This is the 15th of my blog posts about Cerebus, a self-published comic/soapbox by a Canadian recluse. As ever, this post contains spoilers for the story as a whole and the current book, though this particular spoiler warning is probably just a ‘warning’.
Previously: Cerebus’ journey with Jaka reaches a bad end and Cerebus discovers his parents have died in his absence. Meanwhile, Dave Sim has rejected the ‘Marxist-Feminist’ society he lives in and devoted his time to scripture.
What does it mean for a comic to be “unreadable”? Difficult, perhaps? Repetitive or dull? Morally repugnant? Bad on the technical level of the story – nonsensical, poorly crafted, impossible to follow? Or on an even deeper level – physically hard or painful to read: full of tiny text, maybe?
In the purely technical sense, Latter Days is readable. After all, I read it. But if there has ever been a comic which deserved to be called unreadable, on all the above grounds and more, this is it. Latter Days has a fair claim to be the worst comic I’ve ever read. Usually when Cerebus gets hateful or tedious there’s a lot of craft to guiltily admire but the most loathsome parts here are also the weakest artistically – story and art become almost entirely unmoored as the entire comic distorts under the pressure of Dave Sim’s religious obsessions. On Goodreads even the handful of reviewers who were all “yeah Dave you tell those beta cucks” through Reads and Guys come to Latter Days and go “ok actually fuck this”. In fact, I’ve only encountered one blogger with good things to say about Latter Days, and he ended up collaborating with Dave Sim.
In general with this series of posts though I’ve taken the approach that if Sim is doing a thing, he’s doing it for a reason, and it’s worth exploring what that reason is. On one level the reason for Latter Days is crystal clear: Sim is finishing off the outstanding plots in Cerebus – the Cirinist revolution and Rick’s “Cerebite” religion – at the same time as outlining some of his own religious beliefs, centered around his interpretation of the Torah. That isn’t what many, perhaps any, readers hoped he’d be doing with the last stretch of Cerebus, but even before God called Dave to reveal the Truth he didn’t give much of a fuck what the readers hoped for. As I said back at Volume I, Dave Sim following his impulses is part of what we signed up for.
What is more difficult to answer is why Latter Days takes the form it does. A reminder of Sim’s story so far: while doing the Bible parody in Rick’s Story, Dave Sim had a conversion experience and realised the Bible was true, as was the Koran, and devised a religion of his own combining bits of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Sim’s religious journey has so far had only an oblique effect on the comic – Cerebus ending Form & Void by tearing his clothes and smearing his face with dirt in an imitation of Old Testament mourning, for instance. But in Latter Days it comes roaring back into focus – around two-thirds of the way through the book a bespectacled ‘samaritan’ named Konigsberg shows up with a copy of the Torah and Cerebus starts reading it, dictating his commentary to his visitor and an unseen scribe. In practice what this means is page after page of Dave Sim’s Torah exegesis in infinitely small text alongside inscrutable pictures of Woody Allen.
“Chasing YHWH” – as this section is called – is one of the bits of Cerebus that’s become notorious, like the anti-feminist rant in Reads. People who’ve never read the comic and never will read it are dimly aware that at some point it turns into Torah study. But even when you know it’s coming, it’s almost impossible to convey how difficult, tiresome and awful the experience of reading these parts is, the sheer despair you feel as you turn the page to be confronted with another double-size wall of quarter-size text. Sim is apparently convinced it will take 100-200 years for Jewish scholars to catch up with his analysis here and yes, it does feel like that is how long it’s taking to get through it.
As we’ll discuss, the core of Sim’s beliefs about the Torah – including the reason it’s called “Chasing YHWH” – are deeply strange. There is probably no way to have included them in the comic that would not have baffled or alienated readers. Still, to frame his commentaries as these detailed, verse-by-verse exegeses rather than, I don’t know, ‘draw’ some of the incidents as a ‘comic’, is a deliberate choice. Can we find out why he does it this way, beyond the baseline hypothesis of “Dave Sim has gone actually mad”?
I hope so. But first we have to get there. And the rest of Latter Days is also a profoundly miserable – even worse, in some regards – experience.
