Comments for FreakyTrigger https://freakytrigger.co.uk Lollards in the high church of low culture Fri, 29 Mar 2024 03:30:49 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Prince Mick https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584741 Fri, 29 Mar 2024 03:30:49 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584741 In reply to Prince Mick.

Also, was just looking at some individual issues and noticed Dave referring to a girlfriend as a “Residents/Cure fan” … perhaps showing him to be at least aware of music beyond the usual 70s rock.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Prince Mick https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584733 Wed, 27 Mar 2024 23:40:51 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584733 In reply to Tom.

Yeah, maybe Sim wasn’t *deep* into music but I remember him describe going to a Clapton show and being blown away when a guest was brought out to play and it was Keith Richards.

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Comment on Aard Labour 6: Melmoth by Prince Mick https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-6-melmoth/comment-page-1#comment-2584732 Wed, 27 Mar 2024 21:12:05 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34930#comment-2584732 All I remember about this book was Sim, somewhere in his letters page commentary, saying that when he went to buy a nice hardcover Wilde biography he was concerned about looking gay.

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Comment on Aard Labour 11: Guys by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-11-guys/comment-page-1#comment-2584712 Mon, 25 Mar 2024 23:12:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=35017#comment-2584712 In reply to Curt Holman.

The chronology is pretty weird on it – the interview Sim took offense with predates the Hemingway stuff, but the “challenge” is 3 years later, after he’d finished the Hemingway book. Sim was very disappointed by Hemingway, who he’d never actually read anything by, precisely because the man did not match the mythos, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was some of that frustrated energy looking for an outlet. AFAIK Sim was still moaning about the non-fight after Cerebus ended so I expect this chance for self-reflection was (gasp) not taken.

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Comment on Aard Labour 11: Guys by Curt Holman https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-11-guys/comment-page-1#comment-2584711 Mon, 25 Mar 2024 16:34:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=35017#comment-2584711 Regarding the Sim vs Smith boxing challenge, I wonder if he’d started researching the life of Ernest Hemingway by then. One can imagine Sim seeing the boxing challenge as a way of emulating the masculinity of the Hemingway mythos.
To me, the boxing challenge has a postscript: coincidentally, Cerebus and Bone ended their runs a few months from each other. Cerebus ended first and at the end of one of Bone’s last letters pages, Smith ran a short message of congratulations on getting to #300 and told his readers, “My differences with Dave are personal, not professional.” I don’t know if Sim ever reciprocated or otherwise commented. I wonder if it ever occurred to Sim that, by rejecting his challenge to a dumb fight yet offering a congratulations on his work, Smith may have been the bigger man. (Probably not.)

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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-2584699 Sat, 23 Mar 2024 21:37:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584699 In reply to Peter.

This reminds me that Sim does a bit of work in Flight to establish a subplot about dissent in the Cirinist ranks and rivalry among Cirin’s underlings – Normina Swartskopf (god Sim’s parody names are rubbish sometimes) outright disobeying an order; tension between Thatcher and another character over the sphere; Cirin purging one of her generals in Women. IIRC it doesn’t really go anywhere, though it’s interesting that we never actually see Cirin or get direct evidence for her doing anything after Minds until her fate is mentioned right at the end of the series. I wonder if her reappearance after her journey to Saturn was not exactly warm – the Cirinists in Guys and Going Home seem less militarised, and there have been policy changes. I have no idea how much you’re meant to read into this, especially as the Cirinist strand of the plot ends so ludicrously in Latter Days, but these hints are often more interesting to me at least than the ‘proper’ on-page action.

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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-2584696 Sat, 23 Mar 2024 09:30:26 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584696 In reply to Muir Douglas.

I would say that, reading Mothers & Daughters before Sim’s personal revelations, Cirin is interesting because she is such a subversion, both of the expectations of a villain, in that she’s maternal, matriarchal, yet entirely dictatorial, and also of what we expect of Aardvarks, Cerebus small, headstrong, self interested, Cirin huge, reserved, and genuinely interested in the people she has control over (even if her opinions on those people are malicious in many ways). Once Dave reveals himself and we see how little he thinks of her, it’s certainly a blow to the character, but there is still something genuinely fascinating in her construction. In my opinion at least. I would still stump for Astoria and Jaka first, of course.

