Cerebus Rex

This is a big one. I can’t pin down an opening sentence for this. This is suppose to be about a comic series. A monumental 300 issues series from one: David 'Dave' Sim, with 26 years spanning publication from December 1977 until March 2004, titled: Cerebus. What it is about? Well, I'll just quote from Dave's own word:

“Cerebus is my attempt to document a life for twenty six years in three hundred issues, which conclude with the death of the title character. Sometimes the Cerebus story-line is funny. Sometimes it is sad. Sometimes it crawls along month to month with very little happening and sometimes it flies by at breathtaking speed with everything happening at once. In some story lines, Cerebus is a central figure and a driving force behind the events taking place. At other times he is a secondary figure, observing rather than participating. I create the book consciously this way because that this is the way I see life; my life and the lives of those people that I know.”

The title character, is a misanthropic three-foot tall bipedal grey earth pig, aadvark, whom at various point in his life has been a mercenary, prime minister, pope, renegade and a messiah. What were started as a parody of sword and sorcery genre (namely Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian), transcended into a complex narrative of political-religious satire and drama. What were began in humorous tone turning into a bitter personal commentary of his opposing view toward the feminism movement (titles of his 8th - 11th collected edition can be read as “Women-Reads-Minds-Guys”).

As intended, the series concluded when Cerebus met his inevitable end, as earlier foretold to him: "..you will die alone, unmourned and unloved". Cerebus dies as he had lived, and leaves behind a long life, filled with bad decisions, dizzying peaks and valleys, and a richness that usually only get to describe when dealing with real, historical figures. The aardvark is a romantic, a power-hungry despotic ruler, a religious scholar, and a greedy blood-thirsty pope. He was a loving father and husband, yet will be remembered as a self-centered figure.

During the first half of the run, the series enjoyed a peak sales as high as 35,000 copy an issue, a record breaking sales for a self-published title. But later issues of the series became almost inaccessibly personal, with a long and involved plot regarding truth, religion, and biblical text. It began to alienate many long-time fans, including his female readers, with his strong misogyny sentiment. The publication ended as planned in March 2004 with issue #300. This final issue was received with a muted, rather than celebratory, response from the comics industry.

Toward the end, Dave reportedly cut all ties with his family and his industry colleagues (with exception of Gerhad, his background artist) in order to finish the work. He made progressive changes to his lifestyle: eliminating TV, radio, alcohol, and tobacco. He considered Jewish, Christian and Muslim holly scriptures as the Word of God upon which he bases his current lifestyle (which includes fasting, reciting a prayer of his own devising five times a day, alm-giving and other form of asceticism). He regarded the production of Cerebus as of secondary importance only to his religious practices.

Three interconnected things reportedly responsible of how he got the idea for the need to write these whole 26 years of 6000 pages: (1) a nervous breakdown, and diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic, (2) the hospitalization, following his brief but massive experimentation with LSD, (3) the separation with his wife, a former publisher of the series, which later he incorporated as a key character in the series: Astoria.

Nevertheless, Dave Sim considered to be a comic genius. He know his way around a narative drama, while being funny at the same time. He also known as a master of parody with flair for a funny dialect. It is generally agreed that his fifth collected edition, “Jaka’s Story”, is the series pinnacle of his narrative achievement. In which Cerebus spends two years hiding in an attic, doing nothing but hiding and playing a bucketball. Here’s how he parodying Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

And here’s a sample of his (a rather big 1.5Mb pdf) silent narrative work