Cerebus the Barbarian Messiah (2012)
Edited by Eric Hoffman
MOTION PICTURES COMICS.com:
(from the Motion Pictures Comics blog, 14 April 2014)
Cerebus the Barbarian Messiah: Essays on the Epic Graphic Satire of Dave Sim and Gerhard
is exactly what the book’s title promises. It's a collection of essays
by different authors, attempting to take a serious, scholarly look at
various aspects of Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard’s 300-issue
independent comic book masterpiece. I found myself occasionally rolling
my eyes at some of the overly verbose scholar-speak in the essays, but
mostly I was delighted by this serious look at an important (albeit
controversial) comic book work, and I found it a thrill to dive back
into the deep, crazy waters of Cerebus.
For the uninitiated, Cerebus is a 300-issue-long
black-and-white self-published comic book. At first the series was
written and drawn by Dave Sim by himself, but eventually he was joined
by Gerhard as his partner on the art. What began as a silly parody of
Marvel Comics' Conan series (illustrated at the time by Barry
Windsor-Smith) evolved into an incredibly complex saga that dealt with
politics and religion and male-female relationships. If one were to sit
down to read 300 consecutive issues of, say, Spider-Man or Batman or Superman,
it would become quickly obvious that the stories, while having some
continuity, couldn’t possibly represent events that could actually
happen to a real character. There might be the illusion of change, but
ultimately all of these characters have to remain in a perpetual status
quo. Sim set out to do something completely different, to tell the
story of the life a character -- the titular Cerebus -- in 300 issues,
with the 300th issue chronicling the character's death. Over the course
of twenty-six years, Sim and Gerhard did exactly that.
That alone would make Cerebus a jaw-dropping achievement. I
am hard-pressed to think of any example of long-form story-telling that
can come close to matching this sisyphian effort of telling the story
of Cerebus in monthly twenty-page installments over twenty-six years. But there’s far more to Cerebus
than just Sim and Gerhard’s endurance. The story is at points
hilarious and thrilling and infuriating. It can shift from juvenile
humor (when Cerebus is funny, it is VERY VERY funny) to
incredible action-adventure to painfully sharp observations of marital
discord. The series features a wealth of fascinating characters and
settings. Cerebus is one of the most complex, fascinating examples of fantasy world-building ever made, rivaling J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Isaac Asimon's Foundation, and George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones.
The series also pushed the boundaries of comic book art farther than
any other series I can think of. Sim and Gerhard experimented
gloriously with page-layout, with different approaches to the
combination of words and pictures and the use of large blocks of prose
(sometimes without any accompanying illustrations at all). Mr. Sim's
sharp ear for dialect and accent resulted in extraordinarily wonderful,
distinct dialogue for his different characters. And I stand firm in my
assessment that the lettering in Cerebus -- particularly in the
final hundred-or-so issues -- is the finest achievement in comic book
lettering ever created. Mr. Sim's extraordinarily expressive
word-balloons and lettering brought his characters' subtlest inflections
and inner thoughts to gorgeously realized life.
Cerebus is also a profoundly frustrating, confounding piece
of work in that, in the series’ final third, the tone and focus of the
story shifted dramatically into areas many readers found unsettling
and/or disappointing. I have read the experience of reading Cerebus
in its entirety described as an opportunity to watch its creator Dave
Sim go slowly insane, and I think there is much evidence in support of
that theory. In the three decades of producing the comic, Dave Sim came
to possess some extraordinarily unusual opinions about women and
religion that earned him the label of misogynist in the pages of The Comics Journal
and that lost him a great many readers. (I am not sure that misygonist
label is fair, but there's no question that I find many of the opinions
Sim came to possess about women to be deeply distasteful.) I tend to
be able to separate an artist's personal life and beliefs from his/her
work, but there's no question that Sim's weird ideas crept into the Cerebus
narrative in a way that unfavorably, for me, color its concluding
volumes. The infamous text-only issue #186 consists almost entirely of
an anti-woman rant that is difficult to stomach, and the six issues
spent late in the series in a bizarre, loony analysis of the first
several chapters of the Torah (a sequence nicknamed "Cerebexegesis" by
readers) is -- while funny at times and fascinating at others -- such a
far cry from what fans like me used to know and love about the series as
to be difficult to fathom. (Dave Sim has stated that those six issues
represent his actual thinking about the Torah, which makes the
experience of reading them like staring deeply into the mind of a very
crazy person.)
