And what rough aardvark, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Iest to be born?
-- The Collected Writings of Suenteus Po, Vol. 23, Book 23, Part. 23, Chap. 23, Sec. 23
WELL, OKAY, TO be fair, maybe, given the direction the book had been
taking it its last few years, maybe, ultimately, sure, okay, an ending
like this is, maybe, sort of what I expected--
But, say ten years ago,
maybe fifteen, if someone would've told me that Cerebus was going
to conclude with a series of confused allusions to angry Muslims, ancient
Egypt, some sort of demiurgic thing named "Yoohwhoo" that lives in the
centre of the Earth, and a pretentious epigraph from the book of Macabees,
I would have laughed.
I would have said "Yeah,
right!"
I would have shaken my head
and dismissed that person as an idiot, a moron, a loon....
WELL, OKAY, WELL, to be totally honest, maybe even now an ending like
this is still not exactly what I expected, really-- because I'd had hope!
Faith!
Hope for something better,
something less trite, something... more... somehow....
Faith in Dave Sim.
Because for what seemed
like eons I'd been reassuring both myself and others, telling them over
and over, sporting a glazed, drooling fanboy smile and spouting a steady
litany of "Dave can't screw it up, he can't he can't he can't, it's too
big, there are mechanisms in motion he has no control over, it's just going
on auto-pilot...."
"AUTO-PILOT, AUTO-PILOT, AUTO-PILOT," like some sort of demented, obsessive
mantra. Desperately holding onto something, anything....
Telling them over and over
that Dave can't possibly ruin his life's work.
And then I get Sphinxes,
Yoohwhoo, and Macabees.
The lesson here, I suppose,
is to never underestimate the infinite resources of the mentally ill.
But it wasn't always like
this.
Really.
PROLOGUE 2:
MARCH 2005
EXPLORING AUTHORIAL INTENT can be extremely difficult because authorial
intent can never be accessed.
For example, look at someone
like Shakespeare. You can never know what Shakespeare's intent was
in writing any of his plays because he's long dead. And even if you
had bits of correspondence from Shakespeare spelling out his intent, you
could still never access the intent behind his writing about his intent.
Again, this is because Shakespeare is long dead and so you can't really
ask him what he meant by writing about what he meant. Also the matter
of establishing Shakespeare's intent is further complexified by the fact
that there isn't even a consensus on which of the plays we know as being
written by this entity called "Shakespeare" were actually written by "Shakespeare."
Thus, Shakespeare's intent is forever lost in the mists of time.
And even later writers like,
say, James Joyce generate an intent problem because even though there are
better records of Joyce's publications, and there's more correspondence
by Joyce spelling out his intent, and so on-- you can still never get into
Joyce's mind and absolutely determine his intent, or the intent fueling
his writing about his intent. And so, again, even though Joyce made
visible some documents that pointed towards something that could possibly
be defined as "intent," any ultimate authority regarding this "intent"
is still inaccessible.
But, okay, you might think
that you can't get at a dead guy's intent, especially if he died centuries
ago. But what about someone who's still alive, someone you can questions
directly? You still can't get at that person's intent, either.
Even if he or she is right here, in front of you now, telling you what
his or her intent was or is.
This is because intentions
shift. The intent of a creator at one point during the creation of
a text may be different later on. And also, if the author realizes
his intent is shifting that author may (or may not) choose to revise his/her
intent as it applies to the earlier parts of the work. And thus intent
is never fixed. Also, there could be subconscious stuff going on
that the author isn't even aware of. Human beings are filled with
multitudes of conflicting drives that influence every aspect of psychic
life.
And so there's really no
way to objectively determine if even the intent of an author speaking in
front of you is stable, even if the author says it's stable. His
or her intent may always shifting, and he/she may not even be aware that
his/her intent is shifting. Or, this is also very important to consider:
he or she could also be lying. And-- for reasons similar to the instability
of intent-- there is no way to objectively determine whether an individual
is lying or telling the truth.
Even if some people profess
to be able to detect physical behaviour patterns that signal attempts to
suppress the truth (being unable to look an interlocutor in the eye, nervous
twitches, changes in heart rate, and so on) these behaviour patterns are
not universal and can also be caused by a variety of other factors, some
of which are also no doubt unknowable in and of themselves. And also,
once individuals are aware of these behaviour patterns, the patterns can
be easily and consciously changed.
And so, intent is inaccessible.
(For more information on
this and related topics check out either version of Wimsatt and Beardsley's
famous essay "The Intentional Fallacy," which informs some of the above
stuff about intent, and/or Roland Barthes' equally famous (if not maybe
moreso) "Death of the Author," and/or Stanley Fish's Is There A Text
In This Class? Also notable are the works of William Empson,
Allen Tate, Matthew Arnold, and just about any literary theory/semiotics
book by Umberto Eco-- or even a good literary criticism or philosophy dictionary.
Not to mention works by dozens and dozens of other critics including, but
not limited to Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Derrida, Paul deMan, Terry Eagleton,
Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Plato and Aristotle, and so on.)
Therefore, relating a text
to intent is a nebulous exercise at best-- and, at least on one level,
it's automatically doomed to failure.
And when the text in question
is a periodical such as the Cerebus comic book, the fluctuating
nature of intent is magnified by the scope of years. And when the
author of the text himself seems to have undergone both a mental collapse
and/or a religious epiphany-- marking an extremely radical change in perspective--
and is also currently in the act of revising his intent in light of his
new "insights," the issue of intent is further problematized. As
are issues of internal coherence and meaning.
However, this doesn't mean
that one can't choose to focus on intent. You can. It's just
that any attempts to focus on intent immediately become vague and subjective.
So if you choose to do so, get ready to produce a barrage of stuff that's
traditionally "unprovable."
(For a pretty good example of
this, check out Edward Said's excellent Beginnings, a book-length
essay that deals with, among other things, the problem of artistic genesis
as it relates to intent. The essay isn't easy reading by any standard
and very quickly becomes so vague and strange that it almost verges on
the mystical-- but this only further illustrates the point that dwelling
on intent with any sort of seriousness gets you into a very strange mental
space very quickly.)
After all, intent itself
is a text, and all texts, although they may seem fixed, are equally unstable.
This is partly because the units that generate meaning in a text always
depend upon the various meanings societies and individuals impose on them.
And these meanings, because they come from individuals who all come from
disparate backgrounds and environments, in other words different contexts--
contexts that influence all their interpretive abilities-- are always multiple.
One way of looking at this
is that a text means what it means because it is read by individuals, and
the way each individual reads a text is necessarily different from the
way each other individual reads-- because no one is the same as anyone
else. And so, the meanings inside a text (any text) are, largely,
a matter of opinion-- and sure, these opinions are free to coincide, and
often they do-- but these opinions are just as free to oppose each other,
or free to exist in any state (determinate or indeterminate) between absolute
mutual agreement and absolute disagreement. Here's another way of
looking at this:
A text can mean an number
of things, or one thing, or nothing at all, simultaneously. And if
someone says something is inside a text, even if an author didn't put that
thing there, it exists.
And so intent itself is
a kind of text generated partially by the context in which the creator
creates, as well as the context in which the reader interprets, on top
of lots of other things.
And, of course, this is
all an extremely oversimplified way of looking at meaning in a text, but
I do want to eventually get around to talking about Cerebus, at
some point, and so even though what I've said above is far too simple and
filled with critically naive thinking, it'll have to do.
AND INTENT PLAYS a large part in Cerebus-- partly because Dave Sim now seems to consider it a book of religious instruction, a way of reaching a divine capital-T Truth-- even though earlier issues of Cerebus seem to be the result of a far different intent: a desire to critique society and comic books and expose the follies of mankind in a sophisticated, satirical way. But this intent changed over time as Sim himself changed. Unless it was always Sim's intent (which he now claims in interviews and conversations) to use the Cerebus format to uncover a more universal kind of Truth. But proving this is impossible either way for the reasons I've sketched above. It's all too vague and subjective. But still, in my estimation, it's extremely important to keep intent in mind when thinking about Cerebus. No matter how vague and subjective that makes things.
I AM ALSO aware that it can be a critical no-no (or at least frowned
upon in some circles) to take into consideration the life of the creator
over and above the text he or she creates-- or to even consider the creator's
life in any way at all. Working with a creator's life is a job for
historians, not literary critics-- and even historians tend to refrain
from blanket value judgments.
But a creator's life is
a text as well, just as unstable as intent and everything else, and so
what the hell. I'll do whatever I want.
And besides, once Dave Sim
began the process of putting analogues to himself into the Cerebus
text, turning Cerebus into what might actually be the longest "meta-comic"
in history, divorcing the life of Dave Sim from Cerebus becomes
difficult. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that although
Sim has become reclusive (to a certain degree) he still wishes to remain
an accessible public figure-- at least as far as Cerebus and Cerebus
criticism is concerned. His wish to remain at large, from what I've
been able to determine, seems to stem from a desire to insure that readers
of Cerebus understand and unequivocally "get" his "message."
He wants us (to appropriate one of his more idiosyncratic, and maybe annoying,
rhetorical techniques) to. Get. It. Right.
Although sometimes he does this in a sly way-- in the pages of the relatively
new periodical Following Cerebus, other times on the Internet (relayed
to the world by his ex-partner Gerhard)-- by explaining his intentions
while simultaneously reminding the reader that what Dave Sim is writing
about Cerebus is still just Dave Sim's opinion of Dave Sim's text
and that everyone else is entitled to have their own opinions if they wish.
However, when Sim does this
he is still writing from within a bubble of authorial privilege that he
believes dominates all discourse about Cerebus because-- and this
is important to keep in mind when considering Sim's attitude towards his
own work-- Dave Sim believes that he has discovered The Truth-- the
objective, verifiable, singular, self-evident Truth about the workings
of the entire universe, and that he has encoded this Truth into the pages
of Cerebus. Therefore, because Dave Sim has "discovered" this
Truth-- "the Unified Theory that eluded Einstein all of his life" (TLD
viii)-- he perpetually places his interpretation of his own work objectively
above all others, even while he acknowledges-- or at least pays lip-service
to-- the idea of subjectivity.
ANYWAY, BECAUSE OF the way Cerebus was composed, and because
of the nature of a large part of its content, the various, shifting mental
states of Dave Sim are forever fused with the Cerebus text itself.
