Comments for FreakyTrigger https://freakytrigger.co.uk Lollards in the high church of low culture Mon, 18 Mar 2024 19:41:17 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Tommy Mack https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584641 Mon, 18 Mar 2024 19:41:17 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584641 I’m definitely quoting this to Mrs Mack when she interrupts me teaching the kids how to play You Really Got Me on one guitar string to ask if I’ve put out the bins. (Bin = a sort of void. COINCIDENCE?!)

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Comment on Aard Labour 7: Flight by seo.cognitiveit https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-7-flight/comment-page-1#comment-2584634 Mon, 18 Mar 2024 07:28:35 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34935#comment-2584634 Clicky Vouchers” likely refers to discount vouchers or coupons provided by the Clicky website or platform. Clicky Vouchers may offer discounts, special deals, or promotions on various products or services from participating retailers or businesses. Users can typically find and redeem these vouchers online through the Clicky platform or website, enabling them to save money on their purchases. Clicky Vouchers can be a convenient way for consumers to access discounts and savings when shopping for goods or services online or in-store.

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Comment on Aard Labour 8: Women by Corey Klemow https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women/comment-page-1#comment-2584633 Mon, 18 Mar 2024 05:46:14 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584633 In reply to Tom.

There’s kind of an element of those “This is the world that liberals want!” memes to it, isn’t there? Sim shows us characters he thinks are self-evidently appalling, but you have to buy into his own awful assumptions about women to find them so.

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Comment on Aard Labour 8: Women by Corey Klemow https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women/comment-page-1#comment-2584632 Mon, 18 Mar 2024 05:45:56 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584632 In reply to Tom.

[accidental double-post; delete if’n you can]

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Comment on Aard Labour 8: Women by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women/comment-page-1#comment-2584627 Sat, 16 Mar 2024 23:36:28 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584627 In reply to Peter.

It’s interesting that there’s no male character (beyond and maybe including Cerebus) who approaches their complexity, partly because most of the significant men are Sim doing a riff on a living person (I need to talk about this in Guys, I think). This is sometimes held up as evidence that Sim isn’t or wasn’t a misogynist, which I don’t really buy – I think you can be a careful, even empathic observer of something you detest. What is fascinating is that with Astoria and Jaka so often the way he talked about them in interviews – how awful he thought they were – just didn’t transmit to the page.

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Comment on Aard Labour 8: Women by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women/comment-page-1#comment-2584626 Sat, 16 Mar 2024 23:29:52 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584626 In reply to Dan P.

Had a look through the thread now – really enjoyed it. I think we pretty much agree on the highs and lows, I’m a bit harsher on the prose elements in some places than most other reviewers I think. There is something about finishing it that seems to compel bloggers who’ve made the trip to talk about it and try to get their heads around it.

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Comment on Aard Labour 8: Women by Peter https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women/comment-page-1#comment-2584625 Sat, 16 Mar 2024 23:06:25 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584625 It always struck me that Sim, at least at his peak, wrote excellent women, Astoria, Jaka, Cirin. They were fascinating, complex characters, and he told stories with them that were not present in any other comic book, really in any other medium. I guess the sad thing is that he knew that great villains, that great monsters, contain multitudes, and Sim would come to see them all in a monstrous light.

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Comment on Aard Labour 8: Women by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women/comment-page-1#comment-2584624 Sat, 16 Mar 2024 22:47:27 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584624 In reply to Dan P.

Awesome – once I’ve done the final post I’m going to do a conclusion which will include a round up of some other attempts to get to grips with it, and I’ll make sure this features!

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Comment on Aard Labour 8: Women by Dan P https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women/comment-page-1#comment-2584623 Sat, 16 Mar 2024 20:44:03 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584623 I’m really enjoying these essays. It’s a fascinating book, brilliant and flawed in equal degrees. I was involved in something similar a few years back, if you or any other readers are interested…. https://theafterword.co.uk/in-which-kid-dynamite-bingo-little-and-a-cast-of-thousands-reread-cerebus/

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Comment on Aard Labour 8: Women by Muir Douglas https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women/comment-page-1#comment-2584619 Sat, 16 Mar 2024 19:42:08 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584619 This is just excellent stuff. Thank you for the time and effort you’ve put in.
Doug M.

