This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

We did it, we fixed Cerebus.

I think it's Form & Void which has a very well done issue with minimal drawings where Cerebus and Jaka are trapped in a tent in a snowstorm? Stuck in my mind anyway.

also sparing us Rick's Story, and thus Dave's last two decades of auto-religious obsession.

I'm confident he would've got there by another path.

Yes, stuck in the tent is in F&V. One of the few images is the stitching straining and starting to tear, and that's one of the ones that's stayed with me.

Anyway, I can't take credit for Hemingway = Bear as Dave himself includes it in his notes, but does so for the wrong reasons. His version is because he'd created such a great character and he wasn't going to change what F&V was going to be (so, for obvious reasons, he could make offensive comments about Ernest and Mary, as well as Gore Vidal and Gertrude Stein vice 'homosexualists' period), so he had to relegate Ham to the vegetative lump he appears as even though it makes Cerebus' hero worship - which, remember, has never vaguely been touched on and we have never even seen him with a READS until after Ham is dead plus is contrary to the forthcoming RABBI plotline iirc - even more incongruous.

as-inexplicable-as-any-other-Sim-strategy policy

The guy who recently kickstarted a deluxe reprint of Cerebus #1 and is currently running the KS for the superdeluxe Spawn #10 had a special one-day Halloween-only promo for an exclusive variant cover, limited to 50 copies.

So Dave did a competing one-day Halloween-only promo for a different one-day Halloween-only exclusive variant edition that he will Print On Demand through ComiXPress. And marketed it by sending a dozen or more updates throughout the day to the guy that runs his blogspot, several of them complaining at length about how badly he had hurt his non-working arm by trying to draw the variant cover for the guy that is actively trying to support / publish him. He appears to have sold a couple of dozen copies, mainly to the blogspot guy and the four or five other fans that attempt to do all his promo and production work and co-write and paste up the monthly Cerebus fumetti comic.

Dave says that the future of collectible high-$ comics is going to be individally-numbered printings, so he'll be proved right after he's dead.

Scott Adams has come up with his own equivalent of Dave's Five Impossible Things To Believe Before Breakfast

To believe Biden will be sworn in as president in January, one must believe at least one unlikely thing:

1. Despite being brainwashed to believe Trump is Hitler, Democrats in key cities did NOT attempt a large-scale voter fraud to save the country.

or. . .

2. Democrats did commit major voting fraud to remove "Hitler" but for some strange reason all the geniuses looking for indications of it can't find any confirmed evidence and there are no whistleblowers.

or. . .

3. Democrats WANTED to commit major fraud to get rid of "Hitler" but there is no practical way to do such a thing and hope to get away with it.

or. . .

4. Democrats didn't REALLY think Trump was so bad that it was worth cheating to remove him.

Remember, it's still #2020.

Seeing the recent Dave Sim "humorous" covers make me think he needs to be beaten with a metal bar.

He has insightful opinions about the electoral process that he can express coherently and humourously, though;

https://i.imgur.com/6uh4Q9k.jpg

btw

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?

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.

They went to Hawaii for three months in late 1992 and did five issues.

Latter Days.

Ok, this is not going to be short.

The first part of the epilogue is the funniest Cerebus has been in well over a decade at time of publication. The second not so much - and a lot of the goodwill built up is destroyed by Dave's notes where he pretty much says he was deliberately being racist because he thought it was funny - but the central idea (that Cerebus is actually really good but unlucky enough to be competing at the same time of the GOAT) is solid and entertaining enough to carry the plot through.

And then we get to the Stooges. Dave the Genius has assumed that his parodies were what made him a genius and pushes on regardless with this one no matter how weak it is and it adds nothing. So for a year we get Dave pushing some photorealistic portraiture and complaining about how utterly boring biblical study is, or rather listening to someone reciting at length the results of their biblical study and expecting you to say OMIGOD YOU ARE SUCH A GENIUS YOU HAVE BLOWN MY MIND. If only he heeded his own words, eh readers? And if you liked these parodies, I have others! Let's explore why Todd McFarlane is a closeted homosexualist mind controlled by the feminists! And let's do it really subtly by rehashing plots and set pieces from the best part of 20 years before!

