Fun With BRGWST

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.

More fun from Dave Sim’s 22nd notebook, which we just saw in last week’s Fun With Black Holes. I had been wondering if Dave wrote all 36 pages of text all at once or if he wrote some, took a break, and came back for it. We’ll have to make a note to ask during the next ‘Please Hold for Dave Sim’. All I can see is that there were no rewrites. 

In the notebooks there are walls of text, and there are instances of different paragraphs and sometimes pages being written again with small differences. That is not the case in these 36 pages of text. Just one long narrative. Yes, there are some mark-ups, but that is it. I don’t even see an outline at the start.

On page 19 the reference to The Big Round Glowing White Strange Thing stopped me. Well, not so much that, but the reference to the BRGWST having male pronouns: “The Big Round Glowing White Strange Thing, and his tiny radiant companion are visible as if from a great distance.”

Notebook 22, page 19

I wondered if  that matched up to the finished work. It did. The above notebook page matches up with a section of text that goes from page 221 to page 222 in Reads:

Reads, excerpt from pages 221 to 222

Dave did a Q&A with the Cerebus Yahoo!Group in March of 2004 in which this question and answer appeared:

Question: Were all the BRGWST the same thing/person? In particular, who or what was the BRGWST that spoke to Cerebus on the platform in "Talking with Tarim?")

DAVE: Yes, all BRGWST (never typed that before) are the same thing. For all I know they're all YHWH across the length and breadth and height of every reality of which we are aware. I would be surprised if the living thing in the earth invented the name YHWH.

That is probably why never assigned the BRGWST male pronouns, but used gender neutral pronouns. Curious that Dave associates it with YHWH, when in Reads the BRGWST stands opposite from the void.

The rest of the text on the notebook page matches up about the same as the text we saw from last week’s notebook entry. Some of it is the same, there are some additions, a few subtracts, but pretty close.