Adam Beechen, Dave Sim, and Aardvark Comment

Hi, Everybody!

So here's the NEXT round of Adam Beechen/Dave Sim dialogue. the previous round can be found of of this post.

Mail there, or just Fax: 519 576 0955. Or email me at momentofcerebus@gmail.com and I'll take care of it. 

Adam Beechen's Hench is available from Amazon. (Which is were his website sends you.) Most recently, Adam wrote an eight-page story featured in the 'ROBIN 80th Anniversary Special' for DC. [I read it, it's a good story -Matt]

And this time Adam says:


May 13, 2020

Hi Dave:

I hope this finds you well – and I hope you’ve solved, or solutions have otherwise revealed themselves for, your SDOAR issues. As one of your 80 or so “patron/financiers” (only in the sense that I’ve pre-ordered SDOAR), I eagerly await the book.

Thank you very much for the in-depth answer(s) to my earlier questions. I found it (them) illuminating and satisfying. I went back and read your interview in the first issue of Following Cerebus, and saw that it touched on several things I asked you about, so I apologize for asking you to repeat yourself.

Loved the walk through the Gil Kane/Noel Sickles relationship and conversation. I have Sparring With Gil Kane, and have yet to read it – That’ll change shortly. I knew nothing about Noel Sickles, however, and, having now looked at some of his work online, I think this afternoon I should probably order a book featuring more of his art and telling me more about him. One of the great benefits of SDOAR to a reader like me is that, in addition to educating me on a period of comics history I know very little about, it’ll get me interested to learn more about, and seek out work by, artists like Drake, Raymond, Foster, Caniff and Sickles.

(On the topic of comics history, did you read Howard Chaykin’s Hey Kids, Comics! I’d be interested to know your thoughts on it.)

The level of detail in which you describe such things as the creative history of Scorchy Smith (down to Sickles’ weekly pay) and Foster’s attitude toward his later Prince Valiant work did make me crave a bibliography for all the research you’ve done on SDOAR. Perhaps you’re already planning on including one. I hope so.

I was going to ask you how, while you were working on Cerebus, you managed to read so much to the depth that you did – Russian novels, religious texts, etc. – but then I thought, “Well, 26 years is a long time – I could probably read and digest a few dense and challenging pieces of writing in that amount of time if my curiosity about a topic or a form were sufficiently piqued.” Based on the amount of detail in your comics and text writings, you strike me as someone who, when you have a question or a curiosity about something, you learn absolutely everything you can about it. I don’t picture you scanning headlines but leaving the articles unread.

Your answers to my question(s) were very interesting to me, not so much because of your thought processes regarding NOT EFFING IT UP as the point in your life at which you had these revelations and made these decisions about your creative and professional future. You had to be in your early twenties (at the latest) when you came to your conclusions in this conversation with yourself. As you say, you may not have even been aware that you were having the conversation – You were just “collecting Truths,” and they coalesced into a professional ethos a little later. Still, that coalescence happened remarkably early… and then you stayed with it.

I’m trying to think of promises I made to myself about my future when I was 22 or 23, and I don’t think they went much beyond, “make a stable living.” I made my decision to change careers and pursue writing creatively as a profession when I was 25, and even then, I left myself an out: “I’ll give myself three years after I move to Los Angeles to pursue screenwriting, and if I don’t make any forward progress, I can always go back to…”

That said, while I have many friends from that time in my life who found their careers later, I also have friends who knew what they wanted to be and do from a very young age, and successfully geared their education and development toward that goal. Law enforcement, Air Force pilot, professional athlete. I imagine many people in religious service also knew what they wanted to do at an early age (in some cases, they might even describe it as a calling). Maybe decisions like your early commitment to spending a quarter-century of your professional life on Cerebus, and then actually sticking to that commitment, isn’t as unusual as I think it is – Maybe it’s just unusual to me because of the way my own journey played out.

In any case, it was interesting and helpful to me to read your experience and get your perspective, so thanks.

One last comment concerning your last letter: I’d take issue with your statement concerning the creation of a reality by way of issue 186 in which Cerebus was “completely derailed.” I think it may have created a reality in which some people felt Cerebus was completely derailed, and I do think it led to the legacy of Cerebus being at least somewhat derailed, but I think that Cerebus very definitely stayed on track to the end in that its creator told the story he wanted to tell, the way he wanted to tell it, and didn’t waver in response to the market of perceived public opinion.

