Cerebus and Modernist Freedom, Part I

(This is part one in a series of ... some undetermined number.  Part two can be found here.)

I want to accomplish a number of things here, so bear with me as I approach Dave Sim from a couple of angles.  Given my interest in the ideological conflicts within an author, I think it best to start from the biographical.  Here's the condensed version:

• 1977: Begins publishing Cerebus
• 1979: Drops acid, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, and decides Cerebus will run for 300 issues.
• 1980: Publishes the first issue of what will later be collected in High Society, inaugurating an unprecedented decade-long run of brilliance.
• 1990: Jaka's Story concludes, inaugurating an unprecedented 14 year run of published mental instability.

That may sound harsh, but what I have in mind here is the notion of high art as the product of unsound minds.  My modernist bias may be showing here, but with good reason—Sim possessed a kind of creative control unseen since the days of the high modernists.  He could publish what he wanted, when he wanted to and expect to be taken seriously.  That last part is more significant than it might seem. 

It's one thing to be a James Joyce; another entirely to be a James Joyce who expects his works will be read and discussed by his peers.  The expectations that you'll be read by a committed audience changes how you approach your material.  (No more self-indulgent slap-dash, my stuff must sing!)  Writing one of the three most popular [independent] comics of the 1980s—expanding the political slapstick of Duck Soup into sprawling medieval allegory of the intrusion of kings and popes into the lives of individuals—convinced him he was above the petty squabbling he so brilliantly depicted. 

With no publisher holding editorial power over him, Sim was charmed by the power he once parodied.  As Daniel notes, Sim is convinced that the late complaints against "the feminist-homosexualist axis" are nascent in the earlier works.  I bring this up now only to dismiss it: I'm sure he believes that, the same way I sometimes believe my thinking about Silas Weir Mitchell is nascent in my dissertation prospectus—which is only to say, I address the very same issues about which I'll one day draw entirely different conclusions. 

They are there, only the parody has turned to homily.  For example, here's the back cover to Cerebus 126:

Four years later, in Cerebus 186, Sim would appear, thinly disguised and ranting:

The point, of course, was that the Male Light was not the exclusive property of Men. It was very close to being the exclusive property of Men, but as Viktor Davis had reminded himself, "there are exceptions." In the case of self-publishing (Viktor Davis' idea of self-publishing was best summed up by Don Simpson's promotional slogan: "One Comic Book. One Universe. Why Pay More?"), there were the indisputable contributions of Colleen Doran and Teri Wood. The problem, of course, in acknowledging exceptions in the Female Void-Dominated Age, was that exception was always extrapolated into being a Universal Truth. This was the shaky foundation upon which Feminism was (and is) built. There were (and are) women who begin their sentences with "I believe..." or "I think..." And they do think. They have reasoned and coherent world views. They realise that inspiration is simply the starting point, that without dedication, hard work, and an avoidance of the Rapacious Voids which dominate our civilisation, the "hard, gem-like flame" becomes wavery or is extinguished. This sensibility occurs more often—far more often—in men than it does in women. This is not bigotry, this is not sexism, it is a fact which is supported by empirical evidence. The Bronte Sisters are not William Shakespeare, Madame Curie is not Albert Einstein, Florence Nightingale is not Louis Pasteur, Penny Marshall is not Orson Welles, Joan of Arc is not Jesus Christ. The Male Light is not a genderless thing, but it occurs where it occurs and sometimes (not often) it occurs in women. Where the Male Light occurs, it must overcome all manner of adversity, not the least of which is the war between the Heart and the Mind. The mistake Feminism makes is in thinking (or, rather, feeling) that legislation can be passed to eliminate adversity and, in this, it has been quite successful, to the general detriment of society. The Founders of Feminism, those with Good Brains and the ability to Reason and Contribute, in regarding the babbling cacophony of the "I feel..." Brigade they have unleashed upon the world in the name of numerical parity in all areas of human endeavour, have much to reflect on. I doubt that they do (or will). But I think they should.

