Wednesday 5 July 2017

Purple Unicorn

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.

Dave Sim's notebook #11 covers Cerebus issues #96 through 102 and had 114 pages scanned. We've looked at seven times already the last two times being in 2016: The Unknown Given and Not The Trial. With the many times we've seen pages from it, the cover has never been shown here:

Notebook #11, front cover
A purple Mead notebook with a unicorn? Not your standard Hilroy notebook.

On page 43 of the notebook, we see a full page sketch of Cerebus #98's first page:

Notebook #11, page 43
Compare that to the finish page with Gerhard's backgrounds:

Cerebus #98, page 1


4 comments:

A Moment Of Cerebus said...

Any one else think AMOC should just become a daily dose of Dave's notebooks, as curated by Margaret? That would work for me. So interesting....

Tony Dunlop said...

Sorry, can't answer right now - my hat just fell off.

Margaret said...

lol. Thanks Tim. :) I wish I could do this full time and still pay the bills. . .

Barry Deutsch said...

This is great. Thanks so much for posting this; I love these notebook-sketch-versus-final-drawing posts.