This Sim-Cerebus textual fusion is also supported by the metafictional
blurring of Dave Sim's world and the world of Cerebus through Sim's
use of various God motifs-- for example, Tarim and Terim as mythical (and
false) creator-gods in the Cerebus universe; Viktor Davis, one of
Dave Sim's analogues for himself and the creator of a comic book entitled
Cerebus;
Dave Sim as the true God of the Cerebus world who has created Cerebus,
Terim and Tarim, Viktor Davis, and everything else in the pages of his
monthly comic book, and last (but definitely not least) the God Dave Sim
believes he is in communication with, and whose existence has made both
Sim and Cerebus possible, and whose existence is revealed to Sim
through the act of creating Cerebus itself, and whose messenger
Sim has become, setting up the last issues of the comic as a kind of holy
text that exists to proclaim the existence of God (and Yoohwhoo) to the
world at large.
This is an incredibly charitable
and clinical way to suggest that because Sim's madness eventually leaks
into the text of Cerebus, one can indeed make the claim (however
subjective) that parts of the text are indeed "insane." Another shifting,
subjective category, true enough-- and a category that's ultimately as
unverifiable as intent. But a category I'm still often going to have
recourse to in the wall of words that follows this prologue.
But on a certain level I
don't have a problem with labeling Dave Sim "insane" because he seems to
enjoy wearing the label of insanity like a badge of pride. These
days I've scarcely read an interview with him, or an essay written by him,
where he doesn't, in all his myriad, curling, obsessive, meandering sentences
refer to himself, at least once or twice, however ironically, as "crazy
old Dave Sim," or "crazy Dave Sim the misogynist," or whatnot. And
of course, as is his wont, Sim somehow manages to flaunt his "insanity"
in a way that reinforces his own worldview and (self-perceived) status
in the world. Basically, by obsessively calling himself "crazy,"
Sim acknowledges that he's aware the rest of the world believes him to
be insane which, because he also believes that he's the possessor
of The Truth, reinforces his belief that in reality he's actually
the sane one and that it's the rest of the world that's crazy-- after all,
the rest of the world would have to be insane in order to consider insane
the one man who possesses the only self-evident Truth.
ALSO ARGUABLY TAINTING my text is the fact that because Cerebus
has been such a large part of my life for so very, very long, I'm really
unable to look at it in any way even remotely close to objectivity.
I've been reading Cerebus since I was around 11 years old, in effect
having "grown up" with Sim and Cerebus as almost constant companions since
the very early 1980s. And therefore, because the Cerebus comic,
the Cerebus character, and the personality of Dave Sim have been such an
enormous part of my life, it's unavoidable that any analysis of this stuff
is going to be rife with subjectivity, emotion, and (especially) nostalgia--
and even sometimes anger. And I believe that exercising this kind
of incredibly subjective, biased approach to criticism is not only a valid
option in my case, but a veritable right.
Even if it can be easily
dismissed, by the very logic that Cerebus itself sets up, as "Marxist-feminist-homosexualism."
But, then again, by the logic that Cerebus itself sets up, what
isn't "Marxist-feminist-homosexualism?" Or "Atheism?" Or any
of the other -"isms" Dave Sim uses to describe anyone and everyone who
isn't Dave Sim?
AND SO, ULTIMATELY The Little Aardvark Who Could, And Then Almost
Did, Sorta, But Not Really, isn't really a formal essay-- although
at times it may read as if it's trying to be one. But really it's
an informal, if not occasionally clinical meditation on a work of art that
has been an pivotal influence in my life-- and a work of art that in a
very real way continues to influence it. Although, sadly, not in
any of the ways I had originally foreseen.
A meditation that will touch
on topics as I see fit (men and women, good and evil, sanity and madness,
and lots of other stuff), in a loosely structured way, moving backwards
and forwards throughout the Cerebus text as it currently stands--
although mostly, for the sake of my readers, forwards. And sometimes
very lightly touching on these topics, and other times with much citation
and nit-picking. As I see fit. As my opinions, intentions,
and subjectivities dictate.
And so, because of the ultimate
informality of this work, I really have no central thesis other than this
muddled thought:
Cerebus is over,
now and finally, and although it still is a magnificent accomplishment,
it's also a hideous fucking shame that Dave Sim has gone mad-- and even
despite Sim's madness, Cerebus is still one of the most thought-provoking,
challenging, and amazing things to ever come out of the comic book
world-- even if it becomes, after a certain point, and because of the absurd
and crazy belief system of its author, impossible for me to take seriously.
(AND IT SHOULD go without saying-- but I'll say it anyway-- that it's
one of my contentions that the act of reading Cerebus forces careful
readers to butt their heads up against the cold, hard wall of intentionality.
This contention will by necessity remain largely unexplored, though.
Partially because exploring it is, if not utterly impossible, extremely
difficult to do this forum because even a failed attempt to truly explore
Sim's intentionality would require more energy, patience, and space than
I currently have.
And so, it is my contention
that the above contention will be something that hovers around, above and/or
under the text, informing everything I say-- like intentionality itself--
but it will almost never appear on the surface.)
(AND AS FAR as the Internet is concerned:
I don't like using the Internet
as a source, and I don't really like things that cite the Internet as a
source, because things on the Net tend to vanish quickly and without notice.
However, there is some good stuff about Cerebus on the Net, and so, I have
decided, on occasion to use the Internet as a source. Although I
will do so rarely.
The sites I'll be referring
to throughout the course of The Little Aardvark That Could... are
Andrew Rilestone's blog The Life and Opinions of Andrew Rilestone,
in particular the "Davewatch: February 7, 2005" section: andrewrilstone.blogspot.com/2005/02/davewatch.html,
and Margaret Liss' utterly amazing Cerebus Fangirl site (www.cerebusfangirl.com)
which hosts (among many other things) the 1992 "Dave Sim Usenet interview."
Ultimately though, I will
be using Internet sources sparingly because there's already such a wealth
of material to work with in Sim's own books that these additional sources
will only make things much more complex, and bloat up this already-too-long
"Interlude" in a work that is already taking way too much time to finish.
I am also not going to use
any of the discussions on the Cerebus Yahoo! group-- something I
subscribe to but have been ignoring for over a year... except for a couple
of times-- one of which I made a fool out of myself by coming on like some
sort of Sim expert and fucking up my own point.
(But now that this damn
thing is finally done, maybe that'll change.)
And I do pick up Following
Cerebus whenever it comes out, but in all honesty I've barely read
any of them so far. I've been staying away from Following Cerebus
for the same reason that I usually just delete the messages form the Cerebus
Yahoo! group. (But I do read Sim's commentary on the Buffy picture
each issue. Seems he has a bit of a thing for Sarah Michelle Gellar,
which I find kind of funny. And Sim's comments are also pretty funny.)
After all, my reading of Collected Letters 2004 has already complexified
what I wanted to say here, and I've barely even read any of the letters.
Although so far the most
interesting stuff to me in Letters is that fact that Sim seems to
like the novels of Peter Straub-- which is something I'd never have guessed
in a million years-- and that Straub and Sim have, looking at it from Sim's
side anyway, seemingly struck up a kind of friendship.)
(AND OH YEAH, there will be "spoilers" on occasion, too. You can't discuss something like Cerebus without giving away crucial bits of the storyline. It just isn't possible. So if you haven't read all of Cerebus, you've been warned. Don't come whining to me if I've "wrecked" any surprises, and so on. But I will try to keep the "spoilers" to a minimum.)
(AND IN THE real world I sit and type all hunky dory and read and revise and type this endless fucking torrent of words over days and days and days. Weeks and weeks elapsing in a blur as I stare at the screen and try to hide from what I am, from what I've done, from what I'm becoming, from the mental collapse that always feels now like it's right over the horizon perched there eyeing me, waiting for the right moment to rush swooping onto me and snatch me in its claws. And seasons change from snow to leaves to snow again. And a year goes by, then a year and a day, a year and a week, and so on. And the writing never seems complete and my mind doesn't seem like it's finished collapsing. Or even started collapsing. A crack in the sky, a hand reaching down for me, the nightmares came today, to stay, etc. etc., you pretty things. Make way, make way, fuck you fuck you the girl with the mousy hair-- and so on in an endless cycle. And I type and I type and I type. The new Sisyphus eaten by his very own whale. Etc.)
AND IF I get angry sometimes, so be it.
And if I'm emotional sometimes,
so be it.
And if my little sections
start with a coherent focus and seem to trail off into stream-of-consciousness
digressions never getting back to their original point, so be it.
And if I make leaps of logic,
and if I behave like an irrational, deluded "Marxist-feminist-homosexualist-atheist-fill-in-the-blank-ist,"
so be it.
After all, that's exactly
what I am, according to Dave Sim.
Because it seems like that's
exactly what everybody-- with the exception, of course, of Dave Sim-- is.
And I do mean everybody.
According to Dave Sim.
THE LITTLE AARDVARK WHO COULD,
AND THEN ALMOST DID,
SORTA,
BUT NOT REALLY
OKAY, MAYBE SOME of that's not totally true. I make it sound like
I'd never heard of Cerebus before I stumbled into Heroes Aren't
Hard To Find. The fact is I'd known about Cerebus for a while--
sort of-- at least I recognized the visual-- because I was no stranger
to those old Bud Plant ads.
In the '70s and '80s, Bud
Plant placed little catalogues featuring some of the choice stuff his company
carried on the back covers of magazines like Howard the Duck, Conan,
and so on. These ads were everywhere and advertised "ground-level
comics" and fanzines. If you were at all interested in comics in
the '70s and '80s, you absolutely could not avoid these ads.
And Plant liked Cerebus,
so Cerebus was displayed fairly prominently in his ads.
The image in the ad isn't
exactly famous or anything, but for me it's kind of iconic. A cartoon
aardvark standing on the back of some barbarian-looking guy who's face
down on the floor and muttering, "Mother..." like Daffy Duck in the old
Warner cartoons. At least that's how I remember it. It's been
a long time.
So there were a few shreds
of recognition when I found that copy of Swords of Cerebus #1, but
the shreds were minor.
And, frankly, I didn't really
care about those Bud Plant ads.
Granted, some of covers
of the stuff Plant reproduced in his ads seemed sort of mysterious, and
the people from the First Kingdom comic looked sorta naked, which
was alright. But mostly all the stuff on the Plant pages seemed inaccessible
to me.
And when I was a preteen
looking at his ads, way back then... frankly, I thought that that picture
of that aardvark looked stupid.
SO ANYWAY I bought that copy Swords of Cerebus #1, went back
to my aunt-and-uncle's place, read it. And was blown away.
I knew nothing about Barry
Windsor Smith, or Barry Windsor Smith's work on Marvel's Conan--
which the early
Cerebus issues were a distinct parody of.
