Rick's Story

Cerebus #12

by Dave Sim, Gerhard

Reprinting Cerebus Issues 220-231

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fantasy, Fiction, Satire, Adventure, Politics

247 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1998

About the author

David Victor Sim is a Canadian comic book, artist and publisher, best known as the creator of Cerebus the Aardvark.

Reviews

[Little Timmy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well the downhill slide for this series starts back up. the last book had some glimmers of the old pizzazz but not this one. Not an overall enjoyable read. not recommended

[Luc · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave this book 2 stars because the art is outstanding. The fact that it took me close to half a year to read a comic book should speak volume about either the quality of it's contents or my reading capacity.

As you read this, you have to notice that gone are the days of the gloriously epic adventures of Cerebus. They have been replaced by all the pageantry that the author can cloak around his views on women and his asshattery. If you're a woman, you may want to skip this book. If you're a guy, you probably should too but at least you won't as offended by the treatment of women in this book.

I'm trying to re-read Cerebus for the love I use to bear the franchise and because I only read the later books only once but it is getting harder and harder.

Sim prefaces the book by saying he isn't Rick and was unsure if this was true or not when began reading this. Because Rick, like Sims, has gotten into this religious interpretation of the things that happen in his life that are annoying to misogynist. But the key difference is that Rick lets go of the bar eventually whereas Sims is still so charmed with his barfly life he consecrated two books to his drinking days.

I'll keep reading. Because I only read the later books only once. Because I use to love this series. I don't advise you should. Maybe I should learn to let go too.

[Tom Ewing · Rating 2 out of 5]

The last six volumes of Cerebus are three pairs of books, with "Going Home" and "Latter Days" split up at meaningful break points for (I guess) length and financial reasons. But "Guys" and "Rick's Story", though they feel in some ways like one long story, are delineated by Dave Sim as two separate works: Rick's arrival at the bar is a major break in the Cerebus narrative, even if the broader situation seems not to have changed.

Looking at the back third of the story as a whole, you can take a stab at why this is. Rick's Story is where the overarching plot of the final third gets underway, both at the protagonist's level - by the end, Cerebus has sorted himself out enough to be given a shot at one of his great unrealised dreams - and on the much wider level of setting up the "Booke Of Ricke" storyline which will ultimately be the motor that resolves the Cirinist plotline and drives "Latter Days". Rick's Story, in other words, is the kick-off for both the last two 'big' Cerebus novels. Separating it from Guys lets Guys be the standalone reverie it needs to be - a glimpse at Cerebus life in the absence of plot, where nothing that happens actually matters.

(It's sometimes said that Cerebus #201-#300 is "all epilogue". This isn't true. There's a big wider storyline, but Sim has little to no interest in telling that storyline directly on the page: by this point he knows what he can and can't fit into the book, and with 80 issues left he's happy to let the plotstuff pop up obliquely or in summary.)

Stories that are mostly set-up are often unsatisfying, and even though Rick's Story disguises this part of its nature well, that's true here too. But that's not the only reason Rick's Story is tricky to parse and fit into the wider work. With Cerebus the constant temptation is to ask "how much of this stuff did Dave Sim know he was going to be doing?" - it's inevitable when someone claims they're going to tell a coherent 300 issue novel. Sim has always been very cagey of giving definitive answers to this, and rightly so I think: while it's inevitable people disappointed in the work are going to dream about what might have been, the work is the work.

But Rick's Story is one of the few parts of Cerebus where we definitively know that Sim's outlook changed while writing it. The story was intended as - and is - a satire of religious writing and revelation. Rick, whose sanity is threadbare in any case, begins to interpret Cerebus' every utterance as sacred and his writings become "the Booke Of Ricke", monastic script, archaic language, stained glass windows and all. It's Sim returning to a joke he's always liked making - the ripple effects and unindended consequences of actions, and the way the mundane and the meaningful flip over and change places in time. We've seen in the Pigts characters living their lives according to their understanding of a prophecy; now we're going to see an absurdist take on how that sausage is made.

Except that while researching Rick's Story by reading the Bible and the Koran, Sim realised what he was reading was, in his eyes, the Actual Truth, and was born again to a syncretic and highly individual religion which we'll all learn more about in later books. But this, obviously, coloured what he's doing in Rick's Story - it's no longer a lifelong atheist parodying religious texts, but a devout new believer in those texts parodying them.

