Back in my first column for Ninth Art, I wrote about Dave Sim and wondered why people were still paying attention to his increasingly eccentric ramblings.

Well, that's not really such an issue these days. As near as I can make out, pretty much nobody is paying attention to Dave's eccentric ramblings any more. His opinions have settled into being a regular part of the landscape. And not a particularly widely read part, at that. Hopefully he's got a lot of loyal readers still waiting for the phone books, because if you go by ICV2's estimates, he's only got about 6,000 readers left on the monthly series.

But this seems like a convenient time to check in on how Dave's doing. Those of you who are reading the series in the collected format should take note that spoilers lie ahead. If that's still an applicable concept for this book. I'm honestly not sure.

With the release of the most recent issue, Sim has hit the home straight. The double issue CEREBUS #289/290 marks the beginning of "The Last Day", Book Two of "Latter Days". It's the final storyline, taking the book through to next year's issue #300 and the completion of a series that conventional economic wisdom says should be totally impossible. And whether the remaining issues are good or bad, that alone will be an achievement Sim can be proud of.

Unfortunately, the erratic tendencies in the book have become more pronounced than ever. Those who suffered through storylines such as READS, and through most of his recent editorials, will be aware that Dave Sim prose can be a tortuous, elliptical experience. The first book of "Latter Days", after an initially readable start, decayed into an almost intolerable set of issues comprised predominantly of small-print transcripts of Cerebus engaging in a line-by-line dissection of the Book of Genesis, intercut with material based on the life of Woody Allen.

'Nobody is paying attention to Dave's eccentric ramblings any more.' In the story, Cerebus advances a new interpretation of the Bible, based on the unlikely premise that references to "YHWH" are not simply coy omissions of the name Jehovah. According to Cerebus, they in fact refer to a completely separate entity, a sort of feminine spin-off of God with ideas above its station.

Issue #289/290 elaborates on this theme further. In formal terms, it is one of the strangest comics ever produced. Loosely justified in storyline terms as a dream experienced by Cerebus - though he plays no active role whatsoever - it's an exposition of Dave Sim's opinions on religion and cosmology, with particular reference to the way that the essential difference between masculine and feminine is built into all aspects of the world.

It's written as a pastiche of the King James translation of the Bible, in archaic prose and typeface. The accompanying images represent the development of the universe and of life on Earth. Running along the bottom of the page, entirely and openly out of character, is Sim's running commentary and elaboration on the theories presented above.

I can't recall ever seeing anything like it. Sim has produced a one-panel-per-verse Bible pastiche with art that at times comes close to abstraction, complete with running creator's commentary built into the layout of the page. It's certainly a fascinating experiment.

The problem is that it's nuts. Sim pretty much adopts the bizarre thesis presented by Cerebus in the previous Book and proceeds to explain in tremendous detail his theory of how the universe is the result of a rebellion by God's spirit, which, wrongly adopting feminine values, proceeds to grow and multiply. This leads him to a startling reinterpretation of the Bible that allows him to engage in pick-and-choose Christianity, attributing the bits he likes to the real God and the bits he doesn't to YHWH. A full exposition of Sim's theory would fill up half the column, but this is the general thrust of it.

Of course, the fact that Sim's opinions are weird does not necessarily mean they're wrong. Arguably the main difference between an absurd fringe cult and a mainstream religion is that the latter is legitimised by society. But then, the footnotes suggest some very strange thought processes at work. As near as I can make out from his elliptical reasoning, Sim has concluded that almost everything in the world has been designed as a microcosm - or, as he puts it, a "living metaphor" - of the cosmic truths that he's explaining. This leads him to some extraordinary leaps of logic.

'The erratic tendencies are more pronounced than ever.' "Hydrogen is the lightest element. Helium is the second lightest. I think this constitutes the primordial underpinning of the Lucifer mythology." It gets stranger. Sim goes on to theorise that helium's status as a feminine element is further evinced by the fact that it makes your voice go squeaky. He claims that the "numerical equivalency" of men and women is a deliberate part of God's design in order to make the difference between men and women more apparent - though why a 2:3 ratio wouldn't have done the job, he doesn't make clear.

Sim goes on to speculate that while man is made in the image of God, the penis is made in the image of "God's spirit" (the spin-off thing), and that women are an enlarged counterpart to the penis. "If you're having trouble picturing a woman as an enlarged counterpart to a penis," Sim suggests, "it will help if you realize that her breasts are the enlarged counterparts of the man's testicles and scrotum." Sage advice indeed.

You get the idea. It's completely loopy. Leaps of logic across gaping chasms abound. The general impression is of a creator who still has a sound and innovative grasp of the medium, using it to channel the sort of ideas more commonly associated with men on street corners with loudhailers.

But should that be a problem? If Sim is still making innovative and distinctive comics, and still setting out his own worldview through his art, isn't that enough? Does it really matter if he's talking rubbish? Alan Moore and Grant Morrison produce tons of comics based on worldviews that, while not quite as unique as Sim's, are certain minority opinions. Nobody complains about them, because they do it well.

For that matter, you don't have to be a Christian to enjoy Handel's Messiah. Even if Christianity were proved wrong tomorrow, that'd still be a great work of art. So does it matter if Sim is talking nonsense?

Well, there are two answers to that.

'Helium, a feminine element, makes your voice go squeaky...' First, this is a comic whose primary function is to communicate Sim's ideas. If those ideas are lunatic and wrong, it seems at best bizarre to say that that doesn't affect the value of the work. Handel's Messiah, in contrast, works whether or not you're a Christian because its main appeal is purely musical. You can appreciate it as a piece of music more or less independently of the lyrical content and inspiration.

With this book, the ideology quite deliberately stares you in the face. It's an essay in comic form; its quality can't sensibly be divorced from the quality of its reasoning and its conclusions. As for Moore and Morrison... well, when they're soapboxing about their worldviews, as opposed to using it as a background element and a source of inspiration, the correctness of what they're saying has to be at least somewhat relevant.

Second, this is a grindingly boring comic. Really, it is. Don't get me wrong, it's formally innovative. It certainly holds some interest in the sense that anything that tries something new deserves some attention for that reason.

But judged as reading matter, by god, it's dull. Sim's cod-Biblical prose is repetitive, and a chore to wade through, and the footnotes are like every Dave Sim essay you've ever read. Believe me, the novelty of wondering how weird his opinions are going to be soon wears off when you realise how much work is involved in finding out what they are.

So where does this leave us? Well, by all appearances he's going to make it to issue #300 and he's going to keep up experimenting with the medium till the end. And in a way that's good enough in itself, I suppose.

It'd be even better if the comic was still readable - at this stage, Sim is producing a comic that can only conceivably appeal to a vanishingly small audience who, to put it mildly, would be quite exceptionally open-minded. That may well be a demographic confined almost entirely to Dave Sim, in fact. And while Sim's single-minded pursuit of his vision might be laudable as an end in itself, this seems a doomed, quixotic attempt to persuade the rest of the world that he's talking sense.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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