Okay, that’s it for Old Business. On to New Business.

Here’s an easy one (actually, it’s two): What did you know (in relation to Cerebus’ structure and plot specifics) and when did you know it?

I know for a fact this is a question you’ve been asked (and have answered) before (I think I even asked you in an AC letter), and I’d imagine some of the answers might be found in Margaret Liss’ invaluable scans of your notebooks. But I’m hoping you might go into a few more specifics, if you’re able and willing.

When you announced the decision to cap Cerebus’ run at 300 issues, I believe “High Society” was in its earliest issues, although I may have that wrong. My memory is that the only “signposts” you had in your long-term plotting (or at least the only ones which you were willing to share) were knowing “High Society” would end with issue 50, and the series would end with Cerebus’ death. Did you have others at that point? What were some of the next signposts to come after those? Did you have a list in your mind or otherwise of other themes you wanted to explore (i.e. religion, the origins of the universe, gender relations, etc.), and if so, how specific were they at that point?

My sense is that your spirituality evolved considerably during the series’ run. I assume, therefore, that it wasn’t always in your plan to include multiple issues devoted to commentary on religious text. When did that become something you wanted to do, and how much of what you had in mind previously did you have to change in order to do that?

How and when did you select the historical figures around whom you’d go on to feature in large segments of the series, such as Wilde and Hemingway? Had you already been a reader of Wilde, or did that happen during the course of your work on Cerebus? Assuming the idea of using Wilde came to you during your work on Cerebus, had you consciously structured the series (at that point) to accommodate concepts and characters you might conceive, or become interested in, along the way?

The same questions go for figures in the comics industry. Garth Ennis wasn’t close to being active in comics when Cerebus began. Alan Moore was largely unknown on North American shores. When you had the idea to include “Garth Inniscent’s” work “Rabbi,” or create an Alan Moore-like character, there was clearly enough flexibility in the storyline to accommodate those concepts. Did you ever completely “lock” the issue-to-issue events of the book, or did you leave yourself that flexibility to the very end?

And where along the way did you come up with the pop culture figures you wanted to include? Was it a hope of yours to include Jagger and Richards, or Margaret Thatcher (okay, she’s not pop culture), in some form and were you looking for appropriate sequences in which to place them? Or did sequences inspire ideas for pop culture figures to use? As a for-instance, did you know Cerebus was going to become prisoner of a religious fanatic or a group of fanatics, and were you then struck with the inspiration to use the Three Stooges? In other words, which came first – the pop culture figures or the contexts in which they were used? Or was it a combination of the two? Was there a figure you wanted to include, but never found an organic way to bring her or him into the story?

Finally, you made mention in one early interview about wanting to do a story featuring a “Joan of Arc-type” character who hears voices and leads an army. Did that idea mutate into something else (and if so, what? Spore, perhaps?), or was it simply dropped when you felt you had a better idea or came across a theme that interested you more? If that was the case, were there other potential storylines (or historical, literary, comics industry and pop-culture figures) that were discarded, and if so, would you share what they were?

If these are too many questions, or if it’s ground you’ve trod upon too many times to revisit, I’d understand you don’t want to repeat yourself, and it’s on me to do my research. What I’m really interested in how you were turning the big-picture plotline over in your mind as you were going along, and how granular decisions such as which literary figure to use might have affected what came after them.

Thanks,

Adam

Dave Sim is the creator of Cerebus the Aardvark, which ran for three hundred issues from December 1977 to March 2004 (and is available digitally here.) His latest project is The Strange Death of Alex Raymond (a fundraising Edition is available, details on how to get it here. And there is a Kickstarter for the Remastered version of Cerebus #1. His OTHER latest project is the ongoing Cerebus in Hell? (Daily strips are posted here, and the next #1 is Green Dante/Green Virgil (which should be in stores by the end of the month)). The newest CiH? #1 to order is The Amicable Spider-Vark. And every Friday he posts a video "update".

And his response to Adam is:

16 May 20

Hi Adam!

Thank you, sincerely, for ordering SDOAR VOLUME ONE.  The good news is that the 80 FUNDRAISING copies sold means I can print 400 so every California comic store will now get one.  WHEN they will get them depends on whether a) things get back to normal and b) how normal things will get back to being.