This is background info which is knowable but perhaps not useful - it's difficult to unpick what, if anything, Sim might have done differently in Rick's Story. There's a definite shift in Rick himself across the book, from a welcome old pal who seems to have his shit fairly well together, to a damaged seeker after truth, to, near the end, a suddenly more serious character, someone whose words have actual prophetic weight. Rick is both the vehicle for turning Cerebus into a prophet (as opposed to a mere Pope!) and the first character in the story to have - it's implied - some genuine contact with the divine. Just to add to the metafictional layers, this is also the point at which "Dave" makes his final story appearance, and Rick is revealed to have been getting relationship advice from (oh no) Viktor Davis back in the Jaka's Story days.

It's all dizzying, complex, stuff which - like most of the layered, dizzying, complex stuff in the back half of Cerebus - feels faintly hermetic, a magic trick which is plainly difficult but whose reveal is less scrutable than you'd hope. It's more interesting to think about than it is to actually read, though Sim does have archaic religious language off pat and there are some funny context-switching jokes (and one very good meta-joke about poor Gerhard, stuck with a third year of tavern interiors). But once you've seen a few chapters of "The Booke Of Ricke" you get the joke, and Sim just hammers and hammers at it. As a focus and farewell to Rick, Sim's attempt to create a straightforwardly likeable character, it's a bit of a let down, as his progression through the book feels so arbitrary - from friend to deranged visionary to love rival to prophet.

Love rival, you say? As if there wasn't enough going on in Rick's Story, there's also the conclusion of the Joanne subplot from Guys, with Joanne returning, finding Cerebus tricky to manipulate and immediately setting her sights on Rick. As with the first half of the plot, once you've read Reads it's hard not to see this as didactic. But on its own terms it just about works. Joanne - deceitful, manipulative and sullen - is the female character so far who most incarnates Sim's feelings (sorry, observations) about how women behave in general in relationships. She's a necessary creation because all of Sim's previously established female characters are too nice, too smart, or too Cirinist to be properly leech-y and light-draining. Joanne, though, is properly awful, but she's still a just about believable character, even if you suspect she's being used as an archetype.

I've not touched at all on the art in Rick's Story, which is as good as Cerebus usually is. If the layers and metafictions of the story invite comment but end up as empty calories intellectually, the art here is often the other way around. You can breeze through it without noticing how well Sim's using, for instance, overlaid panels to imply a fragmented grasp on reality for Rick. There's not a lot here he wasn't doing in Guys, though, and some of the things he did well there - like the lettering - spills into rococo indulgence here, particularly on pages where one long vertical stream-of-consciousness thought bubble dominates the page and pulls the eye to its middle or end rather than leads the reader through it. It's a microcosm of Rick's Story as a whole - extremely dense, finely crafted, but ultimately not as substantial as you'd hope.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

To me this book reads like "Guys: Part 2". Cerebus is still tending bar, and still holding internal arguments with different parts of his personality. This time, though, he's accompanied by "girly-boy" Rick. No longer Jaka's husband, the sweet naif with no tolerance for alcohol, Rick has become a slightly overweight, wise-cracking, hard-drinking, successful writer. Or at least he believes he's GOING to be a successful writer. His break-up with Jaka has obviously unbalanced him, and throughout the book he becomes more and more feeble-minded as he decides that everything Cerebus says are prophecies to be written down in his new bible for the worship of the all-powerful god Cerebus.

The lettering in this book is downright byzantine. Sim comes up with all sorts of embellishments for the voices in Cerebus' head, and Rick's internal monologue is mostly done in the style of religious scripture, archaic spelling and all. Rick's also close to crazy, so everything he sees is interlaid with demons and angels, Cerebus being prone to jump back and forth between the to. It's all fascinating stuff, and I usually take at least a few days to read through this volume, so I can linger over the artwork.

This book also has the closest thing to a happy ending in any of the Cerebus volumes I've read so far. I'm really tempted to stop here, since Sim apparently starts to destroy these characters as the series goes on.

[C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

At this point we realize that Sims is never returning to the epic glory of the first few plots, but that's okay - the comic has evolved in strange directions, and instead of being sweeping fantasy, its one of the most touching, human dramas of the comic world. Sims' and Gerhard's art continues to get more impressive.

