Stairs to the Regency

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.

Just this past April we saw page 15 from Dave Sim’s eighth Cerebus notebook in Elf Request. Gerhard was kind to let us know that that page of Dave’s notebook showed us pages #6 and 7 of Cerebus #70. Today we’ll look at page 14 of that same notebook, which as you guessed, shows us thumbnails for pages 3 through 5 of Cerebus #70.

Notebook #8, page 14

Along with the thumbnails the notebook pages has Dave’s really rough outline for the first three pages at the top:

1 2 credits

3 4 climbing just hurry

5 whew I’m exhausted.

The dialogue on the far left of the notebook page is Cerebus with his stuffed up nose. . .snout? 

Id feels like bost holy had walke wa cl’bed as far as d’cabimd k gingdubs

That doesn’t show up on pages 3, 4 or 5. Instead Cerebus repeats his line ‘Don’t get mad at an elf’ through puffs for air. That line is written down on the notebook page. Along with Elf’s line of ‘Try taking the stairs two at a time and maybe the time will go faster by’. Though on the finished page she doesn’t finish the line and it is slightly different: maybe if you tried climbing the steps two at a time. . .

The page thumbnails not only show the layout for the art and the word balloons, but it shows the word balloons differently for each character. Cerebus has regular word and thought balloons while the elf has dashed balloons.

And the three pages from Cerebus #70, aka Church & State I pages 375 – 377 show us what Ger had to work with when he did the background for these pages - just a rough 'put this here'. Sure, on the notebook pages you can see a couple rough circles and faces, but on the finished page we get a better look at all those heads on the inside of the black tower and the stairs all the way to the Regency:

Cerebus #70, pages 3 - 5