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Something fell...
Occasionally I go on media binges. By that I mean I'll suddenly saturate my life with references to a certain slice of pop culture and just soak it all in. Some of the binges can last for quite a while, I still haven't gotten over my Farscape or Chuck Palahniuk binges.
In the past month or so I've revisited a past source of great admiration and entertainment by obtaining a volume of Cerebus each weekend. (8/14 so far)
For those of you who don't know about the wild child black sheep of the comic's industry, Cerebus is an independently published book that has run since December of 1977, and is close to issue 275 by now. The author's plan was to finish up with issue 300 and it looks like he just might make it.
As for a synopsis of the story line, well thats a very difficult task indeed... Cerebus the Aardvark, former magician's apprentice and mercenary is promoted through double-dealing and bribery, happenstance and good fortune through the ranks of society to become Pope... and thats not even half of the first three volumes of this series.
Yes, volumes. The issues are bound together in large telephone directory-sized volumes after every twenty five or so issues. You can beat Spiderman readers to death with these things. "Church & State" lasted for 59 issues, almost five years, running up to 1220 pages. But when you're paying for the print runs out of your own pocket I guess an author can afford to take the chance of trying to keep people's interest for five years on one story line.
Its funny, its smart... reading Cerebus makes me think of higher issues and deeper meanings... I like that in any form of modern media, especially something as enjoyable as a comic book. I mean comic books don't promote introspective contemplation and societal theory, do they? Well this one does. And thats only the deeper level, you can read this and just enjoy the funny aardvark falling on his head and arguing with Ernest Hemmingway...
Over the years the author has managed to have a good poke at a great deal of real-life characters along with the majority of popular comic book heroes... so many of them that I can't even start a list here...
One criticism of the work would be that volume 1, "Cerebus", is a very disparate telling of a lot of the groundwork that becomes required reading in the subsequent volumes. The artistic style hasn't become second nature to the artist/author yet and a lot of it reads like a poor man's Conan the Barbarian story with an aardvark as the main character. But just as soon as Lord Julius, the recurring Groucho Marx characters puts in an appearance... hoboy... does this become a seriously enjoyable slice of pop culture.
One thing that should be noted about the author; Dave Sim, is that he has to be the most arrogant, mysogenistic, pompous, highly-strung, self-inflated, ego-centric bastard ever to walk the Earth and put pen to paper. I mean this guy doesn't just have a problem with women... this guy has trouble with the existence of women as a gender... which is incredibly paradoxal in my view since his work displays a highly-developed intrinsic method of displaying the duality of relationships and the primitive instincts of each sex. Maybe he is working his hatred of women into his work covertly... or maybe he's seeing and saying the same things I see and say with a different motive behind it. I don't know.
The story being told is incredible, simply incredible, my admiration of Dave Sim as an artist and writer are without bounds, his accomplishments speak literal volumes. Its just a shame about the really bad attitude.
Apr.21.2002