Thursday 18 April 2019

First American Tour Poster

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 third notebook covered issues #37 through 40 of Cerebus and had 78 pages scanned in. We last saw it in Remove the Prime Minister from last August. One of those pages was for the first tour of the states that Dave and Deni did back in 1982:

Notebook #3, page 70
Minus the sword, the poser layout is almost the same as the original. The text 'First American Tour '82' is a bit different, and the crossed out part 'See Deni and Dave in person' isn't on the finished poster.

First American Tour 1982 poster
As you can also see, the tour dates in the notebook and the ones on the poster are different. The poster in the picture above came folded from Aardvark-Vanaheim to the members of Friends of Cerebus club in 1982.


5 comments:

Erick said...

Question for Dave:
While on tour, did you try to maintain your work schedule? If not what was the prep in order not fall too far behind?

Tony Dunlop said...

I was at the Comic Art Gallery in NYC!! Got a Cerebus head sketch in my brand new copy of Swords Vol. 4. I was so shy and starstruck that I spent most of the time talking to Deni, who was very nice.

JLH said...

Erick, I seem to recall hearing in a few Aardvark Comments that they got behind a lot in the early days whenever they did conventions. The book was often late in the early 80s, but Dave straightened up his act by around, what was it, maybe the lead-up to issue 100 when he and Gerhard knuckled down and churned out an issue every two weeks or something like that? I, too, would like to know the answer to your question!

Erick said...

JLH,
Thanks for the response

Jeff said...

Actually, IIRC, there were a few separate periods (including during the last push to the goal line), during which they got behind on the monthly publishing and distribution. In the '90s, for sure. And, Diamond may have had something to do with that, but not entirely so.

Wait! What? Diamond Distribution being late?!? NO WAY!!!

And, yes there was a period of about six months, in the 90s, when Cerebus came out every two weeks. I think, but don't know, that that led to the Cerebus Bi-Weekly reprints (which contained some primo backup stuff).

I'm still looking to finish out my Cerebus Bi-Weekly Church & State run. Got all of the others. For you newbies, the Cerebus Bi-Weeklies only reprinted through C&S.