Apathy

I've been trying for some time to formulate an adequate response to the massive existential changes currently tearing up the comics landscape, but it's been a busy month, what with starting a new job and new classes in a new town. Also, whereas normally I would have been tempted to post any old thing just to have something on the site, I've been wary of posting anything substantial on the site until I am done with my Cerebus series. I have a bad history of unfinished series, and I am loath to do anything that might otherwise impede the completion of my Cerebus thoughts. I'm trying to be better about these things . . . but the end result is that, since the Cerebus posts have been incredibly time- and thought-intensive, I jhaven't been posting anything at all. But I can promise you that as of this writing the final - or at least what I am foreseeing as being the final - Cerebus essay is half-done in draft form. It will be finished hopefully within the next couple days. And then hopefully I won't have to write anything about Cerebus ever again. (Unless of course I actually write that book about Cerebus I like to threaten myself with when I'm being particularly bad. But even if I did that it would be many, many years from now before I could even begin to think about devoting the resources necessary to a more in-depth explication of the book.)

But that doesn't mean I haven't been paying attention to the slow roll-out of the Nu52 relaunch, or even the death spasms of Marvel's extremely boring Fear Itself crossover. (Just a quick aside because I don't think the series deserves any more attention than I've already given it: how weird is it that FA would almost certainly read better if the main series had not been published - if all we had to read was the crossovers in the Avengers family of titles and a few of the satellite minis? Think about that for a minute.) I just haven't had anything to say. I briefly - as in, for about two minutes - toyed with the idea of doing the requisite rundown of all 52 new titles, but soon thought better of it. Because, you know, the vast majority of them have sucked. But the most depressing thing about so many of these books is not that they're bad - which they are, but which isn't exactly a crime and is hardly novel - but that DC finally seems to have figured out something about which they were blissfully ignorant for the longest time.

The secret lesson of the Nu52 is that they no longer feel as if they have to pretend that crappy comics are anything more than crappy comics. Without having to worry about whether or not this or that book will be "good" on any kind of arbitrary scale, it frees them up to be a lot more efficient and ruthless in the kinds of stories they tell. So that is exactly why we have so many titty books, whereas titty books had been somewhat underscored in recent years: it's not that T&A books never sold, but for whatever reason the particular publishing culture at the company had moderated against early WItchblade / Jim Balent Catwoman-style T&A. Which is not to say that there was no T&A - God forbid - but that the T&A usually existed in a slightly mediated form, and in other contexts. But now there is no real desire to provide any kind of ameliorating context. We can just have T&A books like it's 1995 all over again, and they're going to sell well because, as I said, they haven't really been doing them like this for quite some time. As crazy as the Star Sapphire costumes are, there's a big difference between a book that has T&A elements and a book that exists exclusively as a T&A delivery vehicle. Suddenly, they realized that for all the good reviews and critical goodwill the early-00s revamp of Catwoman received when reimagined as a slightly more sophisticated, less specifically T&A property, the best way to sell Catwoman comics is still just to go - pardon the expression - balls-deep into the realm of vaguely R-rated content. (Still no nipples, but just about everything else.) If you give up on the idea that you should at least on some level be publishing "good" comic books, that frees you to be a lot more ruthless in your determination about what exactly the core strengths of any potential franchise might be. The T&A in Catwoman and the Red Hood book was no mistake, and complaining about the sexual content is a bit like complaining that Spam is salty. It's supposed to do that.

The few truly good books produced by the revamp are, tellingly, books that most people were expecting to be good going in. Animal Man is a delightful series, perhaps the best of the Nu52, but most people could have predicted that it would have been at least more interesting than the bulk of books that surrounded it because Animal Man as a property has always depended on a high level of execution for its relative success. Ergo, the best way to "sell" Animal Man is to frame it as one of the line's few "prestige" books, the proverbial Merchant-Ivory production sitting next to the sea of Michael Bay joints. You can say similar things about Batwoman, but that's a special case inasmuch as the book would likely have existed in much the same shape whether or not the line had been rebooted.

Most of the other "good" books in the relaunch are not so much spectacular creative achievements as solidly conceived genre material that will probably hold up reasonably well in collection: Batman, Stormwatch (the second issue of which was massively better than the first), Swamp Thing. But at this point in the genre's history the ability to pull together solid creative teams on any given book seems to be as much alchemy and luck as any kind of outgrowth of legitimate aesthetic sensibility. Batman is a bog-standard book enlivened by some fairly spectacular artwork by Greg Capullo - but Capullo's art would have enlivened any other book to which he had been assigned. Swamp Thing has promise but so far seems far less impressive than the similarly themed Animal Man, and this is especially noticeable inasmuch as both books appear to be participating in a larger shared storyline, the size and scope of which is still mostly inchoate. Aquaman is pretty much exactly what you'd expect a relaunch of Aquaman by the company's number one creative team to look like, and as such it succeeds precisely to the degree you would expect. (OMAC is a freak that doesn't really fit any model because it is so obviously only good because Keith Giffen is doing some of the best work of his career on a story that is otherwise fairly tepid, and it will be a miracle if the series lasts a full calender year.)

So DC has finally learned a lesson that Hollywood has taken as dogma for decades: any creative endeavor is essentially a set of variables. The success or failure of any endeavor will depend (or so this model goes) on the ability of the producers to control every possible variable. Execution - as in, whether or not something is actually, legitimately good - is the hardest possible variable to predict with any certainty. This explains why, even though serious dramas usually cost significantly less than action movies or even star-vehicle comedies, its harder to get dramas made at major studios than ever because the success of a serious, potential award-bait movie is dependent on things that no producer or studio can ever completely control - the temperament and talent of artists. (This also explains why most larger studios have almost entirely subcontracted the production of serious movies to cheaper boutique labels such as Fox Searchlight or Miramax - lower overhead, less risk.) So there are only a handful of truly good books in the Nu52 by design: those are the maximum number of dice rolls that the company felt they could legitimately get away with. Most of the other books, inasmuch as they are or are not dicey commercial prospects, nevertheless represent familiar types produced by dependable craftspeople who can be counted on to produce the exact product for which they are contracted to produce. T&A books usually don't need A-list creators, and neither do ultraviolent paramilitary stories or low-key superhero action books, and it is as avatars of these discrete categories that the books will be packaged and sold both to veteran readers and to the supposed newcomers attracted by hype and investment potential. They are less aesthetic genres as product descriptors. And if the logic of capitalism has been evident throughout the industry for a long time, this is still the first time in a long time that the strings have been quite so clearly visible. The best DC can hope for these books is that by producing so many of them in such a rigorous and industrial fashion, they will be producing stories that can most easily be packaged for sale in the same way that thrillers, supernatural romance and science fiction have traditionally been packaged: as impulse buys for travelers and casual readers. That's progress, of a kind.

