Gosh I’m glad I don’t live in Dave Sim’s head.

I was extremely tempted to let that first line stand as the entire
review, but I suppose I should elaborate.

Jaka’s Story is the next installment of Sim’s epic comic book
series, Cerebus the Aardvark; I’ve previously reviewed
Cerebus, High Society, and Church and State.

The first thing to know is that this isn’t a story about Cerebus at all.
It’s primarily about a dancer named Jaka who appears as part of a gag in
one of the early episodes. Cerebus has been slipped a love potion by
some bad guys; things don’t go quite as expected, and he becomes besotted
with the dancing girl at a tavern. She returns his love, or so she says,
but by the end of the episode the potion has worn off, and Cerebus is
gone. Being, after all, an aardvark, he’s not likely to fall in love
with a human no matter how lovely she is.

Jaka makes a number of short appearances in High Society and
Church and State, during which time Cerebus has gotten over his
disdain for human women, and they have a number of bittersweet passages.
This, however, is the first volume in which she plays a major role. And
in fact, she’s center stage–Cerebus isn’t even present for most of it.

The first two-thirds are quite interesting, despite Sim’s penchant for
filling whole pages with four or six or eight panes of nearly the same
image (I suppose it’s supposed to be cinematic, and sometimes it works;
there are a number of pages on which one character is having writer’s
block, where it’s quite effective; but mostly it just seems like he’s
trying to get through an issue with as little writing as possible.)

But as I say, the first two-thirds are quite interesting. The volume
contains two narratives side by side. The first tells of Jaka’s childhood in
the Tavers Family Residence in Palnu from when she was five years old
until she left Palnu and began earning a living as a dancer. The second
follows on from Church and State, and features Cerebus
(briefly) visiting with Jaka and her shiftless husband Richard. The two
stories are converging into what’s looking to be a really dramatic climax
when — BANG in steps the Cirinist Inquisition. The Cirinists are
a matriarchal sect of the Church of Tarim; it seems that dancing has been
outlawed. All and sundry (except Cerebus, who stepped out in boredom
sometime earlier) are shipped off to the Cirinist dungeons, which is
where the last third of the book takes place.

I really don’t know what Sim was trying to achieve, but what ever it was,
he completely blew it with that last third, in both narratives. I won’t
say how the story of young Jaka ends–but the horrible, traumatic event
that is supposed to send her fleeing her patrician birth to become a
dancer in low dives all over Estarcion is too absurd for words. As for
the present day narrative, the ending is truly horrific…but the only
thing I gather from it is that Sim doesn’t much like women and doesn’t
much like religion. I also gather from his introduction that he has no
concept whatsoever what a healthy marriage looks like.

Anyway, I’m disappointed, just as I was with
Church and State–the book’s got an excellent build-up, and
some truly beautiful story-telling, and then the ending fizzles. It’s
really rather pathetic.