But I did know about Conan in some sort of vague generalized sense--
even though when I first encountered Cerebus I'd never read any
Conan
books, or any Conan comics-- although I'd seen them around.
Somehow, though, the image of the sword-and-sorcery barbarian was imbedded
into my subconscious. It is, after all, a fairly universal image
in our culture. Especially if you're a geeky boy.
And also, I got the jokes.
I understood the humor. Unlike Howard the Duck, which I'd
been obsessed with for fairly mysterious reasons, I related to what was
going on in Cerebus. I understood where the aardvark was coming
from. When Elrod the Albino was introduced in "Death's Dark Tread"
(C 75-96), I somehow got the joke-- even though I'd, again, never read
any of Michael Moorcock's Elric novels. But, because of all
the science fiction and fantasy that I'd devoured at an early age, I still
sort of knew who Elric was. After all, I'd seen the name on the covers
of Moorcock novels; I'd read about Elric in fanzines. And, even if
I didn't get all the nuances of the Elrod parody-- like Sim's naming Elrod's
sword Seersucker (I had no idea Elric's sword was named Stormbringer and
I also had no idea what the word "Seersucker" even meant)-- Elrod still
talked like Foghorn Leghorn. And the Foghorn Leghorn shtick, coupled
with Sim's uncanny knack for slapstick, as well as Cerebus' increasing
frustrations with all the situations Elrod dropped on his head, were all
more than enough to keep me sated.
I'd also never read any
of the Marvel comics featuring Red Sonja, but I still knew that Sim's Red
Sophia ("Song of Red Sophia" C 53-74) was a parody of her, and that she
was somehow connected with Conan. And, again, the stuff with
red Sophia was funny, filled with action, witty writing, and perfect slapstick
timing.
And so here was this wiseass,
drunken aardvark barbarian who almost constantly referred to himself in
the 3rd person, and he spent his time careening through all these wild,
goofy adventures-- and even if the art wasn't the best, it was good enough--
and more importantly, it was entertaining. In fact, in the 11 years
I'd been alive, Swords of Cerebus #1 was easily the best thing I'd
ever read.
It blew Howard the Duck
out of the water.
Unfortunately, I didn't
get back to Heroes Aren't Hard To Find during that trip, and so I was unable
to pick up any more issues of Swords-- if there'd even been any.
In all honesty, I hadn't been that dazzled by Cerebus in the store,
just mildly curious, so I hadn't thought to look for any more.
But now, dazzled I was.
I read
Swords of Cerebus #1 until the cover became even more worn
and wrinkled than it'd been when I bought it. In fact, I liked it
so much that, on a certain level, it ruined mainstream comics for me.
Nothing coming from any
of the big companies could compete with the aardvark. Nothing else
was as funny. Nothing else was as smart. Nothing else was as
cool.
Cerebus had rearranged
by brain.
WHEN I GOT back home, I immediately started seeking out more issues
of Cerebus.
I tried to find out anything
about the comic. It wasn't easy. I had no idea how to describe
it, or who to describe it to. There were comic shops in town,
but comic shops were relatively new things to me, and the ones I knew about
were fairly ratty and filled with junk.
Also I had no idea that
Cerebus'
run was already somewhere up in the 30s or 40s.
And so it took me a while
to zero in on the few traces of the comic that existed in my hometown.
First, I had to find good comic shops.
Eventually, I found one,
and in it I found an issue of Cerebus. It was issue #46 (HS
413-32; "A Night In Iest or Summit Enchanted Evening"), the second part
of something entitled "Cerebus' Six Crises." I didn't know it at
the time, but "Cerebus' Six Crises" was the last section of what would
later be titled High Society.
Joyously, I bought it.
Then I read it.
And I didn't get it.
I didn't get it because
it was one of the last chapters in a 25 issue novel-- something else I
didn't know at the time. It also seemed to have something to do with
politics, and Cerebus and someone who looked like Groucho Marx just spent
the issue talking with some other people I didn't recognize, and so I was
totally lost.
(And even Grouch Marx was
someone I only vaguely recognized. I was young and far too interested
in what was going on around me right in the here and now-- so why the hell
would I know anything about some comedian who did stuff back in the dusty
old days of Vaudeville?)
So, I felt a little baffled
because Swords #1 had been so very, very good-- and this other Cerebus
thing just seemed sort of alien to me. It was also printed sideways,
for some reason.
But I wasn't disheartened.
I just decided to buy volumes of Swords, instead. I figured
that maybe if I bought enough Swords volumes, they'd catch up to
that weird "Cerebus' Six Crises" thing that I found, and that maybe then
it would make sense.
And, even if this "Cerebus'
Six Crises" stuff didn't make any sense, the Swords books were still
funny, and weird, and brilliant. And that was good enough.
Time passed. Not too
much time, really, but it is true that when you're a little kid
even a few months seems extremely long.
The comic shop where I'd
bought issue #46 closed down. But other comic shops opened up, or
reconfigured themselves in such a way that they were no longer ratty stores
filled with junk. The beginnings of the black-and-white boom were
just starting to happen and even though the boom wouldn't hit in full force
for a little while yet, comic stores were starting to flourish... a little
bit more.
Issue #50 came out.
I saw it. It was another of those "Cerebus' Six Crises" things, and
it was also printed on its side, and so I didn't touch it. It just
seemed sort of weird.
Then #51 came out.
It was a normal-looking comic and it wasn't a "Cerebus' Six Crises" issue,
so I thought maybe I'd give it a shot.
So, I bought both it and
issue #50 on a morning that my mom and dad and I were going to visit a
different aunt and uncle-- again on my mom's side of the family-- who lived
on a farm.
I read the two Cerebus
issues in the backseat of the car, while in the front my dad drove, and
my mom read a book, or looked out the window, or something.
Issue #50 was the last issue
of High Society-- although High Society wasn't officially
entitled High Society, yet, I don't think, anyway (Sim may have
been toying with that title, though)-- and it was called, simply, "Denouement"
(HS 493-512)-- which, at about age 12, I read as "Denouncement"-- which,
however, given the end of what I perceived to be the story, actually fit.
(It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized the word was actually
"Denouement" because one day my English teacher was talking about Shakespearean
dramatic structure.)
Issue #51 was a stand-alone
issue called "Exodus." (It's also not collected in a Cerebus
phonebook. Even though it should be. But there is at least
a special Cerebus issue that collects "Exodus" and some other unreprinted
stuff.)
And even though issue #50
was the last chapter in a 25 issue novel, and even though I didn't know
who the hell Astoria and The Regency Elf were, the gravity of the events
in those 20 pages, as well as the sheer power of Sim's pacing and writing,
were so intense that when Cerebus broke down the last pages and started
sobbing in the arms of the Regency Elf, I felt this weird, awed, despairing,
kind of sick sense of loss in the pit of my stomach.
And I thought, "Wow...."
So I put down the comic
and stared into space for a while.
And then, issue #51:
After "Denouncement" I didn't
know what to expect. Was it going to be dark, or funny, or
what?
And what I got was-- and
still is-- one of the funniest comic books I've ever read. The entire
thing takes place within the cramped hold of a rocking boat. Cerebus
is stowing away, running for his life and fleeing the repercussions of
issue #50; meanwhile, other characters from High Society slowly
sneak on, also as stowaways, and fill the already minuscule cargo hold.
And Cerebus gets angrier and angrier and angrier. By the time the
comic ends, it's pretty damn cramped in there. It's classic slapstick.
Again, I had no idea who
the characters were (except for Cerebus, of course), but the timing and
the brilliant physical shtick were so immaculately laid down that, as the
narrative began to spiral out of control, I couldn't hold myself back from
turning the pages. Each page was funnier than the last-- and then
the punchline hit-- and when all the potatoes are dropped on the lot of
them, I howled with laugher.
(That scene still cracks
me up.)
"Whatever it is, must be
pretty good back there," my dad said.
He had no idea.
OKAY.
Honestly, in retrospect,
looking back at events, now, with the eyes of someone who isn't a young
boy, Cerebus didn't start strong. The art was okay and the
humor was funny, but there really wasn't much direction.
However, around the time
Sim introduced the Roach character in issue #11 ("The Merchant & The
Cockroach"; C 229-250), Dave Sim began to conceive of a direction.
(For those of you who don't
know-- and there might actually be some people reading this who don't know
Cerebus
all that well-- and kudos to you and your dedication to *30* if you're
one of those-- the Roach is a schizophrenic with a series of shifting identities,
each of which is based upon other comic book heroes and types, almost exclusively
superheroes. A whole list of personalities evolves over the course
of the 300 issues of Cerebus: Moonroach, Wolveroach, Punisheroach,
and so on. The Roach comes and goes throughout the first 200 issues
of Cerebus almost at will, kind of a force of nature that provides
a-- mostly-- humorous metafictional commentary on the goings on in Sim's
universe, as well as sending up comicbook clichés and tropes in
such a way that makes Cerebus a pointed satire of the comicbook
medium, as well as a satire of the act of reading itself. And the
Roach is also an extremely irritating foil for Cerebus, who just totally
can't stand him at all. And, because of all this, the Roach is also
really funny.)
Anyway, the story goes that
Sim had an epiphany during a 3-day acid trip where something kind of God-like
"spoke" to him-- and it was at that point that Dave Sim realized that he
was going to have to make Cerebus last 300 issues, and that Cerebus
the Aardvark would die in issue #300 (Mi 130-3, among other places).
SHORTLY AFTER CEREBUS meets the Roach, aspects of individual issues
start pointing towards a larger narrative. Sim was already using
the early issues to introduce characters and concepts he'd hoped would
return later on in the comic's run, but now, faced with literally thousands
of pages to fill, he begins to think in more novelistic, "big-picture"
terms. He is going to be chronicling an entire life, after
all.
This shift from a satiric
periodical composed of mostly stand-alone stories into a potentially massive
narrative moved Cerebus into a new realm. Things became slowly
more and more sophisticated and interrelated from issue to issue and at
issue #26, Dave Sim embarked on his first major comics experiment.
He crafted the 25-issue "novel" that would later become known as High
Society, placing Cerebus in the centre of a web of political intrigues
set in the fictional city-state of Iest. Cerebus ends up, because
of some allegiances he accidentally forged during the barbarian wanderings
of the first 25 issues, a pawn in a cryptic power struggle that results
in his being elected (very briefly) to the post of Prime Minister of a
city-state known as Iest. Thus suddenly gives him a taste both of
and for power-- something that dogs him for the rest of his life.