When Bad Record Covers Strike

New Order - Republic



This one wouldn't maybe be so bad if the band in question didn't have a history - dating all the way back to Joy Division's 1979 debut, Unknown Pleasures - of having some of the best covers in pop music history. Like all the Joy Division and New Order sleeves that precede and follow it, Republic is a Peter Saville joint. I guess Saville lost a bet or something, and that bet probably went something along the lines of "I'll bet you can't make a record cover so ugly we could use it to scour tub grout."

REM - Fables of the Reconstruction



As opposed to New Order, REM never had many good record covers. In fact, it's far easier to count the bad album covers than the good ones. Of the bad ones, this is one of the worst, although it's hard to say that it's objectively worse than Life's Rich Pageant or Document or Out of TIme or any of their atrocious Photoshop disasters from the last decade. But seriously, people: look at this hot mess. It's like a baby threw up, and it just happened to be baby William Faulkner.

2Pac - All Eyez On Me



"Hello, I'm Tupac, I like sunsets, Lakers games and catching a late dinner at Pink's. I'm looking for a girl who's looking for something on a serious tip 'cause I'm sick of having my heart broken. Enter 9898 to leave a message, and I'll holler back at ya."

This one gets extra points for the fact that the 12" vinyl pressing still has the same "2 Compact Disc Pac" sticker that the CD version had. And for some reason I always see this record for sale at Urban Outfitters when I go in looking for their clearance tchotchkes. So you know there are a ton of Studio Art / Ethnography double majors for whom this is the token artifact of "black" culture that gets displayed prominently in their dorm room.

Bob Dylan - Infidels



The problem with Dylan is that when it comes to certain aspects of his career, he just could not give a shit. Dude seriously could not care less about half the shit that goes along with being a rock star. Like recording albums: it's a well-known fact that one of the reasons that he had so much trouble recording decent albums from 1976-1996 is that he hated being in the studio and really resented the fact that recording equipment got so damned complicated. He hated having to deal with multiple takes and overdubs and layered arrangements and all the methodical stuff that you have to do to record a decent sounding non-Sebadoh album. So if you go back and read about any Dylan album from this period, the story is usually something along the lines of: Dylan finds a producer he thinks he likes. Said producer asks Dylan to do another take, work on the arrangements a bit longer, teach the songs to the other members of the band before pressing "play" on the tape machine - you know, any of the stuff that goes along with actually recording a professional-quality rock & roll album. Dylan walks off in a pissy huff and the album is compiled from scraps of whatever they had sitting around the studio that Dylan didn't piss on out of spite at being asked to, you know, give a shit.

Again, you could argue that Dylan has some worse record covers. (Empire Burlesque is a cheap shot.) But I would argue that you will never find a lazier album cover in the history of pop music - at least, not from a major recording artist working for a major record company. This is seriously the most "don't give a SHIT" record cover ever pressed on a cardboard sleeve. Robert Pollard takes longer to crap out a collage to slap on the front of whichever new Circus Devils record is being released this month.

Husker Du - Flip Your Wig



I have a strong feeling this started life as a Sisters of Mercy album cover - or maybe Killing Joke? - before getting lost behind a filing cabinet somewhere. Fast forward to 1985: Hüsker Dü need an album cover. Someone spots a lost Federal Express box behind the filing cabinet. "Hey guys, let's use this, Bob won't care." "But," someone says, "it looks all gothy." "No problem, we still have some candy letters from that birthday cake we made last week."

David Bowie - Never Let Me Down



Yeah, OK, I know I said Empire Burlesque was a cheap shot, and if you accept that premise then Never Let Me Down should probably be covered under the same "fish in a barrel" clause that covers quite a few other 1980s-era recordings from similarly popular rock stars. (Dylan, Bowie, Neil Young, Elton John, the Rolling Stones, etc.) But I'll plead special circumstances for this one because I actually like Never Let Me Down. It's not a great album but I think there's some good material that shines through despite the awful production. Bowie himself famously hates this album, but it's not that bad. (OK, still pretty bad.)

But the cover? Man, if Dylan didn't give a shit, I think Bowie is a victim here of giving too much of a shit. Seriously, what's going on? Is he swinging on a trapeze through a flaming hoop? Is he cleaning his room? Is he being held captive by the Circus of Crime? I dunno, man. This one's a bit too "high concept" for me.

Orbital - Snivelisation



The Hartnoll Brothers have all of one decent album cover to their names - that would be 1999's Middle of Nowhere. Other than that, we're looking at a vast wasteland filled with either aggressively awful or just ploddingly utilitarian designs. This, however . . . this one takes the cake even over In Sides. This is one of the ugliest pictures I own of anything. I would rather tattoo a picture of Ed Benes to the inside of my eyelid than have to look at this thing for longer than the five seconds it takes me to take the CD case out of the drawer.

The Rolling Stones - Their Satanic Majesties Request



I like this album. It's one of my favorite Stones albums, right after all the ones you're "supposed" to like. It's different. They never tried to get this far out of the sandbox again, and I like that. They could probably have recorded a whole album of songs like "She's A Rainbow" and it would have been one of the best things ever.

But this? This looks like four guys who are terribly, terribly hung over, wondering why the hell they can't remember signing off on the concept for this album cover, probably because they were high at the time. But they really don't care enough to fuck with it, the whole point is to goose the Beatles and I guess you can say that, yes, the bare minimum this cover accomplishes is that it gooses the Beatles right good. (The fifth guy in the picture? That's good ol' Charlie Watts, smiling that same old Sphinx-like smile, perfectly content to show up on time and do everything that is required of him so long as the checks clear.)

