This is my first use of my Constitution Bar & Grill characters in "Thou Good and Faithful Cerebite," a Cerebus-related comic strip appearing in Following Cerebus.

My first "Cerebite" strip, as it appears in Following Cerebus #4

Dave Sim on the above strip:

Apart from just being really funny, Bryan's comic strip illustrates exactly the greatest strength (and cultural value) of cartooning- the ability of cartooning to distil a number of different and complicated ideas into a small space and thus emphasize those ideas in a way that discussing them in a letter or essay is less likely to do.  Are Dave Sim's YHWH theories fascinating or nutty?  Did Dave Sim actually stop being an atheist or is he just pulling our collective legs again?  And is he pulling our collective legs in an innocent way or does he secretly intend to start his own church?  And if he is starting his own church will it actually work?  And what if we go out on a limb and start believing in his theories and he starts, you know, laughing at us?  And if, having answered all of those questions to your own satisfaction and having come to the conclusion that Dave's YHWH theories are all just one big scam, does that mean it actually is okay to marry women?  And the punchline from the guy casting all the doubts is, "No."

It's certainly a handy piece of work for me because it goes a long way towards explaining the reaction to all of my post-1996 work in much the same way that I suspect political cartoons actually help politicians to understand better what the actual reaction to their policies is because the cartoon is going to be far more direct and visceral- and less circumspect and even-handed- than any editorial or news story is going to be.  Which stands to reason.  By definition the political cartoon has to express a widely accepted and more visceral truth because otherwise it isn't funny.

Looking at what I see as the widely accepted and more visceral truths contained in Bryan's strip it's no wonder I'm driving all of you guys crazy.

I haven't been this satisfied since someone mentioned to me that even though they're pretty sure my YHWH theories are completely unfounded, they have noticed that they never use the term LORD when referring to Jesus or God anymore.

Congratulations to Bryan Douglas.  And thanks.

 

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No, Dave.  Thank YOU!  

To date, Thou Good and Faithful Cerebite has appeared in issues 4, 6, 7, and 8 of Following Cerebus.  It got edged out of issue 9, but will return with a vengeance in issue 10.

   

   

You can buy these hot little numbers at your local comic shop (Austin Books has them all in stock) or order online from Win-Mill Productions.

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Philosophical Support for Cerebism

Here I would like to compile a list of other authors' work that, in one way or other, conforms with Dave's ideas about YHWH.  My purpose here isn't to show that his ideas were unoriginal (if there's ONE thing Dave's religious views are NOT, it's unoriginal) but rather to show a bit more of the context of his ideas in the REALM of ideas.  I'm trying to point out that Dave's stuff isn't always quite so off-the-wall as it first might seem.

So, please, if you're familiar at all with Cerebus, and would like to contribute any literary events or characters that seem to match up with Dave's theories, feel free to write me about them and I can expand this page.

Thus far I've only found one writer who's thinking seems to line up with Dave's on a few key points, but fortunately that writer is C.S. Lewis, so we're off to a good start.

On the Sentience of Heavenly Bodies:

From The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

     "I am Ramandu.  But I see you stare at one another and have not heard this name.  And no wonder, for the days when I was a star had ceased long before any of you knew this world, and all the constellations have changed."  
     "Golly," said Edmund, under his breath.  "He's a retired star."
     "Aren't you a star any longer?" asked Lucy.
     "I am a star at rest, my daughter," answered Ramandu.  "When I set for the last time, decrepit and old beyond all that you can reckon, I was carried to this island.  I am not so old now as I was then.  Every morning a bird brings me a fire-berry from the valleys in the Sun, and each fire-berry takes away a little of my age.  And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at the earth's eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance."
     "In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
     "Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of."

Tantalizing, no?  I've not seen Dave Sim suggest he thinks stars are sentient...  Only planets.  But still, an interesting confluence.

On Injury and Ill Health as God's Real-Life Metaphors:

Sim and C.S. Lewis also seem to be in lock-step on the issue of what injuries to different sides of one's body mean:  A wound to the right side means God is trying to tell you something, a wound to the left means you've left yourself open to an attack from Satan.  More on this once I've composed a more thorough list of C.S. Lewis injuries..........

An Odd Cross-Media Cerebism Reference:

In Dave's "Grand Unified Theory of Everything," there's a certain part prior to the Big Bang where things are still pretty simple:  The players thus far are God, God's spirit, and the Light.  God's spirit wanted to be made equal to God, and joined with Him, for all time.  So, to illustrate the folly of this, God lets his spirit join itself to "the light."  Sure enough, no sooner has God's spirit joined the light than does the light set in with "Why dontch'a let US draw forth from within us OUR equals, to join wit' us for all toime??  Hah???"

altered clip from Cerebus #289

So, you had lots of God's spirit's clones and lots of the light's clones, and the light was happy about it and the spirit was NOT happy about it, but the spirit had to keep up pace with the light or else it would be overwhelmed...

But where, I wondered, did Dave GET any of this?  I mean, women (to super-generalize) tend to value life itself a little more highly than men...  Men (to super-generalize) seem more often interested in life as simply a MEANS to more meaningful things.  But this business of one group "out-breeding" the other?  How does THAT work, when both need the other to breed at all???

And so I filed that bit of the story away as weird and unimportant.  There was plenty of other stuff in Cerebus' 6,000 pages that I found NOT weird and VERY important.

...And then, just last year, I saw Mike Judge's Idiocracy.

 

...And it made sense.  The world of Idiocracy, where the stupid have bred in greater and greater numbers than the smart for the past 500 years, presents a world where the representatives of God's spirit have simply given up, and let the representatives of the light overwhelm them.

Chilling stuff....