Reviews for The Waiting Place, Book Three, Vol. 3

The average rating for The Waiting Place, Book Three, Vol. 3 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-06 00:00:00 Bob Grove So here's the moment that Sim takes what was left of the fourth wall and sets about hammering it into a fine powder. No, Cerebus's world will never make any more sense than it does, right now, but on the other hand it all makes perfect sense, and that sense is: it's stuff that Dave Sim thought up. Over a long period of time. During which his ideas about comics, about narrative, and about reality changed quite a bit. And during which he kept producing the comic at a steady pace, twenty pages a month, regardless of what the hell he was doing or what the hell was going on in his head at the time. Honestly, I probably prefer this, as a resolution, to the sort of internally-consistent, narratively-coherent afterthought that I'm sure Sim could have come up with in its place, had he wanted. Cerebus is a comic that Sim thought up and committed to 300 issues of, and by issue 200 he'd been all over the place with it, and to think of Cerebus as unified by any principle more significant than the fact that Cerebus was what Dave Sim would be doing until he hit issue 300 would be foolish. And if you can accept this, and get over the disappointment that you're no longer allowed to think of Cerebus's story as an epic fantasy in the usual sense, you're primed for the next hundred issues. Sure, there will never be a conventional payoff to the rich narrative that sustained the comic for most of the last 200 issues. But you do get to look forward to a hundred more issues of Dave Sim creating the sort of comics art he feels like making at the time, and as an added bonus those issues will continue to be about some of the characters you've grown fond of.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-11-12 00:00:00 Barbara Liebl Collecting issues # 187-200 of Dave Sim's 300 issues limited series Cerebus the Aardvark and being the last part of four in the Mothers & Daughters story arc, this volume returns to the main action once more, while simultaneously offering a much better metafictional intrusion. Cerebus' creator, Dave (presumably Sim, and clearly not, then, Viktor Davis from Reads), has a long conversation with Cerebus about the story so far, basically. As such, it becomes a superbly written and drawn meeting and conversation which is both metafictional (in that the writer/artist inserting himself into the fiction as writer/artist/creator) and metaphysical (in that the relation between a creator and that which he has created is studied). After the hardships of Reads, Minds closes the Mothers & Daughters story arc in a most satisfying way - with Dave Sim back on top of his creative game.