The first thing Dave Sim wants you to notice about Latter Days is that it’s doing something we’ve never really seen in Cerebus before. The aardvark himself is narrating the story. We only find out who he’s talking to at the end of the book – Sim felt, mistakenly, that this mystery was strong enough to sustain the readers’ interest through sequences which he was well aware would be a slog. It isn’t, though at least for the two prologue episodes of Latter Days – covering decades of the aardvark’s life – it’s a welcome novelty.
Cerebus’ narrative voice is digressive, forgetful, boastful. He’s a successful man in late middle age, telling a life story to an indulgent audience – presumably we’ve already missed his accounts of the first fourteen books. The effect is to make the story seem more remote, as if we’ve somehow missed issues 266-388 of a 400 issue comic and are getting the capsule summary. It’s not that there’s anything in Latter Days you’d much want to see expanded, but it means events have a perfunctory, compressed feel, as if even Dave Sim wants to hurry us to the end now – or at least to the parts he actually cares about.
As I say, at first that’s not a problem. Cerebus has struck north again, into Isshuria, a part of his world that’s an analogue for Canada itself. He’s out in the sticks, waiting to die, but while he waits he spends an issue as a shepherd and an issue as a professional Five Bar Gate player. Five Bar Gate is the Cerebus version of ice hockey, and this issue is very much “Dave Sim Does Sports”. It has its fans: it is apparently full of jokes which Sim painstakingly explains in the notes. It also has one of the very few Black characters in the series, and he’s called Paul “Coffee” Annan, which gives you an idea of how good all the jokes you aren’t getting must be. (In fact the only named Black characters in Cerebus are servants or athletes)
I don’t much enjoy the sheep or sports issues, as it happens, but they’re beacons of approachability compared to Latter Days itself. While they’re self-contained, the longer novel feels like an endless sequence of arbitrary incidents, related in an “and then… and then…” style by Old Cerebus. But step back from it and there’s a structure and a theme to Latter Days as there is with every other Cerebus book. One of Dave Sim’s working methods has always been to fold his digressions and obsessions into the comic: it’s why you got everything from the comics convention parodies to the death of Oscar Wilde. Cerebus is a receiving station for whatever’s going through the mind of Dave. So if Dave has retreated from the world and is devoting his days to scripture, you’re going to get a book built around religious texts.
The most generous possible summary I can make of Latter Days is that it’s a novel about the experience of scriptural revelation – having your reality altered by a text, trying to work out which elements in it mean what, and attempting to reshape your life around the teachings you’re finding in it. This, I think, is the reason for some of the extreme difficulty and obtuseness of the book – Sim isn’t just trying to get across his views on the Torah, he’s conveying how hard and painstaking it is to undertake this struggle for meaning. Or at least, how hard it was for him: Sim seems to view religion a bit like an intense spiritual workout – if it ain’t hurting, it ain’t working.
Latter Days is structured around three religious texts: first Cerebus is the subject of the Booke Of Ricke and held captive by people who expect him to fulfil its prophecies, then he’s the author of the Booke Of Cerebus, which he cynically writes as a way to get the upper hand in a power struggle within his movement. And finally he’s the interpreter of the Torah, which guides him towards true religious feeling. The stories – in the very loosest sense – of his interactions with these three texts are wrapped in a fourth, the account of his life he’s giving to the unknown listener.
And there’s a fifth text winding through the book too – the ‘reads’ series Rabbi, written by ‘Garth Inniscent’. Rabbi tends to be glossed over as a “parody of Preacher”, which is true only on the level of the name and the fact Cerebus likes it because it’s imaginatively violent. Its actual role in the story is considerably weirder. Rabbi is an 150-issue ‘read’ which Cerebus becomes obsessed with during his days herding sheep – while in captivity he starts to hallucinate that he is the super-powered title character, who brutally eliminates foes with an entire grab bag of ‘Rabbi-powers’ (he’s like a cross between the 50s Superman and the 70s Spectre). Cerebus’ attempts to use said powers don’t end well, and he spends an issue stumbling around in pitch darkness – the symbolism in Latter Days is rarely subtle.
