She's Got the Devil in Her Heart

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.

In The Judge from July 2019 was the last time we saw pages from Dave Sim’s 12th Cerebus notebook. That notebook covers Cerebus #102 to 111 and had 133 pages scanned.'

Looking at it 12 of the last 14 are mostly text which appears to be the Judge’s monologue. Page 128 is the start of it:

Notebook 12, page 128

An outline for Cerebus #110 with the Judge’s dialogue featuring prominently. The next page has a bit of some key points that the Judge will hit upon, and then on the bottom half of the page is where we see the outline / dialogue for Cerebus #110 being worked on a bit more.

Notebook 12, page 130

It is interesting to me how the text starts out as legible block text and turns smaller and into a mix of cursive and block text. More being crossed out and stuff being written in the margins. I wonder if that just happened as Dave wrote or if he came back later after he wrote 10 DENIAL.