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Cerebus #15
Latter Days
Reprinting Cerebus Issues 266-288
The penultimate volume of Sim's uncategorizable 6,000-page comics epic about a talking aardvark and medieval politics is the oddest one yet. Since its debut almost 25 years ago as a parody of barbarian comics, Cerebus has become one of the most maddeningly idiosyncratic tales available anywhere.
The penultimate volume of Sim's uncategorizable 6,000-page comics epic about a talking aardvark and medieval politics is the oddest one yet. Since its debut almost 25 years ago as a parody of barbarian comics, Cerebus has become one of the most maddeningly idiosyncratic tales available anywhere.
512 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2003
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191 people want to read
About the author
Dave Sim
1,050 books139 followersDavid Victor Sim is a Canadian comic book, artist and publisher, best known as the creator of Cerebus the Aardvark.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
March 15, 2013
There needs to be a term for this. This is not the only series I've read where the author changes philosophies or religions and turns the book series into little more then a pulpit to preach from. The first one that comes to mind is the Sword of Truth series.
But here we lose all pretense of this being a book about an aardvark adventurer and we get to be lectured on by Dave Sim. I'm not going to lie, most of this book I skipped through. It was dull and completely uninteresting. This is not why I got these books. This is not why I wanted to read them.
There is nothing even remotely close to recognizable about this series anymore at this point. I cannot say it enough, there is nothing worth reading here anymore. If you want to read the ramblings of a clearly insane person, be my guest, but it's really not worth it except for a sense of closure at reaching the end. But that is really it.
But here we lose all pretense of this being a book about an aardvark adventurer and we get to be lectured on by Dave Sim. I'm not going to lie, most of this book I skipped through. It was dull and completely uninteresting. This is not why I got these books. This is not why I wanted to read them.
There is nothing even remotely close to recognizable about this series anymore at this point. I cannot say it enough, there is nothing worth reading here anymore. If you want to read the ramblings of a clearly insane person, be my guest, but it's really not worth it except for a sense of closure at reaching the end. But that is really it.
September 20, 2024
I thought I finished this. But I find I have a bookmark stuck in it on page 380. Maybe I did finish and just wanted to explore that page more. (It shows Woody Allen drawn in the style of Robert Crumb standing on a stack of books by Carl Jung, so I don't know why that would interest me much.) Sim's take on the Book of Genesis would leave me scratching my head if I actually attempted to understand it. Even though I've made it through 15 of the 16 volumes, I think I'll stop here.
(The art, lettering, layout, etc., remain fascinating.)
(The art, lettering, layout, etc., remain fascinating.)
June 25, 2024
Well a few bright spots in this book that recalls the brilliance of the 1st 100 issues otherwise this is another disappointment from a formerly excellent series. not recommended
February 7, 2024
Oh Lord.
(of course I would say LORD wouldn’t I because in the Bible LORD refers to YHWH aka YooWhoo who is the evil female demiurge who lives at the centre of the Earth and is constantly trying to persuade God to marry her and half the Bible is her and her mouthpieces being jealous of the truth of God and pretending she can create things but she can’t because women can’t)
Anyway yes it’s this one. Latter Days has a fair claim to be the worst comic I’ve ever read. Usually when Cerebus gets hateful or tedious there’s a lot of craft to guiltily admire but the most loathsome parts here are also the weakest artistically - story and art become almost entirely unmoored as the entire comic distorts under the pressure of Dave Sim’s religious obsessions. On here even the reviews which have been all “yeah Dave you tell those beta cucks” come to Latter Days and go “ok actually fuck this”.
The story so far: while doing Bible parody Rick’s Story, Dave Sim had a conversion experience and realised the Bible was true, as was the Koran, and developed a religion of his own devising combining bits of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Sim’s religious journey didn’t stop him finishing off Cerebus’ story with Jaka in Going Home. But in Latter Days it comes roaring back - around 2/3 of the way through the book Woody Allen analogue Konigsberg shows up with a copy of the Torah and Cerebus starts reading it, dictating his commentary to Konigsbergs and an unseen scribe. In practise what this means is page after page of Dave Sim’s Torah exegesis in very small font alongside inscrutable pictures of Woody Allen in a variety of styles.
It’s almost impossible to convey how difficult, tiresome and awful the experience of reading these parts is. Sim is apparently convinced it will take 100-200 years for Jewish scholars to catch up with his analysis here and yes it does feel like that is how long you’ve been reading it. For all that the commentaries are an endurance test they’re also pretty easy to summarise: Sim has picked up on the (generally accepted I believe) idea that Genesis and other early bits of the Bible are the work of multiple authors, and has refracted this through his gender obsession to decode it as a hostile dialogue between a male divinity and his female wannabe counterpart who can’t admit he created her.
It’s certainly original. But you do not in fact have to hand it to Dave Sim for creating a banging new heresy as the way he does it is monstrously unfriendly to even an imagined sympathetic reader. We never see the text, just Cerebus bantering commentary on it; every pause and aside is ‘faithfully’ documented, and if you do somehow manage to concentrate on the text you’re also rewarded with rancid little nuggets like the Gay Panic defense invoked to justify Cain killing Abel and at least two separate nudge-wink hints that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves. It’s as vile as it is grotesque.
At first the Woody Allen pages - extracts from Konigsberg’s diary of his love life and later his analysis - are a merciful break from this swill. They’re not good - the Freud analogue is called Dr Fraud, which indicates the state of Sim’s wit at this stage - but they’re different. Gradually, though, the Allen sections become more abstract as the character endures a series of humiliating tableaux at the hands of Fellini and others, rendered in the photorealistic style Sim had begun experimenting with. I’m normally keen to ask the question “what was Sim up to here?” but at this point Cerebus defeated me: this and the Torah material in juxtaposition are just utterly unrewarding and grim.
And yet, inconcievably, they may not be the worst parts of this comic.
Before we get to the Torah sections, Latter Days has a job to do, which is covering a span of decades and resolving the *other* main religious plot, the one Rick’s Story was designed to start in the first place. The Booke Of Ricke presented Cerebus as a prophet - now the other shoe drops, and we learn that it also presented him as a Messiah, who will return to fulfil the prophecies and drive out the Cirinists, whose power is waning in any case. While Cerebus is spending decades herding sheep and becoming a professional sports star, the land fills with chapters of Cerebites, all awaiting the one true Cerebus.
There is a long section - they all feel like long sections at this point - in which Cerebus is abducted by the Three Stooges, adherents to this religion, who are eventually convinced he IS the one foretold (Sim said the Stooges were his most difficult caricatures ever; I’ll happily take his word for it). But maybe the nadir of Latter Days comes after he’s convinced, in the sections where the Cirinists are slaughtered by his followers, led by a Todd McFarlane analogue who is also (I think) standing in for the Apostle Paul, and Sim decides to do a Spawn parody, a full decade after the character appeared.
The Torah sections are borderline impossible to read and hateful when you do, but on some important level they aren’t actually comics. I’m not expecting Dave Sim to be a competent rabbinical exegesist. I am expecting him to be a competent cartoonist, and in the middle parts of Latter Days even that falls away. The Spawn parody is inane; the McFarlane character is incomprehensible (ironic that Sim’s worst phonetic speech is him writing a Canadian!); the plot makes so sense; Sim’s choices of what to show on and off page are bizarre (perhaps he was rushing through his original plan to fit the Torah material in). Needless to add the story revels in the slaughter of women, though a resolution to the Cirinist strand was always likely to - but the petty sadism of including a Canadian woman cartoonist (Julie Doucet) to execute her on panel speaks volumes about where Sim’s head was at.
Basically, nothing works in this comic. The setpieces fall flat - theres something which I think is a Kurtzman tribute trying to add pathos to the war scenes but it’s tawdry; the photorealism is static and cold. The pacing is abominable. The ideas are demented. Everything Dave Sim used to be good at is almost entirely absent here. Unbelievable that it’s come to this, and there’s still a book to go.
(of course I would say LORD wouldn’t I because in the Bible LORD refers to YHWH aka YooWhoo who is the evil female demiurge who lives at the centre of the Earth and is constantly trying to persuade God to marry her and half the Bible is her and her mouthpieces being jealous of the truth of God and pretending she can create things but she can’t because women can’t)
Anyway yes it’s this one. Latter Days has a fair claim to be the worst comic I’ve ever read. Usually when Cerebus gets hateful or tedious there’s a lot of craft to guiltily admire but the most loathsome parts here are also the weakest artistically - story and art become almost entirely unmoored as the entire comic distorts under the pressure of Dave Sim’s religious obsessions. On here even the reviews which have been all “yeah Dave you tell those beta cucks” come to Latter Days and go “ok actually fuck this”.
The story so far: while doing Bible parody Rick’s Story, Dave Sim had a conversion experience and realised the Bible was true, as was the Koran, and developed a religion of his own devising combining bits of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Sim’s religious journey didn’t stop him finishing off Cerebus’ story with Jaka in Going Home. But in Latter Days it comes roaring back - around 2/3 of the way through the book Woody Allen analogue Konigsberg shows up with a copy of the Torah and Cerebus starts reading it, dictating his commentary to Konigsbergs and an unseen scribe. In practise what this means is page after page of Dave Sim’s Torah exegesis in very small font alongside inscrutable pictures of Woody Allen in a variety of styles.
