Thirty-three issues in and while Dave has done a lot of innovative things, he's still not ballsy enough to leave all that negative space and clumsily sticks the word "Friction" on there.
Comic book nerds have a huge blind spot when it comes to seeing the ridiculousness of the things they'll readily accept versus the things they complain and moan about in their comic book stories. Sure, the occasional comic book nerd will make a lame joke about it, just to show they "get" how frivolous the entire thing is. But that lame joke doesn't explain away the ten paragraph rant they'll mail to a comic book writer who makes a continuity error or has Batman tell a story about a time, early in his career, when he basically pissed himself. If I were Dave Sim, I never would have cracked to the people demanding to know what happened to Cerebus between being drugged by the Cirinists (or were they Kevillists?) and waking up in Beduin. I would have taken a hard-line stance and just said, "Cerebus doesn't know what happened so why do you think you should get to know?" Especially now that Moon Roach is running around town with gigantic stone crescent moons and smashing people to death under them. How does he carry them across rooftops? How does nobody see him coming? Where does he get them? Is there a giant crescent moon tchotchoke shop? Aardvark Comments had better be full of angry readers asking about the Moon Roach giant crescent moon debacle for the next few months!
I'm sure the reason fans get angry at the missing plot points and not at fantastic things like the giant crescent moon murder spree is because asking questions about the former can be phrased so that you sound like an intellectual critic pointing out the flaws in plot resolution by a professional writer but seriously pointing out the flaws of a ridiculous parody character just makes you sound like a loon. But I say you look like a loon demanding answers from any artist! Just absorb their shit, man. Don't try to change it or influence it or shit all over it (at least try not to directly shit in the artist's mouth, at least. By all means, write critiques of art! Just don't send those critiques directly to the artist. Or do?! I don't have a dog in this fight! Oh man. I hope I don't get yelled at by some twelve year old on the Internet for using a dog fighting idiom!).
Hopefully I don't have to now defend the last ten years of my life writing critiques of comic books and complaining like a raving lunatic about terrible plot resolutions by terrible writers exactly like the bit where Cerebus somehow escapes from the Cirinists. That's a defense I've tried my best to avoid while reading DC's The New 52 because it always felt like a magician revealing a magic trick. My critiques of comic books were always hyperbolic, satirical examples of comic book nerd-dom. Sure, I began the blog rather earnestly, enjoying reading every comic published by DC each month, exactly like I'd dreamed of doing when I was a kid but couldn't afford it. But part of the fun was transmogrifying into a cynical, angry monster because the dream turned so sour so quickly due to DC hiring so many terrible writers and artists for their project. Some fans would get angry when I trashed their favorite characters but if they couldn't see that I was trashing the writing and art because they were disrespecting those characters they loved, I wasn't about to show them my mirrors and secret compartments. I refused to break character to explain reality to them. I mean, sometimes I did. And sometimes I let readers influence how I approached my reviews, which I'm absolutely regretful for. I lost a lot of whimsy in the later years because some readers were so serious about it. Hopefully, I'm learning to get that back. I liked what I did for the last Cerebus "review" and hope I'm getting back on track.
Deni's "A Note from the Publisher" ends like all of her Notes do: like a tween signing off at the end of a note passed to a friend in study hall. "So you gonna meet us under the bleachers to smoke some grass? Guess I should wrap this up and get to work! Mr. Gary's such a hard ass. Ha ha! J/K." If any pop culture historians are reading this, the style and content of that fictional note I just wrote probably dates my junior high school years exactly.
Dave Sim's "Notebooks" mentions strong acid and Wendy Pini so it's possibly a succinct summation of my teenage years. It also mentions Cerebus peeing in the sink but I'd like you all to know that that isn't anything like my teenage years at all. Or my adult years.
Last issue ended with Moon Roach busting in on Astoria trying to fuck Cerebus. Now Astoria has to reassert control of the Roach before he destroys their entire moneymaking enterprise. This time she's gone a bit too far, what with her trying to shove Cerebus's dick into various openings on her body, and it takes her most heroic effort to calm Moon Roach down. And just as her manipulations begin to work, Cerebus throws a great big Estarcionian wrench into her gears.
