Description

C & S II, the fourth volume of the 6,000 page CEREBUS epic, is a book bubbling over with conflict, with borrowed characters and quasi-legal parodies--including a scorching red-hot take on Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns--each synthesized and absorbed into the whole. All of this in the midst of a plot dense with revelation, with changing allegiances and scale shifts that threaten to upend the titular character and even his world. In an industry now filled with "cosmic" plot-lines that last a few months before the status quo reasserts itself, C + S II is the real deal--a dangerous comic, where the various actors behave like real people, beholden only to their own self-conceptions--impulsive, unpredictable, but always real and authentic and grounded.
CHURCH & STATE II is arguably an early artistic peak for the book, as Sim and background artist Gerhard drove themselves to relentless experimentation, using each monthly installment to push the boundaries of what the monthly comics form was truly capable. This art is presented here for the first time in remastered form: painstakingly restored page-by-page from hundreds of pages of original artwork with the original photo negatives filling in the gaps, revealing astounding detail never before present outside of the original art itself. The carefully-textured, detail-rich art is now on full display for the first time, including delicate line work, slashing brush lines alongside organic texture and splatter, and some of the most sophisticated pen and ink rendering of the second half of the twentieth century.
This volume also includes eight brand-new pages of extras, including a 6,000 word essay by restorer and critic Sean Michael Robinson, that contextualizes the wild scale-shifts of Church & State among other resonant works, including but not limited to, Tolstoy's War and Peace and Shooter and Zeck's Secret Wars.