Cerebus Vol 1 "Remastered Edition" Arrives In The UK!

Cerebus Vol 1 "Remastered Edition" 17th Printing 
featuring extensive restoration notes by Sean Michael Robinson

Now available in the UK from Page 45!

"Cerebus Cover Art Treasury" Reviewed!

Cerebus Cover Art Treasury

by Dave Sim & Gerhard

(IDW, 2016)

PAGE 45:
(from a review by Stephen Holland, Page 45 proprietor)

If the 300-issue, 6,000-page magnum opus that is CEREBUS remains one of the most inventive comics this medium has ever produced, with narrative innovations cascading from its pages at such an astonishing rate as to make Niagara Falls look like a domestic, dripping tap - and it does - then its covers were no less ingenious, iconic and iconoclastic, all at the same time.

What makes this luxurious, full-colour treasury even more of a thirstily devoured "Yes, please!" is that so many of these illustrations don't just set the tone but actively inform the story within, which most modern readers have had access to only in the form of those whopping, black and white CEREBUS phonebook collections. They never reprinted the colour covers to keep their costs down, but some seen in sequence form comicbook narratives in their own right (#153 & #154) and they are bursting with clues.

The diversity of their approaches and angles - geometric or otherwise - was jaw-dropping, especially when one considers the relative, relentless homogeneity of the corporations' covers competing for space on retailers' shelves back then, and even more so to this day.

You never knew what you'd be startled by next: stark silhouettes, spot-lit close-ups, balletic action shots, quiet reveries, dream-sequence deliria, architecture only, lunar photography, William Morris wallpaper either hung with framed portraits or used to frame pithy, telling snap-shots; typography only (ever so brave and oh so effective), images rotated sideways to reflect what lay within, woodland landscapes, a funereal flower arrangement, glistening bottles of booze placed in the foreground of drunken misdemeanours, film-poster parodies, cosmic chess matches, or Dave / David Sim drawing the divine Mick / Michael Jagger in precisely the same pose as Michelangelo once sculpted David.

No, I wasn't perceptive enough to spot that little joke - and, trust me, I studied these long and hard as I acquired each treasured gem. The good news is that, thanks to the conversational back-and-forth between Dave Sim and Gerhard's annotations on almost every page, you'll be privy to even more process notes and private self-indulgences. Take the cover to #77. Here's Gerhard:

"Dream covers are always fun. When I was drawing the water pouring from the statue, I thought it might be fun to have the water fill the letters M and T... as in 'MT is full'. Say it fast, and you'll get the joke... or not."

Dave was joined by landscape artist Gerhard in CEREBUS #65, though not on its cover which was the typography-only effort bearing the truism (which has stuck with me ever since), that "Anything done for the first time unleashes a demon". There were some very, very fine titles: some portentous, some ripping the piss - out of themselves, readers' expectations or Marvel's melodrama - some simply playful yet salient, like "Sane As It Ever Was".

From #65 onwards Dave continued to write and draw all the characters while Gerhard would render the backgrounds in meticulous detail, providing both textures and colour. The cover to #66 is a ripped-open version of #65, exposing Gerhard's first cover and colour contribution.

"It was interesting watching Gerhard tearing art paper carefully so it LOOKED like torn art paper."

That's what I mean by meticulous.

"It took me years to figure out that Gerhard LIKED doing precise measurements / vanishing point stuff: that it was his favourite part," observes Dave of the phenomenal window on #68.

Of #162's extraordinary spectacle: "Vanishing point and applied geometry. It was there in front of me the whole time." And once again of #164's delicious, crystal-clear, blue-sky winter panorama with its single shattered skylight because we'd been there before.

Neither of the artists is here merely to pat themselves or each on the back, though. They're both commendably candid about their mistakes, shortcomings and where things didn't work out the way they had planned. But it was a monthly comic which only once fell behind schedule (towards the end of CHURCH & STATE) so at the end of the day, a) they had to go to print and simply strive to do better next time b) you simply don't know what it will look like until the printed article appears right in front of you.

Sometimes I found myself shaking my head, bewildered by what one or the other considers a failure. The library cover to #151 with its tumbling book and exceptional sense of space has always struck me as one of the ten best covers ever to grace a comic, but Gerhard was so frustated by its colours that when he hung it on its clip on completion, he did so facing the wall.

"In these situations," writes Dave, "you take the hint and just hope it's still on its hook, face to the wall, when you come in tomorrow. It's HIS cover."

Hilariously, however, Dave confesses that during much earlier days - the beginning to HIGH SOCIETY - he tried his hand at watercolours for the covers without comprehending that you were supposed to dilute them. You know, add water. So he used them as you would oil and acrylics, virtually smearing them onto the board. Such is the way of the self-taught artist. I actually liked those covers, but you can't un-see something once you've been shown.

Successful experimentations are equally well documented, like Gerhard's discovery that using a toothbrush to flick white or red ink onto the boards was far more effective for snow, stars and blood than an airbrush. There are lots and lots of different space and star effects in evidence. Also, in one instance, a book bearing bloody finger prints. They're Gerhard's, if that ever proves forensically relevant.

You may have noticed by now that the covers are presented in different ways. The majority are shot from the originals before some or all of the lettering and extra effects have been added which, with attendant notes, gives extra insight into the process behind them. I find it fascinating to peer behind the curtains to see bits pasted on here and there, and what was entrusted to the printers instead.

