Cerebus is an colossal 300-issue comic about an aardvark.
It started in 1977 as a simple one-note parody of Conan the Barbarian. As it gained an audience, it evolved into an ambitious and recondite meditation on politics, religion, gender, and liberty. Then, at the peak of Cerebus‘s critical and commercial popularity, its artist began going mad.
I have been vaguely aware of Cerebus for a long time. It exists like a terrible mountain in the indie comics landscape, littered with tattered flags and the bodies of inexperienced hikers. It has a reputation, and not a good one. Whenever it’s discussed, people immediately quarantine themselves from the creator. I don’t agree with Dave Sim, but… or Dave Sim’s views on women are repellant, but… Tom Ewing’s lengthy and excellent writeup of Cerebus finally inspired me to read its 6,000 pages for myself.
I went into it with a “don’t believe the noise” approach. I expected it would be a somewhat nice but dated comic that doesn’t really hold up, and that it’s offensive elements would be less offensive than expected. Both of my ideas were wrong.
Cerebus is an astonishing work in all kinds of directions. I have never read a comic with such extremes of good and bad. Everything is at utter polarity: -1 or +1 with no values in between.
My emotions swung from “this is good” to “this is excellent” to “are you kidding me, I cannot believe how great this is”. I read the final 400 pages of the “Church and State” arc in a rush and went to sleep exhausted, as if Dave Sim had used my amygdala like a speedbag. When it’s good, Cerebus is absolutely in a class with Watchman and so forth: a work that tests the limits of the comics medium and finally tears a hole right through them.
And then “Jaka’s Story” immediately throws away everything that made “Church and State” work…but finds new, different ways to be great. Perhaps equally so! It’s small-scale without being trivial; dramatic without being maudlin; brutal without being gratuitous. Audacious stuff, but Sim pulls it off with brass balls. I’m reminded of Bowie (who makes a guest appearance), and his gear-five-to-reverse shifts through styles and fashions.
Not everything Sim touches turns to gold. The satire in “High Society” is fairly broad—politicians are greedy, religious leaders are hypocrites, Marvel superheroes are silly, and so on. Cheap shots and easy targets. Sim’s pop cultural interests seldom stretch beyond the Great Depression, and can be a bit strange in their construction. I know who Elrod is based on, but why does he talk like Foghorn Leghorn? Often I was struck by the sense that Sim expected me to laugh, but I didn’t know at what, exactly.
The way Sim integrates comedy and drama is impressive: he crafts a world where a throwaway gag can also be load-bearing to the plot. This sucks you deeply into the work: you’re constantly reading between lines, looking at details, waiting for the next shoe to drop. It’s a totally different experience (and a more satisfying one) than, say, modern Marvel movies, which are terrified of confusing the audience and clearly separate humor from drama (shot 1: a scowly gritty action hero says something serious. shot 2: plucky comic relief says a quip.) Sim mixes it all together: Cerebus is streaks and whorls of humor and absurdity and drama, all frozen together in a single sheet of marble.
By “Flight”, cracks are finally starting to appear. Sim appears unsure of the comic’s identity, cyling through retcons and in-jokes. Why bring back a long-forgotten monster-of-the-week from vol 1? Doesn’t it diminish the once-in-a-lifetime cosmic awe of the Ascension to do it AGAIN? What are we doing here? Once Cerebus parodied fantasy, politics, and religion. Now it parodies…Cerebus.
Dave appears to be working under the assumption “I know what the fans want after all that downtime! MORE AKSHUN!”…but I don’t want more action! After the compelling, tightly-woven drama of the previous volumes, I have no desire to watch Cerebus swing a sword around. That is unsatisfying to me. The comic (and the world outside it) have evolved beyond the context where that made sense. Imagine if the Beatles had reunited in 1975, cut their hair in mop-tops, and tried to become a yeah-yeah-yeah skiffle band again. It wouldn’t have worked. Some doors only swing one way.
Soon after that, Dave Sim’s contributions to Gender Discourse emerge. I’m a conservative (unlike most here, I think) and feel directional sympathy to some of Dave’s views. Men and women are different; it’s easy for relationships to pull apart because of this; society is bad at discussing those differences (or even admitting they exist). Sure. There are reasonable arguments to be made for the above.
