Cerebus: A Diablog

My, how time flies! Well, I guess that’s why we only promised you one issue per week. The blogging time, it ebbs and flows like the ocean. Or something. Sorry.

Onward to:

Cerebus #4
June-July 1978

This is a cute little issue, introducing us to Elrod the Albino, lord of Melvinbone. As Dave would later write, “nothing happens” in this issue — it’s all about this wacky character and how wacky he is, with a half-assed framing sequence involving Death himself (!). As with the sorceror from issue #1, Death’s grand evil theatricality is punctuated when his defeat at the hands of Cerebus causes him to break character (”‘Some days..’ Death thought to himself… ‘it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed’”).

But first, a fight scene with a squid demon! In which, once again, there’s something unique about Cerebus that makes him invincible — this time not necessarily an inherent alienness (which protected him from the succubus in #2) but just his unusual skill in battle. Apparently that’s how you roll when you’re “an earth pig born” — as Cerebus is only too happy to inform us. Luckily the “earth pig born” stuff will die down by the end of this volume. It’s pretty irritating, especially since we never meet any other freakin’ earth pigs. He might as well say “you cannot defeat me… for I am no mere city merchant! I am the main character of this comic!”

Once Elrod shows up, Cerebus stops talking — he almost manages to avoid saying a word to Elrod in the whole issue. Sim sets this up with a pretty weak explanation where Cerebus is posing as a “trader of textiles” here in Serrea (capital of the Sepran Empire, and thanks to CerebusWiki for pointing out yet another confusing proper name that was created by accident), and therefore he has to act like a merchant and can’t fight Elrod. So I guess since Cerebus can’t hit him, and doesn’t see any point in talking to him, he tries to just ignore him? But then they fight anyway.

Elrod himself, of course, is Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné with the voice and personality of Foghorn Leghorn. News to me is Foghorn Leghorn’s own secret origin, as a parody of Kenny Delmar’s 1940s radio character Senator Claghorn (soon eclipsed by his own parody).

Anyway, Elrod is genuinely funny — Sim’s lettering is essential to the humor, since the Elrod/Leghorn/Claghorn style is dependent on the rhythm and music of his dialogue, and Sim’s hand-lettering allows him to be incredibly expressive, with multiple, subtle, degrees of italics and bolding.

(is it just me, or is his face the spitting image of a John Buscema Silver Surfer?)

Like most of Sim’s humor, Elrod’s comes from the vast gulf between his own abilities and his estimation of them — a gulf obvious to everyone but himself. He’s also easily offended (easy opportunities for hijinx) and boldly misinterprets everything in sight with total certainty. He assumes Cerebus is a “kid” in a “bunny suit,” which is funny, but he proceeds as though this is not unusual, which is funnier.

Notice how quickly he adjusts his internal reality to account for the real world:

Luckily there are only a few Elric-specific jokes, like the fact that his sword is black (from rust, we are told, and indeed it shatters with the first blow). Sim apparently never read a single Elric story, working only off of his guest appearances in two issues of Conan. I can testify to the utility of this practice — as someone who spent seven years performing as one-half of Hans & Franz at summer camp despite never having seen the SNL sketches, it’s definitely possible to capture the essence of something through osmosis, and then you’re free to run with it and make it your own.

Cerebus’s near-total silence in this issue fascinates me. He’s continuing to develop as a man of action and logic in a world of sophistry and madness. Still ten issues to go until we meet Lord Julius, the ultimate manifestation of empty rhetoric — but Julius will be something deliciously more complex, since he’ll actually have a brain at work underneath the ocean of words. But we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Cerebus #3
April-May 1978

I gotta say, the legendary vixen Red Sophia looks pretty… mannish on the cover. Something’s off with the anatomy there.

Unusually, #3 opens with a Silver-Age-style in medias res splash page (”Superman! Help!” “Gosh, I’d love to help Jimmy — but how I can I rescue him from that gorilla when I’ve been transformed… into an enormous super-banana!?“), which teases the reader with a glimpse of the story to come. Unlike many of those Silver Age stories, though, I think this scene actually does happen over the course of the story.

And, of course, the first line is Sophia begging for a shag, and Cerebus irritatedly swearing “Tarim’s Blood! Does this wench think of naught else?” Because sex is beneath him. Or something.