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Comment on Aard Labour 10: Minds by Stu West https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-10-minds/comment-page-1#comment-2584688 Thu, 21 Mar 2024 17:29:56 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34986#comment-2584688 In reply to Tom.

“Why do you have to be such an arsehole to Joanne” was the point during my reread where I gave up and donated the rest of the series to Oxfam.

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Comment on Aard Labour 10: Minds by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-10-minds/comment-page-1#comment-2584687 Thu, 21 Mar 2024 17:23:58 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34986#comment-2584687 In reply to Stu West.

One of the most noticeable things about Guys (and initially very weird, tho it’s explicable) is that Cerebus is shown as such a loser for most of it

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Comment on Aard Labour 10: Minds by JJN https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-10-minds/comment-page-1#comment-2584686 Thu, 21 Mar 2024 17:12:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34986#comment-2584686 It’s interesting that Sim could have partially walked back his diatribe in #186 here. It would have been very easy to argue here that “Dave Sim” was more in line with his true persona and “Viktor Davis” was an exaggerated distortion … essentially Dave Sim from the perspective of his liberal antagonists. When he passed up this opportunity, it was more obvious that there would be no walk-back and that Reads was an accurate representation of his own views.
The period between “Reads” and his religious conversion is a perplexing one. The series still has some good moments and strong entertainment value, but you’re quite right that the vibe is off. I consider #1 to #200 the best representation of the “Real” Cerebus story, (with “Guys” potentially drafted in as a coda), although I have to admit I slowly lost interest around this time and stopped reading.

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Comment on Aard Labour 10: Minds by Stu West https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-10-minds/comment-page-1#comment-2584685 Thu, 21 Mar 2024 17:08:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34986#comment-2584685 I kept reading for years after the end of Minds but at some point I got rid of my copies of the issues and phonebooks beyond that point. It wasn’t directly because of Dave Sim’s heel turn but because at a certain point I just didn’t want to spend any more time with the shallow grey prick on the page. Before issue 200 Cerebus had frequently been reprehensible, but at least he was interesting. After 200 I found that he wasn’t worth reading about.
I think it’s true that the Cerebus-Jaka sections of Minds put a surprising and satisfying amount of the blame on Cerebus. It took a while for the Dave Sim of the text pieces to fully infect the comics narrative, but once he did, game over.

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Comment on Aard Labour 10: Minds by Curt Holman https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-10-minds/comment-page-1#comment-2584684 Thu, 21 Mar 2024 16:32:39 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34986#comment-2584684 Since you put this in context of other “author meets character” metafictional sequences, I have to say that I find “Minds” more compelling than many of them (even in books I really like, including Amis’ ‘Money’ and Auster’s ‘City of Glass’ — which has a great graphic novel adaptation). At some point in one of ‘Minds” annotations or editor’s notes, I remember Sim saying that when he got to the point when “Dave” says to Cerebus, “Your turn” (meaning, Cerebus’s turns to ask Dave questions), he had no idea what Cerebus was going to say or do.
Where many author intrusions can feel like metafictional gimmicks or existential predicaments, I get the sense that Sim is really wrestling with stuff and, in effect, arguing with his own creation for being a brutal, selfish misanthrope, even though Sim wrote him that way. It’s almost like Sim is taking out his frustations on Cerebus for his commitment to devoting decades of his life as an artist to him. It’s very strange, but interesting.

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Comment on Aard Labour 10: Minds by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-10-minds/comment-page-1#comment-2584682 Thu, 21 Mar 2024 14:19:56 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34986#comment-2584682 In reply to James Moar.

Yeah my guess would be he never actually read Animal Man 26, or at the very least had it confused with The Coyote Gospel

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Comment on Aard Labour 10: Minds by James Moar https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-10-minds/comment-page-1#comment-2584681 Thu, 21 Mar 2024 14:04:32 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34986#comment-2584681

Sim apparently laughed it off and pointed out that Morrison had got it all from Chuck Jones anyway.

Wonder whether this was just referring to Duck Amuck again, or Morrison’s much more direct invocation of Wile E. Coyote?

