This is the 9th in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a controversial independent comic. This episode has the controversial bit! And also spoilers, as usual, for the actual story both in this book and as a whole.
Previously: Mothers & Daughters, the climax of the main Cerebus narrative, reached its halfway point as four of the most important characters met physically for the first time. The comic’s extensive text material, meanwhile, had turned its attention more and more to its characters’ ideas about gender…
“”Fuck off, Viktor”, thought the reader” – Viktor Davis in Reads
OH GOD IT’S THIS ONE
With Melmoth, Dave Sim asked the question “what can Cerebus encompass?” and the answer was “anything I like”. But that turns out not to be the whole truth. The monthly experience of reading Cerebus wasn’t just about the comic, it was about the backmatter: the huge, rambling “Aardvark Comment” letter column, the samples and exclusives of whatever comics or creators Sim was keen his readers knew about, and the essays and commentaries Sim offered.
With the boundary between core story and side project thoroughly dissolved, Sim started testing new boundaries – between the story and the backmatter. Between the thoughts of Dave Sim and the action of Cerebus. Between the comic page and the creator. Even if the text sections were Elrod’s Gardening Tips, Reads would be Cerebus’ most radical book to date for how it shatters these barriers and for how it sets out a relationship between comics and prose which is unlike almost any previous comic – demanding we experience huge chunks of text as part of the comics story. And at the same time as Reads insists on the primacy of text for half its material, the other half is dispensing with it altogether, with a bloody, wordless fight scene occupying the comics pages for issue after remorseless issue.
Reads is one of the most formally challenging graphic novels I’ve ever read. But that’s not why it became probably the most famous, or notorious, section of Cerebus. This is also the point in the story where Dave Sim steps into his own creation at the climax of those text sections and spells out his incendiary views on men, women and creativity. How the world is a battle between creative Lights (almost all male) and devouring Voids (almost all women) and how the Voids’ main tactic for devouring the Lights is luring them with the impossible promise of Merged Permanence (a happy relationship of equals).
As I hinted last time, a re-read in 2024 blunts the impact of those views a bit. Not because time has proved Sim right, but because with hindsight it’s obvious how Sim built up to the bombshell issue #186, and it’s also clear that Sim’s misogynist views aren’t particularly novel. In fact they’re exhaustingly familiar. Even the most scrupulously fair summary of the ideas in Reads is likely to have you saying “Wow, sounds like that guy had some issues”
But Reads still does have an impact, not so much because of what Sim says but the way he says it: the visceral, vicious language of “Viktor Davis” rant in #186 is still brutal in ways that summaries can’t really capture. The stuff about women voting being a mistake comes early on, and it just gets further out from there. Meanwhile the cosmic terminology he drapes over his philosophy – all the lights and voids and merged permanence stuff – make the basic concepts seem stranger, and less tawdry, than they are. Plus, let’s face it, there are no comics parallels to what Sim is doing(1). The closest thing I can think of – almost a decade on from this – is Alan Moore’s tour of the Tree Of Life in Promethea, and that had gorgeous JH Williams pictures to soften the density of ideas. Even Gerhard doesn’t get a look-in here(2).
So Dave Sim’s arguments in #186 overshadow not just the story elements of Reads but the questions you might usefully ask about all the rest of it: do its many formal experiments work? How much text can a comic contain and still be one? What is the first text section of Reads doing? And even the rant poses questions beyond its content: Why is it in the comic and not the backmatter? Why does it have to be so hateful? And what did Sim imagine would happen when he published it?
I’m going to offer an answer to most of these questions, but there’s a caveat: this is the point in this series where all the material was new to me (if not by reputation). I originally quit reading Cerebus at the end of Flight, realising the story would read better in the ‘phonebook’ collections. I continued flicking through the comic in the shop each month, so absorbed enough about Reads to update my plans to “I’ll read it when it’s finished I guess”. Which, 20 years after it finished, I did. So any insights I have on these latter books are based on flimsier ground – I’ve read them more recently and thought about them less.
I’d guess most Cerebus readers haven’t rushed back to this one, though. So first, a quick summary of what else is in Reads.
HE READS READS SO YOU WON’T HAVE TO
So far, Mothers & Daughters has been structured around a single story – Cerebus, Cirin and Astoria’s power struggle – told in a complex, chaotic way by the constant interruption of dozens of simultaneous vignettes somehow related to those events. Reads continues that in a much more straightforward way, as the “ripple-effect” stories fall away and we get an uninterrupted story where the three leads and Suenteus Po finally meet in the cathedral of Iest.
