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Post by wildfire2099 on Jan 1, 2017 18:44:01 GMT -5
I got TMNT Ultimate Collection vol. 2 for myself for Christmas... which includes the Cerebus crossover (issue 8).. where the Turtles accidently get kidnapped by a wayward time travel student and end up trapped in Cerebus' world, where they team up to get back home.
Its a fun one off story, but the meta was very interesting. Cerebus treated the turtles as over enthusiastic children, with himself as the veteran that would show them the way... just as I suspect Sim felt about himself as compared to Eastman and Laird in 1986 (which, I think, is just before the Turtles hit the big time). According to the commentart by Eastman and Laird, Sim and Gerhard drew Cerebus themselves, and Sim scripted his dialogue... as if he couldn't possibly let anyone else do it.
I thought it was an interesting dynamic.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 1, 2017 18:54:16 GMT -5
I got TMNT Ultimate Collection vol. 2 for myself for Christmas... which includes the Cerebus crossover (issue 8).. where the Turtles accidently get kidnapped by a wayward time travel student and end up trapped in Cerebus' world, where they team up to get back home. Its a fun one off story, but the meta was very interesting. Cerebus treated the turtles as over enthusiastic children, with himself as the veteran that would show them the way... just as I suspect Sim felt about himself as compared to Eastman and Laird in 1986 (which, I think, is just before the Turtles hit the big time). According to the commentart by Eastman and Laird, Sim and Gerhard drew Cerebus themselves, and Sim scripted his dialogue... as if he couldn't possibly let anyone else do it. I thought it was an interesting dynamic. Last time I read that issue, I hadn't yet read any Cerebus, but I remember really enjoying it. Yeah, I think Sim took the same approach when Cerebus showed up in Spawn. He retained full creative control of the art and story.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Jan 3, 2017 12:57:03 GMT -5
I enjoyed the TMNT crossover. Eastman's & Laird's work was bland (honestly, outside of the clever title, I never understood the popularity of the comic), but Cerebus was well presented and elevated the level opf the whole comic. I'd day it compares favorably with the lesser stories in volume one.
The Spawn thing was entirely too meta for me and I found it a bore.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Feb 2, 2017 21:39:46 GMT -5
Flight unlocks this month. Anyone out there still reading along with me?
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 3, 2017 15:38:09 GMT -5
Flight unlocks this month. Anyone out there still reading along with me? I'll get back on it. I must admit that when the thread started I read the first three volumes in one go, but then since we were months away from discussing most of the material I kind of lost my sense of urgency! I look forward to discussing the post-Melmoth arcs. They are open to many different interpretations.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 5, 2017 16:29:46 GMT -5
The first arc of Mothers & Daughters promises a return to the main storyline, after the detours of Jaka's story and Melmoth. And do we start with a bang! That prolonged fight scene is extremely dynamic, and a sharp contrast to the sedate pace of Melmoth. Readers must however do their homework once we move beyond Cerebus killing Cirinists. In a not-that-successful (in my opinion) attempt to connect a large number of past plot points, Dave takes us back to the demon Khem from a very early issue, to the magical gold coins either forged by Tarim or by Suentus Po, to the black lotus lost early on, to the Aardvark statue destroyed in the Pigts' burrows, to the moon where the judge is chatting with himself, to the creature introduced as Death back when Cerebus still had a long snout... That's a lot of ground to cover, and a lot of back issues to re-read. Such an effort would be repeated in the final issues of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where all the carefully planted hints, bits and pieces finally came together as a coherent and ambitious whole. Here, it doesn't quite work... mostly, I'd say, because most of the elements alluded to don't seem to have much to do with the current story, and because there's a lot of retconning going on. Oh, Death isn't Death after all... It's a minor god named Belinus that came to believe it was Death. This would herald an annoying trend of negating established story elements. What's more, with hindsight, we now know that a lot of the foreboding events we witness in the early pages of Flight (magical coins dancing underwater, the aardvark statue miraculously reassembling itself, and more) eventually turn out not to be important at all. It would be tempting to think, as Cirin does, that all we witness is the work of the Illusionists, but these are explained to be little more than opportunistic parasites who rode on Alfred's coat-tails way back when (Alfred being the son of Suentus Po, in his war leader days). The magical happenstances we are witness to all seem to say that"something wonderful is about to happen", but... well, you know. More puns with the Pigt names... Fret Mc Murray is likely from Fort McMurray, a city in Alberta. We also get more politicians in the Cirinist government; opposing Mrs. Thatcher is Mrs. Copps, a former Canadian deputy prime minister. More pop culture references, too, which always add a lot of light-hearted fun (mixed with social commentary) to these stories. The Oprah Winfrey show segment was hilarious, especially when the scrawny kid is the