New Inside Front Cover Design

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.

Last week we saw a couple of pages from Dave Sim’s first notebook. This week we’ll take a look at one page. Dave sketched a full page layout for the inside front cover of Cerebus. 

Notebook #1, page 51

Well, the inside front cover of Cerebus #21 didn’t quite look like what Dave had sketched above:

Cerebus #21, inside front cover

It wasn’t until a couple of issues later that this modified layout was used:

Cerebus #23, inside front cover

The layout is pretty much the same: the note from the publisher, the informational box on the right and then  down the bottom another box of publishing information. Though the layout of the information in the box is a bit different than what is on the notebook page. Boobah’s real life counterpart even makes an appearance. Kind of.

And I only just now noticed the typo of aardvark in the box in the bottom.