CerebusThere’s an editorial up over at the official PREVIEWS site by Dave Sim, in which he looks back (more or less) at the past 26 years of Cerebus, his life’s work which will come to an end in just a few months. The end of Cerebus is a sad occasion. Not necessarily because I’ll miss it (I haven’t read an issue in over two years) but because it means, once and for all, that Sim will never be able to return the series to its former glory.


In the beginning, Cerebus was a witty, if somewhat crude, Conan parody. But pretty quickly the book changed into something much, much more than that. High Society, the second “phonebook” collection is a work of true genius. It’s laugh-out-loud funny (a rare feat for any comic book), very well thought-out, and just a triumph of the form. The two books that follow, Church & State 1 & 2 respectively, are good, and in many ways a bit more sophisticated. But alas, the book started to slide from that point on.


Jaka’s Story is a nice tale, and were it merely a bridge between better works, it would have been a nice diversion. Melmoth, which followed that, was likewise a good story, even if this fictionalized story of Oscar Wilde seemed a bit like Sim was treading water.


But it wasn’t until Mothers & Daughters, the book(s) that came after that, that the quality took a real nosedive. Mothers & Daughters, which is divided into four books (Flight, Women, Reads and Minds) is sheer lunacy. Whatever grips the book still had on reality were thrown to the wind, and instead readers were treated to nonsensical, pseudo-existential gibberish, in which Cerebus talked to Dave Sim, Dave Sim wrote about anything that popped into his head, and the written text overtook the artwork to the point where whole issues were almost entirely written in prose. And I’m not even going to talk about the whole misogyny thing. Remember that scene in Crumb where we see that childhood comic by Charles in which the writing eventually overtakes the art and turns into complete gibberish? It’s a disturbing sight, and that’s what I kept picturing as the book got weirder and weirder.


Once everything’s finished and collected, at some point I intend to start over and read, book by book, the entire series one after the next, warts and all. Just to see if I’ve been wrong. Maybe once it’s all collected it will make some sense. But every time I glanced at an issue over the last few years, I saw more and more of Sim’s loony writing, less artwork, and more allusions to the direct market and self publishing within the story itself (apparently the editorials in the front and back of the book weren’t enough for him anymore).


But regardless of the quality, the fact that he’s managed to keep it monthly for over 20 years is a major accomplishment. Even if I never get around to reading the whole thing, I tip my hat to Sim, and hope he (and Gerhard) won’t retire from comics completely.