The Bed in the Ballroom

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.

Dave Sim's 27th Cerebus notebook has only been shown here at AMoC twice. The first time in F. Stop is not an Aperture from  May of 2015 and then in A Face Like the Back End of a Dog from December of 2016. The reason for this? The notebook only has 45 pages scanned, and the majority of those are just walls of text. Most  Dave's notes on an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and the rest are notes on slides to potentially use for the covers.

So when I saw on page 34 some notes regarding Roaring Rick's Rare Books Tavern, I had to stop and take a look.

Notebook #27, page 37

It sounds like Roaring Rick and Jaka? having a conversation about reads. Roaring Rick makes a mention to binding the individual reads together - the creation of phonebooks in Estarcion? A pateron interrupts Roaring Rick, asking him about a particular read, and he says to check under the "B"s in "romance" and continues on.

Unfortunately this is the only page in this notebook with this bit about Roaring Rick, but it does show us how he opened up his tavern.

But as we see in Cerebus #239, Cerebus only visits Roaring Rick's tavern in his dream.