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Trivia / Cerebus the Aardvark

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Trivia tropes for this work:

  • Creator Backlash: Dave Sim himself has come to dislike some aspects of this comic. In particular he regrets how he portrayed feminism and the female characters in general, feeling they were overly idealized/simplified and unrealistic. His contributor Gerhard hated working on the thing in general as he slowly lost any ability to read it and was overworked to exhaustion. He motivated himself to work on The Last Day by repeatedly reminding himself that he would finally be done with the comic.
  • Creator Breakdown: And then some. Gerhard referred to Sim as “schizophrenic” after the comic ended, and he may not have been joking. In particular, it's difficult not to see a correlation between Sim's ranting about women being "leeches" and the collapse of his marriage and his resulting emotional wreck tendencies. (His ex-wife Deni Loubert was interviewed later in The Comics Journal, saying that Sim was "very scared" judging by the essay in #186.)
  • Dear Negative Reader: Sim has a severe case of Insistent Terminology with being labeled a misogynist. While for the most part, he wears his highly controversial views on gender roles on his sleeve and lives on a philosophy of No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, he considers that particular term to carry connotations of describing the "lowest, subhuman form of life in our society" and feels that he cannot adequately defend himself against it, as the label causes most people to dismiss him outright.
  • Flip-Flop of God: The philosophy and symbolism of the story is retconned whenever Sim's own personal views change.
  • Hypothetical Casting: Sim has said he hears George C. Scott when Cerebus talks.
  • The Other Darrin: Cerebus Live! where people read/performed scenes from the comic at various conventions. In the first series of skits (available here), Sim played all the roles. By the time Cerebus Live II and Cerebus Live III came around, almost all the parts had been recast and the only character Sim still played was Lord Julius.
  • Shrug of God: Whether Cerebus went to Hell (as the ending heavily implies) or whether he actually went to Heaven and was just panicking needlessly at the last second, as Sim hints might have actually been the case in the author's notes in the phonebook of The Last Day.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • High Society was originally conceptualized as a Comic-Book Adaptation of War and Peace.
    • Rick's Story was going to be a simple parody of The Bible, but Sim's reading of it for research led to his religious conversion.

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