Dave Sim

Oh Lord.

(of course I would say LORD wouldn’t I because in the Bible LORD refers to YHWH aka YooWhoo who is the evil female demiurge who lives at the centre of the Earth and is constantly trying to persuade God to marry her and half the Bible is her and her mouthpieces being jealous of the truth of God and pretending she can create things but she can’t because women can’t)

Anyway yes it’s this one. Latter Days has a fair claim to be the worst comic I’ve ever read. Usually when show more Cerebus gets hateful or tedious there’s a lot of craft to guiltily admire but the most loathsome parts here are also the weakest artistically - story and art become almost entirely unmoored as the entire comic distorts under the pressure of Dave Sim’s religious obsessions. On here even the reviews which have been all “yeah Dave you tell those beta cucks” come to Latter Days and go “ok actually fuck this”.

The story so far: while doing Bible parody Rick’s Story, Dave Sim had a conversion experience and realised the Bible was true, as was the Koran, and developed a religion of his own devising combining bits of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Sim’s religious journey didn’t stop him finishing off Cerebus’ story with Jaka in Going Home. But in Latter Days it comes roaring back - around 2/3 of the way through the book Woody Allen analogue Konigsberg shows up with a copy of the Torah and Cerebus starts reading it, dictating his commentary to Konigsbergs and an unseen scribe. In practise what this means is page after page of Dave Sim’s Torah exegesis in very small font alongside inscrutable pictures of Woody Allen in a variety of styles.

It’s almost impossible to convey how difficult, tiresome and awful the experience of reading these parts is. Sim is apparently convinced it will take 100-200 years for Jewish scholars to catch up with his analysis here and yes it does feel like that is how long you’ve been reading it. For all that the commentaries are an endurance test they’re also pretty easy to summarise: Sim has picked up on the (generally accepted I believe) idea that Genesis and other early bits of the Bible are the work of multiple authors, and has refracted this through his gender obsession to decode it as a hostile dialogue between a male divinity and his female wannabe counterpart who can’t admit he created her.

It’s certainly original. But you do not in fact have to hand it to Dave Sim for creating a banging new heresy as the way he does it is monstrously unfriendly to even an imagined sympathetic reader. We never see the text, just Cerebus bantering commentary on it; every pause and aside is ‘faithfully’ documented, and if you do somehow manage to concentrate on the text you’re also rewarded with rancid little nuggets like the Gay Panic defense invoked to justify Cain killing Abel and at least two separate nudge-wink hints that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves. It’s as vile as it is grotesque.

At first the Woody Allen pages - extracts from Konigsberg’s diary of his love life and later his analysis - are a merciful break from this swill. They’re not good - the Freud analogue is called Dr Fraud, which indicates the state of Sim’s wit at this stage - but they’re different. Gradually, though, the Allen sections become more abstract as the character endures a series of humiliating tableaux at the hands of Fellini and others, rendered in the photorealistic style Sim had begun experimenting with. I’m normally keen to ask the question “what was Sim up to here?” but at this point Cerebus defeated me: this and the Torah material in juxtaposition are just utterly unrewarding and grim.

And yet, inconcievably, they may not be the worst parts of this comic.

Before we get to the Torah sections, Latter Days has a job to do, which is covering a span of decades and resolving the *other* main religious plot, the one Rick’s Story was designed to start in the first place. The Booke Of Ricke presented Cerebus as a prophet - now the other shoe drops, and we learn that it also presented him as a Messiah, who will return to fulfil the prophecies and drive out the Cirinists, whose power is waning in any case. While Cerebus is spending decades herding sheep and becoming a professional sports star, the land fills with chapters of Cerebites, all awaiting the one true Cerebus.

There is a long section - they all feel like long sections at this point - in which Cerebus is abducted by the Three Stooges, adherents to this religion, who are eventually convinced he IS the one foretold (Sim said the Stooges were his most difficult caricatures ever; I’ll happily take his word for it). But maybe the nadir of Latter Days comes after he’s convinced, in the sections where the Cirinists are slaughtered by his followers, led by a Todd McFarlane analogue who is also (I think) standing in for the Apostle Paul, and Sim decides to do a Spawn parody, a full decade after the character appeared.

