300 AND DONE:

Readers Of The Last Aardvark: Dave Sim's postmodern comic-book epic, Cerebus, ends after 26 years and 6,000 pages (Grady Hendrix, March 30th, 2004, Village Voice)

One of the most ambitious literary projects of the last 25 years came to an end this March and you probably don't even know its name: Cerebus. It's a comic-book series about a talking aardvark, whose creator seems to have slowly gone insane somewhere over the course of its 6,000 pages. But it is also something of a masterpiece.

In 1979, Dave Sim (then just 23) made the improbable announcement that his black-and-white comic book, Cerebus, would run for 300 issues and that he would write, draw, and publish the books himself (although it was initially put out by his then wife, Deni Loubert). [...]

[O]ver the course of this story arc ("Mothers & Daughters")—both in the book itself and in the book's editorial pages—Sim made it clear that he believes we live in a feminist totalitarian state. Readers left in droves. The last 2,000 pages have been driven by their creator's deeply personal preoccupations ("Latter Days," the penultimate story line, devoted 144 pages to commentaries on the first 38 chapters of Genesis) and his religious faith (a homemade blend of fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, and Judaism).

Sim found his religion while writing Cerebus, and his uncompromising beliefs have become a whip driving his readers away and his fictional creations through increasingly convoluted antics intended to make theological points. Vexingly, the last 100 issues have also seen Sim and his collaborator (the mysterious Gerhard, who does the backgrounds) hone their visual technique to unparalleled expressive heights. With its dense layers of lettering, literary allusion, and internal logic, one page of Cerebus requires—and rewards—migraine-inducing concentration.

Cerebus's enormous contradictions have alienated it from the comic-book market. To Sim's readers, Cerebus was the satirical story of a talking aardvark in a realpolitik world. To Sim, Cerebus was a soapbox from which to proclaim his beliefs. And, like a true monomaniac, Sim painted himself into a corner, denouncing the Marxist-feminist axis to an increasingly hostile audience.

But despite Sim's anti-feminist crusade, Cerebus stands on its own as a ferocious critique of power. Sim believes that freedom is an absolute, and to this end he has self-published Cerebus, advocated for artists' rights, and bucked intellectual-property laws wherever possible (after his and Gerhard's deaths, Cerebus will become public domain). In an era when selling out is considered synonymous with success, Sim's resistance is bracing. But independence comes at a cost, and the price of Sim's is that his 26-year project, his life's work, is ending largely in silence. Tired of his grandstanding, most people long ago tuned him out. But for the scale of its ambition, the intricacy of its characters, the beauty of its artwork, and its commitment to mapping the at times objectionable mind of its creator without ever blinking or looking away, Cerebus remains a staggering declaration of independence.

Geez, I read it in high school, but had no idea it was still going and had become so much more interesting.

MORE:
-ESSAY: Requiem for an Earth-Pig (Brian Doherty, 3/23/2004, American Spectator)

