Efan said:

sextonseven said:

I know there was an announcement made last week in Midtown Comics that books would be delayed one day because of the hurricane, but when I just called, I was told all books came in on schedule today. I had better get my ass to their store!

Hey, maybe I'll run into you there!

Oh god, I look a mess today.

sextonseven said:

Efan said:

Hey, maybe I'll run into you there!

Oh god, I look a mess today.

I probably won't be there for another hour or so, so we may miss each other completely.

Got my issues!

these are pretty exciting times for sure. I work at Holland´s greatest distributor for comics, Pep Comics. And we´ve seen a steady decline in comic sales for a few years now. I must say the new 52 sure made lots of headlines and people were really psyched for it. I hope this media attention will somehow contribute to mor people going to the comic shops and buying comics. Nothing beats reading a comic from paper...

anyways i really enjoyed the first issue, and Jim Lee´s art was spectacular to say the least, hope they keep it up!!

Efan said:

Got my issues!

And they sucked big time. They're just incredibly disappointing.

Efan said:

Efan said:

Got my issues!

And they sucked big time. They're just incredibly disappointing.

I agree. I decided to buy Flashpoint as a wrapup and it was just another deathfest with a lame excuse for a new universe at the end.

Bought JL just because I was there and it was just....meh. Boring. I just can't see myself bothering if this is the big push. I've been buying and reading this stuff since '85 too and I really think I'm done.

I haven't read mine yet. It's only right that I first finish read my small stack of old DC universe titles before I get to the end of all that is. So until that happens, I won't be clicking on this thread anymore.

Comic talk? On the org? Count me in!

I'm one of those people that are using the relaunch as an excuse to drop DC altogether. I was buying 30-35 books (which was way too many) and most of them I was only getting out of momentum. The few titles I really enjoyed (Secret Six, Power Girl, Zatanna, Supergirl and, especially, Batgirl) are all ending or being radically altered so DC are not really giving me a reason to stick around. I was considering the Batman and Superman lines but figured it was just as easy to make a clean break. I'm not really crazy about the wave of nostalgia that appears to be taking hold at DC. For me Wally West is the Flash, I kind of liked Dick Grayson as Batman and Stephanie Brown is my Batgirl.

Anyone feeling optimistic about Regenesis and the X-Men relaunch? I'm hoping that we will now get a line where each book has a distinct cast and that Scott/Emma/Wolverine will not be heavily featured in every other book. I've been burned on pretty much every X-Men relaunch since the late '90s but maybe this time Marvel will get it right?

i haven't read much good press on the dc relaunch, so far. i'll reserve judgement for a few months, but i have no plans to buy into any of it.

i'm about 2/3 through 'big questions'...it's awesome. beautiful in it's simplicity, yet the detail keeps you staring at a single page for minutes at a time.

got this...

...in the mail yesterday.

peedub said:

i haven't read much good press on the dc relaunch, so far. i'll reserve judgement for a few months, but i have no plans to buy into any of it.

i'm about 2/3 through 'big questions'...it's awesome. beautiful in it's simplicity, yet the detail keeps you staring at a single page for minutes at a time.

got this...

...in the mail yesterday.

That's one I've long wanted to get. I don't "get" a lot of manga; it's not entirely my thing.

One I was reading about yesterday was Monster by Naoki Urasawa. It sounds like an interesting premise, kind of like The Fugitive. I may pick that up.

this set is very worth the money...it's $100 cover price, but i got it for $60 on ebay. it's a steal at that price. these volumes are very nicely put together. i don't quite like the gloss of the paper they used, but i can get over that.

i don't think i'd classify it as manga, at leat not in the general, american perception of manga (a la shonen jump). but, i dunno. it's all comics to me. but this is american made, and sakai was raised on american comics.

historically accurate, well written and beautifully illustrated. sakai has a knack for timing, especially in the action sequences. this would be just as engaging with human characters. i'm only about 1/4 through the first volume; but it's good, good stuff.

okay, so i read some positive reviews of 'action comics' #1 and broke down and bought it...

meh...seems kind of pedestrian, really. i expected more from grant morrison. this is totally derivitive, with clark kent as peter parker...not much of a story here, but we'll see where it goes (for a couple more issues, maybe). and lex luthor, in issue 1, really? whatever...i'd like to find some lonely isolated human being far, far away who's never heard of superman and get their opinion of it. i'm sure it would go something like 'meh...'

it was nice to visit my local comic book shop again, though...after almost 2 years, it was fun to bullshit comics again with leo. it's like we were never apart, god bless 'im.

i also picked up 'the red wing' by jonathan hickman and some artist...pretty good, if you like hickman...and the latest 'scooby-doo' for my boy, it's pretty good, with 2 stories; one with an addam's family surrogate and another we haven't got to yet.

if i were in brooklyn, i'd go to this...

