Heroes & a rant

The first part of this is a review of as much as I can find of Heroes, the next full chapter, then I'm going to go off on a tangent.

Heroes opens with Cerebus and the Elf. Cerebus is telling a seemingly enraptured Elf the story of a speech he gave, she appears interested, but then asks what colour the curtains were. Cerebus realises that she was only listening to be polite and is about to leave in a huff when she begs him to finish his story and sits listening silently.

For reasons Cerebus doesn't understand he's actually trailing the goat in the docks and the suburbs. The Moon Roach is beside himself because he has finally realised that Astoria does not love him anymore. She never did, but he deluded himself that prior to Cerebus arrival in Iest that she did.

There's a small interlude with a group of derelicts in the lower city reading about the campaign in a discarded newspaper. We glean from this that the reason the goat leads Cerebus is due to Astoria's rejection by the Cirinists. I'm not really sure why Dave used a group of hoboes to get the message across to the readers. In my experience derelicts generally don't vote or care much about election campaigns.

I was just getting to the bit about the Moon Roach's delusion about his heroic abilities and his comparisons with Superman when it just stopped and went to Election Night. For some reason my 'phone book' is missing 33 pages, that's most of Heroes and all of Campaign's End. This is unfortunately the chance you sometimes take with the 'phone books'. They were never really quality productions. The covers look great and are very glossy, but the pages inside are of poor quality, frequently smudged and poorly printed, small writing can be almost impossible to read and in the case of my copy of High Society 33 pages simply aren't there.

For those that are interested the following issue summary was gleaned from Margaret Liss' marvelous Cerebus Fan Girl site: http://www.cerebusfangirl.com/.

For the remainder of Heroes Cerebus was trying to find an albatross, this albatross was the duck statue that formed Cerebus' ransom from the McGrew brothers. Astoria had a protege and assistant, this was Therese who was previously seen in issue #24 as one of the students at Professor X Claremont's school for girls. I found this interesting as I always thought that the 3 girls became part of the professor's Woman Thing which was last seen mating with the mad artist's Sump Thing in issue #25.

In Campaign's End Cerebus continues to campaign, but behind Astoria's back offering bribes to the commanders of the border fortifications in exchange for their support. Although Astoria wouldn't have liked the deals done without her say so Cerebus was really the best equipped to deal with the commanders, he understands them better than any other member of his campaign staff. The Moon Roach's Superman fantasy expands with him believing that snow is frostonite fragments of intense cold formed when his home planet of Froston exploded. Frostonite = kryptonite, Froston = Krypton.

I'll be able to pick the story up properly in Election Night.

Still really crabby about those 33 missing pages. Grrrrr! Frigging phone books!