I did not intend to spend a couple of months writing almost 60,000 words about Cerebus. Honestly.
What happened was this. A reader briefly in the early 90s, I always had a vague plan that I’d finish the comic. I did, adding reviews to Goodreads as I went, and then thought, let’s post the reviews on the blog. Maybe revise them a bit. Revise became rewrite, and here we are.
As I said in the conclusion, there’s something about Cerebus that does this to people. The internet is strewn with readthroughs and reminiscences. If you’re a writer, and you finish it – particularly if you were one of the few who made the trek month on month – you may feel compelled to offer some evidence, a snapshot of you, mad-eyed and frostbitten, on top of this notorious peak.
So there’s a lot of writing about Cerebus already, some of it really good. I wrote my posts as a sort of personal journey through the comic, and as I wrote I realised they overlap a lot with what other critics have said. So I knew I’d need to end with this epilogue, a look at those writers and the context Cerebus exists in now.
Before and early on in the project, I read three pieces, or series, about Cerebus which made a particular impression on me – the Three Wise Criticks of the concluding post.
The first is Andrew Rilstone, who I first encountered as the editor of the seminal RPG zine Aslan and who followed Cerebus til the end, blogging about it as it reached its conclusion. He revisited the series in 2021 and published a short book, When Did You Stop Reading Cerebus?, which is also available as a series of blog posts. It’s about Cerebus as a big, difficult, novel, and how we can’t just ignore the ugly or difficult parts of such books. Rilstone profoundly disagrees with Dave Sim, but the book nonetheless was (kind of) endorsed by Sim in one of his videos. Rilstone is also, as far as I know, the only one of these writers to have done his own Biblical exegesis! (On Mark, a series of posts I enjoyed roughly 10,000 times more than Cerebus’ Torah commentaries)
The second is Douglas Wolk, a music and comics critic who wrote the wonderful guide to Marvel Comics, All Of The Marvels. Before that he wrote Reading Comics, in which he discussed the spectacular craft, innovation and also the extreme disappointment and difficulty of Cerebus. The Cerebus part of Reading Comics is based in large part on his 2006 Believer essay, Aardvark Politick. Wolk was one of the first critics to lay out what you might call the positive case for Cerebus as a great work with terrible aspects, as opposed to the negative case for it, that it’s a great work which turns into a terrible one.
And the third is Tegan O’Neil, who wrote a series of posts about the likely legacy of Cerebus, after a flurry of 2011 interest in the comic (see below). The posts are notes toward an abandoned essay, but she’s the best writer I’ve read about Dave Sim himself, laying out exactly what makes him and his work so tricky to grapple with. I first read her posts doing this project, and they definitely informed my thinking about Sim and his development as a thinker. While in 2011 O’Neil listed Cerebus as one of her favourite comics, she considers Sim indefensible, and thinks the series will survive, but largely as an object of academic study.
For me, those were the big three must-read pieces on Cerebus. They all, I think, are by people who at least once liked (or even loved) the comic more than I do, but that’s fine: most of these write-ups are, and the appeal of Cerebus for me is partly how extreme its highs and lows are.
I would add a fourth piece now I’ve actually read it – Tim Kreider’s “Irredeemable”, published in The Comics Journal in 2011 (excerpted here), which was the major critical analysis that prompted the Tegan O’Neil posts. Kreider’s essay is long and excellent; when I finished my posts, I subscribed to the Comics Journal archive largely so I could read it, and was a little annoyed and envious that it covers so many of the same points, more concisely. If you can get hold of it, it’s a tremendous essay.
Rilstone, Wolk and O’Neil are all ‘long-haulers’ – they had read Cerebus for years and lasted all the way to 300. Kreider is a “finisher” like me – he sat down after the fact and tackled the whole thing. All four write about Cerebus as a whole, which is, I have to ruefully admit, a sensible way to do it. But some bloggers have made a phonebook by phonebook analysis, even if most of them don’t get to the end.
One who did is Carson Grubaugh, an artist who ended up collaborating with Dave Sim on Sim’s most recent non-Cerebus project, The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond. Grubaugh, unsurprisingly given that, agrees with Sim’s ideas more than anyone else I’m mentioning, so caveat lector. But his mid-10s read-through is still invaluable, because it’s the best visual guide to the techniques Sim developed, innovated and used throughout the series. I’ve stayed away from visual examples from Cerebus but this is the place to go if you want to explore the purer craft and technique aspects of the books.
There’s a ton of other critical writing about Cerebus, but I want to mention two other pieces which really struck me. Emma Tinker wrote a PHD about comics and it included a very detailed look at a single sequence from Guys (Cerebus’ drunken dream) which shows how deep you can go into even a fairly brief part of the comic. And John L Roberson wrote a passionate essay about his relationship with Cerebus and his feelings of betrayal at how things turned out, particularly at the level of individual characters like Jaka. I don’t agree with everything he says but it’s a deeply felt example of what I called the “negative case” above.
