty much as bad as you think they are.

I obviously meant his visual skills, which seem pretty strong yet.

Got to the end of Dave's art life and it's losing its way a bit, meandering around the Margaret Mitchell revelation it promised earlier without actually getting anywhere near revealing.

Scott and Zelda turn up about now so I can see Dave folding himself into the metaphysics soon.

And in other cosmic alignment, a GoFundMe was launched while I've been reading to put online the TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY pages Dave has done outlines for since he stopped interacting with Carson Grubaugh (obviously including the Dave versions of the blue pages in SDOAR).

I am resisting, even at the $5 entry level, and looks like I'm not alone as two weeks in there are only 34 donations.

I obviously meant his visual skills, which seem pretty strong yet.

The work he is prolifically publishing is three older existing drawings of cerebus, cut-and-pasted by other people onto a 140-year-dead guy’s drawings! He’s only just started doing some variant covers again in the last year, after …seven years? of not drawing for publication, and mostly copying photos for about as many before that. It’s possible that the SDOAR 3.0 which aldo is resisting gofunding show that he still has a facility for original composition, page structure and visual storytelling, but it’s also possible it shows a significant deterioration — and I dunno that sketching layouts for one patron’s commission can be judged as prolific without seeing any of them.

ie yes one might argue his drawing has not deteriorated to the same degree as his comedy, dialogue, pacing, design and lettering; however, he is prolifically publishing all of those, and his drawings are published a couple of times a year, usually via POD to an audience of …dozens?

I am referring to what I have seen of strange death, which seems cleanly and well executed. Glamorpuss, the Dore stuff and Judenhass are varying levels of embarrassing, yes

With only 34 in for SDOAR3.0 dozens feels accurate at this point.

It's hard to tell just how far Dave's drawing has deteriorated from the limited stuff I've seen because once he moved to the tracing paper technique the 'good' is introduced at the inking stage and the trace drawing is quite literally a bit sketchy. So because all we see now is really the pencil we should be comparing it to something that looks unfinished - and if we do that then it looks fairly sustained. But the point is kind of moot because imo there's no way Dave will ever produce finished art again (not least because that would mean not falling out with a collaborator).

It's also fair to say though that going down the SDOAR route and reproducing other people's work, plus the reproducing photos stuff, has ruined his creative art abilities.

Based on SDOAR2.0 layouts are the only real strength he has at Cerebus levels but I haven't seen any of the SDOAR3.0 stuff and the SDOAR2.1 layouts are a drop off from the rest of the book.

CiH is absolutely dreadful.

Had a dig through the cereblog:

This is the sole image used to advertise the SDOAR 3.0 GoFundMe, that you can subscribe to see more of - I couldn't figure out how much more or for how much.

This is a recent actual drawing, which I couldn't figure out whether it's a cover printed like this or drawn on a "blank" cover.

These are the only art he is publishing regularly at the moment, and afaict the only time he has published art serially in about eight years?

Someone should tell him about the “cool S”

all the actual car crash stuff i've seen from sdoar is quite nice imo but it seems i am not keeping pace with his output and that's because i don't have much interest in him anymore

Kickstarter for Remastered TMNT #8, with 24 variant covers* at $20-$100 each, a behind-the-scenes book (collecting material from two previous BTS books promoting this Kickstarter, plus new material - presumably the two complete BTS books will also be offered as stretch goals) for $30, a comic book of TMNT/Cerebus convention sketches by unnamed artists, a collection of the 75 promo sketches by Sim^ for $30, a trading card set of the promo sketches for $95 and a trading card set of the variant covers for $20, an enamel pin of Cerebus' face, another enamel pin of Cerebus'face wearing a TMNT mask ($15 each or $25 for two), three variant cover versions of a November ashcan promoting this project (regular cover $100, green foil cover $150, platinum foil $300), and new editions of previously-kickstartered remasters of Cerebus #1 and #2 at $15 each, and a Dave Sim cover variant of a previously-kickstartered remaster of Spawn #10 for $50.

$45k raised from 308 backers so far, five days in. I think the cheapest you can get everything (via bundles) for is $1230

*(artists range from Simon Bisley and Brandon Graham to original Mirage artists Michael Dooney and Jim Lawson, to one of the guys that writes & photoshops Cerebus In Hell.)

