Cerebus The Aard-Shark
Can someone please tell me what happened in the last 150 issues of Cerebus? Cerebus, for those of you who don't follow indie comics, is the longest-running creator-written comic ever. Dave Sim started off with a strange little parody comic about Cerebus the Aardvark, a Conan clone who had funny adventures, running into parodies of Red Sonja and Groucho Marx. But at some point, he said, "I'm going to write three hundred issues of this guy! No more, no less!" What happened was that Cerebus - as both a comic and a character - began to get deeper. Sim moved away from the "funny, ha ha" adventures and began to write political escapades - perhaps the deepest and most interesting look at politics ever written in comics, discussing the problems of public will, economies of scale, and religious prophecies. And the more he wrote, the more it looked like he'd reach his Issue 300 goal. But as my friend Jim said, "No two people can agree on when Cerebus jumped the shark." At some point, Cerebus went bad; was it during the High Society arc, the first attempt to move away from funny animal comics? Was it during the humorless antics of Church and State? The character exploration of Jaka's Story, or the retelling of Oscar Wilde's last moments in Melmoth? It went bad somewhere. But where? The vast majority of people seem to agree that Cerebus went bad sometime after Dave Sim became a raging mysogynist, claiming that men were enslaved by women's desires and women were simply physically incapable of being rational. Cerebus the comic was occasionally squeezed down a couple of pages while Dave wrote long, involved tirades that increasingly pointed to the conclusion that women were a positive harm upon society, and the political movements in the comic began to reflect that opinion, turning Cerebus the drunkard into Cerebus the Suppressed Hero of Men's Rights. But I don't agree with that. It's not that the mysogyny is distasteful - he writes well, and though I disagree with his conclusions I love seeing interesting takes on society, particularly marginalized viewpoints. It's that at some point, he made the mistake of both X-Men and X-Files before him: That plot? Eh. Doesn't matter. See, I'm a fan of the loaded gun theory - if you show a gun on the table in Act I, it should be used in Act III. Or at least the gun should be referenced in some way. I like tight plotting, where everything comes together in the end. If there are still mysteries left after all is said and done, that's absolutely fine - fuck, I still don't know what happened at the end of Pi or Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and I have no clue what's in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction- but you should at least acknowledge that you showed me a gun at some point. But one of the problems with serial stories is that frequently, things get thrown out and are just forgotten. One or two loose ends are bound to happen a long story, but the problem with X-Files and X-Men was that at some point they decided that starting plots was a lot more fun than finishing plots. They began to start throwing out hints that there was a larger conspiracy here, and something was going on over here, and oo! Something else is happening here! The loose ends began to pile up. There were simply too many things that had been labelled "significant" - and as a result the plot began to feel not like a narrative, but like a string of random events. The line between cause and effect got blurred as New Plot #357 seemed to contradict what New Plot #784 told us - as in, "Fred the Janitor is a secret agent for both the government and the evil conspiracy that seeks to take down the government? How does that work?" To try to fix this issue, there were ominous attempts to hint that all of these things were somehow linked by a super-conspiracy, as in "Perhaps Fred the Janitor is working for a third cabal with its own ends!" But that just meant that now, there was New Plot #1,076 which couldn't be resolved either. Periodically, both shows attempted to say, "This episode will solve everything!" But they couldn't. They had begun seventeen zillion contradictory plot threads, and at this point there was no way to stuff pandora back into the box. And eventually, devoid of any satisfactory conclusion, the whole thing collapsed. (X-Men did all right, but they did so by periodic revamps and by gloriously ignoring everything that had gone before.) Cerebus also fell prey to the X syndrome, showcasing mysterious Significant Things that turned out not to matter at all, really. Whoops. We just forgot. And that's why I think Cerebus jumped. So. Anyone got a good plot summary of what happened from issue #150 on?
Current Mood:  cynical
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satisfied