Once in happy retirement as leader of the Nation Of Cerebus, prophecies fulfilled, Cerebus turns his attention to Rabbi again, collecting a full set of the read and then setting to work creating a comprehensive guide to all Rabbi’s powers. This effort ruins the texts themselves – I said this wasn’t subtle – and at its end disaster strikes. In an issue of ‘The Reads Journal’, Garth Inniscent is interviewed by ‘Gary Growth’ and reveals that he’s disgusted that the most powerful person in the world is into trash he wrote to entertain 12-year-olds, and that the interview itself is a psychic attack designed to reduce Cerebus’ brain to mush. (Which it does, until Woody Allen turns up with the Torah)
On the page all this reads, as you might guess, like dull sequences of bad jokes and score-settling (in the fake Comics Journal interview Sim even gets a dig or three in at old rival Jaime Hernandez). But Rabbi’s role in the Latter Days novel is important – it’s Sim’s warning about the dangers of being waylaid by false texts, and how the same effort that can reveal the secrets of the universe (according to Dave Sim) is pointless and infantile when applied to junk. I doubt the fact that Rabbi is 150 issues long – the same as the first half of Cerebus so loved by Sim’s former fans – is entirely a coincidence.
So there’s a thematic coherence to Latter Days which may not be immediately obvious as you grit your teeth and slog through it. And it’s a coherence which ultimately points you to the Torah sections as a genuine climax to the story – Cerebus’ encounter with a truly revelatory text which deserves deep rabbinical reading. Dave Sim has not, at least at the design level, gone mad.
That’s as much as I can say, positively, about Latter Days. Because beyond the thematic coherence the book is a disaster: Sim is using the story to elevate his misogyny to a theological principle, and his writing is devolving into a foaming, gnashing mess.
The Torah sections are the most prolix in Latter Days, but that’s a closer race than you’d hope. This book is lousy with text. Great gothic-fonted chunks from the Bookes of Ricke and Cerebus. Endless cramped-letter monologues from the old windbag narrating the story. Diary entries from Konigsberg. The prose has always been the worst thing about Cerebus and it reaches new lows in almost every issue as Latter Days drags on. None of the narrative voices Sim adopts – raconteur aardvark, King James pastiche, or neurotic Woody – are entertaining enough to remotely bear the volume of what he’s using them for. Or the content, frankly, since what he’s using them for is rancid.
Themes aside, Latter Days’ main story job is to resolve the “Cerebites” plot started in Rick’s Story. The Booke Of Ricke presented Cerebus as a prophet – now the other shoe drops, and we learn that it also foretold him as a Messiah, who will return to fulfil the prophecies and drive out the Cirinists, whose power is waning in any case. And so Cerebus is abducted by the Three Wise Fellows, adherents to this Cerebite religion, who are convinced he is the one foretold, and tie him up until he can come up with the “Word Of Truth”.
The Wise Fellows are, as you might expect by now, caricatures of the Three Stooges. Sim has said that of all his real-world borrowings, the Stooges were the hardest to get right, and while I can’t pretend I like them enough to be much entertained by their antics, the Wise Fellow scenes are the only parts of Latter Days where Sim’s love for the craft of cartooning comes through at all – there’s a looseness and flow to them which matches the Stooges’ knockabout physical comedy. It stands as a rebuke to the rest of the book, where moving across the pages makes me feel my eyes have lockjaw.
The Stooges are as balm to what comes next, too, in the sections where the Cirinists are slaughtered by Cerebus’ followers, led by a Todd McFarlane analogue who may also be standing in for the Apostle Paul. ‘Todd McSpahn’ takes over the movement, Cerebus wants it back, and Sim decides the time is right for a Spawn parody, a full decade after the character appeared.
The Torah sections are borderline impossible to read and hateful if you do, but on some fundamental level they aren’t actually comics. I’m not expecting Dave Sim to be a competent rabbinical exegesist. I am expecting him to be a competent cartoonist, and in the middle parts of Latter Days even that falls away. The Spawn parody is inane, the McFarlane character is close to incomprehensible (ironic that Sim’s worst ever phonetic speech is him writing a Canadian!), and the plot is contemptible: the Cirinists are defeated because, being women, none of them can shoot straight.
And – yes, I admit I’m in “the food was terrible – and such small portions!” territory here – it’s all so strangely executed. Let’s take as an example the bit where Cerebus decides to kill all the lawyers. This is not an original joke, and there are a lot of ways Sim might have handled it in the past, from a single panel gag to a comics sequence like the outrageous orders of Most Holy in Church And State. What he actually chooses to do is tell it via two overlaid narratives – one Cerebus reminiscing, one King James pastiche – with non-sequential illustrations, in a way that labours the point and leeches momentum from the story. By this time critical generosity – even curiosity – is starting to break down.