That is but a portion of what he wrote in that issue.  I'm not attacking his opinion here, merely commenting on how he violated the very conventions of the genre in order to do exactly what he had earlier inveighed against.  In retrospect, I'm sure he believes that the Oscar Wilde meant it ironically, and given his talent for blustery deflection, Wilde may have may actually have.  But at some point Sim lost sight of the fact that even if he did believe that "no artist desires to prove anything," Wilde still produced art over invective. 

All of which is only to say that what I've written tonight is a prelude, a means of laying out the conflicts I believe will play out.  (Which is, yes, dull.  But a necessity, since some of my readers may be unfamiliar with Sim.)  Tomorrow I'll address the framing of Jaka's Story and its implications for the narrative as a whole.  The short version: I don't believe it a coincidence that Sim bound his narrative within the conventions of a 19th century novel at the moment his inner ideologue got the upper-hand on his inner artist.

(I feel obliged to add: unlike the series on Keats' Grecian Urn, I've written this one out in advance.  If y'all would prefer I present it all at once, I can.  I'm just not sure that a 3000 word essay is proper material for a blog.)

Comments

[Wax Banks]

Couple of points you reminded me of, which might lie next to where you're going with this stuff (largely for my own benefit, since comment-section real estate is cheap):

1) So Sim shifted from a Conan parody in the first phonebook - set in the usual D&D-style world - to a flexible timeframe out of English/U.S. history. And his depiction of women changed radically in that time as well, going from Red Sophia (parody) to Jaka (sympathetic, rich portrait based on an ex-girlfriend/mistress) in only a few years. Notably: from woman-as-comics-cliché to one-particular-woman-as-key-Simian-autobiographical-element. I wonder how his attitude toward the formal elements of his work changed in that time - and whether there was a shift in that attitude that wasn't just expedient (i.e. prompted by changes in story-scope)...Your mention of Joyce got me wondering.

2) Also: his wife was (unfortunately!) also his business partner; she's apparently the one who (accidentally) named Cerebus. Hard to pare your fingernails out of sight and free of criticism when the Shrew is leaning over your shoulder! If Cerebus is his proxy (to an extent) and much of the series is devoted to ridiculing Cerebus's infantilism, is that lengthy self-excoriation/examination something he wasn't capable of until he and Deni divorced?

3) I've always thought Sim didn't skip the tracks until after Minds - that for all the wrongness of his claims and the silliness of his conspiracy-mongering and hand-wavy mysticism in Reads and the heavy-handed polemics of Women, in Minds he was more honest with himself about his own nature (specifically toward women, toward the memory of the women who inspired Jaka) than in any other point in the series (it's in the conversation on Pluto that he most heartbreakingly treats Cerebus as his proxy - in the final panels, right before 'Have a nice epilogue,' is he stifling a laugh, or stifling tears?). It's weird to me that Jaka's Story is so often cited as the beginning of his decline - the work continues to get more interested from then on, less perfect maybe but far more adventurous and sharp (less mannered). I still think Minds is the creative high point of the series. The Three Stooges section (in Latter Days) contains no women, of course; maybe the most touching issues of the whole saga though.

Goddamn, I'm gonna have to reread Jaka's Story! It's been years. I can't wait to read the rest of your essay. Sorry for rambling here.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I've hesitated to comment on your Sim pieces, since I've never understood what was so great about him. For me, it's like trying to read Heinlein. (And his art style -- those huge black page borders, plus the insistent look of the 60s parody comic, etc.) But whatever my problems with Sim appreciation, your mini-history of him has to bring up comparisons with PKD, doesn't it? PKD also overused drugs, had mental problems, spend his later career in obsessive religious theorizing, sometimes indulged in a weird anti-feminism (e.g. his horrible short story The Pre-Persons. And PKD also started to write a bit differently in his later career, when critics started to take him seriously, so perhaps he would have had a transition to expected to be read by a committed audience if he'd lived longer.

