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	0-919359-07-8
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's 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 reading,^[1] and has been called "one of the finest storylines of the 1980s".^[2] 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,"^[3] 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'"^[4] 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 four-issue collections in favour of the larger collections for the final format of the 6000-page Cerebus saga.