This is the thread where I try and summarise Cerebus

I met Sim at a signing at Comics Showcase when I was a teenager, not long after Flight came out. He seemed like a charming good storyteller. Weird to think he was probably in the middle of writing Minds at the time.

I got (and lost!) a sketch

In news that should surprise nobody, Akimbo is bad. Unreadably bad. But most interestingly it ably demonstrates the complete collapse as of Dave as a comics creator because there is no part of it executed even vaguely competently.

The "writing": in a style familiar to anyone who's ever looked at CiH?! or even just the covers, Dave has a single thought and shouts it multiple times, changing the words ever so slightly, in the hope that it sinks in. I think what he's attempting to do in this case is suggest the feminist/homosexualist axis is trying to normalise paedophilia by making "romance" all about underdeveloped bodies and that real women (specifically ones with boobs) should rise from their slumbers and reclaim their rightful place beside manly men (while executing the girly men that are enablers to this masterplan. If we thought Dave was capable of self-reflection, and pushing the 'Cerebus is Dave' angle, he might be assumed to be referencing the recent grooming stories and indicating that even he, the Diuine Cerebuss, is not immune from the tendrils of the axis and that, no matter how much it suits the narrative and might feel like the right thing, we should always be vigilant that the nest of vipers are permanently trying to undermine the forces of good.

If we're going to be very, very generous there's nearly a point being made about Cerebus (the comic) and how it took on a life of its own - it was supposed to be an adventure comic and instead turned into a romance comic. For girls. And it wouldn't be too much of a reach to think it's at least part of Dave's thought process; he explicitly says the adventure/romance/girls line twice as the internalised thoughts of Akimbo. But whose fault is that, and which periods is Dave referring to? Or which romance even, given I think I've said before that Cerebus/Bear is the love story at the heart of the second third. For a comic that exists now only as exegesis, or Baudrillardan critique, it would be tempting to explore this idea (and I yet might) but these short lines here are already more thought than Dave has given to the topic.

The "art": in total it's about half a dozen sketches. They're relaid on slightly different backgrounds, or in different configurations or magnifications/zooms, but there is very little here. It's also admitted in a thought bubble that these are 'just' tracings - again, this is not even vaguely unusual to anyone who's looked at any of the post-Cerebus/pre-injury work - but what's notable is just how inept they are. In a couple of the Akimbo frames you can see just how rough the trace is, and it looks like Dave can't manage more than a couple of mm of straight work before stopping because there's just no continuous work at all, it's just a series of small scrapes on the paper that just about look like a real thing at a macro enough level. That this even passed a basic editorial quality check is shocking enough but it shows a complete decline in abilities and raises the question of how much work whoever is doing the inking on the 'good' pieces reflects the output and how much of it is even Dave any more.

The "lettering": lOv3 thee qvIRky STYLINGS off gL4mOURpVss l3TTeRinG?!!??! Well it's here in spades. It's obviously supposed to be a specific way of speaking, but buggered if I can work it out or care enough to. It's just a lazy retread of previous work, which itself was a facsimile of late-era attempts to recapture what was once genuine innovation. 35 years of dilution have rendered the effect like homeopathy - a placebo for true believers but the home of cranks and rogues to the rest of us.

And with that, Defend The Indefensible: Dave Sim Current Edition is over. There's no part of his ability remaining that can be used to justify looking at any of the new material and his once numerous talents have deserted him. I'll most likely stay on board for the Archive project, at least until it's done the first pass through all the books, because they're actually very well done (although if i'm honest the quality reduces the later in the phonebooks we get to, as Dave's background is largely already published so he has less to say about them. It looks like facsimile editions of his notebooks is the new cash converter, although in classic Sim style they're only really affordable if you send cheques directly to the Off-White House. Any attempt to use modern technology like a website (that already exists) or electronic mail (that already exists) come with cost penalties that we all deserve, obviously, for daring to live in the current era.