[Hazel · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of the boring bar, but it picks up in the latter half of the book. There is some fairly heavy text, but by the time you get used to the v's and u's it becomes more interesting. The ending is great.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ricks religious folderol was wincey and the misogyny palpable. The art and lettering is fantastic. Shrug.

[Rex Hurst · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collecting issues 220 to 231 of the Cerebus series’s denouement. Cerebus is still stuck in the bar, waiting for something to happen. Either to get kicked out, for his friends to come back, or to die. In this we are reintroduced to Rick, last seen a hundred issues ago. He is the former husband of Jaka, their marriage having broke up after it is revealed that she had a clandestine abortion.

Rick is no longer the guileless and shiftless boy, angry at having to get a job. He is now middle aged, or at least in his late 30s. There is no discussion about what had been happening to Rick since then, though it is implied that he has just been drifting from one bar to another for years.

While at the bar something happens to him. I’m not sure if he is having a genuine religious experience filled with portents and signs following, or if he’s having a stroke and/or nervous breakdown. Whatever it is, he has childishly cast himself as the epic hero and Cerebus is alternately the God or the Devil.

His inevitable turning on Cerebus speaks much of the fanatic. When one looks elsewhere, in a book or person, for spiritual fulfillment, they will eventually become disappointed and then that fanaticism is turned against the former object of its adoration. Rick is that man, perpetually waiting for someone else to show him the light. And thus will always be disappointed.

There has been a lot of discussion on this book, much more than there should have been, on its importance in the series. I don’t understand why those who accept volume 6 Melmoth, but have problems with this book. The criticisms that the text portions of the book incomprehensible or impenetrable is nonsense.

As Rick begins his religious convergence, he shifts into a religious style of writing, faux biblical. Many archaic and exaggerated spelling are used in the script, which is more reminiscent of American colonial style than reformation-era English. And while they prose can be tedious, it is by no means incomprehensible. For those who find it so, you can easily skip over it, the visuals tell the story in that part just as well as the text.

I will say that the text portions are much less interesting than the rest of the book. Despite what he might want to believe, Sim is a better writing comic dialogue than he is at prose. His style is always thick, slow moving, with an excess of unimportant details. And that contrasts sharply against his amazing artwork and uniquely expressive balloon dialogue.

And perhaps this all becomes tedious to the author as well, as he makes his second appearance in the series in an effort to dislodge his creation from his comfy tavern. Dave explains that Cerebus’s struggle is a reflection of his own reluctance to leave a bar. Which is why Cerebus is having so much difficulty moving on, so to facilitate this he gives the one surefire thing that will get his ass off the barstool, the return of his true love, Jaka. Which is where the next volume picks up.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last six volumes of Cerebus are three pairs of books, with "Going Home" and "Latter Days" split up at meaningful break points for (I guess) length and financial reasons. But "Guys" and "Rick's Story", though they feel in some ways like one long story, are delineated by Dave Sim as two separate works: Rick's arrival at the bar is a major break in the Cerebus narrative, even if the broader situation seems not to have changed.

Looking at the back third of the story as a whole, you can take a stab at why this is. Rick's Story is where the overarching plot of the final third gets underway, both at the protagonist's level - by the end, Cerebus has sorted himself out enough to be given a shot at one of his great unrealised dreams - and on the much wider level of setting up the "Booke Of Ricke" storyline which will ultimately be the motor that resolves the Cirinist plotline and drives "Latter Days". Rick's Story, in other words, is the kick-off for both the last two 'big' Cerebus novels. Separating it from Guys lets Guys be the standalone reverie it needs to be - a glimpse at Cerebus life in the absence of plot, where nothing that happens actually matters.

(It's sometimes said that Cerebus #201-#300 is "all epilogue". This isn't true. There's a big wider storyline, but Sim has little to no interest in telling that storyline directly on the page: by this point he knows what he can and can't fit into the book, and with 80 issues left he's happy to let the plotstuff pop up obliquely or in summary.)

Stories that are mostly set-up are often unsatisfying, and even though Rick's Story disguises this part of its nature well, that's true here too. But that's not the only reason Rick's Story is tricky to parse and fit into the wider work. With Cerebus the constant temptation is to ask "how much of this stuff did Dave Sim know he was going to be doing?" - it's inevitable when someone claims they're going to tell a coherent 300 issue novel. Sim has always been very cagey of giving definitive answers to this, and rightly so I think: while it's inevitable people disappointed in the work are going to dream about what might have been, the work is the work.

