High Society (comics)

High Society
Wraparound cover to Cerebus Vol. 2: High Society. The Regency Hotel drawn by Gerhard, though his art does not appear within the book.
Date	1986
No. of issues	25
Series	Cerebus
Page count	512 pages
Publisher	Aardvark-Vanaheim
Creative team
Creator	Dave Sim
Original publication
Published in	Cerebus
Issues	26–50
Date of publication	May 1981–May 1983
ISBN
Chronology
Preceded by	Cerebus (1987)
Followed by	Church & State (1987)

High Society is the second collected volume, and first volume-length story, of Canadian cartoonist Dave Sim's Cerebus comic book series. It focuses mainly on politics, including Cerebus' campaign for the office of Prime Minister, in the fictional city-state of Iest in Sim's world of Estarcion. It is generally considered the best book for beginning Cerebus readers to start with, and has been called "one of the finest storylines of the 1980s". The story was published in individual issues from May 1981 (issue #26) to May 1983 (#50), with the collection published in 1986.

The story is considered a turning point in the Cerebus series, as Sim moved from the "Conan pastiche" of the stories contained in the Cerebus, to making a "piece of political satire," the beginning of Sim moving away from individual issue-focused stories and short, two- or three-issue story arcs, to "longer, far more complex 'novels'" lasting hundreds of pages, that were the focus of the rest of the series.

The storyline became the first of the Cerebus "phone book" paperback collections to be published. Its success led Sim to abandon the Swords of Cerebus series of 4-issue collections in favour of the larger collections for the final format of the 6000-page Cerebus saga.

In Cerebus #12, Sim announced his intention to continue Cerebus until December 2003, which, at a bi-monthly pace, would take the series to issue #156.

In Cerebus #19, Sim announced that Cerebus would last 300 issues, and that it would chronicle the life of Cerebus up until his death. Further, the book would be subdivided into "novels". The first of these novels would be High Society—one self-contained story that would nevertheless be only one storyline in the larger Cerebus story.

Cerebus arrives in the city-state of Iest, where he checks into the high-class Regency Hotel (whose design was based on the Chateau Laurier) and becomes embroiled in political machinations as the Chief Kitchen Supervisor to Lord Julius.