Issue #41 Page by Page

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.

It has been about a year since we’ve look at Dave Sim’s fourth Cerebus notebook in Cerebus’ First Job, which had some bits for the Cerebus story ‘A Friendly Reminder’ that appeared in Epic Illustrated. The notebook also covers Cerebus #41 through 44 and had 99 out of 108 pages scanned.

Looking through it I found what appeared to be a list of things to happen in Cerebus 41 listed by page number. Dave said of page 10 of the notebook “by this point I had the whole issue blocked in up to page 15…”

Notebook #4, page 10

Dave then continues on for page 11 of the notebook: “…and was able to bomb through the Regency Elf / Cerebus scene in one big block of text. As you’ve seen, this is one of the rate times that trick actually worked.”

Notebook #4, page 11

That Elf / Cerebus scene goes is numbered as pages 16 and 17, and then we haver some notes on page 19 as well.  Then a bit of a cliff hangers for issue 42: “Start #42 with full page Suenteus Po history of what”. What what?