TICKETED: An Evening with Craig Thompson

Start: 09/17/2011 8:00 pm

Timezone: America/New York

WORD is delighted to announce that, as our book-end event for the Brooklyn Book Festival, we are presenting an evening with acclaimed graphic novelist Craig Thompson!
Attendees will be able to meet and mingle with Thompson at a cocktail party, followed by an interview with Sarah Glidden (How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less), Q&A and signing. Tickets are $40 each, include a copy of his new novel Habibi and drinks and hors d'oeuvre, and admit one. The event is capped at 50 attendees, so get your tickets now!

Sprawling across an epic landscape of deserts, harems, and modern industrial clutter, Habibi (which means "beloved" in Arabic) tells the tale of Dodola and Zam, refugee child slaves bound to each other by chance, by circumstance, and by the love that grows between them. We follow them as their lives unfold together and apart; as they struggle to make a place for themselves in a world (not unlike our own) fueled by fear, lust, and greed; and as they discover the extraordinary depth—and frailty—of their connection.

At once contemporary and timeless, Habibi gives us a love story of astounding resonance: a parable about our relationship to the natural world, the cultural divide between the first and third worlds, the common heritage of Christianity and Islam, and, most potently, the magic of storytelling.

We are now over halfway through the initial new 52 from DC, what do people think of the books they have read so far?

[img:$uid]http://i.imgur.com/2tiFS.jpg?7273[/img:$uid]

Here kitty, kitty! Batman finally taps Catwoman in the first issue of her relaunched title.

i'm about 2/3 through habibi now...this book is going to win every eisner it's nominated for and will be talked about for a long time. wow.

[img:$uid]http://i.imgur.com/SQ8Mu.png[/img:$uid]

DC Stimulus Plan Really Working

September 27, 2011

DC Comics has updated their sales numbers for the first full month of the New 52, and as expected, the publisher has announced all new titles shipping this week have sold out at the distributor level before they go on sale and will be going back to press for 2nd printings, which means every one of the 52 #1's have sold out and are getting second printings.

As always, "sold out" at the distributor level means retailers have ordered all copies from Diamond DC Comics has printed. It does not reflect in-store retail sales to customers.

DC also announced this week's Aquaman #1 by Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis is the 11th title out of the 52 with retailer sales (i.e. orders) of more than 100k. It joins Justice League, Action Comics, Batman, Batgirl, Batman and Robin, Batman: The Dark Knight, Detective Comics (retailers love their Batman), Superman, The Flash, and Green Lantern.

Justice League and Action Comics have now been joined by Batman as titles with over 200k in retailer sales. Additionally, Justice League #1 has received four printings, and Action, Batgirl, and the Justice League #1 Digital Como Pack have all received three printings.

Source: Newsarama

I would definitely not want to be a retailer and have to guess how many DC books to order for months two, three and four. There are almost certainly going to be huge drops on all of them but they also don't want to have customers looking for books they don't have in stock.

As an X-Men fan it is kind of a downer to see how poorly Schism is doing compared to the DC books. I believe that Schism #1 only sold around 58,000 copies which is barely more than that months issue of Uncanny X-Men sold (around 57,000 copies). Schism was hyped as a huge turning point for the X-Men and to see the first issue fall so short of 100,000 copies has to be a disappointment for Marvel. It should be interesting to see how well the relaunched Uncanny X-Men and Wolverine and the X-Men sell and how quickly they drop down to pre relaunch numbers.

rialb said:

I would definitely not want to be a retailer and have to guess how many DC books to order for months two, three and four. There are almost certainly going to be huge drops on all of them but they also don't want to have customers looking for books they don't have in stock.

when i went in to pick up action comics #1, i talked about this with my guy. he said that everything was 100% returnable. i don't know how long that's supposed to last, but i would think after a couple of months, everything is going to level out to (new) normal levels. i think it will end up being the same people, just buying different books. i have my doubts about new readership being a discernable factor.

