In Remina* (地獄星レミナ) Junji Ito tells a tale as old as time: girl is born; girl is named after newly-discovered star; star turns out to be malevolent planet-sized Lovecraftian entity en-route to destroy the Earth with its tongue (like we’re a Tootsie Pop and it’s finding out how many licks it takes to get to the planet core); girl spends most of the tankōbon running from deranged religious fanatics convinced she intentionally lured the planet here to lick us to death…it’s a well-worn formula, but sometimes it’s nice to relax with the classics.

I reviewed a bootleg translation of Jigokusei Remina 12 years ago. There’s now an official English release from Viz Media, and so I will review it a second time.

My review: It’s worse than I recall it being: the end.

If I gave comics a letter grade, Remina would probably get a C minus. That’s right, Mr Ito. Not even a C! A C minus! Man, I hope he learns English, and reads this review. I bet it would break him. A single tear would slide down his crestfallen face.

Even at the height of my Junji Ito fanboy phase, I was mixed on Remina (or Hellstar Remina, which is what the scanlations^[1]A “scanlation” is an unofficial fan-made translations of a Japanese-language manga. As with most of Junji Ito’s work, Remina‘s path into the English language was fraught with … Continue reading called it). Following on the heels of the fish-out-of-water classic Gyo, and serialized in six chapters from 2004-2005 in Japan’s Biggu Komikku Supirittsu, It was always one of those “good enough that it really should be better” mangas: astonishingly competent in parts, yet collectively a failure.

Ito-san’s viscid, squamous, cell-like art remains fucking incredible and a Cheech-and-Chong-atop-Mt-Kilimanjaro high point for the manga. Lines of black corrugate the page, like Stachybotrys mould infesting your shower and perhaps your lungs. Like most of Ito’s best work, it has a biophilic quality: the art doesn’t seem to have been drawn so much as cultivated in a Petri dish. Hopefully one that got a thorough cleaning afterward.

The editing and pacing of the panels is highly kinetic, giving the work a cinematic quality that pairs well with the loony sci-fi horror plot. Remina is packed with showstopper double-pagers, all placed with a sharp sense of drive and rhythm, going slam against your visual cortex just when the story needs a huge and thrilling needle-drop moment. We get a sense of scale when we see the hugeness of the eye staring out of Remina’s red bulk, a vivid claustrophobia in the shots of humans exploring the planet’s surface. Breathlessly paced, piling spectacle on spectacle, Remina is adrenaline printed on paper and demands to be binged in one go. It remains impressive to me that Junji puts out such complex, integrated art on a monthly schedule (or once did), with such a strong command of things like layout and pacing.

But as a story, Remina was and remains a frustrating read: a litany of opportunities missed and squandered. As an artist, he’s a master. As a writer, he frequently has no idea what he’s doing, and here he hacks off his own story’s legs at almost every turn. Many things about Remina could have worked, in theory. But they’re undermined by something else Ito tries to do.

For example:

• It’s the end of the world…but it’s a world full of insane psychopathic morons, who torture an innocent teenage girl because she has the wrong name, so who cares? Good riddance to bad rubbish.
• Remina (the girl, not the planet) is the innocent victim of a witch-hunt, and we should be on her side…but she’d need to be a character and not just a blank doll who exists to be whipped and beaten, one with no agency, or desires, or anything of her own. Bad things happen to her, and we don’t feel anything.
• *Remina* sees Ito boldly striding from his safety zone, unleashing a radically imaginative…(checks notes)…reprise of standard 1950s sci fi tropes, I guess.

Remina wears its influences on its sleeve. It has the go for broke and then when you’re broke grab your girlfriend’s credit card and make her broke too energy that the better Ray Harryhausen monster flicks evoke, but with the benefit that Ito can draw anything he wants, and isn’t confined by budgetary limitations. Old B movies hang over Remina the way the planet itself does to the characters in the story.