I'm sure the reason fans get angry at the missing plot points and not at fantastic things like the giant crescent moon murder spree is because asking questions about the former can be phrased so that you sound like an intellectual critic pointing out the flaws in plot resolution by a professional writer but seriously pointing out the flaws of a ridiculous parody character just makes you sound like a loon. But I say you look like a loon demanding answers from any artist! Just absorb their shit, man. Don't try to change it or influence it or shit all over it (at least try not to directly shit in the artist's mouth, at least. By all means, write critiques of art! Just don't send those critiques directly to the artist. Or do?! I don't have a dog in this fight! Oh man. I hope I don't get yelled at by some twelve year old on the Internet for using a dog fighting idiom!).
Hopefully I don't have to now defend the last ten years of my life writing critiques of comic books and complaining like a raving lunatic about terrible plot resolutions by terrible writers exactly like the bit where Cerebus somehow escapes from the Cirinists. That's a defense I've tried my best to avoid while reading DC's The New 52 because it always felt like a magician revealing a magic trick. My critiques of comic books were always hyperbolic, satirical examples of comic book nerd-dom. Sure, I began the blog rather earnestly, enjoying reading every comic published by DC each month, exactly like I'd dreamed of doing when I was a kid but couldn't afford it. But part of the fun was transmogrifying into a cynical, angry monster because the dream turned so sour so quickly due to DC hiring so many terrible writers and artists for their project. Some fans would get angry when I trashed their favorite characters but if they couldn't see that I was trashing the writing and art because they were disrespecting those characters they loved, I wasn't about to show them my mirrors and secret compartments. I refused to break character to explain reality to them. I mean, sometimes I did. And sometimes I let readers influence how I approached my reviews, which I'm absolutely regretful for. I lost a lot of whimsy in the later years because some readers were so serious about it. Hopefully, I'm learning to get that back. I liked what I did for the last Cerebus "review" and hope I'm getting back on track.
Deni's "A Note from the Publisher" ends like all of her Notes do: like a tween signing off at the end of a note passed to a friend in study hall. "So you gonna meet us under the bleachers to smoke some grass? Guess I should wrap this up and get to work! Mr. Gary's such a hard ass. Ha ha! J/K." If any pop culture historians are reading this, the style and content of that fictional note I just wrote probably dates my junior high school years exactly.
Dave Sim's "Notebooks" mentions strong acid and Wendy Pini so it's possibly a succinct summation of my teenage years. It also mentions Cerebus peeing in the sink but I'd like you all to know that that isn't anything like my teenage years at all. Or my adult years.
Last issue ended with Moon Roach busting in on Astoria trying to fuck Cerebus. Now Astoria has to reassert control of the Roach before he destroys their entire moneymaking enterprise. This time she's gone a bit too far, what with her trying to shove Cerebus's dick into various openings on her body, and it takes her most heroic effort to calm Moon Roach down. And just as her manipulations begin to work, Cerebus throws a great big Estarcionian wrench into her gears.
Cerebus doesn't even want to fuck Astoria. He just wants to fuck with the Roach.
Astoria manages to get rid of the Roach and then gets to work on Cerebus. And while he's easily controlled in certain ways (usually concerning money and alcohol), Cerebus seems immune to Astoria's manipulations. Later, she'll learn what works against him and use it to the best of her abilities, even if that means goading him into raping her. But at the moment, she doesn't quite seem to know how to get her hooks into him.
Astoria's a great character. It's just a shame that, considering all of Dave's subsequent essays and/or responses to letters in the back of the comic concerning women and relationships, she seems more of a terrible stereotype than a fully realized character.
Meanwhile, The Regency Elf has begun her campaign of vengeance against Cerebus. Her first attack is putting graffiti in the Regency's public bathroom declaring that Cerebus pees in the sink. She's obviously more diabolical than anybody could have thought. The hotel manager seems to think nobody will believe the graffiti but I'm not sure if he's noticed that Cerebus often doesn't wear pants. If he doesn't know what pants are, why wouldn't it be possible to imagine he doesn't know the difference between a toilet and a sink?