While I’m at it, the Terim/Tarim thing bothers me: “Tarim!” has been a swear-word in every issue so far, but issue #2 also featured the “Eye of Terim, the most precious of the five spheres of the gods.” It also mentioned “priests of Terim.” And yet Cerebus swore upon seeing it, “Tarim! What a prize!” So are they two different gods? Cerebus Wiki says: “As I recall, the two different spellings of Terim and Tarim were accidental at first, in the same way that I had trouble bearing in mind that Cerebus was supposed to refer to himself in the third person and would later cover for it by saying that he referred to himself as ‘I’ when he had been around the civilized areas too long. I was covering for not remembering how to spell Tarim by making it the masculine version of the deity’s name.”

That sounds about right. And I haven’t read far enough to know the details, but I know this gender and deity thing is going to be a huge focus of the series later on.

I’m not sure I’m ready to say much about the Cerebus-Sophia relationship. On a certain level, I feel like Dave’s whole approach here is so tired and cliché that I’m not sure what more can be said (an aggressive woman who scorns men but secretly wishes for a Real Man to come along and show her who’s daddy? I’ve gotten enough of those from Frank Miller comics alone to last a lifetime). For the moment, anyway, Dave seems to be thinking of her as just another idiot that Cerebus has to deal with — yet, since she’s the only female character so far, we as readers are almost obligated to extrapolate her to Womankind in general. Especially considering how fervently Dave would later work to emphasize gender as a central concern of his work.

I emphatically don’t want to create the impression that only female critics should be concerned with gender issues, but as I say, I’m not quite ready to wade in yet, and I know Laura has some good insights prepared on Sophia, so I’ll skip ahead to this winner:
Yes, it’s Thugg the Unseemly. I love it. This is what high-fantasy tavern scenes are all about.

Also, he challenges Cerebus in the most perfect way: “I challenge thee, short grey pervert… …SO!” [TWAK as Cerebus is knocked out of his chair] Man, that “so!” is so Stan Lee.

Visually, Dave has his bad days just like anybody. The horribly off-model Sophia of these panels is probably the worst offender:

Drawn at the last minute, I’m guessing.

Obviously, the relationship between Cerebus and Sophia is problematic. Just reading the script aloud is a pretty cringe-inducing exercise. But I have to point this moment out in particular. There’s a point where they pitch a tent and eat dinner, and for the life of me I can’t decide whether this is intentional anatomical humor (it certainly looks like it, out of context):

Cheap shot, maybe, but I couldn’t help but see the uncanny similarity to this controversial 2003 B.C. strip:

Coincidences all around, then.

Elsewhere, Sim is already finding his footing. The comedic timing, physical comedy, and stock characters are crystallizing. As usual for the next 50 issues, Cerebus is a rock of sanity, intelligence, and competence in a world of people who lack these attributes. Cerebus is the Abbott and everyone else in the book plays Costello.

Ineffectual hitting (”wap! wap! wap! wap!”): Always funny. See?

All he has to do is stand there and let the guy’s own inferiority do him in. As David Fiore wrote about the succubus fight in #2, “he merely exists through it, overpowering the monster by virtue of his ontological necessity to the storyline!” Sometimes it’s powerful foes finding their powers mysteriously ineffective against Cerebus, and sometimes it’s lame foes finding their lameness actually becoming self-destructive when turned against Cerebus.

Later Sim will play with this formula and let Cerebus play Costello for a change, but not yet.

Postscript: looking back, I can’t get over how, well, Jewy Dave has made this guy. Cerebus is (like Sophia) disgusted by him ’cause he’s weak and effeminate and asthmatic — both Sophia and Cerebus call him a “fop”– and then he looks like Billy Crystal, or Harvey Keitel in The Last Temptation of Christ:

A little unconscious Judenhass, Dave?

Of course, Jewish or not, he’s part of a long tradition of receding-hairline, probably-gay, old-fashioned-ideas-about-romance nerd laughingstocks that includes Tobias Fünke from Arrested Development. Just because it’s an easy target doesn’t mean it’s not funny.

Cerebus #2
February-March 1978

Was Sim influenced by Barry Smith’s art on Conan during this period?

Savage Tales #1 (1971), pp. 2-3

Cerebus #2 (1978), pp. 2-3

Yeah, maybe.

(Even the layout of the top left page!)

Note also the dialogue of the poor guy fighting Conan: “my brothers in Vanaheim,” his homeland — which Sim would borrow for the name of his publishing company, Aardvark-Vanaheim Press. Apparently in genuine Norse mythology, Vanaheim (or Vanaheimr) is the home of the Vanir, and similarly Howard wrote of a people called Vanir who dwelt in Vanaheim in his Conan stories.

