"Cerebus In Hell? #0" Reviewed!

Cerebus In Hell? #0

by Dave Sim & Sandeep Atwal (with Gustave Doré)

ATOMIC JUNK SHOP:
(from a review by Travis Pelkie, 24 November 2016)

You all probably know by now that I’m a big Cerebus fan.  The recently released zero issue of Cerebus in Hell? shows the humor of the book, a big reason why I love the original series.

Cerebus in Hell? (don’t forget that question mark) is a 4 panel comic strip that releases on a daily basis at Cerebus Downloads, and it takes the character Cerebus, a gruff, obstinate, money-hungry, angry barbarian who’s low on impulse control (and those are his good traits!) and gives him a tour of Dante’s Inferno.  The funny comes from Cerebus being thrown into these situations where he meets various types of sinners, or meets up with Satan, or hangs out with Virgil and Dante, and how his reactions (almost always ill-advised) go down in Hell.

He might be disbelieving of how dumb Dante is when entering Hell, interfere with Artaxerxes Colophon’s parole, encounter multiple versions of himself, be annoyed that no one knows how to tell a knock-knock joke, or deny that he was the one who beheaded all those guys.

Aesthetically it seems like I shouldn’t like it, because it’s taking a few default Cerebus poses and pasting them into Gustave Doré etchings of Hell, essentially.  Yet somehow, it works.  Cerebus is out of place, but that’s the point.  He sticks out like a sore aardvark.

Some of the humor isn’t the most-PC, so if you’re easily offended, you probably want to avoid this.

The text pieces are funny as well, with humorous bios of the creators and an ad for a contest to create your own Cerebus in Hell? strip.

While the strips are written by both Dave Sim and Sandeep Atwal, it’s hard to tell who wrote what.  About the only one I’d say is definitely a Sandeep strip is the one about ’90s Britpop arguments.  Beyond that, I’m not sure, so both writers are working at a high level together.  And if you’re interested, there was a weekly update on AMOC with some behind the scenes stuff on how the strips are created... [Read the full review here...]