Heeeeeere's
Next Time: I'ma gonna go see Eric Powell for the Goon's 20th Anniversary Tour stop at Powers Comics in Green Bay, WI. (I'll be the guy with the "Six Demon Bag" and the Matt Dow's A Moment of Cerebus shirt... If you're in the neighborhood, stop on by!) So I'll probably whip something up tonight, and then get it in the kitty for tomorrow...(None of you care.)
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| I gotta get one that says "2020"... |
Next Time: I'ma gonna go see Eric Powell for the Goon's 20th Anniversary Tour stop at Powers Comics in Green Bay, WI. (I'll be the guy with the "Six Demon Bag" and the Matt Dow's A Moment of Cerebus shirt... If you're in the neighborhood, stop on by!) So I'll probably whip something up tonight, and then get it in the kitty for tomorrow...(None of you care.)
10 comments:
I think Dave's pretty gracious about this whole 300 issue thing and has a healthy perspective on it.
I admit, I'm impressed, I think I read years and years ago how Todd wanted to hit 300 and he did.
So I tried reading Spawn 300 and at first I thought Todd's writing had improved but I quickly lost interest, a bunch of gore and some fighting and I stopped. Hey, I ain't the target audience.
Sure, 301, whatever but Cerebus is a work of art; it may be struggling now but wasn't Lovecraft considered a bit of a failure in his lifetime and now look at his work. So who knows if Cerebus will be read years from now but it's possible.
Todd can pass 300, Erik Larsen could pass it but I think neither is as good or interesting as the aardvark.
cheers
A Fake Name
p.s. Matt, I give you a lot of credit for keeping this place goin'.
"Lovecraft considered a bit of a failure in his lifetime and now look at his work."
I have, briefly. It's overwrought dreck. What's your point?
Hey Tony Dunlop,
You said: "I have, briefly. It's overwrought dreck. What's your point?"
---That his work has only grown more popular with time and is now considered of significance.
cheers
A Fake Name
OK, point taken. Lots of dreck is "considered of significance."
David Birdsong? Amen.
Been there with him in spirit since the late 90s. Been there with him with money since 1982.
It astounds me how much of a clue "this guy" has.
He is one of only two people in my lifetime who have taught me to *think*.
I've never seen any evidence that Jeff S. knows how to think. Of course, to Jeff S. "thinking" means taking out any contents his own brain might have come up with and implanting anything Dave dribbles out. "It's not the fetching and heeling, but the incessant tail-wagging that grates."
Jeff, Davie B., and Dave Himself all seem very sure that Cerebus will be discovered and acclaimed as good and right and true by some future generation, when there is no evidence for this and every evidence to the contrary. I'll link to this essay again for those who haven't seen it: http://whenwillthehurtingstop.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-we-will-read-cerebus-before-you.html. One money quote:
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People aren't reading Cerebus now because the current comics "scene" (make of that what you will) has moved long past Dave Sim. This isn't likely to change anytime soon. But people will read Cerebus again. It will never have a wide audience. It will never find readers who regard Sim's sincere religious and political beliefs with anything more than sad curiosity. But I believe Cerebus will nevertheless achieve a kind of immortality despite its creator's best efforts at marginalizing himself, and among the kinds of readers who Sim himself would probably rather eschew. In the future, the only people with the specialized vocabulary and resources necessary to understand, discuss and appreciate Cerebus will be academics and scholars. The series will be a gold mine for critics and historians looking to reconstruct the trajectory of the comics industry in the late twentieth century. Cerebus tells the story of the evolution of the medium in the English-speaking world throughout this crucial period in a way that no other single text can. It will survive because it is simply indispensable, and without it our understanding of comics history would be immeasurably poorer.
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-- Damian
To get as serious as I care to, my thoughts on Cerebus being read and appreciated by posterity are that such future attention will not have anything to do with Biting Social Commentary, or Insight Into The Human Condition, or even Prophetic Foresight Into The Dire World That We Now Live In. If Dave Sim and Cerebus are remembered, it will (should, in a just world) be for his absolutely staggering achievements with the formal structure and implementation of "graphic storytelling" or "sequential art" (hey, if it's good enough for Will Eisner, it's good enough for me). a.k.a "funnybooks." The guy "gets" the comics form in ways that very, very few cartoonists ever have, in my view.
And that may very well mean that, for a few decades or centuries at least, he's studied only by academics and art historians. Probably not his target audience...but who is? I mean, other than the 200 - 1000 of us who still remember who he is?
Dave does not "call a spade a spade when it comes to feminism". He makes stuff up out of his head and then believes it. (Eg. look at No. 3 of his "15 Impossible Things": "A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus." Except that is directly not what feminists believe; they state in so many words that nobody has a say except the woman herself.) The fact that you share his emotional biases doesn't make them true.
-- Damian
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