The four characters talk – mostly a lecture from the ascetic Po, outlining his philosophy of inaction, as he hopes to persuade the others to basically give up and go home. He leaves, and so does Astoria, who has actually listened, and whose experiences in Women have left her disillusioned about political leadership anyway. Before she goes she drops a bombshell – Cerebus is “a hermaphrodite”(10). This leaves Cerebus and Cirin alone – neither have any intention of taking Po’s advice and they begin a fight to the death.
Giving the volume its title is a short story about Victor Reid, a writer of Reads, mass-market fiction a bit like the old penny dreadfuls or pulps. The Reads industry has been bubbling away for a while now in the background of the comic – Weisshaupt puts Cerebus’ name on some in Church And State, and both Oscars wrote them. It’s often meant to represent the comics industry or some aspect of it. That’s definitely the case here, as Reid’s story is a comics roman-a-clef about a talented young creator swept up by a big publishing house (“Vertigo Horse” DO YOU SEE), who break his creativity on their publishing wheel. He ends up a despairing hack, and the architects of his downfall are women: his demanding, baby-ridden wife; his ball-breaking agent; his fickle, bosomy muse(3).
The Victor Reid section is barely linked to Cerebus’ story – Victor’s great artistic leap forward, whose rejection by his publisher breaks him, is a ‘read’ about Cerebus’ ascension and the events of Church And State. It’s followed by a text section which does tie in directly, in a way we’ve never seen before. At the start of the Cerebus and Cirin fight, the point of view pulls back to show a drawing board with a man drawing the fight, the author of Cerebus. He turns around: this is “Viktor Davis”.
Viktor also demonstrates his control over the events of the comic. “BANG, BANG, BANG” he writes, and three huge bangs demolish the cathedral around the fighting aardvarks, leaving the throne ascending into space with Cirin and Cerebus clinging to it as it flies past the moon. Viktor, meanwhile, ends his role in the book with his lengthy thoughts on men and women and creativity, leaving us with a Pink Floyd quote(4) and a hope that he’s instilled some seed of enlightenment in the male reader. And that’s Reads.
The Viktor Davis sections are very oddly written, a third person description of Viktor talking to the reader about Cerebus. Viktor is, essentially, Dave Sim – he recounts real world anecdotes involving Alan Moore, Jeff Smith, and others. During the story ‘Viktor’ pulls ‘the Reader’ into the comic with him, an experience which reads like a kind of hypnotic ritual, and retells in prose the Judge’s story of the Big Bang from Church And State, except flipping the roles: now the male light is smothered and split by the female void.
Reads kicks off the second half of Mothers & Daughters, but that isn’t its only function in the overall Cerebus construction. It’s also the start of what I think of as the third overlapping Cerebus novel. The first, which Mothers & Daughters ends, is a genre novel – a satirical, political fantasy saga full of dazzling digressions. The second, which Jaka’s Story opens, is a modernist novel, a comic and tragic story about a man and a woman who are unable to be happy with or without each other: it’ll resume as Mothers & Daughters ends. And the third is an experimental novel, a philosophical enquiry into men, women, God and their relationship to one another, in which the character of Dave Sim is as important as the character of Cerebus.
Depending on which of these novels you think you’re reading, the text elements of Reads play different roles. If you’re reading the first novel, they’re an unwelcome and skippable distraction, and even the metafictional elements which turn up here will be better used in Minds. If you’re reading the second novel, then the Victor Reid half of the text section is tangentially relevant but the “Viktor Davis” half is well worth avoiding: it acts as basically a spoiler (in several senses) for the next several books, in that it removes a lot of tension from future narratives by outlining exactly how Sim thinks men and women always behave.
And if you’re reading the third novel, then the Viktor Davis bits are the kickoff, the moment Dave Sim steps out of the shadow of his creation and reveals what the point of Cerebus was all along. Ouch.
YOU DO NOT IN FACT HAVE TO HAND IT TO DAVE SIM
There are several interesting questions about Viktor Davis’ anti-feminist screed, none of which are “is he right?” (He isn’t: for a start all his gender arguments rest on a hard division between ‘reason’ and ’emotion’ which he doesn’t define beyond linguistic pedantry. And that’s the bit even his sympathetic commentators tend to put before the “but…”(5)) One is “why is this in the comic not the backmatter?”. Another: “Is this what Dave Sim actually believes, and if so how long has he believed it?”
