Posey, Bishop Powers, and Tracing Paper

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 way back in October of 2014 we saw pages from Dave Sim’s 11th Cerebus notebook which we are going to discuss again here. That notebook, earlier called #8 before I relabeled them all ‘notebook’ and not ‘albatross’, covers Cerebus #96 to 102, it contain 129 pages of the 140 it started with, and of  those 129 pages, only 114 were scanned as there were a bunch of blank pages.

The page we’re going to look at again is page 51:

Notebook #11, page 51

Which we originally saw in The Trial many years ago. I compared it to the finished pages, Cerebus #98, pages 6 and 7, yes, a double page spread. Now though, we can look at the in-between step: the tracing paper. Dave would draw on the tracing paper, flip it over so the pencil that is on the tracing paper is on the Bristol board art page, and then he would pencil on top of the pencil that he could see on the other side of the tracing paper.

Here is the tracing paper, which measures 14” x 11” (35.6 cm x 27.9 cm). First up is the side that “looks right” in that it the same as the finished page. This was done in blue pencil:

Tracing paper, blue pencil side

The next picture is of the same sheet of tracing paper, but is backwards of the finished page. You can see that the black pencil is more prominent on this page:

Tracing paper, black pencil side

Here is what Dave has to say on his usage of tracing paper, taken from his note that came with a tracing paper preliminary pencil drawing used in Cerebus #300, you can view the entire note here.

Throughout the 26-year-and-3 month production of the 6,000-page Cerebus storyline, as a comic-book illustrator, I went through a number of phases and different techniques which I used in penciling and inking the characters. For example, for a long period of time, I used non-reproduction blue pencil to “rough in” and gesture of the characters I needed to depict and would then “tighten up” the drawings in soft lead pencil prior to inking them. And then, for a period of time, I dispensed with the blue pencil and went right to lead pencil both for layout and tight penciling.

During one of these phases, I also began to use tracing paper as a means of correcting imbalances and inaccuracies in the drawings. This technique involved getting a close approximation of how I intended the finished drawing to look and then flipping the tracing paper over and either drawing a finished version of the figure directly on the other side of the sheet or putting another sheet of tracing paper over the first one and doing the finished version on that separate sheet. When a final version of a figure was achieved (in reverse), the finished drawing was then turned face down on the artboard and—by tracing over the image in pencil—a light pencil impression of the finished drawing was transferred to the artboard which could then be “tightened up” in pencil and inked.

To get another look at the tracing paper and the finished page in the issue (well, phonebook here, page 942 of Church & State II):

Yes, you can clickity click to see all these images bigger

At some point Dave stopped using the blue pencil for the tracing paper prelims and used black pencil for both sides, though I don’t know where exactly.  He would throw the tracing papers away. Only during the creation of Cerebus #256 through 259 did he start to send them to people who wrote to him. Sending a form letter and a tracing paper sketch was his way of making up for not sending a personalized letter in return:

“Dear CEREBUS Correspondent”

Talk about giving me a heart attack. Even back in mid-2000 when I received this form letter. Yes, Dave – PLEASE do not throw them away. Yoinks! So the ones from Church & State II are probably few and far between. I’m not sure how this one survived, just that Dave sent it to me many years ago. I hope he still has some of them up in the Off White House.