Thursday 8 April 2021

The Accurately Inexplicable

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.

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been looking at Dave Sim’s eleventh notebook, which covers Cerebus #96 through 102. And more specifically, some of those pages which had page layouts. Well, page #65 has a page layout for page #957 of Church & State II, aka page one of Cerebus #99:

Notebook #11, page 65

Church & State II, page 957

Astoria’s one line is just to the right of the sketch of that page. The text above her close, not exact. It is even missing THE in the final version.

The text of the bottom of the page is for a couple of pages later in the issue. Some of it is used. The bit about ‘though I die I will be reborn. I am reborn already.’ That wasn’t used. Instead we get the term echoes before we see what came previously.


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