On the surface, it all seems
kind of stupid when you think about it, or at least so abstractly conceptual
that on an intellectual level the story Sim's telling seems like it just
can't be any good-- a comic book about a sword-wielding aardvark barbarian
who becomes enmeshed in a series of life-and-death political maneuverings
by Forces Beyond His Control, which functions as a satire of both comic
books and the democratic electoral process, as well as tells an extremely
moving story about the rise and fall of some poor schmuck who naively finds
himself almost pointlessly rising to the top of the power structure and
gaining a sense of (admittedly confused) idealism, only to crash and burn
and have his dreams ruined in an almost equally pointless way-- how could
this even be readable let alone good? But the end result is a staggering
achievement. Sim brings in several characters from the first 25 issues,
introduces some new ones, puts them all in motion against each other and
deftly, almost effortlessly, hits his mark.
Also the events of High
Society build Cerebus (someone who up until now had been a kind of
caricature) into a three-dimensional anti-hero that you can actually really
and truly care about, even when he's being a complete bastard.
And it's funny and it's
sad and it's really, really Goddamn smart.
AND SO:
After I'd had my mind so
fully and completely bent by "Denouement"-- even though I has absolutely
no way to truly contextualize it and so I didn't really understand what
was going on in the narrative-- I quickly went out and bought the other
23 issues of High Society I didn't own, and dug that other "Cerebus'
Six Crises" thing out from under my bed, and read them all in a row.
And then it all made sense.
Also, during this time I
tracked down two more Swords volumes which ended up being pretty
helpful because they gave me bits of information that were necessary in
order to fully grasp the implications of a couple of key scenes in High
Society.
For example, I now knew
that the guy who looked like Groucho Marx was Lord Julius, the leader of
a very powerful city-state named Palnu (C 296). And I knew that Jaka
was a tavern dancer that Cerebus had fallen in love with when he'd been
drugged by some thieves (C 123). And I also now knew that she was
Lord Julius' niece (C 354).
But even without knowing
all this stuff, High Society would have been pretty easy to understand,
because Sim reintroduces important characters in an extremely accessible
way. You know that these characters are people Cerebus had met in
the past, and you know they all have their own histories, but you still
don't really need to know what these histories are in order to enjoy the
story. And when you do know the histories of these characters, or
if you discover them later, they just add texture to an already exceptional
narrative.
In High Society,
Sim also begins tinkering with layout and ancillary texts, truly beginning
his career as currently one of the most (if not the most) important experimentalists
in Western comics.
Sure, there are some early
experiments in presentation, like the first "Mind Game" chapter (issue
#20; C 415-34), where the lumpy and misshapen panels can be cut out and
arranged to form a giant poster of Cerebus' face. Also, there's the
"Silverspoon" story, a short serial told in the form of a Hal Foster Prince
Valiant narrative, that serves to introduce the character of Lord Julius
through his son (not reprinted in the Cerebus phonebook I have,
but which since has been reprinted in a recent edition). But the
experimental stuff really starts feeling like something significant in
High
Society as Sim composes issues that rotate mimicking the confusion
of extreme alcoholism, lays issues out on their sides, includes bits of
prose juxtaposed with panels of artwork, offers excerpts of official government
transcripts, and other tricks. In High Society, Cerebus becomes--
and remains for the rest of its run-- visually highly vibrant.
And I read those issues
over and over, again, and again, and again.
CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS:
It was cold outside and
I went to be early, just so I could read all of High Society under
the covers.
And I read them all in a
row and was, as usual, blown away, aesthetically stunned in that deep,
infinite way that only teenagers can truly touch.
And everything had that
kind of fresh, clean smell-- sweet new sheets, warm air but it's cold outside.
A smell that you never really smell any more.
And everything felt so new.
Then I realized it was midnight
so I went downstairs, turned on the movie channel and watched the last
Police concert.
And when I came back upstairs,
I was happy. And it was dark outside, mom and dad sleeping in the
next room.
And looking out the window:
ice haloes around the street lights, snow on the ground, the tree in the
front yard covered in frost.
And the stillness of the
middle of the night.
Winter stillness.
HIGH SOCIETY ALSO marks the first appearance of one of the most
interesting and famous of Sim's stylistic techniques: the use of jagged
panel borders to mirror and enhance the tension of the narrative.
In issue #48 (HS 453-72),
Jaka returns just as Cerebus is about to embark on a military campaign.
The panel borders are all very smoothe and uniform throughout most of the
issue, forming a neat grid. However, near the end of the comic, Cerebus
and Jaka have a discussion where she tries to convince him to give up his
foolish ambitions and regain his senses. Then, as things get more
and more heated, Cerebus bellows, "Stop it!" and slaps Jaka's face (HS
471). The border of this panel becomes jagged, mirroring the tension,
rage, and ugliness welling up inside Cerebus, as well as the sudden dark
turn of the narrative. The next panel, Jaka sobbing and running away,
is smoothe, but the final panels of the sequence (and issue), focused on
a dark, brooding Cerebus, contain elements of jaggedness (HS 472).
The next issue features
jagged panel borders throughout its entirety.
Throughout the next Cerebus
"novel," Church & State, the panel borders swing from smoothe
to ornate to jagged, depending upon the amount of anger and tension in
the narrative. After a while, the panel borders in Church &
State become jagged, and then stay jagged, for a very, very long time.
Jaggedness frames most of Sim's and Gerhard's art for roughly the last
two thirds of Church & State (with a few very brief exceptions),
and then all of Jaka's Story, only to ebb back to smoothness for
parts of Melmoth which, however, ends with a jaggedness that remains
for almost the entirety of Mothers & Daughters, until-- Cerebus'
mind beginning to snap-- the panel borders simply stop, almost in medias
res, no longer fully framing any panels (Mi 254). After the conclusion
of Mothers & Daughters, the jagged panel borders return only
three other times (G 388-91, FV 587-620, FV 625-27), and only during periods
of extreme personal tension for Cerebus; however they only appear briefly,
signaling a potential for action that quickly dissipates due to Cerebus'
impotence.
In fact, the panel borders
are so jagged for so very long in Cerebus-- for roughly, I believe,
12 years of monthly issues-- that I suspect many readers eventually forgot
that the borders signify some very specific things in the narrative (if
they even noticed the borders at all). Ultimately, readers simply
accepted the jagged panel borders as a matter of course, as simply the
way panels are framed by Sim. One artist, Drew Hayes, creator of
Poison
Elves, a work very clearly inspired by Cerebus, appropriated
the jagged panel borders as a kind of tribute to Sim-- without, it seems,
really understanding their significance. The panel borders in Poison
Elves seem to be jagged because Cerebus' panel borders are jagged,
and that's all. This isn't to lessen Poison Elves, but simply
to suggest that the story in Cerebus is so tense and ugly for so
very long that readers simply stopped noticing one of the primary signifiers
of the tension and ugliness-- that's all.
ANYWAY, HERE'S A quick, condensed version of High Society:
Cerebus, ends up becoming
Prime Minister because of the machinations of a woman named Astoria; then
he falls in love with her; he then has his heart broken and his spirit
crushed when his political empire crumbles away, literally overnight, while
he's asleep. He starts the story with nothing, becomes a pawn and
has his hopes built up by forces he can barely comprehend. Despite
all his cynicism he begins to actually believe he can make a positive difference
in the world. And then has it all taken away-- again by forces much
larger than him. And, on top of it all he realizes he's been manipulated
by the woman he loves. So, as
High Society ends, Cerebus
is back to square one, and even more miserable than ever-- all within the
confines of 25 issues.
And so, when everybody else
my age was busy reading Spiderman and Superman, I was reading
Cerebus.
Sure, I read Spiderman and Superman a bit, too-- but I never
took them seriously. I still can't. To me, they will always
be disposable fluff that's never truly about anything-- not in the way
that Cerebus was about something. The world of Cerebus
had cause and effect, ramifications and moral dilemmas. And because
it dealt with the mortality of the main character, the things that happened
to him had weight. Unlike Superman who changes every time someone
new writes about him, who will never die, and therefore will never actually
amount to anything.
HIGH SOCIETY ALSO marks the beginning of a series of artistic
plateaus for Dave Sim.
His experiment in form and
content having paid off, Sim embarked on an even more ambitious experiment:
Church
& State.
Church & State
drags Cerebus back into the political chaos of Iest, and then ups the ante
by throwing in a huge dollop religious satire into the mix. Church
& State is twice as long as High Society, and builds on
all the former's strengths. Church & State is also the
period where Sim partners up with another artist named Gerhard (no last
name-- I remember the "give Gerhard a last name contest" way back in the
'80s, but I don't remember the winner) who provides the backgrounds to
all the issues from #65 to #300. It's one of the most significant
partnerships in comics history, and one of the main reasons the art in
Cerebus
will always rank up there with the best of the world's best comic art.
Period.
Without Gerhard, Cerebus
would be so much lesser than it is. Even with the comic's often brilliant
writing, the fact is Dave Sim, while a very good artist, still only really
excels at figure work and caricature-- even though the figure work and
caricatures are generally amazing. Backgrounds aren't really his
forte. This isn't to say that Sim can't draw backgrounds-- after
all, he did draw some backgrounds in the past, and some of them were pretty
good. But they probably took him a lot of time. This is evidenced
by the fact that, in the pre-Gerhard days, a lot of Sim's backgrounds were
basic black, or interiour scenes with a single light source highlighting
the subjects of the panel. Occasionally, Sim would draw minimal shapes
to suggest furniture and doors in these interiours, or maybe one or two
key artifacts like a lamp or a chair which would be represented in a slightly
more naturalistic, but still sketchy way. There were also exteriour
shots, and sometimes vast, blasted-looking landscapes, but these were usually
kept to a minimum. The general rule was always minimalism and sparseness,
and quite often just a black emptiness, and occasional moments of sketchy
detail. Arguably, this technique is a very good way to set certain
kinds of moods, but 300 issues of blackness and sketchy bits probably would
have become somewhat wearying. A different schedule-- maybe bimonthly
or four times a year, might have given Sim enough time to do more detailed
backgrounds, but a more leisurely schedule would have also meant the completion
of Cerebus would have much longer than the (roughly) 25 years Sim
had estimated. And this, for reasons that we will eventually come
to, probably wouldn't've been a very good thing.
And besides, the backgrounds
produced by Gerhard are infinitely more accomplished and intricate than
anything Sim himself could have ever done solo, even at his absolute best.