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Comment on Aard Labour 7: Flight by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-7-flight/comment-page-1#comment-2584617 Sat, 16 Mar 2024 11:46:53 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34935#comment-2584617 In reply to Muir Douglas.

I am always very wary of mental health explanations for terrible opinions but the case of Dave Sim does kind of demand you at least ask – partly because, as you say, he himself raises it. Some of the later work really does seem different in significant ways, that do chime with my personal experience of dealing with people with particular mental illness symptoms. I think “Dave Sim went mad” is a handwave explanation of the gender stuff – those are clearly ideas he developed over time and included in the comic in a very deliberate and thought-through way, even if he always leaned to conspiratorial and paranoid thinking about the world. But Latter Days and the “Book Of Cerebus” are a different thing entirely.

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Comment on Aard Labour 7: Flight by Muir Douglas https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-7-flight/comment-page-1#comment-2584608 Fri, 15 Mar 2024 05:50:58 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34935#comment-2584608 In reply to Samuraiswordfish.

I think the Kanye comparison is a strong one. And there’s a connection you haven’t mentioned: untreated mental illness.
“Was / is Dave Sim mentally ill, and if so how much, and in what way” is actually a fairly deep question. Sim had some sort of breakdown way back in 1979 — details unclear, but it sounds like a profound dissociative episode. Afterwards he was apparently diagnosed with schizophrenia at least one. But we have to pause and note that this was Sim’s own description long after the fact — and he can’t really be considered a reliable narrator.
/That/ said, a lot of Sim’s peculiarities maybe do make sense in the context of something schizoid or schizotypal going on. You don’t have to be mentally ill to believe you’ve found the secret key to everything and that God is talking to you directly, but it probably helps.

Doug M.

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Comment on Why, Claudius? – A Touch of Murder by Bec https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2024/03/why-claudius-a-touch-of-murder/comment-page-1#comment-2584607 Thu, 14 Mar 2024 10:16:13 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34916#comment-2584607 In reply to Neil.

To be fair, we are given a glimpse of her motives as the show progresses and that deathbed confession fills in some blanks. But it would be nice to, as you say, get a flavour for this a scooch earlier.

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Comment on Aard Labour 7: Flight by Samuraiswordfish https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-7-flight/comment-page-1#comment-2584604 Thu, 14 Mar 2024 02:08:40 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34935#comment-2584604 These posts have been so great and fascinating to read.
I’ve never read Cerebus and almost certainly never will. Hell, I’d never even *heard* of it before this (I’m a regular Popular reader who stumbled upon these columns while waiting for new articles on that side of the site). Part of the reasons for this are that I’m not a comics guy, I personally struggle with the format in a way that I don’t with written prose, or television/film, and I’m far too young to have been a target audience for it when it was still publishing (the dreaded tract in Reads was published when I was less than a year old). I most likely never will despite my intense fascination with it largely because of everything I know about Dave Sim, I don’t want to get emotionally invested in a story told from his perspective knowing what I know about where he and it ends up, I know full well that I won’t find the payoff satisfying because I already have an idea of where it ends up. I also don’t want to give a vile misogynist money.
But as a piece of cultural history and a way of consuming the story as a broader, more holistic whole, these columns have been awesome to read, not least because it’s a way of reading about the story from the period someone who is conflicted about the work, and rightly views the creator as a complete and total nut job who tanked his own magnum opus by forcing his own trauma and ridiculous ideas/insanely unhealthy ways of coping with it onto the page. And in such a bizarre and baffling way! I read these posts more as the story of Dave Sim through his work, and I find him so morbidly fascinating! It’s like reading a specific account of an authors descent into complete insanity through his own work, while that work continues to present itself as an overarching story within itself. Nothing like this exists! It’s like if Kanye’s musical output all contained an overarching narrative where you can pinpoint foreshadowing and his own shifts towards insanity and bigotry within that story. It’s the Star Wars prequels if Anakin was an actual real person.
In fact, Kanye sounds like a good comparison, as both were extremely innovative and influential in their mediums before jumping off the deep end, and it seems like it was a lot easier to ignore the obvious red flags when their work was at its peak because of the sheer impressiveness of it. Likewise, they are both examples where it’s kind of impossible to separate the art from the artist because the art is so obviously about the artist.
But consumed this way it’s a great way of both following the story both on page and behind the scenes without having to do the work of reading it and directly listening to Sim’s terrible thoughts. I eagerly await the next few posts!