Man, the Eastman/Sim combo is an unpleasant moneygrubbing two-headed monster.

Tom Ewing's deep Cerebus dive, started on Feb 1st and a post per phone book, is really really good. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/there-are-three-aardvarks starts it off, and there are links at the bottom of that post to each subsequent post. He's up to Rick's Story, posted today.

Thanks, this is great stuff.

Oh this should be fun!

Also tipped me off that he's actually been updating Popular haha

I just got the UPS saying my Minds portfolio is turning up tomorrow - these still remain value imo, full size reproductions of pages and yet more otherwise unavailable Dave commentary - and had forgotten that I had added the Akira Cerebus, which is the first full new Cerebus comic (i.e. writing and art) in 20 years and the first full issue Sim art since glamourpuss finished.

So I guess I will have to report back over the weekend. Pray for me.

"That's right! The first Aardvark-Mangaheim (Dave Sim's Manga parodies) begins here, and Manga will never be the same! AKIMBO! Hand drawn by Dave Sim, it's Manga vs. Photorealism in the battle of the century, with Cerebus caught in the middle! Who will win? Who will lose? "With Hands On Hips And Elbows Turned Outward!"

Dave Sim now only exists to make my brain hurt. Take one for the team, aldo.

They have failed to deliver it, presumably because of some kind of hate crime. Updates when, and if, it ever turns up.

Tom Ewing's deep Cerebus dive, started on Feb 1st and a post per phone book, is really really good. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/there-are-three-aardvarks🕸 starts it off, and there are links at the bottom of that post to each subsequent post. He's up to Rick's Story, posted today.

I commented on one of the posts that the whole thing needs to be collected and published, ideally illustrated by Gerhard. Tom mentions at one point a post-300 interview with Ger, who said that in the latter days (the book's, not the aardvark's) he had to work in silence because Dave refused to have music playing. Can anyone here provide a link to that interview?

A friend sent me a reco for this book in response to me sending the Ewing piece. Has anyone read it? https://www.clairedederer.com/monsters

intrigued, i tried it.

i like ewing's writing better. dederer seems to be reaching towards some kind of Grand Unified Theory, and for me, there isn't one. it's so full of _ideas_. chapter 3:

If you are a trans person, or love a trans person, or simply disagree with Rowling’s language, what then to do with that part of your childhood that had become intertwined with Harry Potter?

i'm not sure why she's asking the question. there are plenty of trans people who have had that experience. each of them deal with it in their own way. she deals with it, apparently, by writing punditry that considers these questions _intellectually_. not my bag.

perhaps there's some merit in dederer's book, but i didn't see on a cursory skim. perhaps i missed it. if someone's read her work more in-depth and believes it _does_ deserve further consideration, i'm all ears.

-

Here's what I like about Aard Labour: The first sentences. Starting with part 5:

This is the fifth in a series of posts on Cerebus The Aardvark, an often technically brilliant comic.
This is the sixth of my posts about Cerebus, the alternative comic that ran from 1978-2004.
This is the seventh in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a comic I used to read.
This is the 8th of my posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a controversial and long-running comic.
This is the 9th in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a controversial independent comic.
This is the 10th in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a 300-issue comic series of some notoriety.
This is the 11th in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a 300-issue comic by a troubled Canadian.
This is the 12th of my posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a 16-book graphic novel by a guy with serious issues.

There's no intent, as far as I can tell, in the changes in these lines. No metanarrative Tom is spinning out. I like the writing, though, the different ways of looking at the book.

Reading Ewing's work has given me lots of cause to reflect. I have had many thoughts. I don't know if there's... value in my sharing them. It's more to do with me than with anything else.

Tom mentions at one point a post-300 interview with Ger, who said that in the latter days (the book's, not the aardvark's) he had to work in silence because Dave refused to have music playing.

Correction, this was from a commenter, not from Tom.

Gerhard stopped drawing in the office years before the end, and would just come in every two weeks or so to pick up Dave's pages and do his part of the business admin. (After he quit altogether, leading to the catch-up double solo issue in the last year or so, he only returned as artist iirc.)

