I think part of the reason for the initial jump in art quality, (and this is completely a guess) is that he stopped trying to spoof Conan artists. (Such as BWS.)

Not really. Not the jumps I'm talking about.

First off, the only Conan artist he EVER aped was Barry Smith (he added the "Windsor" long after leaving "Conan" and I think after "Cerebus" debuted).

Cerebus started out as a cross between Howard the Duck and Conan the Barbarian, and the look Sim was going for, in his own words, was "a Chuck Jones cartoon character walking around in a Barry Smith world."

The first issue is, in my opinion, a very amateurish attempt at this, although he's progressing so quickly that the last few pages are visibly better than the first few. He takes a big jump toward aping Smith better in #2. Both of these include scenes taken almost exactly out of Smith's "Conan" stories, though the stories themselves aren't copied.

When he introduced Red Sophia in #3, he takes his first steps away from Smith, who created the comic version of Red Sonja, trying to draw her instead in the manner of Frank Thorne, who is more associated with her (Smith only did one Red Sonja comic). That was, in my opinion, a disastrous failure, one page in particular being the worst page Sim ever did, at least in Cerebus, but the aardvark himself and the backgrounds and other characters are much more Smith-like than in issue #2. In #4, he introduces Elrod, who looks exactly like Barry Smith's drawing of Elric of Melnibone (which he ironically found out later is really not much like the character as described by Michael Moorcock), in another story featuring scenes taken directly from Smith's "Conan." In #5, he cheats by doing panels and panels (even whole pages), where the only "background" is ruler-drawn lines representing rain, but still the background that's there and the other characters are all clearly Smithian. And even with the cheating, it's his best art yet.

#6 is often thought of as the first "really good" art, because it's the first one that really looks like a cartoon character walking through a Barry Smith world. He has Smith down pretty well at this point.

So the initial leaps were in doing a better job of aping Smith, not moving away from him. And it was a worthy goal to aspire to. Later, he would ape Neal Adams and others, and mix them all together into a style that was uniquely his own, but at first, he was just getting better and better at "doing" Barry Smith -- but since Barry Smith had produced some of the best art seen in comic books at the time, getting better at imitating him was essentially the same thing as getting better as an artist.

By Sim's own account, he didn't even first realize that he didn't HAVE to keep imitating Smith until #7, and that's near the end of the period I'm talking about. #7-9 are very experimental, art-wise, and at least a couple of the experiments don't work very well -- the white-on-black page where Cerebus battles the "energy globes of Imesh," for instance.

By #10, the first appearance of the Cockroach, we have solid art throughout, in an emergent style that is not much different from the art in "High Society" and early "Church & State." There is still a heavy Smith/Adams influence, but Dave is developing his own style.

By "The Palnu Trilogy" (issues 14-16) he's clearly in control and it's smooth sailing from there. Even so, his backgrounds will remain heavily indebted to Smith until Gerhard joins him and he quits doing them altogether.

Dave Sim has quietly become one of the best facial cartoonists in the business. Almost no one seems to notice the fact that he can take a character, either based on a real person like Groucho Marx or Oscar Wilde or one made up out of his head, and draw him so realistically you don't even think of it as a cartoon, the way John Byrne or Barry Windsor Smith or whoever might draw him, and then run him through facial contortions that put Tex Avery to shame, twisting the same face through expressions that couldn't possibly exist, yet never losing sight of the fact that this is recognizably the same character, and then lapsing back into simplistic yet very realistic normality.

That and his expressive lettering are alone enough to make him a genius, in my book.

Is Jaka's Story needed for me to understand the rest of Cerebrus?

do the GN's after Melmoth contain anything really bad.

Heh.

It's like this. Cerebus is one big long story, from issue #1, which came out in December 1977 to issue #300, which is due out in March 2004.

If you make it to "Jaka's Story," that is, if you buy and read the first four volumes, you'll be out over $100 and probably hooked. You'll have to read Jaka's Story, someway, somehow, even if you have to wait another four years for it.

Sim has occasional bursts of violence (a hand chopped off in the first issue reminiscent of the bar scene in "Star Wars," for instance), but although he discusses sex there's very little nudity. There are brief flashes of it here and there, but I don't remember another actual sex scene (and actually the one page in "Jaka's Story" is really an after-sex scene that is pretty discreet, considering, but does display a naked breast) anywhere.

"Anything bad?"

Heh, heh.

