Ten Great Moments In Cerebus
Partly because it’s taken me *much* longer to get the next Cerebus piece up than I’d hoped (either tonight or tomorrow, even if I have to spend the entire time glued to the keyboard), and partly because at least one person I know has started reading Cerebus recently and is deeply unimpressed with the first volume, here’s a little bonus – ten of the best moments from the series, to show it does get better…
I’m missing some of my favourites out here, like the whole prayer sequence (“Cerebus is a bad flyspeck!”) because the pacing of the series tends to mean a ‘moment’ can be ten or fifteen pages. Likewise, scenes like Jaka’s conversation in prison only have resonance because of everything that’s been built up in the story previously. But here’s some of the sequences that last three pages or fewer…
Pope Cerebus teaches a valuable lesson, from Church & State
Alec MacQuarrie tells off his mother, from Guys
Cerebus meets his maker, from Minds
The single biggest "oh shit" moment in comics, from Jaka's Story
The Ben-Gurions Of The Galaxy - even when the content got... unusual... the craft in Cerebus can't be bettered. From Latter Days
Pud Withers, Nice Guy, from Jaka's Story
The Roach and Elrod as Swoon and Snuff of the Clueless, from Women. I have a copy of Women signed by Neil Gaiman...
Not only a great scene, this also prefigures the appearance of Oscar Wilde in later stories, and even Cerebus' own death. From Church & State
Page From Form & Void. I consider this the visual pinnacle of the series, but it's not really a book one can easily excerpt
Double page spread from Latter Days. Even when the story was at its least pleasant, the art is stunning
All character art, script and lettering Dave Sim. Background art Gerhard
Cerebus Reviewed 1: Cerebus
Cerebus – the full three hundred issue story – is, if not the greatest art-work of the twentieth century, at least a strong contender for that role.
That may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not intended to be. And it’s not a statement made through ignorance. Place it up against any of the obvious contenders – Ulysses, The Rite Of Spring, Citizen Kane, King Kong, Revolver, Rhapsody In Blue, The Wasteland, Pet Sounds – any work of high or low culture, any revolutionary piece that overturned ways of thinking or any culmination of centuries’ worth of art – and I guarantee that it will match them for technical skill, for formal innovation, for emotional depth, for the number of ideas in there, and also for entertainment value. There are pieces of art I prefer to Cerebus, but I honestly can’t think of any that I can say are better.
But while Cerebus is a great work, it’s also a great body of work. From 1977 to 2004 – a period longer than, for example, the whole run of the original series of Doctor Who, a period that spanned punk at one end and the invasion of Iraq at the other – Dave Sim (and, from 1984 on, Gerhard, who drew the backgrounds), wrote, drew, lettered and published an average of five pages a day of a single story.
I can’t think of another example in history where that’s been the case, where an artist has made a single work the whole of their professional life. A few examples come close – Charles Schulz, for example, drew Peanuts for forty-nine years – but Peanuts isn’t a continuing narrative. You can read any of the strips in any order and be at no disadvantage. On the other hand, if you were to pick up (to pick an issue at random) Cerebus #273, you’d see an aardvark who thinks he’s a superpowered rabbi trying and failing to detach his foreskin, jumping and breaking his leg, then 16 pages of white lettering on a black background with no other pictures. We won’t even get into the essay at the back…
There’s something magnificent in this, the sheer chutzpah of deciding aged twenty-one what you’re going to be doing aged forty-eight and sticking to the plan, of sitting down every day for twenty-seven years and drawing one more page in the same story. As someone who merely said he was going to do a blog post about Cerebus every week – and is two weeks behind on the second one – that’s a level of discipline I find hard to comprehend.
But it means that all Sim’s ideas, all his obsessions, everything in his life entered the same story. As someone, I forget who, put it, Sim’s achievement is roughly equivalent to Alan Moore – if Moore had drawn, as well as written, Watchmen,From Hell, Promethea, Swamp Thing, Lost Girls, Marvelman, A Disease Of Language and A Small Killing – and if every one of those stories had been part of one larger story starring Maxwell The Magic Cat.
But of course, this also means that the beginning of the story is a bit of a slog (and that I’ll have less to say about this volume than about later ones). Sim started out as a 21-year-old with little obvious talent. The first few issues of Cerebus are very obviously in thrall to two creators. As an artist, Sim desperately wants to be Barry Windsor-Smith, while as a writer he clearly admires Steve Gerber. You could have worse models, of course, but it leads to the first few issues being like this:
Page one of Cerebus #1
These first few issues are essentially just Barry Windsor-Smith Conan comics, but with the title character replaced by an aardvark, with ‘hilarious’ consequences.
But what’s fascinating about this first volume is just how quickly Sim grows as an artist and writer, and how soon he starts pushing the boundaries of what’s doable in comics. By issue twenty (of the twenty-five included in this volume) we get this:
Cerebus issue 20, by Dave Sim
Read page by page, the grey and black areas represented different states of consciousness in which Cerebus, drugged by a kidnapper, talks alternately with that kidnapper and a telepathic communication from elsewhere, but the comic as a whole made the image above. When Alan Moore and J.H. Williams did the same thing thirty years later it was praised as wildly innovative, but Sim not only did it first, but had it make more in-story sense and had form and function fit better.
Over the course of this ‘phonebook’ (as the trade paperbacks of Cerebus are referred to – they’re often over 500 pages long, and printed on cheap newsprint, much like the Marvel Essential or DC Showcase series. Among the many things in the comic industry Sim pioneered was the now-standard practice of keeping everything in print permanently in trade paperbacks) one can see Sim shake off the influence of Barry Windsor-Smith and start trying on a variety of different styles. My particular favourite in this one is this Eisner-inspired panel from issue 11:
The Roach on an Eisnerian background by Dave Sim
But he was still definitely learning at this point, and also struggling with keeping to a regular schedule – one can often see the linework getting sloppier towards the end of an issue as he rushes to complete it by the deadline. At this time as well, Sim was still obviously having difficulty integrating the cartoony Cerebus into the more ‘realistic’ world he was creating:
In this panel, Cerebus looks like he's been pasted in from a different comic from the rest of the panel.