Others are reproductions of the covers as we encountered them complete with the ever-evolving CEREBUS logo and other typography. I learned a new word: "majuscule". Sim has long been hailed as one of the medium's all-time greatest letterers, sliding sentences up and down, giving them an extra lilt or cadence (when Thatcher is speaking, for example), and deploying the visual equivalent of onomatopoeia in places. At least one is the result of Sim and Gerhard revisiting a cover, recreating it for a commission.

They're reproductions or recreations because some of the originals have been sold, and so many more have been stolen. I'll leave the introduction to fill you in on that aspect.

So yes, there are practical and commercial considerations as well as artistic ones assessed. From time to time, Dave's Inner Business Manager retrospectively smacks himself upside the head to much comedic effect when either carelessly or wilfully making design decisions which ran the risk of thwarting his own sales.

When getting it right on #52 he writes: "Cerebus breaking a chair over the head of a barbarian. Yes, Dave, BRANDING. What is it you're not 'getting' about what you're trying to sell here?" In addition both Cerebus and the logo are found at the top, so easily seen even in shops with semi-tiered shelves which obscure some comics' bottom halves. Everything is a learning curve including copyright infringement, though Dave did get away with it on satirical grounds.

"The three 'Wolveroach' covers which I really just did to show Frank Miller and Joe Rubenstein how the WOLVERINE mini-series covers SHOULD have been done - more like Neal Adams. Thus overshooting the 'Branding' runway and smashing through Marvel's intellectual property fence and leaving this mixed metaphor jackknifed into their swimming pool with its tail in the air."

Of the second in the series, #55: "Now that you mention it, it DID look sort of familiar".

From the ridiculous to the sublime, we finish where Dave Sim and Gerhard concluded, with the final ten issues sub-titled CEREBUS: THE LAST DAY. For this Gerhard supplied a detailed 360-degree view of the room divided into nine covers which conjoin seamlessly with each other and at each end. This in itself constitutes sequential art when considering that time passes ever so slowly inside, but the pan is paused with #298 for a halting juxtaposition.

That's what I meant when I wrote at the start that the exterior art informs what lies within and - at times - creates a narrative all of its own.

This is a gallery we never thought we'd see because of those aforementioned colour costs which would have jeopardised the self-publisher's finances, so bravo to IDW for enabling this miracle.

I'd only add that to close this book immediately after the final cover is to feel almost as bereft as Mark and I did after reading the very last panel on the final page of CEREBUS itself twelve years ago.

Page 45: Selling Cerebus Worldwide For Over 20 Years!

A Page 45 Review: The Puma Blues

The Puma Blues

by Stephen Murphy & Michael Zulli

(Dover Books, 2015) 

Eisner Award Nominee! 
Best Archival Collection/Project: Comic Books

PAGE 45:
(from a review by Stephen Holland, Page 45 co-founder)

"Intelligent and urgent mythology for the end of the millennium," wrote Neil Gaiman.

I'm not sure when. It could have been any time during the last two decades since this last saw print, and it's never been completed until now with a new forty-page conclusion by Murphy and Zulli.

Rich in wildlife, the howling coyote on its own seems worth the price of admission to me. It's just a shame there were any humans - on so many levels and indeed ever in this context.

A forward-thinking forewarning about "environmental degradation" and "ecological ruin", as the series kicks off we have already poisoned our waters with acid rain to the extent that they have become poisonous to giant Manta Rays which have instead taken to the skies and hang from branches by their prehensile tails like bats.

Imagine poisoning the air that we breathe to the extent that cities become toxic to humans! Oh. Wait. We have. We did it in England following the Industrial Revolution, a lesson we singularly failed to learn from. Hello China! *waves*

It's a miracle that much of this material ever saw print at all, for its publishing history - after the most unlikely but promising start at Dave Sim's Aardvark One International - contains all kinds of crazy, caught as it was in petty comic-industry squabbles, very much an innocent victim of distributor Diamond USA's vindictive belligerence.

SWAMP THING's Stephen Bissette is on hand with a sweeping fourteen-page afterword explaining every element of that (which I remember all too well), providing also an overview of the aesthetics and intentions behind what was in part a very personal story written by Stephen Murphy who was working through the loss of his father and wandering alone round the shores of the Quabbin Reservoir in search of a real, live puma. Perhaps he was shadowed by one of these "ghost cats" but failed to spot it, much like the protagonist here.

What I don't remember in enough detail is the series itself so I confess that this is more of a dim recollection than a review. I don't have time to re-read five hundred and fifty pages at this time of year.

Melancholic, elegiac, some pages were dense in reverie and introspection while others left Zulli to wow you with wildlife. Even so, I'm not trying to sell you this as something as Attenborough-accessible as the magnificent, painted, natural world graphic novels LOVE: FOX or LOVE: TIGER. One of the joys of a collection like this at the beginning of an artist's career is seeing her or him develop on the page. Much is made of Zulli's love of the Pre-Raphaelites which he shared with Barry Windsor-Smith, but a glance at the earlier human-centric pages shows also shows a huge debt to Bryan Talbot's ADVENTURES OF LUTHOR ARKWRIGHT too.

The flying Manta Rays, however, are a fine example of what to expect. Doesn't that sound so romantic, like the moments of dazzling, fantastical glory in Shaun Tan's THE ARRIVAL? But they'd only taken to the skies because we poisoned their natural habitat, the air that they breathe: water. In case you believe that Murphy and Zulli held out any hope for the future of this planet's ecosystems, towards the end the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - whilst un-sign-posted by Murphy - rode unmistakeably into town (town being the irradiated sands of a Nevada nuclear test crater) to declare in Spanish with a confident finality:

"The Earth is ours."

