This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

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

Also, here's a minute of Mick and Keef from a feature-length animated Cerebus movie being created on spec, that Dave will either approve or decline only after the entire thing is completed, and will not look at any test footage or excerpts.

did not actually read Hemingway until he started writing a planned 400pp book about him

Yes, and decided he hated him when he did.

Dave Sim otm on that, at least.

Finding a small piece of rubber in a taxi is a personal sign from God specifically telling you that you were right about everything and should keep doing the same things you're already doing.

The handful of fans obsessed enough to not only read your inept third-hand blogspot, but to read the cut-and-paste RWNJ satire strips on it, are "Online Trolls" if they think you used to be an admirably talented artist.

Also, if they don't want their google account linked to their comments on a weirdo anti-science blog, even to say "this is a bad post," then they are one person pretending to argue with themself by also posting comments in defence of Dave.

If Dave knew how to work a computer properly (or maybe he does - he mentioned a laptop somewhere?) then I'd suspect it was actually him.

I bailed on the current Kickstarter - because, let's face it, it's going to be worse than we can even imagine - but will admit to being tempted by the hardcover High Society depending on price.

that Dave will either approve or decline only after the entire thing is completed,

I'm going to predict decline.

I'm going to predict that it's never completed tbf.

then I'd suspect it was actually him.

He used to post in the comments occasionally, but he certainly doesn't have the self-awareness to criticise himself for not understanding science or maths.

I think it will be completed, but Dave will be in no state to make a decision by then (dead or complete mental collapse).

Science or "science" or science or 'science' or science or science? (Yes, I am most of the way through Reads thanks for asking.)

Reads is really a book of two halves. The comic and the text. The comic has Suenteus Po and Astoria explaining why they're bored with how the storyline has turned out and are leaving, and the good bit which is the comics version of the fight in They Live. Make no mistake, it's a masterpiece as it records the small gains of evenly matched opponents cut by cut, punch by punch.

The text though. Whooo boy.

It's clearly after a breakdown. Dave spends the first half at least of it alienating himself from the comics community, calling them all liars. He then throws Deni Loubert into the pile - and I'm sure it's no coincidence that the first mention of her allegory is opposite a detail from the rape of Astoria. Real people flit in and out; Neil Gaiman is presented as an arch snob, the Jeff Smith incident is alluded to several times, and he (possibly) blames Alan Moore (and therefore massive amounts of doobage, in the closest to reality he gets anywhere here) for opening his eyes to how nothing he's ever been told is true and he needs to make his own reality. So he does.

He tells us he has done for a long time, since High Society even, and he has hidden it because he knows there will be a backlash. He retells the story George tells us in C&S, and he will retell us in both his Torah commentary and in 289/290. He then just goes into a rant which he himself basically agrees is misogynistic, it's just the 'evil' part of "Dave Sim is an evil misogynist" he disagrees with.

He says Cerebus will finish at #200, then on the other side of a lecture about objective reality that he's kidding. But I'm not so sure. This feels like hurtling towards an end, and to put all your cards on the table about what you think - particularly when you admit it's going to make you unpopular - feels like a final confession rather than a statement of intent. (More on this after Minds). Then there's the deniability aspect Dave creates between Victor Reid, Victor Davis, Dave and Cerebus himself - a luxury he only affords himself - to create doubt on the objective reality of anything written in the pages and who actually has said it or believes it.

It's surprising actually how little controversial material there actually is, it's effectively all in the final text section and it's nothing we haven't seen before or will see again. That said, having paid attention to it, there's nothing on the text that impacts the story and you can read Reads the comic on its own (actually there's probably an argument that if the meta-continuity is important enough then you should also be reading Notes From The President and the letters pages responses but I'm not going there yet).

In the end it was pretty interesting but not something I'm sure I'll repeat.

Minds plays out like a prettier version of C&S2. Big infodumps (including 'the potted history of pretty much everything that happened up until Dave started "explaining") but where it gets interesting - bearing in mind that in Reads Dave at least entertains the idea that Cerebus is him, or one of the versions of him - is the navel-gazing about exactly why you're alone and unloved. At this point it's still a negative as far as Dave is concerned so he does care that he seems to sabotage his own life so much although by the same token this could be the turning point, this is where he realises he's always going to be like he is and no SUCKING VOID will ever change that.

This definitely feels like the END end though and my guess this time round is that Dave realised at about 190 (and had the suspicion around 185) that he didn't have enough for a round 200 and was going to be a couple of issues short. This stopped it from being perfect and flawless therefore he could never complete his ascension - so having had to cobble together a couple of issues of content the only way to resolve his problem is to go back to Estarcion. In the context of the day, Cerebus is still making money and he's not a complete pariah yet so it makes more sense to continue with an existing property (and the chance to make it perfect and flawless at 300 after all). I also think this is at the heart of why he and Ger get so far behind.

nah, he was trolling.

(and they didn't get behind until one hundred issues later (seven years!), significantly because Gerhard walks out on Dave for a couple of months before being persuaded to return for the final year.)

{walks out on as in quits the book - he'd stopped working in the same room, or socialising, with Sim years before.}

I was thinking more of the time Sim and Ger were away somewhere (Bahamas?) and the reality of how far behind they were kicked in and they worked all day in the sun. Wasn't that about the 220s?

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NdEMGNOeYo4/VzCxX5YR-NI/AAAAAAAAQFo/7J5kGTn5LJUWSQlRkxZRPsnkYzkl2wNLwCLcB/s1600/hawaii_sim_1987.jpg

(There might have been a Bahamas excursion in the 220s that I don't recall, but since Dave was reading the Koran, the Bible & the Talmud, and consequently adopting an ascetic lifestyle at that time, I'd be mildly surprised.)

Maybe I'm misremembering.

Wait so what is this comic about

the Koran, the Bible & the Talmud.

Definitely not the kind of things that are causing a clusterfuck on other boards. No siree Bob, no.

My recollection is that they went and holed up in an American hotel somewhere, if not Hawaii, specifically in order to catch up when they were months behind at the end of Church & State btw. Getting away from distractions of regular life and belting out issues in 2-3 weeks until they were back on schedule.

You're probably right. My recollection was that they thought they could take a break - something about Ger discovering yachting as well? - and pretty soon realised they had to work like crazy the whole time they were away That Hawaii shot looks like a hotel and I'm sure I remember photos of a cabana. But my memory isn't what it was and I can digging out floppies.

After spending five years on Church & State, Sim and Gerhard took a few weeks off. Sim decided they would do a double issue between Church & State and Jaka's Story, as they would only have to do one front and back cover, and one letters page.[18]

That was for a breather, yeah - but they were shipping late for months at one stage.

(The Big Bang double-issue at 289/290 was also so Sim could catch up when Gerhard had quit both drawing and his part of the business paperwork - it's the only solo issue after #64.)

Absolutely nothing anyone has said in this thread has made this book sound remotely appealing.

i dont really think thats what theyre going for

why its good: sim and gerhard had, between them, an ability to present action, conversation, and world on the page unmatched in comics

why its bad: see above

it's a conan pastiche where the lead character is an aardvark and then, for a decade or two, it's about how women eat your brains
simple as that

Am nearly certain the Honlulu pic was from issue 98, first issue of Cerebus I ever bought.

And the editorial was about quitting smoking weed.