The First Time That Something Fell

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 week we're looking at some pages from Dave Sim's notebook #3, which we've seen before, most recently in the article from December of last year, His First Fifth Notebook Notes. It covers mainly issues #52 to 59 had 158 pages which were scanned.

On page 142 we see an issue outline for Cerebus #58. It is also the first time in the notebooks that I've seen the phrase something fell. Cerebus #58 is the first instance of the 'Something Fell' motif that runs through the Cerebus story.

Notebook #3, page 142

The top left hand corner has the dialogue between Cerebus and Pope Harmony IV from page 17 of issue 58 (Church & State I, p. 147):

Cerebus: Something fell.
Pope Harmony IV: Yes. Something fell. 'Memory fades and the stars draw near.'

The rest of the page has some other dialogue from the issue, some used and some not used. It also has a sketch of Cerebus' wide eye with what appears to be the Pope slumping over - different then the finished page 18 which shows the THUNK soundfx right under Cerebus' wide open eyes.

Skip ahead to page 146 where we see the thumbnails for page 17, while they are close to the finish page, they are different.

Notebook #3, page 146

We see on the notebook page the soundfx of 'crash' but on the finished page it is 'krak'. Not quite the echo from issue 300's 'wham' and 'snap', but pretty close.