Cerebus World Tour Book 1995

Story by Dave Sim, Chester Brown& BarryWindsor-Smith
Art by Dave Sim, Gerhard, Marshall Rogers, Joe Rubinstein, Gene Day, Barry Windsor-Smith& Chester Brown

The thing that this collection of previously rare appearance of Cerebus brings to mind most is the sheer mastery that Dave Sim possesses of the short story. Five 6-10 page stories are reprinted here, together with 11 single-page Silverspoon stories, a 6-pager entirely from the pen of Barry Windsor-Smith, and a new 19-page surreal collaboration with Chester Brown. The single pagers suffer from a need to recap, and the necessity of getting the joke out before the end of the page, but the intrigue expressed in "What happened between issues twenty and twenty-one?", and the sheer comic potential of a correctly timed Cerebus shown in the entirely silent pair "A night on the town" and "The Morning After" is worth the price alone. "Magiking" is over-long for it's weight, and suffers from Sim's occasional tendency to have a long-winded character explain everything, but it does have some wonderful Cerebus-longwinded person banter, as exemplified best in the Mind Games, as well as a great punchline page. The best of the lot, and the most Cerebus, is "The name of the game is Diamondback", which shows Cerebus beating a series of opponents at the game, simply by virtue of confidence and personality. Dave Sim was born to write Cerebus, yes indeedy. The collaborative piece, which they claim was done a panel at a time, is fine and dandy until the intermission half way through, during which Dave and Chet figure out that sense is optional, and it soon goes out the window, taking the tension of the first half with it.

In summary, indispensable, if you've not got all of these (or even Diamondback or the silent pair) already.

Andrew

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