Covering Cerebus, Part Eight: A Conclusion, in Which Recommendations Are At Last Made, with General Ruminations about the Nature of Love

Part Eight of an eight-part series. An index with links to the entire series can be found here.

So after all that, am I suggesting that everyone run right out and read themselves some Cerebus?

Not quite.

I will say that anyone who is specifically a comics fan should read Cerebus -- at least the central volumes which, from my current perspective (i.e. someone who read the first 2/3 of the series and then bailed) are volumes 2-5: High Society, Church and State I, Church and State II and Jaka's Story. (After that, people will know more than enough to decide whether to go on for themselves. I will say that while you can safely read volumes 2-5 without having read 1 -- and, in fact, probably should read them without having read 1, since if you try to read 1 you won't get to the others -- that if you intend to go much past volume 6 you should probably go back and read volume 1.) As to why I think that comics fans should read those volumes... I hope that this entire series, particularly parts three through seven in which I surveyed the covers of the monthly Cerebus comic, will show why: it's a marvelously innovative comic which is glorious in its use and exploration of the medium. So if you care about the medium, you should read it.

-- But that's just comics fans: people who are the equivalent of film buffs, who care about the medium as such.* We all know that most people don't fall into this category; but what is, I think (although this may be wishful thinking) increasingly true, is that even most people who actually read (some) comics don't fall into this category, in the same way that most people who see movies aren't film buffs, and most people who read novels aren't people devoted broadly and generally to the novel as such. With the ongoing mainstream acceptance of comics is coming (or will come, if it continues and is successful) people who just read some comics the way they just see some movies or just read some books -- who have various types of interests that intersect with some comics, or who are willing to just pick one up if it's good (by whatever their standards are). Comics fans often indicate a wish to convert other people into being comics fans, fans of the medium as such; but a far more reasonable goal is to get people to simply see comics as one more medium to occasionally seek out entertainment, enlightenment or information from -- one that is (potentially) equal to any other.

And to those people -- people who don't have a developed interest in the medium -- I can't really recommend Cerebus. There are a whole lot of graphic novels that they can try, and I encourage them to do so; but not Cerebus.

Why?

Well, a bunch of reasons.

A lot of them are just all those negative reasons I talked about in part one: as the series goes on, Sim reveals himself to be a misogynist, if not a flat-out lunatic; the series starts weakly and ends badly, so that it's not a satisfying overall work of art. And so on. I shan't repeat myself about these reasons... except to note that that last reason is really quite unfortunate: there are a lot of serials (or even just plain stories -- think Huckleberry Finn) that start out weakly and then get better, or that start out well and then end disappointingly, and for the most part we feel that we can recommend them anyway, encouraging people to (in the former case) skip or bull through the weak parts to get to the good, or (in the latter) endure or skip the end after enjoying the beginning. It's not ideal, obviously, but it's not quite fatal either. But somehow a series that starts and ends poorly is much harder: it feels much more like a simple mess, and the good parts begin to seem to buried and partial to be worth digging out.

So that's one set of reasons.

A second set of reasons are that so much of what makes Cerebus good are things that will appeal, centrally, to fans of the comics medium, namely his talent with and innovation in it. While Sim certainly does have moments of sublime humor or awe or any of those other things art can invoke, his good points are too tied up with being a path-breaking cartoonist to recommend to the general public.

And a third set of reasons are a cousin of those, namely, that even some of Sim's other good points won't be clear to those without a grounding in comics. This is true above all of his parodies: they are some of his funniest material, but unless you've read the relevant comics (which comics fans are likely to have, since they're pretty-well known, but others aren't, since they're not that well known), they'll fall on deaf ears.

This relates to yet another point, one I haven't managed to work in before this, namely, that for all Sim's ambitions to create genuine graphic novels, with the weight (in every sense) of real novels, what he created feels to me very much a comic book series -- not in form or genre or anything like that, but in its simply being a work created over time, reacting -- often in quite specific and now-dated ways -- to the changes of the time, without the possibilities of retrospective revision. SF critic Samuel R. Delany has talked about how SF series are often packaged as novels, where in fact that is a misleading metaphor: he suggests as a comparison the serially-composed poem such as Ezra Pound's Cantos, where the later number critique the earlier ones, and it is much more a process than a single artistic unity the way (we imagine that) novels are. The same may be said for many comics later collected as graphic novels, I think; and it is true in particular of Cerebus: it is a work produced over time, with later issues critiquing (changing, rewriting, undermining) the earlier ones, in reaction to changes in history and the creator's life and the artistic field and all those things. And yet again this is a reason not to recommend it: it is not one work, that a casual fan might pick up and enjoy, but rather a whole complex artistic and intellectual process that you need to really dig into to get what's worth getting.

Ultimately, Cerebus is simply a series which one has to forgive too much to enjoy. Comics fans will forgive it, enough to get a lot out of it; others probably won't. Read another comic. There are lots of good ones out there.

I suspect that Cerebus fans will be annoyed with me at this point. They will claim, with some justification, that I am underselling the series' good points. But it's not just funny and gripping and doesn't just have great characters and amazing moments of beauty and terror and awe, I imagine them saying; it's funny and gripping and has great characters and amazing moments of beauty and terror and awe!

And they're right, of course, as far as that goes. This is the reaction of love: that what we love is not replaceable, that it is unique and valuable in ways that nothing else in the world can replicate. This is why, if we say to a broken-hearted lover, that there are other fish in the sea, that it sounds so utterly empty: they don't want anyone else, they want the person they love who is absolutely unique and irreplaceable.

And they're right. They are. They're also just a human being, one of more than six billion, most of them loveable in some way or another.

Artistic works are, like people, unique: to those who love them, their virtues are not replicable, and must be savored in themselves.

But -- and this is what broken-hearted lovers cannot see -- to those who don't love them, they're not unique. And to anyone who doesn't yet love Cerebus, who is standing in that detached position where there are many different artistic wonders to be sampled, they won't feel that tug. And to them we can say: there are a lot of great works out there. Choose another.

Don't fall in love with this person, however intelligent and creative and funny and brilliant they are. For they're also misogynistic and crazy and are not going to end well and you don't want them to drag you down with them. And while those of us who love them can't abandon them -- because we love them, for who they are, not simply for any list of their virtues -- everyone else can find plenty of other intelligent and creative and funny and brilliant people out there, however pale that substitution will seem to those of us who are already smitten.

So, to end where I began:

I've been reading Cerebus.

I've enjoyed it tremendously, and gotten a lot out of it. Dave Sim and Gerhard are brilliant creators, and have made -- in places -- a brilliant creation.

But, Noble Reader, I'm not quite sure that I'd recommend it to you.

