Cerebus phonebooks are the paperback collections that Dave Sim has collected his comic book series Cerebus in since 1986. They have come to be known as "phonebooks" as their thickness and paper stock resemble that of phone books. The format had a large influence on alternative comics publishing, and was key in the move from the periodical-centric publishing style that was once dominant.
Contents
Swords of Cerebus
Starting in 1981, Sim started collecting the Cerebus stories in Swords of Cerebus. Swords collected four issues per volume, each with a backup story and new cover.
High Society
High Society had been conceived as one complete story, but Sim had not originally planned for it to be published as one volume. He did so more as an expedient:
I have arrived at this decision for a number of reasons (a) the difficulty involved in keeping each volume of Cerebus in print at all times, (b) the convenience of being able to introduce new fans to Cerebus with two large volumes and (at most) two dozen back issues, (c) a manageable format for someday having all 300 issues available, (d) the opportunity to expand Cerebus' exposure by making it available in bookstores.
Sim published it as one 512-page trade paperback volume in 1986. It was offered exclusively through mail order, and sold out its 6000-copy print run within a year. Its success convinced Sim to drop the Swords collections and republish their contents as one volume as well.
Further volumes
Church & State, at 1200 pages, would have been too unwieldy for one volume, so it was published in two—the first in 1987, before the story was finished.
Jaka's Story was the first to be conceived from the beginning with the end "phonebook" collection in mind. When serialized, it prominently displayed the novel name (Jaka's Story) on the cover, and printed both the current issue of the series and the current issue of the novel—so, for example, the January 1989 issue was numbered both Cerebus #119 and Jaka's Story #6.
In High Society, each issue of Cerebus comprised one chapter of the story, but as the series progressed, Sim came to compose the stories with the collected volumes in mind. This meant that the stories would be serialized in the comic book in twenty-page installments, but with little regard for the per-issue reading experience—sometimes an issue would end mid-scene. Many fans started waiting for the collected volumes to be released, abandoning the monthly series—a phenomenon that came to be known as "The Cerebus Effect".
Starting with the thirteenth volume, Going Home, the books featured colour covers. The covers to Going Home and Form & Void were photographs taken by Gerhard.
Distribution dispute
When Sim published the High Society phonebook, it was initially not available through traditional comic-book direct market distributors, who felt that Cerebus' success until then had been largely due to them, and put up "a lot of resistance" to Sim selling directly through the mail.
In retaliation, Diamond Comic Distributors in 1987 chose to drop Puma Blues, which was being published by Sim's Aardvark One International. Diamond's orders accounted for 33% of Puma Blues' sales. To extract themselves from the dispute, the book's creators, Michael Zulli and Stephen Murphy, moved publication of Puma Blues to Mirage Studios.
Sim didn't relent on having the "phone books" distributed by the Direct Market until well into the 1990s. Retailers were able to get bulk discounts on boxes of Cerebus phonebooks directly from Aardvark-Vanaheim, however.
The Cerebus Effect
In the 1990s, fans started to come to expect their favourite comics to become available after a time in collected form. The collections, while requiring more money to be spent up front, were seen as more convenient and economical than periodicals. This put creators in a bind if they relied on the income from their series to support themselves until they could work up enough material for a collection. Comics Journal columnist Bart Beaty coined the term "Cerebus effect" to label this tendency, as Cerebus was seen as the first book to mark and influence this tendency.
Another aspect of "the Cerebus effect" was that Cerebus and certain other serialized comics (such as Chester Brown's Underwater, Gilbert Hernandez' Poison River and Tom Hart's The Sands) would appear in installments that critic Robert Boyd said were "like they were cut randomly from a larger narrative." This hurt the serialized reading experience and further convinced many readers to wait for the collections, to the detriment of the periodical comic sales.
Printing
The books are all softcover and printed on newsprint, printed by Preney Print & Litho, of Windsor, Ontario in Canada. Except for the final four volumes, the covers are all in black and white.
At one time, Sim talked about publishing high-quality, oversized editions of Jaka's Story, but soon scrapped it as a cash-grab. Foreign editions, however, have come out on higher-grade paper, some in hardcover.