From very early on, though, we start seeing the characters who will form the supporting cast for the first 200 of Cerebus’ 300 issues. In issue three we get Red Sophia, an airheaded parody of Robert E Howard’s ‘female Conan’ Red Sonja:
Red Sophia
Issue four gives us Sim’s first really inspired creation, Elrod of Melvinbone. The albino last ruler of a dying race, with his black sword Seersucker, Elrod is Moorcock’s Elric in body, but with the vocal mannerisms of Foghorn Leghorn. Looney Tunes cartoons would be one of the main inspirations for this early phase of Sim’s work:
Elrod explains the concept of status
Issue six brings us Jaka, a dancer who Cerebus is drugged into loving and then forgets – for now. Their romance becomes one of the major driving forces of the story:
Jaka
There’s also the Cockroach – a mentally unstable man who takes on various guises throughout the series – The Cockroach, Captain Cockroach, Moon Roach, Wolveroach and so on – in a parody of the superhero genre that clearly (ahem) ‘inspired’ The Tick a few years later:
Captain Cockroach mourns the death of his assistant Bunky
And we have the first of the real-life figures (of sorts) to make his way into the story, in the person of Lord Julius, the rather familiar-seeming ruler of Palnu, who rules by instilling so much confusion in the bureaucracy that he’s the only one who understands the system:
Lord Julius
While introducing these characters, in stories that are mostly one-off stories (with the occasional two- or three-parter) parodying other comics (we have Professor Charles X Claremont’s School For Girls and the first meeting of Sump Thing and Woman Thing, for example) Sim slowly sets up the background against which the first two hundred of his three hundred issues will be played. Lord Julius is ruling the city-state of Palnu and is the most important political figure at the moment. ‘President Weisshaupt’ (a George Washington lookalike – a reference to the conspiracy theory that Adam Weisshaupt, head of the Illuminati, replaced Washington) is trying to take over the United Feldwar States.
There are various tribes of barbarians to the North, and there are at least three other groups – the Cirinists, a group who at this point seem like nuns, whose ‘only goal is to wipe out fun in our lifetime’, who worship the goddess Terim (rather than the god Tarim, worshipped by Cerebus), and whose holy book is called “The New Matriarchy”, the Illusionists, led by Suenteus Po, who at this point seem to be hippies-cum-Buddhists, who mostly just want to smoke dope and be left alone, and the Kevilists, about whom we’re only told they exist.
The power struggle between these different groups will power the main plotlines for Cerebus’ first eighteen years or so, but we also have some of the themes that will come up over and over again cropping up here. Two separate groups (the Pigts, led by Bran Mak Muffin, and the Cirinists) decide they want to worship Cerebus as the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. We have several oppositions between male and female (and a third, neutral, force) from Cerebus’ fight with Red Sophia through to the meeting of Sump Thing and Woman Thing. And we already have the sense that Cerebus is very important to all the groups and individuals who are jostling for supreme power, and that political and religious power are closer in this world than in ours.
Cerebus gives little clue as to just how great a cartoonist Dave Sim was soon to become, but of its twenty-five issues, maybe ten of them are at least as good as anything of its time. Had Sim given up after these issues (and had the rest of comics continued on the same course – an incredibly unlikely event, as for all that Sim has been airbrushed out of comics history he was probably the single most influential creator of the 80s) Cerebus would be remembered now as a pretty good Howard The Duck knock-off with a few funny gags and some nice ideas.
But it got much, much better quickly.
Next week (honestly, I promise) High Society
Cerebus Reviewed Part Zero: The Obligatory Pseudo-Psychoanalysis
I am planning, over the next few weeks, to review the whole of Cerebus on here, roughly one post per ‘phonebook’ (some of the more interesting ones may take two posts, and I may do supplementary posts on subjects like the Marx Brothers, Oscar Wilde, Rick Veitch’s dream comics, Eddie Campbell’s Alec stories and other things which have clearly influenced the series).
I am doing this because I believe one can and should separate the wonderful work itself from the views of the creator. If it’s acceptable for me to say that Bernard Shaw is one of my favourite playwrights, despite his vociferous support for Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, then surely it is possible at least to take Sim & Gerhard’s work as a thing in itself, separate from the noxious views of (one of) the creator(s).
Except that it’s not quite that simple, is it? Because Dave Sim clearly thinks differently to other people, and that difference in thought informs his writing, and is quite possibly one of the things that make his work more interesting.
Simply put, anyone who says something like:
I think YHWH’s contribution back in the early sixties was Peter, Paul and Mary. I mean it is a way of looking at Christianity, seeing Peter, Paul and Mary a the three cornerstones after Jesus. Of course, being YHWH her point was; if you have Peter, Paul and Mary what do you need Jesus for? I think that amused God a great deal — to the extent that he countered with John, Paul, George and Ringo. Paul of course, was actually James: James Paul McCartney. SO John and James were the leaders of the band, like the sons of Zebedee, John and James, the brothers Boanerges, the sons of thunder…
So it was a good joke that on the cusp of being famous John and James had ditched Peter, Pete Best, the drummer since this is basically what the biblical John and James had attempted to do with Peter the apostle.
The George part I think was God’s way of saying that leapfrogging Peter – that is the Vatican – lands you in England and Henry VIII’s decision to make himself not only king, but head of the church as well. There have been three king Georges.
Now, having ditched Peter, that meant you had three kings or a Ring of Stars.
The Beatles were the template that attracted their own disciples, the Rolling Stones, which was another play, in my view, on the fact that there had been a pool of disciples for the two Jesus’. There was Peter, Cephas, the rock or stone, but he rolled back and forth between the two Jesus’s.
is clearly not thinking ‘normally’, whatever ‘normally’ means.
