So guess which of the thirty-six notebooks Dave Sim used in the creation of Cerebus that we will look at today? If you guessed number seven, you are correct! Hey, it has 160 pages, and we’ve only seen 36 of those pages.
We’ve been looking at the tail end of this notebook for the last month and a half – that part dealt with Cerebus #69, a little bit of #70, and the never to be Cerebus / X-Men crossover. So today we’ll head towards the start of the notebook, which should be Cerebus #59. And the notebook does cover Cerebus #59 – 69 (plus a little of #70), but we’re not going that far forward.
Page 39 caught my interested because it is just a ton of sketches. We get one of Theresa, probably because she shows up in both Cerebus #60 and #62, and those issues are popping up in the pages of this notebook around this page. Then we get a tone of sketches of another woman, and what I’m assuming are her cats.
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| Notebook #7, page 39 |
Searching for “Citadel of the western world” on google surprisingly only returns 4 results, or 9 if you include similar results. And the Citadel of the western world is not. . .Bethesda. I’m thinking Bethesda is a reference to the location of the Small Press Expo. . .but that started in 1994, and with the number box for Cerebus #61 being on this page puts this page of the notebook from earlier than April of 1984.
3 comments:
I seem to recall this page was reprinted in the Church & State biweekly reprint run, and it may have had an explanation from Dave as to who was on it. But I'm too lazy to dig up my copy to look (at the moment).
I'm thinking Bethesda is the name of the woman in the sketches - either the actual woman's actual name, or the proposed name of a character he was thinking of using that would have been based on her.
I believe Bethesda was a major Diamond hub back in the day. Perhaps Dave was there or thinking of that when he did the drawing? I seem to recall his Address to Pro Con in issue 170 was given there.
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