Jaka, Magic, and the Pageant Story

 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.

So for the past couple of weeks we looked at some pages from Dave Sim’s fourteenth notebook, which covers Cerebus #113 through 117. Jeff in the comments section a while back asked for more text, which he thought he saw last week. Well, we got even more text this week.

A lot more text. Dave would write down Jaka’s Story in his notebook. And then rewrite the same segment again. And then again. This segment deals with Jaka and Thunder, the horse that she called Magic. If you want to follow along in your phonebook, it is page 26 in Jaka’s Story (aka page 26 of #114, try telling my younger self in September of 1988 when she first picked up an issue of Cerebus, yes #114, that she would be scanning in the notebook pages from The Dave Sim that had this text hand written down by The Dave Sim, she would’ve laughed at you).

Notebook 14, page 37

The top of the page is Julius’ experience with Thunder, and then about halfway down it switches to Jaka’s experience with Thunder Magic. Lots of text crossed out and re-writes. 

Notice that the top of page 38 shown below starts again with Jaka’s experience with Magic.

Notebook 14, page 38

On page 38 to the middle of page 39 of the notebook, Dave writes out the text for page 26 of Jaka’s Story, with only a few corrections. Then on the bottom of page 39, he starts writing the text again:

Notebook 14, page 39

However, if you flip to page 40, while it is more text, it isn’t a continuation of this same passage, but the start of the next passage of text for Jaka’s Story. 

Next week: More text? If you want even MORE text, we could try the notebook for Reads.