[Daniel]

I'm glad to hear someone else thought the Stooges bit was incredibly touching. It boggles my mind to think that the issue right after Koshie's death is the start of the Tiny Tiny Type.

I'm curious why people seem to like Jaka's Story, but not Melmoth. I thought Melmoth was pretty nicely done. Is it just that Melmoth's not as good as Jaka's Story, so it's the start of the decline? Or am I just a bad reader of Wilde, leading me to get an inappropriate level of pleasure from Wilde-As-Comic-Book?

[marc page]

However deluded he may have been, James Joyce was very much "a James Joyce who expect[ed] his works [would] be read and discussed by his peers."
He went so far as to direct and (to some extent 'ghost-write') the discussion of "Work in Progress," and was reported to be annoyed about the outbreak of World War II because he worried it might distract from the publication of "WIP" as "Finnegans Wake."

[Wax Banks]

Daniel -

I suspect many of Sim's readers tuned out during Melmoth because it was the longest distance from 'standard' Cerebus. I find it beautiful but exhausting in a way that Jaka's Story isn't - though that read was also tiring, as text-heavy and glacial as it was. Melmoth was also the first book that abandanoned the mythology completely; similarly, while the F. Stop story is at least set in a Simian fantasia, the Ham Ernestway book simply leaves the story behind for a while. If the writing weren't so utterly committed and the art so remarkable in those two 'departure' books I imagine readers wouldn't forgive them at all. (They're also less hopeful than the books that come before them - which can't help.)

Another Sim factoid that fits into Scott's framework up above: Sim was a major comics fanboy during the early years of Cerebus, idolizing the greats at Marvel and their Distinguished Competition (did I get that silly joke right?). Hence the Claremont parodies, the Windsor-Smith parodies, the many faces of the Roach, etc. As he began to advocate for creators' rights, he shifted to an adversarial relationship with the majors; by the time Reads rolled around he was the Angry Old Man of indies, as I understand it. And I think by then the Roach had made his final appearance (during Women?). I wonder whether the total creative freedom of self-publishing was necessarily bounded and counteracted by an 'external' constraint in the form of the need to style himself an 'independent' in every way. By this I mean: I wonder if part of his way of seeing the world isn't a response to formal aspects of the development of Cerebus.

Aaargh. Another knotted-up comment. I seem to forget how to make sentences when I come by here.

Rich - If you care about comics, you need to read Cerebus! Jaka's Story is actually a pretty good place to start; you'll have to reread it in context, but in the main it stands alone.

[Adam Stephanides]

"inaugurating an unprecedented decade-long run of brilliance."

I'd cavil at this (unless you mean "unprecedented for Sim"). George Herriman was more brilliant for longer. And I don't think High Society is in the same class with Curch and State or Jaka's Story, though it was better than what came before.

I'm not sure what you're driving at with the Sim-Joyce contrast. Apart from the point Marc Page makes, are you actually implying that Joyce indulged in "self-indulgent slap-dash" and Sim, in the ten-year period you single out, didn't? If anything, it was the other way around.

"One of the three most popular comics of the 1980s"

Huh? Cerebus's peak circulation, iirc, was about 30,000. That was good for a black-and-white independent comic at the time (and would be incredible now), but a title selling that low at Marvel or DC would have been summarily cancelled. Even today, when the market for comic books has shrunk greatly, there have to be at least three dozen comic books with circulations greater than 30,000.

Unless you meant "one of the three comics published in the 1980s which is most popular today." That would be more defensible, though I'd still be dubious: for one thing, my guess would be that Maus currently outsells the Cerebus phonebooks.

Wax Banks - "If you care about comics, you need to read Cerebus!"

No, you don't.