A lot of the initial response to Reads, especially from fellow creators and regular readers, leaned heavily on the fact that “Viktor Davis” is a pseudonym, and that his views might not fully reflect Sim’s. A lot of the later response takes for granted that Sim ‘went mad’ or was radicalised somehow and that the screeds of Reads bear no real relation to the humane, even liberal comic Cerebus used to be.
Both of these responses are anticipated by Reads itself. Reads is painstaking in establishing that yes, Viktor Davis is the writer of Cerebus, Dave Sim. Sim’s own views – explained at infinite length ever since – tally with what he writes here. Viktor Davis writes about how he’s been self-censoring himself for years, and anticipates the horrified reaction to Reads in general and specifically ‘the reader’s’ appalled response to his reversal of the Judge’s monologue. In interviews at the start of Mothers & Daughters he put forward the idea – which he’s stuck to since I think – that the Judge and Viktor Davis represent two extreme points of view and readers can choose for themselves which is right. There’s a worthy liberal tendency to imagine that an author depicting two extreme points of view means they feel the truth must be somewhere in the middle: Dave Sim would not agree(6).
AARDVARK SHRUGGED
Viktor Davis is certainly Sim framing his beliefs in the starkest, harshest terms he can to get his point across, but it’s a point he’s been building to. In the Women post I went through the three strands to Dave Sim’s philosophy – the gender, creative freedom, and religious parts. Viktor Davis is where the first two of those end up: all the wider political elements feel like window dressing for Sim’s real issue, which is the way the “voids” absorb and drain the creative energy of the “lights”, i.e. the way women, in his view, sap and stymie men’s’ creative impulses.
This directly ties back to the Victor Reid parts of the book – Reid is an object lesson in how this happens. But the important part of the two stories isn’t just the women in them, it’s that Reid is also the victim of an industry which has the exact same goal – diverting and draining his creative light. Sim’s libertarian philosophy of self-publishing – that you simply cannot trust publishers not to force you into compromises, and compromise means artistic death – is the backbone of Reads as much as the gender material is.
In fact, you can see Sim’s philosophy of men and women as the next step of his belief in the importance of self-publishing to artistic greatness. Following your artistic path is hard. You will constantly be expected to compromise or weaken your work by the uncreative forces around you (publishers, distributors, other middlemen) so you have to own it for yourself. So far, so Randian. But Sim goes further, with his “Light does not breed” mantra – by expecting to be an equal partner, women (and later children) are automatically diluting and stealing this creative ownership and control. If publishers are parasites, how much worse are wives and families?(7)
Where Sim’s two big concerns – creative freedom and the iniquities of womankind – have ended up is a kind of Objectivism of the Boudoir, Cyril Connolly’s “pram in the hallway” bon mot on libertarian steroids. I don’t think you can disentangle those two elements of Dave Sim’s philosophy, which is one reason Jeff Smith becomes such a bete noire for Sim. Smith has a cameo here as a pal of Viktor, but is a living refutation of Sim’s ideas: his wife gave up her job to support his self-publishing ambitions, and his comic Bone is visibly Cerebus inspired but also considerably more palatable to a wider comics-agnostic public. Bone ends up in libraries and homes across the world(8) – it replaces Cerebus as the success case for self publishing at exactly the time Cerebus becomes a cautionary tale.
BUT IS IT AARDVARK?
So far I’ve looked at what Sim thinks in Reads and why he thinks it. For the reader of Cerebus, looking aghast as they turn the page to find yet another double page spread of small print, there’s a more urgent question: what is this stuff doing in the comic? It’s clear how they link philosophically, but how do the Victor Reid and Viktor Davis sections work as part of the actual story?
It’s initially very hard to see what the point of the Victor Reid parts in particular is. Artistically it’s the weakest element of the book, without the genuine brilliance of the comics sections or the “what the fuck is happening” rubbernecking of the Viktor Davis part. In its own right it’s just not a great story: Sim’s prose is as fussy as it ever was when pretending to be Oscar, and over time the gossipy elements have faded out to leave a set of stereotypes. It seems mainly addressed to Sim’s fellow creators: Reid is an example of artistry denied and defiled by compromise.
