Dave Sim Cerebus

Dave Sim Cerebus was one of my favorite series's when I really started getting into comics outside the superhero genre. This had to be going back to probably sometime around 1995/1996. I think I was still going to college at Mount Wachusett but getting ready to head off to finish my college edumacation in Savannah.

Dates and times are starting to get muddled. But it was somewhere within that timeframe. I was young, shaggy, bearded, smoking Lucky Strikes and looking like I just tumbled out of someone's cedar chest with the clothing I was wearing at the time. All the inch of a pretentious young artist. Thinking I had so many ideas but really very little to show for it.

However, that's for another tale.

But getting back to the story we used to have this really great comic shop in Spencer called Last Frontier. I couldn't always drive out to the Mecca which is That's Entertainment so having a place like Last Frontier in town was great. And for a smaller store Scott who ran the place had a pretty good selection of books to choose from.

I had started to get bored with most of the mainstream titles and I happened upon the latest issue of Cerebus. I got into the game a bit late so I really missed out on Sim's grandiose Church and State storyline. However, what I read in the issue I flipped through impressed me greatly.

I started collecting back issues of the current tale Mothers and Daughters as well as the story Reads which was happening at that time. This lead me into getting what are commonly known as the Phonebooks of the past stories.

I imagine the name of these volumes were derrived from the fact that they were literally the size of a phonebook and the gritty quality of the paper they were printed on had the feel of the page of a phonebook.

What impressed me was the artwork. Sim character designs and Gerhards backgrounds just seemed to work really well together. And his association with Gerhard improved Sims artwork greatly from many of the earlier stories. I think the artwork the two produced from High Society on is what really influenced my work down the road. Especially his use of crosshatch.

Sims draws characters very well. And I loved how he incorporated characters from Pop Culture like Groucho Marx and Oscar Wilde into this imaginary world he and Gerhard brought onto the pages of Cerebus. As someone who grew up appreciating the movies of the Marx Brothers, I was thrilled to see characters resembling Groucho and Chico popping up in odd places in the stories.

I began to fall out of love with Cerebus as the later tales like Reads and Guys dragged on. I felt as though he was just "phoning it in" and using the umbrella of "free speech" as a reason to just to be pornographically explicit. But that was just my feeling at the time and I might have been completely wrong. I think people sometimes go about the right of free speech the wrong way around. They seem to think if they constantly drop the "F" Bomb and make their work overly phallic they're making a statement.

And lets not get started about his views on women which would make Sir Arthur Conan Doyle blush.

Personally, I feel people who can find clever ways around being vulgar to be much more intelligent than people who feel the only way to talk is to use every four letter word under the sun.

Groucho Marx made people laugh with just wiggling of his eyebrows and the insinuation of what he was saying rather than just making a dirty joke. But we think it's a dirty joke all because of the delivery.

But you can disagree with me. Free speech remember ;-)

That's all besides the point. At it's height Cerebus both art and writing-wise was a great series. I still use examples of Dave Sim and Gerhard's collaborations in many of my cartooning and comic art classes. To show students what you can do with storytelling and art.

I highly recommend you stop in your local comic shop and check out the Cerebus phonebooks. Church and State I&II, Jaka's Story and Melmoth are highly encouraged.