An appendix with links to other Cerebus material is here.
An index to the entire series is here.

_____________________________________
* This paragraph is indebted to the writings of Paul O'Brien -- I don't have a specific link, but he's made this point a couple of times -- who likes to point out that many (most?) comics fans aren't fans of comics as such, but of something else -- in the case of "mainstream" comics, of the superhero genre, and they read comics to get their fix of that genre: and so they really have no particular interest in non-superhero comics (or, at any rate, no interest beyond their natural interest in other things or in anything new).

Covering Cerebus, Appendix: Cerebus Links

In the course of writing my eight-part series on Cerebus, I did a lot of surfing. If you're interested in Cerebus, here are some links I'd recommend.

- All the covers to Cerebus are reproduced here; likewise here. Without those two sites, I couldn't have written my series.
- This is the single best essay I read about Cerebus -- it covers the terrain of my first two posts from the point of view of a person who was reading Cerebus as it came out rather than in retrospect. Highly recommended.
- This is the major fan site for Cerebus. It includes a few online stories, many of which can also be found here.
- Dave Sim's own introduction to Cerebus ("Free Cerebus" from 1992) is online here.
- A (probably illegal) scan of Issue #51 is here. (This is one of the four-and-a-half issues never included in a phonebook (which were collected in in Issue #0.))
- Wikipedia has a very good page on Cerebus.
- This is why I (like everyone else) call Dave Sim a misogynist.
- I'm not sure if this offer is still open (I haven't tried it), but for a long time, if you wrote a letter to Dave Sim, he'd send you a free issue of Cerebus.
- A story about a comics fan attempting to explain to Dave Sim's own cousin what Cerebus is. If you've read my series, you have the background to find this funny.

And, lastly, here are a lot more links if you want more.

Update (3/17): It turns out that another blogger is also writing a multi-part series on Cerebus which I just stumbled upon. His is better than mine; you should go read it. Parts so far: one, two, three.

(Housekeeping: I'm deliberately keeping this post below part eight, since it's just an auxiliary.)

Kieran Healy Is a Prophet

"I just watched the trailer for 300... My feeling is that the likes of Melanie Phillips, Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson are already drafting the flinty Op-Ed pieces they’ll publish the week the film comes out. They can add themselves to the wide variety of people who have been inspired by the story of Thermopylae. It’s all about juggling the analogy to make sure that you get to be one of the lonely 300, and not the vast invading foreign army."

-- Kieran Healy, October 5, 2006

"I went to the Hollywood Premier of the "300" last night... Why—beside the blood-spattering violence and often one-dimensional characterizations—will some critics not like this, despite the above caveats? Ultimately the film takes a moral stance, Herodotean in nature: there is a difference, an unapologetic difference between free citizens who fight for eleutheria and imperial subjects who give obeisance. We are not left with the usual postmodern quandary 'who are the good guys' in a battle in which the lust for violence plagues both sides. In the end, the defending Spartans are better, not perfect, just better than the invading Persians, and that proves good enough in the end. And to suggest that ambiguously these days has perhaps become a revolutionary thing in itself."

-- Victor Davis Hanson, March 6, 2007 (via)

Just to Be Clear

Any US attack on Iran would be a war crime -- the crime of aggression, with which we (rightly) charged the Nazis at Nuremberg.

The US has already committed the "supreme crime" of aggressive war once this century in its attack on Iraq. Let's not let it happen again.

Two petitions to sign (via via):
Just Foreign Policy Petition
Democrats.Com Petition

More ideas on what to do to try to stop this criminal insanity here and here.

God only knows if Bush is really planning to do this; God only knows if we can stop him. But we are morally obligated to try.

That's all.

Covering Cerebus, Part Seven: In Which Covers are Discussed Apart from Their Contents

Part seven of a series. The earlier parts are here: one, two, three, four, five, six; and an index entry for the entire series can be found here.

One of the reasons I was surprised that I was unable to get into Guys (as I discussed in the previous installment) is that the covers are so wonderful. The majority of the covers to Guys (which collects issues #201-219) are pages of comics -- something that has certainly been done before, but which I always like. In fact, the pages are so integral to the comic that the covers to #202-213 are included in the phonebook collection, albeit in black and white versions. This is the only time that Sim includes the covers in his compilations. Anyway, here's what some of them look like:

The covers are, as I said, pages of comics -- but not quite just pages of comics. Guys takes place in a bar, and in many of them Sim works a different bottle of liquor into each composition. It is elegantly and stylishly done, and, so far as I'm concerned, simply makes the covers all that much better.

Note that some of the covers are more like single panels than actual comics pages -- the cover to #205 (bottom left) is an example of this. Nor do all of them contain liquor bottles -- such as the bottom right cover (to issue #209), which shows one of the bar denizens, plus Cerebus reading a comic. But (I believe) they all serve as part of the story. The one on the bottom left, incidentally, is a good example of one of the nice features about this set of covers, namely, the mix of black and white and color. The "comics" part are in black and white (presumably since it is part of the story, and the interiors are all black and white), but other elements -- often the liquor bottles -- are in color. In the cover to #209, of course, it is the comic Cerebus is reading which is in color -- a way of showing its fascination and power. Its an effective technique.

One of these covers I want to point out particularly is the cover to issue #212:

Like many of the Guys covers, it is a comics page (in this case, a one-panel page) with a liquor bottle (in this case two) on the cover. We see Sim's extremely expressive lettering as two of the characters talk off-panel. But not entirely off-panel, since we also see them reflected in the liquor bottle (on the left). Further, the logo itself is half bent around the bottle, half projected on the wall behind it. The overall effect is wonderful -- a good example, really, of Sim's marvelous page design.

Later in the Guys storyline, Sim stops using the covers as comics pages (which is presumably why he doesn't include the later ones.) He uses a variety of images -- presumably miscellaneous scenes from the story. My favorites are the covers to #214-215, which are Andy Warhol pastiches:

-- in the latter case combined very effectively with a more muted picture of the outside of the bar.

The storyline after Guys is Rick's Story which, I believe, still takes place in a tavern (as with all the issues discussed in this post, I haven't read 'em, although in many cases I've read a bit about 'em.) The central visual motif in the covers for the Rick's Story storyline is the name sign hanging outside a tavern.

Sounds simple. But Sim does wonderful things with it. Usually, he has the sign (viewed from a direct angle) contain the "Rick's Story" logo, while a signed-shape image, projected against a colored background, contains an image from (presumably) the story inside. Look at these:

In the first one (on the left, #220) you have to look twice to see that the image is, in fact, shaped as another tavern sign; but it's true in all three cases.