But Dave’s views are not reasonable. They’re based on resentment. They’re little hacked-out flecks of spite—exacerbated and possibly created by his divorce, drug abuse, and untreated mental health issues—which slowly gather into a rolling avalanche of all-consuming hostility, with Dave and his comic lost in the middle. Dave is worse than wrong. A wrong person can be taught to be right; an irrational ego-monster can’t be reached at all.
Lionel Trilling described conservatism as “a set of irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” You may or may not agree in the general case, but it feels true of Dangerous Dave’s worldview. It’s reactive and insubstantial. There’s no “there” there. There’s nothing to support them, and nothing a critic can score blows against. It’s just blind rage, scaffolded to a lot of shallow post-hoc intellectualization. I’m not afraid of weird, outré philosophy. It’d be interesting to read a serious intellectual argument in favor of (say) kicking puppies, if only to see the mental gymnastics involved. Yet there’s fundamentally no substance you can engage with in Dave’s thought. It’s just a guy with more issues than his comic, trauma dumping on you.
It doesn’t work. His gender-obsession infests and paralyzes Cerebus like a cordyceps, corrupting even the good parts. “Form and Void” could have been a powerful return to form…but not if you know what Ham and Mary Earnestway represent. Comics are a bad medium for didactic “here’s wot’s wot” preaching anyway, and Dave is forced to rely on all-text passages—first as a crutch, then as a wheelchair—to get his ideas across. All the worse for Cerebus, because Dave’s prose can kill an ox at a dozen paces. I skipped a lot of text in Cerebus‘s final 100 issues. Life’s too short.
At some point, Dave and reality part ways. It takes a while for you to notice that the author of Cerebus has gone mad, but eventually you DO notice. The earliest warning sign comes in Cerebus #12, where Deni Sim mentions that her husband has suffered a mental breakdown. She would later supply more details: he freaked out on acid, punched a hole in a wall, and she and his mother had him committed. (Dave disputes this: he went of his own free will and the wall-punching never happened).
Either way, the “classic” Cerebus run (“High Society” thru “Melmoth”) was likely made by a troubled man. If Dave Sim wasn’t on the struggle bus by the late 70s, he’d at least bought the ticket. I don’t say this to castigate or excuse Dave, but it feels important. There’s no “sane” Dave Sim that can be quarantined off from the rest. He didn’t get bumped on the head in 1991 and turn into Mr Hyde. His mental decline was gradual. Did incipient madness fuel the good parts of Cerebus, in some weird way? I don’t know, but on paper, a comic like “Melmoth” seems like a terrible idea. And yes, you might call it insane. Why put Oscar Wilde in your talking aardvark comic? Yes, it 100% works in practice, but it’s an artistic swerve that few normal artists would consider.
Dave’s peculiarity metastasizes into hatefulness. Long before Issue #186, we start getting weird little rants in the introductions page. Like that bizarre “sir, this is a Wendy’s” tirade in #103 about gay men and AIDS and bath houses. It’s an oft-noted phenomenon that websites with “truth” in their name have none in their contents. You could devise a similar aphorism for essays beginning with “here’s a thought”.
And then there’s the intro letter (I forget the issue) where he describes a woman at a bar grabbing his wrist and forcing him to dance with her (I may be misremembering the specifics). It’s totally reasonable to be annoyed by that, but then he goes on a proto-incel rant about how this is a CLASSIC EXAMPLE of how WOMEN exploit their POWER over MEN to (etc). It was viscerally unpleasant to read, like something you’d see on /r/PussyPassDenied.
A lot of men feel Sim-like impulses at times. At a Static-X show I was assaulted by a woman and felt anger, some of which settled on her gender—”Yeah, it’s cool how you can punch me and know I’m not allowed to hit you back”. Then I calmed down and realized I was being foolish. I hadn’t witnessed some dark gynocratic evil that lurks at the heart of Woman(tm). I’d merely had an unpleasant encounter with a stranger.