A Word About Hate



Unfortunately we do not live in a world wherein all hate comes wrapped in bilious anger, color coded for our convenience. It would be wonderful of all bigotry came in the form of (to use Tom Spurgeon's wonderful analogy) Bull Connor-style red-faced pyrotechnics . . . but that's just not the case. Rage does not necessarily precede hatred. It is possible for hatred to come wrapped in piety, shorn of any overt animus. Hate in these terms is not an emotion experienced but a sensation conveyed. History is replete with examples of passive racism and bigotry that takes the form of (seemingly) gentle condescension and even active (seeming) beneficence. This is one of the reasons why a book such as Uncle Tom's Cabin is such a tricky, unpleasant read: there was almost as much antipathy towards black slaves on the part of white abolitionists as southern plantation owners. The difference is that the bigotry of the latter came cloaked in righteousness and religious conviction, wafted on a cloud of noxious, patronizing contempt.

The situation becomes even harder to parse when we view history through the lens of gender. We don't have the option of erasing sexism from history because history is permeated with - and in many ways, even predicated upon - the assumption of institutional sexism throughout every layer of society. This is a very difficult subject precisely because it implicates almost the entirety of human culture. We can choose now in the present not to give our money or attention to blatantly racist, sexist, or homophobic garbage media, but we can't look backwards with these same blinders: we would in that instance find precious little on which to fix our attention.

The problem is not that hateful attitudes and soft bigotry in all forms existed throughout history, however. That is given. The problem is that these ideas, whatever they may be, are by no stretch of the imagination dead. We can't sit back and calmly, disinterestedly dissect the racism in The Birth of a Nation because the ideology that inspired Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman is still alive, regardless of our best wishes and actions to the contrary. But at least we can say that any reasonably intelligent person should reflexively regard these kinds of stories with the proper contempt they deserve. The Birth of a Nation will always be important as a primary document in American history as well as one of the formative works in film history, but there's a difference between appreciating a desiccated cultural artifact for its inarguable significance and keeping that same artifact as a part of our living culture, right?

Let me introduce an example that might hit a bit closer to home for many of my readers. Say, just for the sake of argument, that there was an American author from the first half of the twentieth century who - while obscure in his lifetime - in death eventually became recognized as one of a handful of the most influential fiction writers of the century. Let's say that this author's stories became widely read and anthologized even outside the small ghetto of his genre, that he became recognized as one of the preeminent writers of American gothic fiction, an heir to Poe and contemporary of Faulkner. Let's go one step further and say that this hypothetical author was even inducted into the esteemed company of the Library of America, gaining the imprimatur of the "official" guardians of American literary culture, and confirmed as an artist of enduring historical import.

But let's also pull back the curtain and look at the reason why this writer's work has remained so persistently popular. Let's say this writer produces horror fiction, books and stories filled with images of unease and dread, animated by an overwhelming and overriding spirit of animal revulsion to the mysteries of an unknown universe. Let's say that the source of this dread - one of the prime factors in this hypothetical writer's ability to so effectively conjure up imagery of inescapable terror - was actually a very real and methodically documented pathological racism, a hatred of non-whites so severe as to resemble a form of psychosis. What then do we do with this hypothetical writer, a man whose books have against all odds become a part of the American canon, and whose work is now more popular and more widely read than it ever was in his own lifetime?

You probably see where this is going, and the chances are good that if you're reading this blog at home you might just be able to walk to a bookshelf and pull down an example of this "hypothetical" author's work. It might even be something you take great pleasure in reading - not just for homework, mind you. The author in question is H. P. Lovecraft, and despite his unquestionable importance he was also, inescapably, a terrible, terrible racist. And it's not even as if - as is the case with Roald Dahl - we can set these facts aside in our considerations of a (relatively) sanitized body of work. No, Lovecraft's racism permeated just about everything he ever wrote.

We can't just say that because an artist is a racist or a sexist or a homophobe that his work is without merit. We can't even say that work produced with the express purpose of promulgating objectionable or offensive ideas can be safely set aside, because we can't erase these ideas from the history books, and we can't erase the influence of even an unquestionably, unforgivably racist document such as The Birth of a Nation. We can hope that the only people who will ever want to see The Birth of a Nation are scholars and historians.

All of which is to say that we can't sidestep the fact that large portions of Cerebus are unquestionably, unforgivably sexist. Sim himself can quibble all he wants over just what the word "misogyny" actually means, but dictionary arguments impress no one. He proposes with a straight-face in as unambiguous language as it is possible to use that he believes women do not possess the mental capacity to differentiate themselves from animals and babies (for just one example). He sincerely believes that women are substantially and substantively inferior to men in every significant way. Under almost any contemporary definition, the assertion that an arbitrary percentage of the population is sub-human is simple bigotry. This is the social compact that most reasonable human beings should accept as a given, even if these ideas have obviously not been expunged from society. For vast stretches Cerebus transforms into a strange hate screed, a rant whose offensiveness is only very slightly ameliorated by the fact that Sim's self-imposed exile from mainstream society appears to have brought far more harm to him than his words have ever harmed another human being. I will not go so far as to say that Sim is crazy, or unhinged, or possesses in any way a compromised mind: these are ad hominem attacks that do little to engage with the reasoning (or lack thereof) behind Sim's actions. No, Sim's words speak for themselves, and they say in as unambiguous a manner as possible that Sim's ideas about gender are a cauldron full of hateful gibberish built on subjective readings of religious documents and specious anecdote.

So with that said, can we dismiss Sim as a useless and tired crank? Can we throw Cerebus in the trash heap? I don't believe we can dismiss the work in any such summary fashion. As much as we would all like to believe that Dave Sim and Cerebus are exceptional outliers with little or no relation to the mainstream of comics culture, doing so ignores a very important and very unsettling fact: the sexism that Sim perpetrates is not, in fact, totally alien to the comics field. Despite the best efforts of a number of diligent historians and activists to shine light on forgotten or ignored crevices of comics history, the fact remains that the comics industry - or at least the North American English-language comics industry - has traditionally been the bastion of men. This is especially pronounced in the later years of the twentieth century, at which point the gradual industry domination of superheroes and similar adventure genres only exacerbated the push in readership away from generic diversity. In other words: historically men have always produced most comics, but for much of the last century comic books (as a children's medium) were read by boys and girls in comparable measure. Towards the end of the century this changed, and the increased masculinization of the field meant that creators who came to prominence in a post-superhero world were producing books for an audience that had become increasingly, exclusively male.

