Feeling like a bad furry for not knowing Hepcats or Cerebus but uh, well, whatever I guess
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i used to see issues of hepcats in cheap back issue boxes pretty often, but something about it just never appealed to me.
i was gonna say it was because it looked like a slice of life comic, but i’d pick up issues of like, hate or dirty plotte from those boxes.
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I’ve only read the first 75 issues of Cerebus (he went to 300) because it was a big deal in indie comics from back in the day. Todd McFarlane had Cerebus show up in issue 9 of Spawn and that was my gateway. The story up through High Society/Church and State is pretty good. It start outs as an adventure comic borrowing heavily from Conan the Barbarian but after the first couple years morphs into this whole other thing.
Dave Sim decided early on he wanted to do 300 issues and then quit so you see this long meandering story develop in a bunch of directions while the creator explores and works out his own bullshit. It’s kind of like The Odyssey in a way but with a talking aardvark.
Sim’s Cerebus Guide to Self Publishing is still a great and important read for anyone seriously considering self publishing their own work as a living.
The latest thing Sim worked on was The Strange Death of Alex Raymond, a story about a guy who died under mysterious circumstances (the guy in question was the cartoonist who created Flash Gordon). I haven’t finished it so I can’t say if I agree with his conclusion about the case (I also don’t know enough about it to form an opinion either way) but the artwork is great and it’s very up it’s own ass about the comic book medium in a way that speaks to me as a comic book nerd.
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Cerebus was completely formative for me. The first issue I bought was 155 and I picked up every issue after that until it ended. At a certain point, though, I stopped reading them. They got really tough to deal with. I had most of the phonebooks — up until Rick’s Story I think, at which point I couldn’t be bothered. I’ve since gotten rid of all that stuff.
I won’t say that I ever bought into his misogyny at all, but I did read Reads, and I was a teenage boy at the time. As such, I do feel that it did me some real harm, and I’m pretty pissed off about it looking back. Sim seems a sort of pathetic figure to me now, but at the time, Cerebus was my model for what a literary comic (whatever that is) could and should be. I remember having recurring dreams about the reading the new issue of Cerebus (often inexplicably in color!) even years after it had ended. That’s how much it got under my skin.
Anyway, nobody asked, but if anyone is interested in it, where I got on is about where you should think about getting off. You can skip the Conan stuff at the beginning, though those characters do tend to reappear later in more serious roles. High Society is good. Church and State is pretty profound. Jaka’s Story is good, but it gets a lot of credit for being a small, personal drama at a time when there weren’t that many of those in comics. Melmoth is a strange idea. Mothers and Daughters is like Church and State 2, but from an anti-feminist pov complete with manifesto 3/4 of the way in. Then there’s the part where Cerebus sits in a bar for years and years, and then Dave creates his own religion. Then he does Melmoth again, but with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Earnest Hemingway (and misogyny). Then there’s text, then it ends.
Anyway, that’s my post for the month.
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OH YEAH GUYS IS SUPER GOOD CUZ ITS ABOUT HOW NO MEN ARE ALLOWED OUTSIDE ALONE AND IF YOU’RE SINGLE YOURE JUST FORCED TO LIVE IN A BAR TIL A WOMAN PICKS YOU UP, it’s supposed to be a dig on women but it comes off as really angry 90s feminist if you’re a weird teenage girl who’s been in bad situations with men. it’s also is a break in the serious drama and just has a lot of funny gags
I guess if I was a guy when I read cerebus I’d be affected differently, and that’s a good point, but since I wasn’t raised as one I already understood the ridiculousness of it and would loudly announce myself as VOID COMING THROUGH, HERE TO STEAL ALL OF MENS LIGHT. my mom was a militant second wave feminist but gave up on it when she started dating men again so I was being raised by the polar opposite (still not good! not defending my moms proto terfness) of Dave sim while reading it
also the lettering, hoooo boy the lettering!! you’re not allowed to put that much emotion in FONTS (yes you are it’s the best. are there any graphic novels without pictures and just some really unhinged hand drawn words? I want to read it)
basically cerebus is awesome if you twist and reclaim it cuz there’s a million times where he’s almost on to something, but it’s good that he’s been pushed to obscurity so that people don’t take his ideas seriously
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i only read it when i saw daphny posting about it here like 15 years ago, having seen the trade paperbacks sitting the comicbook section of bookstores (when there still were highstreet bookstores in britain) looking all respectable for years prior
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it is kind of uh, ‘funny’ that dave sim has been cut out of gamer gate (&c.) and the post-gamer gate resurgence of people in nerd media with vocally regressive politics because his groomer activities in the 80s were like forcibly resurfaced to discredit him. if it weren’t for the particulars behind that i would say there is something kind of admirable about him not embracing his potential to become a real demagogue like mencius moldbug has
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comicsgate is it’s own special mess.
