Cerebus No. 5

***Cerebus the Aardvark No. 5*** is the fifth issue of *Cerebus*.

## Story

Escaping from Serrea, Cerebus sells his sword to Turan Genn. On patrol in the Red Marches, he takes shelter from the constant rain in a tree stump. A group of Pigts find him and want to take him to their leader, Bran Mak Mufin. Put off by their "disturbing" attitude, but hoping to get out of the wet, Cerebus follows them to their underground city. Along the way they retrieve their swords, and Cerebus notes their high quality. They climb down a tunnel in a hollow stump. The sentinel, Fret Mac Mury, lets them pass.

Bran greets the aardvark with reverence. He explains the mission of the Pigts: "We exist only to topple the empire ... you name it and we've toppled it." They have a grand total of fifty men. Cerebus thinks he is "crazy as a Panrovian monk" but agrees to stay the night. Bran shocks him by correctly guessing his age (twenty-six) and says they will talk further the next day.

That night a faint sound wakes him. Wary, he follows it to a temple, where the Pigts are worshiping an idol in the form of an aardvark. Bran announces that they have found their "god-king" again and that he will lead them to victory.

Stunned, Cerebus waits until the Pigts leave. He considers the possibility of leading them to conquest and plunder, but he can't see himself as a religious figure. He destroys the clay idol, finds an exit, and climbs back to the surface.

## Characters

* Bran Mak Mufin (first appearance; next appearance in issue 34)
* Cerebus (last seen in issue 4, next appearance in Demonhorn)
* Cromag Macs Milc (only appearance)
* Fret Mac Mury (first appearance; next appearance in issue 156)
* Partha Qua Non (only appearance)

## Objects

* Cerebus' medallions
* Cerebus' sword
* Pigt Idol

## Story Notes

* Like the story in *Cerebus No. 1*, the story for this issue originally had no title. It was named "The Idol" in the *Cerebus* phonebook.
* Cerebus' vest is missing in this issue, but it reappears next issue.
* Oath utterance counts: Tarim 3, Ashtoth 2, and Ishtar 1.
* (p. 1) Contrary to the introduction, the Red Marches are east of Serrea.
* (p. 2, 6) This issue establishes a running gag that Cerebus's wet fur smells very bad to everybody, including himself.
* (p. 2) Partha Qua Non's name is possibly a parody on "Parthenon" and "Sine Qua Non".
* (p. 3) The Pigts apparently believe in the goddess Ishtar.
* (p. 7) "Excellant" is misspelled.
* (p. 8) One of the Pigts refers to Bran as the "penultimate swordsman." Is there an "ultimate swordsman" that is better, or does the Pigt just think that "penultimate" means "better than ultimate"?
* (p. 10) Apart from his name being a pun on *bran muffin,* "Bran Mac Mufin" is a reference to Robert E. Howard's Pictish hero Bran Mak Morn.
* (p. 12, 17) "Pigt" might be short for "Sons of the Pig."
* (pp. 12-13) The Pigts, according to Bran, have toppled the Redeemer Dynasty, the Eastern Monoliths, and the Black Tower Empire, and they plan to topple the Dehrsion Monarchy and then the Borealans.
* (p. 13) Bran Mac Mufin's houseplant looks suspiciously like a hemp plant. The plant withers after Cerebus disposes of his beverage (fermented goat's blood) in its container.
* (p. 19) This issue, like Issue 3, has Cerebus considering himself distinct from humans ("no way to understand how these creatures think").
* (p. 19) Cerebus thinks of the gods Tarim and Ashtoth, but not with oaths.
* (p. 20) Cerebus's war plans suggest that there is nothing to conquer east of the Red Marches and west of the Feld River, and only primitive lands east of the Feld River. Later issues establish, though, that the Hsifan Khanate and the Feldwar States are there.
* (p. 22) Issue 196 establishes that, had things gone differently, Cerebus might have led the Pigts to world conquest.
* (p. 22) Cerebus's journey to Iest is seen in the short story "Demonhorn."

## Publication Notes

* Reprinted in *Cerebus Bi-weekly - January 27, 1989* with a new cover and additional material.
* Cerebus story reprinted in *Swords of Cerebus Volume Two* and *Cerebus*.

## Dave Sim on Cerebus No. 5

* "This story only has one joke, Cerebus' fur smells bad when it gets wet. Why, you might rightly ask, is this the only joke in the whole issue (barring the phonetic Pigtish pun names)?