For whatever reason, Dave seems incapable of those realizations. Everything that happens is Deep and Important to him. It’s a common schizoaffective trope to see deep meaning inside random things, but honestly, I think all humans are wired up that way, at least a little. We all have a Viktor Davis inside us, trying to get out. We just have to ensure that our personal Cerebus issue #186 gets lost in the mail.
Religion? Dave didn’t find God, God found Dave. In principle, a religious conversion should be a humbling experience—you’re broken down, and forced to rethink your life and values basically from square one. But all too often, it’s a moment of personal narcissism. You have discovered The Truth(tm). You are wise, and other people are foolish. Dave’s conversion seems like the second kind: a chance to take all of his prejudices and rewrite them in permanent “God says it” ink.
What changes when Dave found God? Nothing. He didn’t like women before or after he converted. He was paranoid before and after he converted. His comic remains a dismaying wreckage-field (strewn with broken beauty and rubbish) before and after he converted. His shoggoth-philosophy sprouted a few more mutant heads and limbs, but that’s it. How kind of God to confirm that all of Dave’s pre-existing views were correct.
At least his triple-conversion to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism is fairly unique and interesting. Based on what I’ve seen, he now seems to be turning into a yet another Fox News viewer (or the Canadian equivalent): his brain foaming with worms, obsessed with Muslims and liberals and Covid, mad in the most boring way possible. If Cerebus had been completed a decade later, I suspect we’d be reading arcs about Barack HUSSEIN Obummer, with Hillary Clinton cackling inside her Cirinist hood. So I suppose there’s always that: Cerebus could have been even worse.
Was Dave ultimately a force for good in independent comics? He seems almost like a cautionary tale. If you were a businessman with an algorithm instead of a soul and you wanted to make a case that artists should be shackled to their desks and forced to crank out product…wouldn’t Cerebus literally be the first case you point to? “Here’s what happens when an artist controls their own work. Cerebus happens.”
Dave Sim destroyed his life’s work. Not only did he ruin Cerebus, he salted the earth beneath it, ensuring it would never come back in the hands of another. Maybe that was the plan all along. There will be no Cerebus revival; the world is slowly forgetting it. Casual discussion of Cerebus online is dominated by shock and outrage over its creator’s Bad and Wrong views—nobody seems to care much about the actual comic. Which is sad, because the comic is often extremely good!
Tom and his commenters have compared Dave to Stan Sakai and Eiichiro Oda. You could also compare him to his longtime acquaintance Harlan Ellison: notorious SF gadly. Discussion of Ellison generally revolves around his personality, not his stories. One can be too good at self-promotion.
For better and for worse, Cerebus will remain a weird, fascinating, horrible curate’s egg. It’s like a drug. One hit makes you feel good, as does two. But eventually you stop feeling good; you have a terrible habit that you must either quit or die from. Except in the case of Cerebus, you don’t die at the end. You have read a disappointing comic, which is basically the same as dying if you think about it (I didn’t.) There’s not really a good place to stop reading Cerebus: either you leave trailing pieces of story unfinished, or you soldier through to the end, and then wonder if it was worth it.
At least we’ll never get a JJ Abrams movie where a CGI Cerebus wears sunglasses and floss-dances and says “that’s not a thing”. Again, it could have been worse.
A small book of small stories, written in prose as clean and spare as a hotel counterpane. Most of the stories are extremely memorable: bits of them tend to break off inside you.
The subtext is quiet, leaving room for the reader’s thoughts. I don’t know if Antiuk intended a theme or if one emerged by accident, but it’s “people making mundane life bearable”. The stories tend to be about folk confronting tedium, poverty, disabilities, old age, and incipient death with humor. They paint cartoon mustaches on the mouths of dragons. They are fundamentally happy, despite their circumstances.
“Bruises” details a couple whose violence is a secret love language between the two of them. Their behavior is indescribable, which is literally the point. They communicating things via contusions and cracked bones that words cannot describe. I was reminded of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, and her claim that pain represents a basic and universal biological language—if aliens exist, we might not be able to communicate through anything except injury and violence against their bodies.
“Mold” is about people scrubbing a bathroom at the end of their lease, so they can get a security deposit back. It captures something I haven’t often seen in fiction: the way even filth and stains seem “yours” once you’ve lived in a spot for a while. Removing them hurts. Particularly as it’s a reminder that you’re living at someone else’s sufferance, that your home is not actually yours in a legal sense. In that light, the behavior of the protagonist at the end seems natural and obvious.