I'm feeling nostalgic today. Think I'm going to read some Cerebus this afternoon...

I'll have some thoughts on the relaunch titles I'm reading and a couple of other books (like Fables, how long its been going and where its going next) in the next week or so.

http://www.tcj.com/tcj-301-excerpt-from-irredeemable-dave-sims-cerebus-by-tim-kreider/

I'd like to say the comments at the bottom of this link are intersting, but they're really not. Just par for the course amongst people trying to explain, describe or sum up this work with one witty blurb. I lived this thing (mess, some might say) issue to issue from 1982 to 2004 and I can say with complete certainty that it can't be done. That's why TCJ is still doing massive pieces on it seven years after it ended.

TCJ #301: Excerpt from “Irredeemable: Dave Sim’s Cerebus”

I’m not sure to what extent I need to explain the graphic-novel cycle Cerebus to a Comics Journal audience. Hard as it is for me to believe, based on my conversations with younger cartoonists, it seems like some basic background might be advisable here. The history of this book and its author used to be a legend in the comics world — in fact, it reads a lot like a superhero origin story. In 1977 Dave Sim, a 21-year-old comics fan, whose only job had ever been working in a comics shop, began drawing his own comic book, a parody of/homage to Barry Windsor-Smith’s Conan, featuring as its hero the eponymous Cerebus, an avaricious, hard-drinking barbarian who is also an aardvark. Two years into the series, Sim took LSD for a week and a half, suffered what he described as a “nervous breakdown,” and had to be admitted to a hospital, where he was diagnosed as “borderline schizophrenic” (whatever that might mean as applied to someone coming down off several days of acid). Recovering from this experience, he had a life-changing epiphany: Cerebus would run for 300 issues. It was a vast story; it would be his life’s work. Deranged hubristic ambitions are not uncommon among schizophrenics, people on LSD, or 23-year-olds, but here’s the remarkable part: He actually did it. Dave Sim drew Cerebus, putting out an issue a month, for the next 25 years. He finished it in 2004. It runs to 16 volumes, and occupies a solid foot of shelf space.

In the early, sword-and-sorcery issues of Cerebus, Dave Sim drew about as well as the second- or third-best artist in your high school, the guy you’d ask to do the cover for your heavy metal band’s album or airbrush the side of your van. After drawing about a hundred issues, by the time he’d finished Volume II of Church & State — around the same time he hired a brilliant and apparently indefatigable draftsman named Gerhard as his background artist, freeing himself to concentrate exclusively on his characters — Dave Sim had become one of the best cartoonists in North America. And not just in the excellence of his technical skill — he was relentlessly inventive and virtuosic. His exuberant formal experimentation extended from his lettering and paneling to the design of whole issues: Readers puzzled and wowed over the issues in which each page’s background was a fragment of one large picture of Cerebus, or the spinning of an ascending tower was reflected by the page layout rotating several degrees on each page, so that you had to slowly turn the whole book 360º in your hands in the course of reading it. “Thou shalt break every law in the book,” was his injunction to himself.

Sim was also a smart and voracious autodidact (he dropped out of high school after grade 11), and, as he matured, his intellectual passions grew beyond comics, and his artistic ambitions far beyond parody. The single-issue stories expanded into longer and longer story arcs, gradually growing into full-length, 500-page novels. As he continued drawing Cerebus, Sim incorporated everything that captured his interest into the book: He became interested in the mechanics of electoral politics, and Cerebus ran for Prime Minister; he got interested in the history of religion, and Cerebus became the Pope; as Sim’s literary tastes became more sophisticated, Cerebus encountered incarnations of Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. He insatiably appropriated not only literary, historic and political figures, but fictional characters and screen personae, the likenesses of friends and colleagues, other authors’ prose styles, even another cartoonist’s dialogue in a manner that would’ve been called postmodern if he’d had an MFA. He wrote books within books, invented intricate political ideologies, created whole cosmologies. Throughout all of which the book’s central character remained the same anthropomorphized aardvark.

