(Review by Noel Murray at A.V. Club, 15 October 2012)
Finally, after a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign (followed by
over 100 increasingly confusing Kickstarter updates), the rollout of the
digital version of Dave Sim's classic graphic novel Cerebus Volume 2: High Society has finally begun. The first issue is available for free here,
with additional issues coming weekly for 99 cents each. The digital
files are available in multiple e-reader-friendly formats (including
PDF, CBZ, and ePUB), and also available as a Quicktime movie, featuring
close-ups of the panels and pages that the camera scans while Sim reads
the text himself, doing all the voices. The result is halfway between an
audiobook and a motion comic, with sound effects and music enhancing
Sim’s spirited reading. The downside to the audio/video version is that
by the time of High Society - which began in issue #26, a little over four years after Cerebus
debuted - Sim’s pages had become so graphically complex that they don't
lend themselves easily to being read aloud. The upside is that Sim has
always been undervalued as a writer, and even though some of his best
jokes don’t land without the rhythm of a comics page to put them across,
his rich description of life in the bureaucracy-choked city-state of
Iest (and how the arrival of one barbaric aardvark changes the political
dynamic) sounds as good as it reads. The strange directions Sim
eventually took Cerebus over the course of its 300 issues have
led to the series and Sim himself often being excluded from the larger
comics canon, but make no mistake: Warts and all, Cerebus is a must for fans of the medium, and High Society
is pretty much flawless from start to finish (give or take the
occasional dated superhero parody). Anyone who's never read the comic
should feel comfortable starting here, and should expect some
pleasurable reading - and listening(?) - in the weeks to come.
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