“Dumpster Pizza” is about two people who have gone on a hunger strike (“for no reason other than we had nothing better to do”), and how it warps their thinking. Dumpsters of moldy pizza seem like an Aladdin’s cave of gustatory delights.
“The Festival” is about two older men, trapped in the rhythm of a life that may be winding down (“almost everyone we know either lost their mind, or their bodies. Sometimes it was both.”). Their conversations are all haunted by the idea that death is close. They talk about the Grim Reaper. One feigns a heart attack, terrifying his friend. Even though it’s a joke, soon it might not be.
“Porch Pirates” is about thieves whose actions have some of the tarnished but alluring romance of pirates or highwaymen. Unfortunately for them, truly valuable parcels are usually delivered via consignment signature these days, not left on a porch.
“Gobbler Bowl” is overtly sinister. A person takes a ride with a taxi driver who seems strange. Aggressive. Off. He makes inappropriate comments to his passenger, and starts crossing line after line. The protagonist doesn’t seem to realize that things might be heading in a dangerous direction. Optimism doesn’t always protect you.
Some of the stories hint at dark things happening off the page (or maybe on the page, but at a later time), but the general mood is a happy one. The setting and time period is harder to pin down (though smartphones appear in some of them), but I’m reminded strongly of my own childhood in the 1990s, where unyielding boredom existed everywhere, and if I couldn’t play outside or read a book, my mind started to go insane…but insane in a creative, weird direction. I invented bizarre games and rituals, created new languages that I immediately forgot. Kids (and adults) become brilliant when there’s nothing to do, and Dumb Music stands like a shrine to that impulse.
That’s the thing: nobody has to work hard to have fun anymore. There are devices that stream algorithmically-optimized entertainment into our brains until they’re vortexed into mush. Dumb Music captures a playful creativity that I worry is being lost in the modern day. In a recent Stephen King story (“Mile 81”, published 2011), the young protagonist encounters a boarded-up rest stop, that some kids are using as a hangout. Taped to the wall, he sees a poster.
This one was Justin Bieber. Justin’s teeth had been blacked out, and someone had added a Notzi swat-sticker [sic] tattoo to one cheek. Red-ink devil horns sprouted from Justin’s moptop. There were darts sticking out of his face. Magic Markered on the wall above the poster was MOUTH 15 PTS, NOSE 25 PTS, EYES 30 PTS ITCH. Pete pulled out the darts and backed across the big empty room until he came to a black mark on the floor. Printed here was BEEBER LINE. Pete stood behind it and shot the six darts ten or twelve times. On his last try, he got 125 points. He thought that was pretty good
That detail rang false to me. Kids don’t put that kind of effort into stuff anymore—now they just let their phones facehug them into oblivion. As he often does, King is shifting details of his childhood in 1950s Maine into a modern context where it’s simply anachronistic. When I talk to a teacher, I’m struck by the sense that our cultural idea of a child is warping and melting at the edges. There’s less play now. More conformity. Vicious circular social media firing squads for girls. Ebola-grade pornsickness for boys. Not my favorite timeline, but what can you do? At least we fixed the hole in the ozone layer.
So there’s a tragic sense of Atlantis vanishing beneath the waves in Dumb Music. “Oh yeah, I used to do that kind of stuff too.” By “that kind of stuff”, I mean “Crab Day”.
I was seven. I had a weekend, and nothing to fill it with, so I made a decision. Today would be Crab Day. For an entire day—morning to night—everything I did would relate to crabs in some way.
I woke up, and I drew a picture of a crab. My mom said it was OK. Then I watched some nature shows on public access TV, hoping they’d be about crabs. None were. I tried walking around the house sideways, but it was exhausting, and I soon gave up. I drew some more pictures of crabs (with the idea of hanging them around the house) but I couldn’t find thumbtacks or tape. I asked my parents if we could have seafood for dinner. They said we couldn’t afford it.
Judged objectively, Crab Day was a failure. But I still remember it. I’d taken what would have been a boring day, and made it a little bit different from all the others. By default, the vacuum of life fills with either silence or noise. With some effort, we can fill it with a third thing: music.