It also, against what might seem like any reasonable expectations, became a success. Dave Sim was one of the first cartoonists to publish his own work, and he was a vocal proponent of self-publication as the only means of securing artistic autonomy and control. Not only did he actually make a living being a cartoonist, he made it look glamorous. The monthly “Note from the President” and the photo that accompanied each issue of Cerebus hinted at a life spent doing nothing but drawing his comic book, smoking pot and going out (and breaking up) with good-looking girls. At comics conventions, he showed up in limos, rented out whole suites, threw parties. He’d become an alternative-comics rock star. He appealed to the young and unformed in much the same way as Jim Morrison or Hunter S. Thompson, artists whose personæ are at least as compelling as their work.

But then somewhere in there, roughly two-thirds of the way through the series, Dave Sim began to develop some let’s call them idiosyncratic and controversial views on the sexes, politics and religion — about which more later — all of which found explicit expression in his work. These “rants” and “tangents,” as he called them, alienated a lot of his audience. Quite a few of his readers would tell you that he went insane before their eyes. By the end, Cerebus’s circulation had dropped almost in half from its high point, circa Church & State — although that might also be attributed to the more static and internal action of the later books, or to changes in the business and culture of comics. The final issue, which showed the title character dying “alone, unloved, and unmourned” in fulfillment of a prophecy made back in 1988 (so this isn’t exactly a “spoiler”), completed an undertaking that began as an in-joke and ended as what its author, a man not given to modest understatement, claims is “the longest sustained narrative in human history.”*

Dave Sim noted ruefully that the completion of his vast project was met with “the sound of one cricket leg chirping.” Gary Groth, editor of the Comics Journal, which had had a combative history with Sim, sent him a note of gentlemanly congratulations of the sort you might imagine Holmes sending to Moriarty after the unexplained disappearance of the crown jewels. There were mentions in The Village Voice and The Onion’s A.V. Club — mentions that tended to take the same tone of straightfaced, whatever-else-you-wanna-say-respect the media pays to achievements like a record-setting win at the national hot-dog-eating contest.

It’s true that Cerebus occupies an oddly provisional place in comics’ canon, given the sheer magnitude of the project, its stylistic innovation and virtuosity, and its influence on other artists. (It was conspicuously excluded from The Comics Journal’s list of the 100 Greatest Comics of All Time.) It hasn’t helped Sim’s critical standing that he belongs to a cartooning tradition that’s currently unfashionable in an era of hip minimalism and the amateurish DIY aesthetic. His artwork is part of a lineage of densely detailed, illustrative, caricature-based cartooning, descended more directly from the fine art of William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier than are most contemporary American comics, a style whose modern masters are the likes of Arthur Szyk and Mort Drucker (and of which this writer is a marginal practitioner).

Cerebus is also too much a product of, and too narrowly concerned with, the world of comics ever to become the kind of breakout critical or commercial success as, say, Maus, Fun Home or Persepolis. Anything you can’t even begin to describe without explaining, “It’s sort of like Howard the Duck …” is never likely to get discussed in the New York Review of Books. Its parodies of characters, creators and trends in the world of comics circa 1980-2000 date badly, and were never even comprehensible, let alone of much interest, to anyone outside that marginal subculture.

But the main impediment to Dave Sim’s literary reputation is Dave Sim himself. His regressive social and political views and obnoxious rhetoric have created a public persona that’s eclipsed his artistic achievement in the comics world much more completely than it would have in the larger, less insular artistic world — where, for example, plenty of people call John Updike a chauvinist but not even his bitterest detractors question his mastery as a prose stylist, where Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ill-advised statement about 9/11 being a work of art didn’t get him ejected from the first rank of postwar composers, and artists like Wagner and Pound are still secure in their respective pantheons despite having endorsed ideas that are, to put it charitably, pretty well discredited.

But Sim’s controversial ideas are not peripheral to his work; he ultimately makes them its central message and purpose. Wagner never actually wrote any operas about the villainy of the Jews, nor Pound cantos praising the wise and just rule of Franco, but Sim incorporated his screeds about women and the tenets of his one-man religion into the text of his novel, so that even a reader determined to ignore all the apocryphal gossipy bullshit accumulated around the artist and concentrate on the work itself is finally forced to confront the fact that the man has some bizarre ideas and an abrasive way of expressing them.