But what I don’t want to do is turn the whole thing into me trying to psychoanalyse Dave Sim through the medium of his cartoon drawings of an aardvaark. So what I propose is this – in the rest of this post I’ll identify what I think is the most relevant of Dave Sim’s differences. I’ll talk a little about it, and then not mention this again directly. The connection will be there to be made in future posts, but won’t be explicit. Those who don’t care about my untrained opinion about the mental health of someone I’ve never met can skip this bit. I really don’t even like doing this, but it’s *so* difficult to disentangle man and work…
I think Dave Sim’s problems fundamentally come down to an overactive theory of mind. Now, theory of mind is usually just an ill-defined stick with which unscientific psychologists choose to hit people with autism, by claiming that people with autism don’t have one, without actually asking them. But there’s a core meaning there, which is that most people will, if they see someone behaving a particular way, assume a set of motives for that person’s actions. (Autistic people can do this, just as anyone else can – but they’re more aware than other people that they may be assuming the *wrong* motives, because they know other people think differently from them. Normal people are more likely to assume that everyone thinks the way they do.)
However, in some people this instinct goes into overdrive. With those people, they become convinced that they know others’ motivations, even when provided with evidence to the contrary. Some people even start to impute motivation to inanimate objects and natural processes. It has even been suggested that this is the basis of religious belief, although based on spurious evidence - this study just shows that when religious people think about the emotions and behaviour of God, who they consider a really-existing being, they use the same part of the brain as when thinking about other really-existing beings, while this discussion manages to be equally offensive to both religious people and autistic people (and yet he says that the autistics are the ones who don’t distinguish between other people and inanimate objects!)
But this gives us a lot of explanatory power for a *lot* of Sim’s stranger behaviours – his belief that natural phenomena are caused by spirits (e.g. YHWH causing the Asian tsunami of 2004) or that historical events have some hidden meaning (see the quote above), and his attributions of frankly bizarre motivations to others (e.g. his belief that a gift from his parents was cursed, detailed in the notes to Latter Days) would seem to stem from this.
More importantly – and the only reason I bring this up, as I consider speculation about the mental problems of someone I’ve never met distasteful at best and extremely unethical at worst – is that this explains a good deal about his writing. Often – almost always – Sim’s characters are sharply observed in their behaviours. They often behave in unexpected or unusual ways, but after we read this we think “Yes, that is *exactly* what Jaka [or Julius, or Cerebus, or Pud] would do.”
Sometimes we can even identify with the characters, and say “Yes, I hadn’t realised it, but that’s exactly how I’d react in that situation”.
But this observation rarely extends to internal states. Apart from the utterly chilling portrayal of ‘nice guy’ nerd and attempted-rapist Pud Withers’ mental state, and the caricature that is Cerebus, we’re rarely given a glimpse of anyone’s internal monologue (understandably, as for most of the story Cerebus is the viewpoint character), and when we are, it often seems somehow… off.
And when Sim talks in text pieces about why he had characters behave as they do, his reasons often make so little sense that he might as well be saying ‘curious green ideas sleep furiously’ – there’s a basic cause-and-effect disconnect there.
This disconnect will come up time and again in our discussions of Cerebus, as I attempt to go through the whole thing, but I promise the only further mention I’ll make of how it connects to his mental state will come, if at all, in the discussions of Rick’s Story (about someone who had a lot of similarities with Sim, but had a mental breakdown and became convinced he was the Messiah) and Latter Days (the vast bulk of which is taken up with an exploration of Sim’s idiosyncratic theology, which seems very hard to detach from his mental problems). I hope to avoid it even then.
But now that the elephant in the room has been dealt with, we can get on with talking about the aardvaark.
Melmoth (hyperpost 2)
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
The death rattle, from Melmoth
Biography lends to death a new terror – Oscar Wilde
Melmoth, the sixth and shortest of the separate ‘graphic novels’ that make up the work Cerebus, is, at two hundred pages, described by its author/co-artist Dave Sim as a ‘short story’, because it takes so little time to read in comparison with his longer, more obviously dense works. Melmoth is a huge departure from everything that Sim had done before in Cerebus, not advancing the plot of the main series at all until the epilogue, but rather telling the story of the death of Oscar Wilde through the letters of the friends who were with him in his last days.
On the surface Wilde may seem a strange subject for Dave “the feminist/homosexualist/islamofascist/Marxist conspiracy are reading my mind when I masturbate” Sim, but Melmoth is the work of a very different Sim to the one we have today – a man who had recently contributed a story to Alan Moore’s GLAAD compilation (a benefit comic to attack anti-gay laws in the UK), and who dedicated this work to a cousin of his who had recently died of AIDS. And Sim treats the subject with the respect that it deserves.
After the emotional climax of Jaka’s Story (still, to my mind, the single greatest graphic novel ever created, by quite a long way) Sim had a year to kill before getting back to his gigantic political-religious conspiracy plot, and so he decided to keep the title character sidelined (Cerebus himself had not appeared for a year at the start of Melmoth, having gone off to buy a bucket of paint at a crucial moment and missed the climax of Jaka’s Story), having Cerebus appear for a handful of comic relief pages each issue, completely catatonic after the shock of Jaka’s Story‘s ending, while Sim told the real story – the story of the death of Wilde, drinking himself to death under an assumed name in exile.
And it’s done beautifully. Other than some dialogue in the early pages, every detail of the story is taken directly from the letters of Wilde’s friends Robert Ross and Reginald Turner, both dialogue and caption narration, with the only changes being the replacement of real-world place names with their comic-world equivalents (and the letters are reproduced in full in the end notes). We see Wilde slowly dying, starting off with him clearly ill but able to walk and converse, and ending with him emaciated and incoherent. Along the way he’s clearly trying to pretend, to himself as much as his friends, that he’s OK, but he looks visibly more distraught in almost every panel, as the realisation of his imminent death hits him, while also so tired he clearly almost welcomes death.
With little in the way of real writing to do, the story has to be carried by Sim and Gerhard’s art, and luckily they were both at their peak here. Sim, in particular, while he’s not doing the formal experimentation of earlier or later stories, manages to use an art style that is distinctly his own but also very strongly hints at Wilde’s contemporaries (some panels look to me exactly like Beardsley, though he denied any influence when I asked him about it in a chat on the Cerebus mailing list).
