Cerebus the Aardvark is a barbarian fighter who also happens to be an aardvark. A very stylized and cartoony aardvark. He was created by Dave Sim, a Canadian artist who, a few years into his cult comic book series, had a personality breakdown and adopted a new philosophy that alienated huge numbers of his fans. The Frank Miller of Jordan Petersons, you could call him.
The big difference between comic book culture from the pre-War days through the 1970s and that which took hold in the 1980s was the spread of the comic book store. When comics were sold primarily through newsstands they encouraged a kind of casual engagement with narrative. If you had fun with the story involved you'd gotten your quarter's worth.
Comic book stores enabled stronger content in terms of sex and violence, yes. But they also created a new audience who looked for longer, more involved, and in some cases more obscure narratives than had been available before. Heavy marijuana users, you might guess, and in a number of cases you'd be right.
Comic book stores always had Cerebus merchandise front and center, making him a mascot of the industry. Along with Omaha the Cat Dancer, whose title was basically furry erotica, but with a higher level of craft than the webcomics that would follow in her wake.
Anyway, I'm not really a big follower of epics, with some exceptions, which is why I never got into the Cerebus thing myself. Sim does seem to have been an accomplished artist, or at least gradually became one. And as I said before, the stories provoke interesting reactions from some other critics, like the ones I linked above.
2 comments:
Wow! Thanks for the introduction to Dave Sim's extraordinary accomplishment - and I do mean his amazing talent as an artist. You can actually see how it evolved over the years. I asked Jer if he was familiar with Cerebus the Aardvark since he was completely new to me. Jer said Cerebus was well worth his attention but at the time he wasn't captured by the intricate story. He did mention though that the artwork blew him away. Apparently there were a number of stories over the years, some very good ones and others that didn't make the grade.
The first person I thought to compare him to was Virgil Finlay - only because of the exquisitely detailed drawings that resemble engravings. I did see that Gerhard did the background illustrations while Sim himself drew the main characters - many of which aren't aardvarks. There are Manga stories that are pretty long with detailed illustrations (Tezuka's Buddha, for instance) but I haven't seen the quality of drawing matched anywhere.
I came upon an article from Comics Alliance you may already be familiar with that has a selection of images and a sensitive essay about Dave Sim's work on Cerebus and as a person. It is weird that artists both contemporary and classical are judged by some on the quality of their characters rather than the genius of their oeuvre.
https://comicsalliance.com/tribute-dave-sim/
You're certainly welcome. Yeah, Jerry seems to have not gotten into it for the same reason I didn't. The comic lasted 300 issues, which isn't unique, but in mainstream comics you'd have had several changes of creative teams. Sim was the writer and artist--at least foreground artist--through the whole thing, and seems to have gone in with a plan for what he wanted to do throughout the whole series. I don't know how closely he stuck to said plan, but the idea of seeing that far ahead is both impressive and rather alien to me.
Finlay's a good model for an illustrator. It's wild to see how vivid his artwork is, especially when you consider how drawing for the pulps was pretty much piecework. Gerhard is unusual in that he has mostly specialized in background art, which he's very good at. But for most cartoonists characters and action make up the entire point. Manga appears to be a sophisticated visual language when you dig deep but I'm not really conversant in it.
That's a good article in Comics Alliance, a website that in more recent years seems to be primarily about movies and TV. It also includes a lot of the original artwork, which helps.
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