Thunder the Wonder Pony

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.

The last time we looked at Dave Sim's notebook #14, which covers Cerebus #113 through 117, was back in March of 2016 in Reprinting Cerebus Every Two Weeks. We also looked at two other times, in A Gold Coin? and in Jaka and Missy. While we've seen pages from it three times, we've not yet seen the cover. Would you be surprised if I told you it was a Hilroy notebook?

Notebook #14 front cover

Yeah, I wasn't surprised either. A well used notebook by the looks of the cover.

On page 36 of the notebook, there is some text that is used on page 26 of the Jaka's Story phonebook (or page 16 of Cerebus #114 if you're following along in the single issues):

Notebook #14, page 36

The above page shows us Dave's re-write for Jaka's Story page 26 text on Thunder. Dave does this in many of his notebooks - writing and rewriting and sometimes re-writing several more times until he gets it just the way he wants it. Here is the finished text for you to compare it to:

Text from Jaka's Story page 26

And just because I like it, a sketch of Jaka that I found by itself on page 16:

Notebook #14, page 16