The Torah sections are borderline impossible to read and hateful when you do, but on some important level they aren’t actually comics. I’m not expecting Dave Sim to be a competent rabbinical exegesist. I am expecting him to be a competent cartoonist, and in the middle parts of Latter Days even that falls away. The Spawn parody is inane; the McFarlane character is incomprehensible (ironic that Sim’s worst phonetic speech is him writing a Canadian!); the plot makes so sense; Sim’s choices of what to show on and off page are bizarre (perhaps he was rushing through his original plan to fit the Torah material in). Needless to add the story revels in the slaughter of women, though a resolution to the Cirinist strand was always likely to - but the petty sadism of including a Canadian woman cartoonist (Julie Doucet) to execute her on panel speaks volumes about where Sim’s head was at.

Basically, nothing works in this comic. The setpieces fall flat - theres something which I think is a Kurtzman tribute trying to add pathos to the war scenes but it’s tawdry; the photorealism is static and cold. The pacing is abominable. The ideas are demented. Everything Dave Sim used to be good at is almost entirely absent here. Unbelievable that it’s come to this, and there’s still a book to go.
(by Tom Ewing) show less

In terms of journeys starting with single steps, Cerebus is the first 25 issues of the epic run of comics that would eventually take 300 issues to tell. By a single author. Over nearly 30 years. Epic.

Of course, this is merely the beginning, where an aardvark simply wants the opportunity to earn enough gold to live his life, get his drink on and generally be left alone. And yet, adventure insists. And insists. Politics, gender relations, religion, conspiracy, sorcery and the impending show more apocalypse - they're all covered and insist on involving Cerebus. And hilarity often ensues.

There are some rougher spots, but some of it comes from age and others come from being new. This is all easily forgiven by the much stronger parts that make the whole a great story of a hero that openly refuses to believe in heroics of any kind. show less

This is the first volume collecting the long-running comic book Cerebus by Canadian cartoonist Dave Sim. I learned about this from friends online, and thought a comic about an anthropomorphic aardvark mercenary in a medieval fantasy setting sounded delightfully absurd. After reading it, I found it kind of a slog. This first volume of Cerebus is several unconnected stories satirizing both medieval fantasy tropes and politics with many of the stories concluding anti-climatically. Cerebus is show more serious, amoral, and competent and often plays the straight man to ridiculous characters around him (including an albino who speaks like Foghorn Leghorn). I've heard that later volumes in the series are much better, but I'm on the bubble about reading further, (especially since I've read that Sim is a creepy misogynist and his views are expressed in the comics). show less

A beautiful book that’s somewhat challenging to read both in terms of content and presentation. The bulk of the art is recreations of various photorealistic cartoonists of the mid-twentieth century who make up the central characters. There isn’t really much of story in the traditional sense—the basic facts of the titular death are dispatched pretty quickly—but it’s Sim’s exploration of the event’s Cosmic Significance that, for better or for worse, make up most the book.

Dave show more Sim is a big believer in what can best be described as a magical connection between our reality and creativity. Fictional characters and situations will be replicated in real life and vice versa. As Sim sees it, Alex Raymond’s strange death we foreshadowed in (or caused by) events in comics created by him, his contemporaries and others. And not just Raymond—Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell (who gets just as much screen time as Alex Raymond) also died in a car accident which was also a manifestation of various creative works. Other real life people associated with Raymond and Mitchell also had fates that echoed fictional works, and it seems that the more Sim dug the more connections he found.
At its best the book reads like an entertaining comics history version of someone pointing out all the fun coincidences when you play Dark Side of the Moon with “The Wizard of Oz.” But eventually the obsessive depth becomes exhausting (if two events happen on the same date years apart or if two people share the similar last name they obviously have a Cosmic Significance, for instance). show less