[Daniel]

Wax: Technically, The Roach's final appearance is in Guys; there's a single panel with "Fan Roach." But his real final appearance was in Reads, with Kae Sarah Sarah, who's parodying "Destiny" from Sandman. And in Women he'd been another Sandman parody, excepting that weird three-page sequence where he rotates through about 50 different Forgettable Marvel Characters. But Sandman isn't an independent comic; it's DC (the start of their "Vertigo" line). So I don't think it's quite as simple as "Grumpy Old Man of Self-Publishing Sets Face Against Established Comics", but it does appear that he gradually became less and less friendly towards "normal" comics; if we judge Sim's views by who the Roach is parodying, then Dave wasn't really a fan of much besides Sandman at that point. If you were suggesting that self-publishing Cerebus lead Sim to eventually see himself as opposed to darned well everything else, and that this is responsible for a lot of the odder content in the book, then there's probably a grain of truth in that; the reverse probably also holds to a degre: Dave self-published because he couldn't abide compromising with any other players, and so the wonkier individualist stuff was latent in Dave before he adopted the odd means of production he ended up with.

(There's actually a lot of comics parodied in Guys, but they're all fairly-obscure self-published stuff; "Hilly Rose" is not exactly mainstream (I don't think it was even around by the time of Guys!), nor is "Dandy" Don Simpson's stuff. I have no idea what, if anything, this indicates about how Dave saw his relationship to "Comics In General" post-Read/Minds. But the comic parodies didn't stop after Mothers & Daughters; they just got harder to "get". It'd also be interesting to look at how often he was previewing other comics in the back of the issues; I think by the time of Guys he'd moved to just having essays and Bob The Angry Flower comic strips.)

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

To answer thematically:

Adam: I flubbed the "most popular comic" line. I meant independent, obviously. What happpened -- and what makes the Joyce comments odd upon re-reading them today -- is that I removed a whole bit about independent publishers like Shakespeare & Company, which would've made the context of "most popular comic" clearer. I only go on at length because it may help clarify the Joyce/Sim comparison: they both expected a large, literate audience would receive their work. That's not entirely clear in what I've written up there, but my gesture was of the "mute inglorious Milton" variety.

I admit to laying the praise on a little thick -- although I think Sim compares with Herriman, whose work I appreciate, but which I've never enjoyed as much I enjoyed mid-period Sim -- but that's only because I'm going to ladle out the criticism fairly thick.

Also, I agree with Wally that Sim is significant influence (if not voice) on the contemporary comics scene. He altered the notion of what long-form comic serials could do -- and if you don't believe me, I have a Jaime Hernandez quote somewhere around here to that effect. More on that later.

Wally: I actually see him losing it a bit with Melmoth, with the main narrative fragmenting, Sim fumbling, then returning to the standard with a whole new (though not entirely sound) set of ideas for how to finish out the series. So while it stands on its own, I do consider it the beginning of the end. That said, I haven't read anything past Jaka's Story in a long time -- I no longer own those phonebooks, although I ordered Melmoth and Flight last night -- so I'm working in part on old impressions. (The notes from which I'm drawing this are actually about a decade old. I never knew what to do with them until I found Jaka's Story at my parent's house over the break. I brought it with me to Philly, Holbo stole it, we discussed it for a little while, and now I've repurchased all the books up to it.)

Rich: The PKD analogy works for me, and he's a much, much better analogue than Heinlein, with whom Sim insanity alone. I'm not sure what you mean by "those huge black borders," though. In the phonebooks, they're white, the backgrounds (after Gerhard arrived) often movingly impressionistic (despite being rendered in meticulous detail). I'd (obviously) recommend you give Jaka's Story a go, but I found it much better re-reading after starting over than I did in Philly. It stands alone, but much better as part of the whole. The thing is, that requires you read the first book, which is funny, but all schtick and rather unrewarding. (Unlike, say, Dr. Futurity or Solar Lottery.) I may push this line of thought a little later on, as it could be a fruitful comparison.