Unsurprisingly, the story also revels in its slaughter of women. A resolution to the ongoing Cirinist strand was always likely to be bloody, but Latter Days takes it much further than you’d imagine, going into some detail around the laws of the new society Cerebus sets up. Every year the men get to vote on whether every individual woman gets executed or not. Only some men, mind you – if you say your wife is your equal you get disenfranchised. (Lest Sim be accused of bias, men can also execute another man if a dozen guys declare him a “complete dick”)
Yeah, yeah, Dave Sim doesn’t ‘actually think’ men should execute any women they don’t like, in the same way he doesn’t ‘actually think’ women are telepathic soul vampires. And this stuff is hidden in the middle of some of the worst comics ever created so almost nobody saw it, and it’s just showing that a male tyranny would be as bad as the female one was, and so on and so on. But… this part of the comic is still toxic, repulsive bullshit; dismal to read. When the execution policy is introduced, the first woman up for a vote is an imitation of Julie Doucet, a Canadian woman cartoonist who self-published a lot and did an award-winning comic called Dirty Plotte. And my reaction, even twenty years on, is just, fuck off with this stuff, Dave Sim. It’s a nasty little in-joke that sums up the petty sadism of the whole story, and the guy doing it has the sheer nerve to expect us to take his “personal prayer” and religious exploration seriously? Go to hell.
Anyway, then we get to the Torah stuff.
For all that the commentaries are an endurance test the central point of them is fairly easy to summarise: Sim has picked up on the (generally accepted I believe) idea that Genesis and other early bits of the Bible are the work of multiple authors, and has refracted this through his gender obsession to decode it as a hostile dialogue between a male God and his female wannabe counterpart Yoohwhoo (aka YHWH), who lives inside the Earth and controls plants and can’t admit he created her.
It’s certainly original. And judging by many, many, interviews since, it’s a sincere reflection of Sim’s actual beliefs, not just some crap Cerebus is coming up with. But even if you were impressed by Sim coming up with a whole new heresy, the way he presents it is monstrously unfriendly to even an imagined sympathetic reader. We never see the text, just Cerebus bantering commentary on it; every pause and aside is ‘faithfully’ documented, and if you do somehow manage to focus past all the obfuscation you’re also rewarded with vomitous little nuggets like the Gay Panic defense invoked to justify Cain killing Abel and Cerebus making coy hints that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves by sacrificing cattle to Yoohwhoo. It’s as vile as it is grotesque.
At first the Woody Allen pages – extracts from Konigsberg’s diary of his love life and later his analysis – are a merciful break from this swill. They’re not good – the Freud analogue is called Dr Fraud, which indicates the state of Sim’s wit at this stage – but they’re different. Gradually, though, the Allen sections become more abstract as the character switches from Freud to Jung and loses his mind: plenty of opportunity for Sim to indulge his disgust at cross-dressing here, if you’re keeping score. And another dump of text, of course. The Konigsberg sequences are presumably a counterpoint to the religious material, with Konigsberg (like Cerebus before his arrival) reduced to an infant by foolish engagement with a false text, in this case the man-made gods of psychiatry. But they’re utterly unrewarding.
Finally, to my intense relief, the commentaries end. Cerebus’ narration turns flirty, and we discover that he’s been telling this story to a young woman he clearly fancies. He marries himself to her – the same trick he used back when he raped Astoria in Church And State – and we discover, in a last page reveal that serves as the book’s cliffhanger, that she looks exactly like Jaka. After 400 pages of Cerebus warning us of the blandishments of women, he’s fallen for them all over again. It’s meant to be a big, portentious reveal. Maybe if you have a shred of investment left at this point, it is.
I don’t. Because the sad, angry truth is that nothing works in this wretched comic. The comic pastiches feel careless and the celebrity ones empty. The setpieces fall flat – there’s something which I think is a Harvey Kurtzman tribute trying to give some potency to the farcical war scenes as a corpse rises and starts quoting verse, but it’s tawdry. Even the reliable Gerhard is breaking down – he almost quit at several points in the last 30 issues, beset by artistic self-doubt and, later interviews hint, a growing despair at what he was having to be part of. There is only one artistic advance – the beginning of Sim’s experiments with photorealism, but it’s a dead end, static and cold.