Perhaps most damagingly of all, Dave Sim is the single most passionate and outspoken advocate of his own work, and also its most reductive and unreliable interpreter. Having finished his magnum opus, he seems unable to let go of it, and continues to hand down authoritative misreadings of the work that do it a serious disservice. He tries to rationalize the kinds of inconsistencies and contradictions that are only inevitable in a work that was written month by month over 30 years; he issues contemptuous dismissals of (female) characters who might have seemed to the reader to have had some depth and complexity; and he sometimes makes assertions that are clearly contradicted by the text. It raises the troubling possibility that what seemed like Cerebus’s literary quality may only have been so much projection on the part of its readers. What’s more likely is that Sim, like a lot of artists, is less than fully conscious of what he’s doing and is the last person who should be consulted about the meaning of his own work.

Sim’s loudmouthed self-promotion and self-pity has effectively divided comics readers into two camps: those who sigh and make the little twirly-motion at their temples when his name comes up, and a devoted core of fans so uncritical and defensive you’d have to call them acolytes, which doesn’t tend to do an artist’s critical reputation much good either. (Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard have both become cult figures among different genera of dingbats, but Atlas Shrugged doesn’t get discussed in the same academic circles as the Tractatus, and you aren’t going to see a Library of America edition of Battlefield Earth anytime soon.) He complains that his work is willfully ignored by the comics world, but blaming his ostracism on the Marxist/feminist/homosexualist axis (this is not hyperbole) hasn’t persuaded many people to take a second look. And for all his plaints about his obscurity, he’s also been perversely obstructionist toward anybody who’s tried to publicize his work. (I’m thinking specifically, though not only, of the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I stance he took toward the [female] interviewer for The Onion’s AV Club.)

It’s a situation I had hoped to go some small distance toward remedying for a new generation of readers who may not even have heard of Cerebus, or have heard of it only as an artifact of mental illness, a companion piece to accompany the story of Dave Sim, a very gifted cartoonist who went around the bend. Sim may well be a wackjob or an acid casualty, but he is also, I would argue, one of the greatest living cartoonists. And Cerebus is more than a curiosity; it’s beautifully drawn, intermittently hilarious and brilliant, the gargantuan and astonishing life’s work of a master craftsman.

That, however, was before I’d actually read the fucking thing.

I read several issues of Cerebus over my college roommate’s shoulder back in the mid-’80s, which, fortuitously, happened to be the era of Church & State II, one of the artistic crests of the book. (Of course it’s possible that everyone’s favorite era of Cerebus coincides with their initial discovery of it — cf. Peter Graham’s adage that the golden age of science fiction is 12.) Dave Sim was one of the very few artists I ever deliberately studied (as opposed to the deep influences I unconsciously absorbed from, say, Mad magazine and B. Kliban): I marveled at his drawings of a hand blurred as it shakes out a match or a face reflected in a rippling puddle of mop water; I imitated the fine hatching in the wrinkles around Bishop Powers’s shouting mouth and internalized the lessons of his expressionistic lettering and word balloons.

I never did get around to reading Cerebus, though. I’ve always had it jotted down somewhere on my life To Do list that someday I’d have to read the whole thing. The glimpses I’d gotten through my sporadic reading were intriguing but also daunting; I was intimidated by the book’s sheer length and evident complexity, all the backstory I’d have to absorb just to have any idea what was going on. I wasn’t looking forward to having to get through all the amateurish fan art and dweeby allusions in the first volume, which veteran readers glumly assured me would be necessary to familiarize myself with the basic cast of characters and background. I decided to wait until Sim had finished the whole 300-issue run and then, I told myself — envisioning this in a comfortably distant future — I’d sit down and read them all in one marathon, War and Peace-like binge.

Which is what I finally did last summer. I traded one of my original cartoons for all 16 volumes of Cerebus and hauled the whole 20 pounds of it down to my Undisclosed Location on the Chesapeake Bay, where I holed up, away from the distractions of the Internet or girls and read them one after the other on the couch, listening to old soundtracks on vinyl and eating Old El Paso tacos, all pretty much while wearing the same T-shirt.

