Latter Days

I didn't want it to end like this.

Truth be told, that's a lie. It implies that I could possibly have predicted where the last long storyline in Cerebus goes, but I'm not sure anyone could have seen the last 200 pages of this one coming.

It starts promisingly enough. After Cerebus' trauma at the end of Form & Void, his life goes off the rails, he blinks in and out, and finds himself as a shepherd, and then a professional five bar gate player. This brief prologue serves to jump us forward to the point where Dave wishes Latter Days to kick off, with Cerebus returning south in order to get himself killed by the Cirinists. Opening a strip club to provoke their wrath, he ends up kidnapped by The Three Wise Fellows, and bound in their Sanctuary. The Fellows are religious fanatics, inspired by the teachings of Rick. They're also the Three Stooges. These Fellows believe that Cerebus is the One True Cerebus whose coming was foretold by the Prophet Rick, but to prove it, they must test him. There's some great slapstick stuff here, which is really difficult to pull off in a static medium like comics, and some strong visual gags.
I said earlier in this thread that I remembered Latter Days being the worst of the Cerebus books. For the first hundred pages or so, I was revising that opinion. The prologue is funny and entertaining. I've always been more of a Marx Brothers man than I am a Three Stooges fan, and in memory I disliked this section. On rereading I enjoyed it a lot. Their characters and shtick are bought across brilliantly, and the end to their story is properly heartbreaking.
But things soon take a turn for the worse, as Cerebus becomes a fascist dictator and instigates a policy of shooting women who are too ugly and / or annoying to live which he then extends to lawyers and “complete dicks” (uh, Dave, we know you don't really mean it, but this isn't exactly going to help with those misogyny allegations, you know). Along the way he has overthrown the Cirinists. This should have been a huge event, a focal point of the last third of the saga, but it's handled as a silly throwaway, that doesn't even make any internal sense, let alone provide any satisfying drama. That said, the sequence where a dying Cirinist is briefly animated by Cerebus' magnifier quality is great. It indicates what could have been done here, and that's really the story of the first part of the book. There are marvellous little moments, but they are stand outs in a big mess that only serve to cruelly highlight how deficient the rest of it is. It just doesn't feel like Cerebus anymore. It's rambling and disjointed, the storytelling discipline that has previously served Sim in such good stead has gone, and the leaps forward in time mean we've shucked off the previous supporting cast, and even the landscape they inhabited. The Spawn parody is awful. Not only does it feel dated in 2016, it doesn't sit right against the rest of the book. This is the sort of thing we expect from Elrod or the Roach, not Cerebus himself. I'd much prefer it if Dave had laid the superhero parodies to rest along with those two characters.
Battles over, Cerebus is ensconced as the head of a religion bearing his name. He fills his days with birdwatching and collecting issues of the Rabbi comic book. An old interview with Rabbi's creator fries his brain once more, and he takes to shuffling around in a dressing gown, his only words “darr, pretty sunsets”. And then there's a knock at the door, and the message that Rick had promised would come all those years ago in Cerebus' dream back at the end of Form & Void is delivered. This is a great example of the way Dave can pull the reader's strings and get you excited to see what comes next, just like the last sentence of Guys. The rest of the book emphatically is not.

The promised visitor is Woody Allen, and the book he brings is the Torah. And so the scene is set for almost two hundred pages of buttock clenching boredom as Cerebus treats us to an interminable sequence of Biblical commentary. In really really small type. And of course, this being Cerebus, it isn't your normal Bible commentary. Cerebus (or Dave, the two being interchangeable at this point) has discovered the hidden truth of the Bible and recast it as a struggle between God and the upstart entity YHWH (or Yoohwhoo). It really is terribly hard going and I'm not ashamed to say I skipped large chunks this time round (hey, I read it all in the serialised issues and then the first time I read Latter Days. Life's too short to do that again). The side story is the Woody Allen character's struggle with Freud, accompanied by illustrations lifted from the films of Fellini and Bergman. I promise you I am not making this up. The usual Cerebus caveats about artistic excellence apply, but they can't save this from being a tedious self indulgent mess. Latter Days was already a bit wobbly before the epic exegesis, but this sends it plummeting. Almost half the book is unreadable. In the addenda to Melmoth, Dave noted that he couldn't find a workable equivalent to “Jew” in Estarcion and so skipped those elements of the historical record. I wish he'd remembered that.

So yeah, I still reckon this is the worst of all the phonebooks. Not to worry, there's only one left, and it gets a lot better