However, every time I go to the store and see like 15 900-page Cerebus trade paperbacks lined up, the part of me that wants to read it dies a little...
The Skinny On Cerebus, From Someone Who Owns 1000+ Pages Of It:
The first eponymous "phone book" is pretty much comic-book parody. It's hit-or-miss but the hits far outshine and outweigh the misses. Sim basically took the whole "wandering invincible barbarian" schtick and made it fresh by (a) okay the barbarian and bad-ass is an
aardvark and (b) he basically does this whole meta-comics thing wherein he meets lots of thinly-veiled stand-ins for comic book icons (e.g. Professor X, Man-Thing, Captain America, Red Sonja,
etc) and reacts to them through his main character. This is Funny and It Works.
Then suddenly Sim got all Serious in High Society. That Worked, too. It Worked
really fuck*ng well in fact and is a hilarious skewering of the democratic process and an excellent goddamn read besides. He also really found his artistic footing here, over time, and the book is really a visual feast. The man loves the comic art form and does it justice.
He continued to be serious and Complex in Church & State. It seems as though he was No Longer fuck*ng Around; all these characters that had been borne of slapstick and parody suddenly had depth and motivation and genuine
creepy life to them. This is not to say the humor had gone; far from it. C&S basically ends with Cerebus being (justly) indicted for the self-centered cunt that he is. I only mention this because Sim would later go
completely insane; we're talking a one hundred and eighty degree spinout here, folks.
Jaka's Story was sensitive and excellent. It could stand alone as a great read. Here's the problem; Dave Sim could write and has written deep, complex, dynamic, and realistic female characters. Jaka's Story is proof of that. Because with Mothers & Daughters (a storyline spanning several volumes) he turned into a epileptic misogynist.
I missed Melmoth (which from what I read was almost entirely Cerebus-free and a striking portrait of Oscar Wilde's declining years) but I got right back into Mothers & Daughters. The satire and weirdness and complexity were all there. Great. I was
really getting into it, i.e. I could hardly wait to get my mitts on the next issue. This was
good and I was reading it in
real-time as opposed to all at once in a collection.
Then came the chapter of M&D called
Reads, in which Sim pretty much capsized
everything by devoting at least
half a goddamned issue, every month to plain text. This plain text did not further the story; it was some goofy allegory about the comics business with a transparent Dave Sim stand-in as its almost Randian defiant protagonist. Which is to say
yawwwwwn. The text bits plus the increasingly symbolic storyline plus his whacked editorial column in each issue was all basically
women fucked everything up by ever having existed and I was torn. I liked Cerebus and his story,
a lot, but I was sick and tired of the way it was going and of having to defend myself to people who were rightfully offended by Sim's screeds. That's where I just stopped reading.
I wish Sim hadn't gone nuts because I really want to know how everything turned out.
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Topic: so...what ya'll reading?: DOUBLE DEUCE COMIC BOOK EDITION (Read 7501 times)