But it’s the fact of Sim not writing – as such – this story (about a writer who’s no longer able to write), that points to its deeper ‘message’. As much as Melmoth is about Wilde, in the wider context of Cerebus it’s about the impossibility of writing a true biography.
While Sim has always used real people in his stories (Mrs Thatcher, Mick ‘n’ Keef, Groucho Marx), Wilde is the only person who has become three separate characters in Cerebus. The character of ‘Oscar’ (no surname) appears in Jaka’s Story and, it’s later revealed, is the narrator of the bulk of the story. At the time of Melmoth‘s publication it was left ambiguous as to whether that Oscar and the one here were one and the same, though they’re physically dissimilar (‘Oscar’ was a baloonish caricature, while the Wilde here is a far more naturalistic drawing) and Wilde (in one of the few bits of original dialogue here) praises “Daughter of Palnu” (the book-within-a-book written by Oscar in Jaka’s Story). That ambiguity was later cleared up by an appearance of ‘Oscar’ in a couple of panels, still alive, but at the time of writing Sim thought the ambiguity an entirely good thing.
A third Wilde, under the name Lord Henry Wooton (to whom many of Wilde’s anecdotes, and Sim’s own pseudo-Wildean epigrams, are attributed), appears several times as well in Cerebus, but Wooton is a creature of text – he’s never drawn, we never see him, he’s just written about and talked about, and we draw our impressions of him from what other people say he said.
And this is the real crucial point about Melmoth, because what it’s really about is only apparent in the context of the wider work of which it’s a part, although some clues are given in the foreword and appendices to the collection, where Sim says:
Each biographer selects those elements of Wilde’s life he finds pertinent and, not incidentally,which reinforce whatever thesis he brings to the story.
and
It was only when I began drawing the last day, together, of Ross and Oscar Wilde that I became suspicious of his narrative…The fact that Reggie and the nurse had been asked to leave (I asked the nurse not to exist myself) meant that Ross was free to describe their good-bye in any way he saw fit
Sim was very deliberately fictionalising a narrative he already regarded as unreliable. But to understand why, you have to look at Jaka’s Story and Mothers And Daughters, the two longer graphic novels that come either side of this story. In Jaka’s Story, almost everything we think we’re being told in flashback turns out to be a novel written by ‘Oscar’, based on stories told him by Rick, who heard them from Jaka, who may be lying or misremembering herself – the supposedly-omniscient narrator is in fact giving us third- or fourth-hand fictionalised versions of the truth (except that there is no truth, of course, because it’s still a work of fiction). The one character who contradicts Oscar’s version, though, Jaka’s old nurse, is such an obviously-biased person that her word can’t be taken as truth, either.
Meanwhile in the next story, Mothers And Daughters, David Victor Sim introduces three new characters – two of whom are, like Henry Wooton, only known through text. The first is Viktor Reid, who is friends with Wooton and who lives through a very-vaguely fictionalised version of the early-’90s comic scene. The second is Victor Davis, who writes and draws a comic called Cerebus, and whose views on women made the majority of Sim’s readership disappear, and who makes public in the text of the comic the extra-marital affair of at least one prominent then-married comic writer, among other indiscretions. And finally there’s ‘Dave’, a voice from the void who, in the couple of panels at the end of the story where he’s seen, looks like Sim, and who can converse with Cerebus and has complete control over his world (the similarities to Morrison’s Animal Man climax are probably due more than anything to both having seen Duck Amuck).
So Sim is almost using Wilde as a ‘fiction suit’ – both as a foreshadowing of the big scene fifty issues later where ‘Dave’ and Cerebus finally talk, but also as a way of reifying the view Sim took until he got a religious component to his mental illness – that there is no single truth, but a plurality of part-truths, and all we can do is examine everything that’s presented to us and try to see things from as many angles as possible.
Wilde’s death is also, of course, the half-way mark of Cerebus, and Wilde’s death – estranged from his family and most of his friends, his reputation in tatters, incoherent and unable to write – is presumably meant to mirror Cerebus’ death at the end of the full 6000-page story, with Cerebus dying ‘alone, unmourned and unloved’. One can only hope that Sim’s own rejection of nearly all human contact won’t lead to the same fate for him, no matter how much he may appear to wish for it.
Because for all that Sim’s work at its peak argues there is no true truth, there still really was a man called Oscar Wilde, he really did die in a manner something like the drawings in this book, and as the book makes clear, it wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t poetic, it was a lonely man rotting away from the inside. And it’s a tribute to the book’s strength that for all its cleverness, its fictional setting, its deliberate lies and misreported facts, and its larger point, that truth still comes through and makes us care for a man who died more than a hundred years ago, represented by a few ink lines.
A Beginner’s Guide To Comics
A colleague at work was asking me the other day about comics – he was interested in the form, but hadn’t really read anything except Watchmen (with which he’d not been vastly impressed, which makes sense for someone who’d not read anything else in the form), and wanted to know what would be good to read, preferably not involving superheroes.
I thought this might be a useful thing to post, then – I’m going to suggest five ‘first graphic novels’, along with suggestions of what to read if you enjoy them. I’m going to try to keep to stuff that could be read by a beginner and be enjoyed without any explanation (I remember when the people at Comics Should Be Good asked for suggestions along those lines a few years ago, it was filled up with people suggesting that X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills should be placed on a university curriculum, and not realising how ridiculous they seemed). Much of what I read in comics is, in fact, pap – disposable superhero stuff that’s briefly entertaining but not worth bothering with – this is meant to be a list of quality stuff only. There will be *one* superhero title, because covering comics without any superheroes at all seems a ludicrous proposition, but that’s it.
Each of these five would appeal to a very different audience, though they’re all ones I enjoy myself.