So, what are we to make of this thing, Cerebus? It’s far too long and complex to give it the kind of close reading it deserves even in the generous space I’ve been allotted here. Its sheer unwieldy scale makes it difficult to evaluate critically; it’s such a vast structure that it’s hard to grasp its architecture. And everything we know about its eccentric author makes it hard to see clearly as a work of art. What I want to try to do is clear away enough of the clutter of extraneous baggage it’s accumulated and step back far enough from it to begin to figure out what kind of book Cerebus is, whether it’s ultimately any good, where it belongs in comics’ history and canon, and whether it’s deserving of — and capable of withstanding — critical attention from the larger artistic and literary world.

*Not sure whether there’s any point in quibbling with a claim this arbitrary and ill defined. Is Cerebus “longer” than, say, Henry Darger’s 15,000-page illustrated novel The Story of the Vivian Girls? Or, for that matter, than Japanese epics that ran for a hundred volumes and took decades to compose, or soap operas that began in the ’50s and are still running today? How to compare the length of graphic vs. prose novels, let alone print vs. electronic media? Let it suffice to agree with Sim that his achievement is, by logistical measures alone, very impressive indeed. Just in terms of the dedication and discipline necessary to such an undertaking, and the 10s of thousands of hours of labor involved, it is awe-inspiring.

(Continued in issue 301)

i just read the full essay the other night...

i haven't read much of cerebus, and tended to avoid the less story oriented parts; but alot of what this guy has to say rings pretty accurate to me. dave sim is certainly a effing brilliant cartoonist, but he made alot of mistakes with cerebus that i think will tarnish his legacy.

peedub said:

i just read the full essay the other night...

i haven't read much of cerebus, and tended to avoid the less story oriented parts; but alot of what this guy has to say rings pretty accurate to me. dave sim is certainly a effing brilliant cartoonist, but he made alot of mistakes with cerebus that i think will tarnish his legacy.

I agree wholeheartedly, and I'm a fervent Sim supporter. Its just unfortunate that so much of his tarnish relates to Dave Sim "the person", not Dave Sim "the writer/artist/independet comic book trailblazer".

Quite honestly, I actually agree with a great deal of his personal views, so they don't affect my interpretation or enjoyment of the comic in the slightest. But I do understand how the same could not be possible for many people.

What I think is most unfortunate is that there are large portions of the comic book run, even the last third, that are pure genius. I realize I'm a bit biased, but for me, now that I can read the entire run in large chunks via the phonebooks, it only really lags in the LAST book. Most people know what's great about the first 2/3, so I won't get into that. But in the last 1/3, I love 'Going Home' and 'Form & Void' as they completes the 'Jaka's Story' circle, as well as provide great insight into Sim's mind regarding interpersonal relationships at the time (while continuing to use interesting historical figures in a creative way, to boot). 'Latter Days', with the Stooges, Woody Allen and the Spawn parody, contains some of the most outright hilarious stuff he had done in about a decade. It was only 'The Last Day', with its rush to finish by issue 300 and pack in everything Sim wanted to say about religion, creationism AS religion and how badly we were sucking as a society where things really bogged down.

Unfortunately, by the time 'Going Home' started (which, amazingly, was clear back at issue 232) a large part of his audience (loyal and otherwise) had lost interest. The outside world, for the most part, had written him off as a woman hating misogynist, loon, asshole, hermit, blowhard, religious nut and whatever else between issues 186 and the early 200s.

What I will never understand is how someone could be so respected for being a hard nosed, single-minded individual at the beginning, and so hated for standing his ground at the end.

There is no denying that to the average everyday, casual comic book reader, Sim would certainly appear to be some or all those things listed above. Especially if you were reading monthly. But if you ever have the opportunity to talk to the guy, or even attempt to read what he has to say impartially, without taking into account all the outside commentary that was piled on top of it, its pretty clear that he's not the Satan figure he's made out to be. Is he a bit "off" from the rest of society? Yes, but I respect that. Has it hurt his legacy and the legacy of Cerebus as a work of art? For now, yes. Absolutely. But the legend of Dave Sim and what did (or didn't) happen over the years has also greatly tainted people's point of view regarding him as a person and an artist. Unfairly so, in my estimation.

Anyway, I'm rambling on a bit, as I'm wont to do when I get rolling on this topic. I just can't recommend enough that people check out Glamourpuss and watch some of the Friday night Cerebus TV episodes to get a glimpse of the man now, post Cerebus, post controversy (if people would quit bringing it up over and over ad nauseam - something the TCJ is known for, btw).

