Jaka's Story (Cerebus, Book 5) [Paperback]

 

 

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After the sprawling, cosmic `Church & State', Dave Sim refocuses with "Jaka's Story", and gives us an altogether quieter, more personal work, centred on the relationships of a tiny cast and taking place in a handful of intimate locations. Cerebus himself is almost superfluous - while he gets some great scenes early in the book, later on he is literally sent to retrieve a `guffin' and is absent for the final third of the book, reappearing only for a dramatic final two-page spread. He will also spend most of the next book, "Melmoth", in a catatonic reverie while the story focuses on a quasi-biographical account of the death of Oscar Wilde, suggesting that Sim probably felt at the time that he needed a break from the aardvark.

So, whereas the prior books have been defined by swords-and-sorcery, political parody and epic myth-making respectively, here the genre shifts to melodrama. Cerebus's one true love, Jaka, has married a pleasant young man who is happy to spend his days trying to bounce a ball into a bucket and has no ambitions beyond engendering a son. The couple rent accommodation from the local tavern-keeper, who also employs Jaka as a dancer in his empty tavern in order to voyeuristically watch over her. The final resident of their tiny isolated hamlet is a fictionalised Oscar Wilde, who spends his evenings socialising with Jaka's innocent husband and drawing out information on Jaka's childhood from him, in order to provide source material for his own "Jaka's Story." A largely unseen backdrop of repression and menace is provided by the matriarchal fascist regime that has seized power in Iest during Cerebus's revelatory experience at the end of "Church & State." A dazed Cerebus stumbles into this claustrophobic set-up, and what follows is a tightly-written drama that addresses the nature of art and the artist's responsibility to their audience and society.

The characters are, by and large, beautifully developed, particularly the tavern keeper wrestling with his lust for Jaka, and `Oscar' is a marvellous combination of superciliousness and obsequiousness. The niggling arguments and simmering resentments of a troubled marriage are captured with great skill, and Jaka herself is beautifully presented to us both as an independent character and through the eyes of others. This book also stands as something of an oddity in the Cerebus series, in that it is free from both the misanthropy that characterises earlier volumes, and the misogyny prevalent in later books.

The artwork is excellent - Gerhard's detailed backgrounds find a middle ground between architectural illustration and the kind of exceptionally detailed line work found in the engravings of Gustav Dore. Sim's cartooning hasn't quite hit the tremendous high-point of `Guys' yet, but is nonetheless remarkable in its ability to convey a range of emotions and tones through the use of a wide variety of cartooning styles. Special mention should also be made of the lettering - it is during `Jaka's Story' that Sim really starts to make progress towards the `illustrative' lettering he would later use with such imagination and aplomb, and a caricature of Margaret Thatcher that appears in this volume is greatly enlivened by superb lettering that successfully captures the exaggerated rhythm and intonation of her voice.

The book is interspersed with extracts from Oscar's illustrated prose "Jaka's Story," and here the work falls down a little. The illustrations are uniformly excellent, but Sim is much better with dialogue than with descriptive prose, and his efforts to emulate Oscar Wilde's writing style manage to replicate the mannered wordiness typical of 19th Century prose without ever quite capturing the wit and sparkle that elevated Wilde above his peers. Consequently these prose sections can feel like a chore.

There is also an infrequent tendency to fall back on cliché (birds flying past the window of the protagonist's plush but restrictive residence, for instance), and the occasional coincidence strains credibility, but these are minor issues in a work that, having expanded the scope and vocabulary of comic books, continues to stand as an impressive piece of storytelling regardless of medium.

Jaka's Story is a very different read from the four books that go before it. After the fast pace of Cerebus' campaign to become Prime Minister and his descent into glorious megalomania in Church and State, things definitely switch gear now.

The tone clearly and deliberately becomes more mature - Cerebus ceases to be the centre of attention, the hero we have seen up until now, and we begin to feel sympathy more than excitement as he turns into a real person who has to face regret and disappointment.

And Sim and Gerhard really dish that out to him in Jaka's Story - cooping him up in a tiny house with his true love and the man she married while he was off adventuring. When the viewpoint zooms in on Cerebus' expressions as he listens to Rick and Jaka having sex in the room next door, we're being taken to places that few comics have the stomach for - or the skill to deliver.

I think people often switch off to this series because of the (at first glance) weak first chapter. The elegant, interweaving structure of Jaka's Story - and its concise portrayal of very raw emotions make this, not Volume One, the book to start with.

The start of what is to become Dave Sim's introduction of literary figures into Cerebus; a tale of a barbarian aardvaark. This is the fourth book of the series that begins with Cerebus.

The book introduces Oscar Wilde, a departure from the host of characters that provide the usual backrop to the rise and fall of the earth-pig born. Apart from this introduction, (Oscar later gets a book devoted to himself; Melmoth) we get a thorough fleshing out of Jaka's character, the tavern dancer has a grand, yet tortured past and is about to take a more prominent role in Cerebus' future. We also learn more about the Cirinists and take a journey into the mind of an man obsessed with a woman.

This Cerebus is, as I mentioned, a more literary tale than the others, bringing the series into greater focus and eschwing a lot of the comedic moments of yore.

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