Thursday 16 March 2017

Does Cerebus Really Need To Go To PetuniaCon?

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.

We've looked at Dave Sim's notebook #2, which covers Cerebus #28 to 37, only twice before. First in Albatross, Too in August 2016 and most recently last month in Hsssssssssssssssssssss. If you've picked up the Cerebus Cover Art Treasury book, you'll see a few pages from this notebook with sketches of the covers of the single issues in High Society.

However, you won't see the page that shows the cover thumbnail for Cerebus #37.

Cerebus #37 cover

On page 186, out of the 198 pages scanned, there is a thumbnail for the cover:

Notebook 2, page 186
As you can see, Cerebus looking a bit irritated sitting in a chair behind a desk is about the only similarity to the artwork which we can see.

Since we can also see Dave's drawings of for the Priestess card game. The next page shows a bit more of the card set:

Notebook 2, page 187


5 comments:

Unknown said...

Coincidentally (?)

a) I just sent Conan Tobias two pictures from the Aardvark-Vanaheim panel -- featuring Bill Loebs, me, Deni, Arn Saba, Jim Valentino and Joshua Quagmire -- at the Real World (?) PETUNIACON '84 in Oakland California (since they were two of the only four photos of Arn Saba that I had for his article on Arn Saba/Katherine Collins for QUILL & QUIRE). Sandeep said he e-mailed them to TimW so, if he did, Tim this would be a good place to run them, I think.

b) researching LOVE & AARDVARKS #1 in Todd Hignite's JAIME HERNANDEZ book, I just noticed in a period photo of Los Bros. that Mario is wearing a Petuniacon t-shirt (it was the first convention Los Bros. attended: Jaime's was definitely the first mohawk I had ever seen in my hotel suite). It was also Gerhard's first convention.

*I* don't even have a Petuniacon t-shirt!

c) a caption for another photo in the book mentions that I had organized PETUNIACON. Which isn't true. Faye Desmond organized PETUNIACON at the beginning until the Bay Area Comics & Comix retail chain crew got wind of the fact that the only guests were going to be Indy creators and recognized a disaster in the making and jumped in and lined up Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz as guests to prevent the disaster from taking place. I did drawings for the program book, t-shirt and poster but that was the extent of my hands-on participation. Apart from holding the above-mentioned Killer Party in my suite. And insisting that I needed to have a suite large enough for a Killer Party as part of my attendance.

Tony Dunlop said...

For what it's worth, that was the current issue when I first discovered Cerebus back in '82. Thanks for the nostalgia trip!

Unknown said...

I always like to hear about stuff like this, Tony.

How old were you and what on EARTH would attract you to the book as a comic fan in 1982? I mean, it's not exactly Chris Claremont and John Byrne's X-MEN.

Tony again said...

I was 17 and a senior in high school and, well, a stack of early "High Society" issues (28 through 35 IIRC) on the coffee table were the most interesting thing at a party I attended. I'm pretty sure "Mind Game II" was the first Cerebus issue I ever read...

Unknown said...

Tony - Here's to lame high-school parties as CEREBUS on-ramps!!