[comics] Aard Labour: Conclusion | Epilogue … Tom Ewing’s reread and analysis of Cerebus concludes.

One thing that does happen when your comic is full of dissemblers and layers of meaning and contradictory versions of reality, and when you go on for 300 issues, is that you’ll have produced a text with enormous discursive potential. Whether that discussion is worthwhile is another matter. I had no idea, starting this project, that it would end up at 60,000 words long. I still feel like there’s more to say, but also that there’s no real way of reaching a conclusion about this extraordinary, accursed, vivid folly of a comic.

I’ve loved writing about it, I’ve often loved reading it, but I feel shocked that I did write to this extent. I think I like the work more than I did going in, but the artist even less. At one point I planned in this final post to try and work out who the best comparison to Dave Sim might be – Ditko? Morrissey? Lovecraft? Rowling? Kanye? In the end it doesn’t matter: what he shares with them all is that initial fascination and horror turns to exhaustion in the end.

[comics] JAKA’S STORY: What It Was in 1988, and What Cerebus Used to Mean … A melancholy look at Cerebus and the fall of Dave Sim. ‘MELMOTH was spent talking about the illness and slow death of Oscar Wilde, at a time people were still dying regularly from AIDS and little was even being tried to stop it. It was deeply sensitive and empathetic. And I still see nothing insincere in Dave’s empathy and affinity to Oscar Wilde, both in the more fictionalized version of Oscar here, who is never not entertaining, but also MELMOTH where it’s virtually the real man himself. That’s what makes later on so baffling.’

[comics] JAKA’S STORY: What It Was in 1988, and What Cerebus Used to Mean … Some Thoughts on Dave Sim and Cerebus. ‘MELMOTH was spent talking about the illness and slow death of Oscar Wilde, at a time people were still dying regularly from AIDS and little was even being tried to stop it. It was deeply sensitive and empathetic. And I still see nothing insincere in Dave’s empathy and affinity to Oscar Wilde, both in the more fictionalized version of Oscar here, who is never not entertaining, but also MELMOTH where it’s virtually the real man himself. That’s what makes later on so baffling. Immediately after he acted like he was purging every bit of that…’

[comics] The Most Important Non-Superhero Comic You’ve Never Heard Of… looking back at the good and bad of Cerebus at 40. ‘Even its misfires serve to make Cerebus more distinct as a work. It’s a massive, brutally complicated, hideously problematic epic. It’s equally revolutionary and regressive, an artistic triumph and storytelling failure. It is one of the rare pieces of entertainment that can legitimately be called unique…’

[comics] Deni Loubert: “It Was Him & Me Against The World” … Deni Loubert on Dave Sim … ‘Truthfully, when I look back on those Cerebus days when it was him and me against the world — that’s how we always used to refer to it — it was marvelous, it was what I thought love was about. Those were the good years but when the bipolar started to show up and he started to not trust me about stuff, that’s when it started to change. I long for that sweet boy who told me he was going to be a millionaire by the time he was thirty by drawing comic books.’

[comics] Dave Sim And Gerhard: Aardvarks Over The UK … Dave Sim interviewed during a tour of the UK in 1993 … ‘The original idea for Cerebus was simply to do a more interesting comic book. I wanted to do something that had adult values applied to it, as opposed to just doing something along typical comic-book lines. You know, “let’s do a superhero ‘cos they’re selling okay”. And the further along I’ve gone, the more I’ve tried to do something that makes me happy, something that is satisfying to me. I enjoyed superheroes the same as any twelve year old, when I was twelve, but I’m almost forty now, so I put things into Cerebus that I’m interested in now!’

[comics] Chris W’s Cerebus Character Index … a comprehensive index of all the characters who appeared more than two times … ‘Missy (52): #114, #118, #124, #136, #141-2, #144-57, #162-70, #173, #191 (flashback), #218 (dream), #230-4, #237-8, #242, #246, #254, #261, #265, #300 (flashback)’

[comics] Cerebus On The Berlin Wall … a photo taken in 1989 and originally published in Cerebus #127 … ‘Conveniently located below a manned East German guard tower. Cerebus is mere yards to the right of Checkpoint Charlie.’

[comics] Alan Moore On the first twenty years of Cerebus … an article from 1997 …

“Did you see the look on her face when I suggested that the whole Cirinist/Kevillist agenda is to smother the light of reason in the dark of emotion? She had absolutely no answer!”

“Dave, that’s the last time I introduce you to my mother.”

[comics] Dave Sim On Oscar Wilde: ‘Why be prolific when one could be charming? Why produce when there’s so much to consume? I have to credit all the research that I did on Oscar Wilde for convincing me that I don’t want to be like that. If I can end my life with a large body of completed works and a reputation as a cantankerous old hermit I’ll consider my time well spent.’

[comics] A Moment Of Cerebus … a blog dedicated to publishing something to do with Cerebus, Dave Sim and Gerhard every day.

[comics] Why We Will Read Cerebus … another attempt to evaluate Dave Sim and Cerebus … ‘[Dave Sim] is a very smart man, and even at his worst he expresses his (often completely illogical) ideas with such forceful conviction that you cannot help imagine yourself in some kind of personal dialogue with him. After reading 300 issues of Cerebus, the reader feels / believes / thinks that he or she knows Sim. Tim Callahan is right to stress the fact that Cerebus is “as autobiographical as any comic book ever written.” That is precisely why it is so hard to separate the man from the work. It’s not just that Sim’s ideas permeate the book, it’s that Sim permeates the book, to the point where any discussion of the book inevitably devolves into a discussion of Sim himself.’

[comics] Excerpt from “Irredeemable: Dave Sim’s Cerebus” … part of a longer-form essay in Comics Journal #301 … ‘Sim may well be a wackjob or an acid casualty, but he is also, I would argue, one of the greatest living cartoonists.’

[comics] Ten Great Moments In Cerebus … ‘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.’

[comics] For Sale on eBay: Cerebus: High Society #1-25 Reprints by Dave Sim.

[comics] The Unpublished Moore … a comprehensive list of the the Alan Moore’s whims, unfinished scripts and lost work … ‘Cerebus #301 Status: Unpublished. I believe a full script exists for this one (which involved Cerebus being summoned during a seance in the modern day), but it was intended to be a Moore/Bisette/Veitch project, and is unlikely to appear now due to ill-will among the creators.’

[comics] Warren Ellis talks about Cerebus. “Dave Sim is more than a little mad, as I think anyone who’s read a great deal of CEREBUS would attest to. Us old lefties instinctively shy away from someone who communicates what is at best gynephobia and at worst pure bloody misanthropy in the way that Sim does, even allowing for the dichotomy between auctorial intent and personal belief. But as a creator I keep coming back to Sim for his masterful, hugely inventive storytelling. Creatively, he’s the mutant bastard child of Will Eisner, The Studio artists (Barry Windsor-Smith and those guys) and Chuck Jones.”