When the underground comix appeared in the sixties they were playing off the mainstream - not necessarily in direct conversation with the superhero comics that found renewed popularity in that decade, but with the very idea of sanitized, family-friendly entertainment represented by the diverse array of properties found in any given run of Dell's Four Color. When the undergrounds receded the post-underground artists who rose to prominence in their place were the product of a more active dialogue with the then-current mainstream. When the first generations of post-underground "alternative" comics artists rose to the fore, many of them - and some of the most prominent names, such as Ware, Clowes, Bagge, Chester Brown and Joe Matt - produced work that was preoccupied with the issue of masculine identity. These are ideas that we can't help but understand, having grown up as readers in the crossfire of the mainstream / "alternative" dichotomy. In forty or fifty years it is conceivable that readers might need footnotes to explain the precise significance of the Superman figure in Jimmy Corrigan or the consistent self-effacing anti-masculinity present in the self-representation of autobiographical artists such as Brown. In the last years of the twentieth century, at the very instant when comics began their push out of the straitening confines of the direct market / superhero retail wasteland - and it must also be said, at a time when more and more female artists began to appear, first in a trickle and then in a deluge - a substantial part of the medium was still for one moment defined by the kind of masculinst / anti-masculinist narrative that already now begins to resemble ancient history.

Which isn't to say that sexism is dead in comics. But for the longest time the dialogue inside the industry was completely dominated by competing views of masculinity, with only so much room for women as was provided by the stupendously large breasts of female superheroes. Some of the most formally adventurous and aesthetically rewarding work produced in the late eighties and the nineties was the product of artists who grew up in the hothouse of men's adventure stories rebelling against the conventions of the dominant power fantasy by producing successive waves of anti-power fantasy - impotence fantasies such as I Never Liked You, It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, the aforementioned Jimmy Corrigan, American Splendor (which, to be fair, began in the seventies when the undergrounds were not yet entirely dead), almost everything by Clowes with (of course!) the exception of Ghost World. Which is not to say that this was the only ideological current stirring the tide in comics, but with so many of the medium's foremost talents dedicated to untangling questions of masculine identity, it's hard not to see that male identity exerted a powerful force on the evolution of the medium in our lifetimes. (And if you don't believe me, another viewing of Terry Zwigoff's Crumb might prove the point.)

In this light it's easy to see that Cerebus, while by far the most extreme example of a masculinist narrative, is essential - and will, in passing years as these historical distinctions become more distant and (hopefully) academic, become even more essential. Dave Sim is one of the great products of the massive wave of post-underground comics artists who did not merely reject the mainstream out of hand but who had grown up with superheroes and fantasy comics, and whose work was conceived in response to and in parallel with these ideas. (You can probably add the likes of Howard Chaykin and Frank Miller, on the more mainstream side, as important creators whose work was defined in part by problematic gender politics.) You can't say that Cerebus is external to comics history because the gender issues confronted in Sim's masterpiece are, for better and (mostly) for worse, inextricably a part of comics history. We were a boy's club for so long that it's easy to forget how odd the shape of our industry might well look to those readers and scholars who will follow in our footsteps, and even how the very idea of the comics "industry" at the fin de siecle period warped the critical dialogue. In order to understand why the comics of today look and read the way they do, people will need to understand why the industry developed the way it did and the ways in which its shape influenced the artists who rose to prominence. Dave Sim, as weird and hateful as he is, is an essential part of this history, and his reactionary politics offer perhaps the most stark representation of exactly the issues at stake throughout the industry in a time of great upheaval. There are few sadder stories in comics history, after all, than the gradual destruction of Jaka by her creator - once one of the great female characters in all comics, turned into a shrill and bumbling bimbo by a creator who had willfully abjured modernity, and in the process turned his back on a medium that had moved onwards and away from him. There's a lesson there, for those who care to listen.

How We Will Read Cerebus - Part I



As I discussed previously, it's difficult to discuss Cerebus without also directly discussing Dave Sim. The hazards of this kind of ad hominem criticism should be obvious. It's easy to dismiss the whole sum of Sim's oeuvre with some kind of reference to his supposed mental state or mental illness. This is a tempting idea even for those of us who find (on balance) a lot more to like about Cerebus than to dislike. But it doesn't really get us anywhere in terms of approaching the work itself, or salvaging the book's reputation from its own damning testimony.

With this in mind, we'll begin by presenting our argument, a la Sim himself, in the form of a series of statements and explications.

First Statement: Dave Sim is a very intelligent and very talented person.

This should go without saying. His ability to perform at the highest levels of competency within his chosen field of cartooning cannot be gainsaid by even his most vigorous opponents. It furthermore must be said that he is an extremely well read person who has consumed and synthesized a monstrously large range of secondary material in the process of making what can only be the most literate comic strip in the history of the English language.

Second Statement: Dave Sim has an incredibly strong will.

This should never be forgotten in any discussion of the man or his work. He set out to accomplish something that almost any objective observer would have deemed impossible, and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Furthermore, he didn't need to starve or live in a garret in order to crank out 300 issues of Cerebus: by all accounts he made quite a bit of money, and even if circulation dropped precipitously in the final years has still been able to support himself quite comfortably off the proceeds of his little gray aardvark.

If you haven't already seen it, I would like to recommend a 2008 film called Man on Wire. The film tells the story of Phillipe Petit's 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It's a fantastic film not merely for the reason that it tells the story of something that should by any measure have been impossible to accomplish, but that it does so without airbrushing the fact that anyone who could accomplish something so monumental would almost by definition be a difficult person with whom to deal. Phillipe Petit did something that no one thought could or even should have ever been done, and the result is that by the end of the movie he has become a raging egomaniac. And really, who can gainsay someone who's done something like that? Who will ever be able to tell that person "no"? Publishing 300 monthly issues of Cerebus from 1977 to 2004 is, I believe, a feat akin to Petit's high wire walk. Dave Sim full well knows this. This is, to put it mildly, a problem.

Third Statement: Dave Sim is an autodidact.

Tim Krieder explains the problem rather well:

Being an autodidact has a lot of the same advantages and hazards for intellectual development that being free of any editorial control does for artistic development: it allows you to pursue original, heterodox, potentially interesting new directions without being hobbled by conventional wisdom. But there's also no one to correct you when you're headed down a blind alley, straying far from your area of competence, or just talking out of your ass.

