Thursday 3 September 2020

Making a Stew

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.

This past June in They’re On A Boat we saw a page from Dave Sim’s 29th notebook that looked like a finished page from Cerebus #240 but it had no background by Gerhard. That notebook contains many other pages that looked like that – very close if not a panel for panel copy of the finished page but no Gerhard backgrounds.

The next page in the notebook is one of those, it looks like a finished page without the backgrounds by Gerhard:

Notebook 29, page 8

Though instead of Lord Julius looking at Zelda Gloria, he is looking at . . .something else.

Cerebus #240, page 8 (aka Going Home page 174)

The text is pretty much the same, a few changes, but nothing major. If you click the pictures to make them bigger, you can read the text if you like. You can also see Dave’s pencils under the inks.


2 comments:

Dan E. said...

At what point did Dave start doing INKED drawings in the notebooks?

Margaret said...

Dan - Dave did inked drawings for a while in his notebooks. And in notebook 8 he did some quarter page 'thumbnails' that were inked. A page was shown in The Unknown Given and in The Trial.

These pages are the first pages that look more finished and polished, minus the Gerhard background.