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Post by Hoosier X on Jan 7, 2016 22:39:09 GMT -5
I read the second half of High Society when it was brand new at the comic-book shop. I read a few issues standing there in the shop for a few months (I didn't feel like actually buying it until I knew what was going on) and I finally started buying it with #39 and I read the rest of High Society as they came out. I read the first two or three issues of Church and State and then I read it sporadically until near the end of Church of State when I got really serious about Cerebus.
So about issue #105, I started reading it regularly as I also set about getting back issues, many of them through the Cerebus Bi-Weekly reprints. And then I read it monthly, every month, through Jaka's Story, Melmoth, Mothers and Daughters, Rick's Story, Guys. Yeah, I think I got through Guys before I started missing issues. Maybe about #230 I started missing issues and sometimes realizing I had missed an issue, but not really feeling like I had missed anything.
I'm not sure how many issues I missed. I'm probably missing 10 to 12 issues between #230 and #300. I do have issue #300 though! That was a big deal when that came out! I felt like I was at the end of a great journey that had gotten considerably less great since the end of Mothers and Daughters. And I figured I would eventually get all the issues I missed. I still haven't done that.
I've read the earlier parts so many times (up to Melmoth) that I can follow along without reading them again. I liked Mothers and Daughters a lot too, but I've only read it once or twice since the first time. The rest of it I only remember bits of it.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 7, 2016 23:22:24 GMT -5
Guys. Yeah, I think I got through Guys before I started missing issues. Maybe about #230 I started missing issues and sometimes realizing I had missed an issue, but not really feeling like I had missed anything. Guys was the hardest volume for me to get through. Sometimes art immitates life, and sometimes art recreates life. In this case, Sim made us feel like we were wasting away in a bar just as much as he had been at that point in his life. Powerful in hindsight, but definitely a difficult experience. For me, the end of Form & Void was the climax to the entire series, with Latter Days and Last Day serving as falling action and resolution. The ending of Form & Void blew me away and literally left me in tears. I think a lot of people didn't stick around long enough for that moment, but, for me, it was worth it.
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Post by Spike-X on Jan 8, 2016 5:45:59 GMT -5
As I read the first 5 , I remember the comments made years ago about the characters. At the risk of spoiling anything ( although, I think I'm the only Cerebus virgin in this thread) one of the characters talks like foghorn leghorn. That's...ah say, that's Elrod of Melvinbone!
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jan 8, 2016 5:50:43 GMT -5
For me, the end of Form & Void was the climax to the entire series, with Latter Days and Last Day serving as falling action and resolution. The ending of Form & Void blew me away and literally left me in tears. I think a lot of people didn't stick around long enough for that moment, but, for me, it was worth it. I really look forward to the moment we can discuss that ending. It shows one character blaming another, but I wonder on which side the author actually was... to me, the one doing the blaming was the guilty party, and not the other way around. Judging from the editorial pages, however, I am not sure that's how Sim saw things... at all! It is one of the moments that exemplify the dichotomy between Sim's published statements about women and what the Cerebus series actually shows. For all that I raged about some of the essays published in the back pages, the comic itself was never misogynistic. Quite the contrary, in fact, as it never reduced women to the status of sex objects or mere ornaments: some of the strongest characters in the book are women.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 8, 2016 5:56:21 GMT -5
For me, the end of Form & Void was the climax to the entire series, with Latter Days and Last Day serving as falling action and resolution. The ending of Form & Void blew me away and literally left me in tears. I think a lot of people didn't stick around long enough for that moment, but, for me, it was worth it. I really look forward to the moment we can discuss that ending. It shows one character blaming another, but I wonder on which side the author actually was... to me, the o e doing the blaming was the guilty party, and not the other way around. Judging from the editorial pages, however, I am not sure that's how Sim saw things... at all! It is one of the moments that exemplify the dichotomy between Sim's published statements about women and what the Cerebus series actually shows. For all that I raged about some of the essays published in the back pages, the comic itself was never misogynistic. Quite the contrary, in fact, as it never reduced women to the status of sex objects or mere ornaments: some of the strongest characters in the book are women. There are so many times in the series where I feel like what happens on the page is Sim's subconscious speaking, and what happens in the letter column is Sim's conscious mind trying to make sense of it. I definitely read that climax the same way you do. Jakka is a veritable saint throughout much of the series that Cerebus understands he is unworthy of. She makes two big errors in the series. The first, in Jakka's Story, is really bad, but it is not something that affects Cerebus personally. In fact, he inadvertently gains from it. And the second was unintentional and not really the cause of Cerebus not being home when his parents died. Jakka didn't cause him to leave home or to stay away for so many years; she just inadvertently delayed the return for too long.