The pacing is abominable. The ideas are demented. The jokes are hate crimes. Everything Dave Sim used to be good at is almost entirely absent here. Unbelievable that it’s come to this, and there’s still a book to go.
I have probably overgenerous feelings about the first bit of Latter Days for all its real issues, because for the first time I was picking up Cerebus as it was published. But just a bit of Chasing YHVH sent me away until issue #300.
How do you reconcile Sim’s treatment of the Shoah here with his later exploration of those themes in Judenhaas, if indeed you think there’s any meaningful tension between them to reconcile?
I can’t answer that directly because I haven’t read Judenhass. But I can clarify what Sim says in Latter Days. I’m using “brought it on themselves” rather than “deserved” deliberately to try to capture what he’s getting at, in his tastelessly coy way. In Sim’s theology, God forbids his people from sacrificing cattle, but they do anyway to please YoohWhoo (the evil female demiurge). Cerebus asks Konigsberg how many cattle “your people” (the Jews) sacrificed – Konigsberg feels sick and answers “Millions, probably”. Cerebus says that one day there will be payback for that, and Sim isn’t subtle about what he’s talking about:
“Someday, Yoohwhoo is going to demand that that “debt” be paid. And… millions, you said? Millions of your people are going to…um [long pause] [clears throat]”
So as far as I can tell the viewpoint is that the Jews’ disobedience in sacrificing cattle will eventually inevitably result in millions of them being killed by a vindictive Yoowhoo. There’s no indication Sim thinks the Shoah is a good thing, more an invitable payback for transgression by an evil divinity. Since Judenhass is meant to be a solemn and respectable historical comic, I’d guess this explanation doesn’t make it in.
I realize that the answer may well be “Sim made it up from nothing”, but is there more detail (presumably extremely cherry-picked verses?) to “God forbids his people from sacrificing cattle”?
And . . . I think there’s an additional point of confusion: YoohWhoo was the one that demanded the sacrifices, but is also the one that was made angry by those sacrifices? Am I understanding that right? (And I realize the answer may well be “Sim lost track of which god/demiurge wanted what”)
Yea I have no answer to why YoohWhoo not God is the one delivering the payback, that jumped out at me too, it’s possible a deeper read of the Torah sections might reveal the answer but that is not going to happen :)
I think looking back at my posts in The Other Place during my lockdown re-read that it’s got something to do with – and I can scarcely believe I’m writing this – it’s because cows are fruit and not actually animals, therefore are not a suitable sacrifice. But I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to read and check.
Oh. Oh no. OH DAVE SIM NO.
I withdraw everything I wrote about Hebrew. The fact that “bull/cow” and “fruit” begin with the same two letters in Hebrew must be a huge coincidence, because that is so much not where Sim got the equivalence from. Actually engage with the original language? Ha ha ha NOPE.
I was curious enough to try and find out if anyone else had commented on the exegesis in Latter Days, so I searched, and before I found anything else relevant, I stumbled across a collection of scans of the actual comic issues. The relevant issues are Cerebus #280-#290 ( Latter Days #15: In the Beginning through at least Latter Days #25: Chasing YHWH IX )
It will take me some time to get the textev written up properly, but, in a very small nutshell, Sim/Cerebus decides that cattle are fruit because of some very very close reading indeed of how the KJV translation of Genesis 1 uses English pronouns about what is created. There’s an image on the same page, by the way, that shows some cows standing around, then slaughtered and skinned cow carcasses hanging from a tree.
lolsob
Ugh.
Well, I can provide some connection there — the Hebrew words for “cow” and “fruit” do actually begin with the same letters (vowels don’t count) (“par(m)/parah(f)” vs “pri” or “peri”). But they are not the same, obviously.
Sim probably got a concordance or dictionary, saw the similarities, and decided that he knew better than actual Hebrew scholars.
And the whole “fruits are not a suitable sacrifice” probably derives from the Cain+Abel story, except that it’s not stated explicitly why Cain’s sacrifice was rejected. There’s never an explicit commandment to not sacrifice fruit.
