Latter Days (phonebook)

***Latter Days*** is a "phonebook" collection of the *Cerebus* comic book which covers the first half of the "Latter Days" storyline (*Cerebus No. 266* through *Cerebus No. 288*). It was first published in November, 2003 by Aardvark-Vanaheim in an edition of 1,000 copies.

## Dave Sim on *Church & State I*

* Q: I noticed that the first two issues of Latter Days had a distinctively different look when it came to the design of the pages. I would guess that this was because both issues were mostly self-contained stories. Could you explain how you go about making design decisions, and how those decisions correlate with the type of story you're telling?
	+ Dave: The decision-making on the Latter Days prologue had a lot to do with Cerebus fading in and out in his own mind. I tried to leave everything very open and a kind of dazzling white (which was fine by Ger: fewer backgrounds) to emphasize both the blanking in and blanking out and the fact that Cerebus was in love again—although we don't find that out until four hundred pages later when we see who he's telling the story to.

* Q2: Latter Days is basically Cerebus' recollection of events in his life as told to the Interviewer/New Joanne. This means it is subjective in nature and, presumably, what we are seeing did not really happen as he's recalling it. (For example, he's hazy on the details of his first meeting with the Three Wisefellows, and appears to be relying, at least on part, on what they told him of those events). This differs from earlier volumes which appear to be told through the eyes of the universal narrator (presumably, you). Can you comment on why you chose to cast this portion of Cerebus' life in a subjective light and what this means in terms of the history of the character as a whole? (i269/p61)
	+ Dave: In some ways it was just a literary device: on the one hand it was a tactical narrative choice to try to maintain what I assumed would be the seriously flagging attentions of the reader when they hit the Torah commentaries (I really don’t care about any of this stuff, but I have to keep reading to find out who Cerebus is telling all of this to since Dave has never used Cerebus as the narrator before and it’s obvious from the way the story is being told that it is being told to some specific individual not just to me and the other audience members)) and on the other hand as a means of identifying that disinterest as an aberrational condition from my own standpoint even though it was a condition I would have shared only a few years previously. That is, having become “sold” on the veracity of the Bible, I had (in an over-arching sense) arrived at what was to me a self-evident state of existence: I believed that someone purporting to have determined what it is that the Bible is actually saying was deserving of undivided attention given that the Bible is the foundational document of our civilization. At the same time, I was enough a creature of my own time and culture to recognize that that was an aberrational viewpoint to hold in the late twentieth century where the Bible was—and is—pretty much universally dismissed as either fairy tales (by atheists and secular humanists) or as metaphorical, literarily distorted non-historical, non-scientific fables seeking to define the nature of God (by the faithful). Even the most devout tend to deconstruct the text as they would Aesop’s Fables or the myths of North American Indians i.e. What is the universal human psychological condition which led to the evolution and adoption of these false stories as foundational beliefs? To me, of course, this is a twentieth century Freudian conceit: the misapprehension that everything originates in the unconscious mind, everything originates from repressed sexuality. As a result it seemed sensible to cast Cerebus in my own situation: he’s the only one who believes that these stories document historical truths and manages to persuade everyone that he’s right. Of course he only manages to persuade everyone he’s right because the text of The Book of Rick establishes him as the long awaited arbiter, just as Muslims hold Muhammad to be the “paraclete” promised by the Johannine Jesus—the one who would come after him and verify everything that Jesus had taught. Which in Cerebus’ case becomes a good news/bad news situation. It gets him unquestioned obedience and obeisance and something of a free ride, but only until New Joanne starts asking some hard questions as a non-believer at which point he begins to unwittingly undermine his own system of belief because a) he’s so used to being considered The Great Cerebus that he’s ceased to question the fact himself and b) he wants so badly to get into her pants by impressing her with his being The Great Cerebus and giving her the exclusive story that he has no idea how inconsistent his own story is and c) he isn’t aware of the level of attraction that being the centre of a system of belief is to someone who is only interested in materialistic things i.e. being Mrs. The Great Cerebus for the sake of the Imelda Marcos-sized collection of shoes and the Queen of the Circus Ego-boo.
	+ Certainly the text becomes partly suspect as a result because it is being documented by New Joanne but only partly suspect because she obviously realizes that the whole edifice is as shaky as it is and that it was so easy to undermine Cerebus’ belief system just by asking some really basic hard questions. Note the fact that at the beginning she loathes the idea that she might remind Cerebus of Old Joanne and he reassures her that she doesn’t and she is reassured by that fact but as she went along she realized that her only claim to co-equivalent power with Cerebus hinges on her being identified with the only female character in the Book of Rick. She would have been sophisticated enough to know that her only hope was to limit the number of falsehoods that she herself espoused in order to keep from being tripped up herself, foremost among them to cast herself in the role of New Joanne. She wasn’t a pathological liar like Astoria with the psychotic ability to keep manufacturing a new reality anytime the old reality got discredited. She was working the other side of the fence: she was in search of absolute truth, as a journalist, so she adhered as much as possible to the party line once she had discredited it. She was interested in tearing the house down when it was Cerebus’ house alone but was interested in shoring it up when it became their shared property.
	+ I think it’s analogous to the situation with Mary Magdalene which has just started to hatch out in the last few years since The Da Vinci Code was published. I just finished my commentaries on the Gospel According to Mark a couple of weeks back and from my reading of the circumstantial evidence in the text, I think it’s a safe bet that the Synoptic Jesus didn’t go to the cross. Someone else took his place and the short ending on the story (there are two versions of chapter sixteen extant) would seem to indicate that he and Magdalene went west. Picture yourself traveling as Mrs. Jesus and taking up residence in a new country just as his “messiahship” is starting to be taken for granted. I think it explains the French Revolution, for one thing. The royal dynasty that they founded eventually has to face the grisly execution their forebears fled in Jerusalem albeit a rather physically easier one (wouldn’t you rather be guillotined than crucified?). It would also serve to explain the cowardice that’s bred in the French bone and the fact that they can’t help undermining their own best efforts (i.e. the French were the ones who championed the universal adoption of the EU Constitution which they themselves wrote and hysterically dictated that any country voting against it would be deemed traitorous and expelled from the EU—and then became the only country to vote against it). From my reading YHWH missed the point of the Synoptic Jesus, seeing him as the ultimate tactical piece in the Great Chess Game with God. Why have him go to the cross when you can spirit him away, have him produce kids and take over the world that way? The point missed, of course, is that the crucifixion was the defining quality. Without the crucifixion of Jesus, there was no resurrection of Jesus (I think his substitute was resurrected). Healing people and walking on water were basically just magician tricks on a very lofty plateau. Being the meschiach involved self-sacrifice and submission to an excruciating death. To not do so was just plain cowardice that no perceived stature—such as the women had about the Synoptic Jesus—could overcome.
	+ I’ll leave it at that since I intend to publish my commentaries on Mark at some future date. I’m about halfway through chapter one of Luke right now.

## References

 1. ↑ March, 2004 Yahoo Groups discussion
2. ↑ April, 2006 Yahoo Groups discussion