This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

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?

You might have heard of a television show called Doctor Who.

i mean, if we're gonna pillory everyone who has done bad work on Doctor Who...

Levine used to introduce teenage boys whom he met in his capacity as a DJ at Heaven to the floor manager of Dr Who, so that the latter and his partner (the producer of Dr Who) could go "two up you" on them, in exchange for Levine getting tapes of the first assembly edits of Dr Who episodes.

He tells this story in the producer's biography as an example of the terrible moral character of the producer.

i am having a hard time parsing that but i also really don't want to think about what it means either

That sort of story is also how the badge for mathematical excellence got its wearer.

Love & Monsters from the modern Who era is a very, very thinly veiled attack on gatekeeping of fandom and the 'right' way to like something featuring a very, very thinly veiled unofficial continuity adviser.

I believe the young man in question has denied that he was cast via a couch, and as he already worked at the BBC as a tea-boy, Levine probably didn't make the introduction, but we've veered quite a distance from summarising Cerebus.

Well he's not going to admit it is he. Much like the stories about a certain someone pegging out while pegging a fan and dressed in their costume, it's been too many times round the world for far too long to go away.

But yes, we should get back to Cerebus.

One comes from known events, direct reportage, had witnesses in the immediate aftermath, and has never been denied by the surviving participant. The other is the sort of thing that both jealous and homophobic straight fans and jealous or catty gay fans would come up by themselves to explain the casting of a notably ungifted cutiepie, whether there were any degree of validity.

(For the passersby, a male star of Dr Who died underneath a female fan in a convention hotel room; as far as I know, no female star has ever expired from a heart attack while banging a male fan with a strap-on.)

jeeeez, i'm sorry i asked

(I know, I was too fond of the pegging usage for my own readability.)

Who was the one who died? I don't know this story.

god forbid sic ever communicate anything without implying special knowledge that only sic knows

Much like the stories about a certain someone pegging out while pegging a fan and dressed in their costume, it's been too many times round the world for far too long to go away.

But yes, we should get back to Cerebus.

― Mud... jam... failure (sic, not aldo), Tuesday, August 25, 2020 5:29 AM (yesterday)

Checks out.

SOMEBODY ANSWER THE QUESTION

The one who looks like Duke Leonardi

Great (and accurate) recovery to topic.

So I read Guys and Rick's Story probably about the last time I posted to the thread and am just about to start Going Home (having finally finished the 'to read' piles of other stuff) so figured I'd best write them up.

Inexplicably, and freed from the constraints of a narrative direction (if we stick to 'only really 200 issues' theory), layout and lettering kick into a whole new gear and this is where Dave is elevated to GOAT. We get parodies of real people from comics and literature, the fan-service return of some minor characters, but most importantly for maybe the first time we find out some stuff about Cerebus himself.

How the hermaphroditism manifests in the present is demonstrated, with Cerebus' desire to surround himself with manly men shown as part of his unresolved hormonal churn. His self-sabotaging comes to the fore, and it's questionable whether he is only involved with women because he feels society demands he be.

As we will see later, Rick's Story is actually him giving Cerebus a heartfelt belief system and succeeding where Cirin failed.

I'm almost sure you could read these - Guys at least - in isolation and, assuming you knew nothing of Dave Sim The Evil Misogynist, have a good time.

Now onto the two big literary character parodies.

Due to the as-inexplicable-as-any-other-Sim-strategy policy of preparing the monthly Cerebus issues a year in advance, his daily strips of a few months ago have now found their way into the print publishing schedule. Make sure to reserve the following five timely issues at your local store now, while the satire is still warm!

August 2021: CRISIS IN INFINITE QUARANTINE #1

September 2021: BATVARK: CORONAVIRUS

October 2021: SUPER-CEREBUS VS COVID-19

November 2021: THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY CORONA

December 2021: CORONAVIRUS BOOK

In other Cerebus news, there's a Kickstarter currently running for a new edition of Spawn #10, with Sim redrawing all the Cerebus figures throughout, and redrawing the entire pages for the scenes where Spawn and Cerebus wander around Sim's haunts in downtown Kitchener.

Elsewhere, there's a limit of 25 per customer on these commemorative Cerebus Trump vs Biden facemasks:

https://i.imgur.com/4gtYMZL.jpg

The Kickstarter offers the opportunity to add copies of the original Spawn #10 for only $15. That's the same Spawn #10 there are multiple copies of on eBay for $5.

Going Home is not necessarily the right book for reading in lockdown. I overheard a pub conversation a couple of months ago and one of the pair was asking the other how their relationship was going since their girlfriend had only moved in to bubble because of COVID. It then led to a quite interesting observation about how COVID was making or breaking relationships as couples were having to spend more time with each other than they ever might have expected to before retirement.