All of which brings us to the four-page PUMA BLUES self-contained short story written by Alan Moore and pencilled by Stephen Bissette then inked by Mike Zulli. It's reprinted in the back here following Bissette's lucid introduction.

Alan Moore has a commendable history of rescuing life from death; specifically life from death through sex.

Sex and death have been intertwined since Shakespearian times when "to die" meant to orgasm. But when AIDS reared its awful head and Thatcher sought to criminalise education in her repugnant Clause 28, Alan Moore wrote a passionate same-sex love poem entitled 'The Mirror Of Love'. He then went on to write the LOST GIRLS graphic novel for Melinda Gebbie to illustrate. It was set on the eve of war, when so many young men were about to be sent to obliterate one another at precisely the same time in their lives that they should have been procreating instead. Gebbie eventually became Alan's wife, and don't you just love the idea of a piece of literary erotica being born by two beautiful people in love?

Here he takes the air-borne Manta Rays' risky but thrilling new mating ritual, copulating in the sky, entering each other at twenty miles an hour then plummeting in oblivious, post-coital free-fall towards to the water below which will kill them if they can't break off from their ecstasy in time.

Weekly Update #132: Strange Death Of Alex Raymond

Featured in this week's update:
 - Page 45... selling Cerebus worldwide since 1994!
 - Dave's research for Strange Death Of Alex Raymond (continued from Thursday's AMOC post).

Page 45

9 Market Street, Nottingham, United Kingdom, NG1 6HY

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Page 45: The Restored "Church & State I"

Cerebus Vol 3: Church & State I

by Dave Sim & Gerhard

PAGE 45:
(from a review by Stephen Holland at Page 45.com, January 2016)

The original art has been reshot then reprinted on such fine paper stock that the book's already considerable girth has almost doubled. 

"Anything Done For The First Time Unleashes A Demon."

Around this time there was a CEREBUS cover whose only visual element was the hand-lettering of the sentence above, white letters on black. No picture at all. I don’t recall that being done before or any time since. As both a brave and successful attention-grabbing visual device and as a Truth, it has stuck with me ever since to the extent that I typed the sentence from memory rather than sought out my own issue.

It's now that we start using the word 'genius'. Not because I am drunk but because the writing and art have both ascended to the point of inspired precision.

Every look, every line has a weight to it. They're so well refined and targeted, and amongst the targets are melodramatic superheroes in the form of Chris Claremont's Wolverine, and organised religion. Not faith – that’s a very different thing. Which is fortunate, for Sim would go on to embrace God with a passion.

Prime Minister Cerebus is persuaded to enter the Church, to vie for the role of Pope which for Cerebus involves throwing babies off roofs to prove a point about obeisance and being careful what you wish for.

Please don't think that Cerebus has been converted. He hasn't. The most famous CEREBUS t-shirt has him dressed as Pope declaring, "He doesn't love you. He just wants all your money." Specifically, he wants gold.

But Cerebus achieves his status through an assassination out of his hands, and for the first time he observes that "Something fell!" It won't be the last. It will ripple through time and, when uttered in the future, will become a catalyst for destruction.

This is where the subplot – hiding in the wings but very much in evidence for those who’ve either been looking for it or reading in retrospect – really kicks in. There is something evidently rather singular about our Aardvark. Also something of a duality. Things happen around him. There are the Mind Games, the Strange White Glowing Thing, and the gold evidently wants him as much as he wants it...

Did I mention he gets married? If the first book begins as a parody of CONAN, you won’t be surprised at the inclusion of a character called Red Sophia based on female barbarian Red Sonja. What would perhaps surprise you is that Red Sophia’s mother is an extended homage to British cartoonist Giles. It's brilliantly done, too.

More Mind Games, more chess pieces, more Jaka. Oh, yes, more Marx Brothers!

For more on CEREBUS – an overview or its story and an assessment of its structure, its art, its invention and its place in comicbook history – please see my reviews of every single one of its sixteen component parts making up 300 monthly issues written and drawn over twenty-three years.

Unusually I wrote them back to back just before Page 45’s website launched because a) most of the collected editions were published long before we wrote reviews so we had none, and b) CEREBUS is such a landmark series in the history of comic art and industry that I would not countenance a Page 45 website launching without every single edition being assessed to one extent or another.

Because I wrote them back to back, they constitute one complete and hopefully coherent review dealing with different elements like the lettering and art rather than repeating myself each time as an introduction. Begin at the beginning?

Stephen Holland is the co-founder (with Mark Simpson) of one the UK's leading comic stores - Page 45.

Ten Years Ago: A Tribute To Mark Simpson

Mark Simpson (1968-2005) 
Co-founder (with Stephen Holland) of the UK comics shop Page 45
Founder of the Cerebus Yahoo Discussion Group.

DAVE SIM:
(from the Cerebus Yahoo Group, 2005)

Before we get started here I wanted to publicly pay my belated respects to the late Mark Simpson here in The House that Mark Built. I didn't know him terribly well but there is definitely something about getting to know someone in the midst of a weeks-long event that you have no idea how it is going to "come off" - the '93 Aardvarks Over U.K. Tour (there’s a good shot of him taken by Gerhard's camera on the back cover of issue 177) - that gives you a clearer sense of the "cut of a man's jib" which is perhaps a more important and central element to the human character than those more conventional attributes we think of in regards to our associates and our friends.