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Muir Douglas https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584678 Wed, 20 Mar 2024 21:45:45 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584678 In reply to Stephen Geigen-Miller.

Ironically, he gave up his art in 2015 when his right hand stopped working. From what little I know, it looks like the sort of injury that is extremely common among long-term artists of a certain age — the human hand isn’t designed to spend tens of thousands of hours over decades doing very precise drawing.
But — those sorts of injuries are very often curable, or at least treatable! Lots of artists have to stop drawing for a few weeks or months, but then come back strong, good as ever. But apparently Sim decided that this was A Message From God, and so never even got it looked at, never mind treated. So his career as an artist just ended right there.
Doug M.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Muir Douglas https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584677 Wed, 20 Mar 2024 21:37:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584677 In reply to Tom.

I knew nothing of them falling out — although I’m deeply not surprised. I didn’t know WML was a socialist, but his work was generally humane, thoughtful, and (by the standards of then and there) progressive.
(And funny! A bunch of lines from _Journey_ — “Rabbits is /wrong/ a considerable portion of the time” “He wondered if that shewed a character defect” — have stayed with me for decades. Journey #1 is really a masterclass in layout and story-telling.)
I don’t know what went wrong with WML’s career, but I always assumed that (1) a one-armed guy couldn’t draw fast enough to make it as an independent (plus, tbf, his unique style wasn’t for everyone — though I liked it), and (2) he was a good writer but never quite good enough to be irreplaceable. Throw in a little prickliness or some slightly unusual politics, and he could easily get labeled “difficult” and kicked to the gutter.
But those are assumptions — I don’t actually know.
Doug M.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Corey Klemow https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584676 Wed, 20 Mar 2024 17:57:48 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584676 In reply to Tom.

Ah, interesting. I ran into a 2016 Comics Alliance article the other day (link below, not that the article is terribly interesting; it’s more of a précis of Cerebus and Dave Sim than any sort of analysis) that straight-up said “Tangent” was in #186, but they must have been conflating the Viktor Davis screed with “Tangent.” I must have just heard about it online, ’cause I sure wasn’t reading the book anymore by “Going Home.” I do recall seeing his “axis” rants in the book at some point much earlier than that, and could have sworn it started during “Reads,” but… memory.
https://comicsalliance.com/tribute-dave-sim/
And I sure don’t blame you for not including the backmatter! As much as Cerebus was part and parcel of a formative time in my life, re-engaging seems to mostly be showing me that there’s even less to re-engage with than I imagined. I just read his note in #147 in response to Michael Moorcock (or, as it later turned out, a reader impersonating Moorcock) cancelling his free lifetime Cerebus subscription and taking Dave to task for his “I Am Not a Feminist” essay; Sim basically argues that everybody in the world is a bigot against some group (though he never uses that word) and where would we be if we all decided not to engage with people we disagreed with. He directly compares boycotting an artistic work you disagree with to the blacklists of the 1950s, and then goes on to directly compare bigotry against a group with the lack of respect prose authors and publishers give him as a comic book author and publisher. As you observed about his misogyny, it’s all so boringly, exhaustingly predictable standard right-wing reactionary stuff.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Curt Holman https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584675 Wed, 20 Mar 2024 16:56:25 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584675 In reply to Tom.

If I remember correctly, Sim began the annotations in imitation of Alan Moore extensive historical annotations in ‘From Hell.’ I read them at the time and recall them as having some interesting details about creative choices, like the comedic body language of the Three Stooges.
There’s a fascinating bit in the annotations of ‘Form & Void’ when he explains that his plan was to have his F. Scott Fitzgerald homage in the first half of ‘Going Home,’ and his Ernest Hemingway homage in the second half. So he read all of Fitzgerald’s work and embarked on “F-Stop Kennedy” section. And then he read all of Hemingway’s work and… HATED IT, comparing the writing style to primers of the “See Dick run” variety. I haven’t read this in 20 years but remember that quite vividly.
I would say that the annotations are OK to skip, but are more readable than his literary style pastiches and Cerebus reading the Torah.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Stephen Geigen-Miller https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584674 Wed, 20 Mar 2024 16:36:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584674 I’ve been thinking about Dave Sim and this part of Cerebus since first reading this post, and one thing really strikes me that didn’t occur to me at the time, when I read #186 when it was new. Sim so clearly relationships, and the simple everyday compromises that make them work – romantic relationships with women here, but as Cerebus evolves it sounds like he comes to think it’s true of all human relationships – as something that people are doing to him, on purpose, to… trick him into abandoning his principles and his art, or something?
I don’t know if this was a cause or a symptom of his views and the increasing self-isolation it led to, especially given his tendency to come up with edifices of rationalization for his choices, but it’s remarkably obvious in hindsight.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Eddy Webb https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584673 Wed, 20 Mar 2024 15:56:09 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584673 In reply to Prankster36.