Gerhard provides a Gustave Doré or William Hogarth level of visual
detail, intricacy, and mood to Cerebus. The effect is lush,
and inviting, and extremely realistic. Often the backgrounds even
seem kind of alive. And this is especially nice when the narrative
itself eventually begins to demand more and more a sense of texture and
place, as the action eventually slows and Cerebus himself becomes more
and more stationary. For example, even when Cerebus spends issues
and issues sitting and thinking alone in a bar, the art behind him is so
wonderful to look at the reader's eye never gets bored.
And so, when Gerhard joins
up, and as Sim hones his figure work and lettering skills over the years,
Cerebus
becomes more like an enormous, experimental woodcut than a traditional
comic book.
It's that gorgeous.
ANYWAY:
At the beginning of Church
& State, after a time of drinking and brawling and trying to write
a book entitled "On Governing" (CS1 14) Cerebus finds himself married to
Red Sophia, and is then conned by a shady character named Weisshaupt into
becoming Prime Minister once again as well writing cheap pornography (CS1
110-24). Weisshaupt was introduced in "Captain Cockroach" (C 435-54) and
is modeled on the historical Adam Weishaupt. Any chronically paranoid
conspiracy buff worth his or her salt knows that the historical Adam Weishaupt
is supposed to have looked identical to George Washington, and either founded
or revived the Bavarian Illuminati in 1776, was also a mason and might
be the reason there's a Masonic symbol on the American one dollar bill,
and may have killed George Washington and taken his place and founded the
USA-- and he's supposed to have done a lot of other thing's too.
So, with that kind of paranoiac pedigree, is it any wonder that Sim chose
to appropriate Weishaupt and use him for his own purposes? After
all, who better to be a mysterious manipulator than someone who has clusters
and clusters of paranoid legends surrounding him?
And so, Cerebus is manipulated
by Weisshaupt into Prime Minister-hood, once again. Then the shit
really his the fan when an already bitter, enraged Cerebus is manipulated
(by Bishop Powers, one of the heads of the Tarimite Church) into becoming
Pope (CS1 229-30). Again, it seems conceptually dumb-- maybe even
more stupid than High Society-- but when you read it, it's brilliant.
And, along with the ever-improving artwork by both Gerhard and Sim, and
Sim's stunning command of dialogue, Church & State reaches aesthetic
heights High Society only suggested.
Church & State,
doesn't end there, though. Cerebus the Pope isn't as easy to control
as Cerebus the Prime Minister. As Pope, Cerebus has now become the
infallible emissary of Tarim on Earth-- and so he quickly realizes he has
to answer to absolutely no one, christens himself "Most Holy" (CS1 268),
and seizes control. Suddenly Weisshaupt and Powers have no way to
no manipulate him. And so their plans are quickly, and terminally
screwed-up as Cerebus decides that he wants to use his power to get all
the gold in Iest and conquer the known world, in order to satisfy his greed.
So Cerebus tells everyone
in the city that the world will end in fifteen days if he doesn't get all
the gold in Iest (CS1 293). And everyone (with the exception of very
few, now powerless, individuals) has no choice to believe him because,
well, he's the Pope-- so he's infallible. And also, if they don't
do what he wants, he tells them he can send them all to hell. To
top it all off, he starts sending peasants out to conquer the rest of the
continent, one small area at a time.
And so, briefly, Cerebus
really and truly ends up on the top of the heap.
However, what he doesn't
count on are the mystical ramifications of his actions which have set in
motion something called "The Final Ascension" (CS1 574-5; CS2 798-804).
All along we've known that
there's something different, if not magical, about aardvarks, and it seems
like we're about to be let in on a bit of the secret.
Meanwhile, all the peasants
and merchants and everyone else in the city are ruining themselves and
their lives by scrounging for gold, cashing in all their bank accounts,
bankrupting the entire city-state (CS1 336-7).
And Red Sophia, who it turns
out actually does love Cerebus after all, has enough of his bullshit
and leaves him (CS1 439-43).
And then Cerebus orders
his henchmen to locate Jaka and bring her to him, because he has power
now and he's in control and so he hopes that she'll love him. And
so there's another bitter and angry exchange between Cerebus and Jaka,
who reveals that she's married and pregnant and doesn't love Cerebus any
more. Then she leaves, and Cerebus is devastated (CS1 447-92).
And society is collapsing
even more.
And Cerebus becomes aware
of The Final Ascension. And even though he doesn't know what it is,
he wants it desperately, because it's got to be big, because it might begin
a process where he could make himself into a god.
And then Astoria lands in
prison for assassinating The Lion of Serrea, one of Sim's more mysterious
shadow-players (CS2 835-8).
And Cerebus, being Pope,
declares himself divorced from Red Sophia and married to Astoria, and then
rapes Astoria in prison-- primarily because she goads him into it (even
though she's kind of stunned when he actually does go through with the
rape) (CS2 868-76).
Then he declares himself
divorced again (CS2 887).
And the Final Ascension
creeps ever closer.
And Cerebus isn't
really very funny any more.
DURING ASTORIA'S TRIAL, The Final Ascension takes place. Cerebus
leaps onto an enormous stone tower made of skulls (CS2 1014-38), and ascends
to the moon where the meets a pompous judge who blathers on and on about
stuff nobody-- neither Cerebus, nor the readers-- actually cares about
(CS2 1125-55). He then shows Cerebus the birth of the universe (CS2
1160-81). Cerebus witnesses the male void raping the female light
and the universe coming into being through her pain and his desperate loneliness.
Then the Judge tells Cerebus how life ends on Earth-- eventually people
devise weapons powerful enough to disrupt the sun's magnetic field and
the sun consumes the Earth (CS2 1208).
And then we're told that
"a hundred million years afterward, a blue-green fungus appears spontaneously
on one of Jupiter's moons[.] It dies out within a week. And
that's it for life in this solar system" (CS2 1208).
....woah....
But wait, it's gets even
better. Cerebus is then told that he will live for only a few more
years, he will die alone unloved and unmourned, and that he will suffer
(CS2 1212).
Then he's told that once
again all his power has been taken away from him, he no longer has any
more followers, and that Cirin (one of the 2 other Aardvarks in Sim's fictional
country of Estarcion) has taken over Iest and environs (CS2 1212).
And that he will deserve
all of his suffering because of his "second marriage"-- clearly a reference
to the rape of Astoria (CS2 1213).
And Cerebus is transported
back to Earth, even more shattered then before (CS2 1216-19).
At the time, the comic world
didn't know quite what to make of this majestic, almost Shakespearean conclusion.
And in large part, it still doesn't. And frankly, that's a testament
to Sim's vision.
In Church & State
(and in certain other parts of Cerebus) Sim approaches the cosmic
from the perspective of a human being, and instead of creating a story
that reads like a bunch of 10 year olds playing make-believe-- like the
stuff featured in the majority of comic books, even now-- he addresses
real issues that plague real human beings. Or that should
real plague human beings-- that is, if they're not ignorant, numb shells.
The mysteries of existence, whether suffering is ever justified, the fate
of the planet and the universe, just for starters.
Sim then offers the only
solution he-- during the late 1980s-- could perceive: total shutdown--
numbness, existential horror, paralysis. Sim's view of the universe
at the end of Church & State is of a cosmos that has been created
by rape, and that in turn rapes everything living within it. Sim
wrestles with not the problem of evil, but the problem of pain:
Why is there so much loneliness
and suffering in the world? Because the world-- no, the universe--
was created out of loneliness and suffering.
Church & State
concludes with numbness and despair, and a shot of Cerebus infinitely small
amidst the ruins of Iest.
THIS KIND OF pessimism and nihilism (for the end of Church &
State does open onto a kind of nothingness) is unusual in comic books--
or at least North American comic books-- but not so foreign to the world
of capital-L Literature. Church & State is, in a sense,
an attempt to deal with a basic existential dilemma most (mature) adults
face at least once or twice in their lives-- if not sometimes on a daily
basis: the recognition that there are forces in the world that are utterly
and completely beyond their control and infinitely larger than them, that
like it or not life is composed of a large part of suffering, and that
no matter how cosmic an individual's worldview gets one must still slug
through the perpetual anticlimax of life-- which, like it or not, ends
with death and therefore does not have a happy ending.
Church & State
is the work of someone who is aesthetically and intellectually a million
light years away from the stunted mindsets of the general comic book buying
and producing public. And, in a sense, if you have a problem relating
to the ending of Church & State-- if you haven't felt that kind
of isolation and hopelessness when faced with the possibility of the void--
you're only really half alive. You don't have to accept it as an
inevitability (even Sim, later on invalidates the ending of Church &
State, opening the narrative up to the possibility of a kind of hope),
but unless you're utterly unshaken and unshakable in the correctness of
your own philosophical centre-- meaning that unless you're a hopeless ignoramus--
you should have at least visited the kind of crisis Sim is pointing towards.
Even if you, ultimately, decide not to live there.
So yes, there's something
very dark about Church & State, as well as banal, as well as
cosmic-- but these three things are necessary because they are key elements
of life itself. And yes, there are times when the darkness in Cerebus
becomes oppressive (although not as oppressive as it will become in
later years. But by then, Church & State should have prepared
you somewhat). I can vouch firsthand for this because while I was
in high school I hit a crisis point with Sim. I'd been slogging through
the political turns and twists, reading issues filled with nothing but
dialogue and no action, for literally years. High Society
was 25 issues long, but I'd read each of the issues after it had been completed.
So, High Society was a huge work, sure, but I didn't experience
it in real time. Church & State was experienced by me in excruciating
monthly installments. And when you're only 15-- even if you're a
teenage pseudointellectual-- sometimes you want your comics to contain
more than, in some cases, only a portion of a conversation. Sim also,
in this time, began experimenting with slowing the action in the comic
to a crawl-- something he became very adept at almost immediately.
But the first time he tried it-- because it was such a new direction for
both Cerebus and comics in general-- it was excruciating, frustrating,
and infuriating. In High Society-- even though the story took
over 2 years to tell-- each chapter was still self contained, so individuals
who followed it in installments would still be able to read a bunch of
nicely self-contained episodes. However, around the end of the first
third of Church & State, Sim began following Cerebus minute-by-minute
through only a handful of days. This is kind of a shock, if you're
not prepared for it. The first third of the story takes place over
maybe a month or more, and then the last two thirds take place over,
maybe, the course of three days. Although once Cerebus "ascends"
time shifts a bit.
Two-thirds of a story that
ended up comprising over 50 issues is a hell of a long time to creep along
minute by minute. And in about Grade 11, I briefly gave up.
I'd waited very patiently
for Cerebus to get sick of Iest... and the 25-issue mark was creeping up.
