This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

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.

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

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison)

I'm very attached to it, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone without a mountain of caveats.

Wait: I thought Cerebus did end in one sense in #200, insofar as it spelled the end of the "grand narrative" and all the conspiracies and mysteries and subplots. I could've sworn Sim said something to this effect in response to a letter writer's question: don't expect any answers to lingering questions like why did Elrod just pop out of existence etc., that part of the story is over.

While I don't have the fortitude to re-read the thing, I remember loving Minds: replaying the tragedy of Walking on the Moon as farce, the Duck Amuck homage, the audacity of ending the entire thing with a coming attraction for the *next* installment. Plus the whole Cerebus talking to Sim thing felt like a callback to that oh-so-80s trend of having characters talk back to/meet their creators; seriously it was really a thing back then.

Following his recent tantrum about how not enough people are supporting him online or financially so he's not going to bother finishing his graphic novel, or bother paying the guy that's been drawing it on spec for years, Dave is now vlogging about how he's spending hundreds of dollars on CGC-slabbed comics "for the Cerebus Archive" (his house, which his will states is to become a research museum after his death).

He takes a seven-minute video to communicate the information that he recently bought Thor #337, because he reads out Beta Ray Bill's wikipedia over a video of the slabbed comic sitting immobile on a table, while commenting "I did not know that either" after each fact.

Someone should burn that house down.

what does "slabbed" mean

Slabbed comic books are books that have been “professionally graded” by one of the three grading companies. After being graded, they are encapsulated in an airtight plastic holder.

NB to JCLC: they are sealed in a hard plastic case that cannot be opened. This ostensibly makes them more valuable than comics which can be read.

https://www.myslabbedcomics.com/Images/Category_509/subcat_852/3006201200271.jpg

it's genuinely astounding that Diamond are still accepting his solicitations

https://i.imgur.com/SvZNz9m.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ydgg4NU.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/0ubwnEc.jpg

Seems ugly and unhinged even by late Sim standards.

they are sealed in a hard plastic case that cannot be opened.

I didn't realise the cases cannot be opened (presumably you could smash the case but that might well reduce yr grade a bit...). That's sick, sic

thanks for the explication sic!

all this stuff is sort of the most destroys-your-innocence stuff for me because when I was super-into comics (not by modern standards, but the standards of '78-ish), none of this was anywhere near my radar. I was a kid, we read Marvel books and they were great stories, we bought back issues and of course preferred comics in good condition but me & the friend with whom I obsessed over titles would have laughed for days at the idea of preserving a comic in a hard case you can't open & if you'd told us "this will be something people take super seriously in the future",...well we just would have laughed some more

I accept the need for some kind of preservation/protection for cheaply manufactured paper products that are 50+ years old, increasingly expensive and hard to find in high grade condition, and that if you really do fancy reading the first Superman story you're not going to be cracking open your original copy of Action Comics #1 to do so. But sealing them up forever turns them into expensive fetish objects only, which is always a shame.

I always wanted to keep my comics in good enough condition that my (theoretical, eventual) kid could read them, but I didn't want to be obsessive about it, so I just chucked them all in a longboxes, unprotected, and left them in a cupboard in my parents' house for several decades.

Now I actually do have a kid, I'm like, do I **actually** want my daughter to read Give Me Liberty, or Cerebus, Justice League Antartica, or my complete set of yellowed Dan Jurgens Triangle-era Superman issues, when she could just read Bone or Nimona instead?

(Am keeping my Doom Patrols and Sandmans though.)

slabbing reduces comics to the objet d'art that's necessary for them to be taken seriously as economically viable collectible art; otherwise they're mass produced publications and only generate meaningful worth in bulk.

https://www.sothebys.com/en/series/dc-complete-the-ian-levine-collection
^ i know COVID didn't help but has this just been hanging out for the past five months without a serious offer?

COVID could be a big part of it - there aren't likely to be many buyers wealthy and interested in London, and nobody else can go get the collection

Then again, the catalogue has been removed so maybe it did sell

hm, you may be right!

Even without covid, who would want to touch something Ian Levine had touched?

i know this guy by general reputation as a collector and a producer; what has he done that makes his touch poisonous?