It’s almost impossible to convey how difficult, tiresome and awful the experience of reading these parts is. Sim is apparently convinced it will take 100-200 years for Jewish scholars to catch up with his analysis here and yes it does feel like that is how long you’ve been reading it. For all that the commentaries are an endurance test they’re also pretty easy to summarise: Sim has picked up on the (generally accepted I believe) idea that Genesis and other early bits of the Bible are the work of multiple authors, and has refracted this through his gender obsession to decode it as a hostile dialogue between a male divinity and his female wannabe counterpart who can’t admit he created her.
It’s certainly original. But you do not in fact have to hand it to Dave Sim for creating a banging new heresy as the way he does it is monstrously unfriendly to even an imagined sympathetic reader. We never see the text, just Cerebus bantering commentary on it; every pause and aside is ‘faithfully’ documented, and if you do somehow manage to concentrate on the text you’re also rewarded with rancid little nuggets like the Gay Panic defense invoked to justify Cain killing Abel and at least two separate nudge-wink hints that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves. It’s as vile as it is grotesque.
At first the Woody Allen pages - extracts from Konigsberg’s diary of his love life and later his analysis - are a merciful break from this swill. They’re not good - the Freud analogue is called Dr Fraud, which indicates the state of Sim’s wit at this stage - but they’re different. Gradually, though, the Allen sections become more abstract as the character endures a series of humiliating tableaux at the hands of Fellini and others, rendered in the photorealistic style Sim had begun experimenting with. I’m normally keen to ask the question “what was Sim up to here?” but at this point Cerebus defeated me: this and the Torah material in juxtaposition are just utterly unrewarding and grim.
And yet, inconcievably, they may not be the worst parts of this comic.
Before we get to the Torah sections, Latter Days has a job to do, which is covering a span of decades and resolving the *other* main religious plot, the one Rick’s Story was designed to start in the first place. The Booke Of Ricke presented Cerebus as a prophet - now the other shoe drops, and we learn that it also presented him as a Messiah, who will return to fulfil the prophecies and drive out the Cirinists, whose power is waning in any case. While Cerebus is spending decades herding sheep and becoming a professional sports star, the land fills with chapters of Cerebites, all awaiting the one true Cerebus.
There is a long section - they all feel like long sections at this point - in which Cerebus is abducted by the Three Stooges, adherents to this religion, who are eventually convinced he IS the one foretold (Sim said the Stooges were his most difficult caricatures ever; I’ll happily take his word for it). But maybe the nadir of Latter Days comes after he’s convinced, in the sections where the Cirinists are slaughtered by his followers, led by a Todd McFarlane analogue who is also (I think) standing in for the Apostle Paul, and Sim decides to do a Spawn parody, a full decade after the character appeared.
The Torah sections are borderline impossible to read and hateful when you do, but on some important level they aren’t actually comics. I’m not expecting Dave Sim to be a competent rabbinical exegesist. I am expecting him to be a competent cartoonist, and in the middle parts of Latter Days even that falls away. The Spawn parody is inane; the McFarlane character is incomprehensible (ironic that Sim’s worst phonetic speech is him writing a Canadian!); the plot makes so sense; Sim’s choices of what to show on and off page are bizarre (perhaps he was rushing through his original plan to fit the Torah material in). Needless to add the story revels in the slaughter of women, though a resolution to the Cirinist strand was always likely to - but the petty sadism of including a Canadian woman cartoonist (Julie Doucet) to execute her on panel speaks volumes about where Sim’s head was at.
Basically, nothing works in this comic. The setpieces fall flat - theres something which I think is a Kurtzman tribute trying to add pathos to the war scenes but it’s tawdry; the photorealism is static and cold. The pacing is abominable. The ideas are demented. Everything Dave Sim used to be good at is almost entirely absent here. Unbelievable that it’s come to this, and there’s still a book to go.
July 6, 2008
Starts off promising, with Cerebus reeling from the shocks at the end of Going Home. He's looking to get killed, since there's nothing left to live for. In between blank-out periods, he becomes a sheepherder who peeps on his boss' wife, then while working at a community job (alcohol in taverns is no longer free, costing community service time) he realizes that he's really good at "five-bar gate", a game that Sim made up as a kid. His adventure with this takes thirty years and one issue. Finally, remembering that he wants to be killed, he heads for (militant feminist) Cirinist territory, where he opens up a strip club. There he meets three wise fellows who are looking for the One True Cerebus prophesied in the Booke of Rick. Enter the Three Stooges. Long period of Cerebus listening to them recite the Booke, detailing Rick's descriptions of the old bar and Cerebus as a holy messenger. Long story short, Cerebus defeats all the Cirinists off-screen by using guns. Since all women are bad shots, and for some reason the Cirinists only have crossbows (and it was established before that they are *crack shots* with those, but not with guns? Please.), the men just stay out of range and slaughter the enemy. We also meet a parody of Todd MacFarlane, creator of Spawn.
Cerebus sets up a way to make society happy by letting the men vote on whether to kill or spare each woman. The ones that are left alive are the good ones. To be honest, Sim does not support this as a real solution, so don't panic.
Eventually, Woody Allen shows up with the Torah and the rest of the book tumbles into the crapper. Cerebus (speaking for Dave Sim) reads through Genesis and realizes that the Deity is referred to as "Elohim" and as "YHWH" at different times (this is from having different authors of different parts - look it up), and he determines that "Elohim" is the real "God", and that "YHWH" is a part of God's spirit that God spun off "in the beginning", and is female, and thinks she is God. God plays the part of the disappointed parent through human history.
Seriously, for eight issues (160 pages) the comic is composed of some silly bits about Woody Allen in the world of Woody, Bergman, and Fellini (making fun of Freud and Jung), and the
rest is text, with Cerebus/Sim quoting the Torah and then interpreting it so that it fits in with his concept that the Bible is a battle between the stupid female YHWH (called "YooWhoo") and God. Sim decides from sentence to sentence whether it's God saying something or YHWH based on whether it fits his characterization. If I were devout, I'd be really really upset at this manhandling of Holy Scripture. And the reasoning he uses is honestly crackpot. He devises logical explanations that he can discard or reinterpret as necessary. A lot of "I'm guessing" and "probably" and similar crazy leaps of logic. I'm also studying Scientology (objectively), and L. Ron Hubbard's "scientific logic" is very similar. In that it is ludicrous. If you wanted to skip this part, you could certainly substitute the sentence "Cerebus studies the Torah and completes his transformation into a devout Jew" and move on.
Anyway, at the end of the book we find the seed of the next book, and the harbinger of things to come. The start of the book, with Sim drawing in an entertaining Mort Drucker style and telling entertaining vignettes, is old-school fun. Then it fades into a society where men have the only vote, and then only if they are not married. Then it becomes scholarship on par with Steve Lightfoot (http://www.lennonmurdertruth.com/), which is entertaining in a sad way.
Cerebus sets up a way to make society happy by letting the men vote on whether to kill or spare each woman. The ones that are left alive are the good ones. To be honest, Sim does not support this as a real solution, so don't panic.
Eventually, Woody Allen shows up with the Torah and the rest of the book tumbles into the crapper. Cerebus (speaking for Dave Sim) reads through Genesis and realizes that the Deity is referred to as "Elohim" and as "YHWH" at different times (this is from having different authors of different parts - look it up), and he determines that "Elohim" is the real "God", and that "YHWH" is a part of God's spirit that God spun off "in the beginning", and is female, and thinks she is God. God plays the part of the disappointed parent through human history.
Seriously, for eight issues (160 pages) the comic is composed of some silly bits about Woody Allen in the world of Woody, Bergman, and Fellini (making fun of Freud and Jung), and the
rest is text, with Cerebus/Sim quoting the Torah and then interpreting it so that it fits in with his concept that the Bible is a battle between the stupid female YHWH (called "YooWhoo") and God. Sim decides from sentence to sentence whether it's God saying something or YHWH based on whether it fits his characterization. If I were devout, I'd be really really upset at this manhandling of Holy Scripture. And the reasoning he uses is honestly crackpot. He devises logical explanations that he can discard or reinterpret as necessary. A lot of "I'm guessing" and "probably" and similar crazy leaps of logic. I'm also studying Scientology (objectively), and L. Ron Hubbard's "scientific logic" is very similar. In that it is ludicrous. If you wanted to skip this part, you could certainly substitute the sentence "Cerebus studies the Torah and completes his transformation into a devout Jew" and move on.
Anyway, at the end of the book we find the seed of the next book, and the harbinger of things to come. The start of the book, with Sim drawing in an entertaining Mort Drucker style and telling entertaining vignettes, is old-school fun. Then it fades into a society where men have the only vote, and then only if they are not married. Then it becomes scholarship on par with Steve Lightfoot (http://www.lennonmurdertruth.com/), which is entertaining in a sad way.