Honestly, given how he’s revised his own work with later work over and over, I’m not even sure he pleased himself.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584671 Wed, 20 Mar 2024 12:28:48 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584671 In reply to Corey Klemow.

Tangent is later – not sure exactly when, towards the end of Going Home I think. By that point he’s stopped directly including this stuff in the comic but started bulking out each issue with extensive annotations. I haven’t read any of the annotations, and refuse to consider them (or “Tangent”) in these essays – if it’s not part of the actual work, I’m not bothering with it :)

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by William Crump https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584668 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 23:59:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584668 In my rich fantasy life, these Cerebus posts will be collected under one cover and copiously illustrated by Gerhard.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Corey Klemow https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584667 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 22:45:11 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584667 In reply to Corey Klemow.

Never mind; I had managed to obliterate the existence of the “Tangent” essay in #186 from my memory.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Corey Klemow https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584666 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 22:07:57 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584666 When exactly did Sim start ranting about the “marxist-feminist-homosexualist axis” and start referring to himself as a “masculinist”? My memory is fogged by the fact that even after I dropped the comic (sometime during “Reads” and very possibly right at #186, like so many others), I kept occasionally glancing at it in the comic shop out of morbid curiosity.
Some research over the last day or so has shown me that my brain has telescoped stuff that happened earlier (the “I Am Not a Feminist” essay from #140 and the printing of a particularly vile letter from a reader talking about his desire to rape a fellow counselor at summer camp in #147) and later (his essays about his religious conversion) into the run of “Mothers & Daughters” in general and “Reads” in particular. I was so certain that that letter was when I had noped out, and that it had come during “Reads,” that I even mentioned it a couple of weeks ago on Bluesky. “Reads,” all Sim’s sins be upon ye! (In my muddled memory, anyway.)

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Peter https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584665 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 21:55:45 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584665 Something else I recall. Sim and a number of his most ardent fans have a bad habit of claiming that people haven’t actually read #186 and are thus making Sim a pariah based on something they haven’t actually experienced themselves. In the excellent Cerebus: Cover Art Treasury, where Sim and Gerhard explain techniques and inspirations on every cover from 1 to 100, Sim uses his moment of #186 to again accuse people of not reading his work and still getting angry at him over content they haven’t directly appreciated. I remember watching someone reviewing every issue individually on YouTube do basically the same thing, saying that people don’t understand Dave’s message without having actually read it, though then not elaborating on what Sim’s message is. From Sim, it’s pure victim complex, from his closest fans, it’s pretty poor media literacy and criticism. Yes, boiling down Sim’s message to ‘Dave Sim hates women’ is pretty reductive after all the work he put into his book and his ideas and into the Reads and so on, but it boils down to that because that’s the message he keeps putting across.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584664 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 18:23:22 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584664 In reply to Muir Douglas.