In the meantime, I'm going to do more writing on AMOC about CEREBUS on the (perhaps mistaken) assumption that that's the best use of my time  [Oh it is Dave, it is...-Matt]

Having flipped through the NOEL SICKLES book IDW did which IDW sent me, definitely clarified for me "Okay, this is what Gil was so excited about."  Sickles was a major name in the slickest of the slick magazines and Gil was quite interested, across the spectrum, in all of the high-end literary and visual things being done.  Sickles did a comic strip Gil could never have done and follows it with an illustration career "to die for".  If you buy the IDW SICKLES book, it's all in there. 

I had no idea Howard Chaykin wrote a book. The HOWARD CHAYKIN: CONVERSATIONS book from the University of Mississippi Press (which includes my interview with Howard) satiated my interest (and didn't include Gil's brutal capsule descriptions of "the talent in the room" -- Norman Mailer's phrase -- which I realize now was "off the record" when Chaykin relayed it to me: at the time, because it would do Howard no good relaying it and, now, because Howard has mellowed in his own brutality).  I really just read Scripture and SDOAR research materials now.

While I appreciate the implicit compliment in "when you have a question or a curiosity about something, you learn absolutely everything you can about it" -- and, really, thank you very sincerely for that -- that isn't really possible, I don't think. I studied Fitzgerald close to exhaustively for GOING HOME -- read everything he wrote including his notebooks and collected letters and as many books about him and his work as I could get my hands on -- and that still amounts (my conclusion) to very little relative to his own 44 years of lived experience.  The human mind isn't capable of anything even approximating omniscience, so you always have to strike a balance between "exhaustive" research and human overview.  If you go in too deep your work is going to lack overview.  Too much overview and your work is going to be shallow.

DIGRESSION There are newspaper articles where "if you've read the headline you've read the article", particularly when they feature mostly speculation. I tend to read more opinion pieces at the moment than "could" "possibly" "might" and "arguably" COVID-19 space filler (which I'm afraid is all I see the COVID-19 coverage as being: how do we cure a more severe form of the common cold? Given that you've had no success curing the common cold SPOILER ALERT you can't), because opinions -- particularly secular humanist opinions -- are, at least, interesting.

Most of the time, my best inference is that their soul is in anguish because they've cut themselves off from God and they spend most of their time trying to find mundane human things to attach their anxiety to.  "This is what I'm upset about, this is why I have insomnia and I'm drinking too much and watching too much TV and getting angry and depressed." It's what the newspaper represents to me: here's what everyone thinks they're anguishing about today in 2020.

I think the problem is that they're used to distracting themselves 24/7 from the state of their soul and they're used to having unlimited self-distracting options and now they have limited self-distracting options. Whatever they can't have right now -- a baseball game, a sit-down restaurant meal, a concert -- is what they think they Need.  What they think will Save Them. Mistaking the pleasure centres in their brains for their soul.  It's like an interesting day-to-day constantly evolving light show except it's what everyone (besides me) perceives as Reality and will be the basis of my incarceration and "treatment" if they ever figure out that I'm out here and fundamentally disagree with them. Majority rules and the majority view right now would be far afield from a "derailed" CEREBUS vs. "not derailed" CEREBUS question. For the vast majority the question is "Is CEREBUS hate speech?" And since the majority criteria for that is "Yes" then incarceration and "treatment" are all that I have to look forward to.  Glad to have you as a fellow dissenter, though. END OF DIGRESSION

The conundrum of human "knowledge" is that we reach maturity late. I binge-read Dostoevsky in my teens. In your teens you don't really have a context for Dostoevsky.  You know it's really well written and evocative but you haven't lived enough to know what it is that he's evoking. A few decades later your short-term memory starts to go.  How many books can you read in between there? Compare that to how many books there are to read.  Ratio of 1:1,000,000? That's optimistic. How much do you retain?  Even a favourite book you've reread a few times, if it's been a few years since you've read it, could you get a passing grade on a book report?  I know I couldn't. 

It always comes back to Scripture for me now. Genuine Depths as opposed to "depths" or depths. The unimaginable profusion of non-Scriptural written and creative works seems to me the best argument against them as a free will leisure- time choice. If the best you can manage in your lifelong reading is to read one out of every one million books available to you, that means that the odds that you're reading something edifying are the same odds you would have buying a lottery ticket. And I include in that commentaries ON Scripture.  Why would I choose what a human being has to say about the word of God over God's word itself?  

