Website (where you can buy the comic, anyway)
Cerebus Readers in Crisis #1
Full disclosure for those who don’t read the site regularly or don’t feel like bouncing around: Cerebus was probably the main comic that got me into small press comics. The different stories in the back of the book, his relentless promotion of good comics, and the fact that Cerebus was a wonderful, wonderful thing for many years pushed me into all this in a big way. That being said, I burned out on the series around #260 or so, and my plans to reread (and finish) the series just took a big hit when I found out that my stored half-dozen Cerebus phone books had been severely damaged by leaky water pipes. Just a little background for the curious. As for this book, it’s basically a mail correspondence between Dave Sim and Jeff Seiler, as Jeff details a drunken night in Texas. See, Jeff had been celibate for seven and a half years by choice. Dave Sim had been getting more and more religious as time went on in his series, which is one of the main things that made me lose interest, as I had been raised surrounded by religion and eventually got how silly the whole thing was. In this story Jeff finds a prostitute, goes to great lengths to track her down later in the night, has sex with her and then is worried when she won’t wake up. He answers her phone and tells her friend and pimp where she’s at, but then has second thoughts and calls the police to make sure everything is OK. They all arrive, but Jeff ends up getting frustrated at the cop, which you can’t do very often without getting thrown in jail, and sure enough, that’s where he ends up. In the meantime he’s robbed of everything he has in his hotel room while in jail. And Jeff’s conclusion from all this? That the whole thing “smacked of God sending a message in that Old Testament sort of way” for him breaking his celibacy. Not that he was an idiot for having sex with a prostitute, or for telling her pimp where he was staying, or for talking shit to the cop, or any of the many incredibly stupid things he did that night. Nope, it was God sending a message. Kee-rist. Look, I usually don’t go into such detail with the comics I ramble about on this site, but I needed to make this all crystal clear. He thanks Dave on the back of the comic about reminding him to always think, but the only message he seems to have gotten out of this whole mess is that he should go back to celibacy because clearly GOD didn’t want him to have sex. What on earth does that have to with thinking? Anyway, if you’re hurting for a Dave Sim fix, he does the cover and a page in the back. The story in the comic is interesting enough, but the art doesn’t help anything and the conclusions he draws from the story are, to me, absurd. Worth a look only if you’re a serious Cerebus junkie, or maybe if the series went on and got better from here. $5