Georges Bataille’s prose reminds me of a fairground rubber mask; the kind where you stick your fingers through the eye holes and twist it into hundreds of leering, meaningless faces. He had a vast number of interests—psychoanalysis, critical theory, eroticism, politics, economics, anthropology—and they were intricately woven through his work to the point where you can interpret his books as saying almost anything. The Story of the Eye has been read as Sadean pornography, a philosophical treatise, a Roman a’clef with details drawn from Bataille’s own life, etc, but I’m struck by the sense that nobody really knows what it’s about. Everyone just brings their own baggage to it.
Bataille is God’s gift to people who want to sanctify some mad theory they brewed in the radiator with vague Smart Person quotes. “As seen through the lens of [dead French philosopher]’s [out-of-context theory], Beyonce has more rizz than Cardi B”—if you get paid to write stuff like that, Bataille’s your guy. But would Bataille have agreed with these theories? Some surrealists sculpted worlds like private gardens and gave outsiders no way in. Bataille is the reverse. His books are often all key and no lock.
Blue of Noon is typically obscure. My impression is that it’s a pornographic narrative dealing with the underclass of society, and the way they essentially preview death before the rest of us (lucky bastards). It starts literally in the gutter—a couple of drunks laughing and fighting and embarrassing themselves—and ends with fascism looming, the Hitler Youth marching in the street, and nations about to topple into abysms of war and fire.
There’s a kind of symmetry there. Bataille wrote the book in 1935 or 1939 (I have heard both dates), but it wasn’t published until 1957, long after World War II had ended. Like a doctor’s warning to quit drinking that got held up in the mail and arrived after the patient had died of liver failure.
We begin mise en scène. Perhaps mise en abyme. The setting is mid-30s London. Henri Troppmann (“Drip Man”??) and his girlfriend Dorothy are getting drunk at some dive. They are both feverishly sick—lengthy prose descriptions emphasize their filth, their depravity. They are alive in a consumed, rancid, rotting sense that closely resembles death. Their conversations are mad and unmotivated nonsense, such as Dorothy’s garbled memory of her mother on the elevator. We’re watching two lost people who are circling the drain. Dorothy is incontinent, and Henri is sexually impotent. They are unhappy together or apart.
The word for these characters is “abject”. They are at the bottom of society, like the figures Bataille wrote about in his famous essay Abjection and Miserable Forms. The filth and vomit are status markers counting them “out” of respectable bourgeoise society, just as a fine suit is a marker counting you in.
The ultimate form of abjection, of course, is death: which is the book’s main subject. It’s filled with subtle, and not so subtle nods, that Henri and his friends might be close to the end—or perhaps even beyond it. Like this:
Before being wholly affected by drink, we had managed to retreat to a room at the Savoy. Dirty [Dorothy] had noticed that the elevator attendant was very ugly (in spite of his handsome uniform, you might have taken him for a gravedigger.)
Later, Henri receives a letter from his wife. It’s very strange, worded in a way that suggests he is already deceased.
Lazare took me home. She came in with me. I asked her to let me read a letter from my wife which I found waiting for me. The letter was eight to ten pages long. My wife said she couldn’t go on any longer. She blamed herself for losing me, yet everything that had happened had been my fault.
There’s no reason to write a letter to a dead man, and his wife knows he’s alive (she later attempts to phone him), but “she blamed herself for losing me” is a striking choice of words But it seems to me that most of the characters aren’t meant to be humans so much as the embodiment of societal, historical, and psychoanalytical concepts. Such as when Henri dreams he is trapped in a dystopian Russia—a barren wasteland of factories and warehouses, ruled by a woman called “Lenova”.
(As a child, I’d always heard that “Lenin” meant “man of iron”, and Stalin had adopted his own name—”man of steel” to upstage him. But apparently both sides of that are wrong. “Iron” in Russian is железо/zhelezo, and Lenin’s name comes from the river Lena, in the land of his Cossack ancestors. The reason for Stalin’s choice of name is unknown but was probably just a homage. Nothing to do with the book, of course. I just thought that was interesting.)
