Tom Ewing's Reviews > Guys

So Mick Jagger, Marty Feldman, Ringo Starr, and Norman Mailer walk into a bar...

Guys is one of the hardest books in the Cerebus series to rate. It's the apotheosis of three of Dave Sim's greatest loves as Cerebus creator - innovative uses of lettering, phonetic speech, and caricatures of living people. It's also an attempt at doing something very unusual in Western comics, though there's no formal reason it should be - a situation comedy. But it's also the first of several books which are more-or-less explicitly workings out of Dave Sim's extreme ideas on gender relations, laid out in theory in Reads and here applied in practice to the lives of his characters.

Let's look at the good stuff first. Technically, Guys is pretty remarkable. Cerebus has used lettering in innovative ways from very early on, and in Mothers & Daughters it was already starting to carry a lot of load as a device for establishing tone and meaning. In Guys, almost every character has a different speaking voice, established through phonetic speech, font, ways of emphasis, and speech bubble shape, all of which also shift around to track the emotional and physical state of their characters. Oh, and mixed in with all this are characters based on other cartoonists' creations, like Eddie Campbell's Alec, whose lettering is taken from their 'native' strips and blends in with what Sim is doing.

It's a tour de force - not for the first time in Cerebus it's hard to think of anyone who's done anything like it, certainly not with this much control and consistency. And it's a feat of cartooning skill which actually serves the storytelling, it's not just showing off. An awful lot of the story in Guys requires paying attention to things like lettering and background details, to track the level of inebriation of characters (variance in which drives the action of some scenes) but also the passing of the seasons outside the pub all this happens in: Cerebus spends years drinking here, something it's easy not to notice if you're reading inattentively.

The gentle passing of time is also a way of serving notice that things have changed structurally: the main story of Cerebus has finished, and Guys is a break point with some of the same characters but none of the momentum. We hear bits and pieces of wider-world developments; we see how the world has settled down following the Cirinist revolution, but for now those things aren't the focus of the comic. Guys is what it claims to be: 19 issues of Cerebus in a pub.

What's he doing in the pub? Existing, which is what gives the story its sitcom texture. Men, in the Cirinists' new world, are allowed to spend their time in taverns and provided with free drink and food, but they aren't allowed to leave unless they're sober. If a married man fails to leave the pub for three days, he's automatically divorced. By the time Cerebus arrives in his particular boozer, a lot of the worse cases have drunk or brawled themselves to death, and the pub population is a motley group of misfits, some of whom can't fit in anywhere, some of whom have chosen an itinerant life, and some of whom are in between relationships.

Guys as a sitcom is a series of comic episodes - Cerebus shows up and is ragged on by the tavern regulars; Prince Mick (the Mick Jagger caricature) gets laid to the disgruntlement of everyone else; Norman Mailer arrives and brings the unwelcome attention of authority to the pub - Mrs Thatcher showing up as a kind of Blakey from On The Buses equivalent; Marty Feldman is duped into believing there's a mongoose in a box; Cerebus and his friend Bear fall out over a game; and so on. In what would be the season finale, Bear's ex appears, threatening to end the masculine idyll.

It's all beautifully told, low-stakes stuff and Sim doubtless had a lot of fun kicking back after the fireworks (on-and off-page) of Mothers & Daughters. But he also had a higher concept for the storyline. Guys is drawn from a boozy stretch he spent as a single regular in a Candadian pub, and he claimed he wanted it to reflect how men really are when they're on their own, away from female influence, shootin' the shit, followin' the bro code, doing (as Bear puts it) "guy shit" instead of "chick shit".

And if so, man alive, Dave Sim needed better friends.

I must declare my interest here as a reader. I love pubs. I love conversations in pubs. I think a gently tipsy pub chat among mates is one of the finest achievements of British culture. Maybe it's different in North America but the action in Guys is unrecognisable to me. It's hard to enjoy the book because not one interesting conversation happens, not one good joke is told. All we get is 240 pages of guys being dickheads to one another and laughing about it afterwards. He should have called it BANTZ.

Behind its genuinely spectacular craft, Guys feels craven. It comes over as Dave Sim writing for a desired audience of real bros who dig "guy shit" and will feel sad when a chick comes in to break up the band and bring the curtain down. For all that I enjoyed reading those issues, it's safe to say I didn't think that. Sim's conception of guys and their shit is cramped and tedious: his reduction of women means he's reduced men too.

Guys isn't over yet, though - the story picks up on a thread from Minds, and Cerebus faces the first of his own temptations vis-a-vis women. This final act of "chick shit" - intentionally, for sure - is as awkward as the "guy shit" was free-flowing, Cerebus and (kind of) new character Joanne having miserable times interspersed with good sex. Again, now Sim's given us the cheat codes for his philosophy, it's impossible to see this section as anything other than didactic. Cerebus as a character thinks with his crotch and his led into unhappy situations because of it - fair enough, that's what people (not just men) do sometimes. People have been telling good stories about such characters for centuries and will do so as long as there are stories to tell. But Sim has made it impossible to read his handling of it, because you know - because he's told you at length! - that he thinks this is the universal male condition which only a tiny proportion of "male lights" can escape to reach true self-actualisation.

Guys, and this is also true of the next few books, would be a lot more enjoyable to someone who hasn't read the Viktor Davis parts of Reads and its objectivism-of-the-boudoir philosophy. When you've drawn a line-in-the-sand between you and anyone who believes long-term relationships can be happy, and then make the next few books domestic dramas about relationships, a certain amount of dramatic tension is going to be lost. Cerebus for the rest of its run is going to be about the tension between Sim's formal experiments and his curiosity about his craft, and his desire to make his books prove a point. Eventually, there's a winner.