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 saw pages from Dave Sim's twenty-fifth notebook was in November of 2018 in Deep and Meaningfuls. The notebook had 138 pages scanned and covers Cerebus #192 through 211.
To me, one of the most powerful scenes in the series occurs in Cerebus #198 when Cerebus comes home to Jaka's . . .note. We don't get to ready the entire note, just bits of it on pages #4 and 5 of the issue (or pages 230 and 231 of Minds). In notebook #25 the entire letter is there, with some mark-ups:
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| Notebook #25, page 11 |
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| Notebook #25, page 12 |
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| Notebook #25, page 13 |
4 comments:
A horribly heart-breaking scene. Thanks for sharing this, Margaret.
Somebody was talking about "creepy" the other day; Dave "doing" Creepy.
THIS sequence is by far the creepiest thing in the entire 300 issue run. Brrrrrr.....
Brrrrrr, indeed. Especially with just her shadow. But, then, that's not how it really happened, was it? Or, was it?
And, then, things got much crazier. Not really creepier, unless...
But, no, I think that Jaka swingin' in the wind was Dave's hypothetical effort (since Jaka didn't *actually* hang herself--she, according to what Dave wrote to me years later, most likely died when pretty much everyone else was crushed by the "demon 'eads and skuws", during Cerebus' second ascension) to tell Cerebus that he needed to clean up his act.
Which, of course, if we were paying attention from the start, was something that we pretty much would never see.
An old girlfriend of mine, the Crazy Canadian Lady, thought that she wanted to *marry* Cerebus. And, told me just that. After I reminded her that Cerebus was a fictional character, and after she had been rebuffed by Dave in her attempts to entice him, I told her:
"No. Cerebus was created by Dave (and, eventually, described by him) to purposefully be the most miserable, nasty, little bastard and asshole of which you could possibly imagine." Or, words to that effect.
Her eyes got wide; she thought (remembered her reading of a few of the volumes) for a moment, and then said something like, "Oh.
"Yeah."
Of course, that was the crazy lady who attempted to seduce a friend of mine, basically, in front of me.
Sorry, guys; no names.
Gotta love crazy ladies.
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