Then there are the websites. The Cerebus wiki is useful for its collecting quotes and interview responses from Sim himself, which illuminate what he thought he was doing or what he claims to have thought he was doing (it gets complicated). You also get a lot of this, and some useful background detail, in the archives of the still-running A Moment Of Cerebus website, which is also your go-to spot should you want to hear the most recent thoughts of Dave Sim and catch up on his current projects, like the imminent manga parody Akimbo.
Which brings us to the legacy of Cerebus. Before I talk about that, a shout out to two non-Cerebus works of comic criticism which have been a more general inspiration.
One is Elizabeth Sandifer’s The Last War In Albion, which she’s been working on for years, an account of the magical conflict between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison which doubles as a (filtered, but fairly comprehensive given how central those two were) history of comics from the 80s onward. Dave Sim appears in a couple of cameos, but it’s mostly the stories of Moore, Morrison and some of their contemporaries. It’s excellent, and you can back it at her and her husband Penn’s joint Patreon.
The other is Harry Thompson’s 1991 book Tintin: Herge And His Creation, still a model of how to write a book-by-book critical biography and appreciation of a comics artist without using any of the actual art.
And I’d like to broadly thank the various people who’ve commented and promoted the work on Bluesky as I posted it, especially (but not only) Cerebus expert Andrew Hickey, who is as tired of Dave Sim’s bullshit as anyone and knows more about it than most.
*
Twenty years after the end of Cerebus, Dave Sim still lives and works in the house and studio where he drew the comic. The big Comics Journal essay on his work came out in 2011; since then, while he remains legendary as a cautionary tale about maleness, madness or divorcedness (take your pick), interest in his actual work has been intermittent. His big creative interest until 2015 was photorealism, carrying on from his experiments near the end of Cerebus. It informed Judenhass, his memorial piece about the Shoah; Glamorpuss, his monthly fashion satire; and the uncompleted (perhaps uncompletable) biography/conspiracy/graphic novel The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond.
In 2015, a wrist injury ended his drawing career for a long time – he’s only recently begun to draw again. He kept a publication schedule going, though, with the launch of Cerebus In Hell?, a magazine made up of regular first issues, in which Sim makes collages of his own and public domain art and adds captions on top of them. The series deals with contemporary life from COVID-19 to the fight for abortion rights – I’ve not read any of it, though by every account, Sim’s views are extremely predictable and have not mellowed.
The world, or the further-right parts of it, have moved closer to Sim, and one of the questions I had sitting down to re-read Cerebus is “how come this guy hasn’t become a cult figure on the alt-right?”. Reading it sorted that one out: Sim’s views on gender and politics are ordinary enough in those circles, but his religious convictions are intense and bizarre and inseparable from anything else he thinks, worlds away from the convenient surface performances that pass for faith on much of the right, and grossly heretical to anyone who does believe.
In 2020, a right-wing artist did try and hire Sim as writer on his comic, only for a fresh scandal to surface – Sim’s grooming of a teenage fan during his “rock star” days back on the 80s convention circuit. Sim was only too happy to clarify: yes he’d done it, and written about it in the letter columns; yes, he’d slept with her when she was older; yes, it was very wrong and oh, by the way, it was also the only truly happy time in his life. So that was the end of Dave Sim, alt-right comics star.
I found that story a little bit into this project and it was one of the times when I thought, christ, am I the arsehole for even doing this? Sim’s views are repellent; I’m hardly surprised he was a creep, why not just forget him and be done with it? I’m still not sure I have an answer for that. I don’t recommend reading Cerebus, I’m just warning you that if you do read Cerebus you might end up wanting to talk about it.
When Dave Sim dies, he says, all of Cerebus will immediately go into the public domain – he has no heirs and he bought Gerhard’s half of the business. As Kreider points out in his essay, it’s possible to imagine someone putting together a bowdlerised version of the comic, or a “best of” spotlighting individual pages or sequences. Maybe the dream of the New York Times might yet come true!
It seems unlikely, and it’s equally possible to imagine nobody caring at all. Cerebus’ readership now remains mostly people who’ve already read it, whether scratching a completist itch like I did, or recreating an extraordinary, unique event that happened once, in and to comics. A few of those original readers of Cerebus will keep doing what I did, mapping their path through the labyrinth of Dave Sim’s creativity, hate and fear. I will not be the last person, outside the academy, to write about Cerebus The Aardvark. But I don’t think there will be many more.
Is the Alex Raymond book uncompleted? There’s a copy in the library system that I’m going to order soon, was it published unfinished?
No but also yes. (I didn’t know all this when I offered that summary!)