Page 45 was a reasonably new experiment back then and it gave me great confidence in the possibilities presented by that experiment (now confirmed and affirmed - exponentially - many times over) to see Stephen and Mark interacting. Stephen - who could make choosing a restaurant into an ardent and critical life experience pregnant with meaning and life-altering potentialities - ably balanced by Mark: he of the dry-as-dust mordant Rule Britannia demeanour who could - with a well selected phrase or two - return any discussion to those more grounded and sensible proportions from which it had recently taken flight. I would speculate that that balance, so crucial in the early years of their collaboration, became less necessary as Stephen learned to fulfill for himself the role that Mark had so ably provided in the beginning (I suspect going back to their Fantastic Store "Rebels in the Basement" days) and that Mark had chosen to open up Page 45's "Internet Front" as a means of widening their on-going war on comic-book retail mediocrity.

It was characteristic of him that he saw a need - no one was discussing Cerebus as a creative work, they were just vilifying Dave Sim - and chose to fill it. He didn't write or phone and say, "Dave. What do you think of this idea?" The straight line he had drawn mentally between the problem he saw and the solution he had arrived at didn't pass through me so, for Mark, there was no need to bother me with it. He built the environment, nurtured it through its early days as an active participant until he was sure that it was up and running and when he was sure that the structure was sound and the concept fully entrenched, he moved on to his other areas of greater need: the unsolved problems. Not only didn't he bother me with issues of midwifery, he also didn't contact me to say "Look at what I've done for you, Dave." The pat on the head was anathema to Mark. The business of improving the comic-book field was something that was to be "gotten on with". A solved problem wasn't something that you admired and waved under the nose of others, a solved problem meant only that there was now more time to devote to unsolved problems. It had been, literally, years since he had even checked in to see how his offspring was doing.

UK Tour '93:
Gerhard, Dave Sim, Mark Simpson & Stephen Holland (seated)

And, of course, the kicker is that - had he contacted me with his solution to the problem - I would've deemed it "just some Internet crap" and told him to do whatever he wanted but that I didn't want to be bothered about it. I'm sure he knew that, too. Just as I'm sure that he had the foresight to understand that this would one day become the primary Cerebus environment after the book was done and that I would come - very, very late - to the realization of just exactly how large a favour he had done for me and Ger and for the book in creating this environment very early on so it would have time to take root before March, 2004.

It would've meant very little to him to have me acknowledge - as I am here - that he had been more farsighted than I had been. There were echoes of Mark in Stephen's voice - the part of Mark that is now as much a part of Stephen as his own personality - when I called to offer my condolences a couple of weeks back when Ger had told me the news.

[I said,] "If it hadn’t been for Mark, there wouldn't have been a Cerebus Newsgroup."

[Stephen replied,] "Well, if it hadn’t been for Dave Sim there wouldn’t have been a Page 45."

We talked about Mark very briefly and then switched to the Situation Board, how things are and what can be done about it. It was really the most effective way to honour Mark's memory. It's all that would have interested him if Stephen and I were jabbering away at each other as we were wont to do. His facial expression was always eloquent: Get to the point, it said, and then get back to work.

Even though he would've made a wry face, arched an eyebrow and said, "That…really…isn’t necessary." I'd like to propose that the headline for this mailing list permanently include a very small line beneath it reading The House That Mark Built with an icon that will take the reader to a short biography and a photo.

There you go, Mark, I got to the point and now I'm getting back to work.

It Could Have Been...

Judenhass (2008)
Art by Dave Sim

STEPHEN HOLLAND:
(from Comics International #207, 2008)

Literally translated as "Jew Hatred", Judenhass' release coincides with the 60th Anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. On the dedicated website, Sim writes, “I decided some time ago that the term Anti-Semitism… is completely inadequate to the abhorrent cultural phenomenon which it attempts to describe… It seemed to me that the term [Judenhass] served to distil the ancient problem to its essence, and in such a way as to hopefully allow other non-Jews (like myself) to see the problem “unlaundered” and through fresh eyes. Europe and various other jurisdictions aren’t experiencing a sudden upsurge in “Anti-Semitism”. What they are experiencing is an upsurge in Judenhass.”

The pages depicting the Holocaust or Shoah – the bleak barracks of Auschwitz in their full, freezing horror, and the gaunt faces of their skeletal occupants crammed onto stacks of hard, wooden racks – are accompanied by a calm, considered explanation of why Sim believes that every creative person should consider embarking on such a work, particularly those who aren’t Jewish:

““Lest we forget”… “Never again”… are fine and noble-sounding sentiments which have attached themselves to the historical remembrance of what was done to these innocent individuals and millions of others like them. But it seems to me that the words are largely meaningless if (as has been the case to now) in movies, in books, in plays and in documents of the historical record they are expressions largely if not exclusively being enunciated by Jews. If there is a chance of systemic Jew Hatred being eliminated from our society, it can’t just be Jews who speak out against it.”

Some things bear repeating, because some things do not bear being repeated.

He also points out that but for “geographical happenstance” the comicbook field “created, developed and built primarily by Jews, painstakingly, one comicbook at a time” could have lost Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel, Will Eisner, Bob Kane, Max Gaines or Sheldon Mayer.

That’s precisely what Joe Kubert set out to explore in Yossel, published in 2003. Joe moved to America with his Jewish parents and sister when he was only a couple of months old, despite them being rebuffed earlier when his mother was pregnant. In Yossel, Joe puts himself in the place of a boy who hadn’t left Poland before its Nazi occupation. What follows is forced evacuation, incarceration, starvation and a systematic deprivation of comforts, communication, heating and clothes – a freezing endurance test without either hope or respite – and then it gets worse.

