Cerebus

[John Peacock]

I am not in any way academic, I am a Pynchon fan, who enjoys reading the musings of more
learned people, and has gained a lot from the posts over GRGR and the ongoing VV.

However...

> David Morris on Cerebus:
>
> Well-known creator Dave Sim surprised readers when issue #186 of ...
> Cerebus ... contained ... a misogynist nonfiction essay.

This post contains SPOILERS.

Couldn't resist that. It does, though.

I want to ... um. Well, I don't want to leap to Sim's defence, necessarily, but to point
some things out.

Firstly, I offer the observation that a concern throughout the book is the unreliability of
narratives, authors and "absolute truths" -  the story is packed with self-appointed
narrators and oracles. The "essay" features Sim's "voice" (presumed autobiographical)
impersonated as "Viktor Davis" (an impossibly, perhaps ironically, glamorised version of
"Dave Sim: Comic Book Star"), who seems to operate as a surrogate for or mutation of "Victor
Reid" (a character who has already appeared in another text narrative parallel to and in the
same "world" as that in the illustrated panels, a writer of "Reads" - a Sim portmanteau of
propaganda, tabloid reportage and comic books themselves - and consequently a further
self-depiction of Sim). By the time we get to the "essay", the sense of who the "narrator"
is already fragmented.

Sim removed himself as a traditional "narrator" in early issues of Cerebus, representing the
events and character interactions in illustrations and speech bubbles without the use of
"Meanwhile"s and "But then..."s - without the explicit mediation of the author (in the same
sort of way that an epistolary novel tries to do). This is far from unique, but it is quite
unusual in its discipline. The character "Dave Sim" was represented by short columns at the
beginning of each issue, called "Notes from the President" - the "essay" resembles these
"Notes" in style, although they are not reproduced in the reprint books. Pages of full
narrative text would appear, interspersed with, separate from and playing off against the
"comic-book action". For example, one of the volumes, "Melmoth", was composed of comic-book
*in*action (a near-catatonic Cerebus sitting outside a bar) cut with the letters of those
surrounding Oscar Wilde as he was dying in Paris (a character modelled on Wilde appears in
the comic-book itself).

The "essay" appears in the volume called "Reads". It is intercut with a hand-to-hand fight
between Cerebus (representing "The Male") and Cirin, leader of a religious gynocentric
empire (well, "The Female", obviously), which neither of them wins. The book ends on the
"Essay", Cerebus and Cirin having been thrown into space by powers Beyond Our Ken. It's not
a gritty realist document, at least.

In the following book, ("Minds"), Cerebus and Cirin continue to fight, compete and bicker
until they drift away from each other in space. And then the character of The Narrator,
"Dave Sim", introduces himself (thus fracturing our certainty that "Viktor Davis" is Dave
Sim). There are two points of view on this - that it is a cop-out and that it is not. I am
in the "not" camp, personally, but see why other people may disagree with me. It is simply
the most extreme alienation device that Sim has used.

There then follows a bunch of stuff about who Cirin really is (surprised me, I can tell
you), and what would happen if Cerebus actually got his "true love", Jaka... etc and etc

If Cerebus the work is misogynist (presumably it is), it is also an unstinting
representation of male self-loathing (which, I admit would not be unrelated). Cerebus the
character (supposed to be Sim's avatar until Sim's avatars started to proliferate wildly)
will, it appears (according to a possibly unreliable source of "absolute truth"), die alone,
unmourned and unloved in 2003, and it will all be his own fault, and Sim shows us exactly
why. Cerebus does awful things, his awfulness is neither condoned nor sympathised with, yet
he goes on being the focus of our attention (although there was a time when I thought he
would drift off a la Slothrop).

I've gone on at length here, because I wanted to show that the "Essay" is not, in fact an
off-the-wall, single-instance, self-contained madman's rant, but part of a developing work
(a gigantic madman's rant?), in places apparently supported by the rest of the work, in
places apparently contradicted.

I'm not sure that I'm anywhere near as interested in Dave Sim as I am in Cerebus.

But, if it was not for what I think I know about Dave Sim (the inability to relate to women,
the rumours of mental instability, the fact that he admits to writing and illustrating a
vast chunk of the book stoned) I would wholeheartedly say that it was a complex, challenging
and even brave work. Because of what I think I know, I am not sure that I want to do that,
even though (to me) Sim seems as aware of his failings as we are, and represents them
openly. One major problem is that he has shied away from literary and other theory that
parallels his own interests and may inform his work, and consequently can appear a bit naive
("Haven't you heard, Dave? The Author's dead and buried!"). He may think he's been writing
the Great Canadian Novel, and in fact come up with a new "Vivian Sisters in the Realms of
the Unreal", I don't know.

If Sim is not exactly a polymath, though, he is certainly not a monomath. Cerebus is often
very well written - subtle and affectionate in the depiction of Jaka, or in "Guys", a
love-letter to a bar -  and often very funny. And always (at least for the last twenty
years) beautifully illustrated, the illustration has consistently been superb, witty and
with an extraordinary clarity. IMHO.

As far as I can tell, the characters that seem to have his respect are Suenteus Po, Astoria
and Cirin. The real Cirin, not Serna. I write that sentence in the full knowledge that
nobody who reads it will have an earthly idea what I'm talking about.

The comic-book medium is full of lovely small moments (in fact, it seems to work best in a
small, personal way - Lynda Barry or Crumb or the Hernandez brothers spring to mind, there
are zillions of others), but there are very few large works that stand up to any scrutiny.
And I think that if you view Cerebus as a large (or even colossal) work, it stands up to
more scrutiny than many people think. You don't have to read hundreds and hundreds of pages
of it, but it's worth a try.

Oh dear, I do seem to have sprung to his defence, after all.

I think I mean that even if a work is written by someone with all the failings that we have
enumerated in Sim, it should not go unread or unrecommended, particularly when it has as
many incidental pleasures as Cerebus does.

When you tear me apart, please do it gently, as I am a civilian, and not used to it.

John