Reads

Cerebus #9

by Dave Sim, Gerhard

Reprinting Cerebus Issues 175-186

The ninth volume of the Cerebus the Aardvark series, Reads, is the penultimate chapter of the larger Mothers and Daughters story. This is one of the most powerful editions in the series and one of the most ambitious narratives that Dave Sim has ever attempted.

In addition, Reads is the most controversial volume of the Cerebus series to date because of a parallel narrative involving two characters--Viktor Reid and Viktor Davis--who are both alter egos for Dave Sim. This controversy is a shame because the offensive section in Reads--which explores the relationship between men and women--represents only one possible view of this subject. When read as part of the whole series, the passages that may have seemed shocking to some, appear (like all points of this narrative) to question and provoke rather than offend. Viktor Davis is far from a reliable narrator, an idea that is reinforced by the final paragraphs of his narrative and demonstrated by the scariest of all Cerebus practical jokes. Are Viktor Davis or Viktor Reid representative of Dave Sim or simply aspects of his persona? The ending suggests the answer.

Meanwhile, Cerebus, Po, Cirin, and Astoria debate the important stuff, including our aardvark friend's genitalia, the history of Illusionism, the nature of power, and the fate of Astoria's child. Despite the bad rap, Reads is Cerebus at its finest. Like the best of art, Reads has the power to shock, surprise, amuse, and offend--and it even has a whiz-bang fight scene. What more could you want?

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fantasy, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Religion, Satire

247 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

David Victor Sim is a Canadian comic book, artist and publisher, best known as the creator of Cerebus the Aardvark.

Reviews

[Little Timmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An Ok read in this series. Not great but not horrible. Recommended

[Killian · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's rare to experience such a meticulously composed and engaging artistic statement whose sole purpose is defame women, and strongly advocate for a misogynist worldview.

Sim comes off as exceptionally bitter, lonely, and wounded, lashing out at the world when the problem very much seems to be with him.

It's impossible to separate the art and artist with this one, and even for all the wonderful things Reads has to say about the creative process, about life and love, it is ultimately weakened by the philosophical worldview of a sexually frustrated teenager being presented as though it were some kind of cosmic wisdom.

[The_Mad_Swede]

Collecting issues # 175–186 of Dave Sim's 300 issues limited series Cerebus the Aardvark and being the third part of four in the Mothers & Daughters story arc, I find this volume to be the weakest link in the story so far, but also the hardest one to in any satisfying way rate (which is why I have left it unrated). In order to explain, one should first state that Reads can be divided into three separate stories and two halves.

To be more precise, the first six of the collected issues (# 175–180) is a mixture between the ongoing Cerebus saga ­ picking up where Women ended and involving a discussion between Suentus Po, Astoria, Cirin and Cerebus (well, Suentus Po doing most of the talking) – and a story about the writer Viktor Reid. The latter story is told in prose segments with illustrations similar to the ones used in Jaka's Story, but ultimately in their rather loose relation to the main story (that the writer is producing "reads" in Estarcion and specifically in Iest and focusing his writing on events relating to Cerebus' ascension) these segments is more reminiscent of Melmoth albeit not as tightly held together. This half of the book is still the stronger part. The Viktor Reid story has its flaws to be sure, and Sim is not really a marvellous prose writers (which always makes the story pay when he goes into that particular mode to strongly).

The real problems start in the second half (# 181–186), however. Here the Cerebus story (as much as there is of it, and far too often way too little) is reduced to what I assume should be an epic battle with cosmic implications between Cerebus and Cirin. This is almost exclusively done as a silent comic, without dialogue or captions, and ends up rushing past you (these pages disappear before you know it) while simultaneously taking forever (hardly anything happens in this epic battle during these six issues, and when compared to the third story... well). While this is slightly annoying in and of itself, the real disturbance is the story of Viktor Davis, told in prose and this time without illustrations at all (and there's much more of it). Now, Viktor Davis is also a writer... more precisely THE writer of Cerebus. Now do not get me wrong, I can appreciate metafiction as much as the next guy and possibly even more, heck there have always been certain metafictional elements to Cerebus in its use of parody, most clearly in the character of the Cockroach. But, and this is a mighty big but, the not too subtle intrusion of Dave Sim's alias, Viktor Davis, generates problems on many levels, and the fact that Sim's fabled misogynism here suddenly surfaces is not the least of them. These loose, fragmentary prose pieces reads in part as overly overtly done metafiction where Sim overplays his hand in nine cases of ten (yes, yes, I get it you know) and the rest as an ongoing essay on Female Voids and Male Lights. Now the latter totally throws around a creation myth offered at the end of Church & State and with no more explanation as to why the old version has been thrown out than a little comment that (metafictional) "the reader" dislikes it as much as I do, obviously noting that Sim has not forgotten the old version, but no more. Secondly, I cannot help but wonder whether Sim is playing an elaborate hoax on me (at least in part), seeing how far he can push his readers with his metafiction and his misogynism, or whether he as it is stated that Viktor Davis has been, has indeed been diagnosed with a mild schizophrenia, and that what I am reading is actually an insight into a mentally unstable an delusional mind. Truly, parts of the analysis is very spot on, but Sim's insistence on putting everything dowm to a dichotomy between Male and Female or Intellect and Emotion, not only seems wrong as a basic premise, but I am simply not buying into the stereotype that intellect is a male category and emotion a female one. This renders all the bits that are actually good a bit hard to take down at times, to say the least. The clear cut line Sim makes between intellect and emotion, would however make a lot more sense if I am looking into the mind of someone mentally unstable, inacpable of dealing with emotions, and therefore a person who would obviously to some extent truly see a clearly divided line of fire between thinking and feeling.

So, how do I feel about all this? Well the latter half of the volume took me quite some time to finish; like a meal that is immensely hard to chew down. I cannot say I am particularly likely to re-read this volume (well possibly the comics parts of it), but then again, I am not at all sure that "liking it" is part of what it requires of its readers. And seeing it either as deliberate provocation by Sim or a glimpse of an unstable mind (or perhaps a combination of the two) makes it fascinating to some degree at the very least. And after all, we are capable of exposing ourselves to ideas that are contrary to our own opinions and beliefs, and to learn from that as well. We do not have to agree with everything we read, but it would probably be boring in the long run to only read things with which we fully agreed from the beginning. Sim offers at least me resistance in my reading in this volume. It is not entertaining and while I definitely have not swallowed his misogynism, confronting it has definitely forced me to both think and feel very actively.

