Issue 112

From CerebusWiki

July 1988: Square One

Issue 112
President	Dave Sim
Backgrounds, cover-colour, and tones	Gerhard
Administrator	Karen McKiel
Circulation	29,000
Between Volumes
Previous	Next

1 Issue Summary
2 Characters
3 Locations
4 Artist Notes
- 4.1 Dave Sim Introduction Cerebus Number Zero
- 4.2 Dave Sim in the small print of the inside front cover to issue 111
5 Annotations
6 Back up material

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Issue Summary

Cerebus explores the ruins of the hotel, discovering that all the gold he had accumulated as Pope has disappeared, along with his servants including Boobah, from whom he finds a note, explaining that he has gone in search of food, leaving him with nothing except for his original personal possessions, the black vest and sword that he arrived in Iest with at the start of High Society, which he recovers from a closet. Cerebus also comes across the rather decayed corpse of Bran Mac Mufin, his face and eyes eaten away by a writhing mass of maggots. Cerebus leaves the hotel through the courtyard at its rear and proceeds 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.

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Characters

Bran Mac Mufin (last seen in issue 102; next appearance in issue 161)
Cerebus (last seen in issue 111; next appearance in issue 113)

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Locations

Iest

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Artist Notes

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Dave Sim Introduction Cerebus Number Zero

"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."

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Dave Sim in the small print of the inside front cover to issue 111

"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."

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