2-25-05

The Cerebus Fallacy

I am fed up.  Because I am fed up, I am going to do something that is usually considered a death sentence for an artistic endeavor:  I am going to talk bad to reviewers.  Mind you, I'm in a pretty safe place to do that;  I don't rely on a loyal or growing readership for my income, and I have a pretty accurate view of the actual quality of my work, so, assuming any reviewers even noticed my presence, if they felt the need to slam the comic for my opinion and not for its obvious flaws, they may feel very free to fuck off.
          The thing that's got me pissed is an annoying buzz-phrase that gets bandied about the webcomics community a lot:  "The Cerebus Syndrome".  I hate that phrase.   I hate that phrase more than anything in webcomics.  I hate it almost as much as I hate people who use "irregardless" and "normalcy" as if they were actual words.  And I blame Snarky.
          In all fairness to the Snarkosaurus, I understand why he coined the term.  He was struggling to come up with some way to express how some comics, especially those that seemed to start out as gag comics, stop being funny, or place the funny on a back burner, and, for him, that phrase seemed to work best.  The problem is, other reviewers and casual readers picked it up.  And it's wrong, so very wrong.

Gasoline Alley
Seriously, it's wrong on so many levels I'll have difficulty describing it in the meagre 500-or so words to which I try to limit myself.  I'll just hit the big three.  For one thing, it's wrong because it's inaccurate.  The allusion to Cerebus the Aardvark suggests that the Cerebus series was the first place that the jump from encapsulated gags to episodic plotting occurred.  This, however is not the case.
          Certainly televison, radio, and literature have plenty of examples that predate Cerebus, but Cerebus wasn't even the first among comics.   Funky Winkerbean and Doonesbury both introduced serious elements and character growth in the 70's.  Al Capp's Li'l Abner did it in the 50's.  Heck, Gasoline Alley made the jump way back in the 20's when Skeezix was introduced.  I have no doubt that others that I have missed or ignored did the same.

Gilligan's Island
And there's a reason for that.  It's a naturaly process, especially when a project is continuously created by a single person or team.  It's part of the writing process; it's part of the living process.  Characters grow.  Things happen.  Lessons are learned.  If the things that happen are big enough, you can never go back.  People who try to pretend otherwise are doomed to a liftime on the island with a bunch of people who can build a radio out of a cocoanut but can't repair a boat's hull with a forest full of trees.
          I am not ragging on gag comics (or television shows, either—despite the derisive reference to Gilligan's Island).  I love gag comics.  I really love comics that can do gags and still give a nod to characterization.  But I truly respect comics that grow.  I am thrilled that Maritza Campos may some day allow Dave to get past his longterm crush on Margaret.  I live for every brutal issue of Something*Positive; Davan and the gang have been growing since day one.  I even love the entropic battle that rages over at Filthy Lies; you have to read the archive at a go to see it, but, little by little, Damien and Joel have worn down each other's respective cynicism and self-righteousness.  I am in awe of Funky WInkerbean and For Better or Worse, two long-standing dailies that have kept an amazing level of funny while being true to their characters and their plotlines, even at the expense of the gag.
          There's a phrase for that, and it's not "Cerebus Syndrome".  The phrase is "damn good writing".

Boxing
The thing that pisses me off the most about that phrase, the bit that just makes me so livid that I can barely type when I think about it, is that it does a disservice to the webcomics community.  Any time you put a name on something, the name makes it bigger, and more of an issue, than it is.  The consequence is that people become trapped by the label.
          Almost the moment the phrase was coined, it seemed to immediately get thrown about like a mudball at every artist who tried to grow and breathe a little.  Gwen, the lead character of Catharsis is dealing with rejection and the gang at Neko the Kitty are dealing with the end of a relationship; are Boeke and Molloy suffering from Cerebus Syndrome because neither of them set out to write Mary Worth?  You can bet some jackass will say so.
          And that's why I hate the phrase so much.  It is a tool for pigeon-holing art.  It makes a natural progression for many writers into a thing to be feared or avoided.  How many new writers will be repressed by the fear of being accused of having Cerebus Syndrome when one of their characters has to deal with the consequences of life?  The fact is that you can't be funny all the time.  Life isn't funny all the time.