[Hamish · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm going to get a little pretentious for a second and discuss my opinion on art (feel free to skip this paragraph). I think the point of any art form (music, lit, comics, film, painting, whatever) is to provide aesthetic pleasure. Whether it accomplishes this by simply being beautiful, by making you feel something intensely, or just teasing your brain in a novel or interesting manner, it's doing its job correctly. I don't think, however, that art is there to make a Point (like maybe "capitalism is bad" or "communism is bad"). Say you listen to a really moving, powerful instrumental song. Would that song become better if it was titled "Free Tibet" instead of "Sue's Last Ride"? Would Madame Bovary be a better novel if it advocated for the overthrow of the monarchy? Lots of writers make Points in their novels, even lots of great writers (Tolstoy comes to mind), but their work is great despite the Point, not because of the Point. The real problem is when writers neglect the aesthetic side of their work to make their Point. But since I don't think that the Point really contributes to the value of an artistic work, I also don't think a piece is better because I agree with its Point or worse because I don't.

What I'm trying to say is that yes, Dave Sim's views on women are pretty vile. However, that's not the reason that Reads is bad. If his views on women were great, Reads would still be bad. What makes it bad is that he completely abandons almost all elements of the story this volume (allegedly) continues to make space for some pretty poorly-written, didactic, Point-making text pieces. Sim is a great visual artist, but he's a pretty mediocre prose writer. You can kind of see what he's stylistically reaching for, but he easily misses the mark.

There's three types of text pieces: a dull narrative decrying the comic industry (in an almost insultingly thin allegory), an even duller conversation with the author, and a mind-numbingly poorly argued essay on the "male light and the female void" (he doesn't even logically argue so much as rant. He seems to assume that you already understand how he reached his point, and instead simply rants on and on about its ramifications. You'd think that someone making as bold a statement as "women are black holes that suck in all that's good about men" might try to, you know, logically convince everyone of that point. But he barely even tries. Though given the absurdity of the statement it's difficult to imagine making a cogent argument for it anyway). Sim seems to think that these prose pieces somehow enrich or complement the comic part of the story. The first third of that is a character lecturing the other characters, and the last two thirds is Cerebus and Cirin beating the shit out of each other. If you think the text pieces in any way relate to that, you are out of your fucking mind.

The prose bits go incredibly slowly, making this a turgid crawl to get through. The comic bits go so quickly that they account for maybe 5% of your reading time. Those parts still show Sim's strengths; the guy can really write/draw a riveting, ultra-slowmo action sequence. But that accounts for so little of the volume that it's not enough to save it.

P.S. Dave Sim is, by his own admission, schizophrenic (or "borderline schizophrenic"). I've read a few interviews with him and the guy clearly has a persecution complex, among other issues. The thing about schizophrenics is THEIR BRAINS DON'T WORK CORRECTLY. Yes, this can allow a person to obtain great creative heights, but it also means that they may fixate on a certain belief regardless of all logical arguments against it. Sim's views on women are clearly both not based in reality and the product of an unhealthy brain. It's not worth getting offended by them.

[Christian Lipski · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book I see as being more or less the "end" of Cerebus. From this point, the storyline was no longer about terrestrial things, about political struggle for control of Iest, or about Cerebus' quest for power. To bastardize the poet, the world ended not with a bang, but with four bangs. After this, the series' focus is split between Sim's twin masters: The Evil Female Void & God.

Reads' content is divided between pages of traditional comic content (the Cerebus storyline) and text. The text in the first half of the book tells the story of an author who sells out to become successful, and is essentially a cautionary tale about the evils of publishing companies.

The text in the second half is Sim (in a saran-wrap-transparent disguise) talking directly to "the reader" about his discoveries about the nature of men and women. And is basically the point where excrement hits fan. I'll skip the explanation, only offering his two main concepts, the Male Light and the Female Void.

On pg 233 he derides Emotion as "animalistic, serpent-brain stuff" and on 239 he claims "Sex" as his "Gold", but perhaps Sim's Sex is all based on thought. Who knows, he went celibate eventually. The syllogism he offers on 240 is faulty in the extreme. On page 245 he points meaningfully to the fact that just months after introducing a Margaret Thatcher character in his book, she was removed from office.

Not to attempt to make medical diagnoses, but Sim's proof of his beliefs are a bit shaky in the logical-foundation area and honestly evoke the tenuous logic patterns of the mentally ill (actually pretty similar to L. Ron Hubbard's writings). Any attempt to negate by counter-example is pre-written off by being labeled an exception to the rule. QED.

Sigh. And this is ending up as the lasting impression for the magnificent and moving work that is Cerebus. The sadly humorous part is that this book contains the most exciting and grueling fight scene I've seen, maybe ever, but every few pages of excitement has to be broken up by smug, self-important rambling.

READ THIS BOOK. Don't skip it. Not just for the great storyline, but to know what Sim believes. Don't rely on rumor, not even my review. See for yourself.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, hey. This volume is not nearly as bad as I remembered. It's really four separate stories— two in prose form and two in sequential art— and only one is terrible.

There's a great story about the encounter between the three aardvarks and Astoria. Suenteus Po and Astoria get some of their best moments to this point.

There's a decent, beautifully drawn story about Cerebus and Cirin that starts out with an absolutely brutal, positively Tarantino-esque melee before leading onward and out, into the next arc.

There's a competent piece of allegorical fiction about artistic vision and creative potential within the framework of the publishing industry, featuring an Estarcion-dwelling analog for Sim (Viktor Reid) and written with a baroque exuberance that carries the work, despite some occasionally vapid polemics.

And then there's that story, featuring a fictionalized-but-contemporary Sim stand-in (Viktor Davis). And it's bad. It's really, really bad. It's not particularly clever, it's not particularly provocative, and it's not justified in any way within the context of the book.

But, you know, that's not enough to ruin the volume. And the rest is pretty good.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reads is three stories. The one most germane to the overall storyline is the continuation of the confrontation between Cerebus, Cirin, Po and Astoria that closed out the last volume. Po is firmly in control here, keeping the other aardvarks on a firm leash as he expounds on the emptiness of power. He is humble, measured, certain and wise. His piece said, he walks out of the throne room and out of the story. The only one who takes any heed is Astoria. Her decision is beautiful, one I'm envious of. Of course, Astoria being Astoria, she can't resist one last quip. That final pause, smile, and suggestion are one of my favourite things in the whole book. And then she's gone as well, leaving Cerebus and Cirin to duke it out in an epic, gruelling, very physical, fight scene that lasts for dozens of pages. They take chunks out of each other, Cirin cuts off Cerebus' ear, both are drenched in blood. It seems clear that the fight can end in nothing but death for one of them, until - something fell - the walls of the throne room fall away, and the throne itself, with the two rival aardvarks clinging on, starts rising and accelerating away from Iest and out into space. The end. This whole section is amazingly choreographed and drawn, with Gerhard once again excelling at creating a solid three dimensional space for the characters to move around. Paired with the dialogue and four way interaction in the earlier part of the book, this is some of the best Cerebus yet. But it's only a third of the book.

