Albatross One - AKA Dave's First Cerebus Notebook

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.

There was some talk about the notebooks in the latest Please Hold for Dave Sim, or just go here to see the video about the notebooks. Matt mentioned that yes, I do keep track of what pages of what notebooks I’ve posted. Yes, he was correct in that I do it so I don’t repeat what pages I’ve shown. I also kept track of how many pages per notebook I scanned, what the notebook’s cover said was the starting page count, and the count of any blank pages in the notebooks. 

In the video they talk about Albatross One, aka Dave’s first notebook. Albatross one had 194 pages scanned out of 200. I’ve posted 33 pages and the cover from that notebook. 

And yes, I will post the ‘recap’ post in early January.  Here is the recap from last year in case you don’t want to wait a month or so. That post includes a link to a post about the notebooks that shows I scanned in 3,281 out of 4,506 notebook pages. At the last count in August of 2022, I had posted 694 pages, about 21% of the notebook pages scanned in. Yes, all of the covers and page ones from every notebook have been posted to the blog at one point. 

All the pages (and covers) that I scanned were scanned with a Epson V500 photo scanner. Hey, it is old because I started scanning the pages in May of 2005. I scanned all the pages (and covers) at 600 dpi, 24 bit depth, full color, and in png format. The files are huge. HUGE. If I had the time, the one enhancement I’d do is rotate and crop as needed so the image is just the page itself. I wouldn’t color correct them – if that notebook has slightly yellow pages, the scan is slightly yellow, why turn them white? 

For instance, notebook one has file sizes from 63.9 MB (page 35, which has a huge color sketch of Captain Cockroach) to 521 kb? What the fuck. Oh, that is page 24 and it is blank. I don’t know why I scanned that blank page in – I can barely see the writing from page 23 behind it. We’ll chalk it up to me just starting out with the notebooks. Typically, the files are 10 to 30 gb. It just depends on the amount of stuff on them. 

So if everyone would like to see pages from Albatross One, from which we’ve seen only 33 of the 194 pages scanned, that leaves 161 pages to post. If we showcase 4 pages per post / week, we’d be done in 41 weeks. Almost a year. . .what do you all want? Does it matter? Will I just post what I want to see as I didn’t get a chance to look at them closely when I was scanning them in? Personally, I like finding pages I can link together with common themes to talk about. Going page to page might get some of that, but not enough. So we could hope around notebook one this year? Here are all the pages, well, tiny thumbnails of them, with the ones posted highlighted:

Notebook 1, aka Albatross One, pages. Click to embiggen.

How about pages 2 and 3 to start? 

Notebook 1, page 2

Notebook 1, page 3

Page two starts and page three continues with material for Cerebus #20: a discussion about the followers and priestesses of Terim in a selection from Cirin’s book, The New Matriarchy. Cirin’s book shows up on page one of Cerebus #20, and it is only one paragraph of the two notebook pages. Though the bottom paragraph on page three is from Innec Starvm’s My Months as Palnu’s Grandlord which is also quoted on page one of Cerebus #20.