This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

High Society definitely feels like a warm-up and Dave still hasn't found his feet yet either in his art or storytelling. Lord Julius is still a bit too much of a parody and the return of Elrond and the Roach seem like an attempt to use familiarity to get readers onside.

But.

The McGrews are Dave's first great self-created side characters. And Astoria - although better is yet to come from her - is thoroughly developed from the outset as the manipulative, scheming equal (superior?) of any other character in the series. It's the Elf that is the master manipulator though and Cerebus starts on his lifelong quest of trying to get things he doesn't want in the forlorn hope it will make him happy.

I again enjoyed this more than I expected and it's hard not to see parallels for the current political climate here, with a buffoon propped up by a Machiavellian idiot who isn't as clever as he thinks he is, elected only because the alternative is even less palatable to the public.

C&S Volume 1

Gerhard joins and it's the missing piece. Everything suddenly gets 10x better through Dave concentrating on the important stuff. Cerebus gets to be the shape and form we know later. The actual main plot is a bit of a duffer if I'm honest, and the Countess is probably the least vital of all the Cerebus Women (which is probably why she doesn't really - at all? - come up again).

Plot be damned though, there are brilliant moments throughout this.

On page 59 there is a panel which is just an eye but between that and a speech bubble you're exactly with it.
Mind Game IV is as good a study of a depressed alcoholic as there is.
Odd Transformations near the end is a 40 page dream sequence with 4 pages of taking a piss in the middle, but we also get Young Cerebus looking exactly like his later portrayals. And this is the first time I've noticed the first time we see Young Cerebus he's up to his ankles in water, like in the stream with the knife.

Then amid all this we get the unheralded introduction of Bear, arguably the love of Cerebus' life.

I keep waiting to be let down by this re-read but it looks like the time I spent since the last read was long enough.

nothing that's happened in the last 3 decades has diminished my desire to do a reread of High Society through Rick's Story. I just keep putting it off.

I had been putting this off for at least 5. I just realised exactly what I had at the moment was time.

The actual main plot is a bit of a duffer if I'm honest

Yeah Sim's not very good at actual main plot on reflection, definitely more of a moments guy.

C&S V2 is ok I guess but very wordy and fond of infodumps to advance the plot (which it does at a frightening pace in order to de-escalate for the calm of the next few books). The Astoria sequences are immense though.

Re-reading the Judge/George material, having got to the end, it seems clear that large chunks of it are #289/290 through the lens of Chasing YHWH.

i am curious to find out how WOMEN holds up

The Cerebus blog has published the official "The Bizarre Autopsy of The Strange Death of Alex Raymond: What went wrong, AND HOW!" explanation of Sim's latest abandoning of a long-term publishing project.

In keeping with Dave's, and his blog guy's, keen understanding of how to disseminate both information and comics in 2020, this consists of fifteen separate embedded youtubes of audio of the blog guy talking to Sim on speakerphone (Dave's handset is broken so he will only use speakerphone), with himself sitting by the microphone and Dave's echoing voice in the distance.

C&S V2 is ok I guess

I remember the eventual confrontation with false pope being pretty darn exciting. Also a hilarious bit where Cerebus accidentally takes the Rolling Stones' drugs?

In keeping with Dave's, and his blog guy's, keen understanding of how to disseminate both information and comics in 2020

Love how bad at this Sim, and anybody who will still work with him, are at The Present Day.

I remember the eventual confrontation with false pope being pretty darn exciting. Also a hilarious bit where Cerebus accidentally takes the Rolling Stones' drugs?

The false pope confrontation is one of the excessively wordy bits I thought. It mainly involves Fred, Ethel and The Fellow With The Hair telling Cerebus how inevitable their victory is and why he should just jump off.

The Stones bit is the worst part of the book, in retrospect. Haha Keith Richards is always stoned. Haha Cerebus says I LOVE YOU to Mick Jagger. I can see why the Dave of the time thought it was him being a genius, but I just thought it was a one-joke part of the story.

I'm thinking of cool bit where he blows up the stone pope with a canon? I could check, the book's right there on my shelf.

Willing to concede Cerebus on drugs might not be as funny as when I was 17 or whatever.

Oh that bit. Yeah, that's pretty great - mainly because of the Weisshaupt reprise.

Sorry, I thought you meant the Final Acension, none of which I enjoyed much (sorry Carrot fans).

Really curious to reread these. I still have the phonebooks up to Flight (my cutoff point) at my parents’ house.

What an putting me off is the amount of Roach/Drew/Fleagle material, always found them totally exhausting after the first book

I read C&S2 when I was 14 and always assumed I would “get it” when I was an adult, lol

The intro of Gerhard is pretty immense though

*What’s putting me off

I've really enjoyed Drew and Fleagle this time round, Roach is (as you suggest) a comics in-joke that Dave plays a bit too hard on whatever but of Marvel mythology is in his head at the time.

Sim definitely way too fond of extended in-jokes.

at least he's still great at them

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3v5WKVeH4Rw/XvSRmaZuA0I/AAAAAAAADOA/abdP2q3HEwEo837zSPJEMZxkPG9LwRocQCLcBGAsYHQ/s640/80%2BThursday%2BJuly%2B16%252C%2B2020.jpg

jeeeeeeeezus

And that's not to mention the forthcoming 'woke comic store clerk' 48 page one-shot by the one that's actually doing the art on SDoAR.

All the CiH? covers have been pretty spicy this year, there were the three C-19 themed ones, the one about cousins fucking each other...

^^ said one-shot written by Sim has been successfully kickstartered by the guy that drew for free for him for years, now that Sim dumped him; $15 for a 48-page comic, or for $200 you also get one of 100 available already-printed promo copies of the first volume of Strange Death Of Alex Raymond, which will probably be the only printing of the book ever.