December 28, 2021
The nadir of the series. First of all, it doesn't really cohere as a book. The first two chapters were originally stand-alone issues and are pretty funny. We then get page after page of Cerebus held captive by the Three Wise Fellows, parodies of the Three Stooges (and well-executed ones at that). There is some very funny stuff here, but not really a return to greatness. Then we get the end of the conflict with the Cirinists, which a) mostly happens off camera and b) (perhaps predictably by now) is profoundly anti-climactic; after well over 100 issues of them as a dominant force, they seem to get wiped out way too easily. We then move into the series's absolute low point, the 100+ pages of "Chasing Yoowhoo," aka the "Cerebexegesis," Sim's frankly bugfuck nuts interpretation of the Bible, in a tiny font typeface that makes it hard to read for reasons other than how bad it is. This fails to work for several reasons. For one, the sudden intrusion (well, not entirely sudden--Muslims were referenced briefly in the previous volume, and the world became explicitly established as "our" world) into Cerebus's world of this text really clangs. This clanging is exacerbated by much of the imagery in the Konigsberg [Sim's version of Woody Allen] sections--automobiles, movie cameras, etc, for which there is no basis at all in Cerebus's world. Furthermore, Sim's exegesis is ... eccentric, to say the least. Sim is not a dumb guy and is well able to recognize (well, anyone who reads it carefully would be so able) that the Bible is riddled with contradictions and nonsensical bits. This is hardly a new problem for those trying to interpret it, as the long history of allegorical readings of the Bible attests. With that in mind, Sim might not seem so crazy; certainly, how he allegorizes the Bible probably isn't any nuttier than how some others have. Nevertheless, his reading (if you can call it that), is laughable--not because it is funny, but because it is so ill-informed and so clearly a projection onto the Bible of Sim's obsession with how terrible women are. What is funny, though not in ways Sim intended, I think, is that he depicts both Yoowhoo (God's female other half) and the fathers of psychology (Freud and especially Jung) as perpetrators of loony ideas that bear no relation to reality, evidently unaware that his own reading of the Bible (placed in Cerebus's mouth) is as absurd as Sim thinks Freud and Jung are. To his credit, Sim recognizes that his readers would probably find his serious interpretation of the Bible as crazy as any shit he could have made up would have been, so he abandoned his plan to have Cerebus just spout crazy shit by putting his own crazy shit in Cerebus's mouth. There's also a fundamental disjunction between what the narrative level demands (religion is a bunch of crazy shit invented by mentally ill folk like Rick or idiot interpreters based on the Three Stooges, for heaven's sake!) and the fact that the "Cerebexegesis" is Sim's own best guess at what the Bible is really saying (yes, 2000 years of so of experts missed it, but an autodidact who hadn't even read the Bible until his forties was able to crack the code). Sim's reading is so riddled with ridiculous assumptions and assertions (and failures of understanding even of what words mean, let alone historical context), not to mention Sim's certainty that sometimes character X speaks in propria persona, sometimes is possessed (I guess) as a mouthpiece by Yoowhoo, and sometimes possessed by God as a mouthpiece. How does Sim know which is which? Well, basically by determining whether he thinks what the person is saying sounds like God, Yoohwhoo, or just the guy. So, yeah. It's entirely subjective, and unsupported by anything more than the most flimsy of evidence. And it leads Sim to some astonishing and repugnant conclusions--e.g. that the Holocaust was payback against the Jews for all the animals sacrificed in the Torah, or that evil shit that happens was thought up by Yoowhoo, who therefore is to blame for it, but actually done by God, because Yoowhoo actually has no real power. So God actually does all the terrible shit, Yoowhoo just thought of it; God does it as part of his apparently endless attempt to make her see the error of her ways. Well, there's a lovely image of humans, existing merely to function as puppets and sacrifices in God's ongoing "dialogue" with his feminine demi-urge, not to mention of God, as willing to inflict immeasurable suffering on humanity not for their own faults but for Yoowhoo's. (Mind you, it's probably as good an explanation for how one might reconcile the world of woe in which we live with the idea of an omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent God.) Aaaaand, it does on for fucking ever, or feels like it does. This sequence is so interminable that when it was being serialized I very nearly stopped reading the book entirely. Only the fact that the series was close to over kept me on board. And it doesn't read any better now. It's interminable crackpot, foil-hat stuff you'd expect to hear from someone raving on a street corner. All the great cartooning here (and there is indeed a lot of great cartooning, despite the preponderance of single-image pages that accompany the "Cerebexegesis"--themselves expertly rendered but narratively irrelevant) can't compensate for the interminable hectoring. This one is for Cerebus( completists only. Everyone else, beware.
November 10, 2017
The nadir of the Cerebus series by a nautical mile.
March 29, 2018
This is how Cerebus ends, not with a bang but a whimper. The penultimate volume in the series, collecting issues 266-288, is perhaps the worst in the series. The author must have felt that as the series was winding down, he could do whatever he wanted and the die-hard fans would buy in regardless. While this is true, the tedium of the last section of the book is inexcusable.
A great deal of time elapses in this comic, roughly about 70 or more years, while Cerebus slowly ages over it all. All of the old characters -Jaka, Rick, Lord Julius, The Roach, Astoria- have passed away. The first 140 pages of the book are rather interesting (especially the first two issues). Cerebus is kidnapped by a group of cultists who are adherents to the Book of Rick (in which Cerebus is mentioned). These cultists are based on the Three Stooges and I will say that the author does a good job capturing the physical elements of the Stooges and their antics. His interactions with the Stooges and other groups leads to a guerilla movement and the eventual overthrow of the Cirinist control of the northern hemisphere of the continent. Cerebus, finally, has won.
During this altercation we see Cerebus dress up in the 90s breakout superhero Spawn, called here Spore. This is a tie in to a guest issue of Spawn with Cerebus, written and drawn by Dave Sim. Spawn is the creation of Todd McFarlane who co-founded Image comics in 1992. The creator himself appears as an anti-Crinist rebel leader here and Cerebus is put off a bit because he realizes that this newcomer is more popular and strategically better than himself. A reflection of the managerial position Sim found himself in Image. This new independent comes along and is instantly a bigger hit and more popular than one of the originals.
After this we delve into the excruciating portion of graphic novel (and graphic would nearly be in quotations marks here) when we are introduced to the Woody Allen analog, Koinsberg. He is in the story to question us holy texts that have now sprung up, all started from the Book of Ricke. Here Cerebus begins going through the Book of Genesis interpreting it as an interplay between the male deity God and a female pretender to the throne YHWH. The latter being the Jewish literature interpretation of God, whose true name could never be spoken or written out in full, so we are only left with the consonants. It is correctly pointed out that we are still unsure of what vowels were originally intended, so Cerebus adds a few making the female deity’s name Yoowhoo. From there it goes on and on and on on a reinterpretation of the various parts of the Torah from the perspective of a male and female divine interplay.
What is wrong with these issues is not what he says, but it's appalling execution. Page after page of poorly written tripe, done in stage dialogue format between Konisberg and Cerebus with every sneeze, pause, and breath added in- which drags out the few interesting points that he has to make into an interminable page length diatribe. And it is a diatribe for the Woody Allen character has very little to say, and it is an excuse for the author, through his puppet, to rattle on and on about his “clever” ideas. It is interesting at first, but quickly goes stale.
This section lasts for seven issues, a total of 140 pages, consisting mostly of large blocks of text done in 7 or 8 point eye straining font font. By comparison, the art is reduced to a series of Mad Marginals. All for what? So the author can make a series of witty statements and get an elitist chuckle from how clever he is. And if he didn’t intend it that way, it sure comes across as such. These issues don’t add to the overall plot or ideas of Cerebus, at least not in any way that the author had already said earlier and better.
I remember Robert Crumb’s visual interpretation of the Book of Genesis which, while not having must individual commentary from the author, had a lot of subtle interpretation by the author in how to present the material. It was a simple presentation: panel, caption, occasional word balloon- but the effect was much more profound than this nonsense. And I’m not saying Crumb is a better artist, Sims has nothing to prove on that score, but if he had stuck to traditional methods, Sim could have gotten his ideas across in a much more palatable way.
For those who have have whined to me in the past about this being “Sim’s comic to do with what he likes.” And if I don’t like it “I should stop pretending to be sophisticated and go back to guys hitting each other.” While the points are well made that Cerebus is his independant comic and the author was free push out whatever he wanted. If that’s the position people want to take fine, but then the author shouldn't whine so much in his annotations about how no one in the comic medium pays any attention to his work anymore.
Like George Lucas, I think the author has gotten rid of anyone who challenged him long ago, thus produces a substandard work in his old age. Perhaps he was just so used to being attacked that he tuned out anyone who had a difference in opinion. Either way, the material in the second half of the book was of poor quality.
This book not not something to be enjoyed, but endured. Being a salivating completionist I had to finish what I started so I pushed through. In fact the most enjoyable part of this book was the anticipation I felt in writing this review so I can tell everyone how terrible it is.
December 15, 2016
I didn’t want it to end like this.
Truth be told, that’s a lie. It implies that I could possibly have predicted where the last long storyline in Cerebus goes, but I’m not sure anyone could have seen the last 200 pages of this one coming.
It starts promisingly enough. After Cerebus’ trauma at the end of Form & Void, his life goes off the rails, he blinks in and out, and finds himself as a shepherd, and then a professional five bar gate player. This brief prologue serves to jump us forward to the point where Dave wishes Latter Days to kick off, with Cerebus returning south in order to get himself killed by the Cirinists. Opening a strip club to provoke their wrath, he ends up kidnapped by The Three Wise Fellows, and bound in their Sanctuary. The Fellows are religious fanatics, inspired by the teachings of Rick. They’re also the Three Stooges. These Fellows believe that Cerebus is the One True Cerebus whose coming was foretold by the Prophet Rick, but to prove it, they must test him. There’s some great slapstick stuff here, which is really difficult to pull off in a static medium like comics, and some strong visual gags.
