Cerebus No. 112-113

***Cerebus No. 112/113*** is a double issue of *Cerebus* published by Aardvark-Vanaheim.

## Stories

### "Square One"

#### Part One

Cerebus explores the ruins of the hotel, discovering that all the gold he had accumulated as Pope has disappeared. He finds a note from Boobah, who took a bag of gold to get more food, but says he may not be back "for a few years". He sees a vision of Red Sophia and finds that she left behind a pair of chain-mail underwear, which depresses him, then throws him into a rage. Continuing to explore. he comes across the rather decayed corpse of Bran Mac Mufin, his face and eyes eaten away swarmed with flies. He finds himself left with nothing but his possessions he had when he arrived in Iest; his medallions, black vest and sword. He has a vision of Boobah working at a desk and then leaves the hotel through the courtyard at its rear, proceeding down the steps of the walkway that clings to the side of the Tower on his way to the Lower City of Iest. To add to his bad mood, Cerebus finds that the walkway has collapsed in one place, preventing him from progressing any further down and just as he thinks it can't get any worse, it starts to rain heavily again.

#### Part Two

While sitting on the edge of the broken steps and contemplating the verdict of the Judge on how his life will end, Cerebus decides to kill himself. Doffing his black vest and medallions and tossing away his sword behind him, he tries to muster the courage to jump to his death through the hole in the steps high above the Lower City. Although unable to carry out his suicide, he almost plunges to his death. Exhausted and frightened by his near fatal experience, he falls asleep on the edge of the gap and then dreams of perilously crossing a rickety rope bridge over an abyss that collapses underneath him, leaving him dangling over the pitch black void. Waking in fright and with terrible neck pain, he picks up his vest, sword and medallions then returns to the hotel and his old bedroom to sleep off the pain in a more comfortable spot - the bedroom floor.

On his way out of the front of the hotel the next morning, he finds a single gold coin in the entry hall; all that remains of his once vast hoard. He puts it in his vest pocket. He meets an old man in a tavern a mile further down the road that winds around the side of the Tower who bitterly confirms that Cirin's soldiers have seized control of Iest by force during Cerebus' absence, without any significant opposition from the Iestan army and have imposed martial law but Cerebus isn't phased by the old man's anger. Instead, Cerebus just tells the man what he wants to know, "where it all ends." by relating the Judge's story of the End of the Solar System.

## Additional

* "Note from the President" by Dave Sim
* "Aardvark Comment"

## Characters

* Cerebus *(last seen in issue 111; next appearance in issue 114)*
* Red Sophia, vision *(last seen in issue 90; next appearance in issue 163)*
* Bran Mac Mufin, corpse *(last seen in issue 111; next appearance in issue 156)*
* Boobah, vision *(last seen in issue 92; next appearance in issue 142)*
* Old Man in the Tavern *(first appearance; next appearance in issue 126)*

## Objects

* Cerebus' medallions
* Cerebus' vest
* Cerebus' sword

## Publication Notes

* "Square One" reprinted in *Cerebus No. 0*.

## Dave Sim on...

* "Having worked on 'Church & State' for five years (Gerhard for almost four), we were definitely at a low ebb emotionally when it came to working on the book. I remember working on 110 and 111 and both of us just had this over-whelming anger about it. As opposed to the exhilaration of finishing 'High Society', 'Church & State' was just this major 'down'. We had a bottle of Dom Perignon in the studio fridge ready to pop open to celebrate finally coming to the end of this mammoth project and as I recall it just sat there unopened for a month or two. We had obviously anticipated at some genetic level the overwhelming indifference that was going to be the reaction. Virtually no mail came in for a month or two.

Anyway.
We took some time off. Not a lot of time, but a couple of weeks or so. I had decided that we would do a double issue of 112/113 and release it in August. Only one cover to do, one letters page, one back cover. I thought it would cut down on the work load a little bit.
It was a nightmare.
At the time we had a third floor studio on King Street which was very long and narrow and we had twenty nails up on the wall with clips hanging off of them. As we finished an issue, we hung the pages up on the clips (in the present studio we don't have any long and narrow space, so the nails are in four rows of five pages each). For 112/113, Gerhard put another row of nails above and another row of nails below. It took forever to fill them up. No matter how hard we were working; no matter how much extra time we put in after hours, we still had a wall full of empty clips. Of course, by that time it was too late to back out or change the format. All we could do was keep going. Of course it didn't help that any visitors to the studio could 'read' what we had done in a little under fifteen seconds.
Of course five years later on, I read it and I'm very happy with the results. I also tend to agree with people that it is an epilogue to 'Church & State' in a way that 'Exodus' is not an epilogue to 'High Society'. We even talked to the printer about the possibility of adding it to the back of 'Church & State' volume two in the later printings. C & S II is already the thickest of the reprint volumes and there would be many problems caused in binding the books by trying to add five more eight-page signatures."
* "Cerebus 112 and 113 will be released under one cover in August 1988. Like issue 51 the forty-page story is a transition between novels and as such will never be reprinted."

## References

 1. ↑ *Cerebus No. 0*
2. ↑ *Cerebus No. 111*