Cerebus #20 Material Part 4

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.

Yes, we are looking at Albatross One, aka Notebook 1, again this week. Someone asked for it, so now everyone gets it. I created a ‘label’ for Notebook One, so if you’d like, you can find all of them with that label – click here to see the posts labeled with Notebook One. Continuing with the notebook, we’ll be looking at pages 14, 15, and 16.

Page 14 of the notebook continues where page 13 left off – Cerebus #20, page 10, item #6:

Notebook 1, page 14

The top half of page 14 shows us the dialogue of page 10 panels 6, 7, and 8.  The notebook dialogue matches up pretty closely with the finished page. The bottom half of the page is the dialogue for the first five panels of page 11. The dialogue for the Cirinist Wenda was changed from this “I’m listening, [illegible] my schizophrenic messiah.” to just “I’m listening.” Not much else of this dialogue matches up with the finished page. None of the rest of the Cirinist dialogue made it to the finished page, and Dave plays up the hedonism and depravity of the Illusionists instead. And Cerebus’ dialogue of “the courage of an Earth-pig born” was removed as well.

On page 15 of the notebook we see the rest of the dialogue for page 11 of Cerebus #20. This matches up a bit better with the finished page, but still not as close as the dialogue for page 10.

Notebook 1, page 15

From the marks on the right side of this page, I’m thinking Dave must have had the notebook opened to this page while he worked on the original art. The bottom of the page starts the dialogue for page 12, the first five panels. For panel 4, Cerebus dialogue reads:

Aye they plan to seed the drink infect the water supply of every major city with [several illegible words] the root of the momtom tree. 

That line on the finished page turned into “Aye, they plan to contaminate the water supply of every major city with ginshu root.”

Page 16 of the notebook finished up the dialogue for panel 5 of page 12, and then has several takes on the dialogue for panels 6 and 7. However, those don’t exist on the finished page. 

Notebook 1, page 16