The Great Cerebus Parashah
There is some talk going on at the Cerebus Yahoo!Group about rereading the entire Cerebus storyline (well, at least what has been published to date). Here is the tenative outline of this massive rereading. We plan on doing three issues a week give or take a few issues to wrap up a chapter. Then we'll have a discussion around those three issues. For people just starting out reading Cerebus, here are your spoiler warnings. We will be discussing what we know now about Cerebus epic during the rereadings to try and gain a better understanding of the story. The side stories, known collectively as the Apocrypha, are not being listed in this calendar. They aren't included in the Parashah because not everyone has access to these stories.
So why are we calling it the Cerebus Parashah? Parashah is a Jewish (Hebrew actually) term (From Dictionary.com:) "A lesson from the Torah, or Law, from which at least one section is read in the Jewish synagogue on every Sabbath and festival." And from Mitch: "Basically, the Torah is read chronologically every week at Sabbath. It becomes linked with that day .. a good "in comic" example would be Maus. There's a scene where Art's father, in the camp, is despondent and cheered up by a priest who compares is "number" to a lucky series of numbers/dates in the jewish faith, and this re-affirms him. He later tells Art that when he looked it up, the parashah (or part of the torah) that was read at Art's bar mitzvah also corresponded to the same numbers. Its to make sure you refresh yourself on the entire Torah regularly, to remember all the things that may fade with time. Our Parashah will allows us to refresh all our connections and memories of the minuteness of Cerebus."
I couldn't have said it better myself. Without further ado, the Cerebus Parashah:
- Parashah Calendar: Lists the weekly reading by issue and pages in the phonebook. Also has links to the synopsis of the issues read so far.
- Apocrypha Calendar: The calendar for the "side stories". Here is the same calendar in Adobe reader PDF format.
- Parashah Questions: A list of questions that keep popping up that we hope to answer. Or at least find more info on.
- Parashah Topics: A list of topics that are popping up in the series.
Here are some links that might come in handy when doing the rereading:
- Alexx's Cerebus Page: A timeline of Estarcion thru 'Guys', Annotated Cerebus 1.2 insight into the comic to link up various events, The Cerebus Concordance 1.2: indexes the people, places, itmes and groups in the stories. Files are all text, but still are pretty large.
- Cerebus' Comics: This site has loads of info: Character descriptions, info about: groups / races, places, things & events, religions, Diamondback and some quotes.
THANKS!
Many thanks go out to Mitch for devising this schedule and for the intro part on Parashahs and for Rick (TTM indeedy) for doing the counting and figuring out which phonebook pages we'd have to read.