Moon Roach goes off Astoria's script and begins squishing people he's not supposed to squish. But knowing Astoria, she'll probably turn it to her advantage. The Elf begins writing Cerebus wee-wee notes all over town. And then Elrod arrives on the scene looking for his pal in the bunny suit.
Cerebus #33 Rating: B. Sometimes twenty pages by Dave Sim go by so quickly, it hardly seems the plot has moved ahead at all. Of course, as long as Dave is writing funny sketches with his various characters, I don't really care about the plot. The plot in this issue simply involves The Roach getting jealous of Astoria and Cerebus's relationship causing him to begin killing whomever he wants (in this case, the governor of the legislature). But that's pretty much all that happened. The real meat of the issue is The Regency Elf smearing Cerebus's name all over Iest with rumors that he pisses in the sink. I'm pretty sure Cerebus's pissing rumor has as many pages devoted to it as there are pages devoted to Astoria's plans with Moon Roach going awry. Plus that extra page where Elrod shows up, just in case any readers thought Cerebus's life wasn't getting complicated enough. Except there's actually more going on here. Think about those pages with just the Moon Roach, off on his own, pouting and jealous. It's not the first time we've had pages of story devoted to other characters alone but it's significantly different. Let me try to explain.
In my last entry, I mentioned how I felt Issue #32 felt like the true beginning of Cerebus, the place were Dave Sim's vision of the entirety of the book came into focus. Something had clicked with the introduction of Astoria, and showing her power over Moon Roach. We'd seen it before with Weisshaupt and his manipulation of the Roach and his attempt to draw Cerebus into his world. That story was like a microcosm of High Society, so in a way, it was a precursor to Issue #32 and what Cerebus would eventually become. It's sort of the shadow of Dave Sim's intent; a dark, vague shape of Dave's ultimate vision, not yet even clear enough for Dave to see yet. But last issue, it all began to clarify. And then this issue does something that's never really happened in prior issues: we watch another character doing his own thing separate from Cerebus's world and Cerebus's plot. Previously, we get moments where an antagonist is watching Cerebus from afar, as in the early issue with Death and his gem. We get some moments with Elrod on his adventure with the Cerebus like-a-look but, being that Elrod thinks he's with Cerebus, it's just part of Cerebus's treasure hunt in the Black Sun Temple. During the war against Palnu issues, we have a few cutaway scenes where we see Lord Julius making his plans. But those moments feel, if anything, more like when Cerebus early on had the occasional omniscient narrator. It's just a few pages of Lord Julius reacting to Cerebus's plans to advance on Palnu and a place for Dave to do some more Marx Brothers parody. But here in this issue, for the first time in thirty-three issues, we have Dave Sim taking a character out on his own, showing his own agency and living his own story. Sure, he's reacting to Cerebus's plans and life, just as everybody else before this. But it's also something new, as we see Moon Roach actively deciding to do his own thing, separate from Astoria and Cerebus's plans.
What we have this issue is the world of Cerebus opening up to encompass the entire cast. Perhaps what we're seeing here is Dave's first realization that he can do a story like Melmoth or Jaka's Story, where Cerebus can take a back seat to somebody else's story. For just a few scant pages, we get to be a character's life that is tearing away from Cerebus's arc. Moon Roach's scene doesn't lead into a scene with Cerebus. It's pure Moon Roach and his crazy. It's Moon Roach's story alone. And it only lasts a few pages but it's definitely something new to Dave's story telling. I don't know how much more of this we'll see coming up in High Society. Like the Weisshaupt story being the shadowy precursor to the real beginnings of Dave's epic, High Society, the Lord Julius scenes were kind of the precursor to Moon Roach escaping Cerebus's orbit, if only slightly, to show that Dave's story can open up into other non-Cerebus-related vistas.
