Jaka's Story (comics)

Jaka's Story
Cover to the Jaka's Story collection (Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1990)
Date	1990
No. of issues	114–136, 138
Series	Cerebus
Page count	486 pages
Publisher	Aardvark-Vanaheim
Creative team
Writer	Dave Sim
Artists	Dave Sim Gerhard
Chronology
Preceded by	Church & State
Followed by	Melmoth

Jaka's Story is the fourth major storyline in Canadian cartoonist Dave Sim's Cerebus comics series.

Originally published in Cerebus #114-136, the storyline continues in the wake of the events of "Church and State" and the conquest of the city of Iest by the fascist matriarchal Cirinists. The story focuses on Cerebus, his longtime love interest Jaka, Jaka's husband Rick, Oscar (a stand-in for the real life Oscar Wilde), and Jaka's employer Pud (a tavern owner who employs Jaka) as they struggle against the repressive fascist regime of the Cirinists. In particular, the free spirited Jaka defies the Cirinist ban on dancing, which leads to ruin for Rick, Jaka, and Cerebus.

The book flashes back and forth between Jaka's lonely, aristocratic childhood up to her twelfth birthday, and the "present" time of the main Cerebus storyline. The "present" sections are told in comics form while the "past" portions are told in flowery prose sections, which the reader finds out later are written by Oscar (and are in Sim's imitation of Wilde's writing style), unknown to Jaka and based on what Oscar has heard from Rick.

The story alternates between "the present" in regular comics pages (mostly done in a six-panel grid) and "the past" in illustrated text passages. Cerebus' character remains mostly in the background, and doesn't even appear in most of the second half of the book.

The overblown prose of the text passages, the reader discovers later, were written by Jaka and Rick's artistic neighbour Oscar (a caricature of Oscar Wilde). It tells the tale of Jaka's childhood and aristocratic origins as she is brought up in her uncle Lord Julius' household with an overbearing Nurse, as interpreted by Oscar from stories he has heard from Rick. Nurse's face is never seen—often it is replaced with the face of Jaka's doll, Missy).

The story is told with a limited number of people and locations, creating a confined, claustrophobic feeling. Much of the novel is spent developing the characters, and Cerebus himself takes a back-seat rôle.

(Cerebus #114)

Jaka goes about her morning, waking her husband Rick and preparing the bath and his breakfast, and irritatedly prodding him to go find work in the Lower City.

Parallel to this, in the prose sections, we see Jaka as a lonely child, also going about her morning, being watched over by her imposing Nurse. Her only friend was her doll, Missy. Together, they are taken to visit a park in which she plays on a wooden horse called Thunder, but which in her imagination is called Magic. The reader finds out that Missy is still with Jaka in the "present", sitting on her shelf, watching over her, as if protecting her.