Thursday 9 May 2019

PetuniaCon Day One

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.

Dave Sim's second notebook covers Cerebus #28 through 37 and had 198 out of 200 pages scanned. Page 186 caught my interested because it has a preliminary sketch for the cover to Cerebus #37:

Notebook #2, page 186
The only similarity to the actual cover, which is for PetuniaCon, is of Cerebus sitting behind a desk. There are also sketches of cards. Going to the next page, it appears they are sketches for a card game called Priestess:

Notebook #2, page 187
If Priestess is anything like Diamondback, part of me is glad it never saw the light of day. Take it from someone who had played Diamondback, the only way to play it is drunk, while complaining about rice cakes.

4 comments:

Slumbering Agartha said...

You know it's Thursday when you see a new aMoC post at 6am. Thank you, Margaret!

And that wasn't a shot at Matt, who does this as a full time job AND has kids. Kudos to both of you.

Tony Dunlop said...

I've always preferred Fizzbin.

Tony again said...

Come to think of it, isn't "Priestess" the game Cerebus plays with Silverspoon, Gwane and Tristram (sp?) in the bar scene that opens "C&S?"

Margaret said...

Tony (again) - You are correct! Priestess is the card game that is played in Cerebus #52. Interesting to see that Dave started working on the deck and rules way back here in notebook #2 at the same time he was sketching out the cover for Cerebus #37.

Mike - I do my columns days in advance and set the post to publish early on Thursday morning so I can tweet the link out before I head off to work in the morning. Or else I'd forget to do it. :)