Cerebus 10th Anniversary Reread - "High Society"

This will go much more quickly. My impression of the first book on reading is was very, very different from how I had perceived it the first - gee, it must be a dozen times or more that I've read it, counting reading the original comics, the Swords collections, and the Bi-Weekly reprints as well as the collected volume itself. Despite feeling like I knew it by heart, I was surprised by it this time.

I was not surprised in the same way by "High Society." Delighted, certainly, but I was delighted the first time I read it. It is what it is, possibly the first true "graphic novel" produced in North America, a brilliant parody of politics, economics, comic books, fandom, the news media and probably a few other things he's juggling while developing an alternate world that seems as solidly built as our own. 

(One of the saddest things for me in the way things change in the later years of the series is that Sim seemed to grow tired of this world-building, and Estarcion became less and less a world of its own developing along its own lines by its own rules and more and more just a somewhat-different analog of our own world Sim could use to make statements about the real world within the context of Cerebus’ story. Of course, he always did that, and he did transform Estarcion early on from a Conan-esque world to one more closely resembling our own through massive infusion of new technology (starting, I suppose, with Weisshaupt’s invention of movable type back in the first book). But in the early days, there was still a world that felt in many ways as real as ours despite being deliberately totally different.)

Anyway, the only big surprise from this reread is that I don't think I'm going to be so quick to say that people should start with "High Society" and only go back and read the first book if they like this one. I now think you should probably, quite logically, start from the beginning. But that's not so much a change in my impression of this book as it is the change in my impression of the first book that I've already done to death at this point, so let's finally leave it behind.

Although it’s the next book that will be called “Church & State,” and on the surface it seems like this one is all about politics, in fact the Church of Tarim is a major presence throughout the book. It’s clear and obvious, and yet somehow people manage to not notice it.

The government of Iest is subordinate to the Church of Tarim. Consider this passage from “The True History of the 1413 Election” by Suenteus Po (not the Mind Games guy, the one in Cerebus’ cabinet): 

“The legislature had never been intended as a governing body. The Church of Tarim instituted it when it became apparent (some hundred years earier) that a disproportionate amount of His Holiness’ time was being spent adjudicating economic matters. His soloution was to allow each district of the city-state, in proportion to their contribution to the economy, to send representatives to debate and form economic policy for the Mother Church. These representatives were appointed by the local churches and then elected by the local people to serve either as conservative or libertine economists in Iest.”

Lest anyone that origin sounds too far-fetched, it is not totally dissimilar to the beginnings of the English Parliament, which existed in its early days largely as a way for the King to justify taxes to the general populace without having to constantly quell revolts and rebellions.

But I knew all that going in. I noticed a long time ago that in many ways this book is a warm-up or prelude to the bigger, 2-volume novel that follows it, in much the same way that Ayn Rand often said that “The Fountainhead” was a “prologue” to “Atlas Shrugged,” or the way that World War I prefigured and foreordained World War II. (What I hadn’t realized until this reread was that this prefiguring goes all the way back to very nearly the beginning of the saga.)

One of the few surprises – and I’m sure I knew it long ago and just forgot it – was discovering that “What Happened Between Issues Twenty and Twenty-One,” with its surprise appearance by Astoria at the end and revelation that she’s had a hand in manipulating Cerebus’ life since long before he ever met her, was first published (in Swords of Cerebus Vol 3) in “Fall 1981.” Since Cerebus #31, the first appearance of Astoria, is cover-dated “Oct ‘81” she was obviously still a brand-new character at the time. Indeed, this revelation probably didn’t mean as much to people who bought the Swords volume when it first appeared as it did to people who encountered the story later in their reading of the overall saga. When her connection to Cerebus waking up in Beduin was revealed, most Cerebus readers had just met her and had no clear idea yet who she was, except that she was obviously more than she seemed.

So my initial plan of presenting first impressions and then moving on to analysis would make this a very short first post. I probably should have left it that way, but I’ve already written several more pages of draft, so here goes:

This book starts with another of Cerebus’ attempts to return to the barbarian warrior he still believes to be his fundamental character. It will become something of a running gag that he will keep making this attempt, and keep getting thwarted.

This, too, started in the first book – Cerebus getting disgusted with Palnu and the ways of the cities, going off and hooking up with the T’Gitans, who want to conquer Palnu as an invading barbarian horde.

In this case, he’s in a bad, bad mood, having dragged a sack of loot through 50 miles of swamps. He’s determined to start a fight with someone. He walks into the Regency Hotel – something he has had to make an incredibly strenuous effort to do (we’ll get back to that point in a moment), knowing that it’s the ritziest and classiest hotel in the whole city and they would under normal circumstances never let him in even if he was willing to pay double for a room, and goes up to the desk clerk, knowing that he’s going to be turned out and looking forward to the ensuing fight.

