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.
Way back in September of 2015 we saw some bits from Dave Sim's 26th notebook in They Give Us Those Nice Bright Colors. The notebook, now numbered 29 due to changing the notebooks labeled Albatross to notebook to keep all of the notebooks in sequential order. But I digress. Notebook #29 covers Cerebus #240 through 250 and had the front cover said there was 300 pages in the notebook. It only had 150 pages scanned, had 134 blank pages and the rest were missing.
That entry from September of 2015 showed us some bits of pages #208 and 209 notebook pages where Dave put the issue number and a quick blurb of what the cover looked like. This continues on page 10. Though this time I looked closer at the page. It appears as if the description of the slides used for the cover where written down on another page and then ripped out and glued to the page with the issue #.
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| Notebook 29, top of page 210 |
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| Cerebus #256 cover |
At the bottom of page 210 is the description of slide #82 which is supposed to be for the cover for issue 257.
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| Notebook 29, bottom of page 210 |
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| Cerebus #257 cover |
7 comments:
Anybody got the slightest clue as to what Dave's notes referred or, um, meant?
Ham Ernestway's inner monologue perhaps? That first entry sounds like someone waiting patiently to hunt for food, someone who has been waiting for while.
Let me re-phrase that: it sounds like someone who HAS been waiting patiently DURING a hunt for game to come to them.
Brian was as right as ever which is to say as right as he ever could be. Jeff had forgotten that the author's style, his...art...was in the use of simple declarative repetitive descriptions of each moment as it happened. The man was hungry. He could feel it in his belly. The man had to wait. Until the man's hunger extended to the man's finger on the trigger. The man's finger pulled the trigger. The man would not be hungry much longer.
As to the second excerpt, I don't think it's supposed to be in Ham's "voice", nor do I think that those thoughts/ruminations made it into the story, as published; certainly not the aerial confluence of up to four rivers. I remember a shaman type guy from quite a bit earlier, but I don't recall any discussion of aerial rivers.
Unless it's all meant to be an oblique reference to "high-altitude mapping".
Any thoughts, anyone?
Jeff,
Thank you. Will be the first to admit that I am not terribly knowledgeable about many facets of Dave's process. But I do remember that he will go to great lengths to find and re-create a historical figure's "voice" if that figure is being parodied in Cerebus. Good to know that I was on the right track there, at least with the first entry anyway.
Yeah, Dave is an amazing mimic, both drawing and writing. Hemingway, though, is really really easy to parody, for reasons outlined above by Mr. S.
The man won the Nobel Prize. Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama also won Nobel Prizes. They won Nobel Prizes in a different area. Their Nobel Prizes were as justified as the man's Nobel Prize. Nobel was a man who made things blow up. The things blowed up real good.
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