Oscar's Letter to Smithers & Co

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.

Back in July of 2021 in A Page Layout Meant For Cerebus #124 is when we last saw a page from Dave Sim’s 16th Cerebus notebook. The notebook covers Cerebus #122 through 127 and had 67 pages scanned.

Somehow page 63 of the notebook caught my attention even though it is a wall of text:

Notebook #16, page 63

The top of the page has a quote that doesn’t seem to be part of the rest of the text: ‘He’s enduring, but as yet he has no urge to know’.

The majority of text on the page is Oscar’s letter to Smithers & Co that is seen on page 273 of Jaka’s Story, aka page 1 of Cerebus #127.

Oscar’s letter to Smithers & Co.

The letter in the notebook is quite a bit different than the one in the finished book. Oscar asking for the money due to him. Though in the notebook version he returns a  check due to it being not enough, and withholding the ‘Locked Door chapter’ of Jaka’s Story, “Not daughter of Palnu  as (they) keep mistakenly referring to it”. 

We also get to see that at the time of Jaka’s Story, a Crown is worth 60 copper bits and that Oscar gets half of a copper bit for each printing of his work. And instead of Oscar talking about how he regard what they did to his book entitled Poems being the cause of it not doing as financially well as it should and Oscar laying out all of the math that got him to the amount he thinks his owed to him of 1,876 crowns.