         

The short  preliminary answer to your new question is that the Debris Field on CEREBUS is enormous. More on this in a moment.

The short secondary answer is that I was trafficking in Verities and exemplars.  "You die alone, unmourned and unloved". To move that from a subjective plot point to an objective Verity requires an irrefutable exemplar: Oscar Wilde. I didn't have Wilde in mind when I wrote the Judge's line but Wilde was needed to emphasize that judgement pronounced upon Cerebus with the Oscar character in JAKA'S STORY -- who, like Wilde riding the crest of his IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST popularity, "alone, unmourned and unloved" seemed an impossible fate -- contrasted with the disgraced post-debacle Sebastien Melmoth in MELMOTH. "A man's fate is fastened about his neck" as it says in the Koran.  

Garth Ennis and Alan Moore were the best current exemplars of what I was talking about when it came time for their respective appearances. It's a way of saying "I'm not just talking about this. I didn't just make this up. This actually exists."  But it was also "of its time".  There was always a fusion of THIS month and THIS year with the thematic point I was trying to make. Subjective because, like any human being, I have my own checklist of iconic presences.  By the mid-1980s Sid Vicious and Nancy actually made more sense than Prince Mick and Prince Keef for the societal contrast I was going for, but I had clearer idea of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' public personas and more of an interest in capturing that.

I was glad I could get Norman Mailer in there but, no, there were no historical personages that I wished I had done.  It went from the Verity to the character -- "who exemplifies this?" -- not the other way around.

Okay, to the Debris Field.     

I've explained, in a very cursory way, the process that took place between issue 12 (when I decided to do 156 bi-monthly issues) and 14 (when I decided to 300 monthly issues) which answered the structural question How big is this canvas that I'm working on going to be? Roughly 6,000 plus pages. And how I began to imagine the scope of that as I was finishing up the groundwork issues that led into HIGH SOCIETY -- which I imagined, at the time, to be my 500-page version of A TALE OF TWO CITIES, only in my case the two cities being the two aspects of the Upper City of Iest with the Eastern Church of Tarim at one end (the locus of Iestan religious faith) and The Regency Hotel at the other end (the Iestan political and economic locus).  With Cerebus as this magnifying presence, part metaphysical electromagnet (enormously powerful in a hidden way, wildly disproportionate to his physical size) and part metaphysical iron filing (he's very, very small), starting on the one side and inexorably being pulled to the other side.

Which, as a CEREBUS reader, you recognize as a rough description of the 86- issue (ONE eighty-six, in a manner of speaking) HIGH SOCIETY, CHURCH & STATE I and CHURCH & STATE II Trilogy.

As I was building that mentally, all of those events were intended to take place in a single 500-page graphic novel.  Political HIGH SOCIETY and Religious HIGH SOCIETY (two different forms of "High" elevation) which the reader wouldn't "get" until the pull of the Church had been fully exerted somewhere near the mid-point of the 500 pages.  And I've described how, as I started the mental high-altitude mapping of the political side of the story, I realized that if I was going to do my imagined construction --  a burlesque of Theodore H. White's THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT 1960 about JFK's presidential political campaign with Richard Nixon's MY SIX CRISES grafted onto it -- even chopping it as fine as I could, that was going to take up all 500 pages.

Okay, all this you know. Which brings us to how this applies to the Cerebus Debris Field. 

After the fact -- particularly well after the fact: we're coming up on 40 years later -- it's necessary for me to adopt truncated-to-the-point-of-complete-inaccuracy explanations of "what that did" because even the most interested CEREBUS fan has limited attention span and interest.  "Explain this to me, but do it in a paragraph or two because after that my eyes start to glaze over."  Well, okay, I've grown up in public, I'm completely familiar with that effect.  So, here's your two paragraphs (see above).

What's missing from the explanation is that figuring out the limits of 500 pages didn't happen overnight.  For a good year and a half from the issues 14 to 16 "Palnu Trilogy" to the "Chasing Cootie" sequence I was still mentally just "playing out fishing lines" on the political/religious HIGH SOCIETY on the (then) safe assumption that 500 pages was 500 pages and therefore I had virtually unlimited room.          