One of our era's most enduring and complex epics of fantasy storytelling came to an end this month. It was 6,000 pages long, and chronicled one man's rise through a fascinatingly imagined world, on the cusp between medieval and early industrial ages. We witness the introduction of the printing press, cannons, and primitive airships as the tale progresses. The hero moves, often haplessly and buffeted by outside forces he barely understands, from a barbarian thief and adventurer to a prime minister to Pope of its Catholic-reminiscent church to renegade fighter against a matriarchal dictatorship to bartender to tyrannical head of his own brand new religion.
As with any 6,000-page epic, a one-paragraph prÈcis cannot do it justice. It can, I hope, hint at the riches to be found therein. A couple of complications are also worth noting. First, the protagonist is not strictly a man -- in two respects. "He" is a hermaphrodite, though he thinks of himself as male, and he's also an aardvark. A talking, hind-foot walking, sword-wielding, hard-drinking, scripture-parsing aardvark, mind you.
This 6,000-page epic, it should also be noted, is 6,000 pages of comic book, told and sold in 20 page chunks (mostly) monthly since 1977, published under the title Cerebus (the aardvark's name). It is a sad reflection of the regard with which the art of storytelling through the artful combination of words and pictures is held in our culture that knowing that Cerebus is a comic book is enough to make most intelligent readers not give it a second thought. The general level of regard for comics is low at best, usually plunging to "beneath notice" for the vast majority of literate Americans beyond an ever-shrinking cult of funny book devotees.
Most unusually for a comic book, which are generally produced in an assembly-line manner as work-for-hire for a corporate entity, this epic was mostly a one-man job, written and drawn by a Canadian named Dave Sim. Sim published it himself and retained full ownership of his characters and work. (With issue 65 of his 300 issue series, Sim hired another artist, the singly named Gerhard, to pen the backgrounds while Sim continued to draw the characters.)
The story started off as a broad parody of Conan the Barbarian comics. But it quickly latched on to greater ambitions. Throughout the series Sim continued his early practice of introducing parody characters based on figures from the world of comic books (both characters and creators), movie comedies (ditto), and authors (these latter less parody than attempts to grapple with the figure's meaning). These takeoffs are almost always hilarious, biting, and brilliantly observed.
Within the pages of Cerebus you'll find takes on Groucho and Chico Marx, Batman and the Sandman, the Three Stooges, and Norman Mailer, among many others, that in many cases capture and extend the essential aspects of those characters (it seems apt to refer to Norman Mailer as a "character") as well or greater than their original creators -- all the while fitting them in to Cerebus' fantasy world with perfect sense.
SIM STARTED OFF AS an energetic cartoonist, but 6,000 pages of practice turned him (and Gerhard) into, if not geniuses, highly skilled journeymen who through hard and continuous work discovered techniques and reached destinations not often matched in their discipline.
Cartoonists can achieve stylistic distinctions far more, well, distinct than a prose writer. A prose writer, after all -- unless he strives for Joycean unintelligibility -- uses the same words as everyone else. But within very wide limits, every ink line, and method of drawing a human figure, hand, furniture, a building, is unique. Sim and Gerhard, to abuse the language a bit myself, were even uniquer than most in the world of comics.
It might seem belittling to call Cerebus great "for a comic." But there is no other way for it to be great -- it is a comic book. This is not an insult to comic art, but the ultimate praise: it can strive for and reach storytelling effects that would be simply impossible for other storytelling forms. Sim's lettering is the most obvious example of this.
No one has yet discovered a way for a prose writer to make dialogue say as much about a speaker's intentions, inflections, thought processes and meanings (both hidden and surface) than Sim's brilliantly varied hand-lettering of it -- the most wild and innovative the form has ever known. Sim once made a bravura eight-page sequence of a broken-legged Cerebus trying to climb a huge staircase in complete darkness say surprisingly much, with nothing but panel after panel of differently-divided solid black ink with his lettering of Cerebus' thoughts and words, incredibly revealing of mania, panic, relief, comedy, and self-doubt.
The mastery of pacing through his choices in how to present images across panels and pages is another area where Sim approaches nonpareil, and similarly irreproducible by prose writers.
WITHIN THE WORLD OF comic books, Sim has achieved something unprecedented in length and focus: 6,000 pages all telling a single life story, all written and drawn by the same man. But he's not much loved for it. Somewhere along the line, Sim decided he had a mission with his story. Its theme became the evils and perfidy of feminism, in all its varieties, especially the notion that a man ought to cleave unto a woman and become one flesh.
Sim's methods of expressing this theme shifted as his own ideology did. The real tectonic shift came when he discovered religion and created his own portmanteau syncretist monotheism from aspects he admired from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Bloody fight scenes, long debates, quotes from fictional treatises, detailed representations of the depths men would sink to in a world dedicated tyrannically to motherhood at all costs, were all in the delightful mix as the story progressed. By the tale's end, Sim was theologizing feminist evils in the YHWH character in the Torah, who Sim insists is not the God who created the world.
I should give a spoiler warning here: One detail of the practice of the theocratic dictatorship that Cerebus sets up toward the work's end will give you a hint as to why, within the narrow community of comics fans, its creator is embattled and widely despised. Cerebus the religious leader arranged the public executions of women who didn't meet the approval of a gathered crowd of men.
Because of his very public animus toward feminism, which shades toward pure misogyny in the eyes of many readers, the comics community at best damn Sim with faint praise, raising the glass to his maniacal productivity and dedication -- a fully written and drawn page pretty much every weekday for 26 years without fail or falter. But they mostly just damn him, and Cerebus, for ideological reasons.
Sim's representation of himself as the embattled last defender of reason and masculinity against the Marxist-feminist axis that he thinks rules the world has marginalized him, to the point that he seriously seems to expect an angry mob of feminazis to lock him up for thoughtcrime. (Well, he is Canadian, so perhaps that's not so unrealistic a notion.)

-ESSAY: Cerebus: An Aardvark on the Edge: (A Brief History of Dave Sim and His Independent Comic Book) (Kelly Rothenberg, Spring 2003, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture)

Cerebus did appear at first to be a funny-man's comic book, taking everyone along for the ride for the first year and a half. The fact that Cerebus is an aardvark and everybody else is human, although never mentioned, is just one small thing (although Cerebus is described from time to time as anything from a short midget to a guy wearing a bunny's costume). The early stories were populated with parodies of famous fictional characters and figures from Marvel Comics. These lampoons of standard comic book clichés made Cerebus stand out in the early days from the rest of the pack; Sim was thumbing his nose at the corporate comic book machine.

