Dave Sim's Cerebus Notebooks: The Covers

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.

A quick one this week as I’m writing it a couple weeks in advance as I’m going to be on vacation when this is posted. . .so hello from the past. 

I was wondering what all 36 notebook covers would look like if I had them all at once and could put them on the floor and take a picture. Since Dave only sent a couple at a time, I never did that. And to be honest, I’d probably wouldn’t have though to do it at the time. I only took a couple pictures of the notebooks themselves; my focus was on scanning them and getting them back to Dave. 

So I’ve done the next best thing. No, I haven’t traveled to the Off White House to take the picture myself. I photo-shopped it. Be advised, that you can click the picture below, but it is pretty big in size. 

The numbering starts from the top left corner with notebook #1 and going right to #6, and then the next row of covers starts with #7 at the far left, etc. So notebook #36 is the bottom right corner. 

A few notes:

• Notebook 6: had no cover, so that is page 1. And yes, page 1 was loose.

• Notebook 7: while it has a cover, it had come off the wire binding at some point.

I tried keeping the sizes relative – so the 3” x 5” notebooks are smaller than the 8.5” x 11” notebooks.

All the notebook covers