I consider Cerebus to be the single most illustratively innovative comic in the history of the form. If there is/was another series as consistently successful at expressing ideas with such elegance, I should very much love to know its name.
The credit here is not only Dave Sim’s. It’s impossible to separate his contributions from those of his collaborator Gerhard: there was a weird alchemy unlikely to be repeated or surpassed. Sim’s design sense and his character work played off the austere backgrounds and gave us Something Else in a truly glorious use of black and white and grey.
That said, I find Cerebus to be deeply, deeply problematic. I would be hard pressed to call it, for instance, “Good.” I certainly would never recommend it to anyone who had not been a long initiate in the arcane world of Comics– and even with an initiate, I could think of probably 50 titles, off hand, that I would recommend before Cerebus.
Since there has apparently been a Homosexualist-Feminist-Marxist-Trotskyist-Situationist-International Conspiracy to prevent Sim and Gerhard’s work from getting the Just Airing it Deserves, let me say, flatly: no. This has nothing to do with Sim’s Theories & Ideas & Truths. Seriously, if there’s one thing that’s been constant through my various stages of life, it is thus: I really don’t care. Anyone can say whatever crazy nonsense they want– and at this late date, I’m way beyond offense. And, again, as I articulated yesterday, I’m not sure that Sim believes any of it. His constant Self-Appointed Gadfly routine strikes me about as a genuine as one by Andrew Dice Clay or Rodney Dangerfield. Could it be that our Form has become a Void?
No, my concerns with Cerebus are best exemplified in its most basic element: there is something distancing about the character of Cerebus himself. Throughout this hugely ambitious work about power, religion, love and every other aspect of human existence, our guide is a cartoonish Earth-born pig that is completely off-model from every other significant personage. This is not to say that Animal Books, or any other type of comic, are inherently unprofound. But books like Goodbye Chunky Rice or Maus work because they are self-consistent. At some point, the little Conan-parody-that-could can no longer bear the weight of 20+ years of Serious Inquiry. If Cerebus himself were merely an avatar, an odd image representing a plausible character, would anyone notice after page 12? Yet, weirdly, Cerebus never loses his initial jokey persona– he always talks like The Incredible Hulk, referring to himself in the third person and flashing one-liners.
This idea is scalable to the series as a whole. For every moment of power or profundity in Cerebus, the reader is expected to suffer through 30 pages of Moonroach. Cerebus is attending to matters of state? Time for a Wolverine parody! Cerebus has just had his heart ripped out? Time to bring in caricatures of the Rolling Stones! And hey, here’s a lot of crap about Oscar Wilde! The entire world is ending? Oh, there’s Alan Moore in a funny hat!
Every major work of literature has its share of digressions and sidepaths– but when these things occur in, say, Ulysses, you know that you’re eventually, somehow coming back to Papa Joyce’s master plan. That’s the key: a plan. A plot. Cerebus wasn’t conceived as a 300 issue series– it ended up as one, and no matter protests to the contrary, it shows. We are in the presence of someone making it up as he goes along. Other people may have an opinion to the contrary, but Cerebus’s many elements never gel for me. They never add up to a whole.
Plus, for such a character driven narrative, Sim can write some truly awful dialogue.
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OK, like yesterday, this post was supposed to be about what many people consider the High Point of the series, Jaka’s Story. Clearly that’s not happening. See you tomorrow, chums!
UPDATE, LATER: Incidentally, this post by Noah Berlatsky, discusses the immutability of Cerebus (the character) and considers it (at least in part) an asset to Cerebus (the series). Which proves: different strokes for different folks.