Or maybe I'm just reading too much into Dave wanting to write a few insane rambling Moon Roach monologues that end in Moon Roach punching himself in the face.
Moon Roach goes off Astoria's script and begins squishing people he's not supposed to squish. But knowing Astoria, she'll probably turn it to her advantage. The Elf begins writing Cerebus wee-wee notes all over town. And then Elrod arrives on the scene looking for his pal in the bunny suit.
Cerebus #33 Rating: B. Sometimes twenty pages by Dave Sim go by so quickly, it hardly seems the plot has moved ahead at all. Of course, as long as Dave is writing funny sketches with his various characters, I don't really care about the plot. The plot in this issue simply involves The Roach getting jealous of Astoria and Cerebus's relationship causing him to begin killing whomever he wants (in this case, the governor of the legislature). But that's pretty much all that happened. The real meat of the issue is The Regency Elf smearing Cerebus's name all over Iest with rumors that he pisses in the sink. I'm pretty sure Cerebus's pissing rumor has as many pages devoted to it as there are pages devoted to Astoria's plans with Moon Roach going awry. Plus that extra page where Elrod shows up, just in case any readers thought Cerebus's life wasn't getting complicated enough. Except there's actually more going on here. Think about those pages with just the Moon Roach, off on his own, pouting and jealous. It's not the first time we've had pages of story devoted to other characters alone but it's significantly different. Let me try to explain.
In my last entry, I mentioned how I felt Issue #32 felt like the true beginning of Cerebus, the place were Dave Sim's vision of the entirety of the book came into focus. Something had clicked with the introduction of Astoria, and showing her power over Moon Roach. We'd seen it before with Weisshaupt and his manipulation of the Roach and his attempt to draw Cerebus into his world. That story was like a microcosm of High Society, so in a way, it was a precursor to Issue #32 and what Cerebus would eventually become. It's sort of the shadow of Dave Sim's intent; a dark, vague shape of Dave's ultimate vision, not yet even clear enough for Dave to see yet. But last issue, it all began to clarify. And then this issue does something that's never really happened in prior issues: we watch another character doing his own thing separate from Cerebus's world and Cerebus's plot. Previously, we get moments where an antagonist is watching Cerebus from afar, as in the early issue with Death and his gem. We get some moments with Elrod on his adventure with the Cerebus like-a-look but, being that Elrod thinks he's with Cerebus, it's just part of Cerebus's treasure hunt in the Black Sun Temple. During the war against Palnu issues, we have a few cutaway scenes where we see Lord Julius making his plans. But those moments feel, if anything, more like when Cerebus early on had the occasional omniscient narrator. It's just a few pages of Lord Julius reacting to Cerebus's plans to advance on Palnu and a place for Dave to do some more Marx Brothers parody. But here in this issue, for the first time in thirty-three issues, we have Dave Sim taking a character out on his own, showing his own agency and living his own story. Sure, he's reacting to Cerebus's plans and life, just as everybody else before this. But it's also something new, as we see Moon Roach actively deciding to do his own thing, separate from Astoria and Cerebus's plans.
What we have this issue is the world of Cerebus opening up to encompass the entire cast. Perhaps what we're seeing here is Dave's first realization that he can do a story like Melmoth or Jaka's Story, where Cerebus can take a back seat to somebody else's story. For just a few scant pages, we get to be a character's life that is tearing away from Cerebus's arc. Moon Roach's scene doesn't lead into a scene with Cerebus. It's pure Moon Roach and his crazy. It's Moon Roach's story alone. And it only lasts a few pages but it's definitely something new to Dave's story telling. I don't know how much more of this we'll see coming up in High Society. Like the Weisshaupt story being the shadowy precursor to the real beginnings of Dave's epic, High Society, the Lord Julius scenes were kind of the precursor to Moon Roach escaping Cerebus's orbit, if only slightly, to show that Dave's story can open up into other non-Cerebus-related vistas.
Or maybe I'm just reading too much into Dave wanting to write a few insane rambling Moon Roach monologues that end in Moon Roach punching himself in the face.
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