Cerebus #53 - Thumbnail for Page 20

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.

So this will mark the end of looking at the thumbnails of Cerebus #53 in Dave Sim’s sixth notebook. We started with a thumbnail for the cover, and we end with page 20. The only page which did not have a thumbnail was page 12.  We’ve covered:

• Cerebus #53 Wrap Around Cover Sketch (July 2023): p. 30
• Cerebus #53 - Page One Thumbnail (July 2023): p. 32 & 33
• Cerebus #53 - More Thumbnails (Aug 2023): p. 34
• Thumbnails for Cerebus #53 pages 5 & 6 (Aug 2023): p. 35 & 36
• Cerebus #53 - Thumbnails for Pages 7 & 8 (Aug 2023): p.37
• Cerebus #53 - Thumbnails for Pages 9 & 10 (Aug 2023): p. 38
• Cerebus #53 - Thumbnails for Page 11 (Aug 2023): p. 41 & 42
• Cerebus #53 - Thumbnails for Page 13 (Sept 2023): p. 43
• Cerebus #53 - Thumbnails for Page 14 & 15 (Sept 2023): p. 44 & 45
• Cerebus #53 - Thumbnails for 16 - 19 (Oct 2023): p. 48 & 50

The final thumbnail is on page 51 of the notebook. To go along with that thumbnail there is a thumbnail for the cover to Cerebus #54:

Notebook #6, page 51

The dialogue around the thumbnail is the same as the finished with the exception of one line is moved. One of  the pages we didn’t look at in this series on Cerebus #53 was page #47 which covers Cerebus #54 and has an earlier sketch for the cover of Cerebus #54. 

Dave had this to say about the Wolveroach triptych: “The three ‘Wolveroach’ covers which I really just did to show Frank Miller and Joe Rubinstein how the Wolverine mini-series covers SHOULD have been done – more like Neal Adams. Thus overshooting the ‘Branding’ runway and smashing through Marvel’s intellectual property fence and leaving this mixed metaphor jackknifed into their swimming pool with its tail in the air.”