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Monday, May 09, 2005
Rediscovering Cerebus
Thanks to Last Sanctuary, I'm now giving Cerebus a second chance. During their FCBD sale this weekend, I got four volumes of the so-called Cerebus phone-books for the price of one: this includes High Society, Church & State II, Jaka's Story, and Melmoth. This covers four of the six volumes that make up the first half of the series. From that first half, I'm missing the first volume, Cerebus, and the excellent Church & State I. I've been trying to locate a copy of the latter at less-than-cover price, but it looks like I'm going to have to bite the bullet and shell out thirty bucks.
For those who don't know, Cerebus is a 300-issue series written and drawn by Dave Sim (with luxuriously illustrated backgrounds by Gerhard, starting midway through Church & State I) that started as a funnybook parody of Conan - Cerebus is an aardvark - and morphed into a complex satire of politics, religion, and the arts... and then, apparently, morphed into a maddeningly misogynist screed posing as a beautifully-crafted comic book.
Or so I've been told. I didn't stick around for the whole run. I started around #81, the Mick and Keef issues, backtracked to the very beginning, then read it regularly until I dropped it out of boredom somewhere towards the end of Women, the story which began the second half of the series. At that point Sim was under fire for a philosophical view he developed that branded women as voids that suck the energy out of men, or some such nonsense. It reached a point where the notorious ideas of issue 186 overshadowed the comic itself. I remember being mildly surprised at seeing debate over 186 (a debate which led to several broken friendships between Sim and others in the comics community) then realized by that point I'd only skim through individual issues of Cerebus and not remember what I read afterwards. In short, the magic was gone. Soon after that I just stopped buying the comic, not wanting to waste two more dollars a month. I told myself I'd pick up the trade paperbacks collecting the storylines, dubbed "phonebooks" because of the size of each volume, but was disenchanted enough not to bother.
Until, of course, those trades were on sale.
Cerebus used to be absolute favorite comic book. I still remember huge parts of High Society and Church & State. Now, perhaps even more so than before, I am in awe of the sheer technical virtuosity that's found on most every page. Sim is not only a gifted - if often self-indulgent - writer, his understanding of comics as a narrative medium is one of the most finely developed ever. He didn't do much to develop new tools for comics as a language, but he used the established tools to the best of his extent, serving the story in delightful and often unexpected ways. Sim's ambitions were huge - 300 issues at 20 pages each meant a 6000 page graphic novel, a true novel with all the depths and complexity of its literary forebears. And he delivered, something many people doubted. And after 300 issues, he walked away, the story all told (and Cerebus dead - Sim made no bones that the series would end with the main character's death).
Looking over the volumes I picked up, I was also sharply reminded of why I stopped reading Cerebus - the novelistic length made following it from month-to-month difficult, even prohibitive, and the larger story (the one that would eventually encapsulate Sim's philosophy, as all good novels should) at times became too insular, too caught up in itself, to be completely satisfying. Jaka's Story works well as a stand-alone story, but its gravitas often hinges on knowing the bigger story surrounding this dancing girl and her aardvark lover. The short story Melmoth (which clocks in at 240 pages, longer than what most comics creators would deem a graphic novel) should work well as a stand-alone, but there are too many walk-on cameos for this to be the case. By the time the second half started, Sim was neck-deep in exploring a society defined by a kind of rabid feminism - called Cirinism, after its founder in the story - and as a result became more esoteric in storytelling, both denser and more abstract.
This may brand me a philistine, but at the time I preferred the more straightforward satire of High Society (where Cerebus runs for Prime Minister) and Church and State I (where Cerebus becomes Pope) to the meanderings that followed. And while I didn't describe it as such at the time, I'm willing to admit now that Cerebus began to outpace me intellectually in its second half, even as it tried my patience for a sustaining narrative.
But now that it's all over - Cerebus completed sometime last year - I think I'm ready to give the aardvark a second chance. At the very least, the magnificent craft of Cerebus is worth discovering all over again. Just as important, I'd like to see if the actual story makes more sense when read as whole books and not individual issues, if the esoteric flights of fancy (both literal and figurative in Cerebus' case) will be more concrete.
As for the misogynist philosophy Sim develops in Cerebus' pages - well, I've never held it against him, quite. People are entitled to their own opinions - that's what art is for, for Christ's sake! - and to appreciate a work of art does not mean you subscribe to its philosophy. I love Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers - neither makes me a Nazi. I love Lolita but do not condone child molesters. As one of the guys at Last Sanctuary wisely pointed out, it's tragic that Sim has created this magnum opus of comics but will forever be remembered first as a crazy guy.
For my part, I want to see if I can get past that crazy guy and enjoy the magnum opus to the best of my ability.