It would be absurd - not to mention monumentally classist - to assert that someone can't be smart without having gone to college first. College doesn't even do that great a job of making most people smart to begin with, after all, given how many university degrees are little more than trade school certificates for entry to reasonably remunerative middle-class jobs.

But with those caveats well in place, it needs to be said that if you want to be a working intellectual of any caliber, college really is a good idea. You can learn almost anything on your own without the benefit of a professor or a classroom of your peers, but the one thing you can't get on your own is the sensation of being told "no" by someone who is objectively smarter than you. Being told "no" and being able to learn from being told "no" is the single most invaluable experience any intelligent person can have.

Here in these United States we have a lot of respect and reverence for "self-made men" who craft their own destiny through nothing but hard work, perseverance, and willpower. (Yes, Sim is Canadian, but the point still holds.) This idolization of individual autonomy has turned into something of a mixed bag. People who learn from hard-won experience to trust no one's authority but their own, to disregard the wisdom of their elders, and that the habitual breaking of proscriptions carries no negative consequences, are quite insufferable. They make bad neighbors and bad citizens. Dave Sim succeeded in accomplishing the impossible, and in the process became an artist of formidable intelligence, but the price he paid was the acclaim and esteem of his peers and his potential audience. Because he succeeded so definitively in what, to him, became the only possible meaningful measure of success (that is, the exercise of his Herculean will), there's simply no one alive who can tell him "no" in a way he'll understand or respect. In fact, he almost certainly sees the disdain of his detractors and the neglect of critics as perverse reinforcement.

Fourth Statement: Dave Sim does not see the world the same way that you or I do.

This fact is a consequence of the first three. Sim rejects modernity on an almost wholesale basis, an abjuration that extends all the way to having a disinclination for computers (his internet presence often takes the form of transcripts uploaded from his electric typewriter). His religious turn - a turn which was preceded by and followed perhaps as an inevitable consequence of his conservative turn - recasts almost the entirety of modern existence in negative terms. He dislikes Picasso and dislikes Freud and dislikes Marx and (although I can't remember specifically if it's come up) probably dislikes Nietzsche as well.

What this means in practice is that he explicitly rejects the language and collective metaphors that we - many of us, at least, of the leftist, liberal or conservative persuasions - use to discuss the contemporary world. Although he has little patience for narrow-minded congregationalists, he has cast his rhetorical lot in with the forces of anti-modernity who insist on using the language of scripture to diagnose the sins of the present. He outright dismisses the language of contemporary (and by "contemporary" in this instance I mean at least the last 250-300 years) philosophy and social theory as meaningless "bafflegab."

This is frustrating on a number of levels. The first level is that, according to our First Statement, Dave Sim is a very smart person. There is no good reason why he couldn't read and understand Sartre (to pick an example mentioned in the most recent issue of Glamourpuss) if he decided it was important for him to do so. Most contemporary philosophy is very difficult to read, and the same goes for economics, political science, literary theory, historiography, sociology - pretty much any highly specialized academic discipline you care to mention. But this is an unavoidable consequence of the accretion of thousands of years of scholars building increasingly complicated idea systems, systems which can most easily be penetrated by recourse to highly specialized and specific jargon. If you think, say, Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (to pick a completely random example of a book on my desk) is dense and difficult to parse, you're very much right (especially in translation). But that doesn't mean you can't understand the book if you try.

Sim rejects this notion outright. The entirety of modern political theory rests so far outside his purview that speaking to him on these terms is futile. He rejects the language of modernity, and refuses to read or willfully misunderstands the books that explain the concepts of modernity. I will repeat for emphasis: it's not that he couldn't if he wanted to. There are lots of conservative academics and intellectuals who defend their worldviews in a persuasive and articulate fashion without being swallowed in the sea of "bafflegab." He chooses not to do so, and so it should come as no surprise that he is left without the means to explain much of what he castigates in contemporary society.

Take, for example, his infamous "Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist." If you've never read them or the screed from which they are taken ("Tangent"), they are helpfully reproduced here. Sim begins from the highly biased position of rejecting the last however many hundreds of years of social development in favor of a worldview that refuses to accept any advancement since (in his exact words!) "the death of God's Last Messenger and Seal of Prophets, Muhammad (peace be upon him) in 632 CE." So that's, uh, 1400 years of backwards progress, I guess. If you read through the list, it's not even as if he hasn't pinpointed a few of what could be construed as legitimate points of contention and grounds for reasonable disagreement within contemporary civilization, but he's done so in a way that cannot be breached by recourse to any reasonable argumentation that postdates the birth of Islam.

When I read back over that list in the year 2011 what I see is a number of assertions that can best be answered by economic data, assertions based on faulty premises, assertions based on a frankly bewildering intentional misreading of selective data, and assertions that are meaningless to anyone who does not believe in God. But he distrusts and loathes the Marxists / Feminists / Homosexualists so much that the possibility that he may, just may be misrepresenting the other side of his imaginary straw-man arguments never even occurs to him. A few of these assertions are issues of domestic politics that, icky as they may seem, do little more than prove Sim's status as a inveterate chauvinist. But the larger part of the list is built on the premise that social conditions which haven't existed in hundreds of years are the default norm and that any possible ethical morass will either find immediate explanation in Scripture or ultimate explanation at The Last Day (again, his words). Put aside the reality that much of the "sins" Sim diagnoses are direct manifestations of economic inequality, because the language of economics - not even, to be sure, Marxian economics, but all economics - simply has no basis in Scriptural authority. The sum of economic theory since the Reformation is predicated on a materialist interpretation of human existence. Sure, the Protestants helped matters considerably by welding economic success to spiritual esteem, but as soon as the general Catholic distrust of industrialization was lifted across Northern Europe, we were off to the races and haven't looked back since. Our lives as citizens are not defined by our relationship to God and King - as per Hobbes - but by our relationship to Mammon, otherwise known as market capitalism. This is something that cannot be adequately explained in terms of religion, and that is why so much of the religious right in the industrialized west is completely unable to produce effective social policy.