It’s also a more general comment by Sim on the state of the industry. At the end of Women, the Roach has a crisis, and a horde of alternative identities threaten to burst out of him, all based on short-lived comics or publishers from the early 90s boom. Most are now unfamiliar even if you “were there” – yes, I could spot the Warriors Of Plasm reference, but I wish I couldn’t – but it’s the sheer number and relentlessness of them that’s the joke, a market glut given physical form. The material in Reads is more pointed – the boom was turning to bust, and Victor Reid’s story is a barbed commentary on the ‘mainstream alternative’ companies like Dark Horse and DC’s Vertigo imprint, which offered more varied and critically respectable – but still corporate-owned – output.
All the reads industry sections, though – not just this but the equivalent sections in Jaka’s Story and later books – are making a wider point within the story, which is that popular art is not any kind of bulwark against tyranny: the reads industry is subject to market pressures and tacit censorship under the Cirinists just as it was subject to political pressures before them, and creators are ultimately indentured labourers. Genuine artists can and must work only for themselves.
Artists like Viktor Davis, whose Read exists in our world and is a comic called Cerebus. And this is one answer to that question – why is Viktor Davis’ beef with women part of the actual comic? For Sim, only the genuine, self-publishing artist has the freedom to say the unsayable in modern society, but that freedom is meaningless unless it’s exercised. Sim has to push Cerebus to its most extreme point, in terms of form and content, at least partly because no publisher would let him do it.
Sim knows very well that the Viktor Davis stuff is going to shock and upset readers. Davis prefaces his big mask-off disquisition in #186 with a lot of “aint-I-a-stinker” hints about how controversial the last chunk is going to be. He’s already worked hard to rattle readers(9). And it’s written explicitly to be as offensive and horrible as possible. Nothing else would prove Sim’s point to his own satisfaction. There’s a moment in Victor Reid’s story where his evil aspect, the backmasked Rotsieve, comes out and says hateful things to everyone. Is Viktor Davis – David Victor Sim backwards – Sim’s Rotsieve? I think that probably was the point of that concept – but it was there to explain why Davis is so venomous, not what he was actually saying.
And the other reason it has to be in the comic is that each part of Mothers & Daughters is a reprise and revision of an earlier part of Cerebus, and here we’re redoing Church And State. As I mentioned above, Viktor Davis is the devilish reverse of the Judge: an omniscient being talking us through cosmology and inverting the Judge’s origin of the universe. Not an act of cosmic rape; an act of cosmic smothering and emasculation. If the Judge’s monologue has to be part of Cerebus, so does Viktor Davis’.
FORM AND AVOID
So now we’re just left with the question – does it work? This is Sim’s biggest, most notorious, most ambitious and most shocking risk? Does he pull it off?
Reads is obviously the book where a lot of readers noped out. Even if they made it through to the end of Mothers & Daughters in Minds, the decision to quit happens here. Whether or not you respect Sim’s artistic freedom – and despite Sim-as-Davis saying he could be prosecuted for hate speech, nobody has ever tried to ban Cerebus – from this point he’s a guy a lot of people don’t want to give money to.
Some people agreed with Sim, or partially agreed, or thought he had a point but ‘went too far’. Obviously they didn’t stop buying it, though Cerebus has never gained a reputation as a great work of conservative or libertarian art. Others argued for a “separate the art from the artist” principle which seems a little insulting in this case, given how diligently Dave Sim worked to make that impossible.
Many, probably most, readers decided that Dave Sim’s obvious artistic excellence meant putting up with his being an arsehole, and kept reading. The best critical work on Cerebus I’ve read, Andrew Rilstone’s When Did You Stop Reading Cerebus?, roughly takes the line that Cerebus is a big, deliberately complex and difficult book in a similar way to Moby Dick or Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, and that reading it involves reckoning with the parts that are most difficult, Reads included.
I think, though, that you can see Reads as horrible but necessary to Sim’s overall conception, and still see it as an artistic failure.
Bits of it – the bits Sim actually draws – are certainly not a failure. Sim gives us both a philosophical and a physical resolution to the big conflicts of the series. The conversation between the three aardvarks and Po is the kind of thing people now call a “lore dump” but it gives a solid explanation to what an aardvark is and what’s been going on in Mothers & Daughters so far. Aardvarks magnify the traits, people and events around them: the only good course of action, according to Po, is inaction.
