Cerebus: The End… Cerebus the 6,000 page comic book allegory ended in March 2004.  Finally ended, one might say, and in keeping with the Chinese curse many interesting things happened to Dave Sim's story during the 27 years he spent making it (assisted by background artist Gerhard for most of the run).  Whatever else is said, one has to be a little in awe of the accomplishment – Cerebus was, is, entirely self-published, begun as a funny-animal Conan spoof until Sim got the idea to satirize the comic book industry, politics, religion, secular society, and, most definitely, most especially, women.

It's always something (click for full page)

It is difficult to properly introduce a work which went on so long and took so many left turns, moreso when the work in question is part of an increasingly self-enclosed medium; I purchased the final volume ("phone book" in comic book industry parlance) in one of those comic book shops which one feels rather embarrassed to actually stand in, given over as they are to a queasy adolescent subculture of roided-out, tights-wearing, enormous-breasted superheroes and all the confused sexuality that implies.

But a comic book?  I make no defense of the medium, which is generally about as puerile as you would expect, except to note that it's not too debased a form for Hollywood to mine for material.  And Hollywood usually does very little with the rather humble comic book stories it rips off.  When Alan Moore's From Hell, a stark, dark, period retelling of the Jack the Ripper case, was made into a movie, the result was a pitifullly reduced Silence of the Lambs-wannabe starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham.  Tim Burton pillaged Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns' version of Batman, but other than a few über-Gothic sets seems to have learned nothing from the vastly superior (and scathingly satirical) source material.  Spider-Man, for all the praise Sam Raimi got for bringing it to screen, managed little more than an echo of the original four-color monthly.  And the less said about feeble actioners like Judge Dredd or Hellboy, the better.

So Dave Sim cannot be accused of wasting his life on a contemptible art form any more than some very well-paid quasi-auteurs can (Memento's Christopher Nolan will join the list next year with yet another version of Batman).

Cerebus, for the uninitiated, follows the adventures of an anthropomorphic aardvark in a vaguely medieval sword and sorcery setting.  Which is to say it is nothing like that.  But why not let Sim answer the question:

Actually from the moment I say that I write and draw a comic book, the conversation takes care of itself.  In order of appearance (a) "What's it called?" (they never heard of it) (b) "Where do you buy them?" (they have stores for that?) (c) "How many do you sell?" followed by "How many do you do a year?" (even those with the most rudiment grasp of math or rigidity of character tend to get glinty eyes at this one), (d) "What's it about?" the answer to that one depends on whether I want to get down to cases or if I want to kill a few hours first or if I just want to flirt or save her for next week.  If I want to kill a few hours I would probably say "Lust and morality", or "Good girls and bad girls" (no hot-looking chick wants to be thought of as a good girl) or "Aardvark lust".  If I wanted to flirt I would say "Cerebus the Aardvark and all his girl-friends" or "Power".  If I want to save her for next week I'll say "Why don't you come up to the studio" and give her the address and phone number.  If I want to get down to cases I'll say "Why don't we finish these drinks and I'll get you a copy up at the studio…" "Will you autograph it?" (Sure.)

Perhaps that doesn't make it very clear after all.  Alright, in Cerebus (the first volume) Cerebus the Aardvark takes a job as Kitchen Staff Supervisor in charge of security for Lord Julius, who looks and talks like Groucho Marx and who clings to power by contriving to be the only person who knows what is going on.  In High Society Cerebus becomes Prime Minister of Iest and in Church & State he is made Pope through the machinations of Adam Weisshaupt, better known to us as the founder of the Illuminati.  Cerebus ultimately destroys Weisshaupt and ascends to the moon where a caustic, all-knowing judge informs him that he will die alone and unmourned and that the solar system will eventually be destroyed when someone pushes a button and blows up the sun.  At which point Cerebus returns to Earth and finds that an army of belligerant feminists has overrun Iest and that men, now the property of women, are more or less confined to pubs.

Irate as usual (click for full page)

This army of feminists is ruled by one of only two other living aardvarks, who calls herself Cirin but who is actually named Serna, having imprisoned and assumed the identity of the original Cirin, a kind of Leninist proto-feminist whose lips were sewn shut by Serna.  Cerebus confronts Cirin/Serna and there ensues a long, vicious, desperate fight between the two, at which point Cerebus ascends a second time and confronts Dave Sim, his creator.