More than anything, this is Dave's Breakdown writ large.

He actually has Cerebus go through Dave's Breakdown without (because he doesn't acknowledge it in his notes) apparently realising what he's done but Cerebus skips from fairly normal (by his own standards) to WOMEN MUST DIE in relatively short order, via revelations about celibacy and the Jews not being clever enough to get things right. And the notes make it clear that Dave actually is completely on board with all the words on the page, that this is the divinely communicated Voice of Dave.

Does any of the Rabbi stuff really make any sense? I get the Stooges period stuff suggesting that Cerebus is still a child mentally in part and prone to magical thinking, but the Garth Ennis breakdown inducing stuff? I've re-read it several times and I still don't see how it works. Because he thinks of himself as Rabbi there have been lots of subliminal mental ticks added which instantly get triggered by pointing out they're there? For a payoff that lasts a total of SEVEN PANELS this seems like a whole load of overthinking just to indulge in abusing Gary Groth.

And now we come to Woody Allen and the Journal of the Smallest Type.

I think I zoned out during the notes, if I'm honest, but Dave appears to be being honest when he says this was an early idea he had for a straight biblical parody which then became something else as Dave's character and beliefs changed in the interim. Although he doesn't say the last part of that obviously and encourages us to believe it's still a parody even when making small text notes in his own notes about Christianity and biblical rectitude.

The main book Small Type arguably has a single debatable idea behind it in a stoner WOOOOOAAHH way, that the Pentateuch is a schizophrenic conversation between God and the Earth but it's drenched in such waffling drivel that it's as unreadable as you always thought it was. Relatively early, that idea gets seduced by "women are stupid and think they're smarter than men but that's just stupid thought because they're stupid." And there's a hundred pages of it. With Woody Allen as a stand-in for you, the reader, having his mind blown by how smart this all is.

There are some singularly strange ideas though. An obsession with the idea that "moved" is a euphemism for God having an actual literal wank and creating things with his Godspunk. Cows aren't animals, they're fruit. The earth is presumably hollow because it's full of the souls of humans and birds. Abel tries to fuck Cain which is why he gets killed (and deserves to die). Countries have souls. Everybody who doesn't see through the fake woman God like Dave does is gay, or loves incest, or is a paedophile or a woman. Tough to know which one he thinks is worse at times. And all of these ideas are correct, of course, because God has chosen to let Dave, and only Dave over the millennia, know the real truth.

It all just began to wash over after 40 pages. Women all secretly want FGM because they're fucked in the head? It's ridiculous to think "sure, why not" but by then "sure, why not, Dave probably believes that" is very nearly a rational response at this stage. And never, ever read Dave's take on the story of Abraham & Isaac where Dave confuses even himself as he's writing in his desperate need to make everything for his theory.

The funniest part is that Dave himself gets bored with publishing it BEFORE HE GETS DONE WITH GENESIS. Does the rest exist or just the bits that he prints? If the latter, how did he choose what bits to print? Dumb luck or God's hand? It is it just that nothing else supports his argument? Nobody, not even the most ardent fan, cares by this point.

The Woody Allen stuff is Dave's least successful parody by some margin. And following the Stooges, that's saying something.

Actually, the interesting thing that never properly gets explored is Cerebus' complete lack of attachment to material things. He ruins the sheep owner's Reads just by reading them himself. He destroys a complete set of Rabbi in the quest to understand. And he takes the priceless artefact of Konigsberg's Pentateuch and in the quest to explain, improve and bend to his understanding obliterates it. Each man kills the thing he loves indeed.