It was originally serialised in Glamourpuss then *heavily* rewritten for publication as a book. But Sim’s hand injury meant he couldn’t finish it, so Carson Grubaugh completed it using his notes and sketches and that’s the published version.
BUT since then Sim has recovered enough to draw his own version and is redrawing and building on the Grubaugh work to create (presumably) the definitive version. So it’s both completed and uncompleted.
(”Uncompletable” is me referring to the book’s actual content, a web of connection making which might potentially include everything that has ever happened in comics)
” So it’s both completed and uncompleted.”
Seems about right!
Yes, and also no.
As I wrote about it on ILC, for I have actually read the thing:
I’m about halfway through the Sim content of SDOAR and it’s… something.
I hadn’t realised until I read Eddie Campbell’s intro that Sim had abandoned completely all the work he had included in glamourpuss (for, frankly, Sim-based reasons) and instead appears to be creating a revenge narrative where Alex Raymond is the only true artist and Caniff had him killed so the extent of his rip-off wasn’t exposed.
Of course, Dave being Dave, this is only revealed when you compare King Features published funny pages vs the original art and they are in on the conspiracy. And in an even more Dave move, this is a multi-dimensional conspiracy achieved using an as-yet undiscovered school of metaphysics revealed to (possibly only) him.
The most ridiculous part so far though is obliquely comparing Rob Liefeld to Alex Raymond. Even the staunchest defenders have to acknowledge that’s fucking crazy talk…
…At the moment it’s all mystic visionary Dave and very little sexual politics Dave – he touches on it once and backs the fuck away VERY quickly – and if it was anybody else (e.g. Scott McCloud) it’d be getting discussed very seriously.
Even if you don’t agree with his central premise (and I’m not sure who else does apart from Dave) some of his Tangents are really engaging no matter how implausible (for example, Raymond’s affair physically manifested a parallel Earth in another dimension which Oskar Lebeck had his ideas for Twin Earths psychically beamed from which is why they’re so technologically accurate to the modern day).
Also Dave’s art is, for the first 100 pages or so, absolutely undiminished and his layouts are great. Lettering sucks though…
…I’m at about page 150 and Dave’s last is 209 before it becomes nearly all Carson…
…The Dave stuff in SDoAR is somewhere between 15 and 8 years old, depending on reuse. Haven’t got to him just doing layouts yet…
…Got to the end of Dave’s art life and it’s losing its way a bit, meandering around the Margaret Mitchell revelation it promised earlier without actually getting anywhere near revealing.
Scott and Zelda turn up about now so I can see Dave folding himself into the metaphysics soon.
And in other cosmic alignment, a GoFundMe was launched while I’ve been reading to put online the TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY pages Dave has done outlines for since he stopped interacting with Carson Grubaugh (obviously including the Dave versions of the blue pages in SDOAR)…
It’s nowhere near as interesting as Dave thinks it is, but the level of rambling incoherence and faux-mysticism is astonishing. But also in some ways more readable because it doesn’t have any of the Marxist-feminist-homosexualist axis stuff (or not very much) so may be more palatable. But it is almost fascinating to see a different aspect his madness.
I tried to read it because I was hoping it would be a pseudo-biography of Alex Raymond in the style of Melmoth or Going Home, and it sure as hell ain’t that.
Right….
Well, be interesting to see the current volume…
Thanks so much for writing this. I found it through a link to the 3rd or 4th post while the sequence was in progress, then I had to reread all of Cerebus (skipped the last 2 volumes tho, your summaries were quite enough) and follow along.
I’m a cartoonist and webcomic creator, not at all successful in any capitalist sense but I keep at it. I got hooked on Cerebus phonebooks in college, right about when Church & State I came out. Only now am I realizing how much I internalized Sim’s hyper-willingness to follow a whim and ignore familiar structures, which has been both liberating and limiting. (Thankfully that’s all I internalized.)
What a weird intractible beast of a work of art. Thanks again for your most enjoyable and edifying insights.
“It seems unlikely, and it’s equally possible to imagine nobody caring at all.”
Alone, unmourned and unloved, yeah?
The victim of the alleged ‘grooming’ published a spirited defence of Sim on Moment of Cerebus recently. Having read a previous defence she’d made of him as an individual on a comics board post-issue 300 (and the resultant bullying/abuse from guys who’d been pontificating on Sim’s misogyny at some length) I’d taken the backwards conjecture of a few comic fanboys with a pillar of salt anyway.
Suspect it was more a case of manchild dates emotional equal, which her account -and his – seem to bear out.
Somewhere else on Moment, there’s also an interesting piece of advice he gave to young female artists on gauging responses to their work at Cons etc aimed at filtering out potential creeps…
Worth noting his post Deni exes -including the one he was dating to sometime during Going Home /Latter Days – all report he was gent as a boyfriend and saw little to no evidence of the extreme positions he was taking in print.
