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.
For the third week in a row, a notebook that we haven't seen yet. Dave Sim's notebook #32 was simply labeled 'Spore & Konigsberg' and had 36 pages scanned out of 80 pages, with 44 blank pages.
Most of the notebook is Dave writing Konigsberg's diary entries. Here on page 11 we see what appears to be a checklist of sorts. It looks like Cerebus' calendar was originally going to be six 66 day seasons, but turned into four 91 day seasons.
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| Notebook 32, page 11 |
The upper right hand corner has an list of things that I can't link together - Mussolini and Hitler are an easy connection, but Ulysses S. Grant and Boris Pasternak, the writer of Doctor Zhivago?
After some more Konigsberg diary entries, here is some dialogue from Latter Days, starting on page 421(or issue #287, page 1) between Cerebus and the narrator:
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| Notebook 32, page 25 |
The dialogue pretty much follows the finished page. Though the finished page has the transcript between Cerebus and the narrator interspersed between the word balloons.
5 comments:
Perhaps Dave was going to either use direct quotes or ape the style of quotes from the people on his list, maybe using them as verses from the Booke of Ricke?
Cerebus quotes them on pg 187 of Latter Days when he's trying to rally the Cerebites for war. From the appendix (pg 479):
"I fell back on the old cliche of pulling military quotes from both good guys and bad guys. It does make an eloquent point that a pithy military observation is a pithy military observation whatever team the guy is on. In this case can you tell who of U.S. Gen Tommy Franks, Benito Mussolni, Ulysses S. Grant, Patrick Henry, Adolf Hitler and (just for laughs) Dr. Zhivago author Boris Pasternak came up with which quote Cerebus pilfered for his speech?"
Hi Margaret and Tim,
I've got a request...I don't recall whether we've seen any background material on the Three Wise Fellowes. If not, can we see some? Thank you!
Tony - I can probably find some Three Wise Fellowes stuff in the notebooks, I'll take a look this weekend.
Much obliged!
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