Dave Trying Hal Foster on for Size

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.

For the last couple of weeks we’ve look at pages from Dave Sim’s sixth Cerebus notebook which covers Cerebus #52 through 59. Skipping a couple pages a head to page #14, we see letter boxes for issue #53. The content on the page however, is for Cerebus #52, and the story The Insecure Sinecure.

Notebook #6, page 14

The sketches line up pretty well with the finished pages as does the text.  The next page has some more layouts for the issue, and page 3 matches page 3 of the mini-story within Cerebus #52 perfectly. The page 4 layouts are only different in the first panel. 

Notebook #6, page 15

Dave said this about this page of the notebook “trying Hal Foster on for size again.”