Winky, Blinky, and Noddy

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.

Some more stuff from Dave's 29th notebook! This time we'll be looking at more of the "shooting scripts". We saw first saw some pages of these way back in July of 2014 in Form & Void Shooting Script. That entry started out with page 47, which is a couple pages into the shooting script. So let's start out with page 44:

Notebook 29, page 44, top left

A title page for "Shooting Script Fall and the River" which shows us it is for Cerebus #248, 249, and 250. In Dave's notes for Form and Void, "Chasing Scott", Dave says that he had typed up his Pat Veteran piece, and then "rolled another sheet of paper into the typewriter and typed" that page that says "shooting script".  He later says "In fact, no one - apart from Gerhard - was ever going to see the script, let alone reject it or send it back for revision." He talks a bit more about how the writer and artist in him worked on and with the script in those notes.

The next page of the shooting script on the notebook page describes the first couple pages of issue 248, which are mostly Gerhard's handiwork with one lone Cerebus figure at the bottom of page 328. There is also a bit on page 3 with some dialogue.

Notebook 29, page 44, bottom right

And the finished pages:

Pages 327 through 329 from Going Home