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i only know about Dave Sim/Cerebus adjacently as a Bone fan, apparently their “feud” is that Sim went on a misogynist rant while like hanging out with Jeff and Vijaya Smith and they were basically like “hey knock it the fuck off”. and later Sim tried to challenge Smith to a boxing match.
anyway Bone rulez and every character in it who does anything of consequence is an ass-kickin lady of some sort
Cerebus might be a lacuna in my indie/furry comics knowledge but 
look at all that baggage. i ain’t reading that shit.
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Did Savage Dragon crush Cerberus’ record yet?
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Almost. Erik Larsen is currently at issue 261 or 262 I think. Todd McFarlane tried to claim the record after Spawn hit 301 but like come on Todd you stopped drawing Spawn regularly after number 25 doing the occasional cover and inking someone else doesn’t count. We all know the real record only counts for books done entirely (or just about) by a single person.
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I’m shocked Todd did 25!
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Technically it wasn’t even 25 whole issues. There were a few fill ins from like 16-20 by Greg Capullo while Todd did the Spawn/Batman book with Frank Miller.
I would say Todd only did maybe 2.5 years of Spawn before bringing on other people to help, first with the art then later on with the writing. He’s a good artist and has a great sense of design but ultimately he’s a businessman above all else. He could have stuck with doing just his book and probably made an okay living at it but he decided he wanted to be rich instead so he branched out into doing other things. I can’t say I blame him. I loved his art but it’s undeniable that the book got a lot better after he brought other people on.
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McFarlane had Moore, Gaiman, Sim, and Miller writing #8-11 so I’d say he barely made it half a year!
He also didn’t self publish and had a letterer and a team of colorists, though I’m sure keeping Todd Inc. running was an awful lot of work. Just writing those “love checks” to all the creators who weren’t getting proper royalties probably took a lotta time out of his day.
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including miniseries and oneshots, usagi yojimbo is also close to reaching 300 issues (excluding them, it’s at 240-ish
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He couldn’t even setup a proper contract but had no problem dropping a one time six figure payment to each of them. Stupid or evil? You decide!
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wow my two faves back to back : chatting about cerebus and shitting on todd mcfarlane!!! I do have one nice thing to say about him though, he hired larry marder to run the toy department giving him enough money to spend time on making beanworld, beanworld is so cute!!
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C’mon, you gotta trust this guy, why would you ever need a contract
The MP3s of Gary Groth interviewing Todd McFarlane are no longer on the Comics Journal website and this is fucking killing me, I gotta listen to that again right now, it is so fucking good, the text still seems to be there but listening to Gary just crushing Todd with facts and logic and Todd being totally flippant about it all is such a joy, I wish I was a dumb as this guy, imagine how many noteworthy baseballs I’d own if I was that fucking dumb yet confident
Really blew my mind when I learned he permed his hair
I think McFarlane claimed Cerebus is the book that got him back into comics and I know way back when he said it was the only book he actively followed. I can’t think of anyone who draws human faces like Todd aside from Sim, that dude draws some weird fucking faces, I do not like looking at Todd’s faces
The other night I lost an hour or two flipping through issues of Hepcats and it was one of the worst comics I’ve ever read, it’s so fucking bad I’m actually hesitant to discuss it publicly, like if its author is still alive he most likely name searches and part of me doesn’t want to hurt the feelings of someone who was so bad and failed so hard and another part of me worries he’d actually register here just to flame me. I wouldn’t be proud of that, I do not want to ever interact with the author of Hepcats in any way. He was clearly another Sim disciple in all the worst ways, I was struggling to actually pinpoint another major influence on his art and coming up short, dude was learning all the worst lessons and making the ugliest fucking comic with the maximum amount of labor while losing all of his (and his wife’s) money. Also had all the really petty grudges but without the, I dunno, buffoonery of Sim. Like, he wasn’t using his soapbox to challenge Gareb Shamus to an arm wrestling match, y’know? Fucking wuss.