I also note that that the Cain+Abel section (Gen 4) actually has, explicitly, Cain bringing “fruit of the ground“, which cannot be construed as “cow”.
Finally, Gen 4 is one of the J sections, where God is referred to as YHVH in the Hebrew. So Sim did (probably) originally intend that YoohWhoo forbids her people from sacrificing cows, and got confused.
OK, I *have* now read Judenhass – Sim has made it publically available and it’s very short – and Simon is right, it’s *astonishingly* hard to reconcile with Latter Days, which not only parallels Jewish cattle sacrifice with the Shoah but a page or two earlier has Cerebus make indirect reference to the antisemitic “Christ-killers” trope…which crops up as such in Judenhass. Since Sim has publically stood by his Torah commentaries (and AFAIK his subsequent Bible readings line up with them), I can only think of three options here:
i) The basic thrust of Cerebus insight is meant to be taken as (ahem) gospel, but some of his glosses on it are just him being an asshole
ii) Sim realised those elements were antisemitic, and Judenhass is partly meant as an act of repentance for crossing those particular lines in the earlier comic
iii) Sim genuinely didn’t see any contradiction, because he’s Dave Sim and he tends not to: the Torah commentaries were a righteous act, so was making Judenhass.
I don’t know which is right. What a strange guy he is.
From reading the Cerebus Yahoo Groups around the time that Judenhass was published, it was the third. He genuinely believes that YHWH caused the Shoah to punish the Jews for their “transgressions”. He also didn’t see any contradiction between the theme of Judenhass (that sustained propaganda against a group of people as being subhuman leads to them being murdered) and his own hate-speech.
Remember, this is a man who literally thought that the 2004 tsunami was caused by YHWH being angry that he’d revealed her secrets in his comic.
Absolutely not here to defend this, the Torah sections is indeed the most unreadable thing I’ve ever seen – but one note of something that only Dave Sim had the ‘foresight’ to do: create a cast of characters over decades of work and kill them nearly all off-screen. 3 year pass in the first issue, 30 in the second, and by the end of the book it’s another 150.
I came to this numbers by looking up The Cerebus Timeline, because of course someone’s made one. There’s a note at the end saying that the author had presented an earlier version to Dave Sim, and Dave had mentioned it in the backnotes to Latter Days:
And the author says huh, it’s weird that he thinks that’s weird
a) sure, buddy b) I suppose if I found myself a massive fan but wanted to avoid considering how much time I’d spent involved with Dave Sim’s emotional state, constructing a Timeline might work as a distraction…
Hello, I was the compiler of the Cerebus Timeline. I began work on it partway through Church & State, back before Sim’s toxicity had really manifested. I greatly enjoy this kind of amateur scholarship, and have done a bunch more over the years with other (less problematic) authors. It is true that, by Latter Days, I was having serious second thoughts. I was enjoying the comic less and less, yet a) I really didn’t want to leave the project incomplete and b) Sim was doing some interesting things with chronology. So yes, doing the Timeline was pretty much the only thing that got me through the last few books. The primary point of the coda was to make it clear that I in no way endorsed the views of late-Sim.
Hi! Sorry if I was a little dismissive, big projects are one of the things that I love about the internet, and in many ways it’s better than having complex feelings about Cerebus and expressing them by just… buying the comics.
(were you reading this anyway, did I trip some referral alarm?)
No offense taken!
I don’t have the ego to have alarms about myself. I do, still, have sufficient fondness for the “good parts” of Cerebus that I was following these essays with interest.
The best/worst/most Dave Sim example of this is Astoria, who walks off-page to live a life of personal satisfaction above the political fray… and is promptly annihilated along with the entire rest of Iest. (Bad luck Dino and the Bistro Continentale)
Yeah, though at least you can call her story (abruptly) over – the thought occurs to me that one of the main effects of this FFWD on the story is that we never (I think) get to see what Rick thinks of what happens?
We do – kind of. Rick appears to Cerebus in the blizzard in a vision, as a young man, and explains he’s dead, crucified by the Cirinists a few days previously.
In fact I think the only real regulars who don’t get an individual ending are Julius (and Leonardi, if he counts) and the Roach. Rick is executed; Astoria and Po (and Powers?) die in Iest; Posey dies in the labour camp; Jaka’s exit from Cerebus’ life is pretty definitive as a conclusion; we can assume the Guys continue to booze it up in the bar; the Elf and Elrod turn out to be fictional; Joanne is sent to hell; Cirin ends up a lab rat.