You know the thing that really annoys me about this the most? The issue breaks are in the wrong place throughout the Stooges section. Every one, a couple of pages misplaced. It could have been fixed by making one issue longer, but instead over a year of pauses mid-sentence.

I am a comics reader.

I think (from memory of the final book) you can read the first two issues (266/267 or pages 1-40) and the last one (288 or 441-460) and not really lose anything that can't be replaced by "Cerebus eventually overcomes the Cirinists again and lives for a long time afterwards ruling an empire" with a side for the final issue of "ignore what's going on with these film titles, Dave was doing a parody". You could read the Stooges stuff if you wanted but in all conscience I can't recommend putting yourself through it.

I tried to move on to The Last Day and had to give up 2 pages into the prologue. I might be a while, I think it's just proximity.

All I can say is better you than me.

Does (work-life balance) even exist any more(...) since the COVID Reality Shift hit? Which, personally I think is permanent. Finger of God stuff. In the same sense that we dialled 911 to report an emergency for decades and then 9/11 happened, the adjectival short form for visual acuity has been 20/20 since(...) the mid-19th century. God was telling us what the year 2020 was going to mean -- profound change based on multiple levels of visual acuity (Seeing, "seeing" and seeing) -- over a hundred years before it got here.

mindblown.gif

If you're tempted to try and parse any of the small-print theological stuff in the coming three years, just remind yourself that this ^ is the standard of it.

Also as best I can tell, the Spawn #10 reprint is now up to 23 or more variant covers in different degrees of limitedness, spread across four different crowdfunders. 16 of them are the same group of four drawings, but with different colour schemes.

One of the covers contains a "behind-the-scenes" book instead of the comic, at an additional $15 for 24pp of the new cover drawings and sketches plus Dave's rough notes from 1993. Except if the third and current crowdfunder gets another $111,057 in pledges (on top of its current $8,943), it will have 32pp and "extra rarities".

The minimum number of different variants you can currently buy in one order is 4, but you can buy one of each of the "main" 20 of 'em today for US$375, reduced from $475.

Nah the small print stuff is worse than that, that's 289/290 standard.

The reprint stuff is just a giant clusterfuck. I could maybe have been persuaded to trade up to a really nice version of High Society but not for what they were charging.

Thing is, the Archive prints with background notes were lovely and - although they weren't bringing in the cash - were actually something you could pay attention to and get something new from. But then the wrist injury reduced the profitability (because the extra for headshots etc bumped up the margins) and falling out with three lots of guys in the course of producing them basically killed them as a concept which is a massive shame.

Apropos of that, Aldo seems to have glossed over the interminable section I vaguely recall in Latter Days in which Cerebus defeats the Cirinist Empire by cosplaying as Spawn. Or I might have dreamt it.

he touched on it:

Let's explore why Todd McFarlane is a closeted homosexualist mind controlled by the feminists!

It was glazed over, like my eyes.

Given that Dave (or whoever*) is pushing Spawn #10 hard at the moment, it's ironic he attacks it hard here as something on the blindest, dumbest, mind-controlled homosexualists would fall for and uses it as a prop to rehash old routines i.e. selling the same old story with slightly different art to gullible fools.

* I mean, wouldn't it make more sense for a Britney style intervention to take place? Dave can keep sending faxes to AMOC while somebody else works out how to keep him in rice and water.

This has reminded me that the latter half of the small text stuff has Cerebus do lisping limp wrist camp stereotype gay mannerisms every time he comes across an idea that doesn't fall into Dave's worldview.

Which is basically all of it, given Dave's interpretation is only really about the first parts of Genesis.

Nah the small print stuff is worse than that, that's 289/290 standard.

I meant the standard of intellectual analysis: even from before the religion stuff, Dave was keen on reading numerological-style significance into homonyms or spelling oddities, and doing his Thing, "thing" or thing riff*. Since the conversion, he's just added a belief that these are signs from God that Dave's the only person perspicacious enough to read.