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Comment on Aard Labour 6: Melmoth by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-6-melmoth/comment-page-1#comment-2584596 Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:37:15 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34930#comment-2584596 In reply to Andrew Hickey.

It’s *wild* isn’t it?

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Comment on Aard Labour 6: Melmoth by Andrew Hickey https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-6-melmoth/comment-page-1#comment-2584595 Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:18:12 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34930#comment-2584595 “This is very much a wider idea of Sim’s – people and events are unknowable, there can be no ‘definitive’ account of anyone or anything.”
And of course this is one of the real problems with Sim later on. He goes from this radical agnosticism/postmodernism to a certainty that there *is* a single definitive version of reality and that he knows it.

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Comment on Why, Claudius? – A Touch of Murder by Neil https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2024/03/why-claudius-a-touch-of-murder/comment-page-1#comment-2584591 Sun, 10 Mar 2024 22:30:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34916#comment-2584591 Super stuff.
For Livia and the “Why” of it all, I remember a scene much later on, I think during Caligula’s reign, where she discussed her motives with Claudius. But it’s hard to reconcile that with the scheming that happens in these earlier episodes to put Tiberius in position. And it’s a very long time since I’ve sat down and watched it, or read the books so my recollection will be wonky.
Like Tinker Tailor it’s something I’ll always just watch whenever I come across it. If only to stupidly shout “Biggins!” Or “Engage” in the later episodes.

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Comment on Aard Labour 5: Jaka’s Story by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-5-jakas-story/comment-page-1#comment-2584574 Thu, 07 Mar 2024 11:56:19 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34875#comment-2584574 In reply to Kyle.

I think there are several types of conservative who do make spectacularly bad art and that tends to be generalised by people like me. If you’re aesthetically and formally conservative the art you make has a high risk of being lifeless (Sim is a bit aesthetically conservative but not at all formally conservative). There are a lot of very angry conservatives, and I’d say in most cases anger in political art requires at least some alignment with the politics to appreciate. And there are economic conservatives who simply don’t see art as productive or valuable within a capitalist framework – a lot of those around at the moment: obviously the art they make or sponsor is likely to be pretty limited.
But beyond all that I also like a lot of writers who I think you could fairly label conservative in major ways – Wolfe, Anthony Powell, CS Lewis… there are moments where I read it and think “oh come ON” (the bit in Book Of The Long Sun where Silk invents the Second Amendent) I think the thing I find valuable about them is often the way they are writing from a place of unfamiliarity to me – their assumptions about human nature and behaviour are different in ways that are interesting artistically even when they’re toxic in a policy sense. Pessimism about human behaviour is more interesting on the page than when it’s being used as a justification for not feeding or clothing people.

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Comment on Aard Labour 5: Jaka’s Story by Kyle https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-5-jakas-story/comment-page-1#comment-2584573 Thu, 07 Mar 2024 04:47:21 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34875#comment-2584573 My first time reading Jaka’s Story was for a comics club I was in about 10-11 years ago. While I think it does stand-alone well, the eventual context I got from reading the preceding phonebooks turned it around from a “good if sluggish book” to a “knockout”. But yeah, Sim is not a strong prose stylist.
Very interesting point about the misconception that conservatives make bad art. I leaned towards that line of thinking for a very long time, especially based on what would surface into the mainstream. But writers like Wolfe, Vance, Lafferty and yeah, Sim, challenged that notion significantly. I mean, there’s no question that Tolkien was a religious conservative himself as another example.

