Found this posted on some sort of hobby website and thought it might
be of interest to the group.

http://www.collect.com/interest/article.asp?id=9925

Cerebus #300, okay Dave, now what?
By Thomas Kintner

With its 300th issue on schedule for a March release, the final
curtain prepares to fall on Cerebus, a story that has run its course,
often in controversial fashion, over 26 years and 6,000 pages. At a
time when looking back from the finish line at the book's high and
low moments seems appropriate, it is just as natural to wonder what
the future holds for its creator, 47-year-old Dave Sim, his longtime
partner Gerhard, and the series itself. For the moment, Sim appears
first and foremost to be relieved, saying in a way that nearly
disserves his creative efforts, "I've been doing the dishes for 26
years, and now the dishes are done."

Many series have made it past the 300-issue mark, but Cerebus
represents an accomplishment that no other long-running comic book
created in this hemisphere can boast: It has been shepherded from
start to finish by one person. For good or ill, Dave Sim has spent a
creative lifetime on Cerebus — publishing, writing, lettering, and
drawing the figures in the monthly black-and-white series under the
aegis of his Aardvark-Vanaheim imprint from a studio in out-of-the
way Kitchener, Ontario, keeping back issues in print in phonebook-
sized compilations. In the process, his artistic and financial
accomplishments have set standards a generation of aspiring self-
publishers can scarcely dream of equaling. The book's run has been so
long and so marked by controversy that it is easy to take for granted
its bona fides as a trailblazer, but even a cursory glance across its
bookshelf-filling breadth quickly serves as a reminder of its
singular achievement.

Cerebus chronicles the life and times of a humanoid aardvark living
among people in a roughly medieval setting. The book started out as a
mildly amusing take-off on Roy Thomas and Barry Smith-era Conan
stories but became far more enticing in short order, as Sim developed
distinctive voices as both a writer and artist. Those voices served
him well in political-, religious- and relationship-themed stories
that were funny, astute, and unusually complex. Midway through the
third volume of a story that will run 16 books all told, Sim was
joined by Gerhard, whose intricate background drawings have given the
book impressive texture for nearly two decades.

Sim announced long ago that the last issue of the series will end
with its title character's death, an event that seems more coda than
crescendo in final issues filled with a portrait of an aged aardvark
carrying on a comically muddled internal dialogue while stumbling
around his sealed chambers. That storyline follows several that have
at times been built on text-heavy, meandering narratives that offered
far tougher sledding than the book's early days. There was a time
when Cerebus was a "hot" book in a marketplace that loved such
things, a more-cerebral-than-most fantasy-adventure strip.

Those days are long since past. In fact, some content Sim has
proffered in recent years has actually made past readers hostile.

As it nears the end of its run, Cerebus has a circulation that is
roughly a quarter of its peak numbers, due in part to the fact that
Sim has espoused unpopular sociological viewpoints in back-of-the-
book essays and story content alike. Particularly infamous, when it
saw print in 1994, was Cerebus #186, in which one of Sim's in-story
essays drew a specific line between two fundamental sides of gender
roles he termed the Male Light and the Emotional Female Void, in the
process forever concretizing himself as a radical anti-feminist in
many minds. He has held fast to — and often expanded upon — that
position despite torrents of criticism. As a result, he has been a
polarizing figure in the industry ever since. That said, it is worth
remembering that Sim has been a strong advocate of creators' rights
throughout his career, as well as a staunch supporter of such
industry organizations as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. He is
also thought-provoking, earnest, and, on occasion, terribly clever:
worthy of attention, when he is on his game.

While unpopular opinion pieces and such odd detours as an offer to
fight Bone creator Jeff Smith by way of bringing closure to a
perceived wrong have lost Sim some allies along the way, several
fellow creators who know what it means to maintain a project over
such a long span remain impressed with Cerebus for both its sheer
volume and its artistic standard. Neil Gaiman, whose popular Sandman
series ran a meager six-plus years over 75 issues, told CBG, "I think
it's an astonishing achievement. I'm enormously looking forward to
Cerebus #300, and feel like it would be foolish to pronounce any
judgments on the story Dave told before I've read the final page —
and I'd rather like to reread the whole thing."

Sim finished working on the final story pages of #300 the week before
Christmas and, in keeping with his avowed commitment to rationality
όber alles, betrayed no hint of nostalgia — or even anticipation — as
the finish line drew near. Asked whether his last few pages had
presented any special challenges, he said, "The process remains the
same. My approach to page 17 of issue 300 isn't any different than my
approach would have been to, say, page 14 of issue 220." Shortly
after completing the last page, he was hardly reveling in the
accomplishment, admitting that his state of mind was "more relief and
gratitude that God allowed me to finish than satisfaction, per se."

However historic his accomplishment, Sim is sufficiently pragmatic to
know that his place in history is not yet written, particularly given
how the industry has cooled to him in the wake of his outspoken
stances. "I've been ignored by the comic-book field for so long I
just assume that Cerebus will either never be popularly acknowledged
as anything in the comic art form or that it will only be
acknowledged a long time after my death, since the comic-book field
is the only manifestation of the comic art form that has any
awareness of Cerebus. It's hardly worth my time to consider either
possibility, since neither of them involves me, personally," he told
CBG.