There are also two long text pieces running alongside the comics action. Throughout the first half we have been privy to the misadventures of Victor Reid, a writer of "reads", penny dreadfuls of the kind we previously saw Oscar writing about Jaka. It's a roman a clef based on the early 90s comics scene with plenty of recognisable characters. This of course means that it is hopelessly dated, but it's interesting in as much as it is a robust defence of Sim's attitude to publishing and creativity - do it yourself, maintain control, be beholden to no one. Cerebus was of course a self published work throughout its entire run, and this is basically Dave explaining why. But if that wasn't metafictional enough for you, the second text segment (I say segment, these are more like long essays), opens with a drawing of someone who looks an awful lot like Dave turning from a drawing board on which we can see the pages we've just read being created. It's time to meet Victor Davis. He wants to talk to you.

From here, we are off into something very like the Mind Games from earlier volumes. Victor Davis is talking to someone labelled "the reader", leading them on, tricking them (I vividly remember my reaction to the 200 issue fakeout when I read it for the first time), and controlling them. It's interesting stuff, with cameos from Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. And Davis then switches to telling the reader how (he believes) the world works, an arrangement of Lights, strong, creative, dynamic leaders, and Voids, empty leeches that feed off them and pull them down. Not so controversial in itself - I've met plenty of Voids and Lights in my own life - but Davis goes on to divide these qualities along gender lines. Women are Voids, depicted as literally eating the brains of their male partners. Unsurprisingly, this is where a large chunk of the audience got off the bus. This is the part of the series that has led to Cerebus being excoriated online and Dave Sim dismissed as a wacko nutjob (mind you, as far as Dave's unusual beliefs go, you ain't seen nothing yet), and that's before you get onto the Death vs Life spiel after the attacks on feminism. Per Bingo's comments on Women, there are points that might be interesting in here, but the presentation of the ideas is let down by hamfisted hyperbole. The writing is incredibly verbose - the Merged Permanence argument Dave spends pages and pages outlining is far better described in Cyril Connolly's famous one sentence quote about the pram in the hall. Once you wade through it, there is however much to chew on throughout this whole piece. To what degree are we supposed to equate Victor Davis with Dave Sim? The repeated refrain of "all stories are true" stacked against the way the Big Bang here is exactly the opposite of what Dave showed us at the end of Church & State? How the idea of Merged Permanence is given dramatic life in the hermaphrodite Cerebus, constantly chasing power, wealth, sex, respect but never finding satisfaction? But the burning question, of course, is is Cerebus misogynist?.

I can't answer that. I've turned it over in my head for years, and I've never definitively come down on one side of the fence or the other. Look at some of the contentious statements in Women. Victor Davis' screeds don't make for pleasant or sensible reading. And yet, and yet...in just this volume, we've seen Milieu's diligence and passion in the Victor Reid story being thwarted by a lazy indolent man too weak to stand up for himself. We've had Astoria, the prototypical modern feminist, as the most sympathetic character in this volume, the only one who can recognise wisdom when it is shared with her, and one of the few characters in the whole work who is given a satisfactory character arc (and she has a great exit). Elsewhere in the series, the relationship between the workshy parasite Rick and the artistically committed Jaka is exactly that of a Void and a Light, yet the genders are opposite to Davis' proclamations.

So, did I enjoy Reads? Pfffft. The Victor Reid section is superfluous and forgettable. The Cerebus stuff is brilliant. The Victor Davis part is alternatively intriguing and infuriating, thought provoking and ridiculous. Ultimately, Reads is what it is. To a significant proportion of that part of the public which cares about comics, it's come to define Cerebus, although of all the volumes in the series it's the one that has least to do with Cerebus the character or Cerebus the story. Reads is what you get when you turn away from the Victor Reid route. It's not edited, it's not focus grouped, it's not smoothed down or made palatable. I'm not sure if I like it, but I admire the tenacity, the unyielding vision, the individualism that forced it into being.

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

[Felix · Rating 2 out of 5]

Again, this is a tough one to rate, since there are some parts that are okay, some that are good and some that hit rock bottom. The pictorial sequences that show Cerebus and Cirin in a bloody close-quarters sword-and-fists fight are as artistically convincing as ever even though the pacing is so extremely slow-motion that it runs the risk of no longer being able to captivate the reader's interest. Still, in the light of the second half of the text-only passages the word "mother-complex" springs to mind in letters of epic proportions.

The first half of the text-only passages (yes, I know there are illustrations) tells the story of comic-artist Victor Reid's struggle with an evil lecherous publishing house called Vertigo Horse and its haughty, malignant, scheming female editor. An amusing though thinly veiled satire of the world of comic-publishing that reflects Sim's own crusade against corporate publishing and already foreshadows the metafictional passages that follow it.

It is in these metafictional text-only passages that the bone of contention lies, since here Sim's extremely misogynist views are expressed at length. For the author's alter-ego Viktor Davis, females are leeches that do not have any creative power of their own and are therefore called Voids. Males on the other hand are possessors of the light of creation and can either develop this flaming potential of creativity by never getting too attached to any female 'void' or become a brainless pawn, that is sucked dry by the parasitic woman that has attached itself to him. All counter-arguments are impossible because for Sim/Davis there are only two possibilities: a) you are a thinking, reasonable man and then you agree or b) you disagree which means you are a brainless pawn reiterating feminist nonsense unable to think for yourself (as made evident by the fact that you disagree). Yeah, well, whatever...

The only reason I give two stars is the quality of the artwork and the actually quite well-written satire. I find it really sad that the hateful misogynist cr*p almost completely blots out the good points of Sim's argument like for example his critique of the flaws of a self-immunising feminist theory and his analyses of rhetoric vs. action, anthropocentric world-views etc. They are quite good but unfortunately all complexity is finally reduced to the oversimplified dichotomy of evil women vs. good men.

[Robbie Shepherd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dave Sim reaches the Perceived Brilliance=Becoming a Ginormous Asshole of a human being section of Cerebus with the last text sections of this volume. Worth a read as a “see it to believe it” kind of thing.
Holy fuck I’m still baffled a HOW GOOD (and objectively brilliant) Cerebus had been up to this point, and how it led to this PILE OF STEAMING MISOGYNISTIC SHIT that parades itself as the truth/a revelation/etc etc. I wish Dave Sim had taken his meds for this one.
7 volumes to go.