Jaka’s Story by Dave Sim & Gerhard
This is volume five of Sim’s 6000-page epic story Cerebus, but this one, more than any of the other volumes, can be read on its own. Sim’s work is now very controversial, because of his… unusual views (read “he appears to be suffering from a long-term, severe, untreated mental illness”), and many, many people refuse to read his work purely because of his views. But at the time this was published, Sim was widely regarded as one of the very best comic creators around (when Todd McFarlane wanted some guest writers for his new comic at that time, the four he chose were Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller and Sim, and that was the company Sim was placed in before his illness started affecting his public persona.)
Jaka’s Story is quite simply the most emotionally affecting story I’ve ever read in any format – with a very small cast and only a few ‘sets’ (it would make a great play) it shows a love triangle and the breakup of a marriage, and is about the difference between people’s inner lives and the perception of them by others. I wrote a very long essay on this a couple of years ago on my old blog, and could write a book on just this story, but here’s a brief excerpt of that post:
Much like the works of Shaw or Ibsen, each of these characters more or less stands for an idea. Unlike Shaw, at least, the characters still work as characters. Jaka’s Story is a true tragedy in a way that very few people have managed in the last century. There are no truly ‘good’ characters in the story, but nor are there any truly bad ones – they’re all motivated by mostly selfish motives, but try their best to be decent within their own moral framework. Pud, the character who is motivated by thoughts that are at best disturbing and at worst comes very close to committing rape, is also the only character who doesn’t end up causing huge amounts of damage to everyone else’s life. Conversely, Mrs Thatcher is (or appears to be) motivated by a firm moral and ethical code, but this allows her to commit acts that no-one but a fanatic could possibly condone (it is no surprise that Sim now finds her the most sympathetic character in the text). Cerebus is motivated solely by his own drives, but even he finds it impossible to cause any harm to Rick, and it is his desire to help that leads him to be away during the denouement, and thus unable to save them.
None of these characters are ‘sympathetic’ in the classic sense of only doing good or decent things, but I can identify with all of them, from Mrs Thatcher letting her morals destroy others’ lives, to Pud Withers trying his best to behave like a decent person but with no outlet for a sex drive that leads him into ever-more-dangerous fantasy territory. All the characters are, objectively, horrible people when judged on the basis of their actions, but they are no more so than I am, or most of my friends.
If you liked this, try the rest of Cerebus, obviously, to start with. In his early years Sim was hugely influenced by Barry Windsor-Smith’s work on Conan and Steve Gerber’s Howard The Duck, but at this point his peers were people like Rick Veitch (whose dream comics he references in several other Cerebus collections). Sim also influenced Canadian comics creators like Chester Brown (Ed The Happy Clown, Louis Riel) and indie people like Eddie Campbell (who I’ll talk about later) and Jeff Smith (whose Bone is hugely rated). His work was also an influence on Eastman and Laird in their early Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stories.
From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell is a docudrama black & white comic about the Jack The Ripper murders. Exhaustively researched (pretty much every panel is annotated in the appendix) but at the same time makes no pretence of being ‘the truth’, and in fact goes a long way out of its way to demolish the very idea of one single truth. The historical facts, and the plot Moore spins round them, are merely a hook on which to hang Moore’s ideas about reality, the ‘psychogeography’ of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, the work of WIlliam Blake, Freemasonry, the psychopathology of serial killers, the nature of time, and whatever else. Fascinating, disturbing, provocative material.
If you liked this, try Moore and Campbell have one more collaborative work – A Disease Of Language, which is very much like this would have been if the plot had been stripped out, and is one of my very favourite comics of all time. Moore pretty much redefined comics writing single-handedly, and a list of his works could easily do double duty as a first draft of the comics ‘canon’, but the ones that are closest to this (in very different ways) are probably V For Vendetta, League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Promethea. Campbell, meanwhile, is best known for his (excellent) autobiographical ‘Alec’ stories (about to be reprinted in one gigantic hardcover) and his take on the Greek myths, Bacchus, which will be getting the same treatment next year.
If, on the other hand, you want more black-and-white comics about true life Victorian events, there’s Chester Brown’s Louis Riel and Dave Sim and Gerhard’s Melmoth (the follow-up to Jaka’s Story, the sixth Cerebus trade is the story of Oscar Wilde’s death, as told through his friends’ letters).
The Doll’s House by Neil Gaiman and various artists. Gaiman’s series Sandman was the most acclaimed comic of the late eighties and early nineties. There’s recently been a backlash against it, but at its best it was *almost* as good as its reputation, and the backlash is more against its fans (who tend to be rather heavily-made-up young women who like Buffy, and who are therefore regarded as The Enemy by many of the nerdy men who make up comics fandom) than against any real shortcomings in the series itself. A dark fantasy epic, but influenced far more by Lord Dunsany, C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carrol than by Tolkein or his imitators, Sandman is one of those landmarks of the medium that everyone needs some passing familiarity with in order to talk intelligently about any comic since it came out. The Doll’s House is the second volume of Sandman, and the first one where Gaiman has really found his feet and knows what he’s doing.
If you liked this, then try after reading the rest of Sandman, your first port of call should be the classic run on Swamp Thing by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, John Totelben and Rick Veitch. The early issues of Sandman are influenced by this to an utterly absurd degree – Gaiman’s comics career has essentially been built on redoing one or two things Alan Moore did first, but doing them very well. Sandman was also influenced by, and an influence on, the early issues of Swamp Thing spin-off Hellblazer (John Constantine, a character from both these series, occasionally appears in Sandman). You could also try Gaiman’s Books Of Magic, a series set in the magical corner of the DC universe and featuring Constantine among others. After that, you might want to venture into the other long-running series in DC’s Vertigo imprint, like Preacher, Transmetropolitan and Fables, all of which are very different to this but appeal to the same kind of audience.
All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant
In which the best writer working in mainstream comics today, and either the best or second-best artist, show everyone exactly why Superman was important and matters. This is an ‘out-of-continuity’ story, that can be read by anyone who knows who Superman, Lex Luthor and Lois Lane are from any popular media, without any more information, and is essentially a retelling of ‘the myth of Superman’ in the way we retell the myths of Robin Hood or King Arthur. If the human race survives the next hundred years, this will be the version of Superman that survives and is remembered.