I figured that since High Society had lasted 25 issues, this new
(at the time still untitled) story would also only last 25 issues.
A fair assumption, given the earlier evidence. Also, Sim was playing
with this expectation. When Cerebus #75 ("Terrible Analogies";
CS1 473-92) began looming over the horizon, it really looked like the aardvark
was about to give up all his power and wealth and leave with Jaka.
And then he didn't.
He offered to give it all
up, and go with her, if she'd have him. And Jaka, being married and
terrified of what Cerebus had become, refused the offer. And Cerebus
was stuck in Iest.
Thud.
This is a prime example
of how Sim-- almost always very deftly-- plays with reader expectations.
He sweeps you into the story and then plays with you like a puppet; he
gets almost complete control. How he achieves this-- granted, incredibly
subjective-- effect is still kind of a mystery to me. Maybe I'm just
really susceptible to being manipulated by stories (although I don't think
I am), or maybe Sim is just plain supernatural, but he does it often in
Cerebus.
It almost always seems to be related to the way the series is structured
around kinds of cliff-hangers. Because every issue, after a certain
very early point, contains exactly 20 comic pages, Sim plans out the final
pages of each issue with care. Even later issues, where it seems
as if he's only writing for the "phonebook" format and simply stopping
the flow of the story after 20 pages, have a kind of cliffhanger structure.
If you examine the way Sim stops the story at the end of each issue it
usually stops at a point that contains some sort of dramatic tension, or
a point that opens onto a bit of uncertainty or expectation-- even if these
points simply involve waiting for the answer to a question, or the resolution
to a sight gag, or even a simple shift in narrative mood or scene.
Sim knows how to tell a story.
Sim also knows how to play
with the reader's hopes. And I had been hoping-- desperately, desperately
hoping-- that Cerebus would get together with Jaka. But it wasn't
to be. She refused him (with good reason) and crushed his hope--
and mine.
Because Jaka's refusal of
Cerebus meant Cerebus was still stuck in Iest, which also meant that I
was, in a sense, also stuck in Iest-- and stuck reading a narrative that
I was finding increasingly more and more disillusioning. The 25-issue
mark passed, and the action slowed even more, and I stuck around for while,
watching Cerebus dreaming, seeing him arguing with Astoria. And nothing
seemed to be happening.
And what little was happening
was becoming darker, and darker, and darker. And more and more unpleasant
and ugly. And the bleakness of the narrative was wearying.
And coping with high school
and teen angst without Cerebus to drag me down was already bleak
enough.
So I gave up. I sold
all my issues.
And I didn't read Cerebus
for quite a while.
ABOUT A YEAR and a half later, I picked up the first "phonebook," the
reprint of High Society. And read it. And I really began
to regret selling all my Cerebuses (Cerebi?).
Then I saw the issue entitled
"Dead Friends" (issue #89; CS2 755-74)-- a story that was, like two others
in Church & State, little more than a transcription of one of
Cerebus' dreams. And I read it. And it was really moody, and
creepy, and it felt very, very important-- kind of like the way "Denouement"
had felt very, very important. I felt a chill.
The narrative, I realized
then, had always been progressing, and progressing smoothly, towards
some still unknown but enormous end-point. I'd just been too stupid
to notice it.
I mentally booted myself
in the ass and began reading Cerebus again. And when the second
"phone book" came out-- Church & State Volume 1, I picked it
up immediately and reacquainted myself with the plot. Fortunately,
I was able to get the issues that would eventually make up Church &
State Volume 2; and so, even though I'd been unable to locate all the
issues I'd sold, with the two phonebooks and all the issues I'd been able
to scrounge, I managed to get all the important stuff.
And eventually I was
able to get all my old issues back-- and, get this, they were the exact
same issues I'd sold. This was because the comic shop I'd sold them
to had simply put them into storage because the owner didn't really know
what to do with them. The guy who ran the store at that point didn't
really like or understand Cerebus-- or even comics, really-- he
was just getting comics into the store because they made money, subsidizing
the main business of the store, which was used and collectable books.
And so he'd tucked the issues away; and they stayed in hiding for roughly
a whole decade. Eventually, the shop changed hands, sold to two guys
who were more interested in the comics end of the business, and they dug
the Cerebus issues out of storage. Utterly by accident, I
saw the issues and explained to the guys that these were the exact same
comics I'd sold here ten-plus years ago, and I'd pay anything-- anything--
to get them back. Fortunately, they, the nice guys they were, sold
the whole boxful-- all of High Society, most of Church &
State, all my Swords volumes, and even my signed copy of issue
#51 (the funniest comic book ever written, remember?)-- back to me at a
very reasonable price.
And I will never sell them
again....
ANYWAY, AFTER BEING exposed to "Dead Friends," I started reading Cerebus
again, and I loved every minute of it.
Part of the "problem" I'd
been having, I realize now, was simply a result of my own relative youth
and a then-primitive set of expectations of how comic books should be.
Granted, my comic book tastes were generally more arty than those of my
classmates-- because of the way Cerebus wrecked comics for me, I
was into all sorts of "alternative" comics and undergrounds, and European
stuff, and so on. However, even though I liked to elevate Cerebus
in my mind, silently reminding myself that it was light years beyond Superman
and Spiderman-- I was still fairly aesthetically undeveloped and
Cerebus
still tripped me up. I just wasn't used to real Literature in a comic
book format.
But that changed.
If I'd only held on for another year and not sold my issues, my experience
of Church & State may have been considerably different.
I wouldn't have felt all that anxiety while I debated getting rid of every
trace of my most favorite comic in the world; and I wouldn't've felt like
a complete ass when I rediscovered Cerebus and realized that Dave
Sim was not only as good as I'd thought he'd been, but better. And
I wouldn't've had to get back into
Church & State in a fragmented
fashion.
However, I also may not
have had the same chill when reading "Dead Friends." And the incredible
aesthetic rush when I finally realized that Church & State really
was an epic masterpiece.
Maybe I'd needed a break.
CHURCH & STATE also, and very significantly, is the work
that introduces something I'm going to call the "something fell" motif--
because that's what it is.
The "something fell" motif
runs through Cerebus, in many different ways; some are totally obvious,
like the recurrence of the phrase "something fell" at key times in the
narrative, and some are more oblique: things tipping over, people "falling"
either figuratively or metaphorically, the events leading up to Cerebus'
death, and so on.
(Some might even say that
Sim's eventual insanity is also a manifestation of the "something fell"
motif with Sim as the person/object who "falls"-- from the eyes of the
public into obscurity, away from the cutting edge of a self-publishing
movement he was the leader of, from the good graces of the critics, and
even arguably away from the brilliance of his initial creation.)
The "something fell" motif
has its genesis early in Church & State, in a scene where Cerebus
is talking to the Pope of the Orthodox Tarimite Church moments before the
Pope is assassinated-- the very event that begins Cerebus' propulsion to
the top of the Iestian theocracy. As Cerebus is listening to the
Pope, he hears something fall in the distance. Cerebus then blurts
out "Something fell!" moments before the Pope is killed by a crossbow bolt
(CS1 147-8). At the time it seems as if the sound Cerebus hears is
nothing more than a stray sound made by an assassin.
However, four years, later
this "something fell" moment comes back in an extremely crucial and unexpected
way (CS2 1005-10). I won't tell you what it is in case you haven't
read Cerebus-- after all, even though this essay gives a lot of
stuff away to those unfamiliar with Sim's work, there still have to be
some surprises. And, if you've already read Cerebus, you already
know what it is.
For a teenager who naturally
has the time sense of a teen, and is therefore someone for whom 4 years
is an enormous stretch of time, the return of "something fell" in the last
third of Church & State was one of those Great Moments In Comics,
kind of moment that defines an era-- at least if you're a comic geek which,
at that time, I definitely was. Even now, I get kind of excited when
I think back to that first echo of the "something fell" scene. I
was in a comic shop when a friend of mine, a guy I knew named Morgan, someone
I haven't seen in literally decades as of this writing, showed me the issue
which had just come in. He said, "Holy fuck, you have got to fucking
read this right fucking now!" And I read it and then we both stared
at each other, slack-jawed.
A while ago, I think it
was Wizard magazine, had a list of the top 25 moments in comics,
and naturally "something fell" wasn't there-- but it should have been.
But the article had been written well after the (metaphoric) public gutting
of Dave Sim because of his views.
And, okay, honesty, it is
hard to believe that there was a time when Dave Sim was one of the most
influential and well-respected figures in comics. That there was
a time where if Sim said something, people listened, and that when Sim
parodied you, you were flattered-- if not a bit irritated. A time
when Cerebus appeared in an issue of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
way back when the Turtles lived in a black and white indie, and were also
only known as a parody of Frank Miller's (mostly now-forgotten) Ronin,
not a franchise unto themselves. Back when there was also a
playful war between Sim and Marvel comics. Sim had become friends
with Chris Claremont, the man who at during the '80s took the X-Men
places it had never been before. Claremont was one of the people
who began raising the bar for mainstream comics and the X-Men under
his control achieved a level of complexity and intellectual sophistication
that was seldom if ever seen in superhero comics at that time. And,
although Claremont is mostly forgotten because others have achieved much
more than him, many of his X-Men issues are still considered "classics"--
even if they are fairly light and melodramatic by today's standards.
Regardless, there was a
point where Sim and Claremont were such good friends that there were whispers
coming down the vine of a Cerebus/X-Men crossover. Sim's parody
of Wolverine-- Wolveroach, who adorned the covers of three issues (#54,
#55, #56; CS1 49- 108)-- also resulted in Marvel creating a character,
in a kind of playful mutual-parody relationship, called S'ym. S'ym
was a huge deformed pig-creature, a barbarian who referred to himself in
the third person like Cerebus (mostly) did.
Wolveroach also almost got
Sim sued for copyright infringement by Marvel, too. And this caused
something of a stir at the time. Issues about fair use, satire, and
the ownership of publicly available images were raised. Then, of
course, they faded away. But the upshot was that Dave Sim was worth
noticing, and worth suing-- and that mean he was threatening.
The Cerebus/X-Men
crossover fell apart when Sim realized that Marvel would own Cerebus
if any of his characters appeared in a Marvel comic. And, also, it
was around this time that Sim's relationship with his wife Deni fell apart
because she (according to he) tried to sell Cerebus behind his back,
among other things. (Sim's relationship with Deni fell apart roughly
around the time Cerebus' relationship with Sophia collapsed. An interesting
coincidence, or something more?) How much of this is true and how
much of it is Sim's bitterness is unclear. Also, it is quite possible
that it was Deni's money that got Cerebus off the ground in the
first place, which implies that she may have thought that because she funded
Sim's work she partly owned it. Again, how much of this is true remains
unclear. Deni herself doesn't talk too much about her life with Dave--
not that I've noticed anyway.
