Summit Enchanted Evening Part Two

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.

Last week in Summit Enchanted Evening we looked at pages #25 and 26 from Dave Sim’s fifth Cerebus notebook that had dialogue from Cerebus #46. That dialogue continued for a few more pages.

On page 27 there is a Cerebus line that Dave didn’t want to use: “If you send in some troops to relieve my men, I’ll go along with the three way split.” Down the bottom of the page on the right side is a stamp that I can make out says ‘Aardvark-Vanaheim’. Click on the picture to make it bigger:

Notebook 5, page 27

Dave had this to say on page 27 of the notebook: “"Finished dialogue. It came pretty easily. Just a few odd corrections here and there."”

The dialogue continues on page 28

Notebook 5, page 28

Those 20 thumbnails in the upper left corner? Dave had this to say about them “Still trying to figure out how to structure the issue where you turn the sideways book back to right side up.”
Down a little lower on the left side you can see the Aardvark-Vanaheim stamp coming through on the other side. I’ve taken the original 600 dpi scans and cropped them to the stamp:

AV stamp

It looks like it just says “Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc” and in the inside Ontario Corporation. Then there is a single star down the bottom. I thought it was used on the First Fifth prints, but when I checked, I didn’t see it.

Towards the bottom of the page by the stamp there is some text crossed out, Dave had this to say about the page “A little cutting and pasting here and there. As you can see, I rejected my idea of "divide the summit into two days. Cerebus is conferring with Henrot and Elf in between".”