The Sky Is Falling

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.

We've looked at Dave's notebook #8 only twice so far. Both times were almost a year ago: "The Final Ascension" and "The Trial". As we saw before it covers issue #96 to 102. It has 140 pages, only 114 were scanned and 15 were blank pages.

On page 32 of notebook #8, Dave starts some near complete thumbnails of issue #97 page 8 and 9 (or if you're following along in the Church & State II phonebook, pages 924 & 925):

Notebook #8, page 32

It looks like Dave even wrote "Cerebus No. 97 page no. 8" in the middle of the page. Along with when issues #97 to 100 will be at Preney, the company who printed Cerebus, when the issues would ship and the cover month.

You can also compare page 8 and 9 of issue #97 to the above notebook page:

Issue #97, page 8 and 9

The thumbnails match the finished pages pretty close with a few minor tweaks. Most notably page 9's Cerebus-Astoria-Astoria-Astoria-both goes Cerebus-Astoria-Astoria-Cerebus-both instead. Dave also changed Astoria's come here finger motion for her pointing at her mouth instead.