Cerebus Reread - Volume 1 (Part 4 - Tarim as God and Political Shenanigans (the first hints of Church and State))

OK, this is taking *way* too long, I’m done reading “High Society” and need to get my first impressions of it down before they’re no longer first impressions, so I need to make short shrift of the rest of this book.  I need to make these shorter and quicker or I’ll never get the whole thing done.

With “Black Magiking,” we see a major change in the world Cerebus occupies, and in the next three issues we see a major change in Cerebus’ life and lifestyle. He will initially reject the latter and try to go back to being a barbarian warrior, but it will never work.

Up until now, Cerebus has inhabited a world that was a typical sword-and-sorcery world copied from the first 24 issues of Marvel’s “Conan the Barbarian” comic book, written by Roy Thomas (often, but not always, adapted from one of Robert E. Howard’s original stories) and drawn by Barry Smith (before he added the “Windor”), who was at the time one of Sim’s personal heroes in terms of stretching the medium of comic book art. Indeed, he has said that the whole point of Cerebus was not just to do “Howard the Duck” as a parody of “Conan the Barbarian,” but to do the art in such a way as to have a very cartoonish Cerebus walking around in a very realistic world, the kind of hyper-reality (compared to most comic book art of the time) portrayed by Barry Smith in those Conan books, and he described it specifically in those terms: “A Chuck Jones cartoon character walking around in a Barry Windsor Smith world.”

The basic milieu, familiar nowadays not just to Conan fans but to fans of heroic fantasy in general, usually includes a sort of mashup of the ancient and medieval worlds, mostly individual city states, with perhaps a nascent Empire or two absorbing other cities into their sphere of influence, with more-or-less medieval technology, especially when it comes to weaponry (crossbows are usually present, but not gunpowder). For those stories set in our own Earth’s past, it is usually imagined that once upon a time magic worked in a way it no longer does, but it was still operational at the time of the story. And in keeping with the idea that these stories are set long before Christianity there is usually an assumption of a polytheistic world, one where there are several, perhaps dozens of super-powered beings that might as well be thought of as “gods” and are worshipped as such by humans. “Demonhorn,” which is not part of the collected books and I regard as non-canonical (despite Dave Sim himself once placing it in the continuity between two early issues), makes it unmistakable that the impression one has reading the first half of this book that Cerebus inhabits such a polytheistic world is correct. Not only do various character utter oaths in the names of several different gods (Tarim, Terim, Clovis, Ashtoth, Ishtar, Set and Tauran, for instance, all in the first 6 issues), but there doesn’t seem to be anything like a Church or a monotheistic religion to contrast with this, as one might have in the first few centuries of the Roman Empire, for instance.

There are hints of Sim’s abiding interest in religion – at this time, and through most of the saga, it’s the interest of a fascinated outside observer chortling like Puck,”Lord, what fools these mortals be!” Sim has said that he often had the TV on while he worked, not so much watching it as absorbing it by osmosis while using it for white noise to actually help him concentrate. He said that in the context of introducing the T’Gitans, whose leader is a smarter, more serious version of Sgt. Schulz. Earlier, though, we can see that he spent at least some of that time watching or at least listening to Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, who pretty much had to be the inspiration for Cerebus’ exhortation to the Cockroach (while pretending to be the Roach’s father, visiting him in a dream):

Cerebus: Praise Tarim! I am here to bring you the Word – the Word of Tarim.

Roach: The Word, Father?

Cerebus: Condominiums! Tarim has a condominium just for you! Luxurious living in the afterlife – IF you believe!

Roach: I do! I do!

Cerebus: Praise Tarim!

 Suddenly, Tarim is not just one of many polytheistic gods in an ancient culture, he’s a stand-in for the modern God worshipped by the followers of Jim and Tammy Faye. It’s a funny bit, and on first reading, I’m sure most people think it’s just a bit of anachronistic funny business. I certainly did. In fact, in planning this very essay, after reading this umpteen times and just rereading it again, I was still thinking of “Black Magiking” as the introduction of the concept of “Tarim” as a stand-in for the Christian God in Cerebus’ world.

Certainly neither Cerebus nor the Roach could know what a “condominium” is, and this does stand, to my mind, as much of an example of Sim breaking the fourth wall – and frankly, not a very successful one (he’s to have a few other flubs like this before doing it really, really well in the latter parts of the series, particularly “Minds” and “Rick’s Story”) – as it is an early example of the role of religion, and in particular Christianity, in Cerebus.