I guess you’re getting a sense of how Blue of Noon is written: very dreamy and slipstreamy and loose. Characters are impressionistic studies. Events are freighted with symbolic baggage. It’s only 150 pages long but feels accordionlike, as though it could be collapsed far smaller, or expanded far longer, without really becoming any different. Take it for what it is: a weird, out-of-focus snapshot from a man staring off the edge.
Neither the wife nor Lenova appear in the story. Many other women do, though. One is Dorothy. Another is Xenie. Another is a “skinny, sallow-fleshed Jewess” called Lazare, whose name reminds us of the Biblical figure of Lazarus. That figure, of course, is famous for not being dead, and Lazare is the book’s most conspicuously living figure. She’s a saber-rattling Marxist activist who Henri seems terrified by, as though she’s a light shining into all his hollow spaces. But even she seems haunted by death. After all, where did the Bolshevik revolutions end up?
Near the end of the book, when it’s obvious that war is coming—a rictus spasm of violence that everyone fears and secretly relishes—Henri overcomes his impotence, and has sex with Dorothy over a graveyard, while pondering his own death. I was reminded of the way the penis of a corpse will fill with blood. Soon, with Germany firmly Nazified, Henri tries to flee…to France. That was funny. He can’t run. Not from Nazi Germany, not from death, not even from who he ultimately is.
The book moves at whirlwind pace, although it’s not always clear where it’s going. There are little flashbacks and side stories and detours. It really captures how memories feel from a time when you were drinking heavily: like a card deck shuffled out of order. There’s quite a few references to then-contemporary things that would have seemed quite out of date by 1957, like Austrian singer-actress Lotte Lenya, and the Bal Tabarin cabaret in Paris’s 9th arrondissement, and even the eruption of Krakatoa, which was still within living memory in 1935/1939.
Blue of Noon contains necrophilia. Henri has sex with his mother’s dead body (or attempts to). This bizarrely pathological act (which doesn’t even appear on the page) seems to be the one thing people know about the book (the way that nobody remembers a damned thing about The Master and the Margarita except Belphegor the cat). But what’s more interesting is the way Henri behaves toward his own necrophilia: while bragging about necrophilia, he also lies about it to Lazare, hiding the identity of the corpse. Even while admitting to something horrendous, he’s still spin-doctoring the truth; trying to salvage his reputation. I suppose that’s true to how people behave in real life. If you’re caught stealing a million dollars, admit to stealing nine hundred thousand. Who knows, you might still make out with a hundred large!
The book takes stabs at politics. It also takes stabs at body horror and dysmorphia and the dissolution of boundaries and many other things. It’s prime-time Bataille, in other words, firing ideas around like lethal buckshot. There are fantastic runs of surrealist prose. There’s also a sense of gutter-mouthed profanity that reads more like Tropic of Cancer than anything. Did the translator take liberties with the book?
Bataille’s prose seems to teem with wild horses, stamping the ground, nostrils flaring, ready to gallop in any direction. Perhaps over the reader. Yet if you have a strong stomach, Blue of Noon is worth reading. It’s a strange and surreal look at the past. Maybe the present and future, too.
The excessive descriptions of bodily fluids might be off-putting, but really, it’s like a fractal: you zoom out, but the picture remains the same: a diseased churn that foretells approaching disaster for everyone. The body starts to die, the nation starts to die. An act of vomiting is a match cut for the Beer Hall Putsch. Like Sade, Bataille was good at taking the affairs of the body and expanding them outside it, projecting them onto society at large. Hangover diarrhoea is caused by a drinking binge. But you did not go on a drinking binge for no reason, but because you were, on some deep level, unhappy. A person who puts poison into their body is a person who wants to die. And what causes that feeling, apart from (ultimately) the society you live in? Everything in the world is twisted together, a braid tightly-woven from the obnubilation of shadow. It’s often unclear what’s wrong with the world, but once you start throwing up, it’s undeniable that there is something wrong.
Maybe that’s the core of Bataille’s whole deal. He studied abjected things. The waste, the filth, the rejectamenta of body and society. The haruspices of Ancient Rome sought to learn deep truths by inspecting entrails. Bataille was a haruspex of society’s shit and vomit.