Anyway, back to the "something
fell" motif:
Unfortunately, like most
echoes, the echoes of "something fell" gradually lose their power.
And I can't help but think this is somehow a failing on Sim's part.
Having recurrences of the phrase "something fell" at crucial moments, while
initially a brilliant concept because the phrase comes round and round
in interesting and even compelling ways, eventually becomes a mere gimmick.
And then it peters out, in a kind of flat way, never really meaning much
and becoming a stock phrase that promises much but delivers very little.
Sim could have made so much
more of "something fell."
CHURCH & STATE also has one of the best cliff-hangers of
all time. In issue #98 (CS 2 937-56; "The Trial"), during Astoria's
trial, Cerebus, arguing with her about religious matters, spreads his arms
and bellows "What is truth?" (CS2 956). And then, at the time,
reading Cerebus issue by issue, I had to wait a full month to hear
Astoria's answer....
"What is Truth?"
Best-cliffhanger-ever!
And a question, and a theme,
that informs the rest of Cerebus up to and including issue #300.
Too bad the answer that
Sim eventually uncovers is-- like almost all attempts to answer the question
"what is truth?"-- extremely stupid.
ALSO, CHURCH & STATE is the book where Cerebus utters the immortal phrase: "You can get what you want and still not be very happy." Cerebus is in a crowd, as pope. He blesses a bawling and admittedly ugly baby and then hurls it into the centre of the crowd. He then pronounces:
"The valuable lesson is that you can get what you want and still not be very happy." (CS1 296)
JAKA'S STORY:
Jaka's Story is perfect.
Perfectly paced, perfectly written, perfectly drawn. The characters
are precisely crafted and compassionate. It is flawless.
Actually, that's not true.
There's one typo. On page 27 Jaka is referred to as "Jake."
I some incredibly fond memories
of reading Jaka's Story alone in an enormous university library.
They're mopey memories, but I'm fond of them. It's amazing how you
can be nostalgic for anything, even sadness.
The first issue of Jaka's
Story came out during my second year of University. I was
young, and in a state of emotional overdrive because University life was
still a new environment and I was relatively friendless, and I was really
beginning to have to deal with the fact that I was now an adult, that high
school was over and my life had no direction. I had no job, wanted
no job, was scared of finding work and so did nothing but still felt the
stress of unemployment even though was stuck living with my parents and
they took care of everything. I felt like an adult and a kid at the
same time (and I still do). Also, I missed a lot of the people I
used to hang out with in grades 11 and 12. University was cold and
forbidding and impersonal. And I didn't even really understand my
classes, what I was doing, why I was doing it. And so on.
And the prologue to Jaka's
Story-- 20 pages of Jaka very simply living out a few minutes of a
day, thinking about her life, intercut with bits of dense text describing
her lonely childhood-- precisely mirrored my own loneliness and alienation,
as well as the creeping realization that I was aging, that I wasn't the
centre of the universe, that the world in general didn't care about me
at all, and that there was nothing I could do about it.
And all the while there
was still a sense of newness, of freshness in this sadness-- in the sadness
of both Cerebus and my own life-- because both Cerebus and
I were heading out into new, uncharted waters.
(The Japanese call this
mono-no-aware, a sudden sensitivity to the sadness the permeates all life,
all things.)
And it was then that I experienced
a sense of convergence with Cerebus, something that continued for,
literally, years, and still exists, in an abstract way, even now.
JAKA'S STORY, SIMPLY enough, is a story about Jaka-- and if Sim
hadn't lost his mind years later, it would have been a harbinger of even
better and better things.
More about that later, though.
Right now, a bit about Jaka:
If you remember, when Cerebus
met her, way back in issue #6 (C 119-140; "The Secret"), she was a tavern
dancer. Cerebus, being drugged by some thieves, immediately fell
in love with her and swept her off her feet. The drugs then wore
off and Cerebus left her. Later on, it was revealed that she's the
niece of Lord Julius, leader of the realm of Palnu, and that she's in fact
an incredibly powerful woman-- just someone who has no use for her uncle
and a life of high society.
She is (and these are Sim's
words, written in the forward to Jaka's Story-- even though these
days he might try to deny ever having written them): "Cerebus' One True
Love (if one is disposed to simplistic and melodramatic characterizations)
a kind of Achilles Heel and raison d'être" (JS 8). Jaka
is also "an Artist first, last and always. That she was a wife, an
aristocrat, an object of adoration and lust, an employee and a scoff-law
intruded nowhere near the center of her being wherein the Dancer resides"
(JS 8).
Actually, let's look briefly
at the rest of that paragraph, because it sheds light on who Jaka initially
was supposed to be for Sim, as well as gives voice to some of his attitudes
towards the reception of comic books in the culture in general. "If
I identify with her moreso than with Oscar, it must be attributed to our
both toiling in fields of endeavour damned by faint and patronizing praise,
over-looked and almost universally dismissed by the doctrinaire in favour
of the third-rate and the merely lucrative" (JS 8). Here, Sim actually
says he, on some level, identifies with Jaka. Granted, he says that
he identifies with Jaka more than he identifies with Oscar-- a writer
character in the book modeled after Oscar Wilde. However, Sim doesn't
say that there's a 1-to-1 correlation between himself and Jaka-- but the
Dave Sim of Jaka's Story does admit to the existence of an element
of identification with a woman. This places aspects of Jaka, or elements
of the female as Sim perceives it, in line with the male. Sim's attitude
towards Jaka will change and darken considerably later on (she will become
a "viper"), while the anger he feels towards the dismissive attitudes of
the public as they wrestle with the idea of comics as art will grow.
AND SO, JAKA comes and goes throughout the series, arriving to interrupt Cerebus at key times in High Society and Church & State, trying to remind him of where his heart really lies and trying to get him to think straight-- even though later on Sim will (only half-successfully) try to depict her as doing the opposite.
IN CHURCH & STATE, it is revealed that Jaka is both married
(CS1 452) and pregnant (CS1 479). And in Jaka's Story Cerebus
is in a situation where he's forced to endure life with Jaka and her husband,
Rick. Jaka, however, had a miscarriage some time before the beginning
of the story and so Cerebus is spared having to wrestle with the personal
anguish of the live of his life having had another man's baby (JS 49).
From the very first issue,
Jaka's
Story is a tense, dark, melancholy comedy that centres around Cerebus,
Jaka, Rick, a tavern owner named Pud, and a writer named Oscar. Cerebus
spends much of the novel hiding from the Cirinists who have taken over
Iest because of the way he mishandled his rule as Pope, and mooning over
Jaka; Rick is out of work and idolizes Oscar like a child; Jaka loves Rick
and is terrified for Cerebus, wishes Rick would get a job, and has a secret;
Pud is in love with Jaka and is mentally unstable; and Oscar is writing
a book called Jaka's Story based on the life of Jaka, as it's being
secretly relayed to him by Rick; and, oh yeah, Oscar's also got a bit of
a crush on Rick.
The pacing in Jaka's
Story slows to a crawl, giving the narrative ample time to breathe,
and plenty of space for characters to grow and become multi-layered.
And the many silent bits where characters pass time doing simple, mundane
daily things are mesmerizing. And Gerhard's lush backgrounds also
continue to improve. We're treated to some foggy days on the side
of the mountain (the story takes place on the side of the enormous mountain
whose top houses Iest-- there are small little rest-areas/hamlets littering
a enormous road that corkscrews up the side); a few sight gags; and several
interiour monologues by Pud that take the from of imaginary dialogues between
himself and Jaka, where he rehearses confessing his love for her.
We're also treated to the
contents of Oscar's book, written in a turgid, grinding Victorian style
patterned on the pompous prose of the real Oscar Wilde And it's dead-on.
Oscar's book is just as dull and self-congratulatory as anything written
by the real Wilde, and it is also just as paradoxically compelling-- and
for this, Sim should be applauded. Oscar's book concerns Jaka's upbringing,
her relationship with her faceless ogre of a nurse, and the reasons she
left Palnu to pursue life as a dancer.
Ultimately, Cerebus is marginalized
in Jaka's Story and all but vanishes in the end (gone to get some
paint from one of the other little hamlets) when the Cirinists sweep in,
carting away Oscar, Jaka, and Rick to prison. The last large part
of Jaka's Story ("Mystery Achievement"; JS 353-472) concerns Jaka
in a holding cell conveniently located beside her real nurse (someone we
have only up until now seen through Oscar's eyes as he relates Rick's versions
of Jaka's memories). Through dialogue and lots and lots of moody,
black and gray panels, we revisit key parts of Oscar's book from the eyes
of the nurse, who is finally humanized. The rest of Jaka's Story
deals with Jaka's release from the Cirinist jail because of her diplomatic
immunity; an exchange between Jaka, Rick, and a Cirinist based on Margaret
Thatcher; and the revelation of Jaka's secret (which I won't reveal).
And it's hard to have an
ending bleaker than the last chapter of Church & State, but
Sim pulls it off.
Where the despair at the
end of Church & State is cosmic and universal, the nihilism
at the end of Jaka's Story is extremely personal. It's almost as
if Sim painted a broad picture of the universe at the end of Church
& State, knowing that the climax would be viewed by many as being
far too "cosmic," and then in Jaka's Story channeled his bleak vision
of things into a discrete little package that almost anyone could relate
to.
"Here, kids. You don't
get The Big Picture? Well, then here's The Big Picture in miniature.
The strong and evil win, the weak and good suffer, there is nothing but
vagueness and injustice, hope is a lie, and everyone is wrong about everything--
always."
It's also worth noting that
at this point in Cerebus' run the comic had, quite possibly, the
largest female readership of any Western comic at that time. It might
be possible that more women read Cerebus in those days than have
ever read comic books since-- with the current exception of manga, certain
types of which are arguably designed to appeal to a female demographic.
Regardless-- because I'm not 100% sure of the numbers-- even if Cerebus
didn't have the absolute largest female readership in the early 1990s,
its female readership was still staggering. Jaka's Story--
and Cerebus by extension-- was touted somewhere in the comics media
(can't remember exactly where, it's been years) as an intelligent, sophisticated
comic that women would be able to read and enjoy; something that wouldn't
overwhelm and alienate them with all the embarrassing machismo and testosterone
bullshit that infests superhero comics-- that kind of pissing-contest swagger
and wank-fantasy crap that only dateless virgin geeks really think is cool
and "masculine." Cerebus was seemingly a comic that was immune
from the immaturity of a medium that then was-- and still is-- largely
run by socially backward little boys with no grasp of storytelling and
human nature. Jaka's Story-- and Cerebus by extension--
were viewed as a step forward for comics partly because of the complex,
detailed, and realistic way women were portrayed by Dave Sim. Not
to mention the incredible complexity and sophistication of the narrative.