Sim had already begun to insert himself into the story, first through a series of interspersed essays penned by a thinly-disguised pseudonym and finally as himself, drawing himself drawing himself drawing Cerebus.

All of which should give you a fairly accurate idea of where Cerebus leads, artistically:  ever inward.

Cerebus comes close but never quite clears the artistic hurdles it sets for itself.  There is the problem that any 27 year work-in-progress will have, which is the strain put on it by a continually veering artistic sensibility.  More unfortunately, Sim's early volumes, notably High Society and Church & State, reach a pinnacle of writing and illustration that the rest of his work never quite attained, even as Sim continued to mature artistically (but defray intellectually).  Which leads us to a more sensitive question.

Dave Sim has taken some grief for (and lost many readers over) two particular essays which grafted Sim's politics onto Sim's story in the crudest possible way.  (The so-called authorial fallacy will have a hard time with this one.)  The essays have the effect of the author interrupting himself mid-story to spell out in excruciating, torturous detail the larger cultural allegory he is constructing.  Apart from suggesting a lack of confidence in himself as an author/satirist/dramatist, the essays have the considerably worse effect of encumbering the continuing story with an elaborate Weltanshauung that is equal parts paranoid and badly reasoned.

As sane as he ever was

The essays in question are unabashedly misogynistic; to find their parallel you would have to read a lot of Andrea Dworkin, sex as rape, etc.; they're that bad.  Imagine the weirdest, strangest extended rant you've ever read on the Internet.  Sim's riffs on men and women will probably match it down to the most insane detail.

During the process of creating his 6,000 page epic, Sim has come to regard contemporary Western society as excessively feminized, which in Sim's terms is putting it mildly.  The "male light" has been suffocated by the "female void".  Women are parasites.  If men could realize the extent to which they have been fooled into compromising their own (superior) values and ambitions, Sim argues, balance would be restored and various societal ills (homosexuality, feminism, the therapy industry, many, many other things) alleviated.  If you dilute it to one part per thousand you might get something vaguely defendable out of this, but not as Sim presents it.  He went out of his way to publicize these views, and Cerebus, formerly one of the most highly regarded independent comics, became known (a little unfairly, but not much) as the scribblings of a lunatic.

Cerebus did not suddenly acquire religious overtones – Sim's heavily satirical exposition of religion's frauds mark some of his finest output – but it did eventually acquire a minutely detailed cosmology, a fusion of monotheisms that, being the product of Sim's peculiar outlook, and proceeding from a series of enormous leaps in logic, is not much more interesting than any other schizophrenic worldview.  This cosmology worked its way intricately into everything about Cerebus from there on out, mostly to the detriment of the comic.

From the start Sim's fascination with coincidence and occult thinking marked him out as an unusual figure to be making any big points about politics or religion.  His clashes with comic book industry figures sometimes had the character of an argument one might overhear outside a methadone clinic.  So even at his best Sim was always right at the edge seeing how close he could balance himself.

Surprisingly, then, Cerebus attains moments of bracing wit, clarity, and force right up until the very end.  The Reads volume, which includes pages and pages of Sim's notorious digressions about men and women, also includes one of the tensest, most suspenseful action sequences in comic books – and it doesn't do so badly when put up against the other visual arts.  The Last Day, the final Cerebus volume, shows Sim still capable of top form for pretty long stretches, and rewards the patient reader with a climax that actually manages to bring Sim's amateur religious philosophy to a satisfying close (ending, as predicted, with the death of Cerebus).  (There's also a little joke about "going toward the light".)  Sim's mastery of lettering word balloons gave Cerebus sympathizers one point of uncontroversial praise no matter how weird Sim became (Sim used lettering to do a tremendous amount of work, giving an added kick to the story's best moments).

But one is still left with the old wheat/chaff problem – so much of later Cerebus is turgid, ponderous argumentativeness* that the better parts seem like shrinking islands of dramatic accomplishment in an ocean of nonsense.

Movies love the one about the misunderstood genius, but it usually comes down to someone who is misunderstood for being amusingly odd, like Robin Williams regaling a class of preppies whose balls haven't dropped yet with his stand-up routine, or the real-life Harvey Pekar moping about as a gruff but lovable loser.  Sim is probably at some level of genius within the confining art form of comic books, but he's the genuine article when it comes to being misunderstood and disliked.  I have a measure of respect for him for that.