On a more trivial note, the number #1s are mostly dreadful, though there are flashes of the old wit buried in there. But these are very intermittent.Predictably enough, COVID 19 was Marxist-feminist-homosexualist-axis hysteria…
I could believe that Sim is a different man in person.
There’s a legendary 1970s film called If Footman Tire You, What Will Horses Do? adapted from the preaching of Estus W Pirkle, a psychotic Baptist minister who believed that America’s moral decline (rock music, candy, pre-marital sex, women wearing short skirts) meant it would be taken over by Marxists from Cuba in a few years. It’s as gory as any horror movie, but strangely compelling, if you like that sort of thing.
I recently listened to a commentary track from Estus W Pirkle’s son, Greg, who describes his upbringing. You’d think it’d be a childhood from hell—Ned Flanders meets A Child Called It. But no. Estus W Pirkle was apparently a kind and loving father! (Although he did get really upset when he heard that Negativland had sampled one of his sermons for “Christianity is Stupid”)
People have layers, I guess.
All the ‘relatonship advice’ in the comic itself – some of which is explicitly characterised as coming from Sim-analogue Viktor Davis – pretty much amounts to “men, pretend to be happy and personable all the time”, no reason to believe Sim didn’t apply this to his own relationships IMO.
There’s a lot of competition but I still think “Dav(e) is, Viktor” is Sim’s worst ever pun/DO YOU SEE gotcha.
I actually think Burning Hell and Believer’s Heaven are better Pinkus-bait but neither have the Communist edge that mark out Footmen as being an oddity.
The problem with the “alleged” comments is that she wouldn’t be thr first person to defend her abuser.
Also, we don’t really need “alleged” at all. Her met her when she was a child and he was an adult, kept up a relationship with her and then consummated it when she was an adult. That’s a fairly textbook case of grooming. Being an emotionally immature manchild doesn’t change any of that.
I’ve enjoyed reading these and it’s made me wonder why comics are something I kind of stalled on. I read the Beano and Oink as a child (and Peanuts and Asterix sort of count too?), but never really graduated to anything else, think maybe my lack of interest in superheroes of any sort was a barrier. As an adult I’ve read a few Daniel Clowes and a few other things, but nothing has stuck. I love massive unrealistically ambitious literary projects, Emile Zola’s Les Rougon Maquarts is a favourite, but you’ve convinced me that Cerberus isn’t for me. So, what is? Wondering if anyone here has any suggestions. Would prefer set in a real-ish world, and no superheroes, should be unrealistically ambitious in scope, that’s a given.
Dave has just published his first ‘all-new writing and art’ Cerebus book, a quite slim manga influenced piece. It’s also bloody rubbish.
Again, from That Place:
In news that should surprise nobody, Akimbo is bad. Unreadably bad. But most interestingly it ably demonstrates the complete collapse as of Dave as a comics creator because there is no part of it executed even vaguely competently.
The “writing”: in a style familiar to anyone who’s ever looked at CiH?! or even just the covers, Dave has a single thought and shouts it multiple times, changing the words ever so slightly, in the hope that it sinks in. I think what he’s attempting to do in this case is suggest the feminist/homosexualist axis is trying to normalise paedophilia by making “romance” all about underdeveloped bodies and that real women (specifically ones with boobs) should rise from their slumbers and reclaim their rightful place beside manly men (while executing the girly men that are enablers to this masterplan. If we thought Dave was capable of self-reflection, and pushing the ‘Cerebus is Dave’ angle, he might be assumed to be referencing the recent grooming stories and indicating that even he, the Diuine Cerebuss, is not immune from the tendrils of the axis and that, no matter how much it suits the narrative and might feel like the right thing, we should always be vigilant that the nest of vipers are permanently trying to undermine the forces of good.
If we’re going to be very, very generous there’s nearly a point being made about Cerebus (the comic) and how it took on a life of its own – it was supposed to be an adventure comic and instead turned into a romance comic. For girls. And it wouldn’t be too much of a reach to think it’s at least part of Dave’s thought process; he explicitly says the adventure/romance/girls line twice as the internalised thoughts of Akimbo. But whose fault is that, and which periods is Dave referring to? Or which romance even, given I think I’ve said before that Cerebus/Bear is the love story at the heart of the second third. For a comic that exists now only as exegesis, or Baudrillardan critique, it would be tempting to explore this idea (and I yet might) but these short lines here are already more thought than Dave has given to the topic.
The “art”: in total it’s about half a dozen sketches. They’re relaid on slightly different backgrounds, or in different configurations or magnifications/zooms, but there is very little here. It’s also admitted in a thought bubble that these are ‘just’ tracings – again, this is not even vaguely unusual to anyone who’s looked at any of the post-Cerebus/pre-injury work – but what’s notable is just how inept they are. In a couple of the Akimbo frames you can see just how rough the trace is, and it looks like Dave can’t manage more than a couple of mm of straight work before stopping because there’s just no continuous work at all, it’s just a series of small scrapes on the paper that just about look like a real thing at a macro enough level. That this even passed a basic editorial quality check is shocking enough but it shows a complete decline in abilities and raises the question of how much work whoever is doing the inking on the ‘good’ pieces reflects the output and how much of it is even Dave any more.
