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.
Dave Sim’s tenth notebook contains material on Cerebus #87 through 95 and had a total of 115 pages scanned in. Back in May of 2019 in Cerebus Has Something Else To Do we saw page 55 from the notebook and it contained a thumbnail for Cerebus #92 page 4 and dialogue for pages 6 and 7 from that same issue.
Well, the next page in the notebook has a thumbnail for you guessed it, page #5 of Cerebus #92:
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| Notebook #10, page 5 |
Compared to the finish page, it looks very similar panel and character wise. It is just missing Gerhard’s amazing background:
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| Cerebus #92, page 5, aka Church & State II page 821 |
Some, but not all of, the dialogue for the page is in on the notebook page. We also get a few extra sketches of the Bill Mox character.
4 comments:
So the tall guy was based on the artist Seth, but does anyone remember who the other guy was supposed to be? As the years go on, my memory becomes more and more fuzzy due to the Heineken intake and it becomes harder and harder to recall some of these more obscure references.
Bill Marks, publisher of the Canadian-based Vortex Comics. IIRC, Dave wrote about him in the Note(s) From The President when this sequence was first published. Maybe Matt can find it and run it someday? (In general I think a nice occasional feature here could be rerunning the historically interesting NFTPs.)
Bill Marks, publisher of the Canadian-based Vortex Comics. IIRC, Dave wrote about him in the Note(s) From The President when this sequence was first published. Maybe Matt can find it and run it someday? (In general I think a nice occasional feature here could be rerunning the historically interesting NFTPs.)
If Cerebus is still read a hundred or more years from now - I hope and expect it will be - it's going to need annotations, like the explanatory footnotes they put in collegiate "readers," explaining just who Shakespeare or Pope was making fun of.
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