Swords Of Cerebus Vol 1
(1st Edition, January 1981)
(1st Edition, January 1981)
The six Swords Of Cerebus volumes, published between 1981 and 1984, were Dave's first attempt to collect the book's individual issues in a more permanent form. Each volume contains four early issues of Cerebus, plus a bonus short story often involving a guest artist. Marshall Rogers, Joe Rubenstein, Gene Day, Barry Windsor-Smith and Gerhard all contributed to these.
What interests us here, however, are the Swords introductions. Dave wrote 26 of these ranging in length from half a page to six pages in length. Some, like the one below, tackle just a single issue of Cerebus, while others stretch out to cover a whole arc, such as The Palnu Trilogy's run in issues 14-16. Each of the bonus short stories gets its own introduction too.
In these essays, we meet a rather different Dave Sim to the one we know today -- he'd have been in his middle-to-late twenties when writing them -- hear a lot of very entertaining anecdotes and learn a lot about his experience of producing the book in its first three years. They're a lot of fun. With Tim's indulgence, I'm going to present one of the Swords introductions here every week. They'll be appearing in chronological order, each accompanied by a panel or two illustrating one of points Dave mentions in that particular essay. I'm using scans because none of the free OCR software available online seems able to cope with files of this size, and because I don't have time to retype all the introductions from scratch. I hope the scans will be legible on whatever device you're using and that you enjoy reading them as much as I always have.
Cerebus #1: "The severed hand bit served to establish that tho this might be a
cute and furry aardvark, this was also a mean and lethal aardvark," says Dave.
Next week: Dave-the-writer and Dave-the-penciller negotiate a deal.
Next week: Dave-the-writer and Dave-the-penciller negotiate a deal.