Still, it can’t be denied that this is the first tantalizing hint that this is where Sim is headed.

In Chapter 13, “Black Magiking,” Cerebus encounters an emissary of the Church of Tarim, who seems very much like a medieval priest, particularly the kind who was always on the watch for Witches and Devil-Worshippers. Cerebus seems unsurprised by this. From this moment on, Sim will pretend that he never used “Tarim” in such a way as to equate him with a bunch of other polytheistic gods, and he gradually drops the use of almost all other gods’ names from the dialogue. He will even later explain away Cerebus’ once-constant oaths about Clovis (“By Clovis’ Beard!”, “Clovis’ Molar!”, “Clovis’ Teeth and Tankard!”) by saying that Clovis is a northern version of Tarim invented by Tarimite missionaries to ease their charges into proper worship, or something like that – it didn’t make sense to me at the time, and I doubt if it will when I get to it in the reread, far, far ahead.

From this moment on, we forget (or at least pretend to forget) that Cerebus started out inhabiting a polytheistic world. We are now in a world where all civilized people (not necessarily the barbarians Cerebus will still consort with on occasion, but all the people living in the big cities where he’ll be spending most of his time from now on) are either members of the Church of Tarim (or I should say one of the *two* Churches of Tarim – but we’ll get to that), Cirinists or Kevillists who worship Terim (again, we’ll get to that) or cynical atheists who use other people’s beliefs to their own ends. Bran Mak Muffin, who essentially worships The Great Cerebus when we see him again (not in this book), is the only exception to this I can think of offhand.

One could argue that the cities were always this way, but with the exception of a brief visit to the lower-class portions of Iest and his stay in Beduin with the Roach, Cerebus has always been out in the countryside, among the pagans (a word which originally derives from the Latin word for “country folk). The problem with that idea is that the Church of Tarim as a stand-in for Christianity is introduced to us not in a city, but among a village of superstitious farmers. So it’s not just the urban sophisticates who have embraced Tarim as the One True God, and the Church of Tarim is revealed to be very, very old – it is never actually specified, but the clear implication is that the original Tarim, who was to some certain extent an analog for Christ, although very different in historical terms (the first, for instance, to coin money, which certainly makes him quite different in his primary interests), lived about 1400 years before Cerebus – but we’ll be getting to dates and things in the next book.

So “Black Magiking” introduces us to the Church of Tarim, which will be a primary thematic and plot element for the next several books. Then we have the interlude of “Silverspoon,” where Sim stretches his artistic chops and instead of imitating Barry Windsor Smith tries to imitate Hal Foster, which perhaps mixed success but it’s actually astonishing that he can pull even a semblance of Foster off without embarrassing himself, considering the level of art he was producing just a couple of years before. “Silverspoon” introduces us the Lord Julius, and leads directly into what at one time was called “The Palnu Trilogy,” Sim’s first 60 page story (81 if you count “Silverspoon”). The main interest in Chapters 15-17 (we are now off the count from the original comics because of “Silverspoon,” which was originally published as single pages in the Comics Buyers Guide, and these represent issues 14-16 of the original comic book) is Lord Julius, who is the Estarcion version of Groucho Marx (whose real given name was Julius), being Groucho Marx as the leader of an Estarcion city-state, apparently the richest and most successful one around. Hilarity, of course, ensues.

(In case you’re wondering why there should be an “Estarcion version of Groucho Marx,” Sim at the time espoused a cyclical view of history, wherein everything that happens has happened many times before and will happen again, never exactly the same, but never completely different, either. This gave him an excuse to use historical and fictional characters in his milieu, supposedly our world about 6,000 years ago. Of course Julius Marx would have appeared in this world. And if he had been lucky enough to be born into an important family, he might have used his anarchic wit to rise to the top. We will see many other real people along the way, mostly artists of some kind – writers, rock stars, comic book creators – and also versions of other people’s fictional creations – primarily the Cockroach, who is a parody of the Batman, and later becomes Captain Cockroach (Captain America) and many, many others.)