And that's what the first part of this is about. Cerebus and Jaka have to spend every waking second together , and it's not really what they thought it would be. Aided by booze and company the evenings are tolerable but the rest is about fighting your thoughts and second guessing feelings having nothing but time to think about them. What's not completely clear is whether this Jaka - before FStop and Ham - ever actually intended going to Sands Creek. It's a slow painful journey, but a well-observed one for all Sim's other faults.

The extended Fitzgerald section seems like an indulgence of sorts, but reading it in conjunction with Dave's notes (which he claims Alan Moore made him do, by obscure means) is accidentally illuminating. While explaining how women are too stupid to understand literary techniques and unable to think of things outside their own experience, it's not out of the question that Sim sees himself as the successor to Fitzgerald and reuses his 'Word, word or word ' motif to celebrate - in fact he draws direct parallels by attributing innovations in literature and comics to themselves.

(Actually Dave's notes are a car crash start to finish, with diatribes about homosexualists and how men are only attracted to 17/18 year old girls even if they don't like them, and how this hormonal/emotional reaction is better than women's reactions which are only based on hormones and emotions.)

More next time on my sudden revelation about the three lengthy author appropriation sections.

reading the alex raymond book now; it's doused in batshit but he's also making great points about brush styles

a well-observed one for all Sim's other faults.

Sim is (was?) often an extremely keen observer of the minutiae of human behaviour, for all his other faults.

Definitely was.

Fucking hell, Form & Void.

Ok, so let's do the easy bits. Sand Hills Creek, as developed through this book, is an ultra-orthodox religious community. The 'women should shut the fuck up and do what they're told' type. Unsurprisingly, given where he is by this stage, 'Cerebus as substitute for Dave' thinks all this is not only ok but admirable. That said, the build of every new rule is very well done and the rejection of Cerebus (and his - as foretold - rejection of Jaka is as affecting and wonderfully written as it felt the first time I read it.

But the Hemingway bit. Jesus.

Dave is quite clear in the text he only uses him because everyone thinks he's good but he's really shit. And in the text he expands on this, adding that fucking his cats might have been the final straw.

Mind you, at least he's only a sexually abnormal, drunken, talentless braggard. It could be worse - he could be a woman who wants to be a sexually abnormal, drunken, talentless braggard MAN but is as bad at pretending as a women would undoubtedly be...

The African scenery and animals are lovely to look atthough and I could maybe have gone a book of them.

The interesting part is Sim wondering why he had to use Hemingway and he wonders himself but the problem was he already had Bear. Bear was exactly the character he wanted - I've commented before on the weird sexual attraction Cerebus has for the manliest man he can think of - and unfortunately because of this Hemingway makes no real sense and has a limited place except for one thing - the transplanted author in Cerebus.

Each time we have an author, one of the main cast learns something fundamental about their relationship with Jaka. Oscar Wilde shows Rick(e) she doesn't love him. Fitzgerald shows Jaka she doesn't love Cerebus enough to be with him. Hemingway shows Cerebus he doesn't love Jaka the way she wants and Mary shows Jaka Cerebus doesn't love her.

I have no interest in reading the text section of this ever again.

Talking of which, next month it's Chasing YooWhoo. Oh fuck.

The African scenery and animals are lovely to look atthough and I could maybe have gone a book of them.

Gerhard lives off commissions, you could make this happen!

For mine, the only good issue after Guys is in the two parter you're about to hit (iirc), where Ger draws his only character of the entire run, a nice sheepdog

The interesting part is Sim wondering why he had to use Hemingway and he wonders himself but the problem was he already had Bear. Bear was exactly the character he wanted - I've commented before on the weird sexual attraction Cerebus has for the manliest man he can think of - and unfortunately because of this Hemingway makes no real sense and has a limited place except for one thing - the transplanted author in Cerebus.

Excellent observation. If Sim had ever read Hemingway, instead of just deciding 15 years earlier that he would make a book about him and then nor bother to read him until he got there, he could have folded his reactions into the Cer/Bear dynamic of Guys.

(Or even had Bear become a writer and work as a direct analogue, also sparing us Rick's Story, and thus Dave's last two decades of auto-religious obsession.)

Fuck, Bear as writer would make even more narrative sense - especially given the dismissive opinion Sim has of Hemingway. Bear could easily sit down for four hours every day and write and assume something would come out of the other end.

"Courage is waddyacall... grace under pressure."

And especially

"Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee."

We did it, we fixed Cerebus.