Yup – WML’s association with (and falling out with) Sim was one reason I wondered if he might be a model for Reid, who starts as a talented independent and is then lured to the supposedly ‘mature’ but just as controlling Vertigo Horse – I can’t think of any of the actual Vertigo writers who have anything like a similar career arc.
I’d say Loebs’ superhero work was actually a highlight of that period at DC, though he never had much luck with artists. His worst extended run for them – Wonder Woman – is the only one that’s stayed in print, thanks to Mike Deodato showing up on art. I think there’s an omnibus of his Flash work coming out too – it still amuses me that they replaced the libertarian Mike Baron with the socialist Loebs (both runs were excellent). His best superhero stuff was his Doctor Fate run, though, a real inheritor of the street-level/social satire Gerber style and probably the first big two book to prominently feature a Donald Trump analogue as a villain.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Prankster36 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584663 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 18:16:36 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584663 I actually bought the Cerebus Guide to Making Comics back before I realized just how far off the rack Sim had drifted…I think I thought Reads was ironic, or something? Anyway it shows a guy who is having real difficulty maintaining focus, as all his wall-of-text comics prove. About one-third of it is genuinely useful comics advice, one-third is opinions on comics that may or may not be of use, and one-third is basically nonsensical tangets. At one point he rails against the internet as a medium for comics (specifically calling out Scott McCloud–who I think he still thought of as a friend at that point!) with no real substantial arguments other than “the internet is basically TV and people are like, addicted to SCREENS, man”
It really is a case of someone who, by doing something that’s theoretically admirable–pursuing artistic independence at all costs–ended up demonstrating the dangers, on both a personal and artistic level, of not having to be answerable to anyone, or even having to listen to anyone. The end result is solipsistic incoherence that probably pleased himself but no one else.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Muir Douglas https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584661 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 17:34:47 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584661 In reply to Tom.

Huh: It’s funny you should mention Messner-Loebs.
One thing that was very cool about early Cerebus was the backup strips. Most issues would have short (usually 3-4 pages) strips by other independent artists. This went on for some years… I’m going to say roughly Cerebus 20 through 60, something like that? Working completely from memory, so that could be way off.
Anyway! Those strips varied wildly in quality, as you’d expect, but they were something you couldn’t find anywhere else and some of them were really good. Messner-Loebs contributed a couple of neo-noir parody strips about “The Dead Detective”; these were well done and a lot of fun.
WML went on to do “Journey”, which was good to excellent, and IMS was Aardvark-Vanaheim at first but then went to Deni Loubert’s Renegade Press after the divorce, and eventually to Fantagraphics. WML couldn’t make a living as a freelancer, so he ended up working for DC, and he pretty clearly had a less great career than he might have. He and his wife have been struggling financially for many years; occasionally it bubbles up into the comics press.
But — WML has *one arm*, his left. (He lost his right hand and arm to childhood cancer.) He’s an interesting artist — Journey had a pretty unique expressionist style — but I’m guessing that it simply wasn’t possible for a one-armed artist to crank out enough pages to stay afloat as an independent comics artist. So he had to fall back on writing, where he was perfectly competent (his late 1980s run on The Flash is still well remembered) but by no means outstanding — and once you get below the top tier, comics writers are even more expendable and disposable than comics artists.
Doug M.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584660 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 17:29:03 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584660 In reply to Curt Holman.

Viktor Davis’ summary is *also* wrong, according to the gospel cosmology Sim puts together in #289/290, so even if Sim did believe Davis at the time, we know he changed his mind on that. Maybe he also changed his mind between the Judge and Davis, but I doubt it. I think the Judge was always intended as a convincing exaggeration of a position (nor is everything the Judge says a lie – Cerebus does die AU&U, and for all we know he’s right about civilisation’s death drive, which certainly seemed credible enough back in 1988).

I’m never sure what Sim planned when. From reading a lot of his comments in order to write this series, this is my best guess:

Sim decides in 1979 that Cerebus will run 300 issues. He knows the comic will be the story of a life, and has the basic shape of the first 200 issues in mind, including Cerebus’ two ascensions. The first will involve meeting a convincing godlike/omniscient Watcher-type figure; the second will involve meeting Dave Sim. The rest of the comic will cover the rest of Cerebus’ life and Sim will work out what he wants in it nearer the time.
Obviously with this structure in mind, the first ascension can’t reveal the whole truth – you have to have something for the second. Whether Sim planned the Judge to reveal a partial truth, or a convincing lie, or something people might believe (but Sim doesn’t), we just can’t ever know. But I think, if we believe in the double-ascension structure, we know there has to be something more than what The Judge is saying. But he has to *sound* convincing or the climax of C&S doesn’t work.
(The thing that’s hardest for me to figure out is when Sim decided on the first-Viktor-then-Dave structure, and why it’s *Viktor* who gets to explain cosmology to the reader (not to Cerebus!) when you’d think it would be Dave in the final book.)

