Latter Days (comics)

Latter Days
Cerebus #300 Latter Days #35 final issue of Cerebus
Series	Cerebus
Page count	700 pages
Publisher	Aardvark-Vanaheim
Creative team
Writers	Dave Sim
Artists	Dave Sim Gerhard
Original publication
Published in	Cerebus
Issues	266-300
Language	English
ISBN	(Latter Days)  (The Last Day)
Chronology
Preceded by	Going Home

Latter Days is the tenth and final novel in Canadian cartoonist Dave Sim's Cerebus comic book series. It is made up of issues #266-300 of Cerebus. It was collected as the 15th and 16th "phonebook" volumes, as Latter Days (#266-288, November 2003) and The Last Day (#289-300, June 2004).

The novel concludes Cerebus life, as Sim had long announced it would, and is generally considered the most difficult and problematic of the Cerebus novels.

Narrated by Cerebus from sometime later in his life, Latter Days is heavy in religious themes, and also features caricatures of the Three Stooges and Woody Allen.

Sim had declared early on that Cerebus would chronicle the life leading up to death of its titular character. The Judge at the end of Church & State had foretold that Cerebus would "die alone, unmourned and unloved". The main Cerebus story came to an end with issue #200; the final 100 issues served as a dénouement, with Latter Days an "epilogue-to-the-epilogue".

At the end of Going Home, Cerebus comes to reject Jaka, the woman he has loved almost since the beginning of the series and with whom he has been travelling to his childhood home.

(Cerebus #266–267)

Thirty years following Going Home, Cerebus, working as a shepherd, is only waiting to die.

(Cerebus #268–288)

Cerebus returns from the north with the intention of provoking the Cirinists into killing him when he is abducted by radical followers of the religion Rick founded in Rick's Story—they turn out to be a trio of caricatures of the Three Stooges called the Three Wise Fellows. With these followers behind him as an army, Cerebus leads a successful rebellion against the Cirinsts and conquers the continent of Estarcion, setting up a fascist utopia, from which he retires and starts obsessively collecting a Reads called "Rabbi", becoming an expert on the series and setting out to write "The. One. Definite. Guide to Rabbi."