The “lettering”: lOv3 thee qvIRky STYLINGS off gL4mOURpVss l3TTeRinG?!!??! Well it’s here in spades. It’s obviously supposed to be a specific way of speaking, but buggered if I can work it out or care enough to. It’s just a lazy retread of previous work, which itself was a facsimile of late-era attempts to recapture what was once genuine innovation. 35 years of dilution have rendered the effect like homeopathy – a placebo for true believers but the home of cranks and rogues to the rest of us.
And with that, Defend The Indefensible: Dave Sim Current Edition is over. There’s no part of his ability remaining that can be used to justify looking at any of the new material and his once numerous talents have deserted him. I’ll most likely stay on board for the Archive project, at least until it’s done the first pass through all the books, because they’re actually very well done (although if i’m honest the quality reduces the later in the phonebooks we get to, as Dave’s background is largely already published so he has less to say about them. It looks like facsimile editions of his notebooks is the new cash converter, although in classic Sim style they’re only really affordable if you send cheques directly to the Off-White House. Any attempt to use modern technology like a website (that already exists) or electronic mail (that already exists) come with cost penalties that we all deserve, obviously, for daring to live in the current era.
Ooooof. Yes I wondered what this would end up like. Sim’s non-engagement with manga, working in an era which spanned its first big wave of Western influence, is one of the many things that make him stand out, especially as he keeps hitting on techniques that parallel it and its tropes (the climactic five-bar-gate scene in Guys!)
Popular and influential as AKIRA is, there’s definitely an on-brand quality about Sim picking something from the early 80s for a parody of a medium where the turnover of popular series is generally quick.
Thanks for writing this series. I enjoyed it immensely. It actually inspired me (contra doctor’s orders) to start reading Cerebus.
I read issues #1-#3, then skipped ahead to somewhere in the high 200s. The difference was amazing—going from a bud sprouting on a stem, to a huge rotting flower, petals dissolving into muck. Obviously I didn’t expect to understand the story, but the sense of aesthetic collapse was stark. The start and end of Cerebrus barely look like they were created by the same species, let alone the same human!
Even in the early issues, Dave Sim isn’t an amazing writer. I noticed this in the letters of introduction: Deni Loubert’s will be fun and witty and engaging…but then I turn the page, and crash at high velocity into an ENDLESS BLATHERING TEXTWALL that I kind of bounce off. I’m sure Dave sharpens up after a few volumes, but I’m not looking forward to his Torah exegesis.
You’ve mentioned anime several times. Cerebus is also seen as an influential early work in the furry fandom (along with other culturejamming “comix” like Fritz the Cat and Omaha the Cat Dancer). Ironic, given Dave’s stance on gay people, that furries later became possibly the gayest subculture of all. (“By and large, furries are bi and large”—Eric Blumrich).
Well, there’s also the paradox at the heart of extremist movements. The worst thing you can do is ACTUALLY BELIEVE.
The ones who rise to the top tend to be grifters and carpetbaggers. People with no real ideological attachment to the cause, but who have glommed onto it as a way to raise their own status. (Example: one of the main figures of the GamerGate movement was Milo Yiannopolis, who a year previously had tweeted that men who play videogames are losers.)
The grifter’s strength lies in knowing when to backpedal, when to apologize, when to moderate their words and behavior. They have rabbit ears to how they (and their movement) are perceived by outsiders, and are willing to pull things back to the center (at least on a shallow rhetorical level). They play the game.
Dave Sim does not play the game. He doesn’t think it’s a game at all. He’s on a holy quest to share the truth which supersedes all politics and optics. He either doesn’t know how repellant he looks or doesn’t care.
Hardcore culture-warriors of every stripe—Ayn Rand, Andrea Dworkin, Kellie-Jay Keen—often end up as pariahs in their own movements. Their charisma and force of will gets bums onto pews, but eventually, they bog the movement down, jamming it up with their unwillingness to compromise. Not that Dave Sim is necessarily on a level with those people (he’s not charismatic), but the same principal applies.
Just wanted to say thank you for doing this. I am fascinated by Cerebus for, I suspect, much of the same reasons you are, but I don’t have the time nor inclination to read it past the parts I liked.
But with other media, I can usually scan Wiki articles, or fandoms, or read TV Tropes to find out what happened and what the fandom is saying. Cerebus is essentially blackholed for the very good reasons you’ve outlined. And as I am generally more fascinated by the discourse around controversial works of art than I am the art itself, I find that lack of discussion…
…well, I can’t say it’s a shame that there’s little discussion. It’s well deserved. But I feel the loss of that analytic body of work, that willingness to engage, and so reading this through really helped scratch an itch that’s been decades in the waiting.