But Rick's Story is one of the few parts of Cerebus where we definitively know that Sim's outlook changed while writing it. The story was intended as - and is - a satire of religious writing and revelation. Rick, whose sanity is threadbare in any case, begins to interpret Cerebus' every utterance as sacred and his writings become "the Booke Of Ricke", monastic script, archaic language, stained glass windows and all. It's Sim returning to a joke he's always liked making - the ripple effects and unindended consequences of actions, and the way the mundane and the meaningful flip over and change places in time. We've seen in the Pigts characters living their lives according to their understanding of a prophecy; now we're going to see an absurdist take on how that sausage is made.

Except that while researching Rick's Story by reading the Bible and the Koran, Sim realised what he was reading was, in his eyes, the Actual Truth, and was born again to a syncretic and highly individual religion which we'll all learn more about in later books. But this, obviously, coloured what he's doing in Rick's Story - it's no longer a lifelong atheist parodying religious texts, but a devout new believer in those texts parodying them.

This is background info which is knowable but perhaps not useful - it's difficult to unpick what, if anything, Sim might have done differently in Rick's Story. There's a definite shift in Rick himself across the book, from a welcome old pal who seems to have his shit fairly well together, to a damaged seeker after truth, to, near the end, a suddenly more serious character, someone whose words have actual prophetic weight. Rick is both the vehicle for turning Cerebus into a prophet (as opposed to a mere Pope!) and the first character in the story to have - it's implied - some genuine contact with the divine. Just to add to the metafictional layers, this is also the point at which "Dave" makes his final story appearance, and Rick is revealed to have been getting relationship advice from (oh no) Viktor Davis back in the Jaka's Story days.

It's all dizzying, complex, stuff which - like most of the layered, dizzying, complex stuff in the back half of Cerebus - feels faintly hermetic, a magic trick which is plainly difficult but whose reveal is less scrutable than you'd hope. It's more interesting to think about than it is to actually read, though Sim does have archaic religious language off pat and there are some funny context-switching jokes (and one very good meta-joke about poor Gerhard, stuck with a third year of tavern interiors). But once you've seen a few chapters of "The Booke Of Ricke" you get the joke, and Sim just hammers and hammers at it. As a focus and farewell to Rick, Sim's attempt to create a straightforwardly likeable character, it's a bit of a let down, as his progression through the book feels so arbitrary - from friend to deranged visionary to love rival to prophet.

Love rival, you say? As if there wasn't enough going on in Rick's Story, there's also the conclusion of the Joanne subplot from Guys, with Joanne returning, finding Cerebus tricky to manipulate and immediately setting her sights on Rick. As with the first half of the plot, once you've read Reads it's hard not to see this as didactic. But on its own terms it just about works. Joanne - deceitful, manipulative and sullen - is the female character so far who most incarnates Sim's feelings (sorry, observations) about how women behave in general in relationships. She's a necessary creation because all of Sim's previously established female characters are too nice, too smart, or too Cirinist to be properly leech-y and light-draining. Joanne, though, is properly awful, but she's still a just about believable character, even if you suspect she's being used as an archetype.

I've not touched at all on the art in Rick's Story, which is as good as Cerebus usually is. If the layers and metafictions of the story invite comment but end up as empty calories intellectually, the art here is often the other way around. You can breeze through it without noticing how well Sim's using, for instance, overlaid panels to imply a fragmented grasp on reality for Rick. There's not a lot here he wasn't doing in Guys, though, and some of the things he did well there - like the lettering - spills into rococo indulgence here, particularly on pages where one long vertical stream-of-consciousness thought bubble dominates the page and pulls the eye to its middle or end rather than leads the reader through it. It's a microcosm of Rick's Story as a whole - extremely dense, finely crafted, but ultimately not as substantial as you'd hope.
other-comics (by Tom Ewing)

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly feels like Cerebus at probably its most deranged, continually the arc set in Guys where it's basically just set inside a bar as he dwells on his demons and so forth, and gets involved with a guy called Rick who isn't all that there mentally. Started off pretty much hating this volume, there's just something where the leering misogyny bleeds heavily into the material and Cerebus dwells on being a "girlboy" and this woman who teases him who spends a lot of the comic with one bare breast hanging out. It's like, this would almost feel like an absurd, transgressive parody - but then there's bits at the end where the author very explicitly goes on entire essays about how women are just out to wreck things up for men (you might disagree if you're into Xena, etc.)

