Cerebus Bi-weekly Special from November 24, 1989

This one isn't numbered because it contains stories that didn't appear in the monthly series.

Frank Thorne died a few days ago. Seeing as how much influence he had on the early days of Cerebus, I just thought I should acknowledge it. So, there you go. Acknowledged. I hope somebody cares enough to acknowledge my death this dispassionately some day.

The inside cover of this issue. Rather than list the stories and where they were first published, we get a self-portrait of Dave Sim sipping coffee and wearing his sweater made out of small animal vaginas.

The first story is "Magiking" and it appeared in the pages of Swords of Cerebus Volume 4. I don't think I've ever read this because I only purchased the first three Swords of Cerebus volumes before I discovered the Cerebus phone books.

This story probably takes place around Cerebus #13, "Black Magiking." Necross the Mad was the evil magiking. This story is about the good one. Who may or may not be mad.

Cerebus wakes up falling onto a chessboard floating in space. A wizard that appears somewhat as crazy as Necross the Mad materializes and begins researching Aardvarks. Apparently they're not beasties but something else entirely. An aardvark is a magnifying lense to increase the power of magic. That's why so much weird magic crap happens around Cerebus. He's just going about his business of trying to get rich and drunk but not laid for some reason (maybe because Dave Sim wasn't trying to write Heavy Metal) when he stumbles into magic trouble. Will the series be more understandable with this knowledge? Not that it was hard to understand before. But some weird shit does go down around Cerebus. Now I can just chalk it up to "aardvark magic magnification powers."

This seems familiar. Maybe I have read it. Maybe in Cerebus Zero or Cerebus Jam or Cerebus GamJam I.

The next story is "Silverspoon" which appeared serialized in Comic Buyer's Guide. This story takes place between Cerebus #13 and Cerebus #14 as Cerebus travels from Lower Felda to Palnu with Lord Silverspoon, Lord Julius's son. I think it's a Prince Valiant parody but it's hard to say because Prince Valiant bored the shit out of me and even though I read it because I was a funny papers completionist, I was usually thinking of other things as I did.

This Prince Valiant parody was so spot on that I was completely bored and was thinking about Scarsdale Vibe from Against the Day the entire time.

Without the Swords of Cerebus essay and the lack of letters pages, Dave had room for four pages of "The Single Page" this issue. I liked this one:

I'm not rating this issue because I don't know what to call it. Plus I wasn't expecting it. No wait, I will give it a short review: I would have been somewhat upset if I'd purchased this issue as part of the bi-weekly run, mostly because of the dumb Lord Silverspoon story. But since it was just thrown in extra on my eBay purchase of Cerebus Bi-weekly issues 1-25, I didn't mind it at all. It was a diversion. Is that compliment? No? Whatever.