Guys

The revelations in Minds were going to be a pretty hard act to follow and for me there was interest to see if Dave could do so in Guys. Unfortunately he couldn’t. I think this was about where the book lost me. I did keep buying it for some time following Guys, but much of the interest and enjoyment had gone. The reread hasn’t actually proven to enhance the experience.

Guys is mostly set in one of those bars that the Cirinists set up to keep the male population happy, sedated and out of their way. Their existence had been spoken about in Minds, when Cerebus found out the truth about Cirin/Serna. The bar itself, and a good many of the conversations in the narrative are based on a local establishment Dave frequented during a period of near alcoholism in between relationships. It does have that feel about it, and the conversations that float around a regularly drink sodden Cerebus, are of the type that you can hear in places with heavy regular drinkers.

Dave took the opportunity to reintroduce a number of characters from previous adventures. Mick (he seemed to have dropped the Prince title) was a regular, Keef also popped in at one stage, but his role was little more than a cameo. Bear was there, resuming his relationship with Cerebus. In Cerebus’ head at least, the two seemed much closer than I’d ever realised. Cerebus is almost dependent on the big bearded mercenary. Boobah also shows up, sporting some extremely impressive facial hair. The Roach has a cameo as ‘fanroach’, there’s a reference to a writer of ‘graphic reads’ visiting the bar, and that’s what fanroach turns up for. Elrod doesn’t appear, but he and Sophia are mentioned at one point. They seem to live together as man and wife. Mrs Thatcher comes back, she appears to administer the bar, she’s far less terrifying and her authority seems to have greatly diminished (I’m not sure of the dates when the book was written, but her real life counterpart may have been voted out of power by this time). Some new characters were introduced; bartender Harrison Starkey, the name is a mixture of George Harrison and Ringo Starr, and he did have a very Beatleish look about him, he also spoke with a heavy accent which was meant to represent the Liverpudlian accent of the Fab Four. A bug eyed, hunch backed character called Marty also played a part. He was very obviously based on the pop eyed comedic actor Marty Feldman. His character was one of the funniest things about Guys, although I’m not really sure why Dave felt the need to use Marty Feldman in the book.

Cerebus spends the first half of the book in an alcoholic stupor, listening to the nonsensical chatter in the bar, and slipping in and out of consciousness after drinking copious amounts of ‘scodge’. There were a few dream sequences, but they were a little different to the ones in earlier books, often being influenced by what was going on around Cerebus at the time. From the conversations in the bar readers gleaned some information about what had happened while Cerebus was floating around in space. Mind you the conversations were damned hard to follow due to the speech patterns the characters employed. Both Mick and Harrison spoke with heavy accents, and were at times unintelligible. Bear is hardly capable of stringing more than three words together without inserting ‘whadyacallit’, and when Cerebus spoke, his speech was so badly slurred from the alcohol that it was also hard to decipher. Cerebus seemed to have been out of the picture for a number of years. Cirin returned, and due to lack of opposition cemented her control even more firmly.

Eventually the other patrons leave the bar, and Cerebus takes over as bartender. No one actually ever frequents the bar after this, until a lady called Joanne comes calling. Joanne was one of the women Cerebus met in one of Dave’s futures for him. This was really confusing, because Cerebus knew her, only she didn’t know him. I’m not sure how Dave kept it straight in his own head, because it was really throwing me out. I understood it, but it was just such an odd concept. Cerebus started a relationship with her, while knowing that it was all going to end in tears, because unless Bear returned to the bar by a certain date Cerebus had determined that he was heading south, without Joanne. Joanne was the person who mentioned Elrod and Sophia, they were apparently her neighbours. When she first appeared in Minds, Joanne reminded me of someone, and it dawned on me in Guys, who that was. She looks a lot like an older version of the young waitress Doris, who Cerebus met in Melmoth.

Joanne finds out about Cerebus’ plans to leave, and walks out on him. The epilogue introduces a new patron of the bar. A big, bluff bearded blonde chap, who seems to be very confident and competent. No one knows who he is until he leans across the bar, and tells Cerebus that the aardvark once told him that he was in love with his wife. Rick?!

Rick’s surprising reappearance aside, there seems to be little reason for the existence of Guys. It doesn’t advance the story, it doesn’t tell readers anything they don’t already know. Cerebus is barely sane, he hates himself, he drinks heavily, all his relationships with women end in disaster, he’s not going to stay around. We’ve seen all this. We didn’t need it explained again and again. There are a lot of words in Guys used to say very little. To be totally honest I felt that it was spinning it’s wheels, and longed for the book’s earlier days when stuff used to happen. Maybe Rick’s Story will be a return to form, at least hearing about Rick changing from the skinny idler to this big confident bloke would provide some new information about a character.

The artwork throughout was competent, without ever doing anything astonishing. Most of Dave’s ‘people’, not Cerebus; he always looks like a cartoon, look very real and you can see the developments in inking and shading since the early days of the book. For what was at one time a very funny book, both in it’s visuals and words, there’s not much to laugh about in Guys, although I did find the labels on the alcohol served in the bar rather amusing, Lord Julius’ company seemed to produce most of them. Nice to see that no matter how bad things get in Estarcion the master bureaucrat always lands on his feet.