only one to applaud when professor Ironcat (Cat Yronwoode?) says that what matters is what's inside a person. The Punisherroach and his difficult relation with sexuality struck me as a caricature of the Stereotypical Comic Book Guy, with a fixation for big guns and a cavalier attitude towards women... even as he definitely fears them. Punisherroach pretends to see women as objects of desire or as distraction, nothing more, and acts and talks in a very misogynistic way... but as soon as there's a chance he might have a connection with one, he instantly falls in love and is flabbergasted, even crushed, to realize that his feelings aren't reciprocated. That was a cruel, cruel, cruel depiction... but an apt caricature, in that caricatures take certain traits and exaggerate them to the point of absurdity. Sim is definitely a sharp observer of our society, even if his conclusions about it often differ from the norm. I really enjoy the continuing development of Sim's storytelling (which was already brilliant at that point). One example: when Cerebus calls the Iestians to arms, after a few issues of cutting Cirinists in pieces, there's this feeling that we are now in a "Vengeance is mine" type of arc, and that Cerebus is on the verge of leading a counter-revolution against those evil (*boo hisss*). The crowd does rise against the oppressor, and we see a rag-tag band of angry men charging a handful of professional Cirinist soldiers. One sound panel-filled panel later, we see that all the men are dead, and the Cirinists look straight as the reader (as well as Cerebus, one imagines), as if saying "did you really expect those flea-bitten and ill-equiped dudes to take on a cadre of trained warriors? Really?" One thing that becomes clear here is the difference between Kevillism and Cirinism. Both appear to be variant visions of what Feminism can be. Astoria's kevilism is a manifesto for the individual freedom of women, and in a partiarchal society, it is to be applauded. Unlike Cirin, she doesn't view the point of a woman's existence as caring for the next generation of women; she sees the individual as the important thing. Astoria's feminism does not say much about men, really; just that insofar as they must be considered at all, it is to further the goals of the individual woman. Cerebus's world is in dire need of such a revolution! Cirin's vision of the world is a nightmarish totalitarian, motherhood-oriented state. An Estarcion U.S.S.R. where we can happily murder an entire neighbourhood to protect the "official" version of an event. A vision that evolved from Cirin's (well... Serna's) frustration with her own traumatic life, as is often the case with tyrannical leader who want to correct perceived wrongs. I'm rambling a little... More later as the discussion resumes!!!
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Post by mikelmidnight on Feb 6, 2017 12:38:30 GMT -5
Such an effort would be repeated in the final issues of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where all the carefully planted hints, bits and pieces finally came together as a coherent and ambitious whole. Here, it doesn't quite work... mostly, I'd say, because most of the elements alluded to don't seem to have much to do with the current story, and because there's a lot of retconning going on. Oh, Death isn't Death after all... It's a minor god named Belinus that came to believe it was Death. This would herald an annoying trend of negating established story elements. Moreover, earlier Sim had stated that 'Death' would appear one more time, in issue 300, so I suspect this was a changeover in Sim's viewpoint and part of a deliberate purging of old continuity. It still doesn't make sense to me, because someone still went through a lot of trouble to set up the original ascension, which was a real and significant magical event, but yet somehow it doesn't mean anything? American readers would have assumed it was Fred McMurray, a tv actor from down here, but you may be right. I hated the Punisherroach with a passion. The problem was that all the previous Roach incarnations were parodies of characters I basically liked, so enjoyed seeing them skewered. But at this point I had grown to dislike Marvel's development of the Punisher, so this just seemed like more Punisher to me. I still wish he had kept to his original plan to feature a parody of Chaykin's American Flagg! as a 'Feldan Flag Roach.'
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 6, 2017 13:59:26 GMT -5
American readers would have assumed it was Fred McMurray, a tv actor from down here, but you may be right. Your guess sounds more likely than mine!
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 6, 2017 15:53:21 GMT -5
It still doesn't make sense to me, because someone still went through a lot of trouble to set up the original ascension, which was a real and significant magical event, but yet somehow it doesn't mean anything? That's correct, as far as I understand it... The ascension was obviously a real event, a magical one, which led to Cerebus finding out the origin of the universe and his own eventual fate. But a few years later, the judge who conveyed the information was revealed as an untrustworthy source at best, and an outright fraud at worst. The judge was also wrong about Cerebus living only a few more years before dying alone, unloved and unmourned. At this point in Mothers & Daughters the renewed magical activity seems to point to a new, even more significant ascension, even at the cost of some retconning... however, said ascension (graphically spectacular as it's going to be, with some of the best pages I've ever seen in a comic) will be a big thematic let-down.