This was to change in later
issues-- at least the maturity and the well-rounded female character stuff
would change, the complexity would remain. But as far as the late-'80s
and early-'90s were concerned, it looked to everyone like Jaka's Story
was promising good things for the future, and that Cerebus was only
going to get better and better, and more and more significant, ushering
in an age of new, intelligent, literary comics that relied less of the
manipulation of tired superhero motifs, motifs that really aren't as universal
as fans want to believe (in fact, even now most grownups think that superheroes
are disposable crap at worst, and mindless entertainment at best, and nothing
akin to a pop culture "mythology," and hardly deep, if even worth noticing),
and it would do this by focusing more on depth of character, realism of
event, and a stylistic complexity that involves placing different kinds
of textual media in relationship with each other-- as long as you could
handle the talking aardvark.
(And granted, stuff sort
of like this did already exist-- Peter Bagge's Hate/Neat Stuff comics,
and the work of Harvey Pekar, to name two. But unfortunately, Bagge's
art style, while technically excellent, is hideously exaggerated and--
looking like some weird acid-flashback cliché-- inaccessible to
almost anyone except people who've been weaned on very specific types of
early comics-- both underground and aboveground-- or who like stuff that's
ugly because ugly is punk and cool and "alternative," or something.
And Pekar's work-- while
also very good-- is so fragmented and Carver-esque that the majority of
the general public also finds it extremely inaccessible. And, I mean,
I like Pekar, but I'm also aware that most people out there still want
stories with beginnings, middles, and ends-- oh, and if not beginnings,
middles, and ends, at least points, of a sort, even if these points are
abstract. Much like Raymond Carver, Pekar's work only really appeals
to a certain narrow "realistic fiction" subculture that finds itself currently
dwindling away in coffee shops and university classrooms. And it
also doesn't help matters that many of the artists Pekar chooses are very
ugly and off-putting, and that many of his narratives are so compressed
they read like expositional vignettes. I think he's brilliant, in
his own way, but I can understand why neither the majority of comic book
readers nor the general public really cares about him. If they even
notice him at all.)
Jaka's Story occurred
in the middle of the big self-publishing boom. And everybody was
publishing their own comic books. At the time the theory was that
with so many people self-publishing, the intelligence of the unbridled
creator would begin to show through and there'd be a renaissance that would
result in comic books that could compete with capital-L Literature for
levels of maturity and complexity of subject matter. That didn't
really happen. Most people wanted to publish either funny animal
comics where the animals said "fuck" and got laid a lot, or superheroes,
who also said "fuck" and got laid a lot-- and very few of these were very
good. There was also a deluge of autobiographical comics, modeled
mostly on the Pekar style-- and the majority of those were also not very
good.
And Cerebus was at
the vanguard of this movement. The theory was, if Dave Sim could
do it-- if Sim could publish brilliant capital-L Literature in a marginalized
medium, so can I!
And it was an exiting time
because of all the weird stuff coming out. But little of it matched
what Sim was doing. And then the self-publishing movement dwindled
away, and was replaced by the 'zine movement which again held out similar
promises of quality, the artistic intelligence and purity of the unbridled
creator, and grass-roots brilliants. And, again, Cerebus was
more than occasionally cited as an inspiration, if not a success story,
for 'zines are nothing if not a kind of self-published work.
But eventually the 'zine
scene, which, like the wave of self-publishing before it, amounted to little
and petered out.
And Cerebus endured.
JAKA'S STORY ALSO contains a little hint of what's to come regarding
Sim and his burgeoning obsessions-- but at the time, it seemed utterly
inconsequential.
In his introduction to the
Jaka's
Story phonebook, Dave Sim refers to Oscar as a "homosexualist":
"[Once] I was asked by one of the dimmer bulbs of comics journalism if
this was my first use of a homosexual character in Cerebus. The question
is ill-founded for I never considered Oscar a 'homosexual character' per
se (though homosexualist he is). First, last and always (to me)
he is an Artist" (JS 8).
"Homosexualist" is a term
appropriated from Gore Vidal (there-- I double-checked-- I actually wrote
"Gore Vidal". For some reason when ever I talk about Vidal I always
feel compelled to either say or write "Truman Capote." Even though
the two are very different writers. Go figure. Maybe it's all
Yoohwhoo's fault)-- but it's also something that will come to the foreground
in later years, underscoring Sim's paranoia. However, even though
I noted the oddness of the word-- because "homosexualist" is a really weird,
paranoid kind of word that politicizes something that just shouldn't be
politicized because homosexuality is just one of many potential very natural
results of the intersection between biology and conditioning-- I made nothing
of it at that time. Beyond just noting how strange the word "homosexualist"
sounded and looked. And how pretentious Sim seemed to be while employing
it. But, I concluded that it was a harmless little term, nonetheless.
A bit of triteness on Sim's part, maybe. But no big deal.
Wow. That was a mistake.
AFTER JAKA'S STORY comes Melmoth.
If little surface action
actually happens in Jaka's Story, even less happens in Melmoth.
And this is a good thing. Melmoth is about stasis and death--
and, eventually, rebirth. Cerebus is catatonic, rendered useless
after discovering Jaka gone at the end of Jaka's Story, the result
of a Cirinist raid-- a raid he could have possibly prevented if he hadn't
gone toddling off to buy paint. Thus, having no idea if Jaka's alive
or dead, Cerebus assumes she's dead-- which, given what he knows of Cirinists,
is a logical assumption. And so, he himself inwardly dies.
Cerebus spends most of Melmoth
sitting and staring.
This results in Cerebus
finding himself even more marginalized than he was in Jaka's Story.
(At least in Jaka's Story he did more than sit and stare.
He wandered around a bit and talked, too.) And so the focus of the
narrative shifts even further away from him, and to good effect.
The main focus of Melmoth
is the last few days of Oscar Wilde's life. We watch Oscar as he
slowly dwindles away, and we watch Cerebus as he stays absolutely still.
The two narratives only
briefly intersect: the first time is for one panel as Oscar is dying (M
202), and the other time is after Oscar's death, and again for only for
one panel, this one stretched across two pages (M 222-3).
And so Oscar begins the
story alive and ends up dead while Cerebus, reduced to a state of near-catatonia,
begins the story for all intents and purposes "dead" and gradually comes
back to life.
And after almost 200 masterful
pages of introspection, stillness, and utter despair, the last few moments
of Melmoth explode into a whirlwind of violence and panic.
WITH MELMOTH, THOUGH, there are two little hints of the direction
Cerebus
would be taking in the future. And once again, much like with the
use of the word "homosexualist" in the preface to Jaka's Story,
at the time I made little of them. And one was actually so well hidden
that I didn't even realize it was a possible symptom of something being
wrong with Sim's mind until much, much later. Well after he finished
stunning the comics world with his views on gender relations, in fact.
The first hint is fairly
straightforward and actually kind of funny. Melmoth opens
up with a prologue featuring the Roach, who in hiding has dawned the guise
of "normalroach," a parody of the normalman character created by Jim Valentino
and published by Sim's own Aardvark-Vanaheim company in the mid-1980s.
normalman (no caps) was essentially a normal man, an individual without
any superpowers trapped in a world where everyone else had superpowers.
The normalman idea is a common theme in comics nowadays, but it was fairly
new at the time and the normalman comic was (if I remember correctly)
a fairly funny satire on comic book tropes and genres, as well as a pretty
good spoof of the comic industry itself. Thus, having the Roach decide
he's going to go incognito by dawning the guise of normalman is actually
a very deft move on Sim's part.
Anyway, normalroach is sitting
in front of a café, staring paranoiacly at the landscape while muttering
and stammering variations on the phrase "fucking cunts" over and over and
over (M 12-26). The "cunts" in question are no doubt the occupying
Cirinists.
Because of all his apoplectic,
Tourettes-like sputtering, normalroach eventually gets into some minor
trouble with a Cirinist guard, but then weasels out of it (M 15-19).
Nothing much else happens in the issue other than the introduction of a
surly, abrasive serving girl who will be fired a few issues later.
And once again, because of Sim's deft comic timing, the issue is a lot
funnier than my description makes it seem. And at the time, normalroach
saying "fucking cunts" over and over again was kind of shocking.
After all, Cerebus never really shied away from profanity (except
in the very early issues), but there'd never been that much extreme profanity
in an issue before. However, looking back on the normalroach scene
in the context of Sim's current views on women, God, and the universe in
general, the Roach's attitude towards the "cunts"-- a bitter, paralyzed
kind of rage and loathing-- seems kind of like a harbinger of things to
come.
The other hint of weirdness
to come, however, is much more odd. Whereas the surface misogyny
of the Roach only parodies what, it's been revealed, are more-or-less Sim's
attitudes towards women, the other thing in Melmoth goes much deeper
to the core of Sim and doesn't have anything to do with women-- except
maybe obliquely-- and, in fact, even now I still don't know exactly what
to make of it.
It appears (although this
is not readily apparent-- and wasn't apparent to me for quite some time)
that there are two Oscars in the world of Cerebus. There's
the Oscar of Jaka's Story, and then there's the Oscar of Melmoth.
Jaka's
Oscar has been taken to prison and Melmoth's has been released.
Both Oscars are writers and share the same name, yet neither has met the
other.
Initially, I believed that
there was only one Oscar, and that the Oscar in Jaka's Story was
the same individual who was in Melmoth. But, over time I began
to perceive from talking to fans, from letters Sim printed in the "Aardvark
Comment" section in the back of Cerebus, from things I'd read in
interviews with Dave, and from reviews of the Melmoth issues in
various publications (this was all very long ago, so please forgive me
if I don't cite particulars. Also, the recognition of the possibility
that there might be two Oscars was quite slow to come to me, and on a certain
level almost subliminal and insidious), that there were people who believed
that the Oscar in Jaka's Story was a different individual from the
Oscar in Melmoth. Eventually, Sim himself even seemed to second
this. The following is from "Dave Sim-- The Usenet Interview":
tyg: Was Oscar in Melmoth the same character who was in Jaka's Story? People have said you've answered this question differently at different tour stops.Dave:-- That