Sim's development as a visual storyteller takes center stage in these issues. As the author himself notes in the Swords of Cerebus introduction, issue #8 ("Day of the Earth-Pig"--how many comic book titles did Nathanael West unwittingly give birth to? Once I'm done my dissertation research, I'll actually be able to give you a pretty good idea--I mean, Amazing Spider-Man alone could fill up an ark with animal "days-of", right?) is practically "Mind Game 0"... Cerebus spends the entire first half of the book weaving back and forth between the subconscious and waking worlds, and it is here that the zipatone phantoms which provide the only scenery--not to mention the only ballast--in his nebulous mental landscape first appear.
I find this sequence fascinating:
On page 3, we find him ensnared by black "cords", indicating, I suppose, that he is struggling, quite literally, to regain his senses (to fight his way out of a solipsistic void)
and then, quite suddenly, the cords "go gray", which suggests that he is now conscious enough to import the "stuff" of reality into a dream he never made... and look at them! Sure, they're holding him back--but they're also, it seems to me, propping him up:
Finally, he comes to consciousness, climbing up out of the void using fetters of reality that he appropriates for his own subjective use. And there you have it--a sophisticated philosophical (& psychological) argument in grayscale!
The non-"Mindgame" aspects of this issue--and the following two as well--deal with mindgames of a different sort: the realpolitik-al kind! As a 14-year old, I think it's pretty safe to say that my favourite things in life were strategy boardgames like Diplomacy, Dashiell Hammett, the memoirs of Bismarck, hyper-convoluted film noir, and Cerebus--studies of manipulation (with varying degrees of emotion-based commentary on this type of behaviour..which is what I tend to respond to now--back then, the manipulation itself was the key...which I suppose was owing to the Machiavellian wasteland that I grew up in!) Cerebus learns some hard lessons in these books-- about military coups (when he is "elected"--at swordpoint--to wrest command of the Conniptin army away from the princely cocaine-fiend pictured above), about the "honour of kings" (when K'Cor keeps him busy with knightly challenges while he poisons the army Cerebus intends to sack his city with), and about the sources of sovereignty--and its potential uses: also from K'Cor, who seems like your basic "I just want power" tyrant, until he erupts into this Ozymandian oration...
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