Earth Pig
One of my favorite magazines, The Believer, has published a serious essay on one of my favorite comic books, Cerebus, and its creator, Dave Sim. As far as I know, this is the first literary treatment of Sim's epic I've seen in a publication not immediately geared toward the comix audience.
Unfortunately, you can't read the entire essay online (yet). I just got my subscription copy in the mail this week, so the issue should be appearing in bookstores anytime now. (The Believer is always worth picking up; this month's issue also features interviews with Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh, Sarah Silverman, and Tom Stoppard.)
I read Cerebus for more than 20 years. The first issue I picked up (back in the early 80's) was initially appealing to me because of the Wolverine parody featured in the story. But it wasn't long before I fell into Sim's extended storyline (even if, at times, I had no idea what was going on in the storyline). I even had some of my letters published in a few of the issues.
The entire series runs over 6000 pages and has been collected into 16 volumes (affectionately known among fans as "the phonebooks"). My two personal favorites are Rick's Story, an incredibly disturbing portrait of the man who, relatively early in the series, ends up married to Cerebus' lost love, Jaka. As Douglas Wolk writes in his essay, Rick is "a gullible dweeb at first, sweet-hearted but not too bright. In his later years, he's delusional to the point of derangement, interpreting everything in his environment--a bar, a chair, a woman who flirts with him--as a religious portent. The "holy book" he writes is the work of a hopeless, obsessive schizophrenic. He is also, as it happens, the true prophet of God."
My other favorite is, oddly enough, Jaka's Story, which relates the childhood and sheltered upbringing of the aforementioned lost love. Jaka's biography is penned by Oscar Wilde (or, at least, a character very much like him) and builds to a shattering climax involving a police squad of repressive feminists.
Yeah, well, you have to kind of develop a taste for it.
If you're familiar with Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Sim, at one point in his narrative, offered what Gaiman has called "easily the best parody of Sandman anyone's ever done." According to Gaiman, if you write Sim a letter (Sim is a notorious Luddite), he will send you a free signed copy of one of the issues.
Sim is one of the greatest living cartoonists, and Cerebus has had an enormous influence on me. I can't recommend it highly enough--if you ask nicely, I'll even buy you one of the phonebooks to get you started. If you have any interest in comix at all, you need to familiarize yourself with the work of Dave Sim.
Unfortunately, you can't read the entire essay online (yet). I just got my subscription copy in the mail this week, so the issue should be appearing in bookstores anytime now. (The Believer is always worth picking up; this month's issue also features interviews with Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh, Sarah Silverman, and Tom Stoppard.)
I read Cerebus for more than 20 years. The first issue I picked up (back in the early 80's) was initially appealing to me because of the Wolverine parody featured in the story. But it wasn't long before I fell into Sim's extended storyline (even if, at times, I had no idea what was going on in the storyline). I even had some of my letters published in a few of the issues.
The entire series runs over 6000 pages and has been collected into 16 volumes (affectionately known among fans as "the phonebooks"). My two personal favorites are Rick's Story, an incredibly disturbing portrait of the man who, relatively early in the series, ends up married to Cerebus' lost love, Jaka. As Douglas Wolk writes in his essay, Rick is "a gullible dweeb at first, sweet-hearted but not too bright. In his later years, he's delusional to the point of derangement, interpreting everything in his environment--a bar, a chair, a woman who flirts with him--as a religious portent. The "holy book" he writes is the work of a hopeless, obsessive schizophrenic. He is also, as it happens, the true prophet of God."
My other favorite is, oddly enough, Jaka's Story, which relates the childhood and sheltered upbringing of the aforementioned lost love. Jaka's biography is penned by Oscar Wilde (or, at least, a character very much like him) and builds to a shattering climax involving a police squad of repressive feminists.
Yeah, well, you have to kind of develop a taste for it.
If you're familiar with Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Sim, at one point in his narrative, offered what Gaiman has called "easily the best parody of Sandman anyone's ever done." According to Gaiman, if you write Sim a letter (Sim is a notorious Luddite), he will send you a free signed copy of one of the issues.
Sim is one of the greatest living cartoonists, and Cerebus has had an enormous influence on me. I can't recommend it highly enough--if you ask nicely, I'll even buy you one of the phonebooks to get you started. If you have any interest in comix at all, you need to familiarize yourself with the work of Dave Sim.
posted by Chazzbot at 10:19 AM
1 Comments:
You couldn't be more right about Cerebus. Unfortunately, the Believer stressed the negatives of Dave Sim rather than dwelling on the quality of the work. I don't read all that much about Nabakov's life or Dostoyefsky's but Sim's epic is never discussed as a seperate entity. In this age of gossip, the man behind the work is more interesting than the work itself. A shame because it stands alone as one of the most important works in literary history.
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