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584659 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 17:09:13 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584659 In reply to Julian.

Ending at #200 or #265 is more sensible than going on to #300, but of course most people who got as far as that probably kept going.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Curt Holman https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584658 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 17:00:35 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584658 In reply to Julian.

Yes, in some ways Cerebus actually ends at #200 and the rest is a 100-issue epilogue.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Curt Holman https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584657 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 16:40:27 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584657 I started reading Cerebus on a monthly basis almost halfway through Church and State, and found the Judge/”Walking on the Moon” sequence to be mind-blowing and possibly my favorite part of the book.
At some point years later I switched to waiting for the trade collections and I seem to remember reading ‘Reads’ and ‘Minds’ back-to-back that way. And so I discovered that not only did Dave Sim apparently not appreciate “Walking on the Moon,” he actively reversed and repudiated it with a new “gendered Big Bang” narrative. And the idea that the Judge and Viktor Davis represent two extremes is severely undermined by the fact that “Davis” is definitely Sim and says what Sim genuinely believes.
And that alone puts the reader in a bizarre situation. If “Walking on the Moon” is ‘wrong,’ according to Sim, then why is it so good and the reversal so weak? Did Sim believe in the ‘Judge’ narrative when he wrote it, and then change his mind? It’s weird to admire and appreciate something knowing that its creator turned so completely against it.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Julian https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584656 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 14:51:28 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584656 I’m not sure he thought he was really lying about ending Cerberus at issue 200; the book everyone thought they were reading really seems to be over and done with by that point.

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Comment on EVERY WORD IS TRUE – “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” by Andrew F https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2002/10/argentina1/comment-page-1#comment-2584655 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 14:32:54 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/old-ft/essays/2002/10/argentina1/#comment-2584655 In reply to Shan.

They’re here, but it’s a good point that they’re not actually linked to from the first page any more:
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2002/10/argentina1/2

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Comment on EVERY WORD IS TRUE – “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” by Shan https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2002/10/argentina1/comment-page-1#comment-2584654 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 13:00:47 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/old-ft/essays/2002/10/argentina1/#comment-2584654 In reply to Mark Regan.

Where are the comments about Sinead’s version to be found? The only reference I find is in this comment.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584653 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 12:56:49 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584653 In reply to Muir Douglas.

My take on this is going to be in the Minds post but I think there are 2 reasons. 1) A good cop bad cop thing (Viktor Davis is the dark side of Dave Sim in the same way Rotsieve is the dark side of Victor Reid – they believe the same things but Viktor is more horrible about it). 2) Viktor Davis is the aspect of Dave Sim who’s inside the comic looking out and talking to the reader; Dave is outside the comic looking in and talking to the character. This one makes less sense as he shows up on the page in Rick’s Story, but then so does fucking Viktor Davis, so who knows really.

The naming of Victor Reid is weird – I guess it’s to indicate that this is a sort of parallel version of Sim, the one that might have existed if he’d settled down and had kids and accepted the offers from DC or Fantagraphics or whoever. But it may have been an actual creator he had in mind – maybe someone like Bill Loebs? I think I prefer the “parallel version” theory as it’s less cruel, but being cruel has never stopped Sim.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Muir Douglas https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584652 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 12:45:55 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584652 Did we ever get an explanation as to the clunkiness of the self-insert — Viktor Davis, Victor Reid, and then a bit later Dave himself showing up?
It just seems an unnecessarily baroque way to break the fourth wall.

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Comment on Aard Labour 8: Women by Andrew F https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women/comment-page-1#comment-2584651 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 12:07:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584651 In reply to Muir Douglas.

I regret to inform you that there’s a generation who do have a lot of feelings about the nuanced depth of Anakin Skywalker :)

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584650 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 11:18:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584650 In reply to Shaenon.

