(from comments to Dave Sim Receives $500,000 Bequest at The Beat, 4 August 2015)
Re: The availability of Cerebus. As far as I know, all of the books
are currently in print and can be ordered from Diamond. (Rick’s Story
*might* be out of print.) Personally, I think it’s a question of comic
book stores having enough interest from customers to bother keeping the
phone books in stock. Without the weekly comic on the shelves, Cerebus
sort of lacks a presence in the market, as such. I'm trying to help Dave
correct that by establishing a more formal online presence for Cerebus
via twitter, facebook, youtube, tumblr, et al. and helping make sure
there are PDFs available, etc…
As I'm sure you can all imagine, keeping sixteen books in print when
it's a one-man operation can be quite challenging, especially with the
transformation to desktop publishing that occurred during the run of
Cerebus. Throw in the digital remastering of all 6,000 pages and it's
now Considerably Even More Of A Challenge. However, the first two books
have now been reprinted (the second of which, High Society, received a
delightful review from the AV Club and the third book should be out this fall along with a Cerebus Covers Collection from IDW.
Work on the rest of the series progresses and, hopefully, as the
books are remastered and re-released, the work will receive a new
audience. It's been eleven years since Cerebus has been on the comic
book shelves. I think a lot of younger fans have only heard of it (or
never heard of it). Maybe people will still think it’s 'irredeemable'.
Or maybe people won't see his worldview as being so simplistic that it
can be easily dismissed by calling it misogyny. Maybe people will see
events like the witch hunt against British biochemist Tim Hunt
in a different light and it will cause them to reconsider their
position on some gender issues. I certainly don't know, but I think it’s
an excellent body of work that deserves a wider audience, warts and
all, and am happy to be working with Dave on it. For those who care, I
see him every week, and he's doing very well. No, he's not crazy. No, he
doesn’t hate women. He works on The Strange Death of Alex Raymond and
Cerebus-related stuff and prays and fasts and reads the Bible and Koran
and doesn’t smoke or do drugs or drink anymore and tries to be a good
person. But he still can't draw right now, as his hand is still messed
up.
For those who simply do not ever want to see or hear about Dave Sim
or Cerebus ever again, I'm sure there’s a Chrome plug-in for that, but
for those who are interested in examining a body of work about which
Alan Moore once said, "is still to comic books what Hydrogen is to the
Periodic Table" for themselves and making up their own minds about what
it is, well there's lots more coming! A lot more. Oh man, so much more.
So much scanning to do in the future. So much Photoshop. I always say,
he could have just done 200 issues, you know? That still would've been
really awesome and everybody would've been super impressed. But oh no,
he had to go and do 300. Big show off.
