bad mother

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.