Unorthodox. Economic. Revenge.

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 Albatross #2, aka Dave Sim's notebook #2, which covers Cerebus #28 to 37, three times so far.  Most recently this past March in Does Cerebus Really Need To Go to PetuniaCon? It had 198 pages out of 200 pages scanned.

On page 83 there is a page by page summary for Cerebus #31:

Notebook #2, page 83

It looks like the crossed off item for page 15 is "Empty. Back to his own room" and it was replaced with 'Empty. Cerebus was suckered".

Viewing this outline against the finished issue, it appears that Dave inserted an extra page to go along with page 6's "take the costume. I should've burned it. Won't cause you any more problems."

The outline has page 9 as "and is promptly crushed by and two and one half tons of crescent-carved stone. Unorthodox. Economic. Revenge. Complicate matters, M'Lord. Cerebus wouldn't be a bit surprised?" Which is page 10 of Cerebus #31, or page 118 of High Society, to a tee.

High Society, page 118