Pattern Recognition
Cerebus Church&
State II
Issues 81-111
December 1985 - June
1988
625 pages
Church and State
concludes with a beginning, an ugly understanding that comes to the main character,
the foresight to his death. It hits the earth-pig with the force of the moon.
While the first volume of Church and State opened with Cerebus
writing, the second volume opens with a black-costumed Spider-Roach babbling of
the Secret Sacred Wars and dragging Cerebus around the lower city. After short
visit to the spirit world, some spiritual history, and a return to the prime
material plane and lighting of some gunpowder, Cerebus regains his power and
position as Pope. He works at constructing a perfect orb, and riding a black tower
to the moon where he learns of his the creation and destruction of the world as
well as the ending of his own life, where the Earth-pig learns “You will live
only a few more years, you die alone. Unmourned. And unloved.”
The act of creation that carried some form of salvation
mentioned in the response to Church &
State I eluded Cerebus, it continues to do so in this volume. Yet, this
confrontation with a celestial power (along with the revelation that he lost
his gold, army, and position as pope) stuns the title character. The
Man-in-the-Moon slides advice to the aardvark via Dostoyevsky: “To accept
suffering and be redeemed by it.”
It seems, if Cerebus won’t gain redemption from writing,
from creating, he’ll gain it through suffering.
Cerebus gains power and wealth and then loses it. As readers
we’ve been put in the same spot with Cerebus at the end of Cerebus, the end of High Society,
and now the end of Church & State—Cerebus
is broke and left with nothing. Always a dream of wealth and power through
conquest fill his mind, but what the consideration beyond such acquisitions
(when the question is asked) never has an answer from Cerebus, the achieving of
the dream is its own reward. Which sounds fine, but pity is reserved fro the Man, or aardvark,
that achieves a dream and has no other to follow it, or is unable to learn
contentment with a static situation. Yet this static situation of the character
is masqued by his ever-active deeds, wanderings, and political intricacies of
the story. These details of events happening in Church & State II totally elude me. I hoped, in vain, that this
reading of the text (with greater reading skills and familiarity with the story
and the characters) but no. I’m as clueless as Cerebus about the Kelvinists,
Cirinists, Eastern Church, Western
Church and the chronicled
deeds of Suetonious Po.
And yet, at least with the way the story read, this time,
such details seem almost meaningless—broad metaphors for bureaucratic confusion
and needless complication that matters little and amounts to nothing in the
grand weave of the plot. When the Man in-the-Moon informed Cerebus the gold and
empire and position of power he spent the last 1,220 pages assembling vanished in
two panels and five word balloons on page 1212. Brushing aside such complexity
and political points with such brevity hardly stresses the importance of these
details. Here, Sim has this shift of events serve as yet another supporting
point to convey to Cerebus the message of the things that matter—if not to him
at least to the universe at large in the story.
And the poor earth-pig hasn’t gathered it yet in 4 volumes
into his own series.
This repetition too, of an easy truth hard learned (as they
so often seem to be…in hindsight if at no other time) need tough obvious
lessons again and again until it finally sinks in or until the subject is in
the proper frame of mind to notice the lesson and take the learning into
consideration and life.
An hypnotic element exists in black and white art—an element
that that seems particularly apt for this volume of Cerebus-with the void and the light, the East and the Worst aspect
of the Church. The composition assembled by Sim and Gerhard grab attention to
focus on matters that are often overlooked—the glass shade of a hurricane lamp
(on page 773), or the billows of clouds (page 687) and the way the light plays
over shattering glass on page 1024. The lines and crosshatchings and the white space judiciously used bring
out, if not an appreciation at least a fascination with these objects depicted,
or to notice the grain of the wood that lines the page.
This detail, the fine lines from thin crow nibs ensnare the
focus with Lilliputian lines that hold colors and brushed ink can’t manage (although
they have their own machinations to ensnare attention and enflame the
imagination). A fine set of works manages by floppy pages of a comic about a
violent misanthropic aardvark.
So, what to make of this reading of Church & State?
Patterns of oppositions exist. The characters in the story obtained awareness
of these patterns and will gain redemption or destruction from their cycles.
Readers face a similar choice.