Kubert was one of the select few sent early copies of Judenhass and who have lined up to praise it, including Jean Shuster Peavy (Joe Shuster’s sister) and Marv Wolfman. Neil Gaiman wrote: “Judenhass is an astonishing piece of work. Painful and real and unflinching. I don't remember the last comic I read that made me cry, but this did." Indeed visitors to the Judenhass website should be warned, if only for parental guidance, that the animated introduction with its haunting soundtrack and terrible, echoing cracks of gunfire is as profoundly harrowing as the on-site preview.

The website also acts as a compendium to the comic, providing background research, some shockingly Anti-Semitic screeds from unexpected sources, and essays on the production process. In one of those Sim talks about the effect his detailed portraiture had on himself:

"At least temporarily I was able to individualize the victims for myself, personally, to differentiate each one as much as possible back into the individual he or she had been before the catastrophe of the Shoah had overtaken him or her."

"My people did this. That is, all of these individual Jews, all of these individual human beings, none of them very old, most in the prime of life came to the state in which I was capturing their likenesses through the actions of the non-Jews like myself. To set myself the task of capturing likenesses and expressions meant that I couldn't look away or see the Shoah through distanced overview, impersonally. How could I? Each death had been experienced personally, each death had been individual, each death had ended in a final eloquent...and horrific... expression. The only thing to me more horrific than those final expressions was the all-too-human urge to look away."

"How dare I? How dare any of us?"

Stephen Holland is the co-founder (with Mark Simpson) of one the UK's leading comic stores - Page 45.

1977 to 2004: "You Think About That"

Cerebus #1 (December 1977), Cerebus #300 (March 2004)

STEPHEN HOLLAND (PAGE 45):
(from a review of Cerebus #300, 2004)

1977 to 2004. You think about that. And then you tell me that this single story written and drawn by one man and his virtuoso landscape artist - month in, month out, with a beginning, a middle and an end - consistently entertaining, provocative and beautiful to behold... You tell me that this is not just a significant achievement, but the very fucking pinnacle of a relatively infant medium, which will be virtually impossible to surpass.

Go on. You sit there and have the temerity, the impertinence, and the self-incriminating illiteracy to find me one other contender to that throne.

The fact that any other letterer could possibly win an Eisner in any given year, shows how vacuous and bankrupt those awards are.

There are approximately six other creators who could give Dave Sim a run for his money in terms of inspiration, innovation, intelligence and storytelling capability combined: Los Bros Hernandez, Chris Ware, Jim Woodring, Eddie Campbell, and - if he could draw - Alan Moore. There are hundreds of others whom I admire wholeheartedly, but few of them come close to those air-thin heights, and not one of those aforementioned creators has accomplished a quarter of what Dave Sim has achieved in the awesome, demanding, infuriating, and wit-ridden epic that is Cerebus.

That the man has contributed an equal and unparalleled measure to this industry is irrelevant to be sure.

But the fact that Dave Sim is not universally regarded as the very finest comicbook creator to this point in time, is a crime of unbelievable, culpable and fundamentally ungrateful ignorance.

If, you know, you're asking.

Stephen Holland co-founded (with Mark Simpson) one of the finest comic stores in the UK - Page 45.

Gerhard's Photos: Page 45

GERHARD:

Jeff Tundis had posted a bunch of my old photos on his Art of Gerhard website quite a while ago. I've just started going through my old photos again and here are a few that aren't on his website. 

Aardvarks Over UK Tour '93:

A trip to do a signing at the amazing Page 45 in Nottingham co-founded by Stephen Holland and Mark Simpson, "a comic shop whose goal has always been simple: to bring the widest range of quality comics and graphic novels available into contact with as many new people as possible, and to do so with a warmth, honesty and informed eloquence in a relaxed, welcoming and professional environment".

L to R: Me, Serious Dave Sim, Sombre Stephen Holland (seated) and Solemn Mark Simpson.
I have no idea why I’m the only one grinning like an idiot.

Back-cover Cerebus #177 (December 1993)

Gerhard provided background art to Dave Sim's cast of Cerebus characters between issue #65 (August 1984) and #300 (March 2004) - contributing to over 4,700 pages of comic art, as well as numerous Cerebus covers and illustrations. Keep up to date on all of Gerhard's current projects at his blog and website, including details of his new book, The Wish.

High Society

High Society: 30th Anniversary Signed/Numbered Gold Edition. On sale October 2012.
Pre-order now from Page 45 by 20 August to reserve your copy,
or ask at your local comics store.

STEPHEN HOLLAND:

(Stephen Holland is the co-founder/owner of Page 45, one of the UK's best comic stores)

A single story told in 25 chapters with a beginning, a middle and an end.

One of our rationales for recommending this book as your introduction to Cerebus is that if you can trust Dave Sim to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end over 25 issues - and you can - you'll be able to trust that he can do the same over 300 of them. It's also very, very funny.

It's a cross between Blackadder and Yes, Prime Minister, making mockery not just of politics, but of exchange rates: the very idea that you can make money from having money and just swapping its currency. Lord Julius is back, and the extraordinary thing about Sim's treatment is that he looks and sounds precisely like Groucho Marx. You can hear him in your head, and the already impressive wit/actor/iconoclast is given a delirious script eminently worthy of him. Cerebus, previously little more than a mercenary thug and barbarian, finds himself so much in demand amongst High Society that they elect him as their candidate for Prime Minister. His opponent? Lord Julius' goat. Not an anthropomorphic goat, but an actual goat. It's a surprisingly close-run contest until you recall that America did actually elect both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush - the second time, anyway.

