Noice. Fank You.

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.

For the past few weeks we've been looking at Dave Sim's notebook #9 pages that had material on Prince Mick and his brother Keef. Most of it so far has been sketches of Prince Mick as seen in last week's Sketches of Prince Mick we left off with page 67. On the next page we get some thumbnail layouts and dialogue.

Notebook 9, page 68

The page 5 and page 6 refer to Cerebus #85, or pages 679 and 680 of Church & State II if you're following along with the phonebooks. The thumbnail of page 5 follows the finished page pretty closely.  The dialogue from below the thumbnail is a bit different, and it lacks Gerhard's amazing backgrounds, but even Keef's word balloon's in panel two have the bubbles the same as his word balloons on the finished page.

Cerebus #85, pages 5 & 6 (click image to see it larger)

On the next page of the notebook we see more dialogue for pages #5 and 6 along with some sketches of Mick and Cerebus for page 6.

Notebook 9, page 69

Again most of the dialogue was used with just a word changed there or here. Prince Mick is facing the left instead of the right.