That, and I think the narrative itself becomes so abstract to a point where it's like the very fabric of reality unfolds - and it's also kind of clear that Cerebus is composing himself entirely in the third person, becoming this really explicit theme where Cerebus is just outright dissociating, as well as entire passages that are just outright the author trying to connect the Christian bible to Cerebus. I would say that this is just a terrible narrative with some really good artwork and massive tangential issues, but there's honestly a lot that works here (probably both intentionally and unintentionally) at just relaying the attitudes of a really unstable and schizophrenic mindset - which honestly feels quite visceral in its depiction. I would have hated this if not for the fact that I felt in-tune and feel really (oddly) fascinated with the specific type of brain poisoning that's running through this portion of the series.

What I'm saying is that transitioning would have saved Cerebus.

[Mauricio Garcia · Rating 3 out of 5]

As further along I get in the Cerebus series I get increasingly frustrated by Sim's obsession and infantile reduction of, gender relations (and therefore of his own characters and of humans in general).
Yet I persist because whatever the quality of the material (and indeed there are ups and downs) he never stops innovating and willing to push the narrative forward —in this particular case forcing his protagonist to spend years upon years between four walls; keeping up experimenting with speech balloons; trying the author self-insert in a new angle; and it may sound oxymoronic but Rick's writings are at once the height of tediousness and a delicious exploration of religious mania.
Sim goes past simple parody and really gets to the core of the structure of biblical verse in terms of cadence, elliptical structure, content, and made me question the origin of prophets and apostolic revelation... Plus it is hilarious the way Rick understands Cerebus' actions.

Simply put, whether it is good or bad, you can always expect to read something in the next page that you've never seen before in the medium.

[Gilly Singh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Years of waiting around in a bar, in penance for all of the wrongs he has committed, Cerebus gets a second chance at happiness.

There is a note of hope at the end.

The volume as a whole is very uneven. The parts written as prose religious text are more dull and harder to read than the worst parts of Reads. That being said, the emotional journey of Cerebus, as he deals with some of the ghosts of his past is intriguing and worth sticking about for.

I would not recommend reading this unless you have read the preceding volumes as I imagine doing so would leave you without enough enjoyment to make it to the end.

[Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

sim's art and lettering bursts back in vibrant jaw dropping life, but he is still prone to pages of pure text (thankfully much fewer than in reads at least), this time biblical parody, it takes balls to try do the voice of oldschool biblical translations. the misogyny goes without saying this far into the series

[Nathu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate Rick here. I quite liked him during his marriage to Jaka, but this older rick is mostly just annoying, which may be intentional, cause that's about what Cerebus feels towards him as well. That being said, somehow his religious awakening is some of my favourite prose in the series. Somehow the dumbest and smartest book yet. Idk... I like it but I'm not sure what my own justification is.

[Jonathan Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its was okay. The art and lettering continues to gets better and better but Rick and Joanne are boring unlikable characters. However the best parts are Cerebus's talk with "Dave", the reunion with Jaka, and the ending.

[Rockito · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only thing keeping a lot of these last stories from being truly great is the insane amount of prose it features. This time is used cleverly, but it loses strength through repetition. Pretty good and fortunaly everything is a far cry from Minds.

[David Matheny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the 2nd Cerberus book I have ever read and I am shocked how Dave Sims can write a prison story where the two inmates can leave the bar at any time but can't. The pay off at the end is sincere without being loud. Great Stuff.

[Tegiminis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rick sucks, his holy book sucks, and this is the volume where the religiosity kicks into high gear. Some excellent art and definitive to the rest of the series, but also I think where it really starts to fall apart.

[Robbie Shepherd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mental illness is a hell of a thing.
Worth it for the Jaka/Cerebus reuniting alone, but It doesn’t look like this is headed in a good direction.
4 volumes to go.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funny!

[Christian Lipski · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think that it's this book where Sim kind of loses the thread. The return of Rick, Jaka's ex-husband. Rick is now (according to Sim) mentally damaged from his separation, and ends up looking upon Cerebus as a religious leader. Cerebus teaches Rick about how women must be taken and left, because they always end up manipulating you. Rick meets God (or does he, seeing as how Rick is demonstrably schizophrenic) and there will be no turning back.

