The trick with writing Mona is to make her unpleasant, but not unaware of the ways in which she’s unpleasant. Also, IMPORTANT INFO is given.
Despite that, let me CHANGE TOPICS: so, how many of you reading this have read Cerebus, by Dave Sim and Gerhard? How many of you have OPINIONS about it? I would love to hear them, below. I just today picked up and read a copy of Flight, the first part of Mothers and Daughters, which is the Cerebus storyline where Dave Sim starts to go off the deep end into notions of God and Gender in the minds of pretty much everyone, a trajectory that, from all the times I’ve flipped through the last Cerebus volume at the store over the years, leads inexorably to weird stuff like Cerebus’s gay half-aardvark son cloning anthropomorphic beasts in Egypt as some kind of evil scheme by liberal/feminist politicians while Cerebus writes Torah commentaries, or God knows what. It will be exciting to watch this happen, but for now, Flight!
What starts as kind of a straightforward story of rebellion against a sinister matriarchal dictatorship quickly turns into an orgy of continuity that, having skipped the earlier Cerebus storyline Church & State, I have pretty much no context for. This wasn’t a problem with either Jaka’s Story or Melmoth, the Cerebus volumes that to me justify the effort to slog through the whole 6,000 page thing, but there are pages in here that literally make no sense, unless you’ve read all of the earlier barbarian stuff and have an in-depth working knowledge of the politics of the Eastern vs. Western Iestian church. Which is maybe not wrong, since the whole thing is supposed to be a single 6,000 page graphic novel; it’s just frustrating to come in this late in the game. Doubly frustrating is that the continuity elements I do know about — Elrod, the various Roach characters — take up a large part of the page count here, and haven’t significantly advanced in complexity since the early issues, where they were just parodies of, say, Batman or obscure sword-and-sorcery protagonists. AND I HATED THEM THEN AND I HATE THEM NOW, and it’s terrible that we still have to deal with page after page of the “Punisheroach” trying to repress his LUSTFUL THOUGHTS in densely lettered thought bubbles while there’s in theory this complicated political movement going on that almost entirely fails to be rendered or detailed on the page.
When we’re not dealing with continuity issues that are alternately completely oppressive or completely underwhelming, we’ve got Cerebus, who after some good opening pages ends up wandering into an incredibly dense MENTAL VOYAGE involving different aspects of the gnomic character Po, who literally plays a giant game of chess with the title character for something like a hundred pages of densely typeset speculation about The Nature of Reformers, the nature of “up” versus “forward,” “illusion” versus “reality,” etc etc ETC.
Conclusion about Cerebus as I’ve read it to date (basically everything to this point but Church and State, plus a couple of odd issues about Cerebus and Jaka traveling that I picked up in high school or somesuch): It’s a holy mess! But it’s an eerily compelling mess, and it occurs to me that I have a special weakness for narratives of great breadth at the expense of depth: horrible totalizing projects like the Oz books, the Ultima games, this stupid five-party samurai epic about Musashi Miyamoto I’m currently mired in watching, Love and Rockets, In Search of Lost Time, etc. There’s something about a Grand Canvas that really works for me, and part of the fun is always watching ambition fall short, and in what specific ways it falls short, and how the nature of the project almost demands that it fall short. Proust is really the only one that kind of gets it right, and he had to lock himself in an attic for twelve years and mostly write about his own life in order to do so, and it’s still oppressive to spend something like 200 pages of The Guermantes Way describing ONE PARTY AND EVERY GUEST AT IT. But there are really great parts of Swann’s Way and there are really great parts of Cerebus, and could those parts have existed without the rest of the glorious primordial mess from which they emerged? It makes me sad that more people don’t attempt things like this, accepting that more than half of it is going to be kindling that supports the parts you care about. It is a great act of asceticism to spend more than a quarter century on something as demented as Cerebus in order to produce Jaka’s Story some of the time.
I don’t want to end up like Dave Sim, contemplating the meaning of these ridiculous Cerebus stories, so I am hoping that at least some of you, the Readers, have read this stuff, or at least have strong opinions about Dave Sim or something? LET’S TALK CEREBUS ON THIS POST. (Or about the comic, if you like!)
THAT SAID, tune in tomorrow for another adventure of RHODABELLE LETT, and Thursday when we contemplate the mysterious MONSTRO BALLROOM, and the majesty of human creation through the lens of our humble character Cathy.
My favorite thing lately has been incredibly deep shorter stories. This is what led me to the 8 page horror stuff. Most of it is pretty shallow but a handful of these stories are dense enough to break tile if you drop them on the floor. Ultimately that’s probably what I aspire to more than producing epics and I suspect it’s something we’ll be seeing a lot more of in all mediums as attention becomes a scarcer currency than money: Stories, songs, movies, whatever, which only take a minute of your time to sink their hooks in, but quickly expand in your mind once they’ve planted their seed.