Also: Jaka returns in a heart-rending scene during which you will learn the difference between inference and implication; after which you will quote Dave Sim on the subject for the rest of your newly pedantic life.

By this point Sim's skills as a sequential artist have already reached what would be most others' pinnacle, but he's only just begun. For example there are sequences in which Cerebus is drunk and so, reflecting that, the pages need to be tilted 90 degrees successively. It's also relatively rare to be able to emulate other styles and incorporate them successfully into your own comics (Mark Buckingham's particularly good at that - see Neil Gaiman's Death: The High Price Of Living: most readers think Chris Bachalo drew the whole thing), but in using his own Roach character to parody Bill Sienkiewicz's run on Marvel's Moon Knight, he pulls off an exceptional impersonation of a Bill Sienkiewicz then in thrall to Neal Adams' neo-classical photo-realism.

Note: you don't have to have a clue about the contents of that last sentence to enjoy the book in its own right. Over 1,000 copies of Cerebus: High Society have been rung through a till either here or at the last shop Mark and I worked for. Each has been done so with a money-back guarantee. I have had one copy returned in twenty years.

Aardvarks Over UK

Tour Poster: Aardvarks Over UK Tour '93
Poster available from Page 45

STEPHEN L. HOLLAND (co-founder, Page 45):
(from Cerebus Campaign '93, Cerebus #174, September 1993)
This September, Dave Sim and Gerhard are going to be embarking on a whirlwind tour of the UK, a punishing fortnight's schedule taking them all the way from Salisbury to Aberdeen via London and The Midlands. This tour is being co-ordinated by Mark Simpson and myself... basically because we volunteered. Like  many of yourselves we too were wary and weary of the way this industry seemed to be regressing - we were growing tired of gimmicks, price-hikes, crossovers and the narrow, often harmful publicity going out to an already disinformed public through over -exaggerated four-colour deaths and the rise of the amateur speculator. Unlike others, however, we were sick of being tired of it, and decided to do something about it. When Dave Sim announced his first trip to the UK in 7 years, we were determined to use this opportunity, not just to promote one of the sharpest comics this medium has ever witnessed, but the true diversity that this unique and eclectic artform has to offer. For just as there are films, music and books for everyone, so there are comics for everyone.

As well as the above poster, why not complete your Cerebus collection with copies of Cerebus Number Zero (reprinting Cerebus #51, 112/113, 137 and 138 not included in the regular Cerebus 'phone books') and the Cerebus World Tour Book 1995 (reprinting all the Swords Of Cerebus back-up collaborations with Marshall Rogers, Joe Rubinstein, Gene Day, Barry Windsor-Smith and Gerhard, and a new jam story with Chester Brown), both of which are available from Page 45 - one of the UK's finest comic stores - during their gargantuan online sale, with a 25% discount on over 2,000 items. Sale must end 5pm, Thursday 31 May 2012!

Dave Sim: The Glamourpuss Interview

Page 45 in Nottingham is one of the best comics shops in the UK, and has been a strong supporter of Cerebus since opening its doors in 1994. In the following interview conducted in 2008, Page 45 co-founder, Stephen L. Holland, talks to Dave Sim about the launch of Glamourpuss, his first new comic series since the end of Cerebus in March 2004.

"I don’t want to turn heads, I want to snap necks."

Dave Sim is back. And just so we're clear, he's talking about his craft, not some newly discovered interest in martial arts. Four years after completing Cerebus, the longest sustained narrative in comicbook history, racking in at 300 issues and 6,000 pages of gentle-to-scathing sociopolitical satire - each written and drawn by himself with fellow Canadian Gerhard on backgrounds - Dave Sim is returning to the mainstream of comicbook fiction with a new title: glamourpuss.

Its theme? "If you don’t look good, don't go out."

Its style? "Gucci. Flat-out, no holds barred Gucci. And then just when you’re not expecting it: Vera Wang."

Its mood? "Something danceable with a really fabulous matching shoes, purse and nail polish thing happening. I mean, like, the identical shade."

And what can Dave tell us about its main character, the delirious Dior darling, Glamourpuss herself? "As little as possible – being a gentleman. I’m loathe to discuss a lady behind her back… or behind her comicbook for that matter." I'm being toyed with. If so far this sounds totally bonkers, do not adjust your sets: glamourpuss is deliciously bonkers, but it's also outstandingly beautiful and wickedly clever, messing so far with the proverbial fourth wall that we might have to find ourselves a fifth.

Parody Playground

Sim has always been an innovative force. From his constantly inventive approach to sequential-art storytelling in Cerebus to the pages' lettering whose calligraphic approach was often the visual equivalent of onomatopoeia, the man has pushed, smashed and rebuilt more boundaries in this medium than any single artist. And now he's doing it again. Laced with the sort of extras Alan Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen boasted (there in the form of a mock-archaic letter column; here in the form of faux-editorials, dietary regimes, style tips and next issue advertisements), glamourpuss is a comic that casts the illusion that it's also an artifact - a fashion magazine, edited by Glamourpuss herself - that doesn't actually exist.

"That couldn't exist," Sim corrects, "but which - through the bande desinée hocus pocus - does. Imagine a fashion magazine counselling its reader to 'pick one or at most two of the deadly C.A.N. - caffeine, alcohol and nicotine.' Anna Wintour would absolutely have kittens."