If you liked this, try Morrison and Quitely’s other collaborations are all good, especially We3 (an animal rights story which is part Incredible Journey part Terminator). If you want more Morrison superheroics, his Seven Soldiers Of Victory and 52 (in collaboration with several other writers) are logical places to go after this, as is his run on JLA. On the other hand if you want more of the ideas expressed in here, the best place to look is Morrison’s non-superhero (or borderline-superhero) work – Animal Man and The Invisiblesespecially, but also Seaguy.
Morrison’s version of Superman owes most to the late 1950s/early 1960s stories that can be found in the Showcase Presents: Superman series – these are stories explicitly aimed at children, and very simplistic, but they have a charm and imagination missing from many modern comics. Once you’ve read those (but *not* before) try Alan Moore’s Superman stories (all of which are in a collection called something like The DC Universe Stories Of Alan Moore – it’s been printed under a couple of different names) but especially Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?, which is also available on its own. And once you’ve read those, try Moore’s work (with Rick Veitch and others) on Supreme, Moore’s own take on those 50s stories.
And Alice In Sunderland by Bryan Talbot is a stunning tour de force, a discursory essay, much more structured than it appears, on subjects as diverse as the city of Sunderland, the Alice books, George Formby and the history of British kids’ comics. A deeply personal work, part history lesson, part collage, part love letter to his adopted home, this is one of my very favourite comics and shows what can still be done in the medium.
If you liked this, try Talbot’s other work is also good – his Adventures Of Luther Arkwright and The Tale Of One Bad Rat are both worth reading, as (to a lesser extent) is his work as purely an artist in series like Sandman and Nemesis The Warlock.
If you want more discursive non-fiction essay comics with a very similar flavour to this, Eddie Campbell’s The Fate Of The Artist could almost be this book’s twin, and is equally essential. Dave Sim’s current series, Glamourpuss, has a lot of the flavour of this as well, and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics was an obvious influence on parts of this. And you will almost certainly like Rick Veitch’s dream comics series Rare Bit Fiends, the first volume of which, Rabid Eye, very nearly made this list.
And five other comics that nearly made the list but didn’t, for one reason or another:
When The Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs – a touching tale about the aftermath of nuclear war, as seen through the eyes of two rather dim but well-intentioned elderly people.
A Contract With God by Will Eisner. The first comic ever to be called a ‘graphic novel’, Eisner’s writing is dated a bit (though bits such as “Shall not God also be so obliged?” still pack a powerful punch) but he invented almost every bit of modern western comics visual vocabulary that wasn’t invented by Jack Kirby, and was one of the first to see that you could do more than just kids’ entertainment with the comic format.
The Fourth World stories by Jack Kirby – an acquired taste, these are like the free jazz of four-colour superhero epics. Read this after Seven Soldiers if you liked that.
Any collection of any 2000AD stories from 1977 to 1993 – all of these have dated hugely, but this British weekly science fiction comic is where modern mainstream comics were invented – wildly inventive, exciting and over-the-top, pick up any of these (Zenith, Halo Jones, Skizz, Nemesis The Warlock, Slaine, ABC Warriors, Judge Dredd, Big Dave, etc ad infinitum) and you’ll find the prototypes for stuff that was hailed as groundbreaking when the same people started doing it in US comics a few years later.
The Great Outdoor Fight by Chris Onstad, which shows what webcomics are capable of – his Achewood is the most exciting, interesting thing in webcomics today.
And of course more suggestions are welcome in the comments…
A quick Cerebus link
I’ll be continuing my Cerebus posts sometime soon (tonight or tomorrow) but before I do, I thought everyone should go and read/re-read Andrew Rilstone’s look at the last issue ,which says a lot of things I want to say myself. Especially this bit:
And by the way, Dave. Damn right I am a liberal. I read your comic precisely because I am a liberal. Where ‘liberal’ is defined as ‘one who believes in freedom, and in particular, the freedom of expression.’ One who believes in pluralism, different viewpoints, and listening to opinions other than one’s own. One who has contempt for what you say, but will not only defend to the death your right to say it, but will actually read it, and recommend that other people do the same.
Hail, Dave Sim. Greatest living comic book creator, and total asshole.
Why An Aardvark?
I would really appreciate feedback, especially from my politically-aware female readers, for this and the next few Cerebus posts, even if you don’t know anything about Cerebus. I am very aware of my white male privilege, and I am talking about works that are incredibly problematic in every conceivable way, but for which I have an absolute adoring love. I could *very* easily fall here into being That Bloke, and I don’t want to…
This is part one of what will, I think, be a three- or four-part series on Cerebus. I’ve noticed a number of comic bloggers recently start talking, rather cautiously, about Cerebus as one of the great comics again. For a long time very, very few people have publicly stated a liking for Dave Sim’s 300-issue story about an aardvark, and it’s gratifying to see that, now the series has been over for a few years, people are slowly starting to put it in its proper perspective.
For those of you who don’t know about comics, the problem with Cerebus is that its creator, Dave Sim, is incredibly, unbelievably misogynist. His widely-publicised views are so repellent that many people absolutely refuse to even consider reading his comic work, because they don’t want to give money to anyone who espouses those views (a stance I can absolutely understand – I boycott Nestle, try to boycott Coke, and where possible given their near-monopoly on public transport in this city I refuse to give money to Stagecoach (whose CEO has donated money to groups teaching creationism and trying to get rid of homosexual rights) so I quite agree that this is a perfectly reasonable stance to take). Others, less reasonably, refuse to admit that there could possibly be anything good in the work of someone with such repellent views.
For many comics fans, this misogyny is the defining feature of Sim’s views and work – a view not helped by the vocal coterie of online fans he has who seem to think that making public claims that women should be denied the vote, or going on to Gail Simone’s message board and calling her a fat cunt, are ways to increase public respect for Sim’s work.