Wally again: In reference to your first comment, I think the move from cliché to actual woman, then back to a kind of fundamentalist cliché describes it nicely. I think it is formally motivated, though, because there was only so far he could push the Red Sophia character. When she returns in High Society and Church & State, her function is more than just parodic, although the parodic elements are still there. The tension between Cerebus' depth of feeling for Jaka and the formalities of his relationship with Red Sophia is never resolved so much as shucked when Sophia leaves, Cerebus learns Jaka's married, then Astoria returns ... then we have Jaka's Story.

Daniel: More on that after I re-read Melmoth, which may be a while, given that it took four weeks for the second volume of Church & State to arrive.

[anonymous]

Independent/Alternative/Vanity publishing does, of course, connect back to Joyce (and others.) You may recall that "Ulysees" first appeared, chapter by chapter in magazines (through Pound's agency,) and that the first edition (500 copies) of the complete novel was financed by selling 'subscriptions' prior to printing. (In/)famously, George Bernard Shaw declined to 'pre-order' a copy.

[anonymous]

FYI: This thread's just been linked to a fanboy/fangirl forum.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Scott, my mention of Heinlein was not an authorial comparison (as my mention of PKD was), it was a statement of my similar reactions to the two bodies of work. Namely, that here is an author with a polemical worldview that they really want their readers to get, one which I disagree with so intensely as to interfere with any appreciation of their work.

It's not just the late religious antifeminism; the beginning with Red Sophia is classic 60s antifeminism. The middle -- well, I guess I really should try Jaka's Story, but I suspect, from reading about it, that the best of Sim is going to be elevated in this respect to the worst of PKD. I mean, here's a
quote from Sim: "I recognized the disproportionate amount of power Jaka had in the story-relative to her physical strength and how that compared to the physical strength of Cerebus and Pud - and helped me to recognize, as a result, the disproportionate amount of power women have in our society generally." And the bit about how she ruined everything by having an abortion. Mooning over a former lover who would have been OK if she'd just been more compliant does not really seem to be a good basis for characterization.

[Doug M.]

"convinced him he was above the petty squabbling he so brilliantly depicted."

Hum? Read any Sim editorial on Gary Groth. That went on for many, many years.

"With no publisher holding editorial power over him, Sim was charmed by the power he once parodied."

I like this a lot.

"As Daniel notes, Sim is convinced that the late complaints against 'the feminist-homosexualist axis' are nascent in the earlier works."

Well, they are.

Not in the sense of organized complaints, no. But the misogyny was there from day one. It waxed and waned, but was never far away. Red Sophia first appears in issue #2, and sure she's a parody -- "Henrot" is Frank Thorne! -- but what an unattractive one. And note the conclusion of that issue: marriage is torture. That was mildly amusing at the time, but in retrospect it looks pretty suggestive.

Not convinced? Okay, go through the first phone book and pick out depictions of female characters. There's one reasonably sympathetic one: Jaka. Otherwise they're either marginal or threatening. Remember the girls' school? That one had young women shooting men with crossbows -- in retrospect a dry run for the Cirinists a few years later -- and burying them in the garden. Again, amusing at the time, much creepier today.

Occam's Razor suggests that Young Sim always had some screwed-up attitudes towards women and gender issues. Middle-aged Sim then intellectualized these, elaborated them, and developed them into a full-fledged pseudophilosophy. But the underlying attitudes were there from very early on.

Doug M.

[Doug M.]

BTW, if you really want to engage with _Cerebus_, I'd recommend finding a collection of the floppies. The extraneous material (editorials, letters) can be pretty tedious but if you're reading all of Cerebus you're already gearing up for some serious tedium, right? And they offer considerable historical interest.

I recently sat down and read 40 or 50 issues at a sitting -- Church and State II, more or less. Weirdly fascinating. You can track Sim's mental state much more precisely! At one point I was reading an issue's editorial and he was clearly having some sort of depressive episode. "Ah, we'll see this in the main storyline in three or four months," I thought. And sure enough.

