Paul Isaacs

TERRACOTTA WARRIORS
Written and directed by Dennis Law. Presented by Sight, Sound & Action Ltd. To June 27. Tue-Sat 8pm; Sun 7pm; Wed, Sat-Sun mats 2pm. $35-$85. Elgin Theatre, 189 Yonge. 416-872-5555. www.ticketmaster.ca.

I should tread carefully here. The last critic to give Terracotta Warriors a negative review, Leanne Campbell of the Vancouver Westender, found herself barred for life from the play's downtown venue. Considering all she did was compare the show's use of dry ice to a "heavy metal concert," the punishment seems a little harsh. Still, this time next week, if you find my entrails stretched end-to-end across the Elgin Theatre bandstand, I can't say I wasn't warned.

At least the show doesn't want for ambition. In his program notes, director/ writer/producer Dennis Law describes Terracotta Warriors as "the most astounding presentation of Chinese performing arts in the West over the course human history." Law -- whose previous producing credits include 1997's seminal karate kangaroo movie, Warriors of Virtue -- is a true Barnum-style showman. The whole event reeks of exclamation marks. There are 300 costumes! 24 epic sets! 94 performers! Kung fu! Swordplay! Acrobatics! Plate-spinning! It's the greatest show in human history! Terracotta Warriors! (I didn't see any elephants, cockatoos or dancing bears, perhaps they came on during my pee break.)

A show like this lives or dies on the quality of its schlock, and that's especially the case here, as the narrative, based on the life story of the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, is near incomprehensible. (I lost the plot shortly after the actor playing Confucius' ghost started doing backflips.) Sadly, despite the skill of the players and the spectacular costume work, Law's choreography is, on the whole, unremarkable: the acrobats look uncomfortable in their dancing roles, while the often terrific dancers are wasted on bland, overly Westernized ballet routines. If anyone ever opens a hotel in Vegas called Beijing Beijing, Law's going to need more practice than this to score a slot there.




CEREBUS DIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVE SIM
Cerebus #300: Latter Days 53. By Dave Sim and Gerhard. Aardvark-Vanaheim. 40 pp.

When Lee Hazlewood released his 1973 album Poet, Fool or Bum, the NME gave it a single-word review: "Bum." Dave Sim, creator of the comic-strip character Cerebus the Aardvark, took a similar critical sound-biting at the hands of Entertainment Weekly earlier this March. In one sentence, the magazine distilled Sim's entire lifetime's oeuvre, created over 26 years, into just two words: "Grade: B."

In that period, Sim has not only written, drawn, inked and published 300 issues of Cerebus almost single-handedly, but also entertained thousands of readers, pissed off twice as many, been lauded by the comics industry as a guru, been denounced by it as a lunatic and revolutionized the graphic-novel medium. Still: Grade B.

If Dave Sim recorded an album, it would be called Genius, Asshole or Madman. Many readers find it hard to believe that Sim's Sisyphean workload hasn't now driven him slightly ga-ga. In November, Saturday Night magazine published a salacious (if not wholly untrue) profile of Sim, portraying him as a reclusive, near-suicidal religious fundamentalist.

(In an interview with eye, Sim dismissed the article as a "smear piece," like being "kicked in the nuts in print.")

But all you really need to know about Sim, good or bad, is in the comics. Cerebus did not begin auspiciously: the first issue, published in November, 1977, was a rudimentarily sketched, puerile parody of Conan the Barbarian. The one memorable element was its eponymous protagonist: a violent, heavy-drinking, sword-wielding aardvark.

It was one night in 1979, fuelled by a metric assload of LSD, that Sim finally came up with his Big Idea: the comic would run for 300 issues and no more, he decided, in the process telling the story of Cerebus' entire life, up until the final issue in March, 2004, which would end with his death.

Cerebus #300, which was released exactly as planned three months ago, shows about as much likeness to those early issues as "Surfin' USA" does to "Heroes and Villains," or Lee Hazlewood does to Nancy Sinatra. Over the years, Sim has taken a more satirical, post-modern approach. In one extended 500-page story, "High Society," Cerebus becomes prime minister of the fictional country of Iest, and Sim provides a merciless critique of electioneering and spin. Later tales were even more ambitious: in the "Melmoth" storyline, Cerebus disappears entirely for 12 issues, with Sim instead offering a fictionalized portrait of Oscar Wilde.

But at the same time as Sim was hitting these artistic peaks, his idiosyncratic views on religion and feminism began increasingly to inform the comic, causing it to shed readers by the thousand -- especially women. In issue #265, Sim printed a 21,000-word text essay entitled "Tangents" that described women's right to choose as "a lunatic misuse of free will." He also rallied against what he perceived as a "feminist/homosexualist" axis engaged in a conspiracy to tyrannize straight men.

"It wouldn't be that big a stretch to categorize my writing as Hate Literature against women," he wrote, "in this Fascistic Feminist country."

At this point, even Sim's most dedicated fans balked. One British Cerebus website posted often-updated columns entitled "Davewatch," and "Misogyny: Is Dave Sim Mad?" On another comics blog, "Out of the Darkling Wood," one fan confessed that he had stopped reading Cerebus altogether, because "whatever I might learn about characters I used to care about is not worth the pain of engaging with Sim's collapsing soul."

"I've never thought of Cerebus as hate literature," Sim says. "I was trying to make the point that it's become impossible to discuss things in a meaningful way if you're limited only to those subjects that make women feel good. It's why movies and television suck so badly these days. People self-censor themselves so that nothing in them can make a woman feel bad about herself."

Sim's final storyline, "Latter Days," was his most difficult creation so far. It included a several-issues-long segment in which Cerebus offers an obscure reinterpretation of the Talmud, in teensy, migraine-inducing lettering. Sim concludes issue #300 by having Cerebus morph into a super-powered rabbi, complete with hat and ringlets. (In one panel, Cerebus slices off his foreskin to the sound effect "THOIT!")

So is Dave Sim a genius, asshole or madman -- or all three? Perhaps comics historians will see him as a D.W. Griffiths-style figure, objectionable and influential at the same time. His aggressive advocacy of independent self-publishing, for example -- every issue of Cerebus was published by Sim's company, Aardvark-Vanaheim Inc. -- has been a model for hundreds of creators (Todd MacFarlane's Image Comics, for instance).

Whatever happens, Sim remains oblivious to his critics. "I've heard from people who turned away from the book in disgust," Sim says, "only to see merit in those same parts years later. Cerebus is a long way from being a populist work. It has never been widely accepted and I don't imagine it ever will be."