IDK. It's a really interesting topic for me to circle back around on, particularly now that I am, I suppose, at the center of the - what is it - "marxist-feminist-homosexualist axis" he goes on about? In some ways he's very much a proto-Scott-Adams, except that Sim is often brilliant and Adams... isn't, particularly. Whenever I read about Scott Adams, I almost immediately think of some epithet or another used to denigrate another's intelligence (though not the r-slur, at least). Then I say, oh, wait, I'm trying not to use that sort of language, and find that I have nothing to say about Scott Adams. Nothing whatsoever.

Sim, on the other hand... reading about him, I can think of a great deal of things to say in response. Nothing _about_ him. Nothing actually _to_ him. My understanding is that he regularly describes women like me as "devils, vipers, and scorpions". I'm sure he has some extremely logical explanation for why those are _his_ initials. That's the thing. I can say very _little_ about Sim himself beyond "Wow. What the fuck?" The only way I can understand him is through the lens of extreme mental illness - my own, not his. I don't know the man and am not qualified to make any judgement whatsoever on his sanity or lack thereof.

How do I "separate the art from the artist" when the artist, and his statements on his own art, are so bizarre as to be incomprehensible to me? The work certainly has _meaning_ to me. The artist, without particularly knowing me, has passed collective judgement on groups I belong to. In light of that it seems somewhat superfluous for me to form any sort of opinion on the man himself. Confronted with Dave Sim's opinions, all I can do is shrug and say "...OK." I guess it would be different if I could conceive of them as being any sort of credible threat to me, but he's just so _marginalized_. I understand marginalization. He has opinions, and he voices them, and basically nobody listens. A tiny minority. Nobody takes him seriously. "He's brilliant, but...". Some of the labels he bristles against are in fact fully accurate. I'm not sure why he argues so vociferously against being labelled a "misogynist" - it's, again, he has this worldview, this _language_, that just doesn't _correspond_ to other people's. To say that he's not a "misogynist" is to render the concept of misogyny itself meaningless.

Which, I mean. Misogyny isn't really the important thing to me anyway. I've kind of moved away from "misogyny" to a broader critique of patriarchy. Not sure what Sim thinks about patriarchy or whether he'd consider himself and advocate of it.

See, it's easy to get lost. In trying to _understand_ him. Which is impossible, for me, at least. The important part is that long ago, I related to his work a lot, found it brilliant, didn't quite understand it. I only ever read the first four phonebooks. That's where Cerebus ends for me - the end of Church and State II. I reread those phonebooks, particularly High Society through Church and State II, a number of times, and didn't quite ever understand it. It influenced me, though, at least in terms of giving voice to a lot of feelings I had about myself. The trajectory of my life thus far can be roughly summarized by the "gifted boy -> burnout girl with a praise kink pipeline" meme. I think I first read Cerebus post-boy, but pre-burnout. A troubled American with serious issues.

The thing is, at that time I saw myself fully as a man, and I read Cerebus, and it spoke to me on that level, informed how I thought about my own gender. And what I saw, at that time, was a work full of detestable men (and I guess a detestable aardvark). And the aardvark is apparently... intersex? All of the work I see about it describes Cerebus as a "hermaphrodite", which to my understanding is not the preferred nomenclature. All of this time I've been thinking of Cerebus the character as a cis male aardvark and it seems to be more complicated than that. Fuck if I know. Cerebus more than most works I know seems like a palimpsest, the author writing over it while it's still being published. It's sort of this ancient half-buried _thing_ in my past. I've written over myself so many times since then. Sim's written over his work so many times since then. There's some point of contact, some _important_ point of contact that I had with a prior version of that work, but G-d help me if I know how to put it into words.

Boggles me that it’s just a series of blog posts/Goodreads reviews and not something he’ll be paid for.

Indeed the opposite - he's got a Patreon but as far as I'm aware he's paused it until he gets Popular on a more regular schedule?

