(see also: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV)

Only one issue this time, because I don't want to break up the celebrated Palnu Trilogy, and there's no possibility of doing 'em all tonight... but "Black Magiking" is a great story, and quite deserving of the spotlight--so it all works out, right?

Onward!

Sim left the experimental duo-tone/Gene Colan murk (which Dan Parmenter and I discussed, near the end of this TCJ Messageboard thread, earlier this week) of #12 in the dust and ascended toward a new level of crispness in style and process in this issue (in some ways it offers a foretaste of the art decoish deployment of blacks and whites that characterize what I recall of the mid-High Society issues). And what's the story about? Why "Necross the hahahaha Mad" of course! (this guy, particularly in Cerebus' initial encounter with him, makes me think of Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be--"zo they call me 'concentration camp Ehrhardt', do they?"...uncomfortable laugh--laugh--cough... it fits too! Necross is a bit of a buffoon--and a charlatan--but he's no loveable bumbler, a la Wizard of Oz...he's actually dangerous...and so is Sig Ruman, no matter how ridiculous a figure he cuts in his Nazi uniform! The Lubitsch film is amazing that way--Jack Benny playing his silly-assed self, and yet still confronting legitimate horrors, head-on, while the war raged, in the newsreels that preceded the show? That is masterful cinema! And Carole Lombard is great in it too! Her last performance...)

Unnecessary digression there--sorry! Or perhaps not. There is certainly something to be said for thinking of this issue--and the evolving tone of the series as a whole--in conjunction with a work like TBONTB.  We're really not in parody-land at all anymore... It's hilarious, no question about that--but the scenes have a kind of menace that seems to coexist in impossible harmony with the word-play and the slapstick, and the protagonist faces  real dangers--not so much to his aardvarkian person, but to his mind, or, more precisely, to his attitude. Will he be able to maintain his equanimity--his ability to accept the world at face-value--without descending into paranoid skepticism, or developing delusions of grandeur, whilst cutting his way through a narrative that sets him up for exactly that kind of a fall...and that kind of a rise? We'll see... but for now--only remember: Cerebus is goddamned funny-and the stakes are high!

This is the issue in which Sim's lettering skills come to the fore. Take a look at these two pages--