Doug M.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Doug M. is right that the individual comics may give a different impression than the phone books. I think that the first-ever Cerebus I looked at had a long editorial by Sim about how smokers were more interesting people than nonsmokers. A comic starring a parody aardvark with a serving of random conservative culture war issues on top -- yikes. I'm interested in this critical series, because I do really want to try to see what people see in this work.

[Luther Blissett]

Scott, I know nothing about *Cerebus* (and what I'm reading here thus far isn't making the work more appealing). But, in my eternal quest to always find something to disagree with (what Peter Elbow might call my addiction to the doubting game), I came across this:

"My modernist bias may be showing here, but with good reason—Sim possessed a kind of creative control unseen since the days of the high modernists. He could publish what he wanted, when he wanted to and expect to be taken seriously. That last part is more significant than it might seem."

That's just not right. Weird as it might seem, American avant-garde poets since the 50s have basically had the same freedom and same community of smart, dedicated readers. Thus the plethora of critical attention to the idea of "community" in experimental American poetics.

[Doug M.]

Luther, the big difference is, Sim was an individual entrepreneur who /made a decent living at it/.

_Cerebus_ wasn't vastly popular, but because it never had more than three employees at any time, Sim was able to support a comfortable middle-class lifestyle doing nothing but writing and drawing Cerebus.

I don't think there are a lot of avant-garde poets who've been able to support themselves for ~25 years without a grant, some inherited money, or a day job. If I'm wrong, I welcome correction.

Doug M.

[Joseph Kugelmass]

Scott:

This is an excellent beginning. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the connections between the good Sim and the bad. The work I do on authors of mixed quality, such as D. H. Lawrence, Carl Jung, and Hermann Hesse, compels me to look for the same gambles paying off in their best work, and setting them up for failure at other times.

Rather than blatancies like "unbridled ambition," I'm talking about, for example, the conspiracy theories that may have fueled both Sim's insightful political allegories and his ridiculous account of cultural decline via feminism.

[Matt]

I am currently in the process of reading the entire cerebus run and I have just completed Mothers & Daughters (issues 1-200). I can honestly say that, while I vehemently disagree with some of Sim's views, I have enjoyed this work of literature (yes, literature) immensely. Yes, some of the views put forth in Reads are way out there, but at the beginning of the volume he pretty much comes right out and says 'OK, you've stuck around for 170-odd issues, so now I'm gonna say some things I've been dying to say, and this way, I know people will listen'. And while some of the stuff he says in Reads is way, way out there, I still found the volume, as a whole, on the same level of entertainment as Church and State. This owes a lot to the unbelievable ambition shown in the volume. Basically, Cerebus is definitely a must-read for any true comics fan (notice I didn't say INDEPENANT comics, neccessarily). Commenting on a work that the author considers to be a 6000 page continous novel is very difficult to do accurately without in fact reading the whole thing. But, here goes... Yes, the latter half is riddled with off-putting ideas, but these are not put there to put people off. These are intended (imho) to provoke discussion and debate, which they have done to an incredible degree, considering the ideas came out of a self published comic book with a circulation of around 25,000 (at the time). Cerebus has a compelling story, beautiful art, and downright brilliant lettering. Add to that, the fact that it provokes deep thoughts and heated arguments, I think this more than offsets the sometimes heavyhanded prostheletizing (sp?) and slow pacing of the story. To say nothing of the achievement represented by a simgle creator writing and drawing 300 issues of a self-published comic book (with not one being shipped late).
PS I've had occasion to meet Dave Sim, and he is a hell of a nice guy....this opinion was shared by my girlfriend at the time.
PPS Anyone disagree with Sim's view that it is crazy and dangerous to hire female firepersons (to make it 'equal') who only have to carry a fraction of the weight that men do during the entrance test? I don't know about you, but if I'm on the fifth floor of a building that's on fire, I want someone carrying me out who had to carry a 250lb dummy in training rather than someone who carried a 160lb one...