In two of the covers, the image breaks out of the tavern sign shape:

where the ball (for issue #221) and the stained glass (for issue #226) break out of the picture's normal bounds. (The stained glass motif, incidentally, comes from a religious tone which Rick spends the story writing.)

In a few other cases, the single-colored background has a line drawing inlaid upon it, with a full-color sign dangling before it:

Note that in the cover to issue #224 (center), that is just a sign-shaped image: it's just that a 'panel' is highlighted (through different colorization, plus a border) within that image. Also note the continued religious motif, particularly in the cover to #225 (right).

Finally, in the final four covers in the storyline, the image and the text reverse places: the image is in the straight-on, standard-shaped tavern sign, while the logo is visible in the larger, sign-shaped image that dominates rest of the cover -- at least, it's initially visible: it's increasingly obscures a, over the course of the four, Sim zooms in upon it. Together it produces a truly wonderful series:

Following Rick's Story was a thirty-four issue storyline called "Going Home", eventually collected in two volumes, Going Home and Form and Void. These thirty-four issues have, perhaps, the greatest stylistic unity of any Cerebus storyline: all thirty-four covers are photographs -- taken by Gerhard, I believe, although I'm not sure about that -- a series of splendid nature scenes, presumably to accompany the journey motif implied by the title. In some cases the photographs include some building exteriors; in one or two cases they are photographs just of building exteriors. But they are all clearly of a piece: and most of them are spectacularly beautiful. While these aren't the first photographs to be used on Cerebus covers (there were the lunar photographs used towards the end of the "Church and State" storyline, and the photographic cover of issue #138), they certainly stand out -- from other Cerebus covers and from other comics covers in general.

I don't have much more to say about them; you can go take a look at them if you like; but here are a few that I personally liked a lot:

Truly amazing, I think. Richard Misrach, eat your heart out!

And aw heck, I can't resist, here are some more:

Simply gorgeous.

Now we come to the final Cerebus storyline, "Latter Days", which was reprinted in (the final) two phonebooks, Latter Days and The Last Day. The opening dozen or so covers are formed on the following pattern: each contains an image (usually a single image, often a photograph); a picture of Cerebus, usually in a costume of some sort; and a prominently displayed-title, using (to varying degrees) archaic diction in imitation of language associated with religious texts. Here are a few examples:

-- Not my favorite Cerebus covers ever, although the cover to issue #271 (bottom right) shows that Sim still retained his sense of humor.

As the storyline goes on, Sim varies the formula. On the cover to issue #272, for instance, the caption is left out; but we get this wonderful portrait of Cerebus as a rabbi (!):

And on the cover to issues #275-277, the background image fills the cover, as (in front) Cerebus dons the costume of Charlie Brown, another wonderful parody:

One of my favorites of this sequence is the cover to issue #274:

It's still the same basic formula -- Cerebus figure, archaically-phrased title, and picture: but the multiple pictures make it almost comics, and the title is hidden off-panel in places, with one version if it trembling (from Cerebus's fall) -- a cover that manages to be quite funny within the same parameters as the other covers in the sequence, and even to give a real hint of one aspect of the plot (since we see Cerebus on a crutch later on, presumably the fall actually hurts him...)

Issues #282 - #290 are a sequence known as "Chasing YHWH", in which (if the internet is to be believed) Sim presents a long, eccentric interpretation of Genesis (a sequence that convinced Paul O'Brien that Sim had fully lost his mind, even apart from his ongoing misogyny). Save for the first, the covers are all mock-ups of movie posters, as if each issue were a further sequel in a series of films. Here are a few examples:

Pretty basic in concept, although (as always) very well done. And a few of them are fairly funny (you can't quite read all the writing in the images I could find, alas, but even from what I can make out it's clearly true), such as blurbs on the cover of issue #285, which include the self-mocking quote "I prefer the earlier, funnier ones," as well as some hotel reviews.

Lastly -- but hardly least -- we get to Cerebus's last day. The covers all portray Cerebus as a very old man, tottering about in the room where he spends the eponymous day. In fact, if you line them up, they form a continuous picture of the room, with Cerebus as a superimposed figure tottering across it:

Go ahead and click that to enlarge it -- it's a lovely sequence, quite beautiful in a quiet, restrained sort of way. Worth seeing at a size that you can really see. (I got the combined image from this site.)

You'll notice that the cover to issue #298 was left out of that sequence; that's because rather than showing the next part of the room, it forms a pair with #297 to show an aged Cerebus in bed as the room grows dark:

Again, a very subtly beautiful effect, as the dark closes in around Cerebus's life.

And, finally, the cover to issue #300 shows the area portrayed on the cover of #299 flooded with the light seen by the dying Cerebus --

-- a light which, judging by what I've read online, is much more ambiguous in its meanings and implications than it might appear.

And that, at last, concludes my survey of Cerebus covers. I think I'll (probably) put up an eighth and final post with some concluding thoughts about Cerebus, so keep an eye out for it. But I hope you've gotten a sense of the sheer visual creativity and power of Sim's work from these covers. For myself, I am struck by the sheer variety of them. Just look at the ones I've dealt with in this post alone!

And that's to say nothing of the various ways in which he relates particular covers together, parallels that tie smaller or larger sequences together, and so forth. Sim's use of the comics medium was always profoundly creative, exploring and pushing its boundaries; and -- as I hope I have shown -- that was true in his covers to Cerebus no less than in the comics within it.

The eighth and final post is now online here.
(Index to the entire series is here.)

Covering Cerebus, Part Six: Books. Covers. Judgments. Further.

Part six of a series. The earlier parts are here: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five. Links to the entire series can also be found here.

I have come to the third quarter of the "Mothers and Daughters" storyline, collected in the phonebook entitled Reads (containing issues #175-186). This is the phonebook that is about evenly divided between actual comics and Sim's prose. Each issue of the original comic was half-prose and half-comics; and the phonebook reproduces this format so that you get a few pages of one, followed by a few pages of the other. The first group of the prose selections are formatted the way that the dominant popular publication in Cerebus's world (known as "reads") are: prose and single illustrations appearing on facing pages. The second group are simply Sim's prose. And while I read all of the earlier text sections that appeared in the first eight volumes of Cerebus (not as predominant as they are in Reads, but there are some, particularly in Jaka's Story), I should make it clear that I skipped the majority of the prose sections here. (There are summaries of them online here, here and here.) The comics sections are, I think, comparable in quality to the rest of the "Mothers and Daughters" storyline, although the extended fight scene which more-or-less makes up the second half of the (comics sections of) the book is rather excessively drawn out, wonderfully drawn though it may be.

On to the covers.

