Cerebus The Aardvark - Publication History

Publication History

Cerebus was self-published by Sim under his Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc. publishing banner. For the first few years the company's publisher was Deni Loubert, Sim's girlfriend (the two would marry and divorce during the comic's run). Sim's position as a pioneering self-publisher in comics inspired numerous writer/artists after him, most notably Jeff Smith (Bone), Terry Moore (Strangers In Paradise), and Martin Wagner (Hepcats).

Inspired in some ways by the Steve Gerber character Howard the Duck, the earliest issues of Cerebus took the form of a parody of the sword and sorcery genre, particularly Conan the Barbarian. The series developed artistic sophistication and originality very quickly. Citing as his self-originated commandment, "Thou shall break every law in the book," Sim has done everything from flipping the page from horizontal to vertical and all stages in between to alternating comics with prose narrative, to including real dead or living people (himself included) in the storyline, all in an effort to explode the conventions of the North American comic book in every conceivable way.

In 1979, Sim, who was at the time a frequent marijuana user, began using LSD, taking the drug with such frequency that he was eventually hospitalized. It was this incident that Sim claims led to the inspiration to produce Cerebus for 300 monthly issues. The episodic adventures strayed further and further from heroic fantasy, and the twenty five-issue graphic novel High Society segued the narrative into a complex political satire and drama. With issue #65 Sim was joined by Gerhard; Gerhard's intricately rendered backgrounds became a visual hallmark of the comic.

When Sim published the first Cerebus "phone book", a paperback collection of the High Society graphic novel (issues #26-50), he angered retailers — who felt that their support had been instrumental in his series' success in an industry generally indifferent to small publishers — by offering the first printing via mail order only. The decision was a financial windfall for Sim, however, grossing over $150,000 in sales. Sim became known for picking up hotel tabs for self-publishers and helping other self-publishers by paying for meals and limo service between stops. Negotiations regarding DC buying Cerebus took place over the course of 1985 to 1988, offering $100,000 and 10% of all licensing and merchandising, which Sim rejected.

By the end of the 1980s, Sim became an outspoken advocate of creators' rights in comics, and used the editorial pages of Cerebus to promote self-publishing and greater artist activism. Sim was also the biggest individual supporter of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund; when he guest-wrote the 10th issue of Todd McFarlane's best-selling Spawn, Sim donated his entire fee — over $100,000 — to the fund. During this same period he started publishing his and others' experiments with 24-hour comics in the back of his issues, which created greater awareness of this challenge, now the subject of an annual event for creating them.

"Jaka's Story", a tragic character study dealing with gender roles and the political suppression of art, is generally cited as the series' pinnacle of narrative achievement. Later issues of the series became highly personal and began to alienate many long-time fans, his female readers especially. Issue #186 (collected in Reads) contained a lengthy prose section that was attacked by some readers and critics for what they perceived as overt misogyny, but which Sim describes as "anti-feminism". During this part of the story, the storyline consisted of a textual treatise written by Viktor Davis, a fictional "reads" author, interspersed with the main Cerebus storyline. In Davis' material, he refers to the "creative male light" and the "emotional female void", a reversal of the gender-based view of creation espoused by the Judge at the end of Church and State (namely, the "female light" being raped by the "male void" and shattering into the physical universe). As Sim himself says in an interview with The Comics Journal, "Cerebus #1-200 the completion of the story. The yin and yang. The ultra-female reading. The ultra-male reading. I'm attaching an allegory to the Big Bang. You make up your mind which one's the pit and which one's the top of the mountain." By the end of the series, the Void is again male and identified as God, and the Light is female, now identified with YHWH. Issue #186 was followed by an even harsher essay in the back of issue #265 called "Tangent", in which Sim identified a "feminist/homosexualist axis" that opposed traditional and rational societal values. This material appeared as Sim was retreating from public life and becoming more marginalized by his peers in the industry.

Sim himself has appeared as a character in Cerebus, most notably to berate the title character in the "Minds" story arc. A writer entering his own fictional universe is not an original idea either in comics or conventional writing (see Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in Fantastic Four, Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and Grant Morrison's comic Animal Man) for other examples of this type of metafiction, although he claims to have planned the encounter as early as 1979, more than a decade before it actually took place.

He reportedly cut all ties with his family and virtually all of his industry colleagues apart from Gerhard in order to finish the work. He has had very public fallings-out with both Terry Moore and Jeff Smith, the latter of whom Sim challenged to a boxing match in an editorial published in the comic. Sim claimed Smith lied about an argument the two had had over the notorious essay in issue #186, during which he allegedly threatened to give Sim a "fat lip". Sim also developed an adversarial relationship with Gary Groth, the publisher of The Comics Journal, an independently published comics magazine.

Sim's religious beliefs heavily influenced the latter third of Cerebus's storyline. Once an atheist, Sim became a believer in God while gathering research material for "Rick's Story". However, rather than following one religion, Sim believes that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all equally valid and has formed his religious practices from aspects of all three, although he described himself in issue #8 of Following Cerebus as "mostly Muslim". A 2003 magazine interview describes Sim as reciting a prayer of his own devising five times a day (which was published in the back of issue #300), and as having sold much of his furniture to donate the money to charity as an act of religious asceticism. In an editorial contained in issue #297, Sim stated that he regards the production of Cerebus as of secondary importance to his religious practice. Sim's religious beliefs tie into his views on gender, and the bulk of the Cerebus storyline after "Guys" deals with this, especially "Rick's Story", "Latter Days", and "The Last Day".

The publication in March 2004 of issue #300 was met with a muted, rather than celebratory, response from the comics industry. Though Sim reports the print run for #300 was doubled from that of recent issues, that would still only come to around 16,000 copies, a far cry from the series' high of 30,000 copies around issue #100.

A new quarterly publication, Following Cerebus, followed in August 2004, featuring correspondence, essays, and previously unpublished artwork from Sim, as well as interviews with other comic writers and artists.

Sim was rumored as saying that, had he died or otherwise chosen not to complete Cerebus prior to issue 300, however many remaining issues there were left were to either consist of blank pages, or Gerhard was to have drawn his backgrounds only, leaving Sim's contribution blank. It is not known if this plan was ever serious, since it was never put into effect; however, in a 1996 interview, having just broken the 200 issue barrier, Sim mentioned his wishes regarding Cerebus, should he be prevented somehow from finishing his goal: "If something like that happens and I'm at mid-issue, the instructions are that the comic book gets printed with the rest of the pages blank. Look at the last page I drew because that's probably where the gods went 'No, I think we've just about had enough of this guy'".

At the completion of the series, he directed that upon his and Gerhard's death, Cerebus would enter into the public domain. Effective 31 December 2006, Sim purchased Gerhard's share of the company. Sim has already granted a general license for other creators to use his characters in their own works, stating that he is trying to be consistent with his own appropriation of others' works.

In the spring of 2009, Sim launched the bimonthly series Cerebus Archive. Despite the title, the series is primarily a retrospective on Sim's non-Cerebus work prior to and concurrent with the Cerebus series; according to a note in Issue 1, however, the inclusion of Cerebus in the title requires him to include the character in some way, so the front covers of the first two issues published as of July 2009 feature Cerebus.

After refusing for years to allow it to be translated (because he couldn't be sure of the accuracy of translations into languages he couldn't read), with Sim's permission several European publishers are now translating Cerebus. In 2010, High Society was published in Spanish, French, and Italian; and in 2011, Church & State Vol. I was published in Spanish.