Well, it depends on what you mean by "bad." Before he finished "Mothers & Daughters," which is the big four-volume follow-up to "Melmoth" ("Flight," "Women," "Reads" and "Minds"), he ended up losing most of his female readership and inspiring web pages like "The Dave Sim Misogyny Page." Most of the quotes on that page come from issue #186, the culmination of "Reads," wherein "Viktor Davis," who seems to be essentially Dave Sim himself, says things like emotion is vastly inferior to reason, that women make decisions based on emotion rather than reason and "This was the fundamental reason, I believe, that women were (rightly) denied the vote for so long."

And that's a mild example. The dominant image of male/female relations is that of a female void sucking the Light/Reason/Soul/Brain out of the male. "If you look at her and see anything besides emptiness, fear and emotional hunger, you are looking at the parts of yourself which have been consumed to that point."

Of course, during the first 150 or so issues, Dave had been hailed among other things for his sensitive portrayals of female characters, and "Cerebus" had one of the highest percentage of female readers in the industry, which makes the whole thing rather puzzling. Many fans to this day, in the face of continuing evidence to the contrary, insist that "Viktor Davis" was just a character like any other, a pose Dave put on, that these are not his real thoughts and feelings. Sadly, I think they're mistaken.

"Mothers and Daughters" largely undoes everything the first 100 or so issues did, thematically and narratively, after which Cerebus was cast adrift by his creator, who ostensibly had no further plans for him and left him free to do what he wanted (except that the last page shows Dave sitting in his studio, pointing at Cerebus on the page and saying "Whatta maroon. What an ultra-maroon!").

Then we have "Guys," which consists of a bunch of guys hanging out in a bar for an indeterminate period of time that, if you watch the hair and beards carefully, must be quite awhile, like maybe 10-20 years.

Then "Rick's Story," which I can't say much about without giving away other stuff -- indeed, the very title gives away something you shouldn't really know, but it's there on the shelf with the others in the store, so it's not my fault.

"Going Home" and "Form and Void" involve some pretty direct references to sex, but again we don't see anything. They also feature F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, respectively.

That's as far as we've gotten. The penultimate book, titled "Latter Days," is finishing up in the monthly comic and will probably be out next year or so. And then we'll have the Grand Finale (or, perhaps the Grand Finally, as Dave himself had one of his characters joke).

I know that some people consider it perfectly OK to expose their children to incredible amounts of graphic violence, yet somehow believe that a 14-year-old boy, who would have been considered an adult in every human society for the last several thousand years until a few centuries ago, and still would be in some societies today, is going to be scarred for life if exposed to a picture of a female breast, much less actual . . . you know.

I think it's nonsense, myself, and I can't imagine anything in any of the Cerebus books that would be more likely to do you psychic injury than the panel of the Nazi soldier swinging the child into the wall, which still haunts me a decade after I first read "Maus," or that claustrophic insert about art's mom's suicide.

But yeah, by some people's definitions there's probably stuff your tender eyes should be protected from. If you're worried about it, wait 'till you're 18.

Cerebus is just fine for teenagers.

I read the introductory six issues of "Jaka's Story" at like 15/16, and I came out fine. Plus my parents never gave a care.

truthfully, unless you have some REALLY strict(to the point of being blind to today's world) parents, there's nothing in Cerebus more mature than in a movie.

I mean, you can see R-rated movies, right?

Heh...and I started getting CEREBUS with issue 44 when I was 12.

And I may or may not have turned out okay.

S'troo.

T

Thanks for helping me guys. I think i am gonna pick up the book untill Church & State and wait untill i'm older to buy Jaka's story.

How would Whiteout be for someone my age?(I have been interested in Greg Ruka's works and pondered on this question.)

King David by Kyle Baker

Moving Fortress by Ricardo Barreiro and Enrique Alcatena

The Button Man by John Wagner and Arthur Ranson

Astronauts in Trouble by Larry Young, Matt Smith and Charlie Adlard

Treasury of Victorian Murder by Rick Geary

The Coffin by Phil Hester and Mike Huddleston

The Mystery of Mary Rogers by Rick Geary

Mark: Can we get some writer/artist credits? Not trying to be snooty, it's just that except for King David and Astronauts in Trouble, I haven't heard of these comics. Some names might make it easier to try checking them out.

Edited. Any of those you haven't heard of will likely have been reviewed at the Starland/Suspended Animation link.