The covers to the Reads sub-storyline are stylistically all of a piece, with a single image centered on a patterned background. "Reads" are, as I mentioned, the (a?) dominant publication in Cerebus's world, and they covers for the Cerebus issues are formatted the way the (fictional) reads' covers are in the story. (We see several pictures of them, on newsstands and so forth, with covers in this same format.) So for this storyline Sim formats his actual covers the way the fictional (reads) covers are formatted. This is particularly clear from the first issue of the sequence, #175, titled "reads" and showing further "reads" in its sole image:

Overall, the Reads covers are nice enough -- stylish, if not overwhelming. Here are a few more to give you the idea:

There are two particularly noteworthy ones here. First, notice the cover to #181 (bottom left), where the interior image itself is unfinished, simply a piece of a comics-page in progress; this is from a page in this issue in which we see Dave Sim himself creating a page of Cerebus -- marking the beginning of a metafictional motif which (very briefly) begins in this phonebook and which (far more prominently) continues in the next.

Second, the cover to #186 (bottom right), as well as #185 (not shown) are photographs of the moon -- deliberately echoing the covers from issues #105 - 108, since a similar religious journey is begun in these issues -- although of course the photographs this time are incorporated into the general 'reads' style.

The only one that departs significantly from the "reads" pattern is the cover to issue #184:

Here the background pattern is sheer-black; the internal rectangular image is itself a fully-formed reads-style cover -- except that it is blocked by a silhouette. A nice variation.

Now I'll move on to the covers of the last quarter of the "Mothers and Daughters" storyline, the part collected in the phonebook Minds (containing issues #187-200). Unfortunately, while the actual contents of Minds are as stunning as anything in the entire Cerebus storyline, the covers, quite frankly, are not: the majority of the covers to these fourteen issues are marred by a piece of promotional advertising.

The first three Minds covers are illustrations of the ongoing religious journey (through, or at least symbolized by, outer space) that Cerebus is on:

Perfectly ordinary, albeit well-done, illustrations. But then, for the next three issues, we get this:

Still we're illustrating the journey... but now there's the black banner promoting the "Cerebus World Tour" (a signing trip that Sim took, I believe) taking up a third of each cover, and making the aesthetics of the whole distinctly... less.

And these continue for (almost) all the rest of the Minds covers.

Now, the illustrated parts of those covers are nice -- some illustrate moments from Cerebus's ongoing religious journey, others are images derived from visions he is granted of what his future might be like; but as overall covers, as aesthetic objects, they're lessened.

I guess I understand why Sim did this: he didn't seem to think of the covers as part of the essential aesthetics of the series, as indicated by the fact that he didn't include them in the phonebook collections (with one minor exception that I'll get to later). But since in my opinion (as you've no doubt gathered) they are wonderful aesthetic objects, I think it's a pity that he marred this particular year-or-so's worth of covers with an ad.

The last of these is on issue #199, and for the 200th issue of Cerebus we get another cosmic image, a fitting one with which to illustrate the end of his religious journeying:

And that's the end of the "Mothers and Daughters" storyline.

And, rather to my surprise, that's as far as I've read in Cerebus.

Until now.

I have Guys, the eleventh phonebook in the Cerebus series. It's on the table, right over there. I picked it up yesterday, and again last night, and read a little bit. But I can't quite get into it.

I'm not sure why. I don't think it's the book itself -- at least, people whose taste I respect like it a lot, and I can't really say that I've seen anything in the book that would put me off. I've really enjoyed the series up until now -- even the notorious ninth volume, Reads, is perfectly fine if you skip the (lunatic and misogynistic) prose and just read the half that's comics. And the opening to volume 11 doesn't seem all that different, frankly. In fact, it's sort of a return to the earlier, humorous mode of the first few volumes of the series. So it should be a welcome change of pace.

But for some reason, it's not grabbing me.

I guess that, for now -- for whatever reason -- I'm done with Cerebus. I began reading it, more or less, on a whim; and now I'll let myself stop the same way. I've read 2/3 of the run (yes, including the uncollected early issues: I finally got a copy of Issue #0 and read them too), and maybe that's enough. Or maybe not: I still have the book, and maybe one day I'll feel like reading it. Until then --

Just about everybody bails on Cerebus. I guess this is where I bail.

... Or almost. Because even if I haven't read the final hundred issues of the series, I've looked at the covers: and some of them are lovely. In fact, I think that the covers to the final third of Cerebus include some of the very best of the series. So while I haven't read those issues, I've still done a post about 'em. So continue on with me --

Part Seven is Posted Here
(Index to the Entire Series is Here)

Covering Cerebus: Index

For convenience, here are links to all the parts of my now-completed series of posts, "Covering Cerebus":

Part One: In Which I Walk the Standard Line
Part Two: In Which We Get to the Good, Although Recommendation is Withheld
Part Three: In Which the Covers Are Used to Illustrate the Books
Part Four: In Which I Continue to Illustrate the Books with the Covers
Part Five: In Which Further Books Are Judged by Their Covers
Part Six: Books. Covers. Judgments. Further.
Part Seven: In Which Covers Are Discussed Apart From Their Contents
Part Eight: A Conclusion, in Which Recommendations Are At Last Made, with General Ruminations about the Nature of Love
Appendix: Cerebus Links

If you want the abridged version, skips parts five - seven (& the appendix); the rest will hold up without them.

Deamonte Driver is Dead and You Can Thank Bill Kristol

Hilzoy and Matt Yglesias both blog this horrifying story from the Washington Post:

Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.
A routine, $80
tooth extraction might have saved him.
If his mother had been insured.
If
his family had not lost its Medicaid.
If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to
find.
If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother,
who had six rotted teeth.
By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any
attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said.
After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince
George's County boy died.

Both Hilzoy and Matt try to be polite about this. Hilzoy says "We Can Do Better Than This" and "This should not happen in our country," and adds all sorts of useful explanations about why universal health care would help solve this. Matt says that while he "usually" tries "not to be the table-pounding kind of liberal, but on some level delivering everyone a basic standard of health care is a fairly simple moral imperative, and not really this big medico-economo-whatever question." Should not happen. Moral imperative. Right. Got it. We can all feel bad.

But the point is that this happened -- this has been happening, is happening every god damned day, and will continue to happen until we fracking fix it -- for a reason beyond the fact that we don't have universal health care in this country, unlike every other industrialized democracy in the world. And that has to do with why we don't have universal health care.

We don't have universal health care -- and Deamonte Driver is dead from a tooth infection -- because a lot of people have been fighting really fucking hard to make sure that we don't have it.

It's that simple.

Or, to be more specific: liberals have been fighting to try to ensure that American citizens do have universal health care; conservatives have been fighting to ensure that they don't.

Conservatives have been winning. So that people don't have health care who would otherwise have it. And some of those people are dying.

Including Deamonte Driver.