Also, can't recommend enough that you give the complete Cerebus run a go. Its really quite amazing to watch it progress and evolve for the first couple hundred issues. Plus, it may actually change your mind about a lot of the outside bs that gets heaped upon it. Its pretty easy to find digitally, which is something Sim is not against.

Cerebus said:

But the legend of Dave Sim and what did (or didn't) happen over the years has also greatly tainted people's point of view regarding him as a person and an artist. Unfairly so, in my estimation.

i agree. the man is a virtual living legend in his industry. whether you recognize his ideologies or his abrasive personality or his eccentricities or no, there's no denying what he's accomplished. more than most people in their respective industries. only erik larsen with savage dragon comes close, maybe; and he's NOT EVEN close.

I just can't recommend enough that people check out Glamourpuss and watch some of the Friday night Cerebus TV episodes to get a glimpse of the man now, post Cerebus, post controversy (if people would quit bringing it up over and over ad nauseam - something the TCJ is known for, btw).

i enjoyed glamourpuss immensely until i stopped visiting my lcs...and i've watched a few episodes of cerebustv, also VERY enjoyable; especially for industry/process nerds. and, yes, tcj does have a hard on for him.

Also, can't recommend enough that you give the complete Cerebus run a go. Its really quite amazing to watch it progress and evolve for the first couple hundred issues. Plus, it may actually change your mind about a lot of the outside bs that gets heaped upon it.

i have 9 of the phone book volumes (1-7,9 and 15); i've read through jaka's story, after which i think is when things started to deteriorate, so to speak. once i have them all, i've no doubt i'll give it a start to finish read. i look forward to it, but i'm patient (as i'm sure i'll need to be while reading).

Also, I clearly disagree with a lot of Tim Kreider's assertions and assumptions. But again, that's really par for the course with TCJ and Cerebus. They've never been one to just let things go and move on. I'm not sure they, this author or the comic book reading public at large are qualified to make the decisions they're attempting to get at in this article. Cerebus exists. Sim (and Ger) succeeded at what they set out to do. Everything else is (SHOULD BE) up to the individual reading the book.

Cerebus said:

Also, I clearly disagree with a lot of Tim Kreider's assertions and assumptions. But again, that's really par for the course with TCJ and Cerebus. They've never been one to just let things go and move on. I'm not sure they, this author or the comic book reading public at large are qualified to make the decisions they're attempting to get at in this article. Cerebus exists. Sim (and Ger) succeeded at what they set out to do. Everything else is (SHOULD BE) up to the individual reading the book.

did you read the whole essay? i thought kreider maintained a pretty objective tone, gave credit where it was due and acknowledged that sim is a bit off-kilter from societal norms; but that he ultimately was responsible for his own legacy. honestly, it's the most fair assessment of the whole thing that i've read (although my opinion is not informed by a comprehensive knowledge of 'cerebus' itself).

Actually, no, I would never say things started to deteriorate after 'Jaka's Story'. In fact, that's part of what I'm trying to get at in regards to what the comic book world at large has changed about the series as it went on, and since it ended, through opinion and word of mouth.

'Jaka's Story' ended at issue 136, some of the most interesting, well thought-out and controversial aspects of the Cerebus run happened between then and the infamous issue 186. I mean, shit, titling four of the books in the run, in this order, 'Women', 'Reads', 'Minds', 'Guys', ought to tell you there was something different going on there. The art in those books continues to get better. The lettering continues to get weirder. The stories continue to get deeper and more idiosyncratic. But the readership (circulation totals were printed in the front of each issue) didn't begin to decline until after 'Reads'* and the issue 186 blowout. Whether you subscribe to his point of view or not, there is some very heady stuff being presented to the reader in the middle 1/3. What gets missed, I think, is how beautifully done and completely original most of what he and Ger were doing during those years was, and largely still is.