[Rex Hurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collecting issues 175-186 of the series, it is the third volume in the Mothers and Daughters arc. This volume breaks down into three sections: the one everyone cares about, the confrontation between Cerebus, Astoria, Cirin, and Po; and the other two which many many people hated. But we're going to cover them anyway.

Of the four characters Po takes the center stage, explaining that his self-exile is due to the “magnifier” ability of the Aardvark mutation. Things happen around an aardvark that it has no control over. It is a celestial force of undirected change. But ultimately this change will come to nothing, as once the magnifier influence is removed, everything falls back into its natural pattern. Essentially the aardvark is a bubble in reality that the universe will eventually smooth out. Po then takes his bows and leaves, stating that the attempting to control another is useless and he would prefer to live quietly until he dies.

Astoria’s exit is done with style and taste. She alone listens to Po’s words and realizes that she cannot achieve the things that she wants and remain happy. Her and Cirin make are faced with the choice and both, representing their philosophies (described in Women) choose opposite sides- as they do in all things. She chooses happiness and Cirin chooses power.

Before Astoria leaves she does give us the revelation that Cerebus is a hermaphrodite and that Cirin’s greatest fear is that he will impregnate himself and become the progenitor of a whole race of Aardvarks. This scares the feminist more than anything else, as she, the great advocate of motherhood, desires this spot in history. Her need to be the “great mother” overrides all other consideration, leading to her moral and political corruption.

Also making his last appearance is Elrod of Melvinbone, the lost scion of a dead race who talks like Foghorn Leghorn. Easily the most annoying character in the series, I welcomed his departure. As it turns out, he is a illusionary product of the chaos gems from issue two and only held together by a belief in himself. Once it’s revealed to him that he isn’t real, he disappears. Good riddance.

Thus we are left with the massive fight scene between the two unwavering polar opposites of Cerebus series. Cirin, who will not give up her political rhetoric or desires, and Cerebus who fights because that is what he does. He is the warrior and what is important to him is the struggle, not the why of it or how it will end, but the fight itself. He fights because without the struggle he has no definition. Thus a giant battle is inevitable. He had spotted an enemy, even if she is an enemy that he doesn’t understand or care about, therefore she must be destroyed.

The battle, taking most of the last half of the book, is long, extraordinarily bloody, untainted by dialogue, and beautifully illustrated. It is a joy to gaze upon and took me just as long sucking in the visuals and reading the prose. Epic by any definition, it ends spectacularly with another ascension, up to the heavens. But it won’t be the Judge they meet this time, that characters seems to have been merging with the Roach, causing split-personality and forty thousand eyes. It’s why I feel it’s a shame that many believe this volume to be the series’s jumping-the-shark moment (When we all know that distinction goes to volume 13 Going Home).

The section which many claimed was boring is the “reads” story, which this volume is named for. The style used here is double column prose with a single illustration on the corresponding page. In the series, reads are heavily illustrated books, cheaply produced, and lurid in plot, popular among the masses. The protagonist here Victor Reis is a suddenly popular author, now faced with dealing with the politics of a big publisher. His wishes are crushed beneath the weight of the money offered and ultimately he crosses the line between being successful as an author and selling out as an artist.

His dreams of the Ascension reads, where he wants to ascend in his writing is put aside, his ideas of cutting down the illustration in reads- an unsubtle jab at what the author is doing in this section. All the protagonist's desires are shoved aside and he becomes a parody of himself, churning out faded shadows of his past work.

For some reason these sections garnered a lot of vitriol from longtime fans. I’m not sure why, in reality it wasn’t much different from the style he used in Jaka’s Story, only with more text. One fan said to me, “If I wanted to read a book, I’d read a goddamn book. But I wanted a comic book here.” It could be that fans were more interested in the overall plot between the series’s main player, and felt that the Victor Reis story just got in the way. If this is the case then I can understand. The confrontation was certainly much more interesting. I do remember the text elements not being such a problem when reading Jaka’s Story- probably because the two elements were linked more firmly together.

The author, in his introduction, suggests that if the reader has a problem with the text pieces then they should feel free to take a razor blade and cut them out. Personally I have a less damaging suggestion: read the book out of order. Start with the confrontation, skipping ahead to each part. Then read the Victor Reis reads section. Then the editorial section at the end with the paper thin facade of Victor Davis. The books flows better that way and you will find it a much more satisfying read.

The last part mostly is experimental writing by the author. He plays with different methods of expressing himself, interspersed with various vignettes containing famous comic book personalities and other observations. It comes across very distinctly that the author was a mean drunk. The type to make vicious phone calls at night while shitfaced, then forget them in the morning. It’s just as well that he converted to Islam (or a subsidiary thereof) and quit the vino. The writing itself is not great, can be tedious, and really out of place in the book.

The end of this volume contains the infamous issue number 186, Tangent, which went on to become one of the most controversial books in comic history and this, coupled with the other criticisms above, lead to a sharp decline in Cerebus’s readership A lot of people have tried to defend or excuse this portion claiming it to be satire, but it certainly doesn’t read that way. I am of the opinion that he believes what he says, at least at the time of its publication, and must point out that many of his points in regards of feminism and misandry are becoming more and more popular in light of the anti-sjw backlash appearing online. It seems that once again Sims was ahead of the curve. He highlights that in the then media (the 90s) and other talking points feelings trump reason. How one feels about a situation is the most important aspect of the story, not the facts.

His view of male feminists and men in relationships in modern times is, again, now standard. He held back previously from these observations because he was trying to get laid. Now that has given it up, he felt free to express himself without restraint. And as most the male population still wants to have sex, they go along with the feminist dogma.

Using the idea of the female void vs. the male light, he lambastes the idea of patriarchy ruling the government, and the politics of feelings have overrun the necessity to get things done. Virtue signaling through government funds is the most important and visual part of a politician's job. Though I believe part of that is the introduction of television into the political process, not the feminization of politics themselves.

None of these are new ideas now. They are howled from every corner of Youtube. The skeptic community agrees to all of his points and expands upon them. So why was he vilified in certain quarters? Because he was the first to come out and say it, and the first man who tells the truth is always nailed to a tree. The new Mountain Dew flavor should be “Dave Sim did nothing wrong.”

[Luc · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have read this book a bunch of times but I usually skipped the voluminous text version. In the prologue Dave Sim says the text has little bearing on the Cerebus storyline and the few times I tried to read it, I found it pretty boring. This time, though I stuck with and boy howdy did it make an impression.

