The Priestess Must Never Believe In Her Own Power

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 seen pages from Dave Sim’s seventh notebook, which covers Cerebus #59 through 69 and had 160 out of 200 pages scanned. The other forty pages were blank or missing. Last week we saw page 144, which covered Cerebus #69 with a plot outline for some later pages and a couple of cover sketches. Today we’ll look at page 145:

Notebook 7, page 145

In the top left corner, it appears to be Weisshaupt, the soldier, and the cannon on the roof. It then looks like Weisshaupt goes to light a match himself, says damn, and . . .I’m not sure what happens in the final panel, I’m thinking it is Weisshaupt feeling the pain of his hear attack.

The top right corner has Dave’s first title for Cerebus #70 – “The Priestess Must Never Believe In Her Own Power”, which he crossed out and then wrote down title that wasn’t used for Cerebus 70 either: “The Sudden Return of the Melodramatic Narrator”.  That title wasn’t used until Cerebus #102.

Right below that we see a sketch for the cover of Cerebus #70, using the title for Cerebus #102.

In the bottom left corner by the number block for Cerebus #69 is a page thumbnail for page 15, aka Church & State I page 367. It looks almost the same, Cerebus touching the BRGWST while Boobah looks on. Then below looks like three panels instead of the four of the final page. 

Cerebus #69, page 15

The numbers listed on the bottom right of the page, 16 though 20, would be the last five pages of Cerebus #69.