It’s certainly an able recapturing of the Ed Wood spaceship-is-clearly-a-model-dangled-from-a-wire era of science fiction. (We’ll be generous, and shelve discussion of whether that’s something that should be recaptured.) If that’s what you want, you’re eating. And obviously, there’s ample precedent for gonzo “you won’t BELIEVE the size of this thing that’s destroying our city!” storytelling within Japanese media itself—ゴジラ being the central example. Notably, Godzilla is classically portrayed as a saurian monster. Remina has a reptilian aspect too, particularly its forked tongue, and vertically-slitted eye. (The horrific planet overwhelmingly looks human, though, which makes thematic if not logical sense.)

But the story’s most direct evolutionary ancestors are Sakyo Komatsu’s 1973 novel Japan Sinks (where an implausible scenario is described in the terse language of a governmental disaster report) and Kazuo Uemetsu’s Fourteen (a bewildering apocalypse manga where the world seemingly ends in every way imaginable at once). Junji Ito has spoken of highly of Komatsu and Uemetsu as artistic influences, so that’s one possible Rosetta Stone for Remina: a homage to the stories that shaped him.

But Ito’s storytelling is too loose and too “monthly manga” to nail the hard sci fi tone of Komatsu. Everything about Remina’s setting is just an incoherent mess that survives zero logic and exists largely just to set up the next showstopper visual piece. Remina isn’t hard sci fi. It’s so soft it achieves negative digits on the Mohs Scale. This is one of those stories where astrophysicists explain the speed of light to each other.

And although Kazuo Uemetsu (who sadly passed away in 2024) remains Junji Ito’s favorite mangaka (and is praised in every interview the man gives), I have never detected much of the “Umezz” style in Ito’s work. At its best, Fourteen is just a firehose of unchained ideas, disgorged stream-of-consciousness style at your retinas. It was exhausting, and I do not plan on re-reading it any time soon, but it left the same impression on my consciousness that a severe fever might. I was changed by it. Remina is far less fun and spontaneous. It feels planned, calculated. But if that’s so, why plan this?

I think Remina needed to be eerie and dreamy and surreal, not literal and logical. It needed to show us a bizarre, impossible doom overtaking the world without explaining that doom to death at every turn.

Remina offers no ambiguity. On every other page (particularly in the first two volumes), we get Exposition Scientist characters offering verbose narration on what’s happening with the planet (always with camera angles helpfully showing the planet’s approach), ensuring that we see the entire plot in 4K hi-def. And believe me when I say that Remina‘s plot does not stand up to close scrutiny.

If you want to make a scary horror comic about a planet that may be alive, we don’t need to see the planet disgorging a cartoon tongue. You’re rubbing our faces in the story’s weakest aspect: the scientifically implausible setting and story. I wish Ito had focused more on tone and mood, instead of a regime of visual literalness. Perhaps he should have confined us to one character’s viewpoint: someone on the ground, maybe. I know I’m “punching up” Ito’s work to an annoying degree, but if this manga’s events happened to you in real life, you’d probably have no idea what was going on. You’d understand the unfolding disaster as a series of ruptures in your daily life. Strange piercing noises from out of space. An unendurable jangling in your teeth fillings. Vast and horrific shadows drifting monstrously across the voided face of the clouds. The internet would either crash or be packed with contradictory nonsense: a screaming madhouse, its inevitable silencing a mercy-killing. If you had a radio, it would blast out a blizzard of static until you shut it off to save your remaining marbles. You would not know what to trust or to believe. Certainly, you would not trust your own eyes.

That’s the tone Remina left me hungry for. One of uncertainty, with mankind crossing the L1 Lagrange point of something truly inexplicable. The best part of the comic might be the scene (brief but compelling) where astronauts land on the planet, and literally cannot comprehend what’s happening there. They think they see people there…people waving.

But this is seldom the tone Remina goes for. Instead, it shows what should remain hidden.

Stephen King wrote something perceptive about the flaws of visual mediums such as films. Their strength—their ability to connect directly with the reader’s senses—inevitably becomes a weakness, as the audience will start focusing on technical flaws, and trying to pull apart the effect (which we know ultimately comes from a puppetmaker’s workshop or a CGI rendering farm ). As he put it (On Writing)…

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s. When it comes to actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much . . . including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster’s back.

Yep, that’s Remina. 261 tankobon-format pages, slowly zooming in on the monster’s zipper.