And yes, this stuff is amazing - I must have given away the earlier funnier stuff, and all I have is Flight-thru-Rick's Story, but now I even want to read Form & Void. I know I can probably get the torrents, but I want to actually hold the phonebooks (I got rid of the 120+ issues that I had, at some point), but where to source them ethically... - it took me a while to realise that what I didn't want to get my hands dirty, I did want to get my hands dirty

xxp I think it's simply that "hermaphrodite" is the word used in the comics? I think it would be the one used at the time, and even if it wasn't, I can imagine that the boy god + girl god would be a draw for Sim.

I met Sim at a signing at Comics Showcase when I was a teenager, not long after Flight came out. He seemed like a charming good storyteller. Weird to think he was probably in the middle of writing Minds at the time.

I got (and lost!) a sketch

In news that should surprise nobody, Akimbo is bad. Unreadably bad. But most interestingly it ably demonstrates the complete collapse as of Dave as a comics creator because there is no part of it executed even vaguely competently.

The "writing": in a style familiar to anyone who's ever looked at CiH?! or even just the covers, Dave has a single thought and shouts it multiple times, changing the words ever so slightly, in the hope that it sinks in. I think what he's attempting to do in this case is suggest the feminist/homosexualist axis is trying to normalise paedophilia by making "romance" all about underdeveloped bodies and that real women (specifically ones with boobs) should rise from their slumbers and reclaim their rightful place beside manly men (while executing the girly men that are enablers to this masterplan. If we thought Dave was capable of self-reflection, and pushing the 'Cerebus is Dave' angle, he might be assumed to be referencing the recent grooming stories and indicating that even he, the Diuine Cerebuss, is not immune from the tendrils of the axis and that, no matter how much it suits the narrative and might feel like the right thing, we should always be vigilant that the nest of vipers are permanently trying to undermine the forces of good.

If we're going to be very, very generous there's nearly a point being made about Cerebus (the comic) and how it took on a life of its own - it was supposed to be an adventure comic and instead turned into a romance comic. For girls. And it wouldn't be too much of a reach to think it's at least part of Dave's thought process; he explicitly says the adventure/romance/girls line twice as the internalised thoughts of Akimbo. But whose fault is that, and which periods is Dave referring to? Or which romance even, given I think I've said before that Cerebus/Bear is the love story at the heart of the second third. For a comic that exists now only as exegesis, or Baudrillardan critique, it would be tempting to explore this idea (and I yet might) but these short lines here are already more thought than Dave has given to the topic.

The "art": in total it's about half a dozen sketches. They're relaid on slightly different backgrounds, or in different configurations or magnifications/zooms, but there is very little here. It's also admitted in a thought bubble that these are 'just' tracings - again, this is not even vaguely unusual to anyone who's looked at any of the post-Cerebus/pre-injury work - but what's notable is just how inept they are. In a couple of the Akimbo frames you can see just how rough the trace is, and it looks like Dave can't manage more than a couple of mm of straight work before stopping because there's just no continuous work at all, it's just a series of small scrapes on the paper that just about look like a real thing at a macro enough level. That this even passed a basic editorial quality check is shocking enough but it shows a complete decline in abilities and raises the question of how much work whoever is doing the inking on the 'good' pieces reflects the output and how much of it is even Dave any more.

The "lettering": lOv3 thee qvIRky STYLINGS off gL4mOURpVss l3TTeRinG?!!??! Well it's here in spades. It's obviously supposed to be a specific way of speaking, but buggered if I can work it out or care enough to. It's just a lazy retread of previous work, which itself was a facsimile of late-era attempts to recapture what was once genuine innovation. 35 years of dilution have rendered the effect like homeopathy - a placebo for true believers but the home of cranks and rogues to the rest of us.

And with that, Defend The Indefensible: Dave Sim Current Edition is over. There's no part of his ability remaining that can be used to justify looking at any of the new material and his once numerous talents have deserted him. I'll most likely stay on board for the Archive project, at least until it's done the first pass through all the books, because they're actually very well done (although if i'm honest the quality reduces the later in the phonebooks we get to, as Dave's background is largely already published so he has less to say about them. It looks like facsimile editions of his notebooks is the new cash converter, although in classic Sim style they're only really affordable if you send cheques directly to the Off-White House. Any attempt to use modern technology like a website (that already exists) or electronic mail (that already exists) come with cost penalties that we all deserve, obviously, for daring to live in the current era.