So yeah, it's pretty hard not to see Cerebus' treatment of her there as a severe overreaction. Were this real life and I Cerebus' therapist, I'd be 100% convinced that Jakka isn't the one he's really mad at there.
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Post by adamwarlock2099 on Jan 8, 2016 9:22:36 GMT -5
As I read the first 5 , I remember the comments made years ago about the characters. At the risk of spoiling anything ( although, I think I'm the only Cerebus virgin in this thread) one of the characters talks like foghorn leghorn. That's...ah say, that's Elrod of Melvinbone! Which when recognizing that when I first read it lead me to research that Foghorn Leghorn was inspired by the speech mannerism or Senator Beauregard Claghorn of Charleston South Carolina USA.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jan 8, 2016 15:27:12 GMT -5
Jakka is a veritable saint throughout much of the series that Cerebus understands he is unworthy of. She makes two big errors in the series. The first, in Jakka's Story, is really bad, but it is not something that affects Cerebus personally. In fact, he inadvertently gains from it. And the second was unintentional and not really the cause of Cerebus not being home when his parents died. Jakka didn't cause him to leave home or to stay away for so many years; she just inadvertently delayed the return for too long.
So yeah, it's pretty hard not to see Cerebus' treatment of her there as a severe overreaction. Were this real life and I Cerebus' therapist, I'd be 100% convinced that Jakka isn't the one he's really mad at there.
This is like a secret conversation! I had never thought of it that way, but it's a damn interesting analysis... Cerebus would be exactly the kind of individual to blame others when he fully knows that he is at fault. It might even be that he's trying to punish himself as severely as he can by severing all ties with the only person he ever loved.
That's not what Sim says in post-series interviews, of course, in which he describes Jaka as a pampered princess and an egotist. Yes, the same Jaka who was working full-time to provide for her nice but totally useless layabout of a husband, who could neither be bothered to look for a job or at least take care of the house chores.
Cerebus blamed Jaka for delaying him with her whims, but even he must have realized that his lady was not an outdoor person; she was not aware that passes get snowed over during the winter. Cerebus knew (heck, he even agonized about it) but was so insecure about what she might say were he to suggest a quicker journey that he, and no one else, made sure the couple wouldn't make it in time.
Good analysis, shaxper!
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 8, 2016 17:31:44 GMT -5
Jakka is a veritable saint throughout much of the series that Cerebus understands he is unworthy of. She makes two big errors in the series. The first, in Jakka's Story, is really bad, but it is not something that affects Cerebus personally. In fact, he inadvertently gains from it. And the second was unintentional and not really the cause of Cerebus not being home when his parents died. Jakka didn't cause him to leave home or to stay away for so many years; she just inadvertently delayed the return for too long.
So yeah, it's pretty hard not to see Cerebus' treatment of her there as a severe overreaction. Were this real life and I Cerebus' therapist, I'd be 100% convinced that Jakka isn't the one he's really mad at there.
This is like a secret conversation! I had never thought of it that way, but it's a damn interesting analysis... Cerebus would be exactly the kind of individual to blame others when he fully knows that he is at fault. It might even be that he's trying to punish himself as severely as he can by severing all ties with the only person he ever loved.
That's not what Sim says in post-series interviews, of course, in which he describes Jaka as a pampered princess and an egotist. Yes, the same Jaka who was working full-time to provide for her nice but totally useless layabout of a husband, who could neither be bothered to look for a job or at least take care of the house chores.
Cerebus blamed Jaka for delaying him with her whims, but even he must have realized that his lady was not an outdoor person; she was not aware that passes get snowed over during the winter. Cerebus knew (heck, he even agonized about it) but was so insecure about what she might say were he to suggest a quicker journey that he, and no one else, made sure the couple wouldn't make it in time.
Good analysis, shaxper! Love me some secret discourse! It's so weird that Sim can enter the story directly during Minds to tell us women are evil, and yet portray Jaka with such immense beauty and sympathy throughout the series while Cerebus is nearly always depicted as being unworthy of her.
