Melmoth Thumbnails Part 2

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 in last week's Melmoth Thumbnails Part 1 we looked at Dave's nineteenth Cerebus notebook. More specifically we looked at page 35 which had the thumbnails for three pages of Melmoth. Here now is page 36.

So on the page you can see a couple of the thumbnails from the previous page. As you can see, they are much larger than the thumbnails on this page. A couple pages were skipped as well.

Notebook 19, page 36

The thumbnails start with page 120 of Melmoth, or page 12 of issue #144.  And this is where the major difference between the thumbnails and the finished pages is located. Panel two of page 12 in the thumbnails shows someone with their hands above their head - I'm thinking Astoria in chains.  But the finished page shows the tower coming apart and lifting off:

Melmoth pages 120 through 122

The rest of the pages are pretty close to the finish pages, without Gerhard's awesome backgrounds. Nor can you see how Gerhard's backgrounds are not complete at the edges. Like Cerebus is not yet cognizant of his surroundings, being half wake.