Hepcats #11 has no dialogue and is maybe the funniest comic I’ve read since like…Cromartie. But I’m not gonna recommend anyone read it cuz it’s incredibly bad and I don’t want anyone to get mad at me for laughing at a comic that’s all about some pretty hardcore abuse. BUT!! It is really funny, because it is so bad, you see. You might say I’m a little 
, sorry.
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I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t also point out that the dude who founded Caliber (and former boss of my favorite comic store owner) was running his toy division early on. That’s probably why the Crow was in that first wave of Movie Maniacs.
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Now that I’m an adult I realize that what I liked most about Todd McFarlane and Image Comics as a kid was not so much the actual books (which were often not very good at all lol like there are some hits in there but also just as many hard misses) it was actually the story of Todd/Image. It was aspirational to 12 year old me because it was a guy selling everyone on the idea of himself and his friends making their own way etc. and selling it in such a way that you couldn’t help but put yourself in their shoes and imagine doing the same thing with your own friends. It fit right in next to the similar stories of Eastman/Laird with TMNT and id software/Doom. Like I realize now how those things all formed the foundational bedrock of my ideology or whatever.
But now I kind of realize that what happened with Image back then couldn’t really happen in today’s environment because 1. there is no speculator boom anymore and 2. people care even less about comic books now than they did back when there was a speculator boom. I don’t think Spawn could even happen today the way it did originally. Spawn and Image only happened because Todd McFarlane was such a good huckster. Like seriously the guy is some kind of savant level sales genius. He speaks about things with such a wide eyed infectious energy and he brings you to his level and makes you feel like your in on some big secret. He’s seen behind the curtain and he’s revealing everything to you and together you and he can take over the world.
And he does draw the goofiest faces! Like he puts all these marks on the page and it looks like there’s all this detail but there’s not it’s all just noodling! His art is like his story telling and his salesmanship, it’s all smoke and mirrors! But it works and I can’t help but respect the hell out of that. If I’ve learned anything from Todd McFarlane it’s that you don’t have to be the greatest at anything, you can be quite mediocre even, you just have to know how to sell it. Sell people on the idea of you being great and embed within that idea the notion that they too can also be great and people will eat that shit up! It’s like magic!
So Spawn and Image were only possible because comic book nerds who only lived in the Marvel/DC ghetto were able to be taken in by a master hype man who convinced them they could all be rich someday by just buying and holding on to some comic books or publishing their own. And it’s weird how even today so many comic book nerds are still kind of stuck in the Marvel/DC paradigm where now there’s things like manga and the internet and all these other alternative markets for comics stuff that the audiences in all those other places completely dwarf whatever Marvel/DC are doing to the point where Marvel/DC kind of only keep their comic book parts of their companies around just because. Like they make money from movies and tv shows now, comics aren’t even a fraction of what those companies are today but they’re the things everyone knows them for meanwhile there’s manga artists your average Marvel/DC fan has never heard of who have audiences of like tens of millions of people.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this anymore. I hope Todd hurries up and gets another kickstarter going for a new Spawn figure (I believe he’s said the next one will be Medieval Spawn) because I managed to capitalize on the last one and I intend to do it again only bigger with the next.
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