As she did in Women, Astoria shines. I’ve seen people say that she gets the best ending in the comic, and in a sense that’s true – her final contributions are a reminder of why we liked her and she leaves on her own terms, the only character with the brains to actually listen to Po. But even if her arc across Mothers & Daughters is complex and complete, her final turn to the domestic here also feels like a shabby ending for the comic’s great intriguer and manipulator(10). Is it growth, or is it just Sim wanting to take her down a peg, show her plans and schemes as futile? Or demonstrating to his women readers the virtuous way to overcome your devouring void-ness? One of the worst things about Reads is that he lets you – encourages you to – read those kind of motives into the action from now on.
The artistic high point of Reads, though, is the Cerebus and Cirin fight – page after page of weighty, savage, thoroughly choreographed and horribly physical combat, the first time in the entire series that Cerebus has fought someone clearly his match as a fighter. Their combat is quick to read, and continually interrupted by the – equally brutal in a different way – Viktor Davis pages, so it feels like it lasts even longer than it actually does.
Fight and action scenes are part of the grammar of American comics, but they are hardly ever this long – sometimes Jack Kirby would draw a big multi-page slugfest in Fantastic Four, which Stan Lee would usually over-dialogue, mistrusting the simple thrill of movement and the pleasure the reader gets from turning images into motion. Sim’s inner Stan Lee – occasionally a presence in the early issues of Cerebus – is silent here.
What the fight sequence feels most like is a manga episode, where higher page counts often allow for more wordless, decompressed storytelling. In Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, a stellar martial-arts manga, entire volumes are spent on fights in which only a handful of blows are exchanged, including pages of interiority as the combatants size each other up or move around one another looking for an opening. Manga is an influence Sim would have absorbed indirectly via Frank Miller, whose action choreography was the basis for his early stardom, but the level of weight and detail in Sim’s rendering – the blood-slicked fur of the combatants – takes this up a level. Sim disliked drawing fights and action – it was a reason the comic turned away from straightforward fantasy so early – so the Cirin fight in Reads, paired with the Viktor Davis text, is a creator deliberately pushing himself, as well as the reader, well out of his comfort zone.
But it’s those text parts that let Reads down, not just in content but in concept and execution. The Victor Reid sections are a mediocre morality play, a struggle to get through when I don’t know (or have forgotten) who all the characters are meant to be. Reid is a cypher – I don’t believe in his talent, so I don’t care when he abandons it.
The Viktor Davis parts are more readable, because they’re so strange, and because they promise some behind-the-scenes insight into the stuff a reader does actually care about (the Cerebus story). But Davis is insufferable even before he starts talking about women – he’s pompous, long-winded, self-satisfied, and presumptuous. He’s constantly assuming how the reader feels, and usually exaggerating it: as he described the reader’s (my?) horror and grief at his pronoun-switching of the Church And State big bang story, I was in fact flicking back pages to see what I’d apparently missed: in all the verbiage, I’d barely noticed him do it.
The Church And State reversal is – even more than the #186 lecture – the big payoff to Reads, the ultimate rugpull after two books of smaller ones, taking a hammer to one of the fan-favourite parts of Cerebus. It should be as shocking as Davis says it is. It really isn’t. All through the Davis part, Sim quotes Alan Moore talking about how stories work, from a conversation the two of them had. Moore tells Sim that “all stories are true” on some level, and they become true because the hearer gives a kind of permission for them to be true. If you want to defeat a story, you have to tell a better story. And if you told a beautiful illustrated story – like the end of Church And State – you aren’t going to beat it with prose. Especially not Dave Sim’s prose.
Absent Gerhard’s gorgeous lunar and cosmic vistas, absent Sim’s note-perfect Feiffer impersonation, the light/void retcon in Reads is torpid, hard to visualise, unengaging. And, yes, petty. Maybe in Sim’s mind, he was presenting two equally extreme versions to make a point, and when readers in their droves preferred the first one it just proved to him how the feminists had won and only he could see it. But they also preferred the first one because he told it better.
The formal question Sim is asking in Reads – how much text does it take before a comic stops being a comic – is a genuinely interesting one. Maybe there are comics writers who could answer it well, and it obviously fascinates Sim, as every Cerebus phonebook has text-driven elements to a degree. But the more of the comic’s artistic load he asks them to bear, the worse it gets. Sim is just not a good enough prose writer to do the things he needs to do in Reads: I would call it an artistic failure whatever you think of its morality.