Don't get me wrong, the absurd comedy and poking fun at the church, state and the comics world at large that take place in the first 1/3 are some classic stuff. For some people, that's all they will ever read again. And in that respect, 'Jaka's Story' is a turning point. But I'm quite serious when I say that I don't believe the quality or enjoyment of the book really took a serious downturn until the last ELEVEN issues. I mean, I don't know how ANYBODY who had any attachment to the early Cerebus/Jaka relationship, or the beauty of 'Jaka's Story', could not get huge amounts of enjoyment out of 'Going Home' and 'Form & Void'. And as I said before, 'Latter Days' is SERIOUSLY laugh out loud funny a great deal of the time. It was actually Sim giving people a lot of what they said they wanted for the last 100 issues. Unfortunately, as he himself will tell you, he'd lost or tainted a majority of them by then, so this went unnoticed.

Of the entire run, other than 'The Last Day', I would only say 'Rick's Story' is a little bit slow. But if you were reading it monthly over the long haul, a slow down was needed at that point. Plus, in the end, 'Rick's Story' ended up being hugely relevatory and having a long-lasting affect on the rest of the series.

*cough* Obviously, I'm a fan of this series. Notice, however, that I'm not a Sim "acolyte" as Tim Kreider would call us. I think the attention needs to keep being brought back to the book, and that readers should be allowed to judge the merits of the book on its own.

Edit: *I meant until after 'Reads', not after 'Women'.

[Edited 9/29/11 19:56pm]

peedub said:

Cerebus said:

Also, I clearly disagree with a lot of Tim Kreider's assertions and assumptions. But again, that's really par for the course with TCJ and Cerebus. They've never been one to just let things go and move on. I'm not sure they, this author or the comic book reading public at large are qualified to make the decisions they're attempting to get at in this article. Cerebus exists. Sim (and Ger) succeeded at what they set out to do. Everything else is (SHOULD BE) up to the individual reading the book.

did you read the whole essay? i thought kreider maintained a pretty objective tone, gave credit where it was due and acknowledged that sim is a bit off-kilter from societal norms; but that he ultimately was responsible for his own legacy. honestly, it's the most fair assessment of the whole thing that i've read (although my opinion is not informed by a comprehensive knowledge of 'cerebus' itself).

I didn't. I'm not a supporter of TCJ. Haven't been for a very, VERY long time. They've always been biased and used their voice to LOUDLY support or degrade whatever they feel is "good" or "bad" in the comic book world. I've only read what I posted here and I find a great deal of the same ol' same ol' in regards to the TCJ opinion of Sim and how they allow it to reflect on the book, rather than just attempting to let the book speak for itself. Which is how I think all art should be allowed to live and breathe. But then there's the old "no press is bad press" adage, so I'll deal with it. At least it gets people talking about the book again.

i agree they tend to be a bit snobbish (see the recent review of justice league #1), but i thought this essay was pretty fair (again, given my ignorance regarding the series as a whole). i think you might be surprised by the tone of the whole thing. the excerpt that you posted is only the first 4 pages of a 36 page essay. the fact that, after all this time, that much is still being said seems an honor in and of itself.

maybe after another few years, once i've tracked down all of the phone books at a reasonable price and read the whole damn thing, i might be able to discuss it in a more enlightened fashion. it's a task i look forward to. i have no doubt that after that much more time, it'll still be talked about.

Damn. Thirty-six pages is a lot. I'm intrigued, but at the same time I'm not sure I could get through thirty-six pages of somebody else talking about Cerebus.

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Finally picked up Habibi this evening. That is one BIG. ASS. comic book.

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I've also got most (if not all) of the relaunch titles that I'll be reading. So I'll comment on those after I've finished reading them.

DC Crushed The Competition With September Sales

October 7, 2011

Strong sales of the New 52, its heavily promoted line-wide relaunch, made DC Comics the leading direct-market publisher in September, edging out Marvel in market share and dominating the Top 20 titles for the month.

DC carved out a 35.74 percent of the market in dollars and 43.04 percent in units sold, versus Marvel’s 35.7 percent and 37.88 percent, according to figures released this morning by Diamond Comic Distributors.

The $2.99 cover price for the vast majority of DC’s line — the 40-page Action Comics, All-Star Western and Men of War were $3.99 — prevented the dollar share from being larger.

The publisher claimed 17 of the Top 20 spots, led by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman #1 at No. 1. It was followed by Action Comics #1, by Grant Morrison and Rags Morales, which, because of its cover price, was actually the top-selling comic in terms of dollars.

Marvel entered the list at No. 8 with Fear Itself #6, followed by Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #1 at No. 9, and The Amazing Spider-Man #699 at No. 18.