I say "(then) safe assumption" because no one had ever done a 500-page graphic novel. I was the guinea pig.

Originally, at the apex point -- Cerebus the Pope -- he's conquered the political half of the city as Prime Minister and the religious half of the city as Pope -- becomes disgusted and quits, using his absolute authority to commandeer three large ships and goes from being JFK/Richard Nixon to John Paul II to Christopher Columbus crossed with SHIP OF FOOLS. He's still dressed as the Pope but he's running around The Docks outfitting the ships as the Upper City and Lower City convulse around him.

The comedic appeal to me as the writer, was Cerebus thinking that he could effect this level of change and then run away from it.  His thinking is solid as far as it goes. No one's going to follow him -- virtually everyone thinks that he's going to sail off the edge of the world, wherever that is "out there" -- but the point that he misses is that The Circus he thinks he's running away from, in microcosm, is going with him. You still need a crew and the only crew you can get are the craziest and greediest people available who are slavishly following The Charisma That Transformed Iest. He manages this long ocean voyage and everything enacts itself in the same way on the ships. He gets to the New World and everything enacts itself in the same way after he conquers that.

[This one. -Matt]

(DIGRESSION The only reason I remembered that is because at the convention shown on the back cover of #114, a black man asked me about why there were no black people in CEREBUS and I explained how a lot of the book was in flux and I used the ocean voyage to the New World storyline as an example of "what that does" when you need to jettison a giant chunk of narrative. Which, at the time, had been only four or five years before. "It would have been interesting to have a black man as the captain of Cerebus' ships," resonating with the New World being associated with African slavery.  I couldn't think of anything immediately up ahead -- most of the next 50 issues were JAKA'S STORY and that had already been "cast" and my early glimmerings of The Big Cirinist Book was also #CEREBUSSOWHITE -- I did say that I wasn't a tokenism type of writer. I wasn't going to create a black character just for the sake of having a black character in there. I did hope that didn't come up again because we're certainly in a time period where all white writers are caught between the rock of #CEREBUSSOWHITE and cultural misappropriation -- "how DARE you as a white writer pretend to have the lived experience to write a black character?" The interesting thing there is that when I did a birthday picture of Lenny Henry back in 1998 I put a 30% tone on him and thought, "Hmm. That means Cerebus and Cirin and Suenteus Po are, arguably, black."  Which means the voice actor for Oliver's CEREBUS film should probably be black.  James Earl Jones channeling a seriously steamed George C. Scott? END OF DIGRESSION)      

All that had to go. 

I could already see that Religious HIGH SOCIETY -- whatever that was now going to be called -- had to be roughly twice the size of Political HIGH SOCIETY.  How many pages would the ocean voyage take up?  How many pages in the New World?  I didn't want to JUST do politics and religion and adventure for 6,000 pages. The idea of the 6,000 pages was to do a lot of different graphic novels. The as-yet largely unimagined Ur JAKA'S STORY was a square peg that wasn't going to fit in that round hole.

How much "went"?  That is, how large was the Debris Field? I couldn't even hazard a guess on that one. How much conscious, unconscious and semi-unconscious writing can you do in a year and a half when your problem is always not writer's block but holding back writer's flood? 

The Notebooks are the Notebooks. "And it was here that he mapped the whole thing out".  Well, no.  The Notebooks were the monthly dress rehearsal for what was already written and some condensation of future material into a line or two. A lot of listing of the available issues and what goes into them, reduced to a few words. Look at the blanks and start filling those in, mentally. Sketch something and see if that helps you see it more clearly. Figure out where the holes in the plot I'm about to enact are -- I can't redo the issue or the page so it needs to be fixed now -- and try to think of something funny and interesting with which to plug them.

There are long stretches where there is no Notebook dress rehearsal because I didn't need it. THIS one I KNOW how to do. THIS ten-page section I can do in my sleep. THIS five-page section has been "done" for about eight years. 

But, the actual process of plotting the whole thing, imagining the visual and literary tone -- where it got serious and how serious it got;  where it got funny and how funny it got -- was all being worked out in mental compartments marked "future".  JAKA'S STORY had an overall shape and tone and approach attached to it -- this is the KIND of graphic novel I want to do here -- long before I wrote anything down.  Anything that wasn't JAKA'S STORY was thrown overboard. I was reiterating, unknowingly, Hal Foster's choices on PRINCE VALIANT.  You can't have a giant battle scene every week. You have to alternate quiet human level narratives with the buildup to the sturm und drang and the sturm und drang itself.

