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.

“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.”