So the nature of religion and belief, especially explored through the Church of Tarim that is to a large extent similar to and meant to be analogous enough of Christianity that points made about it are meant to be seen as points about the latter, and political intrigue among the ruling class of an at least semi-modern society, are both set as our themes by the end of Chapter 17. And while that chapter ends with Cerebus rejecting cities and civilization and riding away from Palnu, the fact is that these two themes will dominate him for much of the rest of his life, not to mention providing the title for the third and fourth volumes of the series.

 Cerebus is among the barbarians again with the T’Gitans, but it’s actually quite clear throughout these chapters that he isn’t one of them.  Sim has some fun by having Cerebus meet a more or less pure incarnation of Conan (called “Krull,” which was the name of another Robert E. Howard character who was essentially a clone of Conan but living even earlier (by Howard’s pseudo-history), before the fall of Atlantis). When Cerebus tricks the merchants into giving him their goods, and then tells the T’Gitans how he obtained them by threats of violence, we see more clearly than he does himself how far removed he has become for the barbarian warrior sword-for-hire we met in the beginning of the book.

In “She-Devil in the Shadows,” Cerebus has a sword fight with Ghita, whom he at first mistakes for Red Sophia. This is one of many inside jokes for comic book fans in the series, that it’s not really important whether one gets or not to enjoy the series. Frank Thorne, who had done the “Red Sonja” comic book and whose version of Red Sonja Sim first made homage to in her introduction (along with Thorne himself, who used to dress as a wizard to attend comic book conventions, as Sophia’s wizard father “Henrot”), later did a comic book about a character called Ghita who was pretty much exactly the same as Red Sonja. In this story, after Red Sophia left home (to marry Feras at Cerebus’ direction), he missed her. But there were things he didn’t miss about her – she was far from perfect. So he decided to create a duplicate, but one who would be better-tempered, for instance, and all in all perfect.

The experiment failed. Ghita is worse-tempered. In fact, while he has managed to imprison her in the chamber just outside his room, she kills anyone who comes near. Cerebus barely makes it past her alive, and seems to be trapped in Henrot’s room forever.

Well, of course he gets out of it. Where his sword failed it is his ingenuity that wins the day. Then he gets what he came to town for, goes to collect his barbarian companion, and is drugged by a prostitute-cum-fortune teller who turns out to be a high-level Cirinist.

I don’t have much to say about “Mind Games.” The main criticism I’ve made before, that the Suenteus Po we meet here seems to be so far away from the Suentus Po’s we will meet in the future – not just the multiple people with that name, but the multiple versions of what are supposed to all be the same guy, the “original” Suenteus Po (although the founder of Illusionism turns out not to really be the first of that name, either). Sim thought it would be funny to make him a drugged-out hippy, and it is, but it doesn’t fit well with the serious character he decided he needed Po to be later.

Po mainly operates here as an authorial mouthpiece to impart to the reader through funny dialogue rather than endless boring captions a bunch of important narrative exposition. Since we don’t really need all the details, we are given primarily tantalizing hints of the political/philosophical/religious struggle between the Tarimites, the Illusionists, the Cirinists and the Kevillists.

In the introduction to “She-Devil in the Shadows” in “Swords of Cereubs #5,” Sim said of the conspiracy whose existence – but not details – are revealed in these chapters:

 I tried to explain the problem a while ago by explaining that most of the factors involved are secret societies – to put it in a more modern context, it is like a secret cell of Soviet spies in the U.S. government hiring North Vietnamese and Cuban infiltrators to find out if the Red Chinese embassy in Japan is really spying for the Lithuanians in an attempt to find out if the KGB was behind the plot to kill the Popeand hire more Afghanistan refugees to double check the rumours about the John Birch Society joining forces with the Mafia to break the stranglehold the Teamsters have on the underground network of solidarity supporters in Moose Jaw.

Come to think of it, three hundred issues might not be enough.

 That was written in 1983, and of course, most of the “modern” references are now horribly dated, but anyone with any knowledge of late 20th century geopolitical history should get at least most of the references.

As it turns out, it never was *all* explained, but enough of it was explained for us all to be reasonably satisfied.

