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.
Have you got your copy of Albatross One? That is Dave Sim’s name for his first notebook used in the creation of Cerebus. If you want a copy of the notebook – and trust me, as someone who has held the actual Albatross One, it is a pretty close duplicate and looks great – you can check out this post right here. Well not this post. The one at this link. Go check it out, this post will still be here.
And if you don’t want to buy one, you can wait as I release a couple of pages a week and check them out using the Notebook One tag. But trust me, the notebook is much much nicer then my silly little posts.
Last week we ended with page 73 – out of 194 pages scanned, so it will take some time to see them all – which had material for Cerebus #22. So if you’ve been following along with these weekly notebook posts, then yes, page 74 of the notebook is another wall of text for Cerebus #22:
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| Notebook 1, page 74 |
All that work naming the different people on the tribunal, and none of that was used. In fact, the only name we get for the tribunal is “Agenda Secretary Nerak”. Nerak spelled backwards is Karen, so perhaps a shout out to Deni’s sister? (Yes, the same sister who married the real life version of Boobah). Dave even wrote out a bunch of dialogue for the tribunal, but nothing on this page was used. Well, almost nothing. Dave used the name LaFort again in Cerebus #58 when he was mentioned by Pope Harmony IV as the ruler of Lower Felda.
The next page of the notebook is more of the same – more text on the Tribunal that shows up for a couple of pages and really doesn’t do anything except yell for the guards to come get the President and his cohorts.
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| Notebook 1, page 75 |
Then on the next page we see the numbers – which typically indicates either pages or panels. I’m thinking this is pages due to the note near the bottom by ‘page 12’.
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| Notebook 1, page 76 |
More interesting then the text is the numbers at the bottom left of the page. Those numbers is Dave’s calendar: so 10 6 ½ 7 is Dave’s note to himself that on the 10th of the month he’ll do page 6 and ½ of page 7. Then on the 11th he’ll do the final half of page 7 and page 8. All the way to the cover, half of page 19, and page 20 on the 19th of the month and the cover color separations on the 20th. 10 days straight of a page and a half. Sounds like a lot of work!