So what is glamourpuss? It's part-satire of the fashion industry, part-parody of fashion magazines and wicked wink at those who edit, inhabit and buy them. It's suspiciously well informed - I had no idea Dave subscribed to Vogue! This is someone, after all, who has retreated from the materialism of the modern world with all its traps and trappings, ditching the digital in favour of the Divine.

"The only one I subscribe to is Glamour although Vogue has its good points as well. It's not an issue of materialism, it's the purity of the core feminine voice discussing things with itself and relentlessly seeking to present its Best Adorned Self to the world photographically. There are undoubtedly better uses for $100 billion a year but, hey, it's not my money."

No, Dave's priorities lie elsewhere, like the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund for which he's helped raise and personally donated tens of thousands of dollars, including the whole of his scripting fee for Spawn #10, which in those days was considerable and earned Sim their first ever Defender of Liberty Award in 1996.

Scaling Mount Everest

glamourpuss also doubles as an extended exploration of photorealism in comics, as Dave Sim studies the work of Al Williamson, Neal Adams et al, works out how they achieved certain effects, discusses their techniques then emulates and adapts them within the comic he's creating. That's something for both professional and aspiring artists to get their teeth into. "Rick Veitch [Swamp Thing, Bratpack] says that part 'spoke to him' which I consider high praise indeed."

For Dave at least it's a departure from Cerebus, which featured a lot of caricature in the form of Mick Jagger, Margaret Thatcher and co., with Cerebus himself being an anthropomorphized aardvark. It was Gerhard's meticulous backgrounds which constituted the photorealistic elements in Cerebus.

"That's a good was of putting it, although there were later elements of photorealism in my depictions of Ham Ernestway and Jaka in Form & Void and Going Home, quite apart from the pure photorealism of the Woody Allen/Konigsberg material." glamourpuss, however, is on another level entirely. "[It's] a step up... a very large step up... from cartooning to Raymond School Illustration, the most exacting discipline among the many Comic Art Schools." His interest in this field began at least as far back as 1970 when Sim began collecting Rip Kirby strips in 1970, and in addition to Alex Raymond, he cites other influences for the art style including Stan Drake, John Prentice, Al Williamson, Leonard Starr, Neal Adams: "Everyone who spent time at the top of the photorealist Mount Everest."

I asked Dave if he was enjoying his own art lesson. "Enjoying would be a stretch. It's too nerve-wracking to enjoy. All that pencilling and then just one chance to get it right in the inking, which is 'done in a bold and spontaneous yet simple style' as Raymond instructs me, 67 years ago [Tom Roberts' Alex Raymond: His Life & Times]. It even works on me when I get it right - or, more accurately, less wrong. 'Gee, that looks like fun.' You'd think I would know better." Additional challenges include the switch from pen to brush. Also: "Remembering to dip the brush into the inkwell. Otherwise the pictures, just, you know, stay in my head."

Publishing & Promotion

Projected at this point to run for some 25 issues, glamourpuss shouldn't be as much hard work for readers as it will be for Sim. "Cerebus was a 26-year search for Truth or at least Reality. glamourpuss is intended to be a) fun b) funny and c) pretty."

This should come as a relief to those who feared that Sim had gone irrevocably serious on them. One look at the glamourpuss website [now off-line]  is enough to dispel that notion. A virtual warren of rabbit holes, it boasts posters you can download that poke fun at Glamourpuss, glamourpuss and even Dave himself: "The high fashion comicbook that's so six months ago..." "Are you sure Dave Sim did this...?" and "Buy it now while it's still at the "early, funnier ones" stage..."  For such a self-confessed Luddite, an awful lot of lateral thinking and interwebbery pre-planning has gone into the promotion of this new project. On top of the website, there have been internet chats, 4,500 copies of a Comicbook Industry Preview Edition of #1 dispatched in time for retailers to judge their initial orders, generous initial ordering incentives and an exclusive Fashion Industry Edition to entice real-life glamourpusses into comic shops to laugh at (or swoon over) themselves. Does Dave believe that creators and publishers need to do more for retailers than simply deliver the product?

"Well, I think so. Particularly in a field where 1) you know you'll have at least 500 pages of competition every month, 2) the orders on issue #1 are the precipice from which you will shortly plummet and 3) everyone is watching a different 'channel' on the internet." That's one of the reasons he's sticking to self-publishing. "You need that control if you want to do things differently. How could I get DC to pay my salary for three months strictly on promotion?"

How indeed, since DC doesn't even pay to fly its key UK artists over to US conventions? But what about - if just for the sake of penetration into the book stores - Dave gave up such limited distribution rights to someone as aesthetically sound and ethically unimpeachable as Chris Staros of Top Shelf publishing, home to the next incarnations of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?

"No, I’m 100% exclusively interested in keeping comicbook stores alive and flourishing. I'm probably the only publisher that doesn't sell to Amazon.com." Respect.

Appearances & Perception

So what can we expect from glamourpuss or even Glamourpuss herself? Sim is renowned for having planned Cerebus' first 200 issues well in advance, however much those plans may have later evolved. Is Glamourpuss going to be languidly extolling her own glorious virtues each issue, or are we going to be following her through the trials and tribulations of accessorisation to some destination Dave has in mind other than her wardrobe? "It's ill-advised to think of any real lady in terms of a destination I've found, and the truly fashion-conscious experience no trials nor tribulations in accessorising their wardrobes, do they? That's what makes them a glamourpuss. They always get it right the first time. Always."