Mind Games IV

When I initially saw that this was another Mind Games chapter I was hoping I’d get to see some more of Suenteus Po. I like the vague infuriating mystic and I’ve always enjoyed his amusing and rambling conversations with Cerebus. I believe Po featured in all 3 of the previous Mind Games chapters, so I was a little disappointed to see that he was not in this one.

Cerebus isn’t actually unconscious this time, so the story deviates between what he is currently doing (mostly drinking) and the conversation he’s having with himself.

The aardvark has become intensely frustrated with his sham of a marriage to a woman he doesn’t like, his overbearing monster-in-law, playing at being Prime Minister while actually doing nothing and the feeling that he is a pawn in some master game of a crazy man in Weisshaupt.

He seeks solace, as he always done, in alcohol. A good bit of the chapter reads like an alcoholic going through the various stages in their own mind when they go on a bender. If it wasn’t obvious before, this chapter points out quite clearly that Cerebus is an alcoholic. Only his iron constitution has prevented it from taking a higher toll on his body and mind prior to this. Dave had confessed prior to this to some decent all nighters and I wondered if he too hadn’t had battles with the bottle, and was drawing from personal experience. The original Mind Games came from an LSD trip.

The chapter ends with Cerebus receiving the news that he has been chosen by Bishop Powers as his preferred Eastern Pontiff and believing that he only thought he heard that because he was so drunk. It’s also the final chapter in the 2nd book of this volume of Church & State. It is to be hoped that the 3rd part is not full of short, pointless chapters that give the readers small, but unnecessary windows into Iestan society and do not advance the story.

The artwork was interesting in that Dave seemed to playing one of his artistic puzzle games by using bits of the title as the background throughout the length of the chapter. It’s quite clever and I can only guess at how he does it and still keeps the story straight and comes in at the right length.

The Last Stand

The 5th of Cerebus 6 crises was titled rather ominously as The Last Stand. Cerebus' advisors and cabinet are running about like headless chooks reading reports and arguing with one another. One of his military commanders is the only one with any sense asking messengers if there is any sign of military assistance.

Cerebus has retired to his room where he has proceeded to drink himself into a stupor. The combination of the invasion and the disastrous meeting with Jaka, who has once again disappeared from his life, has forced the aardvark to seek solace in alcohol. He does this often and it made me wonder if Cerebus' aardvarkian constitution actually allowed him to become an alcoholic. Astoria is keeping up the fiction that she is consulting with him to buy time and not let anyone else know of his true comatose state.

Just when he is not wanted Lord Julius wanders in. He and Astoria have an argument, or rather Astoria screams at Lord Julius and he responds calmly with inconsequential nonsense. Cerebus staggers out in the middle of this, suffering from the after effects of his bender. The Roach appears claiming that has been doped. The Roach says that liquid frostonite, which is crazy Roach talk for water, will counter the effects of what Cerebus has been given. A bucket of cold water thrown over Cerebus does do wonders for his hangover, though. This was where Dave started to do something that annoyed me intensely. He kept shifting the orientation of the panels around. One page you're reading the book upright, then on it's side, then upside down, the other side and then upright again. It made the story very hard to read and you had to spin the comic around, it was hard enough to do with a simple paper issue, bloody near impossible with a phone book. The Cerebus' fur smells bad when it's wet joke was still running and it got another airing here.

While Cerebus dries off and gets redressed Astoria outlines plans for them to go into political exile and leave the city to the invading Hsifans. Initially Cerebus goes along with it saying he wants to go someplace warm and Astoria suggests Eshnospur as a possible destination. As they plan to leave Cerebus receives news that some of the forces have managed to halt the advance and his thinking changes, he starts talking about mounting an offensive. On the way out of the building they encounter the McGrews, both of whom are trying to learn Hsifan.

Cerebus and Astoria are packed and waiting to leave when Cerebus digs his heels in and decides to take a look at the Hsiffies for himself. Against Astoria's wishes, actually she was screaming hysterically at Cerebus demanding that he listen to her and come back. Cerebus ignored her and continued out with one of his military commanders, an impressively moustached fellow. Once outside Cerebus borrows his commanders sword and goes to meet the Hsiffies, pausing only to tell his commander that if Astoria's screeching bothers him turn her upside down in a snowbank somewhere.

As Cerebus charges towards oblivion, a naked blade in his hand the forces heading towards him stop and start shouting: Might for Right, Might for Might, Right for Might, Fight! Fight! Fight! They aren't Hsifans, they're Conniptins, more specifically they're Cerebus' Conniptins, the ones that he thought perished outside the walls of Imesh way back in issue #9. I'd like to think Dave planned this, but I don't think even he thought that far ahead back then. This was just a convenient way to get out of a seemingly impossible situation.

I do like the way Dave got Cerebus out of this and how we saw that even Astoria can't hold her cool in a hopeless situation, yet Cerebus true colours came to the fore and if he was going down he was going to do it with a sword in his hand and both fists swinging.