To Tilt or Not To Tilt

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.

It was May of 2017 when we last saw Dave Sim's notebook #5 in Cover Art for the Comics Journal. It covered Cerebus #45 through 49 and had 79 of the 80 pages in the notebook scanned.

On page 16 there is a bunch of hand writing at the top - Suenteus Po's writing on the first major crisis of 1413 - and down the bottom are some tiny thumbnails for pages 12 through 19 of Cerebus #45.

Notebook 5, page 16

Cerebus #45 starts as a sideways issue, and it would appear via these thumbnails that during this issues that the panels would tilt a little. On the next page of the notebook, we get a better look at how these panels would tilt.

Notebook 5, page 17

However, those pages never did tilt like that:

High Society, pages 405 - 413

Yes, I threw in page 1 of Cerebus #46. . .mostly because I didn't like the look a 9 panel grid missing its ninth panel.

But you can see, those panels never did tip. Some of the plot points written on the right side of page 17 of the notebook did occur on those pages.