FOOTNOTES
(1) There are Reads parallels further back. In his excellent history of the penny dreadfuls and boys’ story magazines, Boys Will Be Boys, E S Turner gives an example of at least one penny dreadful writer who would regularly stop the ripping yarn for an entire episode to offer digressive essays on economics or prison reform, to the presumed frustration of his thrill-hungry readers.
(2) Which may be another reason for doing it this way. Viktor Davis’ thoughts are Sim’s, and the responsibility for them is Sim’s alone: why make Gerhard an accessory? I think it’s the only section of Cerebus with genuinely no illustration.
(3) These women characters are tiresome cliches or poison-pen caricatures, but for fairness’ sake let’s mention that Reid’s biggest believer, Milieu, is also a woman, who sees Reid’s descent into hackery as a betrayal. It’s not women per se Sim hates, you see, but the innate devouring female essence – he even allows that some rare women may qualify as creative Lights. How gracious of him!
(4) Sim is on record as disliking music, which fascinates me. He doesn’t work to it, he doesn’t make it, he doesn’t play it for pleasure, he thinks jazz is a marxist-feminist psyop, etc. Jaka’s dancing is essentially freeform, silent, non-interpretive. The only music references he makes in Cerebus are comically basic boomer ones – two Pink Floyd quotes, a Beatles quote, and members of the Beatles and the Stones turning up as visual icons.
(5) There are two parts of the Viktor Davis rant which people unsympathetic to the gender elements sometimes give credit to. One is the – I think very muddled – stuff about “Life” and “Death”. Sim thinks (roughly) that there’s too much respect given to individual life and preserving it, which is a factor in overpopulation. Leaving aside the question of whether the planet is overpopulated, one of the most generally agreed on ways to bring population growth down is educating women. The other part of the rant that people seem to like is the stuff on how wretched and uninformative the media environment is and how short-termist and manipulative politicians are. Here the issue isn’t that he’s wrong – people who trust the media or politicians are in a tiny minority. But his explanation for it, that feminism has won and reduced public conversation to arguments about feelings, is poor: politicians have always played on the emotions of the masses (and have always done the Sim trick of clothing unpopular positions in the robes of rationalism, for that matter)
(6) Much later on Sim does change his mind about the cosmology here, and we get a third version (now there’s something to look forward to). But that’s a refinement of his basic idea about the masculine and feminine principles of life, not a reversal. He’s not landing somewhere in the middle, more deciding his previous extreme perspective wasn’t quite extreme enough.
(7) Worth remembering at this point that the only person ever listed as publisher on Cerebus was, er, Dave Sim’s ex-wife.
(8) I’ll get back to Smith in the Guys post. I don’t actually enjoy Bone much, though Smith is a fine cartoonist. But that doesn’t shift his status as a counter-example to Sim’s ideas.
(9) I’ve not mentioned the one thing everyone who read Reads at the time speaks of with awe in the Viktor Davis part – the fake-out section where Davis says he’s going to end Cerebus at #200 not #300. It’s immediately reversed, but people coming to it fresh in issue #183 were genuinely floored. Obviously, that doesn’t work when you know going in it’s a lie, but fair enough – ya got ‘em, Vik.
(10) Of course Astoria has a parting gift – the “Cerebus is a hermaphrodite” thing. It’s hard to parse, and I’m going to park it for a later post – Sim thinks it’s a big deal, Cerebus obviously does too, but his subsequent crisis of masculinity plays out across a bunch of subsequent books. But yes, of course it’s significant that this happens in a comic so rooted in gender essentialism, I’m just not confident yet to say why. Intersex people consider the word to be a slur, so I’m using it in this post because that’s the way Astoria describes Cerebus, but I’ll edit future posts to take that language into account.
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?!)
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.
Yes, you’ll find no argument here. Latter Days makes the text elements in Reads look like models of clarity and economy.
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.
Could you give a link to this interview with Gerhard?
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.
For anyone following the Dave Sim v Music thread I have just read an interview in which he gets into conversation about his namesake Mr GEDGE of the Wedding Present.
(There is no evidence that he has ever actually listened to the band but I feel like there is at least a parallel world where GUYS takes place somewhere on the indie toilet circuit)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, in some ways Cerebus actually ends at #200 and the rest is a 100-issue epilogue.