I said earlier in this thread that I remembered Latter Days being the worst of the Cerebus books. For the first hundred pages or so, I was revising that opinion. The prologue is funny and entertaining. I’ve always been more of a Marx Brothers man than I am a Three Stooges fan, and in memory I disliked this section. On rereading I enjoyed it a lot. Their characters and shtick are bought across brilliantly, and the end to their story is properly heartbreaking.
But things soon take a turn for the worse, as Cerebus becomes a fascist dictator and instigates a policy of shooting women who are too ugly and / or annoying to live which he then extends to lawyers and “complete dicks” (uh, Dave, we know you don’t really mean it, but this isn’t exactly going to help with those misogyny allegations, you know). Along the way he has overthrown the Cirinists. This should have been a huge event, a focal point of the last third of the saga, but it’s handled as a silly throwaway, that doesn’t even make any internal sense, let alone provide any satisfying drama. That said, the sequence where a dying Cirinist is briefly animated by Cerebus’ magnifier quality is great. It indicates what could have been done here, and that’s really the story of the first part of the book. There are marvellous little moments, but they are stand outs in a big mess that only serve to cruelly highlight how deficient the rest of it is. It just doesn’t feel like Cerebus anymore. It’s rambling and disjointed, the storytelling discipline that has previously served Sim in such good stead has gone, and the leaps forward in time mean we’ve shucked off the previous supporting cast, and even the landscape they inhabited. The Spawn parody is awful. Not only does it feel dated in 2016, it doesn’t sit right against the rest of the book. This is the sort of thing we expect from Elrod or the Roach, not Cerebus himself. I’d much prefer it if Dave had laid the superhero parodies to rest along with those two characters.
Battles over, Cerebus is ensconced as the head of a religion bearing his name. He fills his days with birdwatching and collecting issues of the Rabbi comic book. An old interview with Rabbi’s creator fries his brain once more, and he takes to shuffling around in a dressing gown, his only words “darr, pretty sunsets”. And then there’s a knock at the door, and the message that Rick had promised would come all those years ago in Cerebus’ dream back at the end of Form & Void is delivered. This is a great example of the way Dave can pull the reader’s strings and get you excited to see what comes next, just like the last sentence of Guys. The rest of the book emphatically is not.
The promised visitor is Woody Allen, and the book he brings is the Torah. And so the scene is set for almost two hundred pages of buttock clenching boredom as Cerebus treats us to an interminable sequence of Biblical commentary. In really really small type. And of course, this being Cerebus, it isn’t your normal Bible commentary. Cerebus (or Dave, the two being interchangeable at this point) has discovered the hidden truth of the Bible and recast it as a struggle between God and the upstart entity YHWH (or Yoohwhoo). It really is terribly hard going and I’m not ashamed to say I skipped large chunks this time round (hey, I read it all in the serialised issues and then the first time I read Latter Days. Life’s too short to do that again). The side story is the Woody Allen character’s struggle with Freud, accompanied by illustrations lifted from the films of Fellini and Bergman. I promise you I am not making this up. The usual Cerebus caveats about artistic excellence apply, but they can’t save this from being a tedious self indulgent mess. Latter Days was already a bit wobbly before the epic exegesis, but this sends it plummeting. Almost half the book is unreadable. In the addenda to Melmoth, Dave noted that he couldn’t find a workable equivalent to “Jew” in Estarcion and so skipped those elements of the historical record. I wish he’d remembered that.
So yeah, I still reckon this is the worst of all the phonebooks. Not to worry, there’s only one left, and it gets a lot better
Truth be told, that’s a lie. It implies that I could possibly have predicted where the last long storyline in Cerebus goes, but I’m not sure anyone could have seen the last 200 pages of this one coming.
It starts promisingly enough. After Cerebus’ trauma at the end of Form & Void, his life goes off the rails, he blinks in and out, and finds himself as a shepherd, and then a professional five bar gate player. This brief prologue serves to jump us forward to the point where Dave wishes Latter Days to kick off, with Cerebus returning south in order to get himself killed by the Cirinists. Opening a strip club to provoke their wrath, he ends up kidnapped by The Three Wise Fellows, and bound in their Sanctuary. The Fellows are religious fanatics, inspired by the teachings of Rick. They’re also the Three Stooges. These Fellows believe that Cerebus is the One True Cerebus whose coming was foretold by the Prophet Rick, but to prove it, they must test him. There’s some great slapstick stuff here, which is really difficult to pull off in a static medium like comics, and some strong visual gags.
I said earlier in this thread that I remembered Latter Days being the worst of the Cerebus books. For the first hundred pages or so, I was revising that opinion. The prologue is funny and entertaining. I’ve always been more of a Marx Brothers man than I am a Three Stooges fan, and in memory I disliked this section. On rereading I enjoyed it a lot. Their characters and shtick are bought across brilliantly, and the end to their story is properly heartbreaking.
But things soon take a turn for the worse, as Cerebus becomes a fascist dictator and instigates a policy of shooting women who are too ugly and / or annoying to live which he then extends to lawyers and “complete dicks” (uh, Dave, we know you don’t really mean it, but this isn’t exactly going to help with those misogyny allegations, you know). Along the way he has overthrown the Cirinists. This should have been a huge event, a focal point of the last third of the saga, but it’s handled as a silly throwaway, that doesn’t even make any internal sense, let alone provide any satisfying drama. That said, the sequence where a dying Cirinist is briefly animated by Cerebus’ magnifier quality is great. It indicates what could have been done here, and that’s really the story of the first part of the book. There are marvellous little moments, but they are stand outs in a big mess that only serve to cruelly highlight how deficient the rest of it is. It just doesn’t feel like Cerebus anymore. It’s rambling and disjointed, the storytelling discipline that has previously served Sim in such good stead has gone, and the leaps forward in time mean we’ve shucked off the previous supporting cast, and even the landscape they inhabited. The Spawn parody is awful. Not only does it feel dated in 2016, it doesn’t sit right against the rest of the book. This is the sort of thing we expect from Elrod or the Roach, not Cerebus himself. I’d much prefer it if Dave had laid the superhero parodies to rest along with those two characters.
Battles over, Cerebus is ensconced as the head of a religion bearing his name. He fills his days with birdwatching and collecting issues of the Rabbi comic book. An old interview with Rabbi’s creator fries his brain once more, and he takes to shuffling around in a dressing gown, his only words “darr, pretty sunsets”. And then there’s a knock at the door, and the message that Rick had promised would come all those years ago in Cerebus’ dream back at the end of Form & Void is delivered. This is a great example of the way Dave can pull the reader’s strings and get you excited to see what comes next, just like the last sentence of Guys. The rest of the book emphatically is not.
The promised visitor is Woody Allen, and the book he brings is the Torah. And so the scene is set for almost two hundred pages of buttock clenching boredom as Cerebus treats us to an interminable sequence of Biblical commentary. In really really small type. And of course, this being Cerebus, it isn’t your normal Bible commentary. Cerebus (or Dave, the two being interchangeable at this point) has discovered the hidden truth of the Bible and recast it as a struggle between God and the upstart entity YHWH (or Yoohwhoo). It really is terribly hard going and I’m not ashamed to say I skipped large chunks this time round (hey, I read it all in the serialised issues and then the first time I read Latter Days. Life’s too short to do that again). The side story is the Woody Allen character’s struggle with Freud, accompanied by illustrations lifted from the films of Fellini and Bergman. I promise you I am not making this up. The usual Cerebus caveats about artistic excellence apply, but they can’t save this from being a tedious self indulgent mess. Latter Days was already a bit wobbly before the epic exegesis, but this sends it plummeting. Almost half the book is unreadable. In the addenda to Melmoth, Dave noted that he couldn’t find a workable equivalent to “Jew” in Estarcion and so skipped those elements of the historical record. I wish he’d remembered that.
So yeah, I still reckon this is the worst of all the phonebooks. Not to worry, there’s only one left, and it gets a lot better
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 20, 2024
Hard to follow to the point I had to skim. Art is good when it’s there but this one is just a long stream of thoughts. Pre three stooges this volume was alright
February 8, 2015
The short stories that opened this collection were interesting in their pathos, but once the three stooges showed up the rails were completely abandoned. Also I didn't read any of the block text, I value my functioning brain more than that.
August 1, 2007
Several story arcs in this volume, some much better than others.
January 22, 2022
I was going to start off by saying something along the lines of "At least the art work and staging is good in this one." which is a given for the Cerebus series, but I just wound up not liking this volume one bit. Starts off kind of fine with some old-school bits you'd find in the earlier comics, but beyond that the storytelling just becomes really incomprehensible and frustrating - and really this winds up committing a cardinal sin where you have entire pages which are a few very detailed drawings, then most of the storytelling is just segmented to these verbose rants that exist beside them. Creates such a dissonance where you're just stuck reading stuff with no visualisation, and I think a lot of the fun of this series was just how so much of the storytelling was told visually, with such immaculate staging and an attention to detail and capturing the emotions of the characters.
Not really sure how to describe the storyline in this one, but there's something to it where it seems to comment a lot on the War on Terror, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, connecting Christianity with Islam (seemingly switching entire philosophy systems over the entire course), and these really bizarre parodies of Woody Allen, Fellini and Ingmar Bergman films that just don't gel well together at all. Entire issues seem to be dedicated to the premise of depicting prostitutes with Woody Allen's face on them, Fellini and Bergman pastiches with Woody Allen in them, nothing about it really makes sense. Seems like the author was fixated on a lot of things, but there's nothing that really comes out that's at all cohesive - often it just winds up feeling baffling more than anything, missing out on a lot of the sharp satirical edge this series was known for.