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Comment on Aard Labour 5: Jaka’s Story by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-5-jakas-story/comment-page-1#comment-2584567 Wed, 06 Mar 2024 17:08:50 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34875#comment-2584567 In reply to Curt Holman.

Yeah, this is a good point – for me there are two big visible shifts in Sim’s viewpoints. The anti-feminist one was there to an extent all along, but it goes hand in hand with his conviction that artists must operate in conditions of complete freedom and refuse to compromise, and Jaka is always presented as an artist (hence Oscar, who considers himself one, is so staggered when he actually sees her dance). His portrayal of Jaka isn’t totally incompatible with his ideas in Reads, as obnoxious as they are: she could be someone like poor Colleen Doran, who gets named as a rare “female Light”.
The big break comes with the religious conversion, after which Sim’s views on women harden even more and he also acquires hardline views on ‘fornication’ which, I assume, rule out the possibility of dancing being an art. This has big implications for how Jaka is shown in Going Home/Form & Void, where IIRC her dancing is barely even mentioned and her artistic inclinations have been sublimated into a vague role as a possible patroness.

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Comment on Aard Labour 5: Jaka’s Story by Curt Holman https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-5-jakas-story/comment-page-1#comment-2584566 Wed, 06 Mar 2024 16:13:36 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34875#comment-2584566 These have been really, really good at capturing the strengths and weaknesses of Cerebus and conveying the experience of reading it when it was coming out vs. our contemporary knowledge of Sim’s evolving ideas.
When Jaka’s Story came out, Sim seemed to be presenting Jaka somewhat sympathetically as an artist, just as Sim himself is an artist. And the reader could look to the regard Sim had for Jaka (or seemed to have) as a counterbalance to the more caricatured and extreme views of women that emerged in the book over the next few years: “But at least he likes Jaka!” But once he became explicit about his views on women in ‘Reads’, the reader could no longer make that excuse.
At least, that’s how it seemed to me at the time.

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Comment on Aard Labour 3: Church And State I by Muir Douglas https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-3-church-and-state-i/comment-page-1#comment-2584543 Sun, 03 Mar 2024 06:18:59 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34864#comment-2584543 In reply to Doug.

Nah. A hard core stayed to the end, and 20 years later there are still at least a couple of forums.

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Comment on Aard Labour 3: Church And State I by Doug https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-3-church-and-state-i/comment-page-1#comment-2584540 Sat, 02 Mar 2024 23:37:55 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34864#comment-2584540 “Still, from now on every volume will find new ways to drive some away.”
Leaving Cerebus at the end alone, unmourned, and unloved.