Sure, maybe liberals should have fought harder, or fought smarter, or whatever. Maybe Clinton's health care plan was an overly complex attempt at compromise, a pathetic attempt to throw bones to the insurance companies. Whatever. Because if the organized right hadn't been fighting this all along, we would have had universal health care in this country years ago -- maybe as long as six fucking decades ago when Truman -- yeah, Truman -- first proposed it.

People like to talk about morality because it sounds cleaner than politics, and it doesn't carry any blame. Saying it's a "moral imperative" is true, but it dodges the question of why we aren't doing it. And politics sounds so petty. You're just playing politics.

But to talk about "politics" like it is just some sort of fucking game ignores the fact that these policies have real implications for the lives of real people.

Including kids. Including kids like Deamonte.

If you invade a country for no good reason, and more than 600,000 people die, it's not just a political oops. It's a crime: the blood of those people is on your hands. And if you block universal health care, then all the people who die for lack of care are dead in part because of you.

Which brings me to William Kristol.

William Kristol, one of the most influential Republicans in the country, sent out a memo in 1993 on the forthcoming health care proposal. What he said was "that congressional Republicans should work to "kill" -- not amend -- the Clinton plan because it presents a real danger to the Republican future: Its passage will give the Democrats a lock on the crucial middle-class vote and revive the reputation of the party." (via)

Think about that. He said that Republicans should kill -- sight unseen, I should emphasize -- the bill. Not because he was opposed to what he said -- he hadn't seen it; he didn't know what it said. But because it would give Democrats an advantage.

Because it would make voters happy not to have to worry about getting sick without insurance. Because people actually want liberal programs, so we have to kill them with all sorts of redbaiting rhetoric lest they see that liberals are actually trying to improve their lives.

It's one thing to oppose these sorts of things because of some moral notion that implies that universal health care is wrong -- although the opponents of it have to justify the deaths it will cause, in the face that every other fucking industrialized nation on earth has a universal health care system without turning into some Bolshevik nightmare. But at least that's a principle. If your principle is that sick kids ought to die for lack of health care -- or, if not them, then at least their parents if their parents can't afford health care, or maybe even just their childless, out of work neighbor -- because this keeps us free, then fine. (Bush, who thinks we need less health insurance in this country -- that jobs that still offer workers insurance should be taxed for it, because their health care was excessive -- IIRC, "gold plated" was the term -- is an example of this.)

But to kill this bill-- to kill the people that killing the bill will inevitably kill -- for political advantage?

I'm sure if asked that William Kristol will say that, oh no, this was a terrible thing. Of course he didn't want Deamonte to die. Sure he'll say that: He's a pundit; pundits do that.

But when he sent that memo, he knew, he damn well fucking knew that people would fail to get health care because he was afraid that if they'd got it, they'd appreciate it and vote for the party that thinks they should have it. So he was willing to let people be sick -- willing to let people die -- so that the party that opposes universal health care wouldn't have their principles shown to be unpopular. So they could win election.

Now I'm sure people will accuse me of "playing politics" with Deamonte's death. But that's precisely the point. Politics isn't a game. Politics is life and death. It was politics -- the politics that blocks universal health care in this country -- that causes people to die would could live with basic, affordable, ordinary coverage. Accusing people of "playing politics" is just a way to avoid discussing the life and death issues that are really at stake.

When people are dying in easily preventable ways, we have to "play politics". Because it's politics that's killing them.

And if you don't want those people to die, you need to play politics. On the side that is trying to enact policies that will save them, rather than on the side that is successfully blocking policies that will save them. We're playing for their lives, and we're loosing. But at least our side is fighting to save them, rather than fighting to keep in place the system that's letting them die.

So raise a glass to Bill Kristol today -- a glass filled with the blood of the people he helped kill. Sure, people are getting sick, kids are getting sick, kids are dying, who could easily live. But he thought it was more important that the Republicans win the house.

Deamonte Driver is dead. And if Bill Kristol had the slightest shred of intellectual integrity, he would be dancing on his grave. Since he helped to bury him and all.

***

UPDATE:

"Don't blog angry" is good advice. But some topics seem to properly met only with anger. So that when I went and read the comments at the other place I posted this, I got angry all over again, and left the following reply to two of them. (The first I quote in my reply; the relevant part of the second is "...it is sad that someone died over a rotten tooth. But I sure as hell do not want to pay for that tooth or anyone else's... its called freedom." You can read the whole thing here if you like.)

***

Hugh Jass said: Do you actually believe that the mother could not come up with $80? I bet you, the house had cable, the mother had a cell phone, she played the lottery, they had more than one TV, a microwave, etc.

And blogger Fred Clark, from Slacktivist: David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo cites a statistic... "Sixteen million Americans live in "severe poverty," defined as individuals making less than $5,080 annually and families of four making less than $9,903." ... Try to imagine how you might make ends meet on $5,080 a year. That's $424 a month for rent, food, health care, clothing, utilities, transportation. On $424 a month, the ends cannot be made to meet. Try to imagine how you might make ends meet raising two children on $9,903 a year. That's about $825 a month. The ends cannot be made to meet. There are 16 million Americans living like this. That's the combined population of Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, New Hampshire and Vermont.

I don't know what the situation of the Driver family is. But believe that an American family couldn't come up with $80? Hell, yes.

If more people understood, viscerally, what poverty is, maybe we'd live in a different country. A country where people didn't express more emotion about paying for universal health care (like, to repeat, the citizens of every other industrialized nation in the world... I guess there's no "freedom" in Canada, New Zealand, England or France) then about a twelve year old kid dying because of a rotting tooth.

But as I said: some people are fighting for universal health care; some to prevent it. It's that simple.

A Zen Tale

This is my retelling of an old Zen story, which I've come across in a number of places.

A man was running from a tiger, and he came to a cliff. He began climbing down a vine, hoping that the tiger could not follow him down and he could thereby escape. As he was on his way down, however, he spied a second tiger waiting for him at the bottom of the cliff. As he hung there on the vine, wondering what to do, he saw a rat begin to chew through the top of the vine.

Then he spied a strawberry, just in arm's reach. He reached out, plucked the berry, and ate it. It was the most sweet and succulent berry he had ever tasted. He closed his eyes and tasted the berry with his whole being, and said aloud, "what a wonderful berry this is!"

Then the rat finished chewing through the vine and the man fell to the ground, breaking his leg. With his leg broken, he could not run. The tiger on the ground came up to him and batted him around as kittens do mice, giving him one painful cut after another. One swipe tore out his left eye. Eventually the tiger tired of playing with him, and bit a large chunk out of the man's stomach for its dinner.