In 1980 Stephen King wrote a novella called The Mist (first published in the Dark Forces anthology and later reprinted in his own 1985 Skeleton Crew collection).

Thematically, it runs a similar line to Remina. The outer narrative is that a government experiment went horribly wrong and plunged Anytown USA into a liminal half-world shrouded in mist. The mist is the important thing, as it prevents the characters from establishing a rapprochement with their new environment. King recognized that monsters you see aren’t half as scary as monsters shrouded in fog—visible as a limb, a tail, a tongue.

Occasionally (more frequently as the denouement looms), characters in*The Mist glimpse some of the full and horrible extent of the changes that have swept over their world. But they never see the full picture, and what they do see is blurry. This makes parts of The Mist horrifying in a grounded, believable way that Remina never approaches in its blitzkrieg attack on your limbic system. His description of a colossal creature, taking unbelievably large strides through the mist—is one of the most memorable setpieces in a Stephen King story. You feel the ground shake when that thing’s six impossible feet land around the characters.

At about twenty past one—I was beginning to feel hungry—Billy clutched my arm. “Daddy, what’s that? What’s that!”

A shadow loomed out of the mist, staining it dark. It was as tall as a cliff and coming right at us. I jammed on the brakes. Amanda, who had been catnapping, was thrown forward.

Something came; again, that is all I can say for sure. It may have been the fact that the mist only allowed us to glimpse things briefly, but I think it just as likely that there are certain things that your brain simply disallows. There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.

It was six-legged, I know that; its skin was slaty gray that mottled to dark brown in places. Those brown patches reminded me absurdly of the liver spots on Mrs. Carmody’s hands. Its skin was deeply wrinkled and grooved, and clinging to it were scores, hundreds, of those pinkish “bugs” with the stalk-eyes. I don’t know how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us. One of its gray, wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my window, and Mrs. Reppler said later she could not see the underside of its body, although she craned her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight. For the moment it was over the Scout I had an impression of something so big that it might have made a blue whale look the size of a trout—in other words, something so big that it defied the imagination. Then it was gone, sending a seismological series of thuds back.

Did “the mist only allow them to glimpse things briefly”? Well, no. The writer (playing God unseen) did that, because he judged it would be more effective if the story was told this way. He was right.

By contrast, Ito’s world shows too much, and becomes weightless and cartoony and unreal, despite the masterful art. “Mehr licht!”, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is said to have cried on his deathbed. “More light!” Remina needed weniger licht—less light.

Ito makes his ramshackle sci-fi setting support social commentary about fame and celebrity. This is a dubious idea on the face of things, but the commentary only hits shallow obvious points anyway. Did you know there’s a dark side to fame? That your fans might turn on you at any moment? There’s a twist at the end involving the president of Remina’s fan club, a twist both unlikely and on-the-nose.

The protracted horrors of the book’s middle section feel gratuitous and lazily cynical, much as some of Alan Moore’s work does (in my view). It feels truly implausible that so many people would be out to get Remina, just because of her name. Ito’s satiric barbs fail to stick in the skin because this is not what people do. Six years after Ito released this comic, the Great East Japan Earthquake flung forty-meter tsunamis against Japan’s Iwate Prefecture. Twenty thousand people died. The reaction was not anarchy and mobocracy (and the killing of random young women who shared nominative determinism with the tsunami), but an reasonably orderly and effective response. This seems to be the norm when disaster strikes—our culture’s “humans are fundamentally evil” narratives are mostly founded on things like Kitty Genovese—hoary nuggets of “everyone knows” pop culture wisdom that have grown much, much bigger in the telling than they were in reality. Things like PizzaGate are small, ineffective, and usually seem more like social clubs for crazy people (who tend to alienate their real life friends and family) than effective movements.

Ito may have intended a feminist reading of Remina: the central character has not done anything to deserve a hate mob, except have a certain name (a name and role assigned by the ur-patriachal figure of her father). But again, she’s such a nonentity, such a generic made-to-order victim, that it’s impossible to feel anything for her. Toward the end, I started to sympathize with the mob a bit. Yeah, no shit they care about Remina’s name. It’s the only noteworthy thing about her!