* this was fun when his big thesis was that human nature was silly and art was a good way of coping with it. it was creepier in glamourpuss when he would take three lines of third-hand reported conversation between two long-dead people, and extrapolate that the evil spirit of femaleness was corrupting weak artists by giving them attractive underage secretaries so that they manslaughter their rivals, or whatever was going on in there.

I mean, wouldn't it make more sense for a Britney style intervention to take place? Dave can keep sending faxes to AMOC while somebody else works out how to keep him in rice and water.

He does consistently manage to drive the most competent enablers away, or end up in active fights with them: Gerhard quietly and efficiently ran half the office for years even after he'd made the comic come out at all, AND looking great, for decades. Dave recruited a great cartoonist to draw for him once his wrist went, but communicated so weirdly the guy ghosted rather than ghost for him. He recruited an underemployed nobody to draw for him for years afterward, then when the guy got a day job teaching art at a university, suddenly decided that the book they'd worked on would never come out and therefore he didn't have to pay the guy fpr his years of work. All those kickstarter-running and shipping-fulfilment blokes evaporated. The fellow that started and ran his daily blog for five years couldn't hack dealing with him anymore and turned over the login to the first rando that volunteered. One art collector was the or a prime source of Dave's income for many years, until he chose not to loan his decades of personal purchases to the bloke that was doing the digital restorations, after which Dave seemed to stop selling original art...

As it was foretold, 289/290 is a complete nightmare so I'm going to deal with it outside the Last Day so it doesn't pollute it.

Dave starts with an introduction where he bluntly states his is the only ever correct interpretation of the Bible and the only correct ever Unified Theory - which of course Einstein couldn't solve because he was only a scientist - which God has chosen to reveal to Dave because he's pretty much the only person to have got religion right, ever. And these facts are kept from the world because of some proto-QAnon conspiracy.

(Actually an interesting sideline - is QAnon a Dave Sim parody act? Same obsessions.)

Then the comic itself has serious acid casualty/italianspiderman.gif FACTS such as:

• Two events which happened separately INVENTED TIME by happening one after the other.
• Gravity always existed, it's just that you can't see it when the things it affects are too small for you to think it's happening. TAKE THAT, "SCIENCE". This is also why women have periods.
• Planets don't have a circular orbit because God sometimes gets things wrong and he meant to make a circle.
• It's easy to confuse heat with light.

• The Earth is the result of a lesbian wedding between the anthropomorphic entity that is Light and YooWhoo (see Latter Days, I haven't the strength) and is a lesson by God to show that homosexualists are inherently wrong.
• Human souls try to escape back at the zygote stage but are forced to go through the misery of life because YooWhoo is a woman.
• Helium makes your voice squeaky, proving it is a female element. It is also the Devil.

Just skip it, you'll feel better. Although I will say this - of the 40 pages of his Unified Theory so clever Einstein could never have come up with it, a whole page is devoted to descriptions of boobs. And the whole page of footnotes explain how a woman is essentially an enlarged penis, only not as good. And you'll thank me for not enlarging on "collapsed sacs".

And of course Dave has 10 pages of annotations to 40 pages of comics that already have annotations/footnotes on every page, that on some pages are longer than the text content of the page. This is mainly about his voluntary estrangement from any kind of personal relationship and, in effect, society; also included is how all medicine is hokum and illness is a combination of demonic possession and, possibly worse, Marxism; how his mother died of being offended by anti-feminism; and how he always assumed Gerhard was going to die after completing #236 just for the purpose of cosmic symmetry .

Sheesh. Getta loada this guy. Whatta maroon.

What in the holy motherloving fuck.

Like I knew the dude slowly became looney tunes but...wow.

how he always assumed Gerhard was going to die after completing #236 just for the purpose of cosmic symmetry

...because it would mean Dave would have to do the first 64 and last 64 issues alone?

