Timelines and Memories

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.

Just like Jaka’s Story, Dave Sim’s fourteen notebook, the 66 scanned pages covering Cerebus #113 to 117, has walls of text. On the back of one of the pages of those walls of text is a timeline:

Notebook #4, page 10

Cerebus

1, 2         1410

3 – 11 1411

12 – 23 1412

24 – 48 1413

49 – 111         Spring and summer 1414

112 – 136 Fall 1414 Winter 1414 Spring 1515

Which doesn’t match up with Alexx’s timeline, that puts issue #1 in 1411. Continuing Alexx’s timeline, issue #10 is possibly in March of 1412, issue #15 is January 1413, issue #48 is in January of 1414. So, the dates almost line up, but not quite. I’m going to chalk this up to Dave’s memory not being as good as Alexx’s researched timeline.

Alexx also did what he called "Annotated Cerebus" going up through issue #172 and the Cerebus Concordance,