The man went into shock, the pain of the wound coursing through his entire body. But he did not die: he hung on to life for five more days as the two tigers (who, it turned out, were mates) used him as a source of food. His mind was dulled by shock, but not enough to keep the fear and pain from filling his world like a bright light. After five days of agony unlike any that can be described, he finally died.

His corpse continued to serve as a food source for the tigers for several more days. After that, the rat that had chewed through the vine came to gnaw on what was left of his bones.

Playin' with Pulp

BoingBoing linked today to a brief but wonderful video illustrating a scene from Pulp Fiction with typography (direct link). Knowing a good procrastinating tool when I see one, I looked around, and boy, there's a lot of playin' with pulp out there.

Fuckin' Short Version - PF reduced to its usage of the word fuck (and variants) - still over two minutes.
30-Second Version - Re-enacted by Bunnies - Angry Alien always comes through.
Pulp Fiction, Jedi Edition - the trailer to the film, remixed with footage from Star Wars. In the same vein, there's also Ring Fiction (Lord of the Rings) and Pulp X-Mas (Bambi).
Chinese Reenactment. A scene from the film reenacted in Chinese. ("Chinese, motherfucker, do you speak it?")
Brak and Meatwat - Brief finger-puppet-style scene. The way they do the gunshot is wonderful.

And, finally, in case you've never seen the film, someone helpfully posted the entire thing to youtube in fifteen-minute segments - one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten -- although I rather doubt that'll be up there for long.

Auden's Centennial

W. H. Auden's 100th birthday is this week. (That being a nice way to finesse that I'm a day late with this post -- or it would have been had I not added this parenthesis, which sort of gives the game away.) He's one of my very favorite poets -- I'm not sure I'd be willing to put anyone up as my very favorite poet, but he's among the half dozen or so that would come to mind if I tried to choose one.

Auden must be a popular poet with bloggers, since it does seem that the internet is buzzing with Auden this week. Just a few I noticed: 3quarksdaily tips their hat. Patrick Nielsen Hayden put up a centennial notice, leading to a wonderful thread of people posting their favorite Auden poems/stanzas/lines. I put up "A Walk After Dark", saying that it had the lowest attention-by-Auden-lovers to quality ratio of any of my favorite Auden poems. Then I found that Hugo Schwyzer posted it today as his Auden centennial memorial. So maybe I'm wrong about that, I don't know.

But I suppose the best words to mark the occasion might be these stanzas from another of Auden's best poems, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats":

Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

... except that if you click through the link to the poem above, you won't find those verses anywhere in it. Why? Because Poets.org quotes Auden's later version of the poem -- the version that cut those wonderful stanzas out. (Here's a version with them still in, although they add an awkward note pointing their later exclusion in the text of the poem (what's up with that!?), and here's another -- although that one mashes two of the stanzas awkwardly together.) Ah well, as the Guardian noted today, "He was silly like us... Few writers mutilated their own work more often."

Apart from those two, here are some other of my favorite Auden poems (yeah, most of them are on most people's greatest hits list. I'm listing ones I like, not trying to be original).

As I Walked Out One Evening
August, 1968
Epitaph on a Tyrant
In Praise of Limestone
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun
Lullaby
Musee de Beaux Arts
Partition
September 1, 1939
Who's Who

And for those words, among others, time has laid its honors at his feet.

Disgusting

Since I'm busy today I haven't had time to check, but I bet that the various atheist blogs are already all over this one. But having followed Andrew Sullivan's link to this Jim Wallis piece in Time magazine, I had to comment on this line:

Democrats are learning to connect issues with values and are now engaging with the faith community. They are running more candidates who have been emboldened to come out of the closet as believers themselves.

Coming out of the closet as believers? Are you fracking kidding me, Jim Wallis? At a time when it is virtually -- possibly literally -- impossible for anyone who is not (publicly) a believer to get elected to any major office in this country, this is simply a disgusting thing to say. Let's put aside the fact that it is flatly false (since it implies that any significant Democratic candidates have been publicly presenting themselves as nonbelievers); and let's even put aside the fact that it buys into the (false) Republican framing of the issue of Democrats and religion that the article as a whole seeks to counter. But at a time when people are less likely to vote for an atheist than a member of any other group -- yes, even moreso than gays and lesbians, despite the powerful homophobia that continues in this country (although they're second to us heathens, natch), making Wallis's appropriation of the "out of the closet" language even more ironic -- to talk as if it is believers who are shut out of elective politics is, well, vile.

(What Wallis meant by "running more candidates who have been emboldened to come out of the closet as believers" was that Democrats are running more candidates who are willing to follow Republicans' lead in exploiting their religious beliefs to get votes -- and are doing so more successfully. Whether that's a good, bad or neutral thing I leave to "people of faith" themselves.)

Mitt Romney recently responded to attacks on his Mormonism by turning the issue around and issuing an attack on an even less popular group: atheists. "We need to have a person of faith lead the country," he said. Sullivan, to his credit, recognized this as the naked bigotry that it is. But most people didn't. Romney has not been chastised for his comment the way he would have been if he'd said we need a [white/male/whatever] person to run the country. Hell, if Romney had just said we need a Christian to run the country, all the Jim Wallises of the world would have been (correctly) after him for antisemitism, anti-Islamism, and what have you. But to defend his own religion by attacking the least popular group (as far as electoral politics is concerned) in the country -- that's just fine. No one cares.

Look, atheists are unelectable in this country. I can live with that. But to have Wallis imply that it is believers who are "in the closet", in either major political party in this country -- how dare he. How !@#$% dare he. The man should be ashamed of himself.

Of course, he won't be. Because he has God on his side. So what need does he have to be fair to people who don't believe?

Wallis ends his essay by hoping for a "a revival for justice," and then saying " The era of the Religious Right is now past, and it's up to all of us to create a new day." But Wallis's "us" doesn't include me -- it doesn't include a lot of people. You'll forgive me if I find myself worried about the nature of whatever "justice" that man is seeking.

Update: PZ Myers weighs in on Wallis.

Update 2: My speculation in my opening sentence seems to have been wrong -- at least, I haven't seen anyone else who got as cranky about that particular sentence as I did. (PZ doesn't count, since I emailed him to kvetch about it; and anyway, he explicitly said I was "even crankier" than he about it.) Wallis is, however, getting some fairly negative (in both senses) attention for other matters these days. Although he doesn't mention the inaccuracy I was griping about, Frederick Clarkson points out Wallis's history of inaccuracy on these topics.