This thing sounds like time cube the comic

...because it would mean Dave would have to do the first 64 and last 64 issues alone?

Exactly this.

Does he ever suggest that religious conversion made him realise that thinking of himself as the centre of the universe, to such a degree that The Universe would kill his closest companion for the sake of the issue numbers on a barbarian aardvark comic book, was kinda bonkers?

No, because it's the feminist conspiracy making you think that.

fuck! they got me again

The reason I wanted to separate out The Last Day is that it's actually if not good, then at least worth your while.

Over 50 years from when we last checked in, Cerebus is now at the end of times. The Sanctuary is a prison as those who oppose him have taken over again, by taking his (and Rick's and Moshe's) own words and reinterpreting them to their own ends. Everything is painful, and he can't do anything that gives him any pleasure without suffering afterwards. His memory is shot and death is the only release.

Cerebus' son arrives and is a betrayal of all Cerebus holds true. He has aligned with his mother and formed an incestuous union alongside a revived Cirin to perform genetic experiments - they've created a human/lion hybrid which they intend to make giant - and conquer the world.

Cerebus farts and dies, and seeing all his friends is dragged off into the light. Alone, unmourned and unloved.

Dave's final physical model of Cerebus is a little too cartoony rather than authentically aged, and the staging and backgrounds are very static, but through a combination of visual effects, lettering and text the pain, repetition and excruciatingly slow passage of time at that age are convincingly and realistically portrayed. He also gets to redraw a number of old characters and ages of Cerebus which you'd think brought him pleasure (but doesn't seem to have).

Dave also manages one last great insight/truism - Sheshep, drunk on power, pictures himself taking over only for Cerebus to point out the folly of his argument: "you're not inside it, are you? Can you feel your hands holding you up?" (Yes, this is him referring to his own Torah commentaries here but it's a really good sequence nonetheless.)

Cerebus As Dave is in full effect. Isolated from the real world, which is as disgusted with him as he is in it, and with only a go-between to pass on second hand conversations. His closest allies have betrayed him and he is left alone with just God to talk to. His temple of his past achievements is meaningless to any but him and, having shown his enemies exactly how he does it he has been rendered completely impotent. All that remains is to surrender to God and await the sweet release of death that he might become closer to Him.

In lots of ways this might even be the best book of the final third in that it has a purpose and plot, and some actual (not that funny but take what you can get) jokes.

The(e) End(e)

oh man iirc the human / lion hybrid stuff came with sleevenotes by Dave explaining that this was literally what scientists were up to now IRL and this is why we can't trust doctors, or something

Except it's not because of Dave's annotations which, again, I wanted to keep separate from the main book.

They're mainly just Dave explaining why he thought numerous jokes were much funnier than anyone else did, and why, but it's genuinely fascinating to hear how much of the final artwork is down to choices made because of the disintegration of his relationship with Ger and the deal he made to get him to finish. And of course there are some final Dave Doozies.

• The story of the old woman with gangrene is the real life version of events that happened to his mother as he told in the annotations to 289/290 but it wasn't humiliating enough there so he put it in the main body instead.
• His mother tried to curse him with a magic birthday card which was disrupted/destroyed by Dave's personal altar
• The United Nations was doomed to failure because it let people who weren't America join
• Dave admits statuary rape and says that was why he became celibate. He did it because all the Marxist-feminists are paedophiles.
• Believing abortion is ok inevitably leads to believing incest is admirable.
• France is a woman and the UK is a man. The EU is a Marxist-feminist scam to ensnare the UK which it must get out of. SIM INVENTS BREXIT

Dave shuts up, finally. Goodbye goodwill.

the human / lion hybrid stuff came with sleevenotes by Dave explaining that this was literally what scientists were up to now IRL

Yeah this is one of the other things which is an obvious consequence of agreeing with abortion and this is what Marxist-feminists and scientists are conspiring to do irl.

