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Cerebus

Got a call at 12:30 today from 678-904-1418 ... ? Aha! They left a message ... it was Oxford Comics and the final book of Cerebus was in! Got it, read it, and here we go.

Cerebus was a comic begun in 1977 and by 1979 the creator, Dave Sim, announced that it would be a single story ending at issue 300. That brought him to May of this year. Although Sim became quite un-loved, the accomplishment was noted in the comic community, and he was a strong influence on me in my art school college days.

I picked up my first Cerebus late in college, around 1988/89, when I was facinated by the potential of the experiments of independent comic artists and writers. The issue I picked up was at a climax within one of Sim's large story sections. Cerebus was pope and some cataclysmic event caused echoes of parallel universes and parallel Cerebuses to fracture the panels on the page. Then various locations around the city are shown with characters falling dead or witnessing a tower of stone grow and shoot through the clouds. As this happens, the panels are slowly rotated page-by-page so that, by the end of the issue, you have spun the book completely around. As an apocalypse happens in the story, the reader is caught in its vortex.

I was hooked.

Dave Sim, despite all his egomaniacal, misogynistic insanity these days, was an excellent role model for the art student. He wrote, drew, and owned his creation. And, of course, made a living off of it. His "Notes from the President" that appeared on the inside front cover of every issue were always entertaining and generally educational w/r/t self-publishing and creativity.

And he hated the big guys. One entry said (in effect) "So, DC Comics is starting an independent branch that, get this, retains the rights of the creations and gives the creators nothing! At long last: have you no shame?!? Have. You. No. Fucking. Shame?!?" He was the man. Someone should turn those editorials into a blog ... he had some gems in there. Trade-paperbacks are easier than the single issues to peruse (each individually wrapped), but the trade-paperbacks don't reprint those "Notes from the President."

I've been wanting to get back to comics for the past year or so, and I continued where I had left off with Cerebus by purchasing the trade-paperbacks (Cerebus trade-paperbacks are affectionately called "phonebooks" in the industry). I began with Rick's Story, and got caught up just as he finished #300 earlier this year. The final two books were somewhat tedious for obvious reasons (he created his own sort of hybrid Jewish/Muslim religion and much of the story was spent outlining a mythos for it), but they still had their moments with Three Stooges parodies and emotional flash-backs to the 27-year adventure.

Today, serendipitously, I spelunked through a BoingBoing post about a Salon article on Alan Moore that references an older article on Cerebus. Here are some further links: