Tuesday 16 October 2012

High Society Digital #03 - Out Now!

High Society Digital #03 (Cerebus #28, July 1981)
Available from Cerebus Downloads
Out Now! Only 99¢

"Just when you think you know where I'm going with all this, it's time for Cerebus to pay a surreal visit to the Eighth Sphere and to resume his discussions with Suenteus Po! Hi, I'm Dave Sim and this is one of my favourite issues of HIGH SOCIETY. It's ALL Cerebus, ALL layout and storytelling experimentation from beginning to end and chock full of the political and philosophical intrigue and humour the book would become known for! I guarantee, you've never read a single issue like it!"

People everywhere agree that HIGH SOCIETY is Award-Winning (Eisner; Harvey; Shuster, Ignatz, Wizard) graphic novelist Dave Sim's greatest and most hilarious work. It regularly gets a 5-star rating on lists of the Greatest Graphic Novels of All Time. In addition to the 20 pages of art and story, you also get everything that was in the original comic book -- Deni's Note from the Publisher, the original ads, the original letters pages, the original back cover and inside back cover.

BONUS! Original documents from the time period from Dave Sim's Cerebus Archive as well as pages from Dave Sim's original Notebooks (where he plotted and designed each issue) accompanied by Sim's own annotations.

GARY GROTH -- EDITOR, THE COMICS JOURNAL:
(from the Cerebus Archive supplement to High Society Digital #03 - Cerebus #28, July 1981)
...I continue to enjoy Cerebus. Your "Mind Games" story stands out in my memory as one of your most successful efforts. It should put the lie to impoverished hacks and unimaginative comics fans who claim that comics must be filled with pyrotechnical visual flummery to work as comic art. I consider "Mind Games" one of the finest examples of a talking-heads comic I've ever seen. The problem of static was overcome by a keen sense of design and continuity, clever dialogue, and an involving storyline. Keep up the first rate work.

3 comments:

JLH said...

The Audio version of this one is especially good (thanks in part to all the text being off by itself). Here's hoping we get to Mind Game I someday in the same format!

Slumbering Agartha said...

The camera work succeeded in making the viewer (or THIS viewer at least) "move" with Cerebus. At times it was so effective that I started to feel like I was hallucinating. It's a major challenge to make something like this dynamic without taking away from the composition.

Also very cool: the prototype aardvarkian head sketch of Po in the notebook section, showing that Dave knew Po was an aardvark long before the reveal.

Eric Hoffman said...

@ Michael - This is discussed at length in the essay I wrote on the narrative and structural development of CEREBUS. What is equally interesting to what you point out is that the iteration of Po depicted in MOTHERS & DAUGHTERS looks suspiciously like a caricature of Dave Sim. This is no accident: originally, Sim intended the character "Dave" to be an aardvark, but decided that would not work. So he merely shifted that depiction onto Po, who would essentially act as a "stand-in" for "Dave" until "Dave"'s first appearance in the pages of MINDS.