Recommended Reading & Viewing

• Jonathan Lethem's essay "The Ecstasy of Influence"; via Cory Doctorow, who's right -- you need to read this one straight through to the end. I know that everyone's talking about this one, but the reason they are is because it's great. Read it.
• I've plugged Fred Clark before, but he's done some good posting recently; I particularly recommend his post on theology and the prisoner's dilemma, and his review of another review of the Left Behind series. (Update: And this amazing post, "Let us Reason Together" too. Damn but FC's on a roll...)
• I've been enjoying this debate between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris about religion.
• I didn't like his defensive opening paragraph, but Jonny Thakkar's "Visions of Infinity" -- a close literary reading of Bob Dylan's "Visions of Johanna" -- is wonderful.
• Speaking of Dylan, I think you may need to know the original Dylan video to appreciate this parody by Weird Al Yankovic, but the latter is really awesome. And has palindromes! (via)
• Whereas, to find this video funny, all you need ever have done is called a help desk, or worked at a help desk. Oh, and read a book too, probably.
• This parody of the government's get-ready-for-a-terrorist-attack site (via) is hilarious.

Covering Cerebus, Part Five: In Which Further Books Are Judged by Their Covers

Part five of a series. The earlier parts are here: part one, part two, part three, part four.

Before moving on to discuss the covers of Melmoth, the story collected in the sixth "phonebook" compilation of the Cerebus comics, I thought I would pause for a moment to discuss a few other covers that aren't part of the ordinary run of 300 issues of Cerebus.

First up are the dual covers for Cerebus Issue Zero. "Issue Zero" was sort of a mini-compilation, released in 1993, which collects the issues which were left out of the early collections (#51, #112-113, #137 & part of #138). (In fact, the proprietor of the central Cerebus site on the net, Cerebus Fangirl, says that in her view Issue Zero is the best introduction to Cerebus, since it's a good selection of different styles while also being reasonably priced.) In 1993, Sim was still early in the second half of the Cerebus storyline; but he had definitely moved beyond his "earlier, funnier" phase -- parts of which could be found in Issue Zero. So Sim's cover alludes to that, as well as displaying Cerebus's characteristic truculence:

But that wasn't the only cover: there was another, the "gold" edition. In the early 1990's, there was a trend of releasing comics with variant covers -- the same comic, the same contents, just with two different covers. This is still done today, but was particularly widespread in the 1990's -- and, back then, more than a few poor saps still suffered under the misapprehension that these comics (often printed in runs of hundreds of thousands, occasionally even more) would be worth a lot of money, and thus bought all of the various covers. In any event, Sim made fun of this by releasing Issue Zero with a second -- and I believe rarer, although I might simply be making that up -- cover: but this cover wasn't even a different cover. The title was in a different color -- and the dialogue was different. Otherwise, not only were the contents identical, the actual cover images were too:

Of course the dialog is quite funny -- or at least I find it so -- displaying a bit of Sim's humor, usually not the aspect of the series most evident from the covers. And it's fun how Sim double-purposes the image to fit with two sets of dialogue. (The speaker's skateboard, incidentally, says "Spawn" -- another self-published comic (recall Sim was a great advocate of self-publishing), one which was quite popular at the time, and also one to which Sim had actually contributed (for a single issue.))

Then there are the covers to the actual phonebook collections themselves. I'm not sure I like these quite as much as the covers to the individual issues -- partly because, except for the last few, they aren't in color; partly because there isn't the sheer multiplicity of them which allows Sim to play so many fun games with the covers to the individual comics. They can be wonderful, though. (Another fan site, Cerebus the Aardvark.com, has a few of the phonebook covers without their titles and so forth -- and in their full, wraparound version rather than just the front covers -- available as wallpapers, so where possible I'm going to use those. Mostly I think the Cerebus covers integrate the titles very well -- often they are essentially to the images -- but in the case of the phonebooks, the cover images seem to work best plain.)

The cover to the collection High Society shows Cerebus approaching the Regency, the hotel at which most of the story is centered -- and works, basically, as an opening panel for the first issue:

This is one image where the effect is, I believe, mostly Gerhard's -- but it's appropriate to highlight this too since he was, after all, Sim's artistic collaborator for much of the series (although, as it happens, not for the part included in High Society), and his art adds a lot to Cerebus overall.

Also wonderful is the cover to Church and State II, showing a scene from Cerebus's religious quest, with the figure of the aardvark dwarfed by the surrounding dark:

That one makes a pretty fine wallpaper, actually.

The cover to Jaka's Story actually shows part of the childhood storyline, unlike most of the covers to the individual issues in which it was serialized (couldn't find a wallpaper version of this one, alas, so here it is with titles -- and less resolution):

And the cover to Melmoth is wonderfully evocative of that book's depiction of a slow, hard, natural death -- the death of Oscar Wilde, as well as the tavern in which it is largely set:

-- And that brings me back to Melmoth, and the covers for its individual issues.

Melmoth was a brief storyline: only 12 issues (#139-150); it looks downright skinny next to the large, hulking collections that collect the earlier issues, although by the standards of other graphic novels it's not particularly short (just shy of 250 pages). Apparently the shorter, slightly cheaper format sold well, which is why the first half of the Cerebus run is collected in six volumes but the second half is spread over ten. As I mentioned, Melmoth deals with the death of Oscar Wilde -- or his avatar in Cerebus's world, but in this case the parallel is as close as possible: place names are substituted (Iest for Paris), but otherwise the story is taken rather closely from the documentary sources we have about Wilde's death: many of the letters of the friends who attended him are quoted nearly word-for-word as the text of the comic. ("Melmoth", incidentally, is the name under which Wilde was registered at the hotel in which he died.)

Many of the covers are exteriors rather similar to the exteriors used in Jaka's Story -- although the color palette is different and there usually isn't the ominous sense of watching that there is is so many of the Jaka's Story covers. Here are a few in this style, from issues #139, 140 and 146:

These are simply quiet, beautiful images (click for the larger version to really see); the contrast between the day and the night in the first two is particularly nice, as is Wilde's friend walking him home. The cover of #146 again has someone at the window, but he is looking at something inside the room, and has more of a sense of loss and waiting than of disturbed, voyeuristic watching.

The other common type of cover in the Melmoth storyline are interior views of the sickroom in which Wilde lays dying, such as these from #143, 144 and 148:

Here we have Wilde's sickbed, Wilde's friend writing one of the letters whose text makes up the issue, and an aerial view. I think that the aerial view is particularly well done: it is the death issue, and there is the sense of distance which could be interpreted either as the disorientation of grief, or as a heavenly view, perhaps even of a departing spirit. And again, the color schemes in all three covers are lovely, particularly the light in the cover to #144.

