I have been saving this shirt for a Sunday, especially since I spend a lot of my time discussing the Catholic Church with my wife the recovering Catholic.
This is a shirt featuring Cerebus, the aardvark, the most famous, non-mainstream comic and comic creation in all of comic book history. The first and best real "independent" and "alternative" comic published by Dave Sim's Aardvark-Vanaheim company from 1977 to 2004.
Over the years, I have spent a lot of time in the Cerebus universe. However, because of a lack of issues in the places where I was buying comics in 1977 (no direct sales specialty shops), I did not jump on the Cerebus bandwagon until late in the High Society run of the comic, around issue 47 (the run ended at issue 50). I was in college at this point, and a good friend, Mark Brager (who lived in Detroit and had access to direct sales specialty shops) recommended the comic to me. I was quickly hooked.At this point in the long running Cerebus title, its creator, Dave Sim, had begun to divide the comic into novels, which would later be published in large collected editions resembling phone books. At the time that I started reading the series, there were no collected editions. My first real taste of the book came with the Church and State storyline collected in two volumes and consisting of issues 52-80 and 81-111 as well as the years of 1983-1988. Soon after I began reading Cerebus, the earliest issues, the sword and sorcery parodies, were collected as the Swords of Cerebus. I bought and read those issues (LOVED them), but I did not have the means to catch up on the High Society issues until Sim released issues 26-50 as the first collected volume in 1986.
I was hooked on Sim's creation from the beginning and quite enamored of this plan of his to write the life of his character in 300 issues. It seemed a huge and daunting task when he announced it in the 1980s. I cannot claim that I remained as engaged by the stories, or by Sim himself, over the years. But I did read the ENTIRE run of the comic, even when Sim's own beliefs about gender, politics, religion, and many other things were not only unpleasant but downright offensive. (Though I do respect Sim's right to have and even proselytize those beliefs) After all, I am also a fan of Orson Scott Card, despite not agreeing with his views on sexuality. At least OSC keeps his views out of his fiction for the most part or is at least not quite as pedantic and insufferable about pandering these views as Sim became in the later years of the Cerebus novels. Though I did enjoy his essays on self-publishing, his published correspondence with Alan Moore, and his long diatribe essay on the religion of Islam, even though I disagreed with many of his ideas. Sim may be offensive, but he is an intellectual and a worthy opponent in an argument.I tried Sim's follow up to Cerebus, a comic called Glamourpuss, but I quickly soured on Sim's heavy-handed treatment of his views on the world. Besides, the idea for the comic did not have the "legs" that the Cerebus idea had. I stopped buying it.
Criticisms of Dave Sim's views are very deftly handled on a blog called Upton Park by Andrew Rilstone, Gentleman.
I also quite like this essay on Cerebus by Andrew Hickey: "Cerebus is possibly the most daunting work in the whole history of art. This is not an exaggeration."
Still, I love the shirt. And the Church and State novel is definitely my favorite Cerebus book but also one of my favorite comic books of all time. It's one of the single best parodies on religion, especially Catholicism, ever written.
"At a time when the series was about 70% completed, celebrated comic book writer Alan Moore wrote, "Cerebus, as if I need to say so, is still to comic books what Hydrogen is to the Periodic Table'" ("Cerebus," Wikipedia, 2013).
So, I have included some great images here for your edification and amusement, including one of the best pages from the entire run of Church and State. Enjoy!!
And as always, thank you for reading my self-indulgent blog.
- chris tower 1304.14 12:00
Photo courtesy of Liesel MK Tower