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Comment on Aard Labour 4: Church And State II by Muir Douglas https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-4-church-and-state-ii/comment-page-1#comment-2584539 Sat, 02 Mar 2024 23:04:36 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34868#comment-2584539 1) I like the Wolfe comparison. I’ve referred to Sim’s magpie raiding of pop culture as “lowbrow Gene Wolfe”, and that’s not an insult. It’s not too different from what Tarantino or Genndy Tartovsky would be doing a bit later.
2) The rape scene… here’s the thing: whatever else you can say, it felt plausible and true to both of those characters. It’s an unpleasant scene, but it didn’t feel like plot parsley.
Whereas the baby-throwing scene… that fucking bugged me, back when, and it was an inflection point towards noping out of the whole enterprise.
There were a dozen different ways Sim could have played that scene for laughs without having Cerebus, you know, straight up murder a baby because the mother kept interrupting him. “The failure mode of funny is asshole”, type of thing.
And it doesn’t seem particularly Cerebus-like, either. It was established literally on page one that Cerebus could be murderously violent if provoked — but once that baseline is set, the comic literally has more episodes of Cerebus restraining himself or finding non-violent (or at least less-violent) solutions than it does of him flat-up killing people. In fact, the tension between “Cerebus wants to hurt or kill someone, but doesn’t, because reasons” has been a fertile source of comedy.
3) The sudden moments you mention — “Boom” “Go to hell”, and so forth — yeah, those are strong. It’s been 30 years since I read them and I still know exactly what you’re talking about.
Which makes it all so much more frustrating.
4) You know The Countess was based on a woman Sim was sleeping with for a while, yes? IMS she was something like the company’s bookkeeper. Which, whatever, but also probably explains why in her final appearances she’s suddenly diminished and uninteresting.
5) Women: you forgot Red Sophia. And in retrospect Sim’s handling of her is just crackling with Divorced Guy Energy.
6) Gerhard: background artists were so rare in American comics back then that for years I didn’t really comprehend just what Gerhard actually did.
Finally, I love the Oda comparison. I’d throw in another: long-running webcomics. _Digger_, which ran for a decade or so (more or less through the Obama administration IMS), was kind of the anti-Cerebus: cartoonish small grey furry mammal wanders into a more standard fantasy world where gods and religion are a mysterious but important presence, and where she is a unique outsider — but instead of being greedy and violent, she’s practical and sensible. _Digger_ was and is well worth reading (and author Ursula Vernon has gone on to win various awards), but set along _Cerebus) it’s IMO even more interesting.
For another webcomic, _Girl Genius_ is now comparable to _Cerebus_ in terms of duration (24 years) and page count (~4000 and counting). As something that’s recognizably spun off from the mainstream American comics industry, I think _Girl Genius_ works even better than _One Piece_ as an example of “what Cerebus might have been if it had both stayed funny and carried on with some sort of long-term plot”. On one hand, _Girl Genius_ is also kind of slight and frothy; on the other, it has stayed pretty consistently fun and readable.
Doug M.

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Comment on What Album Covers Are Really Trying To Tell Us: 4: Arcade Fire – Neon Bible by Tony G https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/07/what-album-covers-are-really-trying-to-tell-us-4-arcade-fire-neon-bible/comment-page-1#comment-2584536 Sat, 02 Mar 2024 12:42:28 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/07/what-album-covers-are-really-trying-to-tell-us-4-arcade-fire-neon-bible/#comment-2584536 In reply to oms.

Look at this simp defending a literal rapist’s tired band.

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Comment on Aard Labour 3: Church And State I by cms https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-3-church-and-state-i/comment-page-1#comment-2584531 Sat, 02 Mar 2024 08:51:36 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34864#comment-2584531 In reply to Tom.

There is no mention of that being the case in either Dave or Ger’s notes on these covers in the IDW cerebus covers book, and it’s not in the credits.
Dave: “…I was really enamoured — overly enamoured — of Bill Sienkiewicz’s spontaneous inking style. I just didn’t draw well enough to pull it off…”
Gerhard mentions another interesting point in his note though, which Dave admits he had forgotten, but acknowledges- the three colors are supposedly following the coloured stripes on the Police “Synchronicity” LP cover. So there’s an obscure pun on Sienkiewicz/Synchronicity happening.

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Comment on Aard Labour 3: Church And State I by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-3-church-and-state-i/comment-page-1#comment-2584498 Tue, 27 Feb 2024 12:41:43 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34864#comment-2584498 In reply to Ron Hogan.

Oh, that’s interesting – I assumed the (cute) “DS” imitation of Sienkiewicz’ signature on the covers was a tribute not an indication of a collab – but actually it makes more sense, they look far more like Sim, and he’s clearly not trying to “do” a version of what Sienkiewicz was drawing in 1985!