First, let's review the "comic" part. If you just stick to the comic, this could be a 3 star review of a frustratingly short addition to the Cerebus story.

However, if you read the "novelly" bits, it becomes a dragging bit of self-infulgent tripe that take a sharp turn into crazy, woman hating conspiracy town. If you possess a vagina, you will want to pretend this book doesn't exist or else you will never want to read Sim again.

OK, I have called Sim an asshat in all my reviews of his books so far. I sort of knew he was a misogynist but never having read the novelly bits of Reads, I never realized how much. Yeah! I thought that "male Light and female Void" was kind of a theme that wouldn't fly with a female audience. But this time I read the whole Reads book and I see that Sim has pretty much got all the crazy and all the misogyny. Or if he doesn't , he doesn't leave a lot for other people.

The Reads bit is introduced by Sim as a sort of parabola on the role of creator in the comic books world. He introduces Viktor Sim, a promising yet dissolute character who's a Cerebus contemporary. But Viktor quickly becomes an avatar of Sim, a name dropping avatar that can't stop mentioning his conversations with Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Jeff Smith for some reason. An avatar that also thinks the reader is a lot more involved and interested in Sim's rant than the reader actually is, to the point where the reader becomes a character in Sim's bizarre narrative.

But then you hit the last 14 pages and Sim decides to drop any kind of subtlety and drops you in the middle of the most woman hating rant I have read in a long time. A whole bit about how greatness is usually (not all the time but most of the time) the province of Men. Specifically men who resisted the woman Void that literally sucks the money, happiness and intelligence out of men.

Truly, one cannot do the amount of crazy in this text justice.

If you want to read the Cerebus series, I very strongly advise to skip the text part of Reads, stick to the comic. If you're a woman, you may even want to pretend this book doesn't exist. If you ARE a woman, and I suggested Cerebus to you before reading all of Reads and couldn't serve you a devent warning, I am sorry. Sim isn't just an asshat, he the asshat from which all asshattery springs forth.

[Rockito · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a long while but I finally have read the infamous "Reads".
Reads honors it's name by being mostly prose with in-between comic sections showing the battle between Cerebus and Cirin (which is one of the best fights ever done in the realm of sequential art).
About the prose sections, which feature the reviled essay on the "Female void and the Male light", Dave flat out says that not only he expected people to be angry with what he said, but also angry about the way Cerebus' stories were being told, regardless of his views, and even though you have to be in a very "special" state of mind to agree with his views on the "Female void", his views on how "Emotion based" our culture is (even if his definition of emotion is a little "particular") is hard to not find interesting and thought-provoking, specially his definition of a "Fear-based society".
I you're deeply hurt by things said/written by some canadian you've never met, avoid it. Otherwise, recommended just to delve into the mind of Dave Sim.

[Jessica Fure · Rating 1 out of 5]

I ripped through this and Britney Spears' book today. Polar opposites, both terrible. However, Britney's book is passively terrible, while this is actively so. Better to be a ditz than a douche, my brother.

[Gilly Singh · Rating 2 out of 5]

"I'm not here to make you feel good. I'm here to make you think. And to make you think, I have to make you see."

- Dale Sim, Cerebus Volume 9: Reads

The volume which includes the controversial issue. Only... its not actually as bad as I was expecting it to be. Don't get me wrong? There are some of the most misogynistic paragraphs imaginable included in that end piece but, they feel like they're just a continuation and logical conclusion of previous characterisations of the relationships between Sim's character. In that sense I felt "prepared" for them. They also feel a little too on-the-nose, almost as though the author is trying to provoke and offend. All of that being said, I can understand why many people left the series at this stage as I found myself wanting to shout, "F*ck you!" at the author whilst reading the worst parts.

It is sometimes hard to separate the artist from their art and that has not been the more the case, in Cerebus, that whilst reading Reads. The biggest problem here is that, whilst there are autobiographical sections, in which it is easy to put the views described into the mouth of the author, there are also other v different, yet well rounded, characters which muddy the water. This implies Dave Sim's actual views are much complex and self-contradictory than most would give credit.

The self referential, self conscious element to the story telling in Cerebus can subtract from the work somewhat at times. This is only natural in a work in which the writer has poured so much of themselves.

In the prologue to Melmouth, Dave Sim stated that readers of Oscar Wilde read into his life what they want to. In many respects this foreshadowed how the sexist views expressed in this volume would be ascribed to being Sim's voice, as they have aligned with things he has said in interviews, but just as much part of the authorial voice is that of Suentious Po puts forward a markedly different standpoint, one of attempted balance.

As a whole this volume was enjoyable but, much of the text portions are poorly written and disconnected from the wider narrative. They also really slow down the pace of the narrative in such a way as to make it almost jarring. The comic portions whip by at a breakneck speed whereas the written sections can be a slog to get through. I feel a little bad scoring this volume 2 out of 5 stars but I don't feel I had much choice due to the text sections. The comic book portions, artwork and discussions between Cerebus, Suentous Po, Astoria and Cirin are some of the best in quite some time in the series.

I would only suggest reading this if you intend to finish Mothers and Daughters and/or the whole Cerebus saga. If not, your time would be best served, spent elsewhere.

[Mauricio Garcia · Rating 2 out of 5]

So over the place in terms of quality that it feels like an anthology of works by different authors rather than an unified narrative. So, starting with that, it could've been a cool thing to intersect the final showdown with anticlimactic "reads", but in practice it doesn't work as I guess was intended.
The Suenteus Po and Astoria endings (if they are that indeed) were a great curve ball, and the battle that ensues afterwards demonstrate comic-book language prowess and mastery.
As for the "reads" part, well... The novelist story is Sim diving yet again in another form into his publishing industry rants, and is a mediocre cautionary tale at best that has nothing to contribute to the overall story, but harmless in the end. Then we get to the infamous rant at the ending of this book, and boy, oh boy.
For starters, the bloody narrator-inside-his-own-story device never, ever, EVER works. It's just awkward, off-putting and ruins immersion, compounded to the "author" (why does he even use a pseudonym when everything else and everyone else he talks about don't have one?) talking directly to the reader as a second person voice. Everyone who's ever reviewed or comment on Sim's infantile metaphysics have already demonstrated effectively that his ideas have no validity to entertain, so I'll skip all that nonsense, and complement by saying that the rest of this, let's say "essay" part (that is, everything outside the misogynistic cosmogony) is just an incoherent, rambling (self-centred), mediocre prose ("imagine a baseball stadium as big as the sky"), absurd ("we should have more deaths to balance so many childbirths and life expectancy" is supposed to be somehow a proposition not laughable) mess.