And also, I think an aside is that Sim's prose styling here is pretty bad - not that he's naturally like that. Even with a lot of his politics, I thought Sim tended to write in an engaging style where you can tell there's a unique voice behind it - but here it often winds up spiralling into this rambling and incomprehensible tone that made it really frustrating to read. That would probably be easy to dismiss if not for the fact that a lot of the storytelling winds up becoming heavily dependent upon the prose, and really I think this volume as a whole just demonstrates a lot of the worst elements of this series. Really makes me miss the highs of Church and State & High Society.
P.S. Also felt like a lot of Sim's personal rants felt way too overly paranoid, where he claims that people were interrogating him over life details from 20 years ago (from when the comic was published) and often just really outrageous claims. This comic kind of serves as a really interesting proto example of the sort of thing where people have a public platform and unload so much of their life details, creating this sneaky but often vicious and pervasive dynamic that winds up eating away at you. Feel like it's interesting in the age of social media with the amount of people who fall down that path where they feel this compulsion to engage with it and this need to answer for everything and be in the right about everything, and arguing with people that they really don't know.
In the words of Michael Jordan, if you find yourself in that situation then "If you're doing it, stop it, get some help."
Not really sure how to describe the storyline in this one, but there's something to it where it seems to comment a lot on the War on Terror, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, connecting Christianity with Islam (seemingly switching entire philosophy systems over the entire course), and these really bizarre parodies of Woody Allen, Fellini and Ingmar Bergman films that just don't gel well together at all. Entire issues seem to be dedicated to the premise of depicting prostitutes with Woody Allen's face on them, Fellini and Bergman pastiches with Woody Allen in them, nothing about it really makes sense. Seems like the author was fixated on a lot of things, but there's nothing that really comes out that's at all cohesive - often it just winds up feeling baffling more than anything, missing out on a lot of the sharp satirical edge this series was known for.
And also, I think an aside is that Sim's prose styling here is pretty bad - not that he's naturally like that. Even with a lot of his politics, I thought Sim tended to write in an engaging style where you can tell there's a unique voice behind it - but here it often winds up spiralling into this rambling and incomprehensible tone that made it really frustrating to read. That would probably be easy to dismiss if not for the fact that a lot of the storytelling winds up becoming heavily dependent upon the prose, and really I think this volume as a whole just demonstrates a lot of the worst elements of this series. Really makes me miss the highs of Church and State & High Society.
P.S. Also felt like a lot of Sim's personal rants felt way too overly paranoid, where he claims that people were interrogating him over life details from 20 years ago (from when the comic was published) and often just really outrageous claims. This comic kind of serves as a really interesting proto example of the sort of thing where people have a public platform and unload so much of their life details, creating this sneaky but often vicious and pervasive dynamic that winds up eating away at you. Feel like it's interesting in the age of social media with the amount of people who fall down that path where they feel this compulsion to engage with it and this need to answer for everything and be in the right about everything, and arguing with people that they really don't know.
In the words of Michael Jordan, if you find yourself in that situation then "If you're doing it, stop it, get some help."
September 5, 2019
Finally, FINALLY I'm done with "Latter Days". I so far had enjoyed playing "Devil's Advocate" in regards to Dave's putting whatever he was feeling at time in the books because it was seamless or at least half-seamless, not to mention when he felt to put his weird ideas into the book it was mostly through essays that you could by-pass (not that you can't by pass his attempt at no essaying here), however this time his ideas are integrated into the story, and by integrated I mean "The narrative comes to a halt for like 200 of the 512 pages of this phonebook). To say this is a chore to get through is an understatement. This time Dave feels like explaining his re-intepretation of the Abrahamic religions (mainly Judaism and Christianism), and just like he did with the Hemingways, his "logical and not remotely emotional" revisionism is full of "maybes", "I thinks" and "probablys". In Dave's New-New Testament, there's God who's male and "knows better" than everybod, and an "non-God" off-spring of God named Yoohwhoo who's a woman but also a "he/she/it" (Don't worry, I don't get it either, it's even adressed in the story that it doesn't make sense) who like to fancy herself as the God that created everything and it's omnipotent, even though the actual God tries to show her/him/it the contrary, but she just won't listen and would try over and over to "get laid" with God and to constantly get his attention like Women do in real life, according to the same Dave who thinks women want to get rid of men, or some women, but then if there are only some why isn't there another Yoohwhoo who's like the other women? Who knows. With that said, his weird interpretations are, at the very least, creative, even though it just him looking at religion in a way that it validates his views on anything that isn't an "heterosexual male who can fend of for himself and can take on the world whenever he feels like" behaves, which makes me think that someone like an Heterosexual males with a disability, like those confined to a wheelchair, would be in a different rank, like below the "non-disabled" but above Homosexuals and women? (What I did there basically is throwing a Dave Sim). But I digress. His "not-essay" wouldn't be that bad if he didn't kept fixated on the same idea over and over again (the whole thing revolves around some Bible/Torah stories being God making fun of Yoohwhoo crazy ideas and Yoohwhoo wreaking havoc on Earth and stuff, it's too long to explain and its now worth it really).
The thing that really grinds my gears about this whole part of the non-story, and the reason why I give this book two stars instead of one, is that "Latter Days" kicks-off with goal scored right from the kick-off. It was a return to form for Cerebus with really funny moments and great satire/parodies, not to mention Dave making fun of himself and the state of the comic industry at the time. But I guess Dave just hates people enjoying Cerebus.
Final Veredict: Everything recommended except the parts where Dave Sim speaking through Cerebus and the Woody Allen analogue re-interpret religion.
The thing that really grinds my gears about this whole part of the non-story, and the reason why I give this book two stars instead of one, is that "Latter Days" kicks-off with goal scored right from the kick-off. It was a return to form for Cerebus with really funny moments and great satire/parodies, not to mention Dave making fun of himself and the state of the comic industry at the time. But I guess Dave just hates people enjoying Cerebus.
Final Veredict: Everything recommended except the parts where Dave Sim speaking through Cerebus and the Woody Allen analogue re-interpret religion.
January 10, 2026
By the middle I was like: "Wait, maybe this isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be?" and up to the Three Stooges - Wise Fellows biographies everything was good, even touching in how easily Sim can go from one dimensional characters' rapport to giving them depth and turn it into a gripping family estrangement. There is even a touch of great in how early organised religion isn't dissimilar to a cult, and I love how Rick's religious mania transforms into popular tradition. Even the beginning of the book, where Cerebus just gets old and switches from job to job isn't that bad, and my only gripe would be how drastically it switches tone from the Going Home story and also how easily the status quo from the previous 250 issues or so got discarded (the Cirinist revolution and Cirin herself isn't even mentioned, Jaka's love story and the Tavers rule, and basically everything that once was a politically complex landscape just got resolved in the most convenient and lazy way). Then the Woody Allen stand-in appeared and the Torah commentary started and it was simply insufferable: not only do you have to suffer a near incomprehensible - borderline psychotic reinterpretation of even the most straightforward events in the Pentateuch (that nobody asked for not cares about), but you also have to do so through a layer of Cerebus uncommunicative and uneducated internal speech, so it is doubly frustrating to keep up with (that's without including the constant homophobic/sexist ""jokes""), all in the smallest type font possible. If that wasn't enough, the whole 8 issues or so this goes on are interjected with Woody Allen epistolar sections where he is studying a Freud's stand-in which again is insufferable and the whole ending of Later Days seems an exercise in vanity and putting the reader through punishment. The only thing to like here are the illustrations depicting the Woody Allen character and Cerebus inserted into frames of celebrated art house films such as La Dolce Vita or Persona, as the Woody Allen character starts detaching from reality and losing his mind.
The end reveal where Cerebus is being interviewed by someone that looks exactly like his long-lost love gave me a shock, as I thought for one minute it was actually her... Then made me sadly realise that amongst all the other beloved characters (Jaka, Astoria, Lord Julius, Bear, etc) from the saga most have passed away a long time ago with not even as much as a proper send off, as we're nearing a hundred years after the main storyline. How long do aardvarks live in fact?
The end reveal where Cerebus is being interviewed by someone that looks exactly like his long-lost love gave me a shock, as I thought for one minute it was actually her... Then made me sadly realise that amongst all the other beloved characters (Jaka, Astoria, Lord Julius, Bear, etc) from the saga most have passed away a long time ago with not even as much as a proper send off, as we're nearing a hundred years after the main storyline. How long do aardvarks live in fact?
May 19, 2025
Oh Lord.
(of course I would say LORD wouldn’t I because in the Bible LORD refers to YHWH aka YooWhoo who is the evil female demiurge who lives at the centre of the Earth and is constantly trying to persuade God to marry her and half the Bible is her and her mouthpieces being jealous of the truth of God and pretending she can create things but she can’t because women can’t)
Anyway yes it’s this one. Latter Days has a fair claim to be the worst comic I’ve ever read. Usually when Cerebus gets hateful or tedious there’s a lot of craft to guiltily admire but the most loathsome parts here are also the weakest artistically - story and art become almost entirely unmoored as the entire comic distorts under the pressure of Dave Sim’s religious obsessions. On here even the reviews which have been all “yeah Dave you tell those beta cucks” come to Latter Days and go “ok actually fuck this”.
