Yellowcake break

I’ve recently been re-reading an old favorite of mine, Dave Sim’s Cerebus. “Old” is the operative word, because I finally gave up on Sim around 100 issues ago, when he started devoting half of each comic to a series of bizarre, pseudo-autobiographical misogynist rants. I suppose I’ll pick up the last issue, just to see what becomes of the old aardvark, and out of respect for how great a book it was before Sim got dumped by one girlfriend too many.

And great it was. From High Society through Church and State, I spent my whiny teenage years in constant fear of not being able to locate a comic shop that sold Cerebus. I trolled the dealer room at cons for back issues. I made my friends read it. Re-reading it now, almost 20 years after I picked up my first issue, I’m reminded of why. Cerebus must be one of the most densely and intelligently constructed comics ever—up there with Alan Moore’s best work. But it is also one of the funniest comics ever; hell, a collection of Lord Julius pages alone would be one of the funniest comics ever. From the dead-on Marvel “hero” parodies to the merciless lampooning of political figures from Washington to Thatcher, Sim’s nose for caricature never failed to sniff out the hilarity.
And then there was Melmoth—a lyrical and sensitive rendition of the last days of Oscar Wilde. In which Cerebus himself barely appears; and when he does, he does nothing but sit and clutch a rag doll, and occasionally eat a potato. But it’s great.
And then there was the art. Especially after the addition of master-renderer Gerhard on backgrounds, Cerebus was second-to-none artistically. (Well, ok. Second to Love and Rockets.) Sim’s quirky characters, Gerhard’s ethereal architecture, the most evocative lettering in comics—it was masterful.
Which all makes Sim’s precipitous decline into hubristic lunacy after Melmoth all the more regrettable. Always an arrogant jerk, Sim surrendered all pretense of rationality and editorial judgment with his Ayn-Randian Reads storyline. Now half of each book was given over to an ongoing prose story in which an arrogant jerk comic author named Viktor Davis took on the forces of nefarious editors, cretinous readers, and creativity-sucking females, achieving ‘viktory’ over them by virtue of extended application of arrogance and jerkhood.
Or at least, I assume he achieved victory I stopped reading halfway through, because there was finally nothing left of the Cerebus I loved. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t smart. It wasn’t even interesting. Just sad.

Filed under: culture/comics