Cerebus #16... A 32 Year Old Comic

Cerebus #16 (May 1980)
Art by Dave Sim

TUCKER STONE:
(from a review posted at TCJ.com, 15 June 2012)

This issue includes Dave Sim getting worked up in the letters column about Ronald Reagan earning the Republican presidential nomination and a plug for a distributor’s final copies of the first five issues of Cerebus, of which only 2000 copies were printed. The story is about a ball where a bunch of assassins show up to murder the Julius character, and Cerebus successfully fends them off with a similar trick to the one that Bruce Wayne uses in that first Christopher Nolan movie to get all the people out before Liam Neeson burns his house down. There’s also a lot of cross-hatching. Sometimes you look at cross-hatching and wonder if the person responsible only got into comics to cover for the fact that they were into compulsively drawing intricate lines over and over again, and this is pretty much the only place you get to do that outside of when architects add a little flair to a blueprint. But then you realize that’s a stupid thing to think, it’s not funny or mean or even interesting, you’re just an asshole for bringing it up, the same way your mother is being sort of an asshole for not calling you back even though you left really explicit details on when you were going to be available, and fuck it, it’s a 32-year-old Cerebus comic, why not just pad things out with a reference to how the guy feels about women, even if you’ve never actually read any of that stuff and honestly don’t care about it anyway, because it ain’t like he just sent in his resume for babysitting detail? But that’s what everybody wants when you bring up a Sim comic anyway, it’s what they’re waiting for the entire time. It’s like that thing Chekhov always said about the gun, that if you show a gun in the first arc, then you should spend intermission using that gun to murder everybody in the audience, because really, anyone with the gall to even show up for live theater at this point is pretty much openly admitting that they think they’re better than you, that they think you’re stupid for watching the Avengers movie and thinking that maybe contemporary porn has started going too far too often, and I’ll bet you haven’t even read the new Bechdel book yet, you sanctimonious Void-worshipping cretin, you’ll never understand how professional wrestling really works, classic professional wrestling, the kind that had real characters and real people, and also real struggles. Cerebus!

(Submitted by Rea Giner-Sorolla. Thanks!)