Wednesday 20 December 2017

A Friendly Reminder

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 last looked at Dave Sim's seventh notebook used in the production of Cerebus back in January of 2017's Talking to Muffins. Notebook #7 covered Cerebus #59 through 70 and there were 160 pages scanned.  Looking through the pages to notebook #7 I saw several that covered the story Dave and Gerhard did for Marvel's Epic Illustrated title.  This Cerebus short story is entitled A Friendly Reminder and appeared in Epic Illustrated #28.

On page 21 of the notebook is the title 'A Reminder' and then the list of 12 items is the outline for the three page story.

Notebook 7, page 21

There is even two small thumbnails of the first two pages, and then the larger thumbnails are page 3.
On the next page of the notebook, the final title 'A Friendly Reminder' is down at the bottom of the page. There are also thumbnails for each of the three pages.

Notebook 7, page 22
The picture of the shadow of a shaking person on the door and dresser was not used for the first two panels, instead there was a close up of just the door as Cerebus smashes it down.

A Friendly Reminder 


4 comments:

Barry Deutsch said...

Damn, this is cool. Thanks so much for continuing to post these, Margaret!

crazyyears said...

It was always the "SCHMUCK" sound effect that made me laugh the most in this piece, so it is interesting to see Dave sort of stumble upon it while working this strip out in his notebook.
Thanks, Margaret.
--- Michael Hunt

Jeff said...

For deep insiders, the SCHMUCK sound effect is a shout-out to a completely different element of this early Dave'n'Ger collaboration. Can't believe I missed that for so long...

Sean R said...

WHOAH.

Indeed.

This will be a fun one to restore when we FINALLY make it up the mountain. I haven't seen a single piece of original art, and I believe the negatives are missing for this one as well... (as opposed to the negs for the remainder of the EPIC stories, which are safe with me, having been retrieved from elsewhere a few years back now...)