But when the desk clerk discovers who he is, he treats him like royalty, showing him to a free room, offering him a free meal, and when Cerebus pretends to pitch a fit about the crowded nature of the dining room, he is shown to a private alcove where he can dine alone.

Only he’s not left alone. One after another, businessmen come up and offer him money to remember them and their businesses. Finally, Cerebus manages to get one of them to tell him why. It’s because Cerebus is the former Kitchen Staff Supervisor to Lord Julius. Everyone is hoping that he still has some influence with the Palnan leader, and that through Cerebus they will be able to do business with the prosperous city-state to the south.

Cerebus manages to get out of the Upper City (more on that in a moment, honest!) and picks up a 50-pound sack of flour on the way to a dangerous tavern on the bad side of town. There, he throws out both an insult and the flour at everyone in the bar, and of course they charge him.

“Impossible odds; mentally unbalanced foes; cramped quarters for a good punch-up … and people say Iest has no night life …”

And then the Dock Police show up. They never come to this tavern, but here they are, specifically to protect Cerebus.

He manages to elude them and starts up the steps to the Regency.

Up the steps? Upper City and Lower City?

Oh sure, everybody reading this has read the whole series and understands the whole setup, and you’re probably thinking that it took Gerhard’s backgrounds to make you understand the whole thing. At least, that was what did it for me. But I must admit – and again, I’ve noticed this before now, just not when I first read it – that that’s more my lack of attentiveness than the fault of Sim’s writing and art.

Sim had his vision of how Iest worked and what it looked like firmly in place from the very beginning of this novel, and it’s right there, if you look closely. In the beginning of the second chapter, Cerebus has climbed one thousand three hundred and twenty-four steps and *still* not reaching the Regency, so the “Upper City” must be a good deal higher up than the “Lower City.” And on page 450 of my edition (page 18 of chapter 23, “Balances”), there’s a very clear picture of exactly what the upper city looks like from a distance.

I read this entire book at least twice, maybe three times before reading “Church and State,” and finally understanding what Iest looked like. And when I reread this book again after realizing what the setup was, I shook my head in disbelief that I didn’t get it, because it really was so clear – especially on that page.

Just in case anyone’s reading this who *doesn’t* know what I’m talking about,  Greater Iest – where the rich and powerful live, the site of the Regency Hotel, the Legislature, the Executive Mansion, the Cathedral, all exist at the very top of a butte, a massive upthrust of stone that towers over the rest of the city, called “Lower Iest.” There is a road that winds around this mountain, which is how most of the upper half gets to and fro, in carriages. There is also a stairway on the end of the butte on which the Regency Hotel is situated, so that it is possible – though very difficult – to get to the Upper City, and to the Regency specifically, more quickly by foot than one could manage walking around and around the mountain along the road. I call it a “butte” because of it’s shape. It’s usually referred to in the saga as “the mountain” or “the tower.” It seems to be black – could it be the Black Tower of the Black Tower Empire? Sim never says – but it’s interesting that when the first Black Tower showed up in the story (the castle of Necross Ha-Ha-Ha The Mad), he went out of his way to assure us that it had no relation to the Black Tower Empire. He never said that about Iest, even though the Upper City is pretty obviously sitting on the top of a Black Tower.

Or maybe he did have another explanation for the Black Tower I’m not remembering. If so, I’m sure I’ll stumble across it up ahead in the reread.

That Cerebus either climbed all those steps, or took the long road all the way around the mountain a few times, in the beginning of the book, when there were any number of inns at which he could have stayed in the lower city, shows just how foul his mood was, and how determined he was to make his mood even fouler by the time he encountered the desk clerk, and why he got continually frustrated through the first chapter as his intentions to start a fight with someone – anyone, over anything – are continually thwarted. It’s true that the first page says that the Regency is his “last hope” of finding a place to stay for the night, but it really seems quite unlikely that he truly managed to hit up every single inn or tavern with rooms upstairs in the entire Lower City before climbing the stairs. More likely, he hit two or three, got turned down, and his mood turned dark indeed and he decided that a) he had enough loot in his bag to pay for far better accommodations than he was inquiring about, b) it could take forever to find an inn that had an empty room, c) if he was going to take that long, he might as well climb the stairs and stay at the Regency, and d) Even though he could afford it, he knew they would initially assume he couldn’t and treat him like dirt and try to refuse him a room, and by then he’d be just ready to pound somebody’s head into the floor, which would greatly relieve his already-foul mood.