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Comment on Aard Labour 2: High Society by Kian Ross https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society/comment-page-1#comment-2584492 Mon, 26 Feb 2024 23:52:47 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34857#comment-2584492 Thanks for writing this series. I read all of Cerebus in College via a very generous school library. I always used to say that it was simultaneously the best and worst comic I’ve ever read.
Have you read The Strange Death of Alex Raymond? I read it when it was serialized in Glamourpuss but haven’t read this new edition yet.

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Comment on Aard Labour 3: Church And State I by Ron Hogan https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-3-church-and-state-i/comment-page-1#comment-2584491 Mon, 26 Feb 2024 22:22:39 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34864#comment-2584491 I seem to recall the Sienkiewicz covers being actual collaborations—his inks over Sim’s pencils? They were, as I recall, the first issues I ever bought.

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Comment on The Grave Maurice by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/pumpkin/2003/08/the-grave-maurice/comment-page-1#comment-2584487 Mon, 26 Feb 2024 10:24:24 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/pumpkin/2003/08/the-grave-maurice/#comment-2584487 In reply to Sabrina Sardo.

I don’t think there’s any way of contacting someone who left a comment 17 years ago – really sorry.

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Comment on The Grave Maurice by Sabrina Sardo https://freakytrigger.co.uk/pumpkin/2003/08/the-grave-maurice/comment-page-1#comment-2584479 Sun, 25 Feb 2024 21:21:25 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/pumpkin/2003/08/the-grave-maurice/#comment-2584479 In reply to Sabrina Sardo.

My email is:
sabrinasardo@outlook.com

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Comment on The Grave Maurice by Sabrina Sardo https://freakytrigger.co.uk/pumpkin/2003/08/the-grave-maurice/comment-page-1#comment-2584478 Sun, 25 Feb 2024 21:20:22 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/pumpkin/2003/08/the-grave-maurice/#comment-2584478 In reply to terry turner.

Hello! I would be interested in purchasing this sign. Please would you contact me on my email. Thanks, Sabrina

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Comment on Aard Labour 2: High Society by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society/comment-page-1#comment-2584477 Sun, 25 Feb 2024 01:42:18 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34857#comment-2584477 In reply to Andrew F.

My introduction to Feiffer – and to be honest the only substantial collection of his I’ve seen – is The Explainers, a collection of his 50s and 60s Village Voice strips. Sim’s line and page design owes more to Eisner, but his sense of movement on a page, dialogue and to some extent lettering is quite Feifferish.
For the purposes of this re-read (and first read from the latter parts of Women onwards) I used the Comixology Vol 1 and High Society, then files from an old bittorrent which compiles the whole run in 60 or so issue chunks. I used to own the phonebooks of High Society and Church & State (and still do own HS and C&S II) and then individual issues of Vol 1 as Cerebus Bi-Weekly and everything from Jaka’s Story to the start of Women. What happened to those I have no idea – Al may have them but otherwise they just got binned somewhere.

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Comment on Aard Labour 2: High Society by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society/comment-page-1#comment-2584476 Sun, 25 Feb 2024 01:34:08 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34857#comment-2584476 In reply to Andrew F.

I fear you’re replying to a bot here, paraphrasing the comment above!
I think the few not-there-at-the-time younger readers of Cerebus are more likely to be entirely dismissive, partly because the whole tradition of more representative cartooning (what Sim called the Eisner school vs the Kurtsman school) just feels in abeyance. Does anybody under 30 care much about Neil Adams? This is stuff I want to touch on in later posts for sure.

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Comment on Boards of Canada were right! by TheUnseen https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2004/03/boards-of-canada-were-right/comment-page-1#comment-2584472 Sat, 24 Feb 2024 09:54:58 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/old-ft/nylpm/2004/03/boards-of-canada-were-right/#comment-2584472 They WERE right!
.pu ekaw. .live si tenretni eht.

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Comment on Aard Labour 2: High Society by Alexx Kay https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society/comment-page-1#comment-2584456 Wed, 21 Feb 2024 04:33:08 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34857#comment-2584456 In reply to Andrew F.

I’m not sure those exist. Perhaps a better way to phrase it would be “Happy to see Cerebus discussed again, after what appeared to be a decade-long erasure of it from critical discussion.”

