Captain Cockroach Sketches

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’ve seen the first notebook that Dave Sim used in the creation of Cerebus twelve times already, with the most recent time being over a year ago in Notebook Pages on Mind Game. The first albatross, as Dave called it, covered Cerebus #20 through 28 and had 194 pages out of 200 page scanned. And one of the characters we saw debut during this time was the Captain Cockroach persona of the Roach. We’ve seen some early sketches of him and his sidekick Bunky back in the post Captain Cockroach and Bunky.

On page 34 we see a Captain Cockroach logo with the Captain under the logo and what appears to be Bunky and Cerebus in the lower right corner. So this looks like the first appearance of Captain Cockroach in the notebook. 

Notebook #1, page 34

On the next page of the notebook, we get a much better look at the Captain:

Notebook #1, page 35

Pretty nice drawing to be stuck in a notebook.