Cerebus #46 Cover 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 last saw a post on Dave Sim’s fifth notebook way back in July of 2020 in Rejected Plot Point After the Summit. The notebook covers Cerebus #45 through #49 and out of the 80 pages contained in it, 79 were scanned. There are quite a few cover sketches, and I found some more. 

If you have a copy of IDW’s Cerebus Cover Art Treasury, there is  a scan of page #24 of Notebook #5 which has a sketch for the cover of Cerebus #46. The book doesn’t show page #35, which has two sketches for the cover of Cerebus #46:

Notebook #5, page 35

And here is the actual cover to Cerebus #46

If you have the Biweekly reprints, this page of the notebook (along with the aforementioned page in the cover art treasury) is actually printed in Cerebus High Society #21. In that issue Dave had this to say about page #35: “Father Gesolde; a cover sketch including him; and another design for the new Cerebus logo.”