Sim refuses to understand the modern world on its own terms. Of course contemporary civilization is going to come up short when measured against the moral proscriptions of prehistoric desert nomads and the people who subsequently wrote their fan-fic. But in order to engage with modernity most people - even religious people - accept the premise that most phenomena can be explained by recourse to the material world. If you put aside those wonderful people who believe that God creates recessions, most economists believe that economic systems can be described by recourse to data, and although the systems they use to interpret this data may differ widely depending on where an economist falls on the ideological spectrum, few of these systems involve reference to the Pentateuch.

To sum up: if you do not believe in the literal truth (although he fudges some on his metaphorical reading of Genesis, for instance) of not just the Bible, but (on equal footing) the Torah, the New Testament and the Koran; if you do not reject the materialistic interpretation of culture that has dominated discourse in Western society to varying degrees since the Enlightenment; if you do not believe in a fundamental equality between the sexes that exists despite uncontroversial and objective differences between the physical makeup of men and women; if you acknowledge the authority of any academic or scholarly writing in the fields of the humanities or the social sciences; if you do not believe that academia as a whole has been infiltrated by inveterate Marxists; if you do not believe that women are unable to distinguish between the cognitive abilities of pets, children and people; if you do not abhor pet ownership as a concession to female weakness; if you do not believe that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was ultimately undermined by feminism - well, you have to part ways with Dave Sim. And since there is an infinitesimally small percentage of the world's population who would agree with all these propositions - and that population is essentially one person in Kitchener, Ontario - Dave Sim stands alone as the only person in the world who sees the world in quite this way.

Fifth Statement: Dave Sim's ideas don't make sense to anyone but Dave Sim.

Perhaps this should go without saying. Unless you see the world in exactly the same fashion as Sim, many if not most of his assertions will seem completely untenable, if not simply perplexing.

In the United States (and much of the world as well) we're used to religious conservatism walking hand-in-hand with some manner of populism. It wasn't always like this, of course: the constituency we now call the religious right sat out politics for many decades in the middle of the Twentieth Century. Ironically, it wasn't until Jimmy Carter ran for President in 1976 that evangelical Christianity became interested in electoral politics. After being generally disappointed with Carter's progressive stance on social issues, the evangelicals realigned themselves with the GOP, and they've been a dominant constituency on the right ever since.

Religious conservatism is, in other words, something we're used to dealing with. We recognize it and understand it's arguments. Sim is a religious conservative but he's not evangelical. He is a staunch individualist who lives an extremely regimented life according to a highly personalized interpretation of the three great Abrahamic faiths. To the best of my knowledge he has never seen fit to publicly proselytize his beliefs, outside of the occasional public Bible reading. He does not believe he is a prophet, and Cerebus is not intended to be the scripture of a new religion. He appears to be perfectly content to live his extremely ascetic and highly eccentric life - complete with five-times-a-day prayer, frequent fasting, and compulsory charitable tithing - on his own terms and no one else's.

It is difficult to imagine any conventional Christian denominations seeing anything admirable in Sim's ready acceptance of syncretic heterodoxy. He lives according to some tenets of Islamic law but he is not a Muslim. His reading of Scripture is - well, interesting. He believes that the Book of Genesis to be the (heretofore unseen) story of a battle between God and his female opposite, YHWH. Dave Sim appears to have recreated a highly charismatic form of Zoroastrianism.

Dave Sim's religious conversion is, to put it mildly, not the kind of religious conversion that could happen to just anyone. He came to God through intense study. His reading of the Bible(s) is the kind of reading that could only occur to someone who knew their Bible inside and out, knew some Hebrew, cared about the history of the text as a text. Someone educated and intelligent and confident enough to propose a novel reading of the most read and re-read book ever published in the history of the world. And - it really should go without saying - someone with the balls to assert that he perhaps the first person in the history of the world to really understand what God was trying to say.

So it's probably for the best that he is not an evangelical. His religious methodology is so pervasively anti-populist that it's difficult to imagine him being able to gather followers even if he wanted. Anyone intelligent enough to retrace Sim's steps in order to recreate the revealed wisdom he has discovered is, frankly, too intelligent to ever agree with him. These are ideas that make sense only to Dave Sim. He is a religious conservative (small "r," small "c") but he has about as much to do with the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as they do with Lukács. They are populists, whereas he is essentially a hermit, a modern-day anchorite living in modern society but not of modern society. We understand the likes of Beck and Palin because they are - each in their own way - permutations of political and social movements that have been a part of United States society for decades and centuries. Dave Sim is and will likely remain a movement of one.

Sixth Statement: Dave Sim's ideas must be understood in order to understand Cerebus.

Roald Dahl was very lucky to be blessed with a series of extremely courageous and patient editors who were able to excise most examples of his corrosive racism, sexism, and pervasive anti-semitism. It is possible, thanks to these men and women, to be able to enjoy Dahl's essential and strangely heart-warming cynicism without also being exposed in the process to his vituperative rants against international Jewry. The world is better for having Dahl's books, even if the world was perhaps not so blessed to have had Dahl himself.

We're not going to get off quite so easily with Cerebus. All of Sim's beliefs - and the evolution of his beliefs along the way - are part and parcel of Cerebus in a way that could never really be extricated without leaving the work itself crucially bowdlerized. Tim Callahan could not have said it better when he said that, "Cerebus is as autobiographical as any comic book ever written." It's Sim's story, from page one right on through to the end. It is the greatest example comics has produced of a Künstlerroman: not merely the story of a young man's growth and maturity, but the growth and maturity of an artist. That the story does not end, as David Copperfield or Wordsworth's Prelude, with the artist having attained some degree of nineteenth-century Romantic idealism and spiritual empathy, is incidental. By issue #300, Sim has become an artist of exacting skill and intellect, but instead of growing into a great and more nuanced engagement with the world as it exists over the course of twenty-seven long years of labor, Sim's muse (a term I use gingerly considering our subject) has led him away from society and towards a wholesale rejection of modernity.

In order to come to grips with Cerebus we must grapple with Sim's philosophy - as contrary, repulsive and downright unintelligible as it may appear from the outside. The work's unique, even demoniacal power comes from the fact that to be immersed in Cerebus is to be completely immersed in the another man's mind, with all his prejudices and irrationalities wholly intact. It is highly likely that by the end of Cerebus you will hate Sim, you will be angry with Sim, you might even pity Sim, but you will understand him as you have understood few other human beings on this planet.

