First Take at the Introduction to Free Cerebus

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.

It has been a long time since we’ve seen any pages from Dave Sim’s 23rd Cerebus notebook: August of 2018 in The Thoughts of Red Sophia. The notebook only had 36 pages scanned, 54 pages were blanked, and 27 pages were missing out of the 115 pages the cover claimed the notebook started with. The notebook was one of the smaller ones size wise at 5.5” x 8.5” (13.97cm x 21.59 cm).

The notebook was labeled “Mothers & Daughters” by Dave, and contains items around that time frame, including what appeared to me to be a first draft of the introduction to Free Cerebus:

Notebook #23, page 31

The note:

I was a big fan of Superman and Batman when I was a kid. I remember thinking how neat it would be if the three hundred or so issues of each character’s book made sense as a story; t hey don’t, of course. And they make less sense now than they did twenty years ago. It looked like Marvel might do that. When Stan Lee was writing all of the characters, you could almost believe they were real. Well it’s almost thirty years since Spider-Man was a senior in high school and he’s only in his mid-twenties.  That’s the bullshit I’m trying to change. In Cerebus #1 Cerebus is twenty-five years old. One hundred and fifty issues later we’ve seen four years pass in his life. That’s the way I think comic books should be. He dies in issue three hundred. No bullshit.

Quite a bit different than the introduction of Free Cerebus:

Free Cerebus, inside front cover

Quite a bit different. I didn’t see any other ‘rewrites’ of the introduction in this notebook. I did see another mention of Free Cerebus:

Notebook #23, page 45

The note:

FREE CEREBUS – 32 page giveaway comic. A Cerebus “teaser” with highlights from the first one hundred and fifty issue (black and white) bundle of 50 – 5.00