Thumbnails for Cerebus #99

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.

Last April we saw page 18 from Dave Sim’s eleventh notebook used in the creation of Cerebus in Notes for Cerebus #96. That notebook covers Cerebus #96 trough 102 and had only had 129 pages left in it out of 140 pages. Of those 129 pages only 114 were scanned in as the rest were blank.

The notebook has many pages with thumbnails of pages, and one of those pages is page sixty-nine:

Notebook #11, page 69

Along the top Dave wrote page 6 and 7. And those are the layouts for pages 6 and 7 of Cerebus #99, which corresponds to page 962 and 963 of Church & State II. And yes, the text below the thumbnails is the dialogue that goes along with those pages. 

The dialogue and the page thumbnails are pretty much spot on. Well, except of course how Gerhard works his magic with the background:

Cerebus #99, pages 6 & 7

Along the bottom of the page is a calendar starting on May 19th and going to June 16th. Beside each date is a page number – a page a day.