Sim himself appears in the guise of "Viktor", a friend of Rick during the beginning of his relationship with Jaka, who is sardonically wise about women and how they are. Viktor is also unbeatable in a fight, so gee, he's really perfect. Yet another Viktor, yet another blatant character that only exists to provide a mouth for Sim's philosophy.

Sim also makes another foray into the story as Dave Sim, but this time in person, as he walks into the bar to talk with his creation "face to face". In "Minds" Sim said that he gave Cerebus free rein to take his story as he would, but it seems that this project only lasted for a book and a half before Sim had to make manual changes. Even in his "conversation" with Cerebus, Sim has to "make" Cerebus not recognize him or remember what his drink order was in order to continue their talk. The purpose of the talk is to convince Cerebus to leave the bar, which Sim apparently felt he had to do by "convincing" his fictional character. And if the talk itself was not enough, he leaves behind Jaka's old doll Missy, as a harbinger of the arrival of the old flame herself (whose appearance is also manually forced by Sim, who "caused" all the other bartenders to ignore her request for water). Dave Sim's surname is oddly fitting, as he tries to goad his fictional creations in the way he'd like them to go in the make-believe world he created for them.

Sadly, Jaka is hardly the same creature she was previously - from the self-sufficient dancer in Cerebus, to the willfully ignorant but still determined dancer in Jaks's Story, she is now a Sim-Woman, who commands her men-toys and can't wear the same outfit two days in a row.

The last page of the book is one of the happiest in the whole series, and would be a great piece of original art to hag on the wall.

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rather a mixed bag. It continues Sim's radical experimentation with comics form, notably this time by folding in some cod scripture, as Rick (in a state of dubious mental health) takes Cerebus for a messiah and sets out to transcribe his wisdom for the ages. Sim has a decent enough ear for the cadences of the King James bible, but this stuff doesn't quite play, perhaps because Sim was himself on the cusp of a religious conversion at the time, so the satirical edge is somewhat blunted. Sim's problems with women also colour the text, perhaps a bit too much, though to be fair, he depicts men in a comparably unflattering light. Cerebus's choice at the end, between choosing to stay with three drunken louts or to go with Jaka, rather games things, as ultimately Jaka is to prove unworthy too, but there's not much to recommend Bear, Marty, and Richard either, unless one enjoys hanging out with drunken muttonheads. The art is of course stunningly good, and it makes exceptional use of the strengths of comics to depict character and motion economically and complexly. The book's thematic interests are also complex, and it explores with some insight the extent to which one is a product of a coherent self-conception and of a mixture of competing perspectives and perceived realities, in contrast to the real reality, the nature of which here is indeed subject to some doubt. On the one hand, Rick is evidently delusional, if not mentally ill ("crazy," as the text repeats), and his scriptural versions of events we have witnessed often bear little resemblance to what we have seen. On the other hand, liminal and phenomenal, as opposed to noumenal, models of reality are clearly present. The supernatural exists, clearly, but what is objectively real supernaturalism and what is mental construct is difficult to untangle--no doubt deliberately. Challenging stuff, not always easy to read (especially when Sim goes off on dialect tangents or when he depicts the warring voices inside Cerebus's head), but worth the investment, for its formal experimentation, at least.

[Carlos Nouaille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Llegados a este punto, Dave Sim está en caída libre, entregado a su escritura introvertida y narcisista, lo que es una pena, porque el dibujo sigue siendo espectacular. Cerebus está aislado por decisión propia en la misma taberna donde le dejamos el volumen anterior. De repente se presenta Rick, al que conocimos como marido de Jaka, para aturdirse a cerveza y compartir sus vivencias, que está escribiendo en forma de libro. Pero un golpe en la cabeza le lleva a creerse el profeta de Cerebus, y tomarse cualquier frase suya como una revelación divina. No sé en qué momento a Dave Sim le pareció divertido ponerse a parodiar el estilo bíblico, pero a partir de entonces asistimos a dos o tres capítulos en los que casi todo es texto, redactado a la manera de la biblia del Rey Jaime, con arcaísmos y lenguaje místico.

