A Friend of Astoria. . .Sort Of

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.

In last week's Frostonite Claws we saw a couple pages of Dave Sim's sixth Cerebus notebook. We are seeing it again this week because I saw a mention of Sir Gerrik on page 53.

Notebook 6, page 53

Sir Gerrik gets very little mention in the pages of the Cerebus story, never actually appearing in the three hundred issues, but only appearing once in one of the Swords of Cerebus extra stories. It would seem that with that page of the notebook, Dave was going to have Sir Gerrik be the one who brought the Roach to Michelle as Michelle recalls in Cerebus #53.

I looked through this notebook, but couldn't see any other mention of Sir Gerrik, and is the dialogue between Weisshaupt and Michelle that we get instead.