The Fifty-Second Step

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.

Another week of looking at Dave Sim’s seventh notebook used in the creation of Cerebus. It covers Cerebus #59 through 69 and had 160 pages scanned in. . .and so far we’ve only seen 37 of those pages. 

Page 46 is pretty busy. A couple of issue number boxes, but #62 is repeated. Upper left corner has some women’s names crossed out: Deni, Sally, Sheila, Linda, Karen, and Robyn.  And a couple more not crossed out: Janet and Jean. There are a couple of potential issue titles: “The Birth of Politics” and “The Politics of Birth”. 

Notebook #7, page 46

Dave also lists out the potential characters to show up in Cerebus #62, but only Duke Leonardi, Lord Julius, Theresa, and Weisshaupt show up. Though with the other notes in the lower half of the page are for Cerebus #64, the discussion between Weisshaupt and Powers. It isn’t the same as the finished dialogue, just contains some of the same bits.

The next page of the notebook continues with the Weisshaupt and Powers dialogue.

Notebook #7, page 47

It also has some quotes that only “Anything done for the first time unleashes a daemon” shows up later. Kind of. I one which Suenteus Po versions said that.