I first discovered CEREBUS when I began college in 1981, issue 29 was the current issue, but I easily bought back issues that were still on the display shelf with it (obviously not a big seller at the time) back to issue 20. It became increasingly popular in the first few months I discovered the series. I myself gave word-of-mouth to many others upon discovering CEREBUS.

So I kind of rode the wave almost from the beginning. I bought the initial series, then bought the SWORDS OF CEREBUS reprint volumes as they came out.
Then I bought thesame stories again in CEREBUS BI-WEEKLY, because they most closely resembled the earliest issues I'd missed, even reprinting the editorials, lettercolumns and all ads in the original issues.

And then I liked the idea of having them in collected volumes:

CEREBUS volume 1 (also titled CEREBUS THE BARBARIAN, reprinting issues 1-25)
HIGH SOCIETY (reprinting issues 26-50)
CHURCH AND STATE (volume 3, reprinting 52-80)
CHURCH AND STATE (volume 4, reprinting 81-111)
JAKA'S STORY (volume 5, reprinting 114-136)

At that point, you got increasingly less out of reading a single issue of a much larger story, so once I bought the collected volumes, at some point I lost interest in reading the monthly new issues, stopped buying, and just waited for the collected volumes.

And then, after disappointments with MELMOTH (issues 139-150) and FLIGHT (issues 151-162), I just stopped buying altogether. I have single issues up through 176, and scattered samplings after. The art is very consistent right up up through the end, but the storytelling became less focused, and more just random scenes. And surreal scenes such as in "Mindgames" (in issue 20) that initially was one issue and focused toward a specific purpose in the larger story narrative (and the same in "Mindgames 2" about a year later).

But in CHURCH AND STATE, and after in later issues, these visually interesting surreal/dream vignettes became more prolonged and seemed to have less and less of an actual point. beyond nice surreal visuals. More like an MTV video than an actual story. And especially reading one issue at a time at that point, rather than a collected volume, one couldn't make a whole lot of sense out of a single issue, outside of the larger whole.

But I love the first 5 volumes.

Here's the wraparound cover for the first collected volume :

[Linked Image from multiversitystatic.s3.amazonaws.com]

The wraparound covers by themselves were some of the best art of the series. I would have bought poster versions of them, if they'd ever been offered.