The story so far: while doing Bible parody Rick’s Story, Dave Sim had a conversion experience and realised the Bible was true, as was the Koran, and developed a religion of his own devising combining bits of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Sim’s religious journey didn’t stop him finishing off Cerebus’ story with Jaka in Going Home. But in Latter Days it comes roaring back - around 2/3 of the way through the book Woody Allen analogue Konigsberg shows up with a copy of the Torah and Cerebus starts reading it, dictating his commentary to Konigsbergs and an unseen scribe. In practise what this means is page after page of Dave Sim’s Torah exegesis in very small font alongside inscrutable pictures of Woody Allen in a variety of styles.
It’s almost impossible to convey how difficult, tiresome and awful the experience of reading these parts is. Sim is apparently convinced it will take 100-200 years for Jewish scholars to catch up with his analysis here and yes it does feel like that is how long you’ve been reading it. For all that the commentaries are an endurance test they’re also pretty easy to summarise: Sim has picked up on the (generally accepted I believe) idea that Genesis and other early bits of the Bible are the work of multiple authors, and has refracted this through his gender obsession to decode it as a hostile dialogue between a male divinity and his female wannabe counterpart who can’t admit he created her.
It’s certainly original. But you do not in fact have to hand it to Dave Sim for creating a banging new heresy as the way he does it is monstrously unfriendly to even an imagined sympathetic reader. We never see the text, just Cerebus bantering commentary on it; every pause and aside is ‘faithfully’ documented, and if you do somehow manage to concentrate on the text you’re also rewarded with rancid little nuggets like the Gay Panic defense invoked to justify Cain killing Abel and at least two separate nudge-wink hints that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves. It’s as vile as it is grotesque.
At first the Woody Allen pages - extracts from Konigsberg’s diary of his love life and later his analysis - are a merciful break from this swill. They’re not good - the Freud analogue is called Dr Fraud, which indicates the state of Sim’s wit at this stage - but they’re different. Gradually, though, the Allen sections become more abstract as the character endures a series of humiliating tableaux at the hands of Fellini and others, rendered in the photorealistic style Sim had begun experimenting with. I’m normally keen to ask the question “what was Sim up to here?” but at this point Cerebus defeated me: this and the Torah material in juxtaposition are just utterly unrewarding and grim.
And yet, inconcievably, they may not be the worst parts of this comic.
Before we get to the Torah sections, Latter Days has a job to do, which is covering a span of decades and resolving the *other* main religious plot, the one Rick’s Story was designed to start in the first place. The Booke Of Ricke presented Cerebus as a prophet - now the other shoe drops, and we learn that it also presented him as a Messiah, who will return to fulfil the prophecies and drive out the Cirinists, whose power is waning in any case. While Cerebus is spending decades herding sheep and becoming a professional sports star, the land fills with chapters of Cerebites, all awaiting the one true Cerebus.
There is a long section - they all feel like long sections at this point - in which Cerebus is abducted by the Three Stooges, adherents to this religion, who are eventually convinced he IS the one foretold (Sim said the Stooges were his most difficult caricatures ever; I’ll happily take his word for it). But maybe the nadir of Latter Days comes after he’s convinced, in the sections where the Cirinists are slaughtered by his followers, led by a Todd McFarlane analogue who is also (I think) standing in for the Apostle Paul, and Sim decides to do a Spawn parody, a full decade after the character appeared.
The Torah sections are borderline impossible to read and hateful when you do, but on some important level they aren’t actually comics. I’m not expecting Dave Sim to be a competent rabbinical exegesist. I am expecting him to be a competent cartoonist, and in the middle parts of Latter Days even that falls away. The Spawn parody is inane; the McFarlane character is incomprehensible (ironic that Sim’s worst phonetic speech is him writing a Canadian!); the plot makes so sense; Sim’s choices of what to show on and off page are bizarre (perhaps he was rushing through his original plan to fit the Torah material in). Needless to add the story revels in the slaughter of women, though a resolution to the Cirinist strand was always likely to - but the petty sadism of including a Canadian woman cartoonist (Julie Doucet) to execute her on panel speaks volumes about where Sim’s head was at.
Basically, nothing works in this comic. The setpieces fall flat - theres something which I think is a Kurtzman tribute trying to add pathos to the war scenes but it’s tawdry; the photorealism is static and cold. The pacing is abominable. The ideas are demented. Everything Dave Sim used to be good at is almost entirely absent here. Unbelievable that it’s come to this, and there’s still a book to go.
(by Tom Ewing)
(of course I would say LORD wouldn’t I because in the Bible LORD refers to YHWH aka YooWhoo who is the evil female demiurge who lives at the centre of the Earth and is constantly trying to persuade God to marry her and half the Bible is her and her mouthpieces being jealous of the truth of God and pretending she can create things but she can’t because women can’t)
Anyway yes it’s this one. Latter Days has a fair claim to be the worst comic I’ve ever read. Usually when Cerebus gets hateful or tedious there’s a lot of craft to guiltily admire but the most loathsome parts here are also the weakest artistically - story and art become almost entirely unmoored as the entire comic distorts under the pressure of Dave Sim’s religious obsessions. On here even the reviews which have been all “yeah Dave you tell those beta cucks” come to Latter Days and go “ok actually fuck this”.
The story so far: while doing Bible parody Rick’s Story, Dave Sim had a conversion experience and realised the Bible was true, as was the Koran, and developed a religion of his own devising combining bits of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Sim’s religious journey didn’t stop him finishing off Cerebus’ story with Jaka in Going Home. But in Latter Days it comes roaring back - around 2/3 of the way through the book Woody Allen analogue Konigsberg shows up with a copy of the Torah and Cerebus starts reading it, dictating his commentary to Konigsbergs and an unseen scribe. In practise what this means is page after page of Dave Sim’s Torah exegesis in very small font alongside inscrutable pictures of Woody Allen in a variety of styles.
It’s almost impossible to convey how difficult, tiresome and awful the experience of reading these parts is. Sim is apparently convinced it will take 100-200 years for Jewish scholars to catch up with his analysis here and yes it does feel like that is how long you’ve been reading it. For all that the commentaries are an endurance test they’re also pretty easy to summarise: Sim has picked up on the (generally accepted I believe) idea that Genesis and other early bits of the Bible are the work of multiple authors, and has refracted this through his gender obsession to decode it as a hostile dialogue between a male divinity and his female wannabe counterpart who can’t admit he created her.
It’s certainly original. But you do not in fact have to hand it to Dave Sim for creating a banging new heresy as the way he does it is monstrously unfriendly to even an imagined sympathetic reader. We never see the text, just Cerebus bantering commentary on it; every pause and aside is ‘faithfully’ documented, and if you do somehow manage to concentrate on the text you’re also rewarded with rancid little nuggets like the Gay Panic defense invoked to justify Cain killing Abel and at least two separate nudge-wink hints that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves. It’s as vile as it is grotesque.
At first the Woody Allen pages - extracts from Konigsberg’s diary of his love life and later his analysis - are a merciful break from this swill. They’re not good - the Freud analogue is called Dr Fraud, which indicates the state of Sim’s wit at this stage - but they’re different. Gradually, though, the Allen sections become more abstract as the character endures a series of humiliating tableaux at the hands of Fellini and others, rendered in the photorealistic style Sim had begun experimenting with. I’m normally keen to ask the question “what was Sim up to here?” but at this point Cerebus defeated me: this and the Torah material in juxtaposition are just utterly unrewarding and grim.
And yet, inconcievably, they may not be the worst parts of this comic.
Before we get to the Torah sections, Latter Days has a job to do, which is covering a span of decades and resolving the *other* main religious plot, the one Rick’s Story was designed to start in the first place. The Booke Of Ricke presented Cerebus as a prophet - now the other shoe drops, and we learn that it also presented him as a Messiah, who will return to fulfil the prophecies and drive out the Cirinists, whose power is waning in any case. While Cerebus is spending decades herding sheep and becoming a professional sports star, the land fills with chapters of Cerebites, all awaiting the one true Cerebus.
There is a long section - they all feel like long sections at this point - in which Cerebus is abducted by the Three Stooges, adherents to this religion, who are eventually convinced he IS the one foretold (Sim said the Stooges were his most difficult caricatures ever; I’ll happily take his word for it). But maybe the nadir of Latter Days comes after he’s convinced, in the sections where the Cirinists are slaughtered by his followers, led by a Todd McFarlane analogue who is also (I think) standing in for the Apostle Paul, and Sim decides to do a Spawn parody, a full decade after the character appeared.
The Torah sections are borderline impossible to read and hateful when you do, but on some important level they aren’t actually comics. I’m not expecting Dave Sim to be a competent rabbinical exegesist. I am expecting him to be a competent cartoonist, and in the middle parts of Latter Days even that falls away. The Spawn parody is inane; the McFarlane character is incomprehensible (ironic that Sim’s worst phonetic speech is him writing a Canadian!); the plot makes so sense; Sim’s choices of what to show on and off page are bizarre (perhaps he was rushing through his original plan to fit the Torah material in). Needless to add the story revels in the slaughter of women, though a resolution to the Cirinist strand was always likely to - but the petty sadism of including a Canadian woman cartoonist (Julie Doucet) to execute her on panel speaks volumes about where Sim’s head was at.