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Comment on Aard Labour 2: High Society by Andrew F https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society/comment-page-1#comment-2584452 Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:10:03 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34857#comment-2584452 In reply to tunnel rush.

At the risk of being rude, can you find me one ‘temper’-ful article that doesn’t acknowledge* Sim’s talents and the merits of early Cerebus? Everything I remember seeing underlined that the highs made the lows that much worse.

*or be in reaction to one that does – I’m not suggesting everything on the subject needs to start with the recitation of praises.

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Comment on Aard Labour 2: High Society by tunnel rush https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society/comment-page-1#comment-2584450 Tue, 20 Feb 2024 14:30:58 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34857#comment-2584450 It’s refreshing to see some serious re-examination of Cerebus’ important merits now that Sim has mostly sunk into oblivion and tempers have calmed.

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Comment on Aard Labour 2: High Society by Andrew F https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society/comment-page-1#comment-2584449 Tue, 20 Feb 2024 13:46:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34857#comment-2584449 This is great and leaves me in a pickle – I want to read these again, I don’t have my copies of the early stuff, and I don’t _really_ want to buy new ones (I could buy them and donate a similar amount to charity, I suppose) – and I want the physical copies, not digital scans (I’m curious which ones you used).
One thing that I realise that while I’ve got and read a lot of Eisner, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any Jules Feiffer – what’s good?

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Comment on Aard Labour 2: High Society by John Fiala https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society/comment-page-1#comment-2584447 Tue, 20 Feb 2024 03:07:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34857#comment-2584447 I’m happily reading through these and enjoying listening to you talk about Cerebus. I used to be really into it back… ooh, around Melmoth, when I stopped picking up the collections, I think? I’m not even really sure how I would pick them up these days.

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Comment on Aard Labour 2: High Society by Alexx Kay https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society/comment-page-1#comment-2584437 Sat, 17 Feb 2024 00:51:49 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34857#comment-2584437 Thanks for writing these. It’s nice to see some critical re-examination of the significant virtues of Cerebus, now that Sim himself has largely faded into obscurity, and tempers have cooled.

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Comment on Aard Labour 1: Cerebus by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-1-cerebus/comment-page-1#comment-2584334 Mon, 05 Feb 2024 14:48:56 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34834#comment-2584334 In reply to MattM.

That’s interesting too – slight embarassment to admit I’ve never read Berserk, I guess because when I was initially getting into manga seriously a decade ago I was a bit snobbish about it as the one (Western) comics nerds loved above all others: I wondered if it would feel too much like reading an Image or Vertigo book. I should tackle it though!

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Comment on Aard Labour 1: Cerebus by MattM https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-1-cerebus/comment-page-1#comment-2584331 Sun, 04 Feb 2024 22:58:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34834#comment-2584331 I might add Kintaro Miura to the list of comparisons, Berserk’s unfinished nature aside. There’s a similar “watch him learn on the page” element to the craft. And while it’s not as pronounced (thank god), there are also some parallels in the ways Miura reshapes the narrative as his interests and priorities change over the years.

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Comment on Aard Labour 0: There Are Three Aardvarks by James Moar https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/there-are-three-aardvarks/comment-page-1#comment-2584330 Sun, 04 Feb 2024 20:25:18 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34829#comment-2584330 I suspect the ‘first Cerebus’ is something like what Sim had as his vision when deciding to do a 300-issue story, with the others growing out of it (and a retroactive belief on Sim’s part that they were part of the plan all along.)

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Comment on Aard Labour 1: Cerebus by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-1-cerebus/comment-page-1#comment-2584328 Sun, 04 Feb 2024 19:45:22 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34834#comment-2584328 In reply to Gabe Roth.

That’s really interesting – and I might update the post to reflect that! I’ve obviously got some sympathy for Fiore’s wider point (and tend not to trust Sim’s post facto interviews) though I think Cerebus’ role in those books is pretty clear and actually they do end up the most ‘standalone’ in the series.