He gets madder and madder with each step, knowing in advance he’s going to receive exactly the kind of welcome he does end up receiving when he gets there. The Regency isn’t his “last hope” because every other inn or tavern in Iest is booked solid, it’s his last hope because once he made the decision to walk up those stairs, he’s determined not to walk down them tonight. He’s going to stay at the Regency, period.

At least, that’s how I imagine it. I don’t know if that’s what was going through Sim’s mind when he wrote it, but that’s how I read it.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go chapter by chapter giving a play-by-play. I’m planning to do an in-depth analysis, but not quite *that* in depth. Next time we will talk about the kidnapping plot, because it sets up the whole novel – without the need to repay his ransom, Cerebus would never have gotten involved in Iestian politics in the first place. And we have to do “Mind Games II” because it’s the first of Sim’s several famous (or infamous, depending on your view of them) switcheroos, where someone or something you thought you knew and understood turned out to be something very different, usually without explanation.

(This is jumping way, way, WAY ahead, but by way of reference, someone posted recently (or recently posted a link to) an old interview with Sim regarding the second appearance of Countess Michelle, and of course the first question was why was she so different and his answer was that he didn’t see her as different at all. Who knows, maybe he doesn’t see this “Suenteus Po” as being that different from the one in the first “Mind Games,” but most of us do. And I'll discuss why and deal a bit with Michelle and other similar cases next time)

So, next time we’ll do the kidnapping and “Mind Games” and talk a lot about Astoria. I’ll probably put off an actual in-depth discussion of Iestian politics until the next piece after that. I have some observations about Sim’s apparent ambivalence to democracy I want to share. I’m not sure that’s the right word, because “ambivalence” doesn’t usually connote the extremes of the inherent contradictions it posits – in this book Dave Sim has a real love-hate relationship with the nature of electoral politics, which is the necessary heartblood of any kind of representational democracy. You can’t have elected representatives without having an election.

Cerebus 10th Anniversary Reread Volume 1 - Part 5 (Postscript)

I know I said I was done, but I had to say a quick word about the art.

First, as I said I was impressed even more than earlier readings by how quickly the art progressed. By chapter 4, really, Sim was doing a halfway decent job of getting across his idea of a cartoon character in a realistic world, and if his backgrounds weren't quite Barry Windsor Smith they were quite recognizable and unembarrassing Barry Windsor Smith homage/parodies.

I had remembered that by the Palnu story Sim was good enough to make you forgive and forget the early issues of the comic book. What I had not remembered was that by chapter 5, really by chapter 4, there's nothing to forgive or forget. Heck, by chapter 3 there's only one embarrassing page in an otherwise quite well-drawn story.

What we have in this book is a young artist who is improving almost from page to page. Yes, the first page is disastrous. But when he is brave enough to try to draw a horse again in chapter 7, it's a fairly decent horse, not a deformed abomination. It seems to be there, in fact, mainly for him to say "See? I can so draw a horse!" because it is immediately forgotten once Elrod makes an appearance. By the time we see another horse, in "Champion," we have a beautiful animal any horse lover would be proud to own.

For my money, the art really starts getting good with "The Idol," a story that Dave Sim apologized for the art for in the "Swords of Cerebus" introduction. And I like it for exactly the same reason he apologized for it:

Dave Sim had figured out how to cheat.

There are actually very few panels in this chapter with full backgrounds. The early pages are lots of vertical lines representing rain with an object like a tree or a patch of grass to mark the setting. Then Cerebus descends a ladder into a tunnel of solid black. Once inside, the torchlit tunnels of the Pigts are dimly lit enough that things fade into the shadows, and in the torchlight conversely it's bright enough to highlight the characters in the foreground and white out the background. Which may not be *exactly* how torchlight really works in the real world, but is certainly effective at getting the *idea* of torchlight across.

And that's the point. With this issue, Sim discovered that he didn't have to present a fully realized, perfectly representational background in every single panel. He still wanted to -- as evidenced by his apology for this issue in his later essay about it. It was still part of his vision for how the book should ideally look. But he realized that, given time constraints and practicality, he could pick and choose when to do a lot of detail and when to let one or two striking details get across his idea for him. This tension between wanting to put Cerebus in an absolutely real world and the restrictions imposed by needing to write, pencil and ink an entire comic book by himself every month -- and more importantly Sim's wonderfully creative response to the situation -- will continue throughout the early part of the series, up until Gerhard joins on and suddenly relieves him of having to worry about doing backgrounds altogether. When we get to Church & State, I'll bring this up again, discussing in detail a particular chapter done just before Gerhard started that to me is the perfect apotheosis of this approach.

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.