Basically, nothing works in this comic. The setpieces fall flat - theres something which I think is a Kurtzman tribute trying to add pathos to the war scenes but it’s tawdry; the photorealism is static and cold. The pacing is abominable. The ideas are demented. Everything Dave Sim used to be good at is almost entirely absent here. Unbelievable that it’s come to this, and there’s still a book to go.
(by Tom Ewing)
July 14, 2020
So this is a case of the author/creator not knowing when to edit themselves. The last few phone books have been an exercise in sacrificing story for novelty. I like a cool, interesting approach to story telling, especially in comics, but still tell a story without droning on to the point the reader just phased out. Just as I’ve begun to skim the afterwords/notes at the end of the collections, I’ve begun to do the same with the text. There are nuggets of worthwhile writing buried within the fluff, but damn is it tedious looking for it. I’m going to read the last book, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it as I did when I first started the series.
To be clear, the subject matter and opinions, while I don’t share them, are not what turn me off. It’s the over-stuffed writing and inconsistent characters and themes that change only to serve the morals the author wants to purport rather than tell a meaningful and complete story.
To be clear, the subject matter and opinions, while I don’t share them, are not what turn me off. It’s the over-stuffed writing and inconsistent characters and themes that change only to serve the morals the author wants to purport rather than tell a meaningful and complete story.
July 30, 2020
There are only 2 reasons to read this book. 1) To complete the saga, if you've made it this far and, 2) to study Sim's panel composition, lettering and artwork.
As a study in what the comic book medium can do visually, and how it can tell a story, it is a masterpiece. As a continuation of the Cerebus narrative, it is incredibly uneven.
The first 3rd of the book is a series of fun, smaller adventures. The 2nd third a slower paced continuation of Cerebus' life. The 3rd third is commentaries on thr Torah being told whilst analysing Woody Allen's life through the lens of his films. Yes, the 3rd third is as bad as it sounds and it is for that reason I've scored the book 2 out of 5 stars. I was tempted to score it one but my enjoyment of the earlier sections boosted my score somewhat.
If you don't fall into either of the two categories I mention (as to why to read the book), avoid Latter Days like the plague.
As a study in what the comic book medium can do visually, and how it can tell a story, it is a masterpiece. As a continuation of the Cerebus narrative, it is incredibly uneven.
The first 3rd of the book is a series of fun, smaller adventures. The 2nd third a slower paced continuation of Cerebus' life. The 3rd third is commentaries on thr Torah being told whilst analysing Woody Allen's life through the lens of his films. Yes, the 3rd third is as bad as it sounds and it is for that reason I've scored the book 2 out of 5 stars. I was tempted to score it one but my enjoyment of the earlier sections boosted my score somewhat.
If you don't fall into either of the two categories I mention (as to why to read the book), avoid Latter Days like the plague.
November 11, 2025
As readers we have nothing tying us to Estarcion anymore aside from Cerebus himself, who becomes directionless and both in character and writing. It truly feels like after Jaka's departure there was nothing more that needed to be said. This is undoubtedly the low point of the whole series and it really is a slog to get through. This really feels like the logical heigh of whatever psychosis took over Dave's brain as well. Despite some of his less admirable qualities I struggled to condemn him completely until this volume. No longer can he hide under the guise of being an "anti-feminist," this is the point where the misogyny becomes undeniable to any but the delusional. I struggle to identify a single interesting character, including Cerebus. As always the comic conventions being played with and the beautiful art are an ever-present reminder of the fact that this is still a chapter within a larger master work, but it is definitively the worst chapter.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 1, 2025
If this didn't have the extended Torah commentary in it, it would probably be 4+ stars. The "blank outs", the (snrk) "tennis racket", the "Three Wise Guys" (Three Stooges parody), the Spawn parody, and the rise of Cerebus' Catholic patriarchal society are interesting, well-plotted, and fun. The panel work in the pitch-black sanctuary in particular is absolutely wonderful.
But, unfortunately, the latter half of this volume is one looooooong commentary on the Torah, with some (admittedly funny) Woody Allen parody cutting it up into sections. This commentary is distinctly misogynistic, extremely long, and very boring. Easily the worst of the series to this point, as even the more obnoxiously religious stuff in Rick's Story is at least concise compared to pages and pages and pages of Old Testament commentary.
If you want to read this and have a good time, just skip to Last Days once the Torah commentary starts. If you do that, this is a perfectly great volume.
But, unfortunately, the latter half of this volume is one looooooong commentary on the Torah, with some (admittedly funny) Woody Allen parody cutting it up into sections. This commentary is distinctly misogynistic, extremely long, and very boring. Easily the worst of the series to this point, as even the more obnoxiously religious stuff in Rick's Story is at least concise compared to pages and pages and pages of Old Testament commentary.
If you want to read this and have a good time, just skip to Last Days once the Torah commentary starts. If you do that, this is a perfectly great volume.
May 12, 2019
The weakest volume of Cerebus. Its not all bad, there are still some good elements like the art, lettering, and some good scenes but this is where Sim's beliefs really starts to override the story. The sad thing is that the overall story could have been amazing like Church & State or Mothers & Daughers with the final battle between Cerebus and The Cirinists. However, the story is told rather than actually shown except when that one Cirinist soldier briefly gets reanimated(that was creepy and good). Also second half (Chasing YHWH) with the unreadable walls of text was hard to get through. All in all, even with my criticism, a bad volume of Cerebus is better than most bad comics these days.
July 28, 2022
This one is a mess. Sim, throws a few decent comedy pages together before involving the 3 Stooges which gets tired long before he is done with it .
The latter part of the book is an expression of Sims gestalt personal religion which examines the Ibrahimic faiths (largely the Torah) through the lens of Simmism and decides which bits are good (male-ist) and which are bad (feminist).
I don't mind reading things I disagree with but this is dull and insane in equal part.
The latter part of the book is an expression of Sims gestalt personal religion which examines the Ibrahimic faiths (largely the Torah) through the lens of Simmism and decides which bits are good (male-ist) and which are bad (feminist).
I don't mind reading things I disagree with but this is dull and insane in equal part.
June 20, 2020
Unreadable... it has been spiralling downhill for quite some time now but in the previous collections I found some enjoyment. This was a pain to get through.
November 22, 2020
absolutely interminable, hundreds of pages of scriptural commentary and debate between cerebus and a parody woody allen
November 30, 2024
Excellent artwork, awful and boring story.
Read
October 5, 2025After giving up on this series somewhere in the 280s 25 years ago I decided I'm finally going to finish it.
Anyway, this volume.. hoo boy.
Anyway, this volume.. hoo boy.
Read
October 21, 2021Well, I do find it interesting, and I do find it readable, but it is a slog. And a mess. And depressing (in a number of ways, but I mean in the "So this is what Sim decided to do with Cerebus" way.) Currently in the Dave Sim pretends to be Cerebus knitting Biblical exegesis/revision with the "Women, am I right? nyuk nyuk nyuk!" philosophy section.
Sim has said elsewhere that he isn't Cerebus. To which my response would have been, "Duh," coupled with "Why would you even need to say that?" Now it's more like, "..."
Part of the reason it is taken me nearly two decades to come back and reread Books 1 - 14 and finally read 15 - 16: I didn't really want to see Cerebus die. But I'm starting to think he actually died at the end of Form and Void.
-.-.-.-
Note to self: when reviewing simultaneously with reading something for the first time, anything produced will be either wrong or a half-baked epigram.
Sim has said elsewhere that he isn't Cerebus. To which my response would have been, "Duh," coupled with "Why would you even need to say that?" Now it's more like, "..."
Part of the reason it is taken me nearly two decades to come back and reread Books 1 - 14 and finally read 15 - 16: I didn't really want to see Cerebus die. But I'm starting to think he actually died at the end of Form and Void.
-.-.-.-
Note to self: when reviewing simultaneously with reading something for the first time, anything produced will be either wrong or a half-baked epigram.
November 10, 2014
Latter Days was the first time that Cerebus depressed me. Reads — well, everyone knows Reads is coming, and if you skip over the text it's not THAT bad, just skimpy. I found Rick's Story to be pretty hard to get through as well, but that was mainly because it repeated some things that Guys did better, Sim's misogyny was rearing its ugly head again and the whole scriptural thing was a mistake, but I could chalk it up as a failed experiment. But after I finished Latter Days, I just sat there trying to figure out what the hell it was I just read.
As other reviewers have mentioned, it starts out promising. The first couple of issues show Cerebus wandering around Estarcion with a death wish and it's good-but-not-great in the same way that Going Home was. It starts to go south when the Three Stooges, now followers of Rick's loony religion, kidnap Cerebus and they begin a rebellion against Cirinist rule together. There's some humor in their kidnapping attempt, but it all quickly descends to a bunch of quotes from the Book of Rick — and as Rick's Story was my least favorite Cerebus phonebook before Latter Days, I began to lose interest just as quickly.
The return of Cerebus to Cirinist territory should have been a good move — we could've seen more of the book's extended cast of characters, which is where the series really excelled. But here there's no Lord Julius, no Astoria, no Regency Elf, not even any of the major Cirinist characters from Mothers and Daughters. Just the Three Stooges (who admittedly work well in the world of Cerebus), Woody Allen (who feels out of place) and an extended parody of Spawn and Todd McFarlane (which falls flat on its face). Not only did this date the book (who cares about Spawn these days?), but normally this kind of thing would have been handled by Elrod and the Roach, who are MIA here, letting the comic relief fall on Cerebus himself. As a result, the rebellion against the Cirinists feels like a joke and the story ends up as a complete mess.