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Comment on Aard Labour 1: Cerebus by Gabe Roth https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-1-cerebus/comment-page-1#comment-2584327 Sun, 04 Feb 2024 19:03:13 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34834#comment-2584327 I loved reading this and I’m glad you’re doing it. The Jaime/Oda/Ditko analogies are brilliant. One quibble: It’s not the case that “nobody back then … said, wait, why is it all the same work?” The Comics Journal beat that drum quite assiduously during the Jaka’s Story/Melmoth era, when they wanted Sim to be doing standalone books that could be entered as evidence for the case that Comics Are a Medium Just Like Any Other rather than a hobby for obsessive genre fans. Look, here’s R. Fiore: “Jaka’s Story is another step forward in Sim’s artistic development, and yet, well, here we go again. To really understand what’s going on you have to have read the 113 issues that went before… Sim makes it necessary for a new reader to plow through his tyro work in order to comprehend his mature work. It makes his readership practically a closed system.” https://momentofcerebus.blogspot.com/2012/05/love-death.html

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Comment on Omargeddon #37: El Bien y Mal Nos Une by a small world cup https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/07/omargeddon-37-el-bien-y-mal-nos-une/comment-page-1#comment-2584200 Tue, 16 Jan 2024 03:41:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34436#comment-2584200 Grinning from ear to ear for the entire show? I hear you loud and clear, friend. The Volta has a way of pulling you into their sonic whirlwind and leaving you breathless with a smile plastered across your face. You mentioned “Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus” with that glorious extended middle section – I completely get that dream come true moment. It’s one of those songs that demands you surrender to its ever-shifting landscape, and hearing it live with that extra dose of musical taffy must have been mind-blowing.

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Comment on THE SQUARE TABLE 14 / Three Of A Kind – “Baby Cakes” by Henry Russell https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2004/09/the-square-table-14-three-of-a-kind-baby-cakes/comment-page-1#comment-2584132 Tue, 09 Jan 2024 23:26:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/old-ft/nylpm/2004/09/the-square-table-14-three-of-a-kind-baby-cakespop-factor-620-controversy-score-248/#comment-2584132 the rapping is kind of annoying but it just is a very fun song. The backstory is also very weird from the fact that the band met the day of the recording and haven’t recorded anything since. The song isn’t great, but I still like it for some reason. the chorus is very addicting and the production gives it a nice twinkly feel. 6/10 for me

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Comment on British Image No.1 by Fireboy and Watergirl https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2003/02/live4ev/comment-page-1#comment-2584127 Tue, 09 Jan 2024 16:07:44 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/old-ft/essays/2003/02/live4ev/#comment-2584127 Live Forever’s last third follows the breakdown of Britpop into complaining, disillusionment, and creative bloat. Even if the majority of the stars save their finest stories for this final lap, this makes for a dismal finale.

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Comment on Four Candles by Hex D. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/12/four-candles/comment-page-1#comment-2583917 Fri, 29 Dec 2023 05:25:44 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34592#comment-2583917 As an American who tries to keep an eye on things happening both sides of the Atlantic, there’s one point I want to raise in how this happens (albeit to a lesser extent) in reverse as well.
Obviously Wham were huge in the US and UK, but Last Christmas itself was absolutely not a major hit in the US until the streaming era. It wasn’t even released as a single here in the 80s. I’ve heard people around me in the last few years start going “Augh, I’ve lost the Wham game” in the weeks running up to Christmas as if that was ever something that needed to be dodged over here. If anything, through the 90s, the “oh no it’s crimmis” song in the states was probably neither Mariah nor Wham, but “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses.
Per the Billboard charts, Last Christmas didn’t appear in the Hot 100 until 2017 (https://www.billboard.com/artist/wham/) and there’s a similar sort of mental rewiring going on with American listeners, the idea that because GM & AR put the song out in the 80s, we’ve been hearing it since the 80s.

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