Joined in the first issue - very reluctantly indeed - by Glamourpuss' long-term psychotherapist Dr. Norm in the form of a letter he strongly advises her against publishing but which she turns into a column (whoops), and even longer-term evil twin sister Skanko in a laugh-out-loud Dating Guide which Dr. Norm also counsels her against incorporating into the magazine ("You are so @#%!ing dead!" shouts Skanko), Glamourpuss looks set to live out both her inner conflicts and her sibling rivalry in public on paper. In fact, she appears to relish it. Constantly referring to herself in the third person singular as 'Glamourpuss', she's obviously in love with herself, with the sound of her name, and indeed with her own social status as a glamourpuss. "Hey, wouldn't you be?"

The fact that Cerebus did the same thing Sim ascribes to "Borealan dialect" but one has to wonder - because it's an unusual verbal tick to refer to oneself like that - whether it was a subconscious decision that took him by surprise, or an entirely conscious one. "It's a good marketing ploy to associate with characters who always refer to themselves in the third person. They’re like little walking banner ads."

Nevertheless, that's two consecutive works starring two egomaniacs, with both comics also prominently featuring Dave Sim as himself or "himself" as creator of the comics in question. Is Dave Sim, perhaps, an egomaniac? "Not me. I consider myself to be neither evil nor a genius, unlike the fictional Dave Sim depicted in glamourpuss. Give the people what they, evidently, want. That's my motto."

Dave, of course, is referring to the barrage of vocal outrage spread across the internet ever since a certain issue of Cerebus (#186) in which another fictional Dave Sim (Viktor Davis) came out against what he considered the excesses of feminism, then later issues in which the editorial content confirmed it as his own political stance. Branded a misogynist (Concise Oxford Dictionary definition, 1983: "one who hates all women") he's since constantly referred to himself on his blog and elsewhere as "Dave Sim, The Evil Misogynist". Why?

"I hoped to have people reflect on the self-description and really the real foolishness is in someone thinking that holding political differences with feminism either constitutes Evil or Misogyny. Turned out to be a faint hope, as we've seen."

Where Sim can’t fail in his efforts to inspire serious reflection is in his other imminent publication Judenhass (read the Page 45 review here), which has already garnered emphatic praise from the likes of Neil Gaiman and Peter Straub.

Glamourpuss is published every other month and is available from your local comic shop (and Page 45 in Nottingham, UK). Back issues of Glamourpuss are always available at ComiXpress.

A Page 45 Review: Judenhass

Page 45 in Nottingham is one of the best comics shops in the UK, and has been a strong supporter of Cerebus since it opened its doors in 1994. In the following review, Page 45 co-founder, Stephen L. Holland, details his reaction to reading Dave Sim's Judenhass. Buy your copy of Judenhass now from Page 45.

"The only thing to me more horrific than those final expressions was the all-too-human urge to look away. How dare I? How dare any of us?"

Fifty-six of the most important and affecting pages you will ever read for just £2-75/$4.00.

Never in my life have I read anything in any medium that has set my heart pounding so violently in my chest. It was a physical reaction to a mental stimulation without any sensationalist emotions, as I was concentrated (not concentrating) on every single panel of individual human beings reduced to husks. It will halt you to an extent that cinematic record, most certainly awful, actually doesn't.

It's a documentation and exploration of Judenhass: literally, a "Hatred of Jews", because as Dave Sim points out, the word "Anti-Semitism" is wholly inadequate to describe what the Jewish people and Jewish individuals have been subjected to over the past two millennia, in the form of an unremitting barrage of hatred, disdain, prejudice, smear campaigns, impediment and very real violence including wholesale slaughter -- and not just the once.

Within Sim contends that the Holocaust was not an unthinkable act, as we like to comfort ourselves, which came about because of a "one-in-a-million happenstance which could only have happened in Germany and only under the Nazi regime" but - given the historical proliferation, vehemence and tolerance of Anti-Semitism - it was, at some point, wholly inevitable. He makes his compelling case by presenting a series of quotations throughout history, some from otherwise respected quarters. President Harry Truman's pronouncements in particular had me aghast.

It begins inside the bleak barracks of Auschwitz in their full, freezing horror, and the gaunt faces of their skeletal occupants crammed onto stacks of hard, wooden racks, as Dave Sim, with calm and considered words, explains why he believes that every creative spirit should attempt such a work in their life-time, particularly in the US comicbook field built by so many Jewish creators who, but for a "geographical happenstance" might have been abused then slaughtered in concentration camps themselves. Also, why it's important that non-Jews like himself join the Jewish voices in remembering and recognising the horrors of Jew hatred across the years.

So this is where I'd beg teachers - particularly those educating students in history, religious or cultural studies - to please take a look at this book and consider not just stocking it in your school library, but using it as a set text during lessons. If pupils' attention spans are a concern, there are rarely more than a few sentences per page which inclines one to focus on each single defamation all the harder.

For our part, Page 45 will be sending a free copy out to each school library we've ever dealt with, in the hope that those librarians who've already recognised the merits then seen the benefits of comics to their literacy rates, can persuade the relevant teachers for us. I want this taught as a set text in as many schools as possible. My very grateful thanks to Pat Sullivan and co. at Diamond UK for helping me with this.

Parental warning: this website created for the comic by Jeff Tundis is harrowing. 

Buy your copy of Judenhass now from Page 45.