This
book is usually thought of as a collection of mostly unconnected
stories that are parodies of Conan the Barbarian, with a talking
aardvark instead of Conan as the main character.
On this reread, I discovered for perhaps the first time how wrongheaded
that description is of all but the first four chapters here. Those
chapters are indeed separate stories instead of proper chapters in an
overall book, and the first one in particular is
almost completely unconnected from anything else. Starting with "The
Idol," though (originally published in issue #5 with no title) we are
firmly in the grip of a long story whose roots are being established,
even though Sim didn't really know where that story
was headed yet.
The
first four chapters are indeed almost slavish imitations, through the
lens of parody, of the comics produced by Roy Thomas and Barry Smith
(before he added the "Windsor")
for Marvel's "Conan the Barbarian" comic book in the early 1970s. The
first chapter, "The Flame Jewel," has some innovative tricks up its
sleeve in presenting the standard "steal a precious jewel from a
dangerous sorcerer" trope, and a good joke at the end
on the thieves who hire Cerebus. The second chapter, "Captive in
Boreala," opens with an obvious homage to the opening of Conan #16, "The
Frost Giant's Daughter," but wanders a bit, seemingly uncertain where
to go next, before arriving at the Eye of Terim
and the dark, sardonic laughter in the darkness that hints of something
important but ends up never being explained in any of the 298 issues to
follow. I think of this as the first hint that the young Sim had an
ambition to turn this funny-animal parody of
Conan into something more, but by the time he realized what it was to
be, this story no longer really fit into his plans. He tried to explain
this and chapter 4 ("Death's Dark Tread") away in "Flight" many years
later.
There
does at first seem to be a VERY important piece of foreshadowing in
"Captive." The beautiful, glowing, strange white globe that seems to be
the gem called "The Eye of Terim"
(and perhaps it really is what the legendary Eye of Terim was all
along) turns out to actually be a horrible-looking creature called a
succubus that has sucked the souls from countless men and seeks to do so
with Cerebus.
Now,
anyone familiar with the whole Cerebus saga and Dave Sim's
later-expressed view of women as soul-sucking voids cannot help but look
at this as an example that he was headed
in that direction all the way back in early 1978 when issue #2 was
first published. Especially given that a "succubus" is, according to
Merriam-Webster, "a demon assuming female form to have sexual
intercourse with men in their sleep." The thing is, Dave Sim
has disclaimed all conscious knowledge of the meaning of the word
succubus at the time he wrote this story, and has even said that at the
time he did this story he thought of himself as a feminist. He was
vaguely aware of the word, knew it was some kind of
evil supernatural creature, and he liked the sound of it (the "succu-"
seemed to fit with a creature that "sucked" souls), so he put it in
there, entirely unaware that this would become the first "soul-sucking
void" and that that image would come to be one
of the defining points of his life's work.
So
synchronicity, perhaps, rather than foreshadowing, might be best
description of this appearance of a soul-sucking void so early in the
story, and as I say it isn't really
a story yet, just a series of unconnected episodes. It is noteworthy,
though, that though Cerebus is lusting after the "Eye of Terim" he still
at one point swears by "Tarim." In "The Flame Jewel," the sorcerer used
"Terim" in one of his incantations and also
uttered "Tarim" as an oath on the same page. So even this early Sim
does seem to be consciously setting up a world where among the many gods
men worship are a "Tarim" and a "Terim," who seem by their names to be
obviously related to each other in some manner
and yet are also separate and distinct. Whether he already envisioned
them as male and female versions of the same deity is doubtful, and it's
pretty clear that at this point Tarim is not "God" as modern
monotheistic societies think of that term, but just
a small-g "god" like Zeus or Thor. (Tarim is, in fact, one of the
things borrowed from the Conan comic book, where there were two warring
societies whose dispute was centered on which of them deserved to have
possession of the living Tarim, a god-man embodied
in a descendant of the original through dozens of generations.)