But Sim presents a more interesting case than most for discussing whether it’s possible to separate the artist and the art. In the first place – and it’s a minor point – he’s not the only creator of the Cerebus comics. Gerhard, the background artist, has never supported Sim’s views (though he did, until relatively recently, tacitly support Sim-the-person) and did a huge amount of work which does deserve reward. In fact at the moment I think he’s getting all of the money from current Cerebus sales, as Sim is buying out his share of Aardvark-Vanaheim, their publishing company.
Also, Sim apparently lives a spartan life with little or nothing in the way of luxuries, and gives very large amounts of money to charity, so your money is very unlikely to be of any benefit to him anyway.
But these are minor points. The main question, in my view, is to what extent Sim is responsible for his own views. This is a trickier question than it might seem. Most comic fans just know of SIm as a misogynist, but this is primarily because the vast majority of people reading the comic dropped it after issue 186, where Sim first advanced his then ‘thesis’ that women were soul-sucking voids destroying the ‘inner male light’ that was the basis for all creative work and all civilisation.
And reading that essay, or some of the others he published around that time, it is quite possible to see Sim as just a misogynist arsehole, and even to see how he might have come by his views ‘rationally’. He was an intelligent man, but not particularly educated, and very interested in Big Ideas. Almost all his social life was based around comics fans and creators, who are a self-selecting group that is overwhelmingly male and (at least in the circles Sim was moving in, people like Rick Veitch, Chester Brown, Neil Gaiman and so on) more intelligent than average, while most of the women he socialised with were his girlfriends, chosen primarily for their physical attractiveness. You can see how someone in that situation could come to the conclusion that women are just less capable of thought than men. (This is not – NOT – to say it’s a defensible conclusion. Just that it appears to be one that one could come to while still remaining more-or-less rational, given Sim’s circumstances).
But having dropped the comic, most people didn’t see the evidence of Sim’s increasing mental deterioration. Sim had had a spell in a psychiatric hospital in the late 1970s, and later claimed that he spent most of the 80s ‘faking’ ‘normalcy’ – acting normal to fit in, while secretly holding many of the opinions for which he was later ostracised. He also, for the whole of the 80s and much of the early 90s, smoked *huge* amounts of cannabis.
Even without knowing these facts, though, it’s apparent in retrospect that SIm’s views on women are not the aberrant and abhorrent views of an otherwise rational man, as they appeared when he first went public with them. Since that time, he has announced that he has found a secret hidden meaning in the King James version of the Bible (and also in the Koran) which ‘proves’ that all of history is a conflict between God and a transsexual demiurge who is the YHWH of the Bible and lives in the middle of the Earth. This demiurge also caused the 2004 tsunami as a result of Sim revealing the ‘truth’ in his comic, as well as possessing many people around him and making them think he was mad. Sim also gave up masturbation because he believes YHWH gives psychic powers to women, which they use to read men’s minds while they are masturbating.
A typical example of Sim’s ‘reasoning’, from Collected Letters 2004, Vol 1:
I think YHWH’s contribution back in the early 60s was Peter, Paul and Mary. I mean it is a way of looking at Christianity; seeing Peter, Paul and Mary as the three cornerstones after Jesus. Of course, being YHWH her point was; if you have Peter, Paul and Mary, what do you need Jesus for? I think this amused God a great deal – to the extent that he countered with John, Paul, George and Ringo. Paul, of course,was actually James: James Paul McCartney. So John and James were the leaders of the band, like the sons of Zebedee, John and James, the brothers Boanerges, the sons of thunder[...] So it was a good joke that on the cusp of becoming famous John and James had ditched Peter, Pete Best, the drummer since this is basically what the biblical John and James had attempted to do with Peter the apostle[...] Now, having ditched Peter, that meant that you had three kings or a Ring of Stars (Ringo Starr)[...]The Beatles were the template that attracted their own disciples, the Rolling Stones, which was another play, in my view, on the fact that there had been a pool of disciples for the two Jesus’. There was Peter, Cephas, the rock or stone, but he rolled back and forth between the two Jesus’[...]
Both bands, by the way, noticed the James and John connection and were led to wonder: in that case, who was Jesus? The conclusion was Brian Epstein. Which conclusion, I think, led to the premature demise of the Beatles manager and the exiled member of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones. And, of course, later on Monty Python with the financing of George Harrison incarnated the viewpoint[... etc ad infinitum]
Now, I have no formal psychiatric qualifications so wouldn’t want to speculate publicly on what diagnosis, if any, someone would give Sim based on this kind of thing, but I’ve had a lot of experience working with people with mental illnesses (I worked as a nursing assistant on a psychiatric ward for a couple of years fairly recently) and I’ll just say that this stuff sounds awfully familiar.
So how responsible is Sim for his views on women, and to what extent are they even ‘his’ views, as opposed to ‘his illness” views? Does that question even make sense? Should one boycott his work for his views, or would that be punishing someone for their mental illness?
This wouldn’t matter were Sim’s work the kind of ‘outsider art’ one normally associates with this kind of statement – reading Sim’s writings, one would get the impression that his work would be the comic equivalent of Wesley Willis or Wild Man Fischer or at best Charles Manson’s music – interesting far more for what it says about the mental state of the creator than for any quality of the work. But the fact is, Sim is the single most talented comic creator I’ve ever known of. I would take Sim’s work over the complete work of *any two* of, say, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Chris Ware, Eddie Campbell, Darwyn Cooke, Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, J.H. Williams and George Herriman. No exaggeration.
So, can I possibly justify promoting work by someone who considers many – most – of the people I know, love and admire to be literally Satanic and subhuman? Or can I justify *NOT* promoting work that would significantly enrich the lives of those same people to a great extent?
I’m very torn about this… but I’m going to go ahead and look at Cerebus as a whole work over the next few days…
Linkblogging for 17/01/09
I’m still far busier than I expected this week, so I’m still behind on my email correspondence – apologies to those who’ve emailed me recently.
Anyway, in lieu of a longer post, here’s some links:
Debi writes about Thomas Hariot – the most pioneering scientist you’ve never heard of.