There was Elrod of Melvinbone, a character who was based on Michael Moorcock's famous albino hero Elric, whose speech was patterned after the Warner Brothers cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn. There was Red Sophia, a parody of the Red Sonja character created by Robert E. Howard, and The Regency Elf, Sim's version of Tinkerbell. One of the best was Jaka's uncle, Lord Julius, the ruler of Palnu and an impersonation of Groucho Marx down to his speech, mannerisms and his first name (Groucho's real first name was Julius). Finally, but not least, there was Artemis, who morphed into parodies of Wolverine, Captain America, Spider-Man, Moon Knight, The Punisher, Sandman, and countless others over the years.

With all this parody going on, when did Cerebus get serious?

The seriousness started with Sim himself. He was always serious about doing comics, but it was around 1979—when he declared that Cerebus would run 300 issues—that the comic began to show more focus. Sim moved away from sword-and-sorcery tales and started dealing with the more adult themes of politics and society. The comics, collected in Book 2 as High Society, told one continuing story and were first published in comic form at around the same time as his announcement. Nobody noticed this connection, but the reader could see that Sim was more focused, as if he had something bigger in mind, and with each subsequent collection the stories and the artwork became more involved and, at times, more serious in tone. These collections, or Books, would eventually showcase the entire series. Sim also declared that the series would be in two overall parts, each with 150 comics. Cerebus, High Society, Church and State, Jaka's Story and Melmoth (Books One through Six) are the First Half of the series, and the Second Half (unfinished as of this writing) are Flight, Women, Reads, Minds, Guys, Rick's Story, Going Home and Form and Void (Books Seven through 14; the books got shorter as the years went along because Sim published fewer issues per book).

Two themes that developed as the comic evolved were Cerebus' campaigns to move up the ladder of power and his love/hate relationship with the dancer Jaka, who was introduced in Issue 6. Cerebus wanted Jaka, but only when he could not have her, and when he could have her he was too busy campaigning for power to notice. "You said you'd wait forever for Cerebus…" he says to Jaka at one point, referring to their first meeting when he was drugged against his will so he would not remember her. Jaka replies, "I said I'd wait forever for you to remember [me]. Well you did remember and you never came back" (Sim, Church and State I: 461-63). Cerebus does come back to her in Jaka's Story, but unfortunately she is married to Rick (who appears later in Rick's Story). Sim's take on the guy/girl romance angle haunts Cerebus through the entire run of the series. Cerebus is only truly happy with Jaka at the end of Rick's Story, and even that is short-lived. Throughout twenty-plus years of Cerebus, he has loved Jaka and driven her away, and when it seems that he has finally learned his lesson, he drives her off again at the end of Form and Void. The reader can only wonder if Jaka is to be heard from again.

Cerebus' campaign for power eventually wins him the title of Pope of the Eastern Church of Tarim, which in turn leads to a power struggle and eventually a radical power shift from men (Kelvinist) to women (Cirinist) being in control. While Cerebus' quest for power is at times very funny, it is also very serious. When all is said and done, Cerebus embodies the notion that "absolute power corrupts absolutely." The more powerful he becomes, the more insane he becomes until finally he is brought before The Judge—a being of intense power (though his greatest power is observation)—to prevent the destruction of the entire world through Cerebus' greed. Church and State ends with a prophetic warning from The Judge: "You live only a few more years. You die alone. Unmourned. And unloved" (Sim, Church and State II: 1212). This prophecy will haunt Cerebus, and the reader, for the remainder of the series.

Cerebus' drive to do things his way only mirrored Sim's. When Sim launched his series, there were only two comic companies around: Marvel and DC. Rather than sell his creation outright (the fight over creator-owned comics was still to come), Sim decided to self-publish his work. He had an advantage because he could do everything himself, from writing and drawing to stapling the issue together. However, he also had a disadvantage: he had to do everything himself, from writing and drawing to stapling the issue together…

With his girlfriend's help, he began planning out the comic. He wanted a character that was barbaric like all those Barry Windsor Smith comics he read (Smith had worked on Conan for many years before he was let go by Marvel, a move that angered Sim). He wanted a name, something mythological, and his girlfriend Deni suggested the three-headed dog of Greek mythology. Deni, however, spelled the name wrong; Ceberus became Cerebus, and a legend was born (Jones and Jacobs 229). Over time, as Cerebus started to attract a reading audience, Sim realized that there was an incredible amount of power in doing everything himself. He did not have to answer to anybody as far as his subject matter; if the readers did not like it, they would stop reading it. The readers' vote was what mattered most, and not the corporate idea of what a comic should look like or how much money it should make. As Marvel and DC were in a constant power struggle over which company was on top that week, Sim was left alone because, as far as the Big Two were concerned, Sim and his ilk did not matter. Little did they realize how wrong they were.

-DISCUSSION: Cerebus #300 (Craig Lemon, Silver Bullet Comics)
-REVIEW: of Cerebus (Grovel.org)
-Cerebus the Aardvark (Wikipedia)

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 31, 2004 10:00 AM