Honestly, I don’t know how fantasy fans got by in the days before wikis. I’m planning to consult the Cerebus Wiki freely over the course of this project, as the proper nouns start coming fast and furious and we start discussing war with Eshnosopur and the united tribes of Lower Felda and the bloody Hsiffies. There’s a certain personality that goes nuts for this stuff (and I can’t be too condescending about this because I used to memorize Magic cards), but I find it harder and harder to pour my time and mental energy into fictional worldbuilding. I’m getting older, there are more demands on my time, and there’s a diminishing-returns effect that accumulates as I build up experience with countless fictional worlds, each one seems more and more like the others, and the novelty starts to wear off. My immersion becomes more and more shallow each time.

It’s especially problematic with Cerebus because it launches with a fundamentally tongue-in-cheek tone which never fully disappears, so it’s not clear how much Dave has invested in these names and places — whether he has diagrammed and fleshed them out and we need to keep them straight, or whether he needed a generic barbarian tribe to fight on a generic snowy plain and pulled some arbitrary syllables together. My assumption is that he started with “arbitrary” and then decided to get serious with the toys he’d already put in the sandbox — otherwise, why an aardvark, y’know?

Back to the contents!

The transition from page 1 to 2 (see above) is surprisingly clumsy, reminiscent of the abrupt transitions you get sometimes from people working Marvel-style — the artist has drawn two scenes that don’t relate very well, so the scripter does his best to bridge them with narration, describing things we can’t see. In this case: “They [who?] are on the expedition in a moment! Four are dead before any, save Cerebus, is even aware of the presence of danger! They are Borealan marauders [oh.], most feared and hated of the thieving and nomadic northern tribes…” Visually, we don’t even get to the action for another two paragraphs after that! I guess you could argue that he’s trying to replicate the effect of being caught by surprise, but it’s breaking one of the basic rules of comic storytelling, in this case to detrimental effect.

The rest of the issue continues to play on the conceit we discussed in issue 1: the equivalent of a comic where Barry Smith has drawn everything but the main character, and then passed it on to a completely different artist who draws a cartoon aardvark as a practical joke. The high-fantasy tone is mostly consistent but occasionally punctuated by the characters acknowledging the situation, as when Cerebus and a massive barbarian guy duel while clenching two ends of a short length of cloth in their teeth (which results in Cerebus dangling three feet off the ground, until the Assistant Chief Barbarian makes a polite suggestion: “My chieftain — perhaps a six-foot length of cloth would be more — uh sacred?”). Incidentally, this hints at a key Cerebus theme, where authority figures privately acknowledge the arbitrariness and/or idiocy of the grand traditions that they publicly praise.

Notice the difference between these two fight scenes below. The first is set up as semi-comedic, and I think dropping the panel borders contributes to that tone — effectively withdrawing it from the action of the main narrative. It’s harmless fun. The second, meanwhile, is in-panel, and thus in-universe. Its outcome is, at least theoretically, in doubt.

I found this next scene unintentionally hilarious, given how things turned out in the later years:

Somehow I think 1990s Dave (and Cerebus) would be considerably more interested in “writings… something about time and the immortality of all beings.” When he got to that point, readers eventually reacted like Cerebus does here, and walked away.

The rest of the issue is full of more multiple-panels-across-one-background. This is my favorite example, because the background is especially compelling:

But there’s quite a few. Even the last page is a reflection of the first, with our hero diminishing into the distance in tall vertical panels just as he initially grew into the foreground — across a static landscape.

Also noteworthy: in the underground carry-the-ball-of-Wite-Out scene, Sim is already having Cerebus dash along an unsteady Ditkoesque ribbon of path through an endless expanse of black. We’ll see this again in issue 20, the famous “Mind Game.”

Another note on the narrative structure: it’s funny how this issue promises to change up the status quo from the self-contained episodic style, with Cerebus’s attempt to find work as a mercenary, joining the Borealan marauders. But then he gets separated from them, they all die, and he wanders off again. Whew! That was a close one. For a minute there we almost had a plot.

[I kid, mostly. As I say, I'm not much for world-building, and I enjoy these quite a lot in terms of formal play and snappy performance. I look forward to seeing how Sim continues to refine those pleasures as he grafts on a rich narrative.]