Seventh Statement: Cerebus will never be widely read.

If Dave Sim set out to create a work of great literature that would be widely read and disseminated in his lifetime he failed fairly definitively. As the years proceed there will most likely never be any kind of "Cerebus renaissance." Perhaps one day after Sim's death when the work has passed into public domain the book will be anthologized and may appear in some expurgated form. But I do not believe the work as a whole will ever be read by any but a very small minority of even the comics-literate population. When I say, "we will read Cerebus," I'm conscious of two things: one, we don't read Cerebus now; and two, when the time comes for Cerebus to be rediscovered and to reenter the critical dialogue about comics in any meaningful way, it will be championed by the audience Dave Sim himself is probably least eager to cultivate, the critics and scholars of academia.

Even if you discount the controversial second half of the run and winnow Cerebus down to the "good" first half - High Society, Church & State, Jaka's Story - you're still left with something like 3,000 pages of extremely dense, highly allusive, very wordy, and very cerebral stories about a talking aardvark who becomes Pope. And of course the further into the back half of the run the reader progresses, the further down the rabbit's hole of Dave Sim's psyche the reader falls. It is quite simply too complicated and too involved for any but the most dedicated reader to penetrate.

I've seen the comparison between Cerebus and The Birth of a Nation, and while I think that's not necessarily a bad analogy I think a better one would probably be between Sim himself and Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is without a doubt one of the most significant and influential philosophers of the twentieth century, but he was also a card-carrying member of the Nazi party from 1933 through to the end of the war. This problem is compounded by the fact that, despite a long and prolific career in the years following the fall of the Third Reich, he never publicly addressed his Nazism in any but the most abstract and disinterested fashion. He never came as far as Günter Grass, who after six decades of outright lying finally admitted his membership in the Waffen-SS and pleaded, with the equivalent of sixty years' "good behavior" (and a Nobel Prize), for clemency in the court of public opinion.

Emmanuel Faye has argued, in essence, that Heidegger's work needs to be cordoned off from the mainstream of philosophy and exiled to the realm of "Nazi studies." Heidegger's work, some argue, actually provides a philosophical rationale for Fascism that would otherwise never have been created. (It's worth noting that Heidegger himself was anathematized by factions within the party on account of the fact that his books and articles were primarily gibberish to anyone not extremely well-versed in academic philosophy.) But on the balance I think the problem of Heidegger's fascist tendencies is self-correcting. The reason for the this correction is blessedly simple: no one can understand Heidegger. I've read Heidegger and someday I will almost certainly have to read more. I can say with some confidence that there are very few writers in the history of literature less user-friendly than Heidegger. I believe that in order to be able to read and understand a book such as Being and TIme a reader will already need to be sufficiently well-versed in the subject matter and possess a considerable understanding of the historical context. He or she will have been trained and given the necessary tools with which to grapple with the most problematic aspects of Heidegger's philosophy. Just the most simple question as to whether or not dasein reflects the ultimate manifestation of fascistic ontology is so far beyond even the educated the layman that the question of whether or not these are dangerous ideas is moot: no one able to approach Heidegger on his own terms will be unprepared to deal with the ethical consequences thereof. The people who will care whether or not Heidegger was a Nazi will be such a miniscule percentage of the population as to be statistically negligible, but for those who do the question has and will continue to inspire decades of fruitful investigation.

So too with Cerebus. I keep stressing that no one now reads Cerebus, because I think that's essentially true. And the audience for Cerebus is now probably as big as it will ever be. But it will not be forgotten. The conundrum at the heart of Cerebus is the contrast - a contrast that only became larger and more fascinating with every passing issue - between Sim's personal conservatism and the formal radicalism of Cerebus. Sim's transformation into an arch-conservative Biblical literalist was not accompanied by any diminution of his cartooning prowess. On the contrary, his understanding of the depths of formal invention still hidden within the medium rivals that of any Fort Thunder experimentalist. It's hard to see, sometimes, because of how conservative the narrative appears: Sim doesn't appear to have been influenced in any way by manga, most of the action throughout the entirety of the story consists of long conversations, and Sim is heavily enamored of textual exposition. But in practice what this means is that he's been given almost complete free reign to explore a corner of the medium that has been more or less abandoned by his peers in "serious" cartooning. To this effect he's turned his post-Cerebus vehicle Glamourpuss into an examination of the genealogy of "fine line" realistic cartooning, the school of Stan Drake and Alex Raymond. To say that this is fallow territory among contemporary non-mainstream cartoonists would be a severe understatement.

With Cerebus Dave Sim has produced the longest and most diverse sustained poetics yet devised in the comics medium. If we need another analogy then the Cantos of Ezra Pound will do. The Cantos stretch and warp the shape of poetry almost beyond recognition, pulling form past all recognition of function and turning language in on itself. It's an immensely complex work of forbidding erudition. It is also the product of an avowed fascist who spent many years in mental hospitals. His support of Mussolini was no mere theoretical concern: it is addressed directly within the text of multiple sections of the Cantos. His work was immensely influential and important, and yet is now almost exclusively the domain of graduate students and that miniscule portion of the population able and willing to devote their leisure time to parsing some of the most difficult and ethically compromised poetry ever written. So too with Cerebus.

Next: We will discuss the function and importance of parody in Cerebus, and the significance of parody in the work's continued relevance.

Why We Will Read Cerebus



Before you read any further, I recommend you first read Tim Kreider's article "Irredeemable: Dave Sim's Cerebus," from the massive 301st issue of The Comics Journal - excerpted here - as well as Tim Callahan's two-part Cerebus retrospective at Comic Book Resources, here and here. Both pieces are excellent.

Despite the fact that Cerebus has suddenly reentered the critical conversation, these pieces nevertheless point to a larger fact: it seems as though the time is ripe to discuss the work precisely because it has fallen off the radar for so long. Not even ten years have passed since the publication of Cerebus #300, yet the series already appears to be the product of another time, a strange artifact of an era in comics whose time has passed. It was an anachronism even in 2004, a time-traveler from the dawn of the direct market.