The next issue, Cerebus is a long distance and, as it turns out, several weeks away. He was drugged by Perce in Togith not long before Concordance Eve, when the T’Gitans planned to attack Palnu. As it turns out, Cerebus has missed the invasion, which is just as well because the T'Gitans were cut to pieces and there were no survivors.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Cerebus finds himself somehow in Beduin. This is never really explained, although there exists a piece called “What Happened Between Issues Twenty and Twenty-One” that teases us with an explanation that doesn’t explain anything. While there, he runs into the Roach, now “Captain Cockroach,” and Elrod, working together as a team selling “United Feldwar States Government-In-Exile War Bonds.” They take him to see President Weisshaupt.

President Weisshaupt is a combination of George Washington, whom he resembles, and Adam Weisshaupt, who founded the Bavarian Illuminati about the same time the U.S. declared its independence from England, and who somewhat resembled Washington, and who some conspiracy theorists claim came to America and took Washington’s place some time after 1790. With Weisshaupt, Cerebus is thrust back into political intrigue again, although he tries not to get interested, much less involved, and when Weisshaupt’s schemes come apart Cerebus manages to escape.

There is one problem I have with this entire story, though. Part of the raison d’etre for Weisshaupt’s “United Feldwar States” is to “save” the economy of Lower Felda, of which Beduin is the capital. But at the end of “Beduin By Night” the government has discovered the Roach’s stash of gold, which should have provided a solid boost to the economy. Even if a few politicians at the top managed to siphon off most of it for their own purposes, those purposes would have led at least some of it into circulation as they bought luxuries for themselves.

The last story in this book is a three part story that starts off as a parody/homage to “The Beguiled,” introducing Charles X. Claremont. I’m going to skip trying to analyze this story because a) I don’t think it’s really ultimately all that important to the overall storyline (although yes, Charles X. Claremont returns despite being apparently killed and yes, this is the source for “Fred, Ethel, and the Little Fellow with the Hair) and b) this is way, way, WAY too long.

Next one’s going to be a LOT shorter, I promise. For one thing, “High Society” was not the revelation for me that this book was. I read this book and saw it totally differently than I had seen it in umpteen rereadings before. I read “High Society” (yeah, I’m already done with it) and laughed uproariously but basically have about the same opinion of it that I did when I read it 30 years ago. So it will be much easier to talk about succinctly.

Cerebus Reread - Volume 1 (Part 3)

 I had intended originally to do three of these. Part one was going to be first impressions, part two a more thorough in-depth analysis with spoilers, and part three a summary I could use in rewriting my Cerebus page when I redo my website, including finishing out the saga since “Guys” had just come out when I last updated that page (I think I first created it when “Reads” was just out and “Minds” was still coming out in comic book form).

However, I find myself still stuck in analysis mode. And this next piece is already longer than it should be and I’ve only gotten halfway through the book. Which is actually about right, because there is a major thematic change starting with Chapter 13 (“Black Magiking”) that relates directly to Dave Sim having his drug-induced vision in the midst of a “nervous breakdown” that gave him at least an outline of what the story would be. So this piece will only take us through Chapter 12, and we’ll start next time with the second “half” of the book (it’s a “half” because it’s slightly larger than the first half, not only because there are 13 chapters in issues 13-25 and only 12 in chapters 1-12, but the second “half” also includes “Silverspoon”).

To my mind, with chapter 5 we're really into the ongoing story that becomes the 300 issue saga that is "Cerebus." It starts out very much like the previous issues. It's an undetermined amount of time since Cerebus' encounter with Elrod, and he's joined a mercenary force, which we never see because Cerebus has gotten separated from them and the end of this story sees him deciding to leave the area altogether and travel to the city of Iest.

Indeed, it will be some time before Sim throws away the Conan parody altogether, but it's definitely a secondary element from here on, something to trot out to get laughs or to fall back on. He's already moving into deeper waters. In chapters 5-7, we get not one but two hints from wildly different sources about Cerebus' unique (well, at this point we *think* he's unique) importance in his world, plus we get introduced to a love interest that you can tell by the way she's introduced is due to return at some point.

It's very interesting to note, by the way, that up until now Cerebus has been apparently totally immune to the attraction of the female gender, and even with Jaka has to be drugged to be affected by her. It seems that either human females have no attraction and he'd need an aardvark mate to really feel anything (a possibility that, if it occurred to Sim at all, was obviously rejected along the way), he truly has no biological urges toward sex (which, as human as he seems despite his appearance, seems unlikely and also doesn't match his subsequent behavior), or something in his past has caused him to build a Spock-like wall surrounding his emotions. The evidence seems to point to that last possibility, and it's interesting that Dave Sim himself ended up decades later more-or-less advocating that approach, despite by then having allowed Cerebus to thaw his icy heart and let the gentler sex affect him after all. Although, to be sure, the consequences to Cerebus of letting women into his mind and heart were not exactly positive.

