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 we looked at pages 5 and 6 of Dave Sim’s 21st notebook used during the creation of Cerebus. We started our journey at looking at every page in this notebook of which there were 260 out of 300 pages scanned. If you want to see all of the notebook #21 posts to date, just use the Notebook 21 tag. Today we continue with page 7. Well, not really as we already saw page 7 back in the Swooncommamortals post from February of 2019. So we’ll start with page 8.
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Notebook #21, page 8 |
Yup, a big wall of text. Let’s see what it says shall we? At least the main stuff, not the items in the margins – broken into paragraphs to make it easier to read:
Some women are better at reading minds than are others. Some only pick up impressions; they just get a “feeling,” you could say. Others, it’s as easy as reading a book. For many of them it’s as easy as eating a piece of candy, absorbing the entirety of a mind in one gulp.
“Reading” minds isn’t the worst of it. The worst of it is changing the minds they absorb. Changing her mind, the saying goes, is a woman’s prerogative. Changing others’ minds is a woman’s darkest secret; the black cauldron of which we all partake. Some greedily, some guiltily, some intentionally, some inadvertently.
What’s happened in Upper Felda, what is spreading throughout the civilised world is an abomination. An abomination I was very helpful in bringing about and an abomination which can come to no good end. It is a very large and very dangerous conflict. Whose minds are being absorbed and whose minds are absorbing. Whose minds are being changed and whose minds are changing minds.
It seemed inconsequential at first, but mind reading is like any other weapon of power and influence. It will inevitably gravitate to those least suited and who are the most unscrupulous about using it. The matriarchist and the Kevillists.
Simply put, the civilised world is being subjected to mental bullying and thuggery on a monumental scale of which it is completely unaware.
The text in the margins says:
Consider
Heads of state, business and economic leaders
Unelected wives, grasping opportunistic with handsome eyes and attractive figures
Then on the next page of the notebook, the text continues:
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Notebook #21, page 9 |
And what it says:
I am a pariah for speaking these simple truths. You've been doing more listening and thinking than talking and acting lately. That's good. That's very good. Think through the implications of what I've said.
I am a pariah. A complete outcast, dear. I was the first to speak the truth aloud and I have been ostracized because of it. I often wonder if there are others like me who have been made to not exist. Who are excluded from everything. Who have been cast out of their families and forsaken by all their friends.
→ consider implications
→ tavern is off limits to all women. You have only to request sanctuary in one of them
Do you have anything you want to discuss, Vera, before you get the guards and they sew my lips together again?
I don't think so.
Very well, dear. Run along then. I'll be right here when you get back.
Most of the text was pretty much word for word in Cerebus #164 and spoken by the real Cirin, or Serna as she is called. The text starts at the bottom of page 5 in Cerebus #164, or page 31 of the phonebook Women. The text then continues on page 16 of the same issue, page 42 in the phonebook.
However, the text in the phonebook ends with the last sentence on page 8 of the notebook, and even that leaves out the last word, ‘unaware’. The text one page 9 doesn’t show up as far as I can see. Not even her quip to Vera.