Notebook One: Cerebus #25 Part One

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.

Maybe instead of rewriting this opener every week, I’ll be a bit more efficient with my use of time and have this standard opening . . .though Boss Man saying I'm giving the notebook away for free, I see it as a way of advertising all the good stuff in the notebook, and wouldn't it be easier to have a hard copy to flip through and read at your own leisure? 

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.

Okay, now that is done, on with this week’s Notebook One post.

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Last week it appeared that we finished up Dave’s material for Cerebus #24 that is in his first Cerebus notebook, Albatross One with page 112. Pages #113 – 117 were already featured in “The Notebook Pages for The Challenge”. You can also see pages #118 and #124 in “The Way to Sannozay”.

So up next is page 119.

Notebook 1, page 119

Not much of this dialogue between Cerebus and Madam DuFort Professor Charles X. Claremont makes it to the finished Cerebus #25 issue, but there is a bit near the top left:

Cerebus: There’s a word missing.

Professor Claremont: Precisely the point, my friend. He who conjures the beast conjures the power.

In the book that turns into:

Cerebus: There’s a word missing.

Professor Claremont: Exactly! He who manages to harness the beast decides what that word is. . .”

 And then he talks what happened when ‘nothing’ was the first word chosen.

There is a sketch of the two riding on the back of Woman Thing. In the finished comic, they ride in a box that has a harness around Woman Thing’s neck and is in the front. Down the bottom Dave starts a list of items for the pages, and we see page 1 through 4 listed. On the next page of the notebook, Dave continues with page 5 and goes to page 8:

Notebook 1, page 120

The comment down the bottom of the page: “It’s Suenteus’ Po’s original apocalypse beast” isn’t used. Instead the Sump Thing is “Lord Rothsump’s Sump Thing”. We don’t get to see the close-ups of the Artist Chap’s castle either with the skulls on the parapet.