Billy Beach: A Cerebus Reader In Crisis

Cerebus Readers In Crisis #2 (2007)
Cover art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:

(from the HARDtalk Virtual Tour at Terminal Drift, 4 October 2012)

...The last vacation I took was when Cerebus ended and I flew to Italy to stay with Billy Beach and his wife and two kids. Billy also signed the petition. I LIVE in absolute and total peace and quiet so a good vacation is a that non-stop family thing. Don't worry about making conversation, you'll be lucky if anyone can HEAR you most of the time. What are they doing now? Screaming their heads off. Aren't you, like, worried? Shouldn't we see what they're doing? Oh, no, that's just "doing gymnastics on the living room furniture" screaming. A nuance with which I am, to say the least, wholly unfamiliar...

BILLY BEACH:

I suppose my intended theme for the work has to do with the way that Dave and I perceive warnings differently. He perceived a warning in the mishaps of his journey, while I doubted those events were really any kind of warning at all. On the other hand my internal warning system or conscience is more finely tuned to highlight what I view as participation in any kind of pagan worship, while it seemed to me that Dave's conscience was not then affected by those considerations. So, Dave's negative vibe of the journey from Canada is juxtaposed against my negative vibe of the visit to Loreto. I don't know how well that theme is expressed in the comic; probably not very well. You'll have to evaluate that for yourself.

Cerebus Readers In Crisis #2 is published by Effing Magnifier Publishing and is available from Cerebus Fan Girl.