Be that as it may, if it wasn't obvious at the end of "The Secret" that we'd be seeing Jaka again, her name at the bottom of a letter to her uncle, Lord Julius, as Cerebus rides away from Iest at the end of "A Night at the Masque" certainly sealed the deal, even though we still wouldn't see her until the middle of the next book.

"The Idol" establishes that Cerebus is not totally unique in his world, and that at some point someone or something that looked just like him was worshipped as a god. That point is reinforced in "Black Sun Rising" - and it's significant that Cerebus has these two experiences within weeks, perhaps even within days of each other, with his first meeting with Jaka (while drugged, which he won't remember for some time) in between.

Then Sim headed off on a tangent. His stay with the Conniptins is obviously not part of any long term storyline (although he did manage to use them again, despite apparently killing them off in "Swords Against Imesh" - (apparently K'Cor didn't do as thorough a job of poisoning the wells around Imesh as he thought).

I'm not sure, but I think at this point Sim had a kind of loose structure in mind, something like "Lone Wolf & Cub" (which he probably wasn't familiar with) or "The X-Files" (which wouldn't premiere for a decade and a half), where you would have some stories that were episodic stand-alone incidents and some that contributed directly toward the development of the overall storyline. If that was his plan, he changed his mind by the time he finished this book, because there really isn't anything like a stand-alone episode from the start of "High Society" to the end of the saga.

The Conniptins, K'Cor and the return of Red Sophia are all fairly episodic, and arguably as separated from each other and from the overall storyline as the first four stories, but there is a significant difference - after slaughtering four men in a hallucinatory frenzy brought on by giant spider venom and fever, Cerebus doesn't really *act* like a barbarian any more. To be sure, he does have a couple of sword fights in Imesh, against Lord Koghem and K'Cor himself, but in the first he uses his wits more than his strength to defeat his opponent, and against K'Cor he is actually overmatched, and K'Cor's abandonment of the fight is one of the biggest flaws, narratively speaking, in the whole saga. The explanation he gives explains nothing - even if it were true (which it apparently is not), it would have been just as true before he agreed to the duel as it was at the point he cut if off, and while Cerebus was perhaps not as easy to defeat as he expected and he had sustained a wound, in his armor against an exhausted Cerebus it was only a matter of time before he would have defeated him.

Personally, I think Sim just wrote himself into a corner here and came up with K'Cor's lame reasoning because the only other outcome possible at that point was to kill off his title character and start a new book, and he'd already decided he wanted to do this book for a long time. He may even have already been thinking about 26 years.

The duel with K'Cor is the penultimate time Cerebus wields a sword in this book (to use a word correctly that Sim misuses in “The Idol”). The next and last time will go even more decisively against Cerebus, and he will barely escape with his life. So by this point he is already no longer the funny-animal-but-still-supremely-competent-Conan-clone he had started out as.

Also, while somewhat episodic, all these incidents are tied together chronologically much more tightly than the early episodes. The transition from chapter 1 to 2 is completely vague, and 2 to 3 is not much better. 3 to 4 are connected by a caption in the beginning of the latter, but 5 is floated out there with only a nebulous "After leaving Serrea, Cerebus drifts west …"

After that, though, we have a connected continuity through most of the rest of the book. Chapter 5 ends with “Iest is a day’s march away,” and on page 3 of Chapter 6, Cerebus says, “Tarim! It never fails -- two hours in any of these accursed cities and some farmer with more muscle than brains comes flying at me …” Even allowing for exaggeration on Cerebus’ part about how long he’s been in Iest, obviously no more than a day or two has passed since he destroyed “The Idol.” 