Ito has never been one to overload his female leads with character development (his famous anti-heroine Tomie is defined by a lack of a character—in the earliest story she’s clearly an innocent victim of male obsession, in later stories she’s more of an evil succubus figure, in Tomie Returns she’s a “monster of the week” with powers that seemingly change with the story Ito wishes to tell). But on my first read, I wondered if Remina’s blankness might be intentional—Ito setting us up for a twist ending, where she turns to face the other characters, and her human face is gone. Swallowed. Replaced with the horrific cloud-chained visage of the planet Remina, and only the planet Remina. Because the hate mob was right. This blank of a girl was the the living avatar of the hell planet.

Remina is worth getting to complete your (legal) Junji Ito collection. Fast-paced and forgettable, it does not display Ito at his best.

The most enjoyable parts were (again) the pair of scenes where characters explore the surface of Remina. These work great as self-contained horror pieces, and they’re certainly disgusting and gruesome. They also do not feature the girl Remina at all. That could be a clue as to what doesn’t work about this volume.

Viz’s edition lacks my favorite part of the original Japanese release—the concluding standalone short-story 億万ぼっち, or Okuman botchi. The title has been translated various ways. Army of One. Lonely Billionaire. Billion Lonesomes.

The story itself is fantastic: an inspired horror riff on the way antisocial loners view interaction: as bodies being stitched together; in horrific forced intimacy.

It’s clever, surprisingly subtle for such gruesome material, with actual intelligent things to say about social isolation and loneliness in the age of mass media. (I could have done without the final panel.) It connects back in time to the Japanese “Hikikomori” phenomenon (it could also be read in light of Volker Grassmuck’s classic “I’m Alone but Not Lonely” essay, which details otaku culture specifically), and forward to things like involuntary celibates,

Army of One‘s ending, like Remina’s, makes no sense when read literally, but unlike Remina’s, it works well metaphorically. When I read some incel theorypoasting about how Staceys don’t want good kind lads (like him), I can’t escape the knowledge that he has never experienced the thing he claims to desire. He’s attracted to the idea of having a girlfriend. Suppose a girl actually asked him on a date…how would he find the experience? Would he enjoy it? Or would it make him shudder—yet more flesh stitched into flesh? Be wary of climbing unknown mountains. There might not be breathable air at the top.

As I’ve said, this story is not present in Viz’s Remina. Maybe because already collected in the earlier Venus in the Blind Spot. Maybe, too, because it upstages the main event.

In 2003, we enter what you’d call “late Helloween”—the Sasha Gerstner era.

It marks the point where my relationship with this band shifts from “unalloyed love” to an attitude more more careful and critical, more keenly aware of flaws. On paper, albums like 2007’s Gambling With the Devil and 2010’s Seven Sinners are really strong. They have many good parts! So why do I feel at arms’ length from them? They’re really subtly off. Something’s missing; or something’s present that shouldn’t be there. They’re made by a band that doesn’t feel like Helloween anymore.

I don’t listen to modern Helloween as much as the Walls of Jericho to Keeper II classic run, or the renaissance of Master of the Rings to The Dark Ride, but I would say I listen to their newer album harder, trying to pinpoint the source of my emotional discontent.

2003’s Rabbit Don’t Come Easy is easier to discuss. Blatantly weak, it might be the second or third crappiest Helloween album, and that’s a problem, because Chameleon safely locks up the title for first.

Many have described it as another Pink Bubbles Go Ape. Not quite. It has a stupid title, a stupid cover, emerged as a response to a lineup change, and a sense of being an inferior “we have Helloween at home” substitute. But the reason for its issues couldn’t be more different. Bubbles had a singer who didn’t want to be in a metal band and who was trying to change the band into the Beatles. Rabbit was made by the broken pieces of a band, just trying to exist, desperately still trying to be Helloween. “A band trying too hard to be themselves” is implicitly an admission that the band is no longer themselves, which is exactly the case here, as one of the most brutal lineup shifts in the band’s history had just occurred.

