Jaka Finds Fred's Note

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 pages from Dave Sim’s 17th notebook in August of 2019 in Melmoth One. Notebook #17 had 72 pages scanned and covered Cerebus #127 through 135. Going over the scans I saw a single notebook page that contained the dialogue and some sketches for Jaka’s Story pages 293 to 297, aka Cerebus #128 pages 1 to 5:

Notebook #17, page 7

What I noticed is it looks like Jaka near the top of the page says “Cerebus is gone” and then Fred is written over Cerebus. While the dialogue isn’t 100% the same as the finished pages, it is close.

And then on the next two pages of the notebook, Dave puts the text and action to specific pages and panels:

Notebook #17, page 8

Notebook #17, page 9

On page 9 he continues onto Oscar writing Jaka’s Story and another page of Jaka and Rick. Note on page 8 that Dave wrote down Fred instead of writing Fred over Cerebus as he had done on page 7.

I’ve no idea where dialogue on the left side of page 8 is from: “I have however been stricken (emphasis my physician’s) with a severe bout of Panrovian flu.”