[Tom Ewing · Rating 1 out of 5]

""Fuck off, Viktor", thought the reader"

With Melmoth, Dave Sim asked the question "what can Cerebus encompass?" and the answer was "anything I like". But that turns out not to be the whole truth. The monthly experience of reading Cerebus wasn't just about the comic, it was about the backmatter: the huge, rambling "Aardvark Comment" letter column, the samples and exclusives of whatever comics or creators Sim was keen his readers knew about; and the essays and commentaries Sim offered.

With the boundary between core story and side project thoroughly dissolved, Sim started testing new boundaries - between the story and the backmatter. Between the thoughts of Dave Sim and the action of Cerebus. Between the comic page and the creator. And the creator turns out to be a bit of an arsehole.

Reads kicks off the second half of Mothers & Daughters, but that isn't its most important function in the overall Cerebus construction. It's also the start of the third overlapping Cerebus novel. The first, which Mothers & Daughters ends, is a genre novel - a satirical, political fantasy saga full of dazzling digressions. The second, which Jaka's Story opens, is a modernist novel, a comic and tragic story about a man and a woman who are unable to be happy with or without each other: it'll come into its own when Mothers & Daughters ends. And the third is an atrocious experimental novel, a philosophical enquiry into men, women, God and their relationship to one another, in which the character of Dave Sim is as important as the character of Cerebus.

Depending on which of these novels you think you're reading, the text elements of Reads play different roles. If you're reading the first novel, they're an unwelcome and skippable distraction, and even the metafictional elements which turn up here will be better used in "Minds". If you're reading the second novel, then the first half of the text section, in the voice of struggling in-world writer Victor Reid, is somewhat relevant, but the second half, by Dave Sim analogue "Viktor Davis", is well worth avoiding: it acts as basically a spoiler (in several senses) for the next several books, in that it removes any tension from future narratives by outlining exactly how Sim thinks men and women always behave.

And if you're reading the third novel, then the Viktor Davis bits are the kickoff, the moment Dave Sim steps out of the shadow of his creation and reveals what the point of Cerebus was all along.

Oof.

There are two interesting questions about Viktor Davis' anti-feminist screed, neither of which are "is he right?" (he isn't: for a start all his gender arguments rest on a division between 'reason' and 'emotion' which he can't define beyond linguistic pedantry. And that's the bit sympathetic commentators tend to put *before* the "but...") One is "why is this in the comic not the backmatter?" and the other is "Is this what Dave Sim actually believes, and if so how long has he believed it?"

Before I get to those, let's look at the other two parts. The comics stuff is fairly straightforward - it's important to the story: the three aardvarks and Astoria talk about what aardvarks are, two of the characters leave, two fight*. (It's not hard to guess which two but I'll leave it unspoiled). The conversation is interesting, the fight scene is spectacular, one of a few occasions where Sim, who hasn't as far as I know ever read much manga, slides into a kind of manga storytelling but with American comics rendering: sheer decompressed movement and physicality. (Perhaps he got it off Frank Miller). At the end of Reads something happens which spins the book out into the action of Minds, the last chunk of the novel.

That's half the content, maybe a little less. The rest is text. Giving the volume its title is a short story about Victor Reid, a writer of Reads, mass-market fiction a bit like the old penny dreadfuls or pulps, though in Cerebus' world usually more highbrow. The Reads industry has been bubbling away for a while now in the background of the comic, and it's usually meant to represent the comics industry or some aspect of it. That's definitely the case here, as Reid's story is a comics roman-a-clef about a talented young creator swept up by a big publishing house ("Vertigo Horse" DO YOU SEE), who break his creativity on their publishing wheel. He ends up a despairing hack, and the architects of his downfall are women: his demanding, baby-ridden wife; his ball-breaking agent; his fickle, bosomy muse. The usual cliches, in other words.

It's initially very hard to see what the point of the Victor Reid stuff is. It seems partly addressed to Sim's fellow creators: Reid is an example of artistry denied and defiled by compromise. It's not a great story, Sim's prose is as fussy as it ever was when pretending to be Oscar, and over time the gossipy elements have faded out to leave a set of stereotypes.

The Reads sections as a whole, though - not just this but the equivalent sections in Jaka's Story and later book - are making a wider point, which is that popular art is not any kind of bulwark against tyranny: the Reads industry is subject to market pressures and censorship under the Cirinists just as it was subject to pressures before them, and creators are ultimately indentured labourers. Genuine artists can and must work only for themselves.

Like Viktor Davis, whose Read exists in our world and is a comic called Cerebus. And this is one answer to our first question - why is Viktor Davis' arguments about women part of the actual comic? (Later on, Sim will write a second extremely controversial essay, "Tangent", which he DOES leave out of the comic, to my joyful relief. Though given what he does put in it's a very small mercy indeed.)

For Sim, only the genuine, self-publishing artist has freedom to say the unsayable in modern society, but that freedom is meaningless unless it's exercised. Viktor Davis prefaces his big mask-off disquisition with a lot of "aint-I-a-stinker" hints about how controversial it's going to be. And it's written explicitly to be as offensive and horrible as possible. (But fair play, he was right, I suspect to a point well beyond what even Sim expected.)

But the other reason it has to be in the comic is that each part of Mothers & Daughters is a reprise of an earlier part of Cerebus, and here we're redoing Church & State, with Viktor Davis as the devilish reverse of the Judge: an omniscient being talking us through cosmology and inverting the Judge's origin of the universe. Not an act of cosmic rape; an act of cosmic smothering and emasculation.

And this, even before the big philosophical tract, is where Reads really fails. All through the Davis part, Sim has been quoting Alan Moore talking about how stories work: "all stories are true" on some level, and they become true because the hearer gives a kind of permission for them to be true. If you want to defeat a story, you have to tell a better story. And if you told a beautiful illustrated story - like the end of Church And State - you aren't going to beat it with prose. Especially not Dave Sim's prose.

Absent Gerhard's gorgeous lunar and cosmic vistas, absent Sim's note-perfect Feiffer impersonation, the light/void retcon in Reads is torpid, hard to visualise, unengaging. And, yes, petty. Maybe in Sim's mind, he was presenting two equally extreme versions to make a point, and when readers in their droves preferred the first one it just proved to him how the feminists had won and only he could see it. But they also preferred the first one because he told it better. My bottom line on Reads is that Sim is not a good enough prose writer to do the things he needs to do here: it's an artistic failure whatever you think of its morality.

