Big Pope Hat

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.

Yes, I know we’ve looked at Dave Sim’s eleventh Cerebus notebook, which covers Cerebus #96 through 102, for the last couple of weeks. As I said, it is one of my favorite notebooks. Way back in July of 2017 in the entry titled Purple Unicorn we saw page 43, a nearly full page sketch of the cover for page 1 of Cerebus #98. Dave had done the backgrounds in the notebook, and Gerhard took that and just did an amazing job with the finished page.

Well, skip page 44 as Dave didn’t have anything on it, and going to page 45 we see page 2 of Cerebus #98:

Notebook #11, page 45

This time Dave has lightly penciled in some backgrounds, but not much. There is so much more focus on the Most Holy figure and his big Pope hat. The page on the notebook is pretty dang close to the finish page, minus the backgrounds, and the one piece of dialogue is on the page as well.

Cerebus #98, page 2, aka Church & State II, page 938

If you look close at the notebook page, you’ll see pencils under the inked images.