El volumen recobra interés hacia el final, cuando Cerebus se ve cara a cara con un personaje que resulta ser su creador, el mismísimo Dave Sim, que ha tenido que intervenir para resolver el nudo gordiano en el que él mismo se ha metido. Y las últimas páginas son quizás lo más parecido a un happy ending que va a haber en toda la saga para Cerebus... y para ti, sufrido lector.

[Sean Samonas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Once again, you don't listen to me. You poor, poor fool.

Well, there isn't much to say here. Dave continues to descend into madness and misogyny. Hell, there isn't even anything sensationalist to garner from this point on. We've heard it so much that there isn't anything to really get from it anymore.

The reappearance of Rick is forced and contrived, and apparently while many, many years seem to pass for everyone else, Jaka remains in some sort of weird timeless state of youthful beauty.

I really don't have much to say anymore, the art style and storytelling get progressively more avante garde and experimental. This is not necessarily bad, though. The artwork and the way he uses frames to layer various perceptions of the characters is really interesting. The change in fonts is also pretty well done as well.

However, this is the real core of the problem of Dave Sim at the end of the series. Glimpses of really interesting and original ideas mired in utter nonsense and hate-speech. I can't enjoy the artwork or the narrative when you are constantly spouting off offensive and (to be blunt) wrong ideas.

And that is really what is so disappointing about the end here. This series has so much potential, and he lets it all dissolve into just...mediocrity.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here it is: the post-Reads moment when style really rises triumphant over the ashes of substance.

This is, in this case, not a harsh criticism; the style rampant in Rick's Story is stunning, whether considered purely on the strength of the artwork or on Sim's increasingly creative layouts and use of text (Gerhard's art is, as always, stunning; there is no moment in the series when his insanely meticulous detail would be not be capable of carrying the book).

But, still, there's no real heart. There are a lot of Quite Clever moments, but they're mostly mean-spirited, and one feels one must take a side here: does one read the content as a high-concept satire (in which case one concedes that it ultimately says almost nothing) or does one assume that the recapitulation of Abrahamic monotheism is supposed to advance a philosophical stance (in which case one is forced to see Sim as either petty and intellectually lazy or outright cray-cray)? Neither choice is fulfilling; it's not as bad as the similar conundrum at the heart of Reads, but it's not good.

It's a truly beautiful book, in any case.

[Chazzbot · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not the place to begin if you are unfamiliar with the Cerebus universe, but this chapter of the saga offers a devastatingly honest portrayal of the misguided assumptions and overwrought search for personal meaning that leads to the formation of religion. Rick, a misogynistic dolt who was once married to Cerebus' beloved Jaka, returns as an adult who has, based on a number of throwaway remarks Cerebus made in the past, formulated a religious text touting Cerebus as a prophet. The passion and certitude of Rick's newfound belief system is only rivaled by Cerebus' dimwitted egotism and lust for power. When released in monthly installments, this episode seemed like an amusing diversion in the storyline, but in its complete form, this carries the weight of a major thematic component of Sim's opus.

[Robert Hudder · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not like the ending of this part of the arc. Cerebus becomes a bartender and that bar seems awfully familiar to a lot of people I know. The bar patrons dwindle as they move from a previous bad relationship into another bad relationship, a recurring theme in Cerebus.

Even though he is a bit of an ass, we get to see his interior dialogue and realize that there is more to Cerebus than this macho bullshit but he never figures it out. This is another fine example of that story line. The ending suggests some type of reprieve from this misery and I don't trust it, mainly because I don't trust Dave.

I will go on reading until the end of the series but I am afraid for Cerebus that he will end up alone, unloved and unmourned as was foretold earlier in the series.

[Benjamin Kahn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found that Dave Sim peaked relatively early, with High Society, which I loved. Church & State could have been just as good but was too long, and then digressions overtook the story and the series went downhill. This book was part of Sim's playing out the string period, which lasted for a long time and seemed very self-indulgent.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considered the worst of the Cerebus volumes, this one is not too bad. Jaka's ex husband Rick visits the bar Cerebus was inhabiting in the previous volume Guys and asks for redemption. Features a cameo by Dave Sims himself.

[Ms. Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before I read the book, can I say this? I love how the cover of this phonebook is drawn. I have a weakness to depictions of angels and religion, and seeing this made me gape. Both Ricks look amazing on this cover, and the stained glass window behind is just...