Jaka's Dream

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 Dave’s twenty-first notebook last November in Astoria Goes Shopping. The notebook covers Cerebus #164 through 187 and had 260 pages scanned out of the 300 pages the notebook cover says it started with. 

On page 75 we see a wall of text. That text is actually used on page 127 of Women, aka page 1 of Cerebus #169. 

Notebook #21, page 75

The majority of the text is the same as the text on the finished page. 

Cerebus #169, page 1

Note that even the first letter, A, being capitalized and made a different font, and the first line of the text on the finish page is the same as the text on the notebook page. The text describes Jaka’s dream, which is also the cover to Cerebus #169.

Cerebus #169 cover

As Jaka holds the copy of Jaka’s Story, note that is what she sees in her dream, she doesn’t see the title of Oscar’s story of her, Daughter of Palnu. Tilted against the chair is a framed picture of the scene of Jaka’s Story. That picture looks like part of pages 34 and 35 from Jaka’s Story, aka pages 4 and 5 from Cerebus #115.

Both scenes together

While part of me thinks the easiest was to do the cover would be just to copy the artwork to those two pages from Jaka’s Story, something tells me that Gerhard would take the time to recreate it himself. . .just looking at the close up the lines are different. . .just amazing being able to recreate that scene on an angle and making it look the same. The only way I could see the difference was to enlarge it many times.