The time has come to once again discuss Cerebus because the wounds left by the series' long and painful denouement have perhaps begun to heal. This does not and should not be taken to mean that Sim's words from the series' final years have been forgotten (rather, they do and will remain of vital importance to understanding Sim and his sad magnum opus), but the particularly sensationalistic circumstances have already begun to fade. Who now remembers the time when every increasingly strange and inflammatory statement from the back pages of Cerebus was (seemingly instantly) transcribed and uploaded to the Journal's message board for the outraged dissection of the internet at large? Those who never knew Cerebus could be forgiven for rubbernecking at the carnage, but those of us who loved the book could only watch in mute horror as Sim repeatedly set himself on fire in public, for seemingly no reason other than to see how how fast he could burn.

Those few brave souls like myself who actually stayed with the book through the bitter end could be forgiven, at the time, for staggering away from the wreckage in half-delerious exhaustion. I can forgive those fans who stick with crappy superhero comics through the lowest lows just for the sake of completion, because I stuck with Sim through a lot worse than just bad comics. As "bad" as Cerebus got it never actually had the common decency to be bad: issue #300 was no less beautiful a production than issues #200 or #100 had been. Cerebus towards the end wasn't so much a poor reading experience as the final violent convulsions of a bad marriage. I couldn't turn away even though each successive issue angered me more than the one before, even though the reading experience left me consistently enervated and perpetually downcast. Reading Cerebus always put me in a bad mood, a real bad mood, but I never gave up. Because even when the book pissed me off - which towards the end was was damn near always - it was still something I cherished despite myself. And when it was over I missed it, even though my reaction was as irrational as that of a battered spouse longing for their abuser.

I set out to write this because I want to state unequivocally, and in friendly rebuttal to the explicit concerns of both Kreider and Callahan, that Cerebus doesn't need defending. But it's telling for me that even the most cursory approach brings me circling back around to my own feelings regarding the book and the very complicated set of associations I hold towards Dave Sim himself. I use the word "feelings" with the full awareness that some intangible representation of Sim is standing over my shoulder, chiding me for expressing my "feelings" instead of communicating the results of my rational deliberation. Sim is a pedant of the first order, someone who has historically made great hay out of overanalyzing the fact that the word "feel" when used in colloquial speech means about as much as "think" or "believe." Most people in casual speech use these terms interchangeably even though they are perfectly aware that the words have distinct and different meanings. The overuse of the word "feel" is not a sign that society has become rigorously feminized, it is an indicator that everyday speech is informal and imprecise, and of no greater significance than the overuse of the word "like" as a grammatically null placeholder syllable or the perpetual (and usually harmless) misuses of "literally" and "nonplussed."

But that's the kind of trap into which thinking about Sim leads the reader to inevitably fall. He's a very smart man, and even at his worst he expresses his (often completely illogical) ideas with such forceful conviction that you cannot help imagine yourself in some kind of personal dialogue with him. After reading 300 issues of Cerebus, the reader feels / believes / thinks that he or she knows Sim. Tim Callahan is right to stress the fact that Cerebus is "as autobiographical as any comic book ever written." That is precisely why it is so hard to separate the man from the work. It's not just that Sim's ideas permeate the book, it's that Sim permeates the book, to the point where any discussion of the book inevitably devolves into a discussion of Sim himself. I confess that I was vaguely surprised Sim survived the end of Cerebus, not because I expected him to commit some sort of gruesome hari kari as the final issue rolled off the printer, but because, like Charles Schulz and Peanuts, he had become so inextricable from the epic undertaking of his life's work that it was impossible to imagine the two ever parting. Without a new issue of Cerebus to produce every month (it occurred to me), perhaps the man would simply evaporate.

All of which is to bring us back to my main point: it is necessary to restate that Cerebus does not need to be defended. It's as problematic a work as has ever been produced in comics, and those problems will not diminish with time. But the way readers react to these problems will change over time. To put it another way: it's hard to talk about Cerebus - even today - because even though it might sometimes feel like ancient history, it's still recent enough that most people who know comics can feel those old passions rumbling just beneath the surface. It's been long enough since 2004 - and Sim has remained sufficiently, blessedly quiet in the intervening years - that Kreider's reappraisal seems timely and overdue. A write-up in McSweeney's Believer magazine from a year or two ago struck the same chord. It's been long enough that people are starting to look back with the desire to answer the question of where this strange artifact fits into our burgeoning critical canon. But it's still too soon to be able to fully appreciate the work separate from the (largely negative) passion it inspires.

People don't really read Cerebus anymore, and it's apparent from the hook of these articles that people aren't likely to overcome this resistance anytime soon. The moment has passed: the barriers to entry in terms of time, money and willingness to tolerate offensive reactionary horseshit, are simply too high. Fantagraphics has done a good job of keeping the otherwise intimidating bulk of Love & Rockets (thirty years of continuous publication!) accessible to the casual reader by offering the whole of the series in a variety of attractive and affordable formats. Conversely, I cannot imagine Cerebus being published in digest form for casual browsing (imagine Gerhard's crosshatching in a tiny tankobon), or being cherry-picked for "Best-Of" anthologies (at least in Sim's lifetime). Even someone with the willingness to drop a few hundred dollars on a foot-and-a-half of black and white phonebooks has to confront the fact that the final third - something like 2,000 pages - is considered to be either (at best) wildly inconsistent or (at worst) pure hate speech. Then there's the insularity of the constant and unending series of industry-specific parodies. Etc etc etc.

My point is not that these imposing facts need to be mitigated or underplayed or ignored. People aren't reading Cerebus now because the current comics "scene" (make of that what you will) has moved long past Dave Sim. This isn't likely to change anytime soon. But people will read Cerebus again. It will never have a wide audience. It will never find readers who regard Sim's sincere religious and political beliefs with anything more than sad curiosity. But I believe Cerebus will nevertheless achieve a kind of immortality despite its creator's best efforts at marginalizing himself, and among the kinds of readers who Sim himself would probably rather eschew. In the future, the only people with the specialized vocabulary and resources necessary to understand, discuss and appreciate Cerebus will be academics and scholars. The series will be a gold mine for critics and historians looking to reconstruct the trajectory of the comics industry in the late twentieth century. Cerebus tells the story of the evolution of the medium in the English-speaking world throughout this crucial period in a way that no other single text can. It will survive because it is simply indispensable, and without it our understanding of comics history would be immeasurably poorer.