The
third story, "Song of Red Sophia," takes even its title from a Conan
comic book, the last one Barry Smith did, "The Song of Red Sonja." The
story itself has nothing to do
with that story, but the character is essentially that character,
borrowed from a non-Conan story by Conan creator Robert E. Howard. She
was later associated primarily with artist Frank Thorne, who drew a
series featuring her. Sim used Thorne as the basis
for the character Henrot, who is Sophia's father, and in fact "Henrot"
is an anagram of "Thorne." So this issue is a tribute to Thorne as much
as Smith, and it even seems that Sophia is intended to be an imitation
of Thorne's Sonja rather than Simth's, although
Sim's art is not yet good enough to tell the difference. This issue
features some serious backsliding with respect to the art - one page
where he uses an interesting three-panels-in-one trick to show the quick
action of a duel has, in the face of the middle
Sophia, the worst art since that deformed horse back on the first page.
However, the art as a whole is actually better, and the idea of Cerebus
as a cartoon character in a realistic world is beginning to be
realized.
The
storytelling in "Song of Red Sophia" is a huge step up in
sophistication from "Captive in Boreala." Instead of a meandering story
that seems to start out with no destination
in mind (whether or not that is accurate), we have a story told almost
entirely in flashback, giving us a glimpse from just moments before the
climax, then going back 3 days to show how we got here, then proceeding
to the conclusion and epilogue. While not
exactly "experimental," in the usual sense of breaking new ground for
writers in general, it's clear that Sim is experimenting for himself
with different storytelling techniques.
Red
Sophia and Elric, who first appears in the next story, "Death's Dark
Tread," both will reappear later and could be taken as evidence that the
overall story has already started,
as in a sense it had even though its author seems only vaguely aware of
it. In fact, they are both part-and-parcel of the aping of "Conan the
Barbarian," as both characters appeared in that comic. In fact, Sim has
said that at the time he first did issue #4,
he had not read Michael Moorcock's "Elric" stories or even seen a book
cover. His only exposure to Elric was from Barry Smith's version in
Conan #14-15, and he was completely unaware of how dissatisfied Moorcock
and many of his fans were with Smith's version,
and how unlike Moorcock's description of the character it was.
I
regard the continued use of these characters after Sim left the Conan
parody behind to be part fan-service and part simply using the tools
available, rather than evidence that
he was already thinking long-term when he introduced these characters.
Although
Elrod (a name I assume is a joke on L. Ron Hubbard, and hence a hint of
Sim's interest in religion that will soon come to dominate the series)
is based on Smith's version
of Elric in terms of physical appearance, in all other ways he is
essentially Foghorn Leghorn from the old Warner Brothers cartoons (or,
as Sim would have it, Senator Claghorn, the radio character on whom
Foghorn Leghorn was based, but since Sim is far too
young to have listened to Claghorn on the radio growing up, I'm going
to assume the primary influence is the cartoon, and his reference to the
radio character simply evidence of the breadth and depth of his
self-education). He is one of the funniest supporting
characters in the saga, second only to Lord Julius, and his popularity
with fans probably had a lot to do with his continual reappearences over
the years.
The
story itself is a mess, not necessarily in terms of it as a single
narrative - it's a bit meandering, not fully cohesive, but it's funny
and does all finally fit together.
But the appearance of Death as a character, and the way that Death is
presented, is so out of touch with the storyline that eventually
developed that in "Flight," where Sim was catching up with a lot of old
threads and trying to weave them into his story and/or
explain them away, he actually felt compelled to bring in another
supernatural character who confronts this figure and tells him "You are
not Death."
(For
much the same reasons, I regard the short story "Demonhorn," which is
not collected in the saga but was presented in the "Swords of Cerebus"
collections and Sim has even
officially placed in the chronology between #5 and #6, to be completely
non-canonical, whatever he says.)
Although
there are, to be sure, bits and pieces and hints of what is to come, up
until now, Conan the Aardvark has been little more than a simple parody
of Conan the Barbarian.
With chapter 5 of this book, though, that all changes.
