Cerebus

From the diary: “May 2, 1985

“Red sum comics. Cerebus’ latest is great.”

Cerebus is a success story. Published by the author/artist himself it survived 300 issues. Dave Sim decided at some point that 300 issues was it, and that Cerebus the Aardvark would die in the last issue. I read Cerebus for several years. Sim writes fun dialog. I liked the art. And he was creating an interesting separate semi-medieval world and watching him explore it kept my interest.

Gradually Dave Sim himself seemed to get weird then weirder, publishing insane diatribes against feminism in the back of the book. These rants dragged on for pages in small print prose. Sim’s ideas didn’t infect the Cerebus stories too much. There were bad women and there were good women, just like everywhere. Fact is, it often seemed to me Sim’s animosity to feminism was pitched to such a ludicrous wail I was sure it was intentional camp. (Did Sim have a schizophrenic break?) Anyway, I usually skipped Sim’s longer essays.

It was only when Dave Sim started including long prose passages in the comic stories that I seriously balked. These weren’t essays, for the most part, rather the comic became more an illustrated novel than a comic. Which would have been okay, I suppose, but Sim can’t write. He could write comics but his prose needed editing real bad. A third to half the words should have been cut from each page. By the time Sim was indulging himself thus I was in college in Berkeley (this was early 90s) and didn’t have the money to buy bad writing.