Cerebus: Book One

One down, 15 to go.

I just finished the first, self-titled, Cerebus phone book last night. That's 25 issues out of 300 under my belt.

It's interesting to watch the early development of this book. The first few stories are pretty unambitious, for the most part nothing more than a passable barbarian/sword & sorcery pastiche with enough underhanded humour to qualify as parody. Even early on, Sim has a way of writing his characters with just enough awareness of the absurdity of their surroundings to be able to comment on it, but not enough to fully pull them out of their circumstances. That is to say, the stories work on a satirical level, tweaking the tenets of the genre, without undercutting the drama of the set-up. Cerebus, for all his put-upon bemoaning of the fools he must suffer, is never so detached from the narrative as to render it inconsequential. Rather than simply a vehicle for barbarian jokes, it functions equally well as a fantasy genre homage.

It doesn't take long for the book to branch out though. Despite the vast amount of material published in the fantasy genre, there's only so many archetypal stories to lampoon. Sim is quickly referencing material from other genres, most notably mainstream superheroes with the introduction of the Cockroach character, and, in an incongruous stroke of genius, Groucho Marx with the Lord Julius character. Surprisingly, a seemingly oddball character like this quickly becomes one of the most interesting characters in the book, and a fan favorite. There's certainly no denying the skill with which Groucho/Julius' dialogue is written, riffing on the screen persona he's been lifted from. For a book that was already flirting with meta-humour and asides to the reader, Groucho/Julius is a perfect fit. He takes the Cerebus as uber-straight man motif to whole new levels...

The characters develop quite a bit visually over this collection, with Cerebus ending up essentially in the state he'll stay in through the end of High Society and part of Church & State. Is the introduction of Gerhard the impetus for his final visual evolution? There seems to be some correlation there, but I'll have to pay attention to it as I'm reading.

A last short thing: The first Cerebus collection I ever read was Flight, and I didn't realize until years later that the opening sequences of Flight are referencing events that happened 150 issues earlier. We get a "Where Are They Now?" sequence for the Pigts, Theresa (from Professor Charles X. Claremont's school), Death, the Succubus, the mad King K'Cor, and other characters and items from the first two years of the book. Interesting way to kick off the second half...but more on that later, I guess.