Wednesday 24 December 2014

Dave and the Direct Market

MARGARET LISS:
A few years ago I scanned all of Dave Sim's notebooks. He had filled 36 notebooks during the years he created the monthly Cerebus series, covering issues #20 to 300, plus the other side items -- like the Epic stories, posters and prints, convention speeches etc. A total of 3,281 notebook pages detailing his creative process. I never really got the time to study the notebooks when I had them. Just did a quick look, scanned them in and sent them back to Dave as soon as possible. So this regular column is a chance for me to look through those scans and highlight some of the more interesting pages.

So around the time Cerebus #104 came out in November 1987, Dave was having it out with Diamond Distributors due to the publication and subsequent distribution of the first phonebook: High Society. High Society was first published in 1986, and then Dave followed up with Church & State I in June 1987 and Cerebus in August 1987.

In September 1987 he spent some time in Akumal, Mexico where he wrote the following which would become the Note From The President for issue #104:

Notebook #9 page 21

Notebook #9 page 22

Notebook #9 page 23

The above writings would lead into Dave's thoughts on creator's rights, a line that didn't make it into the finished NFtP: "the fewer middle-men (nay-sayers all) involved in the creator's financial security, the better off that creator is."

Thanks to iestyn for the idea.

2 comments:

Jeff Seiler said...

M, thanks for the nice X-men. . .er, X-mas present. Just goes to show, as Dave said to me over the phone one day years ago, "I'm a fairly clever guy."

iestyn said...

thanks for the post.

it's amazing how much these approaches are still the routes to income for many cartoonists, they just seem to be WEB cartoonists now.