And yeah, the analogy about Cerebus being Sim's subconscious even works in Latter Days, where he regularly comes off as an opportunistic fraud and idiot in his writing of the great sacred text. It clearly comes off as irony. And yet Sim espouses a sincere belief in this stuff in the letter column. There's just no way the comic, itself, wants you to take it that way. I don't think there's any support for that kind of reading of the work.
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Post by Arthur Gordon Scratch on Jan 8, 2016 18:39:31 GMT -5
Sim has aknowledged on at least a few occasions, that in the Cerebus controversy he is the problem, even more so because he partakes in the debate and should refrain from doing so. I'm not sure how deeply he believes in his lettercolumn text's practical aspects but suspect he somewhat adopts an "ironic martyr" position for a cause he fails to see any strong literate advocate of, and any intelectualy honest opiniated person would crave for contradictory debate. I feel that he sometimes listens to his oposition in a way reflected on his later views. I'm not saying he is partially insincere in a way or the ohter, just that as RRaider pointed out, there is a personal and practical aspect to his ad Cerebus' views, they are not pure and abstract, which I believe makes Sim aknowledge their inherent subjectivity. Does feminism have an answer for every single of the many wrongs of patriarchy? Probably not, and I think Sim started off from common sense before he became a devil's advocate to a seemingly point of no return, if that makes any sense.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 8, 2016 20:45:42 GMT -5
Sim has aknowledged on at least a few occasions, that in the Cerebus controversy he is the problem, even more so because he partakes in the debate and should refrain from doing so. I'm not sure how deeply he believes in his lettercolumn text's practical aspects but suspect he somewhat adopts an "ironic martyr" position for a cause he fails to see any strong literate advocate of, and any intelectualy honest opiniated person would crave for contradictory debate. I feel that he sometimes listens to his oposition in a way reflected on his later views. I'm not saying he is partially insincere in a way or the ohter, just that as RRaider pointed out, there is a personal and practical aspect to his ad Cerebus' views, they are not pure and abstract, which I believe makes Sim aknowledge their inherent subjectivity. Does feminism have an answer for every single of the many wrongs of patriarchy? Probably not, and I think Sim started off from common sense before he became a devil's advocate to a seemingly point of no return, if that makes any sense. You make a good point here. In a sense, "Dave Sim" as seen in the letter cols and interviews, may be as fictional a character as Cerebus, both reflecting some aspects of the true author.
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Post by coke & comics on Jan 12, 2016 3:48:35 GMT -5
I've reread the first 6 issues. I forget how far I got the first time I read this, but I've read all these. I know I'm supposed to push through to the good stuff in High Socity and Church & State, and I intend to.
But so far I'm left with the same impression I had the last time I picked this up a decade or so ago:
I'd rather read Groo.
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Post by Spike-X on Jan 12, 2016 5:57:37 GMT -5
Stick with it. It's very much worth it. Sim himself doesn't realize until around issue twenty or so that what he's got here could possibly be much more than just a funny animal parody of Barry Windsor-Smith's Conan.
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Post by adamwarlock2099 on Jan 12, 2016 10:18:54 GMT -5
I've reread the first 6 issues. I forget how far I got the first time I read this, but I've read all these. I know I'm supposed to push through to the good stuff in High Socity and Church & State, and I intend to. But so far I'm left with the same impression I had the last time I picked this up a decade or so ago: I'd rather read Groo. I had the same impression when I read it first too. And not so much looking forward to reading it again, outside of the conversation here, for both the art and the story. A lot of that could do with not having any insight on the source material Cerebus is a parody of. But it does indeed get better, for as far as I have gotten at least.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 12, 2016 11:52:02 GMT -5
As I've said before, Issue #14 marks the first time the series begins to see itself as more than a barbarian parody, and it gets more interesting as a result. Still, it's not until High Society that it really kicks into high gear. Tempted as I am, I won't begin re-reading until February 1st, because I definitely want to talk about these stories as I read
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Post by adamwarlock2099 on Jan 12, 2016 12:10:28 GMT -5
Since I read it fairly on my own and didn't discuss it much when I did, even on CBR, I too am looking forward to the conversation as much as the actual reading. And the schedule gives plenty of time for both.
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