For my money, few comic books has been as thrilling and interesting as Dave Sim’s Cerebus – and no other comic has been as infuriating and disappointing in the end. Here are some of my favorite covers, drawn by Sim and Gerhard. (Sim does the figures and lettering, Gerhard does backgrounds, objects and colors).
Issue 87. The cover, depicting two characters falling off a cliff during a blizzard, is lovely in its own right. I liked it even better once I realized that it was a parody of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight cover — but Sim and Gerhard’s version looks better.
Issue 123. I love this cover portrait of a character who seemed simple, but turned out to have many sides, some of them quite ugly.
Issue 140, one of many nice Cerebus covers in this period featuring small figures in front of amazing Gerhard drawings of architecture. This cover stands out to me because of the subtle but perfect body language; Sebastian sick and exhausted and facing a long climb still to go, and Robbie so worried for his friend and eager to help.
Issue 206. I wanted to include a cover from “Guys,” because I really liked the way that the covers were just additional pages in the comic, and fit into the paperbook book collection seamlessly — but are still lovely cover designs in and of themselves. Also, these covers feature Sim drawing in his Drucker-influenced caricature style, my favorite of Sim’s drawing styles.
Issue 96, probably my favorite of any cover to an individual Cerebus issue. This was the second of a series of five covers featuring tight close-ups of Cerebus, all drawn in a rough cross-hatched style. It’s a powerful image, and a great use of cropping to create drama.
Then there are my two favorite phone book covers:
High Society. A stunning pen-and-ink drawing of a small Cerebus climbing the steps to an enormous hotel. Click on the image to see it larger, or see a huge, high-quality scan on Cerebusfangirl’s Flickr page.
Click on it to see it bigger! As I said, I love Dave Sim in his Mort Drucker influenced mode, and the huge crowd scene on this cover certainly gives me a lot of that. A zillion elements — the insane crowd, the overwhelming mountain and architecture, and the little tiny Cerebus making huge gestures on top of the building — are held together by Sim’s solid design sense, and form a perfect illustration for the story inside.
This is a wrap-around cover, by the way. I couldn’t find a really great scan of the whole wrap-around, but here’s the best I did find (click on it to see it larger).
I don’t think this is a cover, but while looking for Cerebus covers, I came across this impressive painting by Sim and Gerhard of Cerebus having a nightmare. And I have no idea where the painting came from! So if you know, please leave a comment.
I like the Drucker-inspired covers a lot. The parody of Batman is clever.
The development of Cerebus should go down in history as one of the most catastrophic tragedies to ever occur to a serial work.
In any sane world, Sim should’ve been Rockstar-famous. The man is a goddamned genius. While individually his talents can be compared with specialists, I really think he might’ve been the best writer+artist in the whole industry.
But instead he went off the deep end. I always wondered what happened to him – what set him off? An abusive relationship? Just getting older? Something clinical?
If the TV tropes site is correct, apparently Sims tripped on acid a few times. While LSD is generally not as dangerous as made out, it can be cut with terrible chemicals or if taken with similar “experience” drugs (such as ecstasy) can cause permanent mind alteration. Such a sharp change in behavior/outlook usually has a brain chemistry component, from what I understand, although this could have been brought about by life events.
I blame the drugs.
I found this author’s attempt to apply the theories of Eve Sedgwick (that “heterosexual masculinity in our culture is defined in relation to, or by excluding, homosexuality”) to Cerebus quite interesting. I haven’t read that much of the series, though, so I don’t know to what extent it’s valid.
It’s worth noting that a lot of research on Ecstasy was actually done on methamphetamine, and the researcher who did this refused to withdraw his results when this was pointed out.
That said, I suppose it’s possible that something in Sims’s brain chemistry reacted poorly with a drug, but I really wouldn’t be on LSD. He’d been slowly working up to the misogynist crazies for a long time before he went over the edge.
Oh, I know that… but my point is that he started in a great place. The relationship between Astoria and Cerebus in High Society is *fantastic*. And it is polar opposite between his ideals of feminine emoting “voids” and masculine rational “lights” he espouses later in his work. Astoria is the cool, rational, brilliant, and manipulative suffragette, and Cerebus is passionate and irrational. This is perfectly demonstrated in *spoiler* their final act when the city is about to fall – Astoria plans their strategic retreat, while Cerebus finally rejects her and walks off to die in battle… a completely futile but passionate gesture.
It’s the typical “dumb man, smart lady” sitcom couple, but he doesn’t just make the dumb man the brunt of the jokes, Sim makes his brutish hedonism into a virtue. That’s part of the reason I love High Society – despite how much Cerebus and Astoria hate each other, neither of them looks *wrong*.