Yeah, I think it’s obviously more sensible to produce shorter, denser, deeper works that have a lot of thought put into them and in which every detail is right. It’s like clearly this is What the World Wants, and I have a more honest enjoyment of shorter better works — like I just read The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe a while ago, which is just 200 pages of a guy trapped in a horrible shack in a sand pit frantically shoveling sand and Learning to Love. That’s like the least broad canvas but it gets to places other stories can not reach. But I still love these really broad canvases, these attempts to Do Everything in a single work, in part because of their doomed quality. Like Ulysses: the last four chapters of Ulysses, the “night” chapters, really wouldn’t work AT ALL without the rest of the day preceding it, which is, IF WE ARE BEING HONEST, hit or miss.
What I love about daily/sporadically updated comics, then, as opposed to “graphic novels!” Here it is: you can deliver a story in a series of smaller, densely told, effective moments, that ultimately add up to a portrait of something that merits the broader canvas. I don’t think other formats can do that in quite the same way, where it’s the *same story* but it’s *not the same story* — like reading old Doonesbury collections over and over, thinking about where the breaks for the weekend would have naturally fallen in the Narrative Flow.
Honestly, a lot of what bugs me about Cerebus is that at a certain point, I guess once he’s put out the first “phonebook” collection, he starts completely taking it for granted that that’s the format he’s ultimately writing for, and he’ll do things like have six pages of a twenty-page comic book be dedicated to like, Cerebus ordering some mineral water (seriously!) It is a SPIRITUAL DANGER.
And I guess honestly I like flawed works — and the question of why they’re flawed and how they might become less flawed — at least as much as Really Good Works, which is a clue as to why I like, work as an editor by day, as well as why I like CRAZY STUFF LIKE CEREBUS. If you just like good works, yeah, short stuff is clearly the way to go, but with long epic stuff THERE’S A LOT MORE FLAWED STUFF TO SAVOR
PS, so the next Rocksalt is finally going out and you will really like the Spooky page in it — when arranged in a certain way it has this really really amazing quality that I am both Proud and Nervous to distribute to the streets of Austin!
Hee hee, COME ON, OTHER READERS, JOIN THE FUN! WALK INTO THESE SPIDERWEBS OF TEXT I SPIN FOR YOU
My favorite meandering comic is Howard the Duck, where the meandering is kind of the point of the whole pointless ordeal. My favorite parts are where a story arc that’s been built up for three issues is just kind of dismissed with an anti-climactic shrug, or where Howard gets a job as a security guard and spends like a whole issue just trying to make ends meet and arguing with his girlfriend.
Thanks for supporting me so much with Spooky. I might have given it up and moved on to something else if not for Rocksalt. It’s like you have so many ideas and directions you could go in and you don’t know which one to choose, so it’s good to hear something like “Hey, this is pretty good. Do more of this.” once in awhile.
I’ve never read Howard the Duck, though I hear pretty good things! And yeah — Spooky is a pretty killer idea, with enough flexibility in it to make it viable for the long term — plus it’s like, some of the comics (Cat Out of the Bag) are just so deeply affecting and messed up in a really earnestly terrifying way. It just has this perfect tone where it’s like the author is aware of how retarded old EC horror comics are, but revels in them anyway, and yet there’s this undercurrent of much deeper sadness and horror that’s like plainly visible beneath the surface and that isn’t dodged. I kind of love Spooky, and totally excited to see what the print edition is gonna be like.
PS, for those not IN THE KNOW: http://www.crithit.org/spooky/
Lol I don’t know how reply buttons work.
Thank you! My theory on honesty in art is just that there’s nowhere to hide from an intelligent audience because they don’t just read what you’ve written, they study the fingerprints you leave all over it, so don’t lie. You can lie to idiots, but don’t you have enough idiots in your life without sending out the Batsignal to get them flocking to you?
I’m hoping this is meant jokingly, because IDKAY, but every trans woman I know gets hit on constantly, and pretty much always by straight cis men, even when we are practically shouting “lesbian” from the rooftops. Also, I know this is an old comic, but it’s “trans woman”, not “transwoman”. The space is significant, thanks.
No I know, and thanks for pointing out for the benefit of those who do not. This *is* a really old comic, and it is meant jokingly, but at the time I think this came more from a place of kinda bad self-image than anything. I personally don’t get hit on a lot, but when I do, it’s always really, distinctly gross and bad, yeah.