K'Cor

Cerebus #156 (March 1992)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

SUENTEUS PO:
(from Cerebus #159, June 1992)

Sedra left him; departing in the night with one of his slaves. He had entrusted her with the formula for his narcotic foodstuff, never once considering that the knowledge made her independent of the absolute control he wielded over Imesh's populace. She left him a short note that was distant and impersonal. His heart broken, he drove the entire population of the city out through a series of underground passageways which he then sealed with structural collapses. Now totally and completely alone, he dismantled the scaffolding around his half completed monument with his bare hands over the course of several weeks... K'Cor has sunk into dementia of the commonest sort; holding conversations with a Goddess for whom he is less than a joke; he will end his days broken and without significance.

DAVE SIM:
(from the Cerebus Yahoo Group Q&A, January 2005)

What K'Cor was attempting to build was a giant DNA molecule, a double helix, but he didn't have much in the way of a three-dimensional sense so that's what it came out looking like. Po was responding to the intent behind it, on the spiritual level and, there’s my sense of humour again. If you are a human being (or an aardvark - let's say "physically incarnated") the danger with attempting to live a spiritual life is that you can only know it imperfectly "through a glass darkly" so your assessments become imperfect and vaguely (or sometimes specifically I'm sure) ludicrous. "There is a great deal of laughter but it's very high up and very far away." K'Cor was guided by his insights, whether he was inhabited by a higher consciousness or spoken to in his dreams or, more likely, a drug victim. You make your own choices. I suspect I was unconsciously showing myself what it was that I was about to choose - to spend twenty-six years building this giant monument which might prove to be something or might not - that might be useful as a "stairway to heaven" or prove to be as valuable as a giant two-dimensional model of part of a DNA molecule. Time will tell.