The first fourteen or so pages of Dave Sim’s twenty ninth notebook contain nearly finished pages to Going Home. More specifically Cerebus #240. We’ve seen a couple of these pages already, most recently in Nearly Finished Page from Cerebus #240 in September of 2020. The notebook covers Cerebus #240 through 250 and had 150 pages scanned.
One of those nearly finished pages we haven’t seen yet is page 5 of the notebook. Same as the other pages, Dave started out with pencil and finished them up with ink. And there are no Gerhard backgrounds to them:
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| Notebook #29, page 5 |
The above page goes along with Going Home page 171, aka Cerebus #240 page 5.
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| Going Home page 171 |
As you can see, the notebook page is very similar to the finished comic page with a few minor differences differences: The middle strip of panels is broken up into only two and not three as shown on the notebook page. And F. Stop is facing to the right on the finished page, but on the notebook page he is facing left. And the shadow is not on his face, nor the highlight on the back of Cerebus’ head on the top right panel.
But dang, pretty close to a finish page. In his notebook.
4 comments:
Thanks for sharing, Margaret!
Though Dave would probably be able to give a laundry list of things wrong with the notebook drawings, they look like finished products to me. I'm amazed that he would do that good a job, and even ink the pencils, in his practice. It's not like he could have reused these either, as aren't the "real" drawings twice this size?
Is it common for accomplished artists to do this? Carson? Ben?
I remember a video from the Cerebus TV days where an artist (I want to say it was Erik Larson but maybe not) talking about young artists not wanting to fix a page because of one bad panel when it could have been a much better page. They would just abandon them and move on.
I wonder if Dave changed F. Stop because this is a right hand page? That way he leads the viewer to the left. I’d look but I’m traveling.
Dave has also talked a lot about his workflow being to complete an entire page, rather than rough out the whole issue first and then go back and clean it up.
Dan-Is it common? Not that I'm aware of. Does it happen sometimes? Sure. If I'm working smaller to figure out composition or layout or acting, I'll generally rough it in with loose lines. Sometimes I'll tighten the drawing. I don't generally get to the inking stage. Although if my lines are a mess, I might lay down ink so I can erase the pencil and see if I'm the right track. I would be curious to know why these pages were inked.
And yes, pages are typically around 11X17 and then reduced, so the notebook page is about half that size. (Although there was a picture Erik Larson posted on Twitter where he showed all the pages of some issue of Savage Dragon. All the pages were different sizes, based on what was on the page and the level of detail he wanted... So size can vary.)
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