Talking Heads

I know I've never seen it stated anywhere, but I really do think Dave was a Talking Heads fan.

Cerebus is hurtling downwards through space, he lands heavily on a platform suspended amongst the stars. A disembodied head belonging to an old man with an impressive set of whiskers is observing him and talking to him. On the other side of the platform floats another head, this one is wearing a conical wizard's cap and belongs to Henrot, not Sophia's mother, her father, the wizard.
Henrot and the other head are both wizards, although Henrot seems to delight in baiting his colleague, who has a hair trigger temper and always bites at the insults Henrot throws out there.

While Henrot and his 'friend' argue the action moves back to Iest, where Thrunk has set himself up as more than the Pope. He has declared himself Tarim, although his demands are every bit as excessive as Cerebus' were, he has the muscle to back it up, too.

We are taken into a room containing Astoria and Lord Julius. Julius continues with his usual nonsense while we find out just what Astoria believes and stands for. The art on these two pages is excellent, it goes from cartoony to looking like photographs.

Back in space a new creature appears. It's the combination of the Womanthing and Sumpthing with the artists head somewhere in the middle. He now calls his joined monsters Fred and Ethel. It appears like everyone thinks they are Tarim. The unnamed wizard, the artist with his two monsters, Cerebus thought he was and although Henrot hasn't openly declared it I bet he thinks he's got a fair claim to Godhood, too.

Sumpthing squeezes the impressively whiskered wizard out of existence on this plane and then knocks Cerebus off his head before floating away. This leaves Cerebus and Henrot together. Cerebus suddenly feels the need to sneeze, but doesn't want to because he knows it will hurt. Henrot tries to help him keep it in, but eventually he does and this time no fire, but his nose grows. He resembles Cerebus back in the first few issues when his nose was considerably longer than it currently is.

The glowing ball reappears startling Henrot. He asks Cerebus where he got it as it starts to engulf the aardvark and Cerebus flippantly replies that it's been in his family for years, as Cerebus disappears a stricken Henrot exclaims: 'Tarim! I hope he was kidding.'