Sim also held firmly to his desire to make Cerebus like real
life in that, in real life, there isn't usually a big dramatic climax
right before one's death. An influential person might have several
years of being able to effect events on the world stage, but then in old
age they gradually fade away. Sim held firmly to that conviction, and
so while there are many joys to be found in Cerebus' final
hundred issues, there is also a lot of frustration as readers clamored
for resolution to many of the characters and story-arcs that had once
been so central to the series. That resolution would never come. This
is a fascinating approach to take, and one that I respect intellectually
while feeling an emotional frustration at the absence of the sort of
resolution I would generally expect from this sort of long-form
story-telling.
Because of the general dissatisfaction with the final third of the Cerebus
epic, I find that the series does not generally receive the acclaim it
deserves. It’s been over ten years since the conclusion of Cerebus, and in some ways the series has been forgotten, something I consider to be absolutely crazy. Though deeply flawed, Cerebus remains a remarkable achievement in comic book story-telling, and one worthy of great praise and critical analysis.
Clearly Eric Hoffman agrees, as he has edited together this book, Cerebus the Barbarian Messiah,
in an attempt to bring Sim and Gerhard's lengthy work back into the
spotlight. This book is not a gushing praise-fest. Many of the essays
deal directly with some of the series' most controversial aspects. But
what the essays have in common is a great respect for the achievement of
the work, and I found that invigorating.
The essays cover many different aspects of the Cerebus
narrative. Several deal head-on with the series’ approach to issues of
gender and feminism/anti-feminism. The essay "Seeing Sound" is a
terrific and well-deserved look at Dave Sim's incredible achievements in
lettering (that I mentioned earlier). I particularly enjoyed the
book's closing essay: "YHWH's Story, or, How to Laugh While Reading 'Chasing YHWH' and Still Have Enough Stamina for The Last Day." ("Chasing YHWH" is the afore-mentioned six issues of "Cerebexigesis", while The Last Day
is the title of the comic's final story-line, chronicling the day of
Cerebus' death.) The essay is an admirable attempt to defend the
digression into Cerebus (and Sim)'s loopy analysis of Genesis as a
story-line that can indeed connect to and feel of a piece with the
series' previous story-lines. I'm not sure I agree, but I love this
line of thinking.
Probably my favorite aspect of the book is actually the lengthy
introduction, by Mr. Hoffman, that provides a detailed summary of the
comic book’s creation and its successes and challenges over the course
of almost thirty years of monthly publication. It's a fascinating look
back at the incredible trials that Dave Sim had to overcome to bring Cerebus
to life and to bring the story to its conclusion with issue #300.
There is a reason no one else in the comic book world has even come
close to matching this feat. Whatever one might think of Mr. Sim
himself or of the effectiveness of the series' latter issues, that Mr.
Sim succeeded in self-publishing his 300-issue story all the way to its
planned conclusion is a singular achievement.
Reading this book, I felt renewed appreciation for Mr. Sim's accomplishment, and for the Cerebus
series as a whole. I find myself filled with a renewed desire to go
back and re-read the series from the beginning. I have several other
planned comic-book re-reading projects to occupy my next several months,
but I have no doubt that I will return to the Cerebus story
many times in the future. While I share in the dissatisfaction that
many readers felt with the series' final third -- and I agree that the
weaknesses of those issues ultimately weakens the over-all power and
success of the story as a whole -- that does not diminish all that the
series achieved, or all that I still love it for. Would that there were
lots more comic books like Cerebus being published today, and lots more creators with the creativity, ingenuity, and long-term drive of Dave Sim.
For readers curious to give Cerebus a try, skip the first collection of the series' early stand-along issues, and start reading with the second installment, High Society. It's a brilliant political satire and extremely funny. I guarantee you'll quickly be sucked into the world of Cerebus.