Which just leaves the rant, and whether Dave Sim believes it, and when. There's a point in Victor Reid's story where his evil aspect, the backmasked Rotsieve, comes out and says hateful things to everyone. Is Viktor Davis - David Victor Sim backwards - Sim's Rotsieve. I think that probably was the point of that concept - but it was there to explain why Davis is so vicious and venomous, not what he was actually saying.

Sim had been saying he wasn't a feminist for years; he'd claimed to be a "masculinist"; he'd grumbled in edgelord ways about how life isn't actually sacred, buster. In the Davis material, he claimed to have carried his terrible secret (about how women are irrational semi-people) through years of tongue-biting self-repression. Yeah, I think he always did think this, and decided to turn his one great avenue of artistic self expression into an outlet for his more general self expression. As Viktor Davis might have said himself, fuck around and find out.

*I've seen people say that Astoria gets the best ending in the comic, and in a sense that's true - her final contributions are a reminder of why we liked her and she leaves on her own terms. But across Mothers & Daughters there's a sense of Sim wanting to take her down a peg, show her plans and schemes as futile, and her final turn to the domestic here also feels like a shabby ending for the great intriguer, like Sim was worried he'd made a woman character who was just *too* capable. One of the worst things about Reads is that he lets you - encourages you to - read those kind of motives into the action from now on.

[Sean · Rating 1 out of 5]

I suppose one has to feel sad for Dave Sim more than any kind of outrage. A fantastic artist, at one time a pretty good story-teller, at least in comic book form, and, also, a sad little boy in a man's body, forever raging at the imagined wrongs done to him by women. He may be (or, by this point, have been) writing a strange, smarter than usual, ground-breaking comic book, but he's still just an angry nerd with a tiny bullhorn. A tiny bullhorn through which he's decided to yell especially loudly, and stupidly, during these issues.

The comic takes a backseat to essays, written by some sort of alter-ego Sim names Viktor. Viktor spends pages and pages of boring, poorly written prose slamming the comic book industry (yawn), then caps it all off by inserting himself into the comic itself, feebly so, and, in the last of these issues, writes a bizarre, insane screed against women, whom he defines as voids sucking out all the marvelous male light in the world. Sad and baffling best describe it. I tried to wade through some of it, and skimmed the rest. Quickly. Life's too short.

Like all too many kind-of-smart people, he doesn't realize how dumb he is. Whatever hangup he has with women has obviously been fueling Cerebus for awhile up to this point. Probably all the pushback he got to his ideas out in the real world made him FEEL the need to shout them that much louder in his comic, the one place where he is king.

As for the comics parts of these issues, it's more dull philosophizing, followed at last by Cerebus and Cirin trying to hack each other to pieces. So at least SOMETHING happens, story-wise.

I've still got a handful of issues left of this thing sitting in boxes (I think I gave up collecting it around issue 220? Give or take?), so I guess I'll check out the rest of them. I recall actual story taking place around issue 200. We shall see...

[Jeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ever since Church & State it seemed that Sim was losing interest in Cerebus and the stories became more tedious and meandering as the issues wore on. I still collected every issue, hoping that the main character, Cerebus, would become the main character again and that the stories would pick up pace. However, Reads was the final nail in the coffin. He just started to seem to go off the deep end not only in the story but in the letters as well. Probably too much time spent alone at the drawing table. I just stopped collecting and was only vaguely interested in skimming issue 300 at the comic shop. Now I read somewhere that Sim has friends sign a contract proclaiming him not misogynistic? No wonder Gerhard is "selling" his share of Cerebus back to Sim.

[Sean Samonas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh boy. Reads. This is it. Again, we see that Dave completely throws the plot and story away so he can write page after page of utter misogynistic nonsense to make his points. If you were to remove all of the utter tripe from this book, it would be maybe a quarter of its size. And that is being nice.

If you haven't figured it out by now, Dave really doesn't like women. This book takes many weird twists and turns and unfortunately is necessary to read for the over-arcing plot. My recommendation is to simply skip over any page where you can't see a drawing of Cerebus. Most of the pages of text are just awful to read, so I don't recommend wasting your time with it.

[Joyce · Rating 1 out of 5]

i knew what i was getting into with this one and i was still surprised. even if (and this is an if the size of the known universe) you discount the vehement, spiritual, unbelievably comprehensive misogyny, it sucks. sim isn't a very good writer of prose because that's not what he's spent 15 years by this point honing, and even the few pages per issue of comics seem to indicate a weakening of his artistic strength, they lack tension because they keep being interrupted.

[C. · Rating 1 out of 5]

The low point in the series, in my opinion. Apparently upset that not enough readers had left when he decided to cut out plots, Sims brings his mysogony to a full boil by alternating pages of evil, controlling women with excerpts from a book about how all women are evil, men destroying, emotional, power-sucking black-holes. In as many words.

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one is a clunker--just a tedious fight scene interspersed with long autobiographical text passages that descend into a very odd argument that a female emotion principle is dominating a (better) male rational principle in our time (and perhaps most of human history).

[Mer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Genius is wasted on the hateful.

[Will · Rating 1 out of 5]

Intellectual foppery.

[Martin Maenza · Rating 1 out of 5]

Everything I loved from the earlier volumes was gone from this one. I'll take a break before tackling the rest of the volumes.

[slauderdale]

I read Cerebus in its collected ("phone book") form over a period from the early-nineties to the early noughties. When I started buying/reading there were just the nine volumes, culminating in Reads. Until Minds came out in 1996, these first nine volumes effectively were the Cerebus narrative, so I guess, timing-wise, I was getting on just as a fair chunk of Sim's readership was getting off.

I was a pretty charitable reader at the time. I had been having fun those first four volumes, was absorbed in the next two volumes, and was interested in where things were going with volumes seven through nine. Hitting Reads, I was open to the experimentation, the alternating pages of comics with dual columned pages of prose, etc. I “got through” the Viktor Reid sections, and was receptive to the didacticism and grand provocateur poseurdom of the Victor Davis sections; I was “Sure, okay” to the dramatic “flip the script” on C&S II, inviting us to revisit the story of the Male Void and the Female Light and ask where the readerly outrage was for that. (Younger me would have benefited from a discussion of punching up vs. punching down, but whatever.) Also there was the matter of Viktor Davis being a fictional character, which begged a deconstructionist approach to the whole thing.