E’Lass, when planning on his sojourn to the Temple of the Black Sun, muses that he’ll need food for two weeks. I assume from this that the temple is a week away from Iest (I’m assuming he’ll want to eat on the way back, as well).  Plus, when Cerebus shows up there next chapter (“Black Sun Rising,” Chapter 7), the narrator tells us that it would have been easier to follow the lowlands to the south and swing back to the north, “but Cerebus is a follower of the ‘old ways,’ so he has taken the direct route.” Even though the direct route is “through a dozen mountain passes and across treacherous terrain,” one assumes that it is if anything shorter than the more obvious route, so it’s possible that Cerebus has gotten there even more quickly than E’Lass was counting on.  In any case, no more than a week could have passed since the end of “The Secret.”

At the beginning of Chapter 8, Cerebus is still suffering from the after-effects of the sting from the giant spider he sustained at the end of Chapter 7. The amount of time passed is not specified, but surely it can’t be more than a few days.  Indeed, on page 6 of “Merchant of Unshib” (Chapter 10), Cerebus summarizes what has happened to him since that spider blasted his back, including the entire contents of Chapters 8 and 9, as having happened “in the last week.” After acquiring the Black Blossom Lotus, Cerebus presumably goes immediately to Beduin to sell it, where he encounters the merchant who turns out to harbor a secret identity – the Cockroach. Three weeks pass between pages 15 and 16 of Chapter 11 (“The Merchant and the Cockroach”),and  two more between that chapter and the next (“Beduin by Night”), which ends on Cerebus’ 27th birthday.  This is significant, because Chapter 5 first introduced the notion of Cerebus’ age, and that him coming to the Pigts “in his twenty-sixth year” was the fulfillment of a prophecy.

(In fact, one’s “twenty-sixth year” would be the year *before* one’s twenty-sixth birthday, just as one’s first year is before one turns one, so he actually came to the Pigts in his 27th year. Of course, Sim was at the time a high school dropout with limited education who in that same chapter misuses the word “penultimate.” He eventually became one of the most successful autodidacts I’ve ever known, and I’ve known several of them, and I think most people would guess from reading his references to various writers or conversing with him about just about anything that he probably has a college degree, and would certainly be surprised to discover he doesn’t even have a high school diploma. But the 22-year-old Sim still had some major defects in his education.)

There is a temporal problem here. At the beginning of Chapter 5, it would seem from the incessant rain to be spring. From later evidence, Cerebus’ birthday also seems to be in the spring – indeed, the most likely time for it is in mid-to-late June, so I’m guessing it’s June 17 (Dave Sim’s birthday). That would seem to mean that he had essentially just turned 26 recently when Bran Mak Muffin says to him, “You’re 26, aren’t you?” The problem with that is that Chapter 13 (“Black Magiking”) starts with the words “The first breath of summer in Lower Felda …” It is clear not much time has passed since the end of Chapter 12. Cerebus, who was holding a piece of a broken boat as he was washed down the river out of Beduin, has washed up on shore, still in Lower Felda. If Chapters 5-12 represent no more than two months (based on the internal evidence of time passing in and between chapters), how can a year have passed?

Things like this were later to become magnified and even at times deliberate, driving fans like myself and Alexx Kay, the kind of people who create timelines for themselves to keep everything straight, absolutely crazy (Kay’s timeline was much more elaborate and well-documented than mine ever was and is still available on the Web at http://www.panix.com/~alexx/time5.html).

Thematically, what we have is a person who thinks of himself as a barbarian and a warrior, but who has some education and is far more sophisticated than most of those around him, moving farther and farther away from the barbarian warrior persona he has chosen for himself and toward the more sophisticated role he is eventually to play. We also see him on occasion being manipulated by those even more sophisticated and learned – first Bran Mac Muffin, who despite his surroundings and companions is obviously a scholar of old Pigtish prophecies, if nothing else, and when we next meet him will fit in with a more-or-less modern city and its political machinations quite well, then the Doctor and the Commander of the Conniptins. Both times, Cerebus recognizes what is going on and rejects it. He destroys the Pigts’ idol and flees, and starts to flee from the Conniptins. But he has second thoughts about the latter, and part of his determination to stay rests on his belief in his ability to turn the tables on his would-be manipulators. “The men had pledged loyalty to Cerebus, not to the commander.” We see that Cerebus himself is quite capable of manipulation in Chapters 11 and 12, as he gets the Cockroach to help him steal the Cockroach’s own gold.

Next time: God and Politics (the first hints of Church and State)

Cerebus 10th Anniversary Reread: Cerebus (Volume 1) (Part 2)

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.

Next time, we'l start the saga proper.