Eric Hoffman (4)

The essays in this collection are not all of the same quality. By far the best pieces are the two by Eric Hoffman, who also edited the volume. By far the worst essay is by Sabin Calvert, a piece so pompous and affected that it should not have been included with the other works in the volume.

I am a huge fan of Dave Sim and also of the work he created. Actually I really only like the first two thirds of the three hundred issues. I collected the individual pamphlets as Sim released them, but found that I wasn't actually reading them, after about issue 200. There was always another comic that was more interesting,..and when it got to be more like Work than Pleasure to go through the comics, I collected the books but did not get around to actually perusing them.
It was interesting, then, to come across a passage in Hoffman's second essay (on page 92 of this collection) that suggested that Dave Sim only had planned a story that was 200 issues long,and that the final third of the epic was "improvisation". (This is Sim's own word. There is a long quote in which he says, "I had no idea what Cerebus' dialogue would be from that point on").
My gosh, what a dialogue gets unleashed. The words started to pour out of Sim in what might be called the worst case of logorrhea in the short history of comic book writing. The fonts became smaller, so as to get more words on the page. Illustrations became smaller or disappeared entirely - indeed this is one of the main points of the Reads section of the epic. And in addition to the comic story, Sim was also writing a monthly essay ( his "words from the president"); and also he was writing long (LONG) discursive answers to the letter addressed to the comic; and also letters of encouragement to other self-publishing comic book creators; and also long interviews (the one with Tom Spurgeon is quoted often in various essays); and apparently there was also a correspondence with Sim's last girlfriend Susan Alston; and probably other correspondence as well. I imagine a Saul Steinberg caricature of a little figure at one corner of an illustration, with a roiling cloudburst of glyphs pouring forth in an effulgent torrent of words that completely fills the page, dwarfing the speaker in the corner.

The subjects of the various essays are fairly wide-ranging. But hopefully this is just the first collection of critical essays about Dave Sim's epic. The work is certainly rich enough to warrent additional discourse. I would love to see an essay that credits Dave Sim with the sheer amount of will involved in writing a single work for most of three decades.

Kudos should be tendered to the publisher, McFarland & Company, Inc for filling this niche of critical essays about graphic novels.… (mer)

I really enjoy when comic books are taken seriously... This book is a wonderful example of that done right. Well done! For anyone who has not read Dave Sim's Cerebus, this book would still be enjoyable for the quality of the essays. For anyone who has read and enjoyed Cerebus, then this book is almost no-thought-purchase. Buy it. Reading it will make you want to revisit the comic (at least your favorite parts) and get more out of the reading than you did the first time around. I want more books about comics.… (mer)