So I was never a Cerebus reader. Pretty much every issue of the comic I own was a back issue purchase; the only exception are the first few issues of Latter Days. When the comic reached this point I decided that I wanted to keep up with it, because despite the toxicity I still considered it a milestone and wanted to be there to see it. I got about 4 issues in before I quit. That this bit was among the more readable parts of Latter Days is astonishing.
To me, the best part of this book, the only part I think of with anything resembling fondness, is when Sim writes about the last days of the Three Stooges. There’s a palpable sadness and despair in the way he details the end of their creative partnership and lives, a reminder that these men who spent their whole lives trying to make people laugh died fragile and damaged old men.
Other than that, the book ranges from so ridiculous it’s hard to care (the Spawn stuff) to utterly unwelcoming. I’ve only read the phone book, and I basically skipped every page of Chasing YHWH. You almost have to give it to Dave, he had to know how many readers he was losing every month and he just kept making these completely unlikeable creative choices because it’s what he felt compelled to do. A single minded, dedicated artist to the very end, even if his art just kept getting worse and more morally repugnant.
That is probably the high point, you’re right – it doesn’t quite land for me because I don’t know anything much about the Stooges and also because Cerebus keeps interrupting himself in his “old man Cerebus” narrator voice, which dampens the retelling a bit. But there’s a humanity to it.
There was a comment he made about the black athlete, something to do with, ‘hif we’re going to have a black character you’re damn right we’re giving him a huge dick’ that curdled the last traces of lingering goodwill I had for Sim and turned the rest of the run into a hate read that quickly dwindled into a bored ‘I forget every month to stop buying this I just want to jump to the end.’
It’s been a long since I’ve read Latter Days, but I remember the Woody Allen material being strange even by the standard of late Cerebus. Allen’s comedic persona had the kind of distintice instantly recognizable speech pattern and body language that makes for easy impersonations, but if I remember correctly, Sim took surprisingly little advantage of that. I don’t recall it as being the kind of lovingly-executed caricature you find in Lord Julius, Guys, the Three Wise Fellows, etc.
But it had lots of references to Allen’s film work, with “Chasing YHWH” opening with an imiation of his trademark “opening credits title font.” During the endless text sections of Cerebus reading the Torah, I remember some of the accompanying art was photorealistic movie stills, many of which were from Bergman or Fellini classics, with Koningsberg dropped in to replace the film’s actual stars (a parody of Allen’s well-established love of the older filmmakers).
At some point Sim uses a quote from Allen’s 1980 film ‘Stardust Memories,’ “I prefer the early, funny ones,” echoing a common critique from when Allen switched from silly comedies to more dramatic ones. Only Sim is applying it to his own readers.
If I’m forgetting something important about this, let me know.
“Konigsberg dropped in”
also this is the plot (and technique) of zelig! woody as a figure dropped into classic stills from history and culture
One thing I think you missed and one thing I have to shamefacedly admit:
1) The Krazy Kat homage, brief as it was, was FANTASTIC!
2) When the woman who we will learn later thought of herself as “the New Joanne” (and there might even have been a reference to this somehow in “Latter Days”?) is revealed in fact to be a dead ringer for Jaka, it took my breath away, for the first time in a looooong time, and the last time until issue #299
“In fact, I’ve only encountered one blogger with good things to say about Latter Days, and he ended up collaborating with Dave Sim.”
Know who this is in regards too, and their own volume by volume reread is very funny to go through. At one point they note they “don’t read novels” except for House of Leaves.
I stopped reading part-way through this volume. Up to this point I was still reading just to see what Sim would get up to next.
But at this point it became unreadable. Just a lot of work with no characters to actually care about even a little.
“In an issue of ‘The Reads Journal’, Garth Inniscent is interviewed by ‘Gary Growth’ “
OK, THIS is funny!
The rest does sound terrible, however.
The self-contained Five Bar Gate issue and the issue where Cerebus and the Stooges stumble their way through 100% darkness are the only two issues worth reading in this wretched stretch. No coincidence that they’re basically standalone 1-issue stories.