Sim has been giving people plenty of reasons for 26 years not to read his comic long before he started talking about feminism and leftists. Really, Cerebus seems as though it was designed every step of the way to alienate the vast majority of people on the planet, which is not surprising for a misanthropic hermit.
I totally disagree with this statement. I would say, very strongly, that prior to, say, Melmoth (starting in #151) Cerebus was very accessible, very readable, and gathering steam as a comic book.
Sim had incredibly high sales for a b+w independent right through to around #200. He might've alienated a few fans with Melmoth, in that it was basically a recounting of the death of Oscar Wilde while Cerebus sits motionless and unblinking in a bar named Peter's, but many of them came back when the story "restarted" at the beginning of 'Flight' (#163).
AFAIK, it wasn't till after #200 and the end of the 'Mothers & Daughters' story that the readership really began to flag, and it was another couple of years before Sim's grasp on reality really began to slip. Yes, #186 cost him readers, but I think the general boringness of the strip after #200 cost him a lot more. People will put up with being offended more than they will put up with being bored.
In terms of achievements, Sim has a crazy list. I agree with El Birdie's comment about "running through the wall".
In terms of publishing, the length of the narrative, its self-contained nature, the fact that it was just two guys over all those years, the consistent nature of its quality, the self-publishing aspect and the fact that for many years Sim spearheaded the self-publishing movement are all remarkable. More than that, the notion of a long story broken into "novels" each of which were collected and kept in print, and much of which was written explicitly for the collections, is all stuff that has now become de rigeur in comics. And all of that started with Sim's treatment of Cerebus. He was there to support Bone, Strangers In Paradise, Thieves & Kings, Castle Waiting and a bunch of other b+w indy comics that are still going, and events like 'Spirits of Independence' did a huge amount to raise the profile of alternative comics in the medium. Hell, he was even one of the few who stood up for the Image seven when they left Marvel, while Byrne and those guys were dissing them for "disrespecting" Marvel's characters.
In terms of the actual comic, Cerebus was extremely formally innovative in its use of space, treatment of characters, and in terms of the types of stories that it told. Sure, the very early stuff was just barbarian pastiche, but by #25 it had solidly settled into being a thoroughly unique and original piece of work, something inherently un-pigeon-hole-able. And it stayed there for 275 more issues, without just building its own little racetrack and running round it time after time. I don't think any of the established books out there can be said to have continued to evolve in terms of their structure, approach and theme throughout their run. Even the end of, say, Sandman, is much like the beginning in terms of the ground that Gaiman is covering and what he's doing there. "The plot" moves along, but the nature of the storytelling is fairly static. In contrast, Cerebus was changing and moving all the way through.
Chareth - Give me a month. Work's kicking my ass at the moment, but I hope to find a weekend to devote to rereading all of 'Latter Days' and 'The Last Day' (all the Cerebus I have with me over here in the US). Once I've done that I'll come kick this thread back to life and we can jaw a bit. |