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Post by whterry on Feb 6, 2017 22:51:04 GMT -5
Hello! I just found this discussion today and read all 27 pages! This is a terrific forum! I am an old (in many senses of the word) Cerebus reader. I started reading it in high school and I know I was regularly buying it in college!(My photo in the college yearbook shows me reading a Cerebus comic and wearing a Cerbus pin!) This was starting with the High Society issues. I kept buying it even after I had given up all other comics. I even managed to utilize "Jaka's Story" in a Decadent Literature course in grad school. HOWEVER...Dave Sim the writer, and Dave Sim the publisher conspired against me to dislike Dave Sim the artist. I completed my collection (Cerebus bi-weekly 1-20ish and regular monthly books 20ish through 300), but I have not read them all. I grew to resent the ret-cons, the verbose prose, the forced literary lectures, and the deadly pace of the stories. I gave up reading sometime in the Three Stooges section, whatever it is called. I hope engage in this discussion with you all. I have never been an internet forum participant before. I gotta tell you though, there are bits from Cerebus that STILL make me laugh! Wuffa-wuffa-wuffa, puncheminnaface, "Cerebus told you his britches were too tight," Archbishop Posey, etc. And yes, "something fell" often echoes through my mind when I hear something fall. What's the next assignment?
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Feb 7, 2017 5:04:59 GMT -5
Hello! I just found this discussion today and read all 27 pages! This is a terrific forum! I am an old (in many senses of the word) Cerebus reader. I started reading it in high school and I know I was regularly buying it in college!(My photo in the college yearbook shows me reading a Cerebus comic and wearing a Cerbus pin!) This was starting with the High Society issues. I kept buying it even after I had given up all other comics. I even managed to utilize "Jaka's Story" in a Decadent Literature course in grad school. HOWEVER...Dave Sim the writer, and Dave Sim the publisher conspired against me to dislike Dave Sim the artist. I completed my collection (Cerebus bi-weekly 1-20ish and regular monthly books 20ish through 300), but I have not read them all. I grew to resent the ret-cons, the verbose prose, the forced literary lectures, and the deadly pace of the stories. I gave up reading sometime in the Three Stooges section, whatever it is called. I hope engage in this discussion with you all. I have never been an internet forum participant before. I gotta tell you though, there are bits from Cerebus that STILL make me laugh! Wuffa-wuffa-wuffa, puncheminnaface, "Cerebus told you his britches were too tight," Archbishop Posey, etc. And yes, "something fell" often echoes through my mind when I hear something fall. What's the next assignment? Welcome, whterry! It's great to have you here and an honor to be the first online community you've jumped into. And yes, I think anyone reading Dave Sim necessarily develops a love/hate relationship with him and his many facets. Personally, I love Dave Sim the creator, have no opinion towards Dave Sim the publisher, and have utter contempt for Dave Sim the person.
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Post by josephwyatt88 on Mar 2, 2017 1:18:25 GMT -5
Damn. It's been a really busy couple of months (green cards, work permits and employment after six months without them is something of a timesuck), so my timings been thrown way off, I thought Flight would be debuting today and it would be a good time to return but it looks like I'm behind by a month! I have a day off tomorrow so I'll use that to have a flip back through Flight and gather some thoughts on it.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Apr 28, 2017 9:29:44 GMT -5
So I am inexcusably behind in my reading right now, but I have detoured into reading Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck for the first time. I don't know if this has ever been mentioned by Sim or explored in any criticism of his work, but it seems clear to me that, to a large extent, Cerebus is Howard the Duck -- the anthropomorphic outsider thrown into a world he never made and battling anger issues and internal sanity while vying for political office and struggling with his conflicting feelings towards the hot woman with which he finds himself paired. Seems like Sim just sort of picked up where Gerber left off, only going into a more surreal and less literal world than Howard's. EDIT: Did a little research. This writer seems to see it the same way: momentofcerebus.blogspot.com/2013/12/this-duck-this-aardvark.htmlWhat do you guys think?
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Post by mikelmidnight on Apr 28, 2017 11:55:40 GMT -5
I don't know if there are any quotes from Sim specifically on the influence, but as someone who was a fan from the earlier days of the comic (I came in around issue 21 or so), everybody reading comics at the time would have assumed that Cerebus (along with Star*Reach publication's Quack) was following in Howard's wake.
I should add as well that Sim's sample page for Howard is horrifically awful and I am immensily grateful he never got the assignment.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on May 2, 2017 8:59:21 GMT -5
(That exception does not prove the rule. Grumblegripegrumblegripegrumblegripe). Say mikelmidnight , are you referring to the Dave Sim-drawn page in Howard the Duck magazine #8? I didn't dislike it. There seemed to be something wrong with Bev's arm but I could have gotten used to Dave's Howard the duck. (His Duck-Thing was pretty cool!)
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