Well.
By the time I was finished drawing issue No 4, I was very happy with what was happening with Cerebus. Issue No 4 had humour, panache, charisma, style, wit, grace, charm, radiance, subtlety, balance, depth, richness. Contrast this attitude (my view of No 4 while I was trying to think up something to do in issue No 5) with the one in paragraph five of my introduction to Cerebus No 4 (in the last volume of SWORDS -- being my view of issue No 4 when it was drawn but not yet printed). You see why I'm crazy? Same story, but one minute it's garbage and the next it's a masterpiece. This was very pronounced between issues No 4 and 5. I was starting to get a grasp of the kind of material I thought Cerebus fans were looking for (there even WERE a few Cerebus fans by the time the fourth issue came out), but I was trying to get an idea of how to do a little less and still get away with it, so this issue was to be a lesson to myself; Dave Sim's First Annual Symposium on How to Fudge Twenty-two Pages and Get Away With It. Concept One was pen lines of varying length and straightness slashing diagonally across the page, with some silhouettes in the middle distance slashed with white paint of varying intensities to create the illusion of driving rain, as well as minor splash lines and effects on the side of trees and in water pools and currents. The extreme background featured two mountain ranges overlapping, done with dark and light fleck tone. It was sort of an experiment in holding a page together with extremely thin black lines and a bare minimum of solid black. This is how things went on page one, anyway. Concept Two was all thin lines, a sudden use of solid black in the middle distance and in the foreground and the alternation of diagonal and vertical pen lines to indicate rain. I was still trying to add a few shorter strokes just to break up the monotony and some use of splashing to show they aren't walking in Jell-o.
By the time I hit page four, we are into Concept Three; Dramatic Fudging and I Dare You to Tell Me So To My Face. Here I am completely without shame. For Five and One Half Pages, the rain looks like it was drawn with a ruler (it was), and the horizon is kept low enough so only the barest minimum of tall grass needs to be drawn. This was followed by Concept Four: If You Liked Vertical Lines You're Going to Love Pitch Black. Fortunately my chutzpah ran out and I couldn't have faced myself in the mirror in the morning if I stuck with the sold black for one more panel. What I replaced it with couldn't exactly be called moral either; Nothing-Could-Cast-A-Straight-Line-Shadow-Like-That Shadows (also known as Concept Five) and Cross-Hatching Till You Could Plotz (Concept Six). The Ending? Well, this was around the time that I got Cerebus' origin straight in my head (Not on your life -- someday I'm going to have it carved on stone tablets and charge everybody two hundred dollars for a peek) and this issue ended on a completely self-indulgent note. A present to me. So you didn't understand it? So who said you were supposed to?
A few weeks after this issue came out, I got a call from Phil Seuling who was out biggest distributor at the time. He didn't like the issue. He said that the first four issue were great, that they had gotten progressively better -- more humour, more plot, better pacing. But No 5 "didn't help the book. It didn't hurt, but it didn't help." That's the way Phil says things.
He was right. Number 5 was a throwback to the second issue. A straight adventure strip with a little humour here and there. It was an attempt to create the illusion that the book had its ups and downs. One issue funny, one issue not so funny. A kind of twenty-two page shrug that translated into "You think I can come up with a new Elrod in every issue? What are you, crazy?"
This tied neatly with the Gil Kane interview in Comics Journal No 38 that had started me re-thinking the whole approach I was taking to doing my own comic book. The particular quote that influenced me was:
"The difference between a comic book and a novel is not labor, not effort, it's the values. In other words, there are no meaningful values in a comic book. The people in comics books are two dimensional people going through the most elementary kind of situations, not enough to sustain anybody's interest beyond an adolescent. A novel has characterization, it has suspense, it has a structured situation full of substantial values that will hold the interest of an intelligent person. That's what I mean. Those values, if they're properly translated -- Harvey Kurtzman translated them into comics. His comics were literate, they were intelligent, they were humane, they were interesting, they were funny, they were everything."
"For instance, political cartoons, humor strips in newspapers are written in an infinitely more adult way: they're more intelligent, they're written for adults by adults with adult humor. They're really clever, and they represent adult values and that's why adults read them. Adults read them because, regardless of the fact that they're comics, they're dealing with adult frames of reference. And comic books don't have those frames of reference."
After I finished the fifth issue I embarked on an extremely lengthy process of applying adult sensibilities to each issue of Cerebus, trying to approach every plot problem on as mature a level of communication as I could. It was not easy, and still isn't. But at the very least, I wanted to feel that each issue of Cerebus advanced our cause just that much more than the issue that preceded it. Fortunately, fan reviewers, editors, columnists and letter-writers have an uncanny knack for recognizing an issue that pulls sideways instead of forwards)I knew they were good for something)."