Some of us may be in to get SDoAR (which felt pretty good in Glamourpuss, will see how it holds up as a long read).

two

hundred

dollars

Well apart from the fact it's $125, less the lower pledges brings it to $105. Which is still kind of ridiculous but, as you say, last/only chance to buy and cheaper (I think, I'm not a subscriber) than the last 50 Patreon editions.

I've got a month to talk myself out of it.

I guess shipping is higher to Canada

Thinking of doing the re-read, I certainly have the time these days, when the kid’s asleep. Which of the books after Melmoth are still worth reading? I’m going to learn a lesson from my 14-year-old self and avoid reading anything too text-y this time

I've only got as far as Jaka's Story this time round so can't help, but I'm guessing Guys still holds up.

I remember being startled by how good Rick’s Story was given its place in the trajectory

The cartooning is amazing, the text is bonkers

I read it month-by-month as Sim analysing why self-proclaimed messianic figures are deluded, and handed-down texts are an impossible method of crafting a moral code. Instead it turned out he was writing himself into a messianic prophet who proclaimed himself to be the one true interpreter of at minimum one of the three core handed-down religious texts in history.

I think, as I get older, bonkers start to sound more appealing than conventional narrative closure.

Like, I’m gladder that Dave got to go out the way he wanted, even if literally no one else, not even Gerhard, wanted it to go that way

i'm less than thrilled myself

Fair

I just think that, by now, I’ve seen so many longform fantasy & sci-fi narratives (especially on tv) wiggle themselves into tidy but very boring places when they finish, that Sim’s complete collapse starts to seem heartwarming somehow

Also I visited Kitchener once and felt like I could forgive anyone who managed to make something even 2% good from Kitchener

i've seen so many people collapse in a similar way to dave

so many

i'm tired of seeing it happen to people i care about :(

Collapse of narrative, I meant. Dave’s health problems are obviously awful.

The cartooning is amazing, the text is bonkers

― bat ain't Thad (sic)

This is just about all of later Cerebus? I remember the non texty parts of Latter Days being quite fun. Going Home is a mammoth slog with a scattering of masterful sequences.

i sometimes wonder if committing to write and draw and sell a comic book a month, every month, for 25 years, while on paper an admirable career goal, might perhaps have had certain downsides sim may not have been aware of at the time

i sometimes wonder to what extent sim's advocacy of creator-owned comics prefigures today's influencers, wherein everybody is not just a creator but a personal brand

particularly when i see the stress and strain influencers are under, and yes yes we're all under stress and strain, Things Are Fucked right now, and yet

do you think any amount of money, any amount of money at all, could induce me to trade my current career for a career consisting, really, of playing video games on the internet?

no, not at all, because "playing video games on the internet" is so fucking much _harder_ than some people seem to give it credit for.

thinking about dave sim makes me very sad.

Dave, who refused to consult a doctor when he damaged his wrist and became unable to draw*, is now concocting his own COVID-truther conspiracies in his daily strips. eg: the numbers of cases are unreliable because they are tallied by university undergraduates who are too distracted by having friends or using the internet to count accurately, and also simultaneously it's all been made up by American medical schools to get all those huge government research grants that are going around.

* (instead going to the US to get a private X-ray, then posting it on a blogspot and asking if his commenters had any ideas)

Why do people keep giving this arsehole money?

tbf it's only 133 people who keep giving him money, as of his latest kickstarter.

Why do people keep giving this arsehole money?

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison)

i nominate this sentence for the "capitalism in 2020 summarized in one sentence" award

Finished Jaka's Story which, it turns out, is still pretty amazing.

Jaka is shown to be absolutely vile and self-centred, there's one bit I hadn't quite picked up on before that shows she knew all along Pud was bankrupting himself over her and Rick, and was happily letting him do it - only ultimately acknowledging it when it appears not to matter any more.

Mrs Thatcher is incredible when she shows up, she's the most successful and convincing use of lettering to create a voice in the book up to that point. I swear you can HEAR the dialogue.

Jaka's Story was always my favourite.

Melmoth is quite fun, or at least the Oscar Wilde parts are (something which I suspect will be repeated when we get into Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. The rest is inconsequential, except for marking the start of the Roach becoming an incoherent mess that confounds rather than entertains.

This decline continues across Flight and Women which are very much These Are My Gender Politics interspersed with the most boring Roach yet. Cerebus is finally a fully fledged alcoholic (for a short period at least) but it's sparse moments that hold the attention such as the revelation that Sir Gerrick is Cirin's son, which shows just how much of Astoria's life has been playing the game.

It's Reads next. Pray for me.

I started buying new issues right around Melmoth. Women was where I realized the book was no longer for me.

I remember Flight being incredibly exciting after the slow pace of the preceding two books.

The Hemmingway/Fitzgerald stuff, otoh, I remember as tedious and pointless.

yeah, the magic is not repeated from Oscar

(partly because iirc Sim had read and admired Wilde, and just decided that Hemingway and Fitzgerald were the two Big American Writers he needed to give the same treatment to, but did not actually read Hemingway until he started writing a planned 400pp book about him)

I read it month-by-month as Sim analysing why self-proclaimed messianic figures are deluded, and handed-down texts are an impossible method of crafting a moral code. Instead it turned out he was writing himself into a messianic prophet who proclaimed himself to be the one true interpreter of at minimum one of the three core handed-down religious texts in history.

Someone asked why he was wearing a bit of rubber on his finger in a recent youtube:

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VLoDJ0Y73fI/Xx2K4a_MYzI/AAAAAAAAPwA/MNqlIGSj26Q0UzuEN-0CSLcjpuEvD-0XwCLcBGAsYHQ/d/16%2Bmarriage.JPG