I find Cerebus to be much like Babylon 5 – a media created at a time of grand experimentation, something that could absolutely not be replicated today because people now know better than to try it, and the funding would never be there for it anyway. But Babylon 5 still has enough good bits that it survives, tenacious as a moss – while Cerebus flakes away, bit by bit, as the 500 remaining true fans die off. Mumble mumble alone, unloved, etc.
That slow wasting is deserved. But the work is also weirdly magnificent simply because of how it fails in a way no other comic could, or would ever again.
So again; thank you for delving deep.
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Rereading Cerebus myself, and was struck by the following passage in issue 159:
The monument was of great and vital significance on many of the inter-connecting chessboards; alignments of power and influence ebbed and flowed in its proximity. Its completion would have wrought profound and lasting change. Now it is a mere trinket; a curiosity for future generations to puzzle over and ultimately dismiss. Once a key figure and active piece, K’cor has sunk into dementia of the commonest sort; holding conversations with a Goddess for whom he is less than a joke; he will end his days broken and without significance.
In hindsight, this is almost self-descriptive. True, _Cerebus_ was completed, which is perhaps significant on some chessboards. But in our world, it has become “a curiosity […] to puzzle over and ultimately dismiss”, while Sim himself is “broken and without significance”.
My thanks to you for writing this. I stayed with Cerebus to the end, out of loyalty and/or completistism. Though I won’t pretend I wasn’t skimming it rather than reading it towards the end.
On “Why isn’t Sim an atl-right icon?” While they might like some of his gender politics, economics might be another matter. As I recall it, in his ideal world it would be illegal for women with minor children to work outside the home, and they would therefore be entitled to support from the community or the government.
More uncertainly, I don’t think he went for the “all women should be the pseudo-property of some man” idea you find on the extreme right.
First there is an aardvark,
Then there is no aardvark,
Then there is!
Well, I finished it. Cerebus is an astonishing work in all kinds of directions. I have never read a comic with such extreme quantities of good and bad.
My emotions swung from “this is good” to “this is excellent” to “are you kidding me, I cannot believe how great this is”. I read the final 400 pages of “Church and State” in a rush and went to sleep exhausted, as if Dave Sim had used my amygdala like a speedbag. When it’s good, Cerebus is absolutely in a class with Watchman and so forth: a work that tests the limits of the comics medium and finally tears a hole right through them.
And then “Jaka’s Story” immediately throws away everything that made “Church and State” work…but finds new, different ways to be great. Perhaps equally so! It’s small-scale without being trivial; dramatic without being maudlin; brutal without being gratuitous. Audacious stuff, but Sim pulls it off with brass balls. I’m reminded of Bowie (who makes a guest appearance), and his gear-five-to-reverse shifts through styles and fashions.
Not everything Sim touches turns to gold. The satire in “High Society” is fairly broad—politicians are greedy, religious leaders are hypocrites, Marvel superheroes are silly, and so on. Cheap shots and easy targets. Sim’s pop cultural interests seldom stretch beyond the Great Depression, and can be a bit strange in their construction. I know who Elrod is based on, but why does he talk like Foghorn Leghorn? Often I was struck by the sense that Sim expected me to laugh, but I didn’t know at what, exactly.
The way Sim integrates comedy and drama is impressive: he crafts a world where a throwaway gag can also be load-bearing to the plot. This sucks you deeply into the work: you’re constantly reading between lines, looking at details, waiting for the next shoe to drop. It’s a totally different experience (and a more satisfying one) than, say, modern Marvel movies, which are terrified of confusing the audience and clearly separate humor from drama (shot 1: a scowly gritty action hero says something serious. shot 2: plucky comic relief says a quip.) Sim mixes it all together: Cerebus is streaks and whorls of humor and absurdity and drama, all frozen together in a single sheet of marble.
By “Flight”, cracks are finally starting to appear. Sim appears unsure of the comic’s identity, cyling through retcons and in-jokes. Why bring back a long-forgotten monster-of-the-week from vol 1? Doesn’t it diminish the once-in-a-lifetime cosmic awe of the Ascension to do it AGAIN? What are we doing here? Once Cerebus parodied fantasy, politics, and religion. Now it parodies…Cerebus.
Dave appears to be working under the assumption “I know what the fans want after all that downtime! MORE AKSHUN!”…but I don’t want more action! After the compelling, tightly-woven drama of the previous volumes, I have no desire to watch Cerebus swing a sword around. That is unsatisfying to me. The comic (and the world outside it) have evolved beyond the context where that made sense. Imagine if the Beatles had reunited in 1975, cut their hair in mop-tops, and tried to become a yeah-yeah-yeah skiffle band again. It wouldn’t have worked. Some doors only swing one way.