Also all the hybrids we see in Egyptian art were actually real because they were a degenerate society and something something Alan Moore.

I don't know if it's worse that I remembered part of it at all, or forgot that Ancient Egypt fell because their DNA scientists got too good at making giant living sphinxes and Anubisesses.

We do see him in the bastardisation of a Holy Trinity

Haha the Marxist-feminists got to me fourteen years ago near the top of this thread.

I want to end on a positive note.

Cerebus 1-300 is a masterpiece of single-minded exploration of a character's life. It is at times hilarious, moving and frightening and contains some excellent cartooning and arguably the greatest lettering in the history of comics. I genuinely commend it to everyone to borrow and read.

Just don't touch any of the bits that are text.

I remember some of the text parts in Jaka's Story being good?

Anyway, thanks for doing that Aldo, I enjoyed your analysis. Overall it's probably made me less keen for a re-read of Cerebus - but enforced my feeling that there's a great book waiting to be written one day with Sim/Cerebus as its subject.

Sounds like this is a whole hell of a something or other

i think a comics-only re-read of Cerebus would be reasonably painless but there is zero (0) chance i will ever read Sim's long-form copy ever again.

I will never read this terrible comic, if only to deprive Sim of money.

Seeing the recent Dave Sim "humorous" covers make me think he needs to be beaten with a metal bar.

you can't argue with this level of comedy

I can't really begin to parse that.

I think it got discussed further up but once you relate it back to the source image it just gets (unbelievably) worse.

try parsing this one: per Dave's weekly Bible commentary, the droughts and fires in California are the God's punishment for the malignant and rebellious free will choices made by the citizens there (Dave does not explain why God is madder at the conservative inhabitants of Northern California than the fornicators and homosexualists of West Hollywood), but God's wrath cannot impact upon his female rival YHWH because dirt and stone and rocks and sand are the embodiment of the vagina. In conclusion, this is why John The Baptist had a thin neck.

He explains (or "explains" or Explains) the lack of vegetation associated with YHWH somewhere in the Torah commentary. Something to do with YHWH not actually being able to create (because of her inferior female brane) but just make limited copies of God's ideas and since her useless female brane is filled with making cows (which are fruit, remember) she can't remember to make plants in many places except the Garden.

You can cure this by shouting at the ground, telling it to listen to you and grow plants, alongside the occasional beating with a belt to let it know who's boss.

I can't remember if that last is an actual thing or just a joke about dirt and sand being female, but I do remember that his rule about beating women was that it = wrong if you used a rod thicker than your thumb. So a belt would be right out, probably.

also I assume Sim has never been to a desert nor to a working farm nor to a local economy impacted by drought, and his cartoonist instinct is sketching the most basic Ernie Bushmiller version of dry weather for him: three rocks of different sizes, and... dirt? that's something that's outside, right?

It's all about scale and the earth is much bigger than a woman so a belt is fine.

If you read the pages it seems like it's just a joke but Dave says in the annotations the only joke is shouting "O YOOWHOO BELIEVE!" is a pun on "oh, you who believe" which is a frequent salutation in the Koran. What a ribtickler. Apparently it says in the Torah men are supposed to "subdue the Earth".

Since I went and got Latter Days out for that I should really check why YHWH just has dirt.

Had an initial look, couldn't find it but realised there was no way I was doing any in-depth searching in that mess.

I like dunking on Dave but think it’s worth distinguishing between Dave Sim (a very unfamous comic book artist with mental health issues, who struggles to even influence even his minuscule devout fan base) and, say, Scott Adams (a genuine asshole with hundreds and thousands of followers who’s been to the White House)

Not to whattabout

Dave's greatest achievements may have been hiding his Kaczynski-level issues* from the general public for so long, and maintaining his focus and getting the book to the finish line ~on schedule after his issues* became apparent.

*really would like to use the word "madness" here but not sure it's appropriate