Throughout this story, Cerebus sits outside the inn where Wilde lays dying, in shock from (his misinterpretation of) the events of Jaka's Story. Neither he nor Wilde is at all aware of the other; the stories are simultaneous but detached. (Not everyone thinks the juxtaposition works, although I felt it did.) Only one cover in this sequence shows Cerebus, #145:

Again we are outside the same inn, although this time without the lush backgrounds that are present in most of the storyline's covers, perhaps to indicate Cerebus's detachment from the world, perhaps to distinguish the fantasy of his storyline with the realism of the story of Wilde's death.

Then, in the final issue of the storyline (#150), we get this image:

Seemingly yet another inn exterior, if anything simpler and with less interest than the previous ones... except that, as we look again, we see the blood splattered on the inn's door. This recreates the effect of the issue itself: starting with Cerebus outside the inn, there is a radical shift in tone, a sudden outbreak of violence, as events suddenly ramp up after two slow, quiet storylines and a bloody confrontation sets up the second half of the overall Cerebus story (or at least I presume it does; I don't know for certain, since this is the last issue I've read!) It's a wonderful off-panel effect, in which the central subject is not shown, in which the tone of the overall image, deceptively similar to the other recent ones, is disrupted by the blood splattered within it.

How much stylistic variation there is within any particular storyline's covers itself varies: there was a huge range of styles in the "Church and State" storyline, whereas the covers from Jaka's Story and Melmoth are more tightly integrated, stylistically, within each series. I think it's fair to say that the stylistic unity of the covers for Cerebus's storylines tend to increase over the course of the run, but this is not at all a hard and fast rule: it's a general trend that seems to appear in a scattered field of data, and whether you see a trend with lots of exceptions or a simple chaotic variance probably says more about you than about it. In any event, after the (comparatively) tightly unified style of the Melmoth covers, the next storyline contains considerably more internal variation. This storyline was labeled "Mothers and Daughters" on the covers of the issues themselves, but it was published in four separate phonebook collections, each with its own title -- sub-storylines, if you will.

The first of those volumes was called Flight, and the covers of the issues collected in it (#151-162) are, as I said, a varied lot. Many of them could be said to "simply" depict moments from the story -- except a lot of them are both stranger and prettier than this would imply, depicting scenes that are abstract or symbolic or strange, as the story takes increasingly metaphysical twists. And of course, even some of the more straightforward covers are quite beautiful, such as this cover to issue #151:

-- Although the context is a bit bleak once you read the story, the actual image is simply gorgeous.

Other covers from this run reflect the bloody events promised by the cover to issue #150. For example the cover to issue #153 shows Cerebus, covered with blood, sword out, exhorting the people of Iest; the cover to the following issue shows the same scene a moment later, as the people react to his sudden and inexplicable appearance:

I find the first image quite funny (the people's expressions are incongruous with Cerebus's bloody pose) -- perhaps unintentionally so, since there's nothing very humorous about the scene itself; but the second image is deliberately and appropriately creepy, particularly when paired with its predecessor.

My favorite cover from this sub-storyline, however, is the cover to #157; but to explain why I'll need to back up a bit. Several issues of Cerebus are titled "Mind Games" (after the John Lennon album, apparently), numbered in sequence -- so that #29, for instance, was "Mind Game II". There isn't a totally consistent pattern for the covers to these issues, although they tend to have a motif of Cerebus repeated multiple times. "Mind Game V" was #156, and its cover was an explicit throwback to Mind Game II, as you can see:

In both cases the multiplied Cerebus is shown in a window, with a similar border, and against a black background.

Now look at the cover to #155-157 in sequence:

In the cover to #155, we have Cerebus in flight (as per the title of the phonebook); this is interrupted by the cover to "Mind Game V" (as happens in the story). And then in issue #157 we have "Mind Game VI" -- as it is indeed so-called -- but Cerebus deliberately refuses it: flies away (continuing, as it were, his journey from #155 -- although far more confident now). We can see the window-image, the 'Mind Game' logo, indeed the Cerebus: Mothers and Daughter logo too, all at the bottom of the image: Cerebus flies away from it, refusing (or trying to) the next Mind Game. On its own it's simply a nice image, but in context, it's genuinely wonderful.

The second phonebook in the "Mothers and Daughters" storyline is called Women. A few of the covers of the twelve issues (#163-174) it collects are, like many of the covers from the issues collected in Flight, simply scenes illustrating the story within; but most of them are in fact based on a very particular pattern: showing a character (or characters) important in the issue against a solid black background. Good examples are these covers to issues #166, 169 & 170:

Actually these are also examples of covers that (however odd it may sound) each portray a scene that takes place within the comic; but the scenes are portrayed in a common (and striking) style.

Sometimes this style is combined with other features as well. In at least one case, for example, it is combined with a parody. In the Women sub-arc, the 'Roach' character, who over the course of the series had parodied a great number of superheroes, becomes a parody of Neil Gaiman's Sandman (perhaps a reflection of the shift that occurred in the comics market about then) -- a parody that Gaiman himself has called "easily the best parody of Sandman anyone's ever done", saying that it had him "curling his toes when he read it." Appropriately, then, one of the covers for this run of Cerebus -- that of issue #165 -- is a parody of the style of cover that Dave McKean did for the beginning of the Sandman run. Compare the cover of Cerebus #165 with the cover of Sandman #1 and 3, and you'll see what I mean:

The face of characters in the issue (in the case of Cerebus, Roach reborn as Swoon, with his 'sister', Snuff) are surrounded by a series of boxes with small images of various mysterious (and presumably symbolic) objects. But of course in the case of the cover to Cerebus #165, this is set within a black background, making it similar to the covers from the later issues as well. It's just that the characters of Swoon and Snuff are also portrayed in a way which mimics a McKean Sandman cover.

Finally, the covers of the last four issues collected within the Women phonebook, #171-174, make a lovely tetrad:

Again we get a character, important to the issue, surrounded by a black background. But in this case the characters are stylized to look like Tarot cards (on the left of each cover), and are paired with a collage of other artistic images (on the right) which match the personality of the figure depicted in the "Tarot" image in various ways. (Actually, in its use of collage, I think there is a distinct (if less direct) McKeanian influence upon these as well, but it's less clear than in the case of issue #165.)

And that brings us up to the next phonebook -- and, again, the limit of what I've read thus far. So I'll stop here for now. I do plan to do one or two more posts analyzing the rest of the covers in the run, plus a final post with concluding thoughts on Cerebus as a whole -- and getting to reccomendations at last. The next post won't be up immediately -- it may be a couple of days or more -- but (FSM willing) it'll be up eventually. So stay tuned.

(Update: In case any of you are waiting brethlessly for part six, it's coming. The delay on the next part is due to a shipping delay in my order containing the next few trades. Hopefully this one will come in another week at most, but it all depends on the mail.)

Further Update: Part Six is now online here. I've also put up an index post with links to the entire series.