Soon after that, Dave Sim’s contributions to Gender Discourse emerge. I’m a conservative (unlike most here, I think) and feel directional sympathy to some of Dave’s views. Men and women are different; it’s easy for relationships to pull apart because of this; society is bad at discussing those differences (or even admitting they exist). Sure. There are reasonable arguments to be made for the above.
But Dave’s views are not reasonable. They’re based on resentment. They’re little hacked-out flecks of spite—exacerbated and possibly created by his divorce, drug abuse, and untreated mental health issues—which slowly gather into a rolling avalanche of all-consuming hostility, with Dave and his comic lost in the middle. Dave is worse than wrong. A wrong person can be taught to be right; an irrational ego-monster can’t be reached at all.
Lionel Trilling described conservatism as “a set of irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” You may or may not agree in the general case, but it feels true of Dangerous Dave’s worldview. It’s reactive and insubstantial. There’s no “there” there. There’s nothing to support them, and nothing a critic can score blows against. It’s just blind rage, scaffolded to a lot of shallow post-hoc intellectualization. I’m not afraid of weird, outré philosophy. It’d be interesting to read a serious intellectual argument in favor of (say) kicking puppies, if only to see the mental gymnastics involved. Yet there’s fundamentally no substance you can engage with in Dave’s thought. It’s just a guy with more issues than his comic, trauma dumping on you.
It doesn’t work. His gender-obsession infests and paralyzes Cerebus like a cordyceps, corrupting even the good parts. “Form and Void” could have been a powerful return to form…but not if you know what Ham and Mary Earnestway represent. Comics are a bad medium for didactic “here’s wot’s wot” preaching anyway, and Dave is forced to rely on all-text passages—first as a crutch, then as a wheelchair—to get his ideas across. All the worse for Cerebus, because Dave’s prose can kill an ox at a dozen paces. I skipped a lot of text in Cerebus‘s final 100 issues. Life’s too short.
At some point, Dave and reality part ways. It takes a while for you to notice that the author of Cerebus has gone mad, but eventually you DO notice. The earliest warning sign comes in Cerebus #12, where Deni Sim mentions that her husband has suffered a mental breakdown. She would later supply more details: he freaked out on acid, punched a hole in a wall, and she and his mother had him committed. (Dave disputes this: he went of his own free will and the wall-punching never happened).
Either way, the “classic” Cerebus run (“High Society” thru “Melmoth”) was likely made by a troubled man. If Dave Sim wasn’t on the struggle bus by the late 70s, he’d at least bought the ticket. I don’t say this to castigate or excuse Dave, but it feels important. There’s no “sane” Dave Sim that can be quarantined off from the rest. He didn’t get bumped on the head in 1991 and turn into Mr Hyde. His mental decline was gradual. Did incipient madness fuel the good parts of Cerebus, in some weird way? I don’t know, but on paper, a comic like “Melmoth” seems like a terrible idea. And yes, you might call it insane. Why put Oscar Wilde in your talking aardvark comic? Yes, it 100% works in practice, but it’s an artistic swerve that few normal artists would consider.
Dave’s peculiarity metastasizes into hatefulness. Long before Issue #186, we start getting weird little rants in the introductions page. Like that bizarre “sir, this is a Wendy’s” tirade in #103 about gay men and AIDS and bath houses. It’s an oft-noted phenomenon that websites with “truth” in their name have none in their contents. You could devise a similar aphorism for essays beginning with “here’s a thought”.
And then there’s the intro letter (I forget the issue) where he describes a woman at a bar grabbing his wrist and forcing him to dance with her (I may be misremembering the specifics). It’s totally reasonable to be annoyed by that, but then he goes on a proto-incel rant about how this is a CLASSIC EXAMPLE of how WOMEN exploit their POWER over MEN to (etc). It was viscerally unpleasant to read, like something you’d see on /r/PussyPassDenied.
A lot of men feel Sim-like impulses at times. At a Static-X show I was assaulted by a woman and felt anger, some of which settled on her gender—”Yeah, it’s cool how you can punch me and know I’m not allowed to hit you back”. Then I calmed down and realized I was being foolish. I hadn’t witnessed some dark gynocratic evil that lurks at the heart of Woman(tm). I’d merely had an unpleasant encounter with a stranger.
For whatever reason, Dave seems incapable of those realizations. Everything that happens is Deep and Important to him. It’s a common schizoaffective trope to see deep meaning inside random things, but honestly, I think all humans are wired up that way, at least a little. We all have a Viktor Davis inside us, trying to get out. We just have to ensure that our personal Cerebus issue #186 gets lost in the mail.