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.
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.)
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.
Honestly, given how he’s revised his own work with later work over and over, I’m not even sure he pleased himself.
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.
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.)
Never mind; I had managed to obliterate the existence of the “Tangent” essay in #186 from my memory.
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 :)
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.
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.
In my rich fantasy life, these Cerebus posts will be collected under one cover and copiously illustrated by Gerhard.
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.
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.
You may already address this in an upcoming post, but for your consideration: “hermaphrodite” is considered a slur by a lot of intersex folks. You may already be aware of this and have your reasons for sticking with the term, but I thought I’d throw it out there just in case.
Thanks – someone on Facebook mentioned this too, after I’d started referencing it. He’s always called this in the text, which is why I stuck to it. But on thinking about it that’s not really a good enough reason – I’m censoring the homophobic slurs Cerebus uses about himself, so why keep this one? So I’ve amended the footnote here and changed the wording in later entries.
I tried reading through the Viktor Davis stuff recently, and it reminded me precisely of a self-published criticism of Black leadership my mom’s thank-all-the-bastard-gods-late ex-boyfriend wrote: Repugnant, insufferably self-satisfied, pointlessly meandering and indulgent, and ultimately incompetent at trying to prove its point. And utterly unreadable. Said late ex-boyfriend was also an unmedicated schizophrenic, take that as you will.
Thanks for the deep dive into all of this lunacy. I started reading Cerebus in high school, when it was somewhere around issue 84 or 85 or so. Loved it! Not really a comics reader at all (Watchmen, Dark Knight, and Stray Toasters were my only other three), but this one really sucked me in. And then… yeah. I made a commitment to myself that if this guy was really going to write 300 issues, then by god I was going to read them. Which I did. Though I stopped buying them around issue 220 or so, because fuck Dave Sim.
My experience at the time was that it was great… until the cop-out ending of C&S. Even as a high school kid, the utter horseshit of whatever the Judge was saying was not only obvious, but was also the worst way to end a story, with one guy talking, and talking, and talking.
Then came Jaka’s Story. I don’t know about calling it the best of Cerebus, since exactly half of it consists of some of the worst prose ever committed to paper. It is truly unreadable. I did a Cerebus re-read a couple years ago (to a point; couldn’t get beyond Guys), and I just couldn’t do it. The other half is pretty good. But “half is pretty good” doesn’t really cut it. It’s also worth noting that however interesting to we readers Jaka may seem, she also represents Sim’s ideal woman–simple, not too bright, just wants to look pretty and dance. He calls her his favorite charater. Yeah. I’ll bet. She’s the perfect woman–until she isn’t.
Reading it monthly, having Melmoth follow the snail’s pace of Jaka’s Story felt like a cruel joke. After that, as you note, there’s some action of mild interest, and some around the 200s, but after his insane essay screed, it was hard to really take anything he did seriously.
One thing that maybe gets lost in your writing about Sim’s big theories is just how poorly they’re presented. This is because you’re describing his theories as best you can. Which makes them, however insane, feel in some sense of the word “coherent.” Yet as written by Sim, not only are his theories totally absurd, he has no ability whatsoever to present them. Sim is a terrible writer of anything except dialogue. He has no sense of flow to an argument, no building up to his points, no carrying the reader along in any way whatsoever. He just spews his venomous nonsense, all the while exclaiming that he is the greatest logician the world has ever known, and basing his entire screed on the claim that to disagree with him is to prove his point. It’s madness. But worse, it’s poorly expressed madness.
If somebody truly compared reading all of Cerebus to reading Gravity’s Rainbow, Moby Dick, and Ulysses, then that person has little understanding of the written word, and how to tell stories. Dave Sim draws like nobody on earth, and my mind still explodes when I look at the art in Cerebus. But whatever knack Sim had for story-telling fell entirely to pieces along the way. From my re-read, I found High Society to be the high point of the work. I probably like the early stuff better than you, especially once past issue 10 or so, when the art really explodes. And then much of C&S is great too, with the art becoming, thanks in part to the amazing Gerhad, even more breathtaking. After that, a pause with the solid half of Jaka’s Story, and then a drawn-out nosedive to the end. All told, what became of Sim always felt to me like a very sad story. A man of great talent who crawled up his own asshole, and never found his way out.