Asked how his work might age over the next couple of decades, he
said, "I think that would depend on whether I was dead or alive and —
if the former — how long I had been dead. If I die five years from
now, as an example: 20 years from now, I think Cerebus will be viewed
as a great achievement. If I'm still alive 20 years from now: I think
Cerebus will be viewed as it is now, a good reason to change the
subject when it comes up in conversation."

Perhaps more fascinating than what happens in the last Cerebus is
what will happen to the whole of the work after the last Cerebus.
Presuming that most members of its core audience will have all of the
reprint collections shortly after the last of them sees print later
this year, Aardvark-Vanaheim's prospects depend largely on a new
generation of readers who won't have a monthly issue to draw them in
on the cheap. Sim plans to spend some time as the book's personal
ambassador. "Once, God willing, the final trade paperback is in print
and we are dealing with a finite 16-volume `package,' I'll be making
another try at communicating with the retailers — this time, one at a
time," he said. "We sent out 1,000 `Campaign 2000' packages and got
three responses, so I think we can rule out mass mailings." He is
also assembling materials accumulated during the series' run into a
documentary archive.

Creatively, Sim is in no rush to undertake any new projects,
declaring himself officially retired. "I read the copy of American
Gods Neil sent me three years ago and experienced no urge to write a
novel," he said. "I saw a play last week and experienced no urge to
write a play." Whatever comes next, he said he is fairly certain it
will not star the aardvark with which he made his name. "Cerebus is
my attempt at a literary work. That means `beginning, middle, and
end.' No Tale of Three Cities or Oliver More Twisted. There are three
uncompleted Cerebus Jam stories buried somewhere in the basement that
I was supposed to do with Mike Grell, Dick Giordano, and Barry
Windsor-Smith. I might finish one or all three for a Cerebus
Miscellany Vol. 17, but not until all the reader mail and the Cerebus
archive are finished. Now that I read the newspaper first and don't
work evenings and weekends, it could be a while."

Essays on an assortment of topics (everything from big-picture
ruminations on Canada's lack of support for America post-Sept. 11 to
a memorable back-and-forth with Alan Moore on the topic of Moore's
From Hell) have taken up ever-greater spaces in the back pages of
Cerebus in recent years, so it is interesting to wonder where Sim the
pamphleteer will go, now that he no longer has a monthly forum. He
seems as willing to eliminate that portion of his workload as any
other. "Sept. 11 changed the rules and demanded — it seemed to me —
the staking out of philosophical territories," he said. "I always
looked on Cerebus as a 26-year presidency. Since Sept. 11 happened on
my `watch,' I thought I was obligated to find the most correct and
thoroughgoing way to respond to it. I discharged what I saw as my
obligation to the best of my abilities, which I think is the
obligation of any president of any entity. I have the same regret
that Harry Truman had going back to Independence, Mo., in January
1953, I suppose: wishing it were still `my turn' but accepting that
it isn't."

The initial weariness that pervaded much of Sim's discourse on post-
Cerebus life was echoed by Gerhard, who has been part of the monthly
grind since 1984, following his Cerebus debut on a series of color
short stories for Marvel's Epic magazine (none of which are planned
for reprinting at present). He said he looks forward to several
months of relaxation and sailing and, when autumn comes, he will take
a fresh look at his options. He remains open to future projects, "as
long as it's not a monthly book. I don't want to do a monthly book
again. Dave and I talked about the idea of just doing covers or
single illustrations. That would be great. It might take a little
while before I feel like drawing again, but I don't think I'm going
to give it up."

Sim was quick to praise Gerhard's contributions to the book, which he
joined without previous experience in the form. "He got a lot better
as he went along," Sim said. "Structurally, it allowed me to
experiment more with a wider `band' between caricature and realism
and back again, because the backgrounds were consistently super-
realistic and, therefore, anchored the page to a Cerebus `look'."

Gerhard was similarly deferential to Sim's work, expressing only mild
amusement that the book is typically portrayed as Sim's solo
accomplishment. "I was talking to someone about Dave doing this
record number of issues, and the second-closest guy, I can't remember
who it was, but it was like my 200-whatever issues don't count," he
said. "It doesn't really bother me. It really is his book. It's his
story. Self-publishing is not for everybody. It takes a huge amount
of commitment. I wouldn't have stuck to it, if it weren't for Dave."

It is reasonable that Sim's detractors attach their disdain for his
opinions and ideas to their estimation of the work he has produced,
given how linked are his philosophies and his fictions, but he has
just as surely earned the right to offer whatever he chooses to a
readership he built over a quarter century, as he developed into one
of the comics form's most skilled and sublime storytellers.

Without a touch of bitterness in his voice, Sim looked back at what
he had wrought and expressed doubt that anyone else will ever care to
make the commitment necessary to match his effort. Weighing his many
successes against the equally diverse assortment of obstacles and
frustrations he overcame to get there, he asked, "What would be the
motivation for someone else to try?"