Religion? Dave didn’t find God, God found Dave. In principle, a religious conversion should be a humbling experience—you’re broken down, and forced to rethink your life and values basically from square one. But all too often, it’s a moment of personal narcissism. You have discovered The Truth(tm). You are wise, and other people are foolish. Dave’s conversion seems like the second kind: a chance to take all of his prejudices and rewrite them in permanent “God says it” ink.
What changes when Dave found God? Nothing. He didn’t like women before or after he converted. He was paranoid before and after he converted. His comic remains a dismaying wreckage-field (strewn with broken beauty and rubbish) before and after he converted. His shoggoth-philosophy sprouted a few more mutant heads and limbs, but that’s it. How kind of God to confirm that all of Dave’s pre-existing views were correct.
At least his triple-conversion to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism is fairly unique and interesting. Based on what I’ve seen, he now seems to be turning into a yet another Fox News viewer (or the Canadian equivalent): his brain foaming with worms, obsessed with Muslims and liberals and Covid, mad in the most boring way possible. If Cerebus had been completed a decade later, I suspect we’d be reading arcs about Barack HUSSEIN Obummer, with Hillary Clinton cackling inside her Cirinist hood. So I suppose there’s always that: Cerebus could have been even worse.
Was Dave ultimately a force for good in independent comics? He seems almost like a cautionary tale. If you were a businessman with an algorithm instead of a soul and you wanted to make a case that artists should be shackled to their desks and forced to crank out product…wouldn’t Cerebus literally be the first case you point to? “Here’s what happens when an artist controls their own work. Cerebus happens.”
Dave Sim destroyed his life’s work. Not only did he ruin Cerebus, he salted the earth beneath it, ensuring it would never come back in the hands of another. Maybe that was the plan all along. There will be no Cerebus revival; the world is slowly forgetting it. Casual discussion of Cerebus online is dominated by shock and outrage over its creator’s Bad and Wrong views—nobody seems to care much about the actual comic. Which is sad, because the comic is often extremely good!
Tom and commentors have compared Dave to Stan Sakai and Eiichiro Oda. You could also compare him to his longtime acquaintance Harlan Ellison: notorious SF gadly. Discussion of Ellison generally revolves around his personality, not his stories. One can be too good at self-promotion.
For better and for worse, Cerebus will remain a weird, fascinating, horrible curate’s egg. It’s like a drug. One hit makes you feel good, as does two. But eventually you stop feeling good; you have a terrible habit that you must either quit or die from. Except in the case of Cerebus, you don’t die at the end. You have read a disappointing comic, which is basically the same as dying if you think about it (I didn’t.) There’s not really a good place to stop reading Cerebus: either you leave trailing pieces of story unfinished, or you soldier through to the end, and then wonder if it was worth it.
At least we’ll never get a JJ Abrams movie where a CGI Cerebus wears sunglasses and floss-dances and says “that’s not a thing”. Again, it could have been worse.
(I apologize for the long comment. Also, I spent 5 minutes workshopping an “involuntarily Cerebate” joke, without success. In hindsight, that wasn’t a good use of my time.)
Harlan Ellison is an interesting comparison to Sim: when I was in college in the 1980s, I became huge fans of both of them. At the time, both were huge personalities and outspoken provocateurs. Sim became marginalized not just because of his increasingly noxious views but because he made them an inextricable part of his work.
I haven’t revisited Ellision in a few years now, but I voraciously read both his fiction and his essays back in the day. Discussion of Ellison may have diminished just because his creative output slowed down in his latter decades (from the 1990s on?) compared to his peak. And not to diminish Ellison’s success, acclaim and popularity in any way, I’m not sure he ever had the mainstream regard to match his self-aggrandizement. I don’t think he ever had the popular readership of, say, Kurt Vonnegut; or the high-brow literary regard of fantasists like Borges or Calvino; or created stories or characters with the cultural footprint of Richard Matheson.
But I don’t want to knock him! A friend of mine recently read “Deathbird Stories” for the first time and really liked it, so maybe he’s ripe for resdiscovery.
My friend wrote an essay about Harlan Ellison. He hit publish and on THE SAME DAY received an angry phone call from Ellison himself (he still isn’t sure how the man found his phone number!), who had compiled a list of “twenty-six factual errors”—for example, my friend had described Ellison as suing AOL/Hollywood/etc for “alleged” copyright infringement, when actually he’d won those lawsuits.
“Well,” my friend said “to my knowledge these were settlements where neither party admits fault.” Ellison then shouted the dollar number on one of his settlement checks (it was six figures) and hung up the phone.
Ellison was a great writer but like you say, he never achieved the mainstream or critical success he thought he deserved. His personality might have played a role, but it’s more that his strength was short stories, and by the time he started writing (the 50s/60s) these were declining as a cultural force. He was never a great novelist. He wrote good scripts, but struggled with the collaborative process TV writing requires. He burned a lot of bridges behind him, and sometimes ahead of him, too.