Since Sim would continue to flog the same script within and outside the world of his ongoing comic book, I wonder now why he used Viktor Davis as a mouthpiece at all. Other readers and the larger comics industry probably had more context for what Sim was doing and where he was going than I did at the time; there were already those lamenting the loss of humor in the larger Cerebus storyline, and there was an unpleasant edge to the humor that remained. Several GR reviews have pointed out the self-importance of the writing, and Sim is very stagey about building up to #186 as a “big deal” and a grand provocation aimed squarely at his readership. Viktor Davis talks a great deal about the blowback he expects, but RL Dave Sim seems to have been somewhat taken aback, with bitterness/defensiveness over how people reacted to his work.

To make the world revolve around me for a moment (and no, I don’t really believe what follows, it’s just an interesting thought), I wonder if the artifices of the two Viktors and those long prosy sections in Reads are aimed squarely at people like I was at the time: readers who weren’t especially enmeshed in the comics industry and weren’t coming to Cerebus through the monthly issues and weren’t reading Sim’s Notes from the President or the back and forth he was having elsewhere. What I had in the phone books were Sim and Gerhard’s dedications, Sim’s introductions, and Cerebus itself. So in the conceit of Cerebus as a 6,000 page novel Sim

a) inserted this polemical material so readers would have to swallow it along with the story we were following, since we weren’t reading his other natter elsewhere, but
b) his use of fictional alteregos would buy him a measure of plausible deniability.

Because hey, it did for me for a while. Then you read “Tangent” and interviews and correspondence elsewhere and you go okay, yes, this is what he believes…

BTW, I know I’m not alone in this “belated revelation” thing about what Sim “really believes.” Google “dave sim” “really believes” and see how many people would keep circling the drain of Sim’s worldview and whether/what he really did/does believe. Sim himself described this as “Dave Sim Syndrome” in his infamous A.V. Club interview by Tasha Robinson: https://web.archive.org/web/200807040...

(Also in that interview:

O: If you were going to "renew the attack," would you consider a follow-up or spin-off Cerebus series?
DS: No. Cerebus is my attempt at a literary work. A literary work doesn't have follow-ups or spin-offs. It's ridiculous to think about More Crime, More Punishment or The Sons & Nephews Karamazov.

Or “Cerebus In Hell”? Hmm.)

Of course, since I *still* haven’t read those last two volumes, all of this commentary still amounts to a half-assed personal response to an unfinished work. On with the Great Cerebus Reread! and maybe at some point I'll go back and post my thoughts re: Melmoth through Women, which I actually quite enjoyed.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is at a point in the Cerebus series where things start to get really unhinged, and I felt that it was at a point where the tangential rants and the incomprehensible storyline and just all the flaws begin to overshadow most of what was good about the series. There's a pretty elongated and bloody fight that I thought was interesting, spanning multiple issues, and where you can really just feel how exhausting and brutal the whole thing is. That's probably the highlight of this volume, to be honest.

The rest of this just feels really weak, and it switches gears heavily into allegorical storytelling and pretty much just the author self-inserting himself as a character named Viktor Davis, and going on really elongated rants about women and how they should belong in society - and they wind up coming across as just very misogynistic. But it's also in a way that I think a lot of people wind up suggesting that it's 'satirical' or that he's putting it in there as another worldview, but then you have issue #186 which has like 5 pages of drawings of Cerebus flying towards the moon on a throne to this verbose, 15 page long rant about "The Female Void and the Male Light."

What I find kind of interesting is that it comes across as both malicious but in a way that's written so abstractly and grandiose in a way that ultimately just conflicts with the fact that it's essentially just someone going on about petty frustrations with women, written like a frustrated teenager. It's probably one of the most pretentiously written things I've seen, probably up there with the infamous Ctrl+Alt+Del comic strip 'Loss' - but that was like a 4 panel long strip and a few comics after that, and this is like an entire narrative curated together into a few hundred pages.

I can really see why a lot of people became alienated by this volume, tbh.

[Tegiminis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easily the most controversial of the series, for good reason. Puts forth a cosmology that is distinctly misogynistic, and by the end is literally just a bigoted screed about the immorality of women and the degrading effect they have on men.

I think in the hands of a lesser writer this would be easy to dismiss and never read. But Reads is *crucial* to future Cerebus volumes and the reader's understanding of Sim. He is baring his soul here - he admits to being a diagnosed schizophrenic, relates how his misogyny has cost him several friendships, all through the micron-thin veil of "Victor" - and that vulnerability comes with a distinct sense of guilt. It feels like he is reaching for a universal truth that barely eludes him because of his preconceptions.

It also has maybe the sickest fight scene in the ENTIRE SERIES, woven throughout the middle of these misogynist polemics such that the last statement on the previous page is punctuated by some element of Cerebus' fight against Cirin. And the first part of the prose sections, which is mostly about how much being an indie artist sucks ass in an industry full of sharks, is still quite good.

I think most peoples' temptation is to skip Reads, or to only read the fight scenes, or to write off the series as the deranged ravings of a misogynistic lunatic. I don't think any of these things are true. You should read this volume. It will be frustrating, but I think it's worth it.

Not the best volume, but I think it's the most artistically-challenging and fascinating one. So I can't help but give it a high rating. I think people should read it, not because I agree with Sim (I don't, on any level), but because the whole is far more than the sum of its parts.

[Thomas Radigan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had subscribed to the individual comics rather than buy the collection, but this still counts. It was this series that finally made me quite Cerebus in disgust after #188.

As a visual artist, Dave Sim was fantastic, though the addition of Gerhard as background illustrator helped immensely. That doesn't make up for a story that had gone downhill-or for Sim's extremely poor prose. I tried reading through one issue, but let's face it-Sim's prose writing is so dull, overlong, and childish ("Don't read this.") that I really had a time slogging through it-and question why I was still following this series. The fun Cerebus once had was gone, and I was naively hoping it would get better. But after Sim made some nasty remarks to complaints from longtime readers, I finally gave up and stopped my subscription for good.

He refers to Charlie Chaplin in the part I read, and indeed is comparable to Chaplin in one sense. Chaplin was a great pantomime artist but a poor regular actor.

[Nathu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the biggest mixed bag of the series. The beginning of the culmination of the Cirin storyline, some of the best art in the whole series, explosive endings and revelations, all chopped up and mixed in with some of the most boring prose writing and the real beginning to Sim's blatant misogyny taking the foreground. Victor Reid is insufferable, and the writing in his voice is dense and unfun to read, which is a real shame. I feel like I can see what Sim was going for in his writing style and it feels close to something which would be more engaging, but it falls short of the mark and becomes a chore before too long. Maybe this is in part of the effect of reading as a novel instead of once monthly, but the idea of waiting a month for a book of beautiful art and boring semi fiction sounds rough too. With all these complaints it's a testament to how great of a comics artist Dave Sim is that this is still an essential volume and one of my favourites.