Oh, and the Cerebists start executing women they don't like. I think it's supposed to be a joke, but Dave Sim is always more of a misogynist than you think he is, so who knows. And if it is a joke, then, uh...ha...ha?
The second half of the book completely avoids story altogether and we get to learnCerebus Dave Sim's views on the Torah, which ends up being about as fun as reading a LaRouche pamphlet.
Cerebus is notoriously uneven, and I've hated some sections of the comic before, but this one just felt sad. All of the humor and drama is misplaced and Sim's rants here make Reads seem like a philosophical masterpiece. Before Latter Days, Sim could maybe be said to have been the Richard Wagner of comics — he was clearly the most talented man in the field, but hearing him talk about women is about as fun as hearing Wagner discuss the merits of Judaism. But in Latter Days it feels like his schizophrenia finally caught up with him. You could maybe consider it to be outsider art, but that's a pretty pathetic fate for a cartoonist who was once one of the leading lights of independent comics.
As other reviewers have mentioned, it starts out promising. The first couple of issues show Cerebus wandering around Estarcion with a death wish and it's good-but-not-great in the same way that Going Home was. It starts to go south when the Three Stooges, now followers of Rick's loony religion, kidnap Cerebus and they begin a rebellion against Cirinist rule together. There's some humor in their kidnapping attempt, but it all quickly descends to a bunch of quotes from the Book of Rick — and as Rick's Story was my least favorite Cerebus phonebook before Latter Days, I began to lose interest just as quickly.
The return of Cerebus to Cirinist territory should have been a good move — we could've seen more of the book's extended cast of characters, which is where the series really excelled. But here there's no Lord Julius, no Astoria, no Regency Elf, not even any of the major Cirinist characters from Mothers and Daughters. Just the Three Stooges (who admittedly work well in the world of Cerebus), Woody Allen (who feels out of place) and an extended parody of Spawn and Todd McFarlane (which falls flat on its face). Not only did this date the book (who cares about Spawn these days?), but normally this kind of thing would have been handled by Elrod and the Roach, who are MIA here, letting the comic relief fall on Cerebus himself. As a result, the rebellion against the Cirinists feels like a joke and the story ends up as a complete mess.
Oh, and the Cerebists start executing women they don't like. I think it's supposed to be a joke, but Dave Sim is always more of a misogynist than you think he is, so who knows. And if it is a joke, then, uh...ha...ha?
The second half of the book completely avoids story altogether and we get to learn
Cerebus is notoriously uneven, and I've hated some sections of the comic before, but this one just felt sad. All of the humor and drama is misplaced and Sim's rants here make Reads seem like a philosophical masterpiece. Before Latter Days, Sim could maybe be said to have been the Richard Wagner of comics — he was clearly the most talented man in the field, but hearing him talk about women is about as fun as hearing Wagner discuss the merits of Judaism. But in Latter Days it feels like his schizophrenia finally caught up with him. You could maybe consider it to be outsider art, but that's a pretty pathetic fate for a cartoonist who was once one of the leading lights of independent comics.
August 12, 2013
So, this book gets off to a great start. The first two issues are gold-standard Cerebus, and exactly where one hopes the series would have headed as it approached the ending. Cleverly-written, beautifully-drawn, acerbic installments that take Cerebus a huge chunk of the way towards old age, first as an comics-obsessed sheep farmer and then as a professional athlete. What they lack in the literary depth of the other post-Church & State stories, they more than make up for as simply excellent comics.
Then we get Cerebus' campaign against the Cirinists, which is somewhat disappointing in its execution (consisting mostly of a Three Stooges homage and an extended Spawn parody) but which is nonetheless hugely rewarding because, seriously, it means that the actual Cerebus story is advancing in an obvious, literal manner for the first time since Cerebus' cosmic showdown with the false Cirin. There's a lot of heart, particularly in Cerebus' relationships with the Three Wise Guys. Anyway: still solid comics.
And then we get to what seems to have been Sim's central purpose with this book: Cerebus unpacks old Judeo-Christian texts, in badly-formatted, rambling small-print prose barely redeemed by the (predictably beautiful) accompanying illustrations and half-hearted side-story, in which a well-drawn Woody Allen analog simultaneously recapitulates the history of 20th-century psychology and of independent comics.
Now, here's the first point in Cerebus where I'm genuinely confused, as distinct from underwhelmed or disappointed. In the context of the Cerebus story, this diversion serves a purpose: Cerebus has decided to step into a new role as a religious leader, and it's relevant, obviously, that he spends some years developing and maturing into that role. And, in terms of the plot, his fandom for an irreverent, profane Preacher analog of a comic book leads him to consult holy texts, and to struggle with them to find wisdom. But the actual content of his exegesis (basically: God is totally a dude, wise and well-suited for governance, and YHWH is totally a chick, and bitches be crazy) is both boring and stupid, and in fact mind-achingly boring, and breathtakingly stupid, and the less said about it the better. I'd skimmed over the text the first time I read these issues, and so this time I forced myself to read Every Single Word, and my brain is still angry at me. Eventually it ends.
The non-Torah parts of Latter Days are 5-star Cerebus material. And it's this fact that makes me the most bitter about the time I invested in reading the 0-star, bury-it-in-a-compost-heap-somewhere-and-hope-alcohol-will-blur-out-what-wrinkles-it-left-in-your-brain rest.
Then we get Cerebus' campaign against the Cirinists, which is somewhat disappointing in its execution (consisting mostly of a Three Stooges homage and an extended Spawn parody) but which is nonetheless hugely rewarding because, seriously, it means that the actual Cerebus story is advancing in an obvious, literal manner for the first time since Cerebus' cosmic showdown with the false Cirin. There's a lot of heart, particularly in Cerebus' relationships with the Three Wise Guys. Anyway: still solid comics.
And then we get to what seems to have been Sim's central purpose with this book: Cerebus unpacks old Judeo-Christian texts, in badly-formatted, rambling small-print prose barely redeemed by the (predictably beautiful) accompanying illustrations and half-hearted side-story, in which a well-drawn Woody Allen analog simultaneously recapitulates the history of 20th-century psychology and of independent comics.
Now, here's the first point in Cerebus where I'm genuinely confused, as distinct from underwhelmed or disappointed. In the context of the Cerebus story, this diversion serves a purpose: Cerebus has decided to step into a new role as a religious leader, and it's relevant, obviously, that he spends some years developing and maturing into that role. And, in terms of the plot, his fandom for an irreverent, profane Preacher analog of a comic book leads him to consult holy texts, and to struggle with them to find wisdom. But the actual content of his exegesis (basically: God is totally a dude, wise and well-suited for governance, and YHWH is totally a chick, and bitches be crazy) is both boring and stupid, and in fact mind-achingly boring, and breathtakingly stupid, and the less said about it the better. I'd skimmed over the text the first time I read these issues, and so this time I forced myself to read Every Single Word, and my brain is still angry at me. Eventually it ends.
The non-Torah parts of Latter Days are 5-star Cerebus material. And it's this fact that makes me the most bitter about the time I invested in reading the 0-star, bury-it-in-a-compost-heap-somewhere-and-hope-alcohol-will-blur-out-what-wrinkles-it-left-in-your-brain rest.
October 4, 2012
This book is a prime example of an old adage.
'Just because you can, does not mean you should.'
Cerebus as a comic book series is known for many things like experimentation with the form, but in this case, Dave Sim's experiments with form break down. Much of the book swings from comics to illustrated fiction as Cerebus has one long conversation with his scribe Konigsberg which is a spot on caricature of Woody Allen. I suspect I was not the only one to catch a cool breeze from the rapid page turning as I searched for the comics.
The touching part of the book was the Cerebus-ization of the Three Stooges as the Three Wise Men and the eventual decline and death of the men.
There is a temptation to chart Dave Sim's shifting mental state as you're reading Cerebus. I do not know if that is a decent measuring stick, but I can make the argument that Cerebus (the character) has a break from reality in this heavy book.
There are seeds of what will be Glamourpuss in the story and a shameless insertion of the writer as the lead character. While much of fiction is wish fulfillment by the author, there should be a little daylight between the character and the writer. It's a very long and very verbose book tipping the scale at over 500 pages. How long-winded was Dave Sim in this tome?
Latter Days has 50 pages of notes as if the first 450 did not get the point across.
'Just because you can, does not mean you should.'
Cerebus as a comic book series is known for many things like experimentation with the form, but in this case, Dave Sim's experiments with form break down. Much of the book swings from comics to illustrated fiction as Cerebus has one long conversation with his scribe Konigsberg which is a spot on caricature of Woody Allen. I suspect I was not the only one to catch a cool breeze from the rapid page turning as I searched for the comics.
The touching part of the book was the Cerebus-ization of the Three Stooges as the Three Wise Men and the eventual decline and death of the men.
There is a temptation to chart Dave Sim's shifting mental state as you're reading Cerebus. I do not know if that is a decent measuring stick, but I can make the argument that Cerebus (the character) has a break from reality in this heavy book.
There are seeds of what will be Glamourpuss in the story and a shameless insertion of the writer as the lead character. While much of fiction is wish fulfillment by the author, there should be a little daylight between the character and the writer. It's a very long and very verbose book tipping the scale at over 500 pages. How long-winded was Dave Sim in this tome?
Latter Days has 50 pages of notes as if the first 450 did not get the point across.
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