Cerebend.
Thanks to everyone for your good birthday wishes…it means a lot to me, and it will certainly go a long way toward easing me into my dotage. By the way, today is my sister’s birthday…apparently my parents only had sex in June.
Enough disturbing thoughts – onward to the comics!
It seems hard to believe that Cerebus is finally over…though I wish there were fewer issues filled with pages of teeny-tiny text relating Dave Sim’s views on religion and gender issues (yes, yes, “Men Good, Women Bad,” we get it Dave), I am glad that I read the whole gosh-darn thing. Bruce Baugh has a good overview of a little over 2/3rds of the series.
It seems to me that I remember a mention of a possible Cerebus Jam-type comic called “After Issue 300,” by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and John Totleben, involving a sorcerer reanimating Cerebus’ body for some nefarious purpose. This was years ago when I read this, probably in an Amazing Heroes interview or something, and it probably wasn’t anything more than Moore or Bissette or Dave Sim saying “yeah, when issue 300 comes out, we really need to do this!” There’s little…well, no…chance of this happening, but wouldn’t it have been nice? There’s a mention of it at the end of this page.
A little more definite was a planned X-Men/Cerebus crossover from the very early 1980s…there was a tiny promo shot in, I believe, Comic Reader. Nothing ever came of it, though a Cerebus-resembling S’ym creature popped up in the X-Men comics. Fred Hembeck has a few words about the crossover’s origins.
Well, maybe in a few years Dave will change his mind and we’ll get Cerebus II: The Aardvark Defined or something. Or how about Imesh, about Cerebus’ formative years, where he fights a different version of the Roach every week? (Um, that was an attempt at a Smallville joke…I can tell already it wasn’t very successful.)
Anyway, I think I’ll pull out the ol’ Swords of Cerebus collections and start rereading the series from the beginning. The last few years of the series may have been rough going, but overall it’s a grand achievement – (cliche coming in) “the likes of which we shall never see again.”