The "Joan of Arc" character is a good example. That was a matter of "Well, thematically, that concept fits CHURCH & STATE but I have a much clearer idea of what Religious HIGH SOCIETY needs to look like now that I've done Political HIGH SOCIETY  and how much room there is to play with".  If I bring in a separate Joan of Arc character, it's going to distract from the hell-bent-for-leather forward momentum of the Ascension taking place.  The solution to that was to make Astoria the Joan of Arc character.  It is a distraction -- the whole episode distracts Cerebus from his Ascension just as much as Seth's painting does -- but it's a contextual distraction. It fits the story because it doesn't fit the story. Astoria was always the driving force behind Cerebus-as-politician and Cerebus-as-Pope and Astoria was always in Cerebus' way.  The Cerebus-as-Pontius Pilate/Astoria as Joan of Arc; Astoria as female Pope/Suenteus Po as Jesus Christ reiteration was a neat solution to that.  Was Joan of Arc the female equivalent of Jesus Christ? being the Larger Question metaphysically.  Is Astoria Joan of Arc? being the lesser plot point.  

As I developed a more precise idea of how much can comfortably fit into 500 pages, the Debris Field on the later books got smaller.  But there was always a Debris Field of manifold un-pursued narrative tracks.  All of them long-forgotten because they weren't part of the final narrative.

If whatever-it-was wasn't going in the book, I stopped writing it mentally long before the Notebook stage and made no effort to remember it. In fact, I made a conscious effort to not remember it. I had more than enough to remember with what was already and with what was becoming CEREBUS canon. And a readership with an obsessive focus on those details. Anything that was "out" needed to be forgotten -- immediately and completely -- because there was an omnipresent danger of remembering something that wasn't in the book as being in the book and then having to spend the rest of my life explaining it.       

I had learned that lesson from Robert E. Howard's experience with CONAN. There are inconsistencies in his CONAN chronology because he took it for granted that he was writing one-off pulp magazine short stories -- here today, gone tomorrow. I knew better because REH fandom had spent decades pulling his stories apart and mapping them by the time I was reading them.  People take their sword-n-sorcery very seriously.

It, accidentally, made the CEREBUS story imitative of the metaphysics of physical- incarnation free-will life choices where we experience time in an illusory way as being sequential when, in the fourth dimension (the spirit realm) events in space- time all occur simultaneously.  I was making (and am making) my own choices which lead where they lead, one choice at a time, even as I was making those choices for Cerebus and the other characters.  An event began as a series of possibilities that had to make it to the Notebook stage but hadn't "happened" until it was drawn and lettered on a finished page. For twenty-six years things passed from the potential event compartment in my brain into the kinetic event compartment in my brain.      

Okay, now it's YOUR turn.

Realizing that there are professional limits to what you can say publicly about your progress on bringing HENCH to market in Hollywood, what can you say, specifically and in detail, in a public forum like this about the experience so far?  Never spit in a well from which you might have to drink, but I'm kind of hoping that there are -- unnamed -- studios to which you won't be returning anytime soon and experiences unique to the various developmental discussions that would be valuable in and of themselves to other indy creators contemplating striking out along that route. 

I've always said that Kevin and Peter's approach with the TURTLES is the gold standard.  The TURTLES was a one-off gag that they "ran with" so their attitude toward Hollywood was to treat it as just another aspect of their deal with Surge Licensing, first with the animated TV cartoons and then with movie(s).  You're more likely to get a cartoon show or a movie made if you sign off on it completely.  Indy creators tend to picture it as signing with a studio who will then allow them to become Walt Disney and oversee and overlord every aspect of production. Which never gets very far.  Someone running a viable studio didn't put in the years and or decades developing it as a business to then vacate the C-Suite and let you move in because you're in love with your characters.  The more of a "helicopter parent" you are to your intellectual property, the less likely it will ever be a cartoon or a movie.

As they say in the university exam papers (so I've heard, anyway): Discuss (please: why don't they ever say "please"?)

________________________________

"Cerebus in the New World"?

Mind. Blown.

Next Time: Oliver. And then on Monday: Six more pages from High Society, because I need to lie down..."Cerebus in the New World"?