That’s really interesting! I certainly never got the feeling he was *deep* into music beyond being into rock on the same level as any adolescent who smoked a lot of pot in the mid 70s would be. There’s definitely no sign his tastes got out of the 70s, but that’s kind of true of him in general – not that many other people would be doing Three Stooges riffs in the late 90s.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584649 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 11:15:19 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584649 In reply to Peter.

Yes, you’ll find no argument here. Latter Days makes the text elements in Reads look like models of clarity and economy.

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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-2584648 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 11:13:45 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584648 In reply to Muir Douglas.

We get Cirin’s origins in Minds! She is Stalin to the original Cirin’s Lenin, basically. Her telepathic power is so huge that she’s essentially edited her own mind to fully believe her version of events (some irony here given Sim’s own propensity to retcon stuff). And yes, there is some suggestion that her core motivation is as overcompensation for being ugly, sigh.
I would agree she is not a particularly complex character – she’s a type. I actually don’t think Jaka is particularly nuanced in Jaka’s Story, either – to an extent she’s Dave Sim’s ideal of the artistic temperament, filtered through what he thinks women are like. One of the things I’m interested in looking at more closely in the later books is the change in her character – I know a lot of people loathe it, and there are bits that seem stupid, but she’s still often the most sympathetic and interesting person in the comic (OK, by Form & Void that isn’t saying much).
I think Joanne works as a character too, within the limitations that she feels like one specifically designed to ‘prove’ Sim’s ‘points’ about the dreadfulness of women.
I think I said in an earlier post that Sim as a writer of great women characters involves a lot of grading on a curve. Visible, prominent women cartoonists were a lot rarer, and it was so rare to find men who wanted to write women, let alone write them well, that the ones who did – Claremont, Sim, Los Bros Hernandez – got rave reviews for it and with hindsight some of the praise doesn’t stack up. (I think Los Bros did deserve it, though at the time Jaime especially got some grief for wish fulfilment because everyone except Izzy looks cute af. But I think they’re just much better character writers than Sim anyway – their men too. Ultimately I’m not sure Sim is really *trying* to write fully realised characters, though: he’s more of a satirist than a realist, if that distinction makes any sense)

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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-2584647 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 10:15:37 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940#comment-2584647 In reply to Peter.

I would disagree with this. I think he gets one-and-a-half interesting, complex, nuanced female characters: Astoria for sure, and Jaka if you only read Jaka’s Story. Before that, Jaka’s little more than a plot device; after that, she’s a different and much less interesting character.
Cirin isn’t complex or nuanced. She’d just a monster, full stop. She’s a great protagonist, but so is Darth Vader, and nobody’s talking about the nuanced depth of his character. In any given situation, Cirin does the most horrible thing. That’s interesting to watch, and it certainly drives the plot along, but it doesn’t make her a complex character.
Remind me — it’s been thirty! years! since I even glanced at these stories — did we ever get a /why/ for Cirin? Any backstory, or even motivation? How she came to her ideology, or why she’s so domineering, brutal, and hateful? Or was it just “women be like that”?
After that it drops off fast. Red Sophia? The Regency Elf? The Countess? All the other female characters are as one-note as he men.
Doug M.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Shaenon https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584645 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 08:08:56 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584645 Sim’s hatred of music is one of many areas where he seems to have retconned his own life, insisting that he always held an opinion or belief that he never previously expressed. It’s obvious in the early volumes of Cerebus that he listened to rock and was interested enough in bands like the Stones to draw them into the comic, but later he decided that music was feminine/emotional/void-y and therefore bad, so, the Rational Male Light logically deduces, he must never have liked it after all.
There’s an interview where Gerhard mentions that one of the downturns in his partnership with Sim, near the end, was Sim deciding that they couldn’t listen to the radio while they worked anymore and had to sit there in silence.

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Comment on Aard Labour 9: Reads by Peter https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/comment-page-1#comment-2584644 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 05:10:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976#comment-2584644 Without skipping ahead too much, I honestly find the text portions of Latter Days harder to read than in Reads. The Viktor Davis stuff is obviously repugnant and politically and morally unacceptable, but it has enough flair in the prose to keep you reading to see what horrible thing he will next. In Latter Days, it’s just walls of boring analysis for pages on end. It is effectively unreadable.

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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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