What Would Most Holy Do With Fire Sneeze Powers?

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.

Hello and welcome to my weekly installment of ‘all we look at are pages from Dave Sim’s seventh Cerebus notebook’ here at A Moment of Cerebus.

Just kidding.

Kind of. We still got one more entry on Dave’s 7th notebook, which covers Cerebus #59 through 69. . .but if you’ve been following along these past couple of weeks, you’ve seen a page with some Cerebus #70 stuff. Not much, but it was there. So, am I still on vacation? Who knows, perhaps I made it to Oregon City, and I’m staying there.

But keeping with tradition, here is page 147 from Dave’s seventh notebook.

Notebook #7, page 147

It continues with Dave’s notes on Cerebus #69. The top third of the page is the dialogue and some rough panel sketches for page 17. Once again including Cerebus speech sounding different due to his cold. There are two things different with the final page. The first thing is Boobah saying “ouch” as the match’s fire reaches his fingers and he drops it. In the sketches for the page, it looks like Dave had put the word balloon above Boobah’s head in the second to last panel, but then crossed it out. The second thing is in the final panel in the notebook, Boobah is shown on the left and Cerebus on the right. On the final page the two are switch, and keep the same positioning they have in the preceding panel.

Cerebus #69, page 17

The bottom two thirds of the notebook page show the dialogue between Cerebus and Mrs Henrot-Gutch. They also show a bit of the panel layouts for page 18. Dave put panel numbers above the dialogue. In panel #2’s dialogue, the cross out bit after ‘Id’s bost holy’ looks like ‘you ugly old bad’. Though the last word is hard to make out. It might be ‘Bap’.

Cerebus #69, page 18