Bobsy shows us his pants.
Over on Lib Dem Voice they’re talking about what the ‘liberal attitude to immigration’ should be. Some of the comments there make sense, but some are horribly, nastily racist. Let them know what you think…
People buying tube tickets will soon be automatically giving their consent to be searched by transport police. Well, that’s one more reason for me to avoid That London…
An interesting post about the Einstein/Bohr dialogue about quantum physics.
Cerebus: A Diablog continue their reading of the greatest comic series in history.
Andy Partridge discussing how Jack Kirby influenced one of his songs. (Surprising, because Partridge has always struck me as more of a DC person, and here he’s talking about Ant-Man. Still, it’s another example of XTC and comics, two of my favourite things, overlapping).
Free comic stories by Rick Veitch and Mark Evanier and Tom Yeates and some others.
And pillock has an excellent post on From Hell.
The Great Outdoor Fight – Webcomics And Slices Of Life
Chris Onstad’s webcomic Achewood is generally regarded as one of the greatest – if not the greatest – webcomics ever created. It’s certainly one of the few to have achieved any level of success while being closer in aesthetic to ‘art comics’ than to manga, and while dealing with subjects that have very little to do with the ‘geek’ interests that make up the subject matter of most popular webcomics. While most popular webcomics have to do with transsexual elves playing Playstation games while talking about Star Trek, or something, Achewood, insofar as it is ‘about’ anything, is about male bonding, and masculine friendships.
This, combined with Onstad’s odd aesthetic, can make it very difficult to get into – at its worst the strip can remind one of Kevin Smith at his most puerile, full of jokes about scrota and cruel humour at the expense of Philippe, the youngest character. The art is crude, and often any individual strip is as likely to leave a reader confused, wondering if it was any good or not, as it is to elicit a laugh.
However, the cumulative impact of several strips is impressive, and soon after starting to read through the archive you find yourself reading more, though unsure why. And a while later you realise that you love it, though you still couldn’t explain the appeal.
After a while, I realised that Onstad’s work reminds me, more than anything, of Dave Sim circa Guys (Sim’s own male-bonding story, which I plan to deal with in my next comic-based post), and that was also when I realised that Onstad is one of the first people to take full advantage of the webcomic medium’s potential for a different kind of storytelling – a kind that I’d previously only seen in Sim’s work.
Most comic stories (in Western comics – I know nothing of manga, and it may be that what I’m going to say is par for the course there, or that there’s some underground community of Indonesian cartoonists who’ve been doing what I’m talking about) tend to fall into two groups. They’re either totally self-contained stories, such as Jimmy Corrigan or When The Wind Blows or Transmetropolitan – stories that are a finite (though maybe quite long) length; or they’re what one might call serial fiction – self-contained stories about characters who are supposed to live through all the stories, but with each story essentially its own thing. You can read today’s Garfield strip without ever having read one before, and The Resurrection Of Ra’s Al Ghul doesn’t require you to have read Batman: Knightfall.
All these share one characteristic – they’re ‘stories’, with a beginning, middle and end, in a way that doesn’t happen in real life. Even in art comics there’s an imperative to smooth off the rough edges of life – Harvey Pekar’s tiny slices of life still don’t usually contain anything that’s not relevant to the anecdote.
There’s a perfectly reasonable artistic reason for this – if you read a comic and there’s no narrative thread, if there are elements that appear completely irrelevant, then you are probably going to wonder why they’re included. In real life, there are all sorts of loose threads hanging round – telephone calls that are wrong numbers, people you chat to one day and get the email address of, but then lose it before you get back in touch with them, things you meant to do but didn’t get round to. But you can’t include them in a self-contained story without that being the point of the story.
In webcomics though, you can include those elements. Because they’re happening in some approximation of ‘real time’, and because the reader can go back and forwards through the archive at her own pace to find out if something’s a narrative strand or just a random occurence, you can build up a picture of an actual real life, loose ends included, without sacrificing narrative momentum or coherence.
Dave Sim managed something like this with Cerebus, which shares a number of other similarities with Achewood, because he had nearly 30 years worth of story to play with and knew so in advance, because he was self-publishing, and because he made sure right from the beginning that every single issue of his 300-issue narrative would remain permanently in print. In other words, because he was taking the same publishing strategy as webcomics.
But most webcomics still think in terms of fixed story ‘arcs’ with a beginning, middle and end, or in terms of single gag strips. The Order Of The Stick, for example, actually has ‘freeze panels’ at the end of every story ‘arc’ for the trade paperbacks. Achewood, more than any other that I know of, completely ignores conventional narrative structure in favour of ongoing, stream-of-consciousness rambling that manages to sum up what real people’s lives are actually like – even when those ‘real people’ are stuffed animals and robots.
The Great Outdoor Fight epitomises this – it’s simply a chunk of Roast Beef and Ray’s life, albeit one in which something important happens (they win The Great Outdoor Fight). There’s a definite narrative there – one of the longest Onstad has attempted – but there’s only a middle. It begins in media res with something that has little connection to the rest of the story (Todd asking Ray for six million dollars to start a company to make fake dog-penises to hang on the back of cars) and ends in mid-conversation at the victory party. It’s actually like following two people’s lives through a chunk of time – just a chunk of time in which something extraordinary happens.
I’ve talked mostly about the formal qualities of Achewood, but the book itself, The Great Outdoor Fight is quite a wonderful little thing in itself. As well as the story (which has been re-edited and reformatted to flow better as a continuous narrative, while leaving the original daily strips intact on the website) there’s a history of the fight itself from the 1920s on, profiles of some of the most famous winners, excerpts from a Great Outdoor Fight themed cookery book, a glossary of fight terms, and blog posts by some of the characters. All of this adds to the creation of an entire complex, dirty, messy real world – the profiles of the winners, in particular, are beautiful things in themselves, little perfect short-story miniatures told in just over a page of text each.
The Great Outdoor Fight, like Achewood as a whole, is violent, funny, at times confusing, thought-provoking, and ultimately life-affirming. Just like life itself.
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