In 2001, guitarist Roland Grapow was fired and replaced with Freedom Call guitarist Sasha Gerstner. Drummer Uli Kusch was also fired and replaced with basically half the drummers inside the Schengen Area. Two drummers are credited on the record—Motorhead’s Mikkey Dee, and At Vance’s Mark Cross—and by the time the record came out they were working with a third drummer, Accept/UDO’s Stefan Schwarzmann. The final drummer was the (excellent) Dani Loble, who remains with the band to this day.

Caught by the chaos of lineup changes, dealing with the aftershocks of an experiment that their label hadn’t liked (2000’s The Dark Ride) Helloween overcorrected here, becoming a silly, excessive parody of themselves.

Andi Deris shoulders the bulk of the songwriting. As usual, he’s responsible for both highlights and lowlights. Grosskopf (who never really wrote much of note before then) rallies and delivers what might be the standout song. The other members just kind of futz around. Gerstner delivers some good work. Weikath has no idea what he’s doing.

“Just A Little Sign” and “The Tune” (by Deris and Weikath, respectively) are bland fast songs that wash off me like water. They’re so flowery and trite they make “All Over the Nations” look like Walls of Jericho. Just nothing Helloweeney about them at all. “Something’s growing in my pants / As she looks into my eyes”. Great lyrics to start the album off with. Where’s Mr Torture when you need him?

They also highlight a pretty questionable production job by Charlie Bauerfiend. He overproduces the fuck out of Rabbit, . The guitar tone is heavily-processed and lacks bite. The drums have a fake, digital quality that almost sounds programmed—the kick drums have the overly present, clicky character of early Sonata Arctica.

Other songs, like “Sun 4 The World” tend to be meager, uninteresting, and mired in overbearing production and excessive double-bass drumming. “Never Be A Star” was apparently written in the “Perfect Gentleman” days. Not much to say about it. It’s barely adequate as filler.

“Nothing To Say” is an overlong dad-rock song with a skank beat in the pre-chorus (?!). What the fuck? “Helloween should not play ska” is the type of thought you expect you’ll go a whole lifetime without thinking, and here Michael Weikath is inflicting it on me at the tender age of 36.

He also contributes “Back Against the Wall”: an obvious leftover from The Dark Ride sessions that makes no sense whatsoever. Angsty, dark, mallgothy. It would have been the worst song on The Dark Ride. Here, it’s just a bit below average.

Having complained about Rabbit a fair bit, is there anything good about the record? Yes. Two songs more or less redeem it on their own.

The first is “Open Your Life”. Despite the flawed production and flower metal influences, it’s amazingly catchy. Sasha Gerstner has a writing credit on it. That’s another parallel point that could be drawn with Pink Bubbles Go Ape. The best song on that album was written by the new guitarist (Roland Grapow), too.

The second is Markus Grosskopf’s “Hell Was Made In Heaven”, which has such a crushing heft and energy to it. I think I have listened to this song on its own more than the rest of the songs combined.

Most of the tracks come across as desperate and calculated, bereft of great ideas, but possessed with a burning need to be Helloween. Again, Halloween as a parody of themselves. That said, there are one or two risks here, and these bomb pretty hard. So I’m not sure what they should have done.

One of the things I’d say about Rabbit Don’t Come Easy (and nu Helloween more generally). It sounds heavily like a fan‘s conception of what Helloween should sound like. That’s not a de facto bad thing. It is, however, a dangerous thing. Fans don’t know shit. Fans want a band to freeze themselves in amber, remaining the same forever. A fan of Walls of Jericho wouldn’t have wanted Kiske to join the band. A fan of Keeper of the Seven Keys I and II wouldn’t have wanted Kiske to ever leave, not even when he was clearly poisoning things. Bands that overly pander to their fans risk becoming a nostalgia act, irrelevant and absurd to anyone who’s not a fan.

I won’t say “fuck the fans”. I will say “half-fuck the fans”. Ultimately, the band’s artistic drive should come from within, not from whatever placard-wielding contingency is making the most noise in their fan club or street team. Fans are the result of a compelling creative vision. They aren’t—and should never be mistaken for—the source of that vision. The horse must go before the cart.

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.