I'm finally reading CEREBUS, the phonebook-sized collections.

And I'm enjoying it!

Sort of a slow start. Those first few issues are rather crudely drawn and written -- mostly just a barbarian spoof, but with an aardvark.

However, Dave Sim gets into the swing of it pretty quick. I like the dark humor, and a little later, once Cerebus enters politics, the intrigue, the maneuvering, the cynicism.

The artwork is very nice. The lettering, of all things, is marvelous and contributes more to the storytelling than you typically see in comic books.

I will say -- the issues where Cerebus, Astoria or someone else just stands there for 20 pages and explains something, or has something explained to them -- those get old pretty fast. Sim evidently had this entire universe he wanted to get down onto the page. Some issues, it was mostly text.

I'm halfway through Volume Four, or Church and State Part II. Friends have advised me that Volume Four is a good place to stop because Sim starts to crawl up his own ass after this, turning his stories into endless rants. True?

I'd say read through Jaka's Story. Sim does indeed go right off the rails later, but that story is honestly one of the better comics ever drawn.

Melmoth is worth a read too, but ends on a cliffhanger. And past Melmoth is where it turns into one big ticket on the Dave Sim express to Crazytown.

OK, Ceci, based on your say-so, I just ordered Jaka's Story.

I scanned the reviews on Amazon. A lot of folks praise it as the best volume in the CEREBUS series, even though Cerebus himself is not a featured player.

Jaka story is fabo.

I guess your life involves a fistfight every three or four pages, huh? Most people's lives don't, and "Cerebus" is the story of a life.



Oh. My. God.

Text?

You poor poor thing, you have to read *text*. How could that evil bastard do that to you? Doesn't he know that Lawson doesn't read text?

I'll light a candle for you.

Dude, you just kicked that strawman's ass.

Sometimes I throw nickels in the washing machine and turn it on, and hear them go zing boing ting ... everything thing is music

Sim's old contention that Cerebus was the story of his character's life never really panned out. It seemed semi-plausible for maybe the first 150 issues, but it went totally off the rails when Cerebus became a professional hockey player, after having been pope and prime minister, and then he became pope a second time and lived a few hundred more years.

When Sim first proposed the idea that Cerebus would portray the life of its main character over 300 issues, he contrasted it against the life of Peter Parker, as portrayed in Spider-Man comics. Sim was right that it's hard if not impossible to fit all of Spider-Man's adventures into one coherent life story. But I would argue that the basic outline of Peter Parker's biography still makes more sense than that of Cerebus.

I think Cerebus is still an entertaining fantasy narrative, but it's not a coherent life story. Actually, it may be more instructive to read it as a journal of Dave Sim's personal interests and obsessions over the course of thirty years.

After 26 years of publishing, Cerebus was very old and died. He had two marriages and one child.

After 40 years of publishing, Peter Parker is how old? Is he married? Do they have a kid?

How about jobs, how long has Peter been a freelance photographer? We know Cerebus spent his Five-Bar Gate winnings on a tavern, what did Peter do with all the money from his best-selling book of Spider-Man photos? Or the gold notebook?

At least Cerebus was set in a barbarian/fantasy world with magic spells and black towers that grew into the sky [and trips to the moon and Pluto!] Spider-Man is supposedly "the superhero who could be you".

You can disagree about *how* Cerebus' life isn't quite a biography (aardvarks living to an extreme old age, the Three Stooges being allowed to use guns) but for giving us all the parts that go into a life, it does way better than Spider-Man ever did.

Sim was right that most people have their life stories finished by #200 (demonstrated with Cerebus' medallions starting in #4) and the rest is aftermath, there's Melmoth's take on mortality, Jaka's Story which let events happen without explanation, until the Cirinists broke down the door. Who hasn't lived through Guys at one point or another, or seen their life's work turned to shit, as Cerebus learns from Shep-Shep?

Realistic? No. Lifelike? Yes.