Just a brief thought about Cerebus #300

§ March 29th, 2004 § Filed under Uncategorized § 2 Comments

As I was pulling out my Cerebus collection to begin, someday, the Great Cerebus Re-Read Project 3000, something about issue #300 kept bugging me. Spoilers ahoy, if you haven’t read the entire series:

Okay, so if Elrod was, as it was revealed around issue 170-180 or so, not an actual person but some kind of magical extension of Cerebus that Cerebus inadventently created, wouldn’t Elrod’s appearance in Cerebus’ afterlife vision in #300 imply that 1) something’s fishy about this particular afterlife, or 2) Cerebus is simply imagining the whole thing? (Or, I suppose, there’s a third possibility…that Cerebus’ creation had enough of an independent will to generate a soul for itself that could make the transition into the afterlife.)

Boy, heady stuff for something that began as a parody of Windsor-Smith’s Conan.

2 Responses to “Just a brief thought about Cerebus #300”

  • Something IS wrong with that afterlife… that’s why Cerebus desperately tries NOT to go into the light. He notices that Rick ISN’T there, and so he is not one of the “two” that goes on to true reward. It’s the final result of the theology he outlined in the book at the beginning of The Last Day.

  • Margaret says:

    Another Cerebus fan asked Dave Sim about that during a phone interview, from the fan’s post to the yahoo!group:
    …how Elrod was “poit”ed out of existence during “Reads”, but showed up in the afterlife, and how that involved Joanne talking about him as her neighbor during “Guys”. It goes like this: To make the “married to Jaka, living next door to Joanne” thing happen during “Minds”, even to just Cerebus, “Dave” had to actually make it happen. He couldn’t exactly un-make it. As such, Joanne became real, where she lived became real, and her neighbors had to be filled in to make up the fact Cerebus and Jaka didn’t live there. Elrod was basically pulled back into existence to fill the gap, and as a result, he ended up married to Red Sophia (interesting observation, if only to me: Dave pronounces her name as “Sof-fi-ah” instead of “So-fee-uh”). And because of that, he was able to eventually end up in the “light”. The “filling in” bit relates to how he figures God probably would have to do it, and why God doesn’t do it, which relates to his view that there are no parallel realities (which he discussed during the start of “The Last Day”).
    the post:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cerebus/message/175486