Post a Comment
For those who don't know, Cerebus is a 300-issue series written and drawn by Dave Sim (with luxuriously illustrated backgrounds by Gerhard, starting midway through Church & State I) that started as a funnybook parody of Conan - Cerebus is an aardvark - and morphed into a complex satire of politics, religion, and the arts... and then, apparently, morphed into a maddeningly misogynist screed posing as a beautifully-crafted comic book.
Or so I've been told. I didn't stick around for the whole run. I started around #81, the Mick and Keef issues, backtracked to the very beginning, then read it regularly until I dropped it out of boredom somewhere towards the end of Women, the story which began the second half of the series. At that point Sim was under fire for a philosophical view he developed that branded women as voids that suck the energy out of men, or some such nonsense. It reached a point where the notorious ideas of issue 186 overshadowed the comic itself. I remember being mildly surprised at seeing debate over 186 (a debate which led to several broken friendships between Sim and others in the comics community) then realized by that point I'd only skim through individual issues of Cerebus and not remember what I read afterwards. In short, the magic was gone. Soon after that I just stopped buying the comic, not wanting to waste two more dollars a month. I told myself I'd pick up the trade paperbacks collecting the storylines, dubbed "phonebooks" because of the size of each volume, but was disenchanted enough not to bother.
Until, of course, those trades were on sale.
Cerebus used to be absolute favorite comic book. I still remember huge parts of High Society and Church & State. Now, perhaps even more so than before, I am in awe of the sheer technical virtuosity that's found on most every page. Sim is not only a gifted - if often self-indulgent - writer, his understanding of comics as a narrative medium is one of the most finely developed ever. He didn't do much to develop new tools for comics as a language, but he used the established tools to the best of his extent, serving the story in delightful and often unexpected ways. Sim's ambitions were huge - 300 issues at 20 pages each meant a 6000 page graphic novel, a true novel with all the depths and complexity of its literary forebears. And he delivered, something many people doubted. And after 300 issues, he walked away, the story all told (and Cerebus dead - Sim made no bones that the series would end with the main character's death).
Looking over the volumes I picked up, I was also sharply reminded of why I stopped reading Cerebus - the novelistic length made following it from month-to-month difficult, even prohibitive, and the larger story (the one that would eventually encapsulate Sim's philosophy, as all good novels should) at times became too insular, too caught up in itself, to be completely satisfying. Jaka's Story works well as a stand-alone story, but its gravitas often hinges on knowing the bigger story surrounding this dancing girl and her aardvark lover. The short story Melmoth (which clocks in at 240 pages, longer than what most comics creators would deem a graphic novel) should work well as a stand-alone, but there are too many walk-on cameos for this to be the case. By the time the second half started, Sim was neck-deep in exploring a society defined by a kind of rabid feminism - called Cirinism, after its founder in the story - and as a result became more esoteric in storytelling, both denser and more abstract.
This may brand me a philistine, but at the time I preferred the more straightforward satire of High Society (where Cerebus runs for Prime Minister) and Church and State I (where Cerebus becomes Pope) to the meanderings that followed. And while I didn't describe it as such at the time, I'm willing to admit now that Cerebus began to outpace me intellectually in its second half, even as it tried my patience for a sustaining narrative.
But now that it's all over - Cerebus completed sometime last year - I think I'm ready to give the aardvark a second chance. At the very least, the magnificent craft of Cerebus is worth discovering all over again. Just as important, I'd like to see if the actual story makes more sense when read as whole books and not individual issues, if the esoteric flights of fancy (both literal and figurative in Cerebus' case) will be more concrete.
As for the misogynist philosophy Sim develops in Cerebus' pages - well, I've never held it against him, quite. People are entitled to their own opinions - that's what art is for, for Christ's sake! - and to appreciate a work of art does not mean you subscribe to its philosophy. I love Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers - neither makes me a Nazi. I love Lolita but do not condone child molesters. As one of the guys at Last Sanctuary wisely pointed out, it's tragic that Sim has created this magnum opus of comics but will forever be remembered first as a crazy guy.
For my part, I want to see if I can get past that crazy guy and enjoy the magnum opus to the best of my ability.
Post a Comment
Sim is nuts. I've seen a lot of his correspondence, and where it relates to women and/or religion, it's well-written and well thought out, but proceeds from totally bat$hit premises.
That said, I got into the comic about 5 years ago, and have bought all of the phonebooks, and read them multiple times. I read the text in issue 186 and was dumbfounded. I put Cerebus aside for a while after that, but I couldn't overcome my curiosity about what the little scamp would do next.
As you say, it's a towering work of art, and represents an enormous achievement, on many levels: the artwork, the lettering, the accents, storytelling, etc., etc.. His exegesis of the book of Genesis in the last or second-to-last book is nothing short of genius.
I don't know if it's significant (and I'm sorry for the spoiler if you don't already know this), but Cerebus is an hermaphrodite. I don't know how that fits in with Sim's cosmology, or what he therefore feels about the character, but it bears remembering.
Thanks for the thoughtful post.