BTW: I’m in the interested camp vis a vis this feature. I always snoop through people’s bookshelves when I’m in their home.

I myself have a kind of outsider view of my own work, so I empathize with him to an extent, but Sim always does everything to extremes. When he partied, he almost killed himself with drugs and booze. When his work was peaking, he rode in limos and stayed at $3000-a-night hotels and payed the bills of less fortunate self-publishers. When his relationships with women tanked, he became an outspoken misogynist. When he thought he had a vision of god, he essentially created a new religion for himself (an Islam-Catholic hybrid) and completely changed the focus of his work, dragging his readers along with him.

The first half of the Cerebus “epic” is about the character, and really does amazing things in High Society, Church & State, and the smaller volumes “Jaka’s Story” and “Melmoth” (which is a sort of biography of Oscar Wilde). Things turn from there into more of a Dave-Sim-working-on-his-thesis thing from there, with side trips about the Stooges, Hemmingway, and Woody Allen. For me, there is too much of a end of the movie Holy Mountain “surprise!” that can feel insulting if you don’t keep it in perspective (that being that this is Dave Sim’s Comic, and really has nothing to do with me). That may be the major failing of the the second half, that you’re not really in the story much. But maybe that’s not really a failing, as Sim had one foot firmly planted in story and the other firmly planted in real life through that whole portion of the narrative, e.g., that’s what he was going for the whole time.

Taster’s choice, ultimately, and there’s a lot to get frustrated about. But I’ve always loved reading stuff that hurts my brain, I don’t know why. I still think it’s too big to ignore. Even train wrecks and Rush Limbaugh can draw the attention occasionally – if you’ve morbid enough tastes.

From the sound of it though, it looks like Sim is playing with the bigger picture stuff with metafictional encounters; the idea that the experience doesn’t end with us, that there’s something bigger behind us watching us. This is the tenth dimensional stuff I like to study.

My only hope is that Sim isn’t arrogant about it. The biggest problem with metafiction is the arrogance it tends to bring out of the writers (like Miguel de Unamuno’s MIST, which, while good, is a little disorientating in how badly the writer looks by the end of the story…something I don’t feel he intended*). Morrison inches a little too close with ANIMAL MAN, but it still works, and he nails it beautifully in FINAL CRISIS and ALL STAR SUPERMAN.

I’m aware of Moore with SWAMP THING. I think Garth Ennis actually played with Moore along the same lines with HELLBLAZER, if I’m not mistaken. Hell, Moore even popped up in the sixth season premiere of LOST.

I think comic book readers, especially those raised on the medium, are more open minded to metafiction. Marvel would have a lot of fun with this stuff. I remember Stan Lee and his artists meeting the heroes pretty often (or, at least, it seemed that way) (it would be awesome if they had a collection of this stuff). And Dan Slott recently bent over backwards in his SHE-HULK run to create an acceptable reason for Marvel Comics to exist within its own universe.

That all said, this stuff is a lot of fun.

*This is why the Stephen King encounters are so interesting, in that he makes himself look so badly to his own creations, especially when they meet him in his drug-alcohol days.

I’m hazy on the rise of Alan Moore in the 80s, so I don’t know if his whole “Scary John Lennon Jesus” look was yet the icon it later became, so I’m not sure if the character’s design was more of an injoke or a nod and a wink to the audience. Either way, he seems to be there as part of Moore’s adieu to the title after such a groundbreaking run.

The book _Minds_ is particularly relevent here, as Cerebus the Aardvark finally meets “Dave,” who he mistakenly believes to be THE god. Dave spends a chunk of this narrative lecturing his creation on his behavior, showing him what could have been…all while Cerebus in return (through his behavoir and narrow-mindedness)shows Dave that it probably never could really be that way no matter what he’d planned for Cerebus anyway (Cerebus being too stubborn, singleminded and too bloody clever to do as he’s told in the first place).

Sim appears as various avatars and as himself, sometimes in the story, sometimes outside the story but still in comics form, and even in written narratives that increasingly eat up page space (as Sim and an avatar in a parallel storyline).

Following? No? I won’t even get into the whole last third of the series.

Read this, man. It’s what you’re looking for. And it will really, really frustrate and piss you off.

Hell, now I’m going to go re-read it from the start myself…

I won’t say Black House is perfect, but there’s a lot to like, especially if you appreciate the Dark Tower series, as King finally connects the dots about where this story fits.

I know there’s been talk of a third book – the ending of BH pretty much screams for a continuation.