Cerebus #153 Notes

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.

We last saw the twentieth notebook that Dave Sim used in the production of Cerebus back in February of 2019 in Looked Like a Hyena. Covering Cerebus #153 to 164, the notebook had 59 pages scanned.

Page one of the notebook has a lightly sketched layout for page 2 of Cerebus !53, and also the text of it:

Notebook 20, page 1

Cerebus #153, page 2 – Flight page 48

Page two has a list of things that will either have happen by issue #153 or will happen at some point in Flight. As long as you think of the Pigts’ statue of an aardvark which looks eerily similar to Cerebus mysteriously being made whole again after lying in ruin as rising into the air.

Notebook 20, page 2

We have a piece of dialogue from the General, and then on the left we have Cerebus’ speech to the watching Iestans.  Original it looks like Cerebus was going to refer to himself as just Cerebus, but Dave changed it to Most Holy. And he also changed Cerebus calling the Cirinists bitches and called them cows instead. The final text has him calling for the Iestans to “kill the Cirinits” not ‘drive the unbelieving cows from your city.’

We also see a bit about the “illusion tower” – seems Cirin was calling the tower an illusion. But how can Cerebus die if he was on an illusion?