Dave Sim's CEREBUS has finally drawn to a close, after 300 issues and some 27 years. I've written about it on Ninth Art before, largely to consider Sim's increasingly erratic opinions and how they've affected his work. (Sim City: Population 1 and Return To Sim City.)

And indeed, in typical form, the final issue features 20 text pages, in which Sim sets the world to rights one last time. Sim explains that he has no plans to make any further comics. He passionately endorses the foreign policy of George Bush. He grumbles about "waiting to be arrested on some trumped-up Marxist-feminist hate literature charge". And he offers a recommended prayer, which fills two pages of text and thanks God for most of the books of the Old Testament individually. (Mind you, God probably doesn't get too many people specifically thanking him for the books of Nahum or Habbakuk. Maybe he appreciates the mention.)

However, aside from that prayer, the last thing in the book is a letter to Sim's lawyer, Wilf Jenkins QC. This contains the interesting information that Sim and Gerhard have arranged for the whole of CEREBUS to enter the public domain once they're both dead. But that's not the main point of the letter. Understandably enough, Sim is concerned about what will happen after his death to all of the material he's accumulated over the past 27 years, including his papers and the original artwork. He'd like to leave it as an archive to be preserved for posterity, his preferred custodian being Wilfrid Laurier University. But Sim has his doubts that anyone will actually want it. As he explains:

"As it stands at the moment, I am... universally viewed as a misogynist (rather than an anti-feminist) and a pariah... with the result that the CEREBUS storyline and the Archive attached to it are perceived to have about as much artistic value as, say, a scale model of Buckingham Palace built, over the course of twenty-six years and three months, out of toothpicks. A peculiar, eccentric and bizarre enterprise perpetrated by a harmless old coot but, in my case, with the veneer of malignancy and evil attached to it. If Ger and I were to die tomorrow and if our legacy was to be entrusted into the hands of the above-mentioned entities, my honest assessment is that they would simply use it all for landfill."

Sim is exaggerating his fears a little here - I would imagine Canadian law allows him to leave his Archive to be held in trust so that, while the trustee could decline office altogether, they couldn't just take it and burn it. But in a broader sense, he has a point. Is Wilfrid Laurier University actually going to want a whopping great consignment of CEREBUS paperwork? Judging from the events listed on their webpage, they don't quite seem like Sim's sort of people. For that matter, is anyone else going to want it?

With that in mind, Sim invites readers to send him letters explaining why the original CEREBUS artwork and its assorted paraphernalia deserve to be preserved. If you feel like contributing then the address is The Cerebus Archive, Box 1674 Station C, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2. Letters should be addressed 'To whom it may concern'.

'CEREBUS must be considered one of the most ambitious comics in history.' Of course, in recent years CEREBUS has come to be known less for its artistic merits than for its creator's extraordinarily unusual opinions, which came to dominate the book, and the increasing impression that Dave Sim's grip on reality is not all that it once was. Sim generally chooses to gloss over that in favour of blaming everything on the unfashionable status of his opinions, and certainly that's a part of it. But the paranoia and erratic logic of his writing gives quite separate grounds for concern, and have helped distract attention from the wider merits of the work.

Which is why it's worth taking some time to remember that CEREBUS is indeed a landmark comic, albeit a severely flawed one. Besides, it's easy to overlook the book or dismiss it as a bizarre freak title. CEREBUS remains determinedly cult material - unlike MAUS, it never became a byword for intelligent comics. Nor is it a SANDMAN or WATCHMEN, with an array of clone books that demonstrate how influential it was. Not many people are making biographical funny animal comics about religion, philosophy and gender politics. And the huge sprawling epic format has swung almost completely out of fashion in favour of the more concise, self-contained graphic novel. Nobody is doing this kind of thing any more. By contemporary standards, SANDMAN is regarded as a bit of an epic undertaking. CEREBUS seems more like an epic folly.

So why is it significant?

Partly, there's the sheer scope of the book. CEREBUS must, by any reasonable standard, be considered one of the most ambitious comics in history - in terms of both the scale of the project and the themes it's attempted to deal with. Of course, ambition on its own only takes you so far. You have to actually succeed as well. But despite the obvious problems with the book, it came an incredibly long way towards achieving those goals. It does grapple with the big issues, even if it comes up with some strange answers. And the first third in particular - HIGH SOCIETY and CHURCH & STATE - is incredibly strong material.

'CEREBUS deserves its place in history for blazing a trail.' Even if it didn't succeed in all it set out to do, CEREBUS was one of the most obvious examples of the untapped potential in comics. It was so far ahead of the pack that it couldn't help but open minds. It may have done that more successfully in the early days when it was more accessibly entertaining - the middle third is challenging and the final third is, frankly, a bit of a slog. But even at its worst, the book still contains an incredible degree of formal innovation. It still makes more expressive use of lettering than almost anyone else. It has wonderfully effective visual storytelling - which, by the way, is fully on display in the last issue. CEREBUS is a comic that's casually innovative in areas most titles take for granted.

So CEREBUS was highly influential in showing what the medium was really capable of, in terms of content, scope and technique. But it was also significant in terms of its publishing format. Back in the days before he was associated with strange views on women, Sim's hobbyhorse was self-publishing and the importance of creative control. History was with him on that one. The trend towards creator control has been gathering pace for years now, and Sim deserves credit for pushing for it (and for using CEREBUS as a vehicle to do so).

Sim's publishing plan of keeping the entire back catalogue in print in trade paperback format also used to seem unusually eccentric. Nowadays, years later, the rest of the industry's caught up with him on that one as well. It must have worked out well for him, considering that the monthly sales of CEREBUS can't possibly have been funding this comic on their own in recent years. That trade paperback policy has helped Sim defy the laws of economics and spend 27 years of his life working on such a strange project.

For that matter, he was also one of the first people to start almost ignoring the pacing of the monthly title in favour of the books. Mind you, that one didn't work out so well - it produced a run of issues, particularly with the Fitzgerald material, that wasn't so much decompressed as mind numbingly boring. Still, he was ahead of the trends.

These things are easily forgotten once they've become commonplace, but CEREBUS deserves its place in history for blazing a trail. God knows this is a hugely flawed title, but when you aim that high, you can miss by a mile and still achieve something worth remembering.

Sim is going to continue footnoting the CEREBUS story by contributing material to FOLLOWING CEREBUS, so we needn't worry about being deprived of his opinions. As for the fate of the work, a lot of it is never going to be widely read - it's really only the first half that I'd seriously recommend to most people for reading for enjoyment. But it does have an important place in the development of North American comics, and it should be remembered for that - not just for the strangeness of its latter days.

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

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