It was just last January in Planning Issue 43 that we saw two pages from Dave Sim’s fourth Cerebus notebook. The notebook covers Cerebus #41 through 44 and had 99 pages out of 108 pages scanned.
Skimming through it I thought I saw a familiar statue:
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| Notebook #4, page 92 |
Well, perhaps not too familiar. It is a bit different then the one that appears in the pages of Cerebus. There is also some text that goes along with the statue:
Albatross it was predicted in the holy books of Tarim a thousand years ago that the albatross would find its way to the heart of Iest just before the Exodus Inward. That the one who finds it will be able to unite the Eastern and Western Churches under a single banner. But only so long as the Exodus Inward lasts – be it one century . . .or a thousand centuries.
An aardvark could change a lot of history in a century.
Or a thousand?
Heh. Or a thousand.
The crossed-out bit says: “If it isn’t found, folks are just going to keep looking for it. With the Eastern Church”.
The text of the top of the page reads like Lord Storm’send, aka the WuffaWuffa Guy.
3 comments:
This is one of the flaws of "High Society": the text doesn't tell us why the albatross is important or what it has to do with the Exodus Inwards or what the Exodus Inwards is, so it's hard to get into the dramatic stakes. Dave was good at big-picture stuff ("high-altitude mapping"), and good at detail stuff (all those little lines!), but not so good at medium-range stuff. Time and again throughout Cerebus he sets up things that he doesn't pay off, and pays off things that he hasn't set up.
-- Damian
This is a valid critique of the work, and it's as much true of some single-issue stories as it is of each phone book as well as the entire opus. I've read "Captive in Boreala" a dozen or more times over nearly 40 years and it's really only in the post-300 era that certain aspects make sense to me in the context of the whole Cerebus story. (That possibly says more about me as a reader than it does Dave as a writer.)
I do appreciate works that don't spell everything out but drop clues that contribute to the theme without calling attention to themselves or being clear about being clues. I used to re-read Cerebus over and over for the jokes and surface plot but I've definitely found joy in recent years re-reading for the behind-the-scenes movement of the religious and poltical movements and conspiracies. Dave's world-building is not as thorough as Alan Moore's or as expertly teased out in the text, and that's sometimes disappointing, but "High Society" and Cerebus still repay re-reading for me as I discover more unpeeling onion layers each time.
I think it's a consequence of keeping the point of view predominantly the aardvark's. Cerebus is a believing Tarimite who doesn't know anything about a dam duck stachoo, but then, how much does the typical believing Christian know about the eschatological distinctions between Eastern Orthodox & Catholic Christianity, or baptist vs. pentecostal Protestantism? Do most Muslims know the theological differences between Shia and Sunni Islam? So we only learn stuff when the aardvark does, with rare exceptions such as Therese talking to Weisshaupt.
But it is still hard to forgive Dave for "What Happened Between Issues Twenty & Twenty-One."
The first half of this article, about the Russian Orthodox Church's role in Putin's plans for Ukraine, reminds me of the Exodus Inward.
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-best-of-christian-compassion?r=2jzol&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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