Cerebus #1
December 1977-January 1978

Right from the cover we get the basic premise of the book, delivered visually. Look at Cerebus and then look at the other dudes. Cerebus is cartoony, colored in greytone, all motion and personality and exaggeration. He is a Funny Animal, inherently absurd because aardvarks don’t really walk around like people and have cartoony humanoid faces. Moreover he is a Funny Animal carrying a sword and shield, which is a surprising juxtaposition. Which gets at the most important juxtaposition: he is a Funny Animal in the middle of a Very Serious comic. Everything else on the cover — the blood-red background, the flame shapes, the late-seventies-Tolkien-faux-Celtic lettering of the title, the laboriously “realistic” anatomy and rendering of the other characters — is straight out of a Conan fanzine or a homemade D&D module. Like Howard the Duck (who in 1977 was at the height of his popularity), Cerebus is “trapped in a world he never made,” but Howard was in (almost) the Real World, based on the irony that a visitor from a cartoon universe could observe and analyze our world more insightfully than any of its inhabitants ever could. But Cerebus operates at a further remove — he certainly does comment on the Real World, but only indirectly. He’s just a guy from one fictional world (Funny Animals) trapped in another (Conan). He’s primarily a commentary on THAT world — in short, “a Conan parody” — at least at first.

What’s interesting about the “Cerebus is an aardvark” juxtaposition — seemingly the point of the comic — is that the comic largely doesn’t notice. The opening few pages of this issue, when the human characters are shocked to see a warrior aardvark riding a horse and entering a bar, comprise pretty much the only time in the series (I think) when the comic draws attention to the conceit. “Though later he would be called the finest warrior to enter our gates, at the time, he was but a curiosity…” “I can’t serve YOU here… YOU’RE A…” etc. But then he’s hired by two thieves to join their heist, with a minimum of hesitation, and that establishes the treatment for the rest of the book: Cerebus is funny-looking, and he’s recognized as an unnaturally skilled warrior, but he’s not a dog walking on its hind legs or anything.

[On a related note, it's worth observing that Sim is already establishing one of the visual ground rules of the series: Cerebus is shaded with a zip-a-tone dot pattern that is unique to him (the image above comes from later in the series but illustrates the canonical pattern). Everybody else is shaded with hatching and other techniques. It's another feature that sets Cerebus apart as unique. I'll keep an eye out for exceptions to this rule.]

What follows, then, is a high-fantasy pastiche fairly typical of competent pastiches — or maybe treading the line between pastiche and parody. Sim plays by the rules of the genre, matching its tone with occasional puncturings, and includes a few formally ambitious passages that attempt to demonstrate A) his talent as a creator and B) the unexplored possibilities in visual storytelling. To me, these efforts at formal innovation are the central appeal of Cerebus.

Each of the challenges that our hero faces in the evil wizard’s dungeon appears to have each been deliberately selected as a showcase for one of young Mr. Sim’s various artistic techniques:

The shadow beast, who is sliced by the absence of ink

The skeleton, showing off Sim’s grasp of anatomy, gesture, and lighting

Probably the least professional-looking page in the book, in terms of the actual renderings, but the page layout is creative and solidly executed.

One of the “puncturings” I mentioned earlier — quite literal in this case. Mike Mignola’s Hellboy would play on this joke a lot, twenty years later: build up the spooky atmospherics, the centuries-old evil spirits, the terrifying agent of darkness… and then Hellboy comes in and punches it. Mignola, like Sim, gets to have his cake (i.e. layer on the high-fantasy theatrics and formality) and eat it too (i.e. point out how silly it all is).

One element of this kind of story is that it positions the deflator, the hero-protagonist, as a kind of reader-avatar, who says and does the things that we want to, who sees the obvious solutions that readers always notice but heroes usually don’t (cf. the famous shooting scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, above). Cerebus, like Hellboy after him, spends his first several adventures as an über-competent know-it-all, waltzing into preposterous fantasy settings, telling everyone how preposterous they all are, beating someone up, and walking out. Eventually both Sim and Mignola would grow tired of that storyline and start throwing their characters into the deep end, turning them into pawns of forces beyond their control.

These pages demonstrate Sim’s attention to page composition — the second page includes two examples of the ever-popular “single scene extends across multiple panels” trick, but moreover both pages include lines and shapes that guide the eye through their contents.

He’s not always successful, but he sure is trying.