Notebook One: Cerebus #25 Part Five

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.

Please buy one so boss man stops yelling at me for "giving the store away for free". Perhaps if he sells one or two or all that he has left, he'll finally give me some PTO.

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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We’ve been looking at Dave Sim’s first phonebook for so long I can’t remember the last time we saw a different notebook. The last couple of weeks we’ve seen material for Cerebus #25. Only one mention of Cerebus #26, which was a title of ‘X-Women” and the couple of times that Cerebus #26 has shown up in a schedule. Last week we saw the schedule which Dave has put in his notebooks, which changes and gets more refined as he approaches those dates. Well, we get another look at his schedule, and Cerebus #26 makes another appearance in a page or so.

The last page we just saw, page 130, just had a bunch of sketches on it, which you can see on the back side of page 131:

Notebook 1, page 131

The material on the page says it is page five and then page four, but it doesn’t look like any of it made the final cut. We’ve moved on from the Artist Chap’s “theme” that he was looking for in the last couple of notebook pages, to Claremont controlling Cerebus. 

The next page shows us Dave’s planned schedule for January of 1981 and forward:

Notebook 1, page 132

Dave plans on drawing a page and a half per day, and the cover for Cerebus #25 taking the full day. The content he is doing from Jan 26 to Jan 30 is the Captain Canuck story. I’m not sure what “Chasing the Swamp Kids” is for – is it a potential title for Cerebus #25 or Cerebus #26? 

The material down the bottom of the page is for Cerebus #25. That material continues on the next page of the notebook.

Notebook 1, page 133

You might need to click on the image to get a bigger view of it so you can see what is below the black pen: some material done in pencil. Some page thumbnails for pages #13 – 17, and then some plot points for pages 16 through 30.

The thumbnail for page 13 is kind of close. It looks like a bunch of flying round objects – which could be Cerebus fighting the Sump Thing and the rocks flying  around as Cerebus tries to knock them down. Dave’s thumbnail for page 14 just say “smash” and some other word I can’t make out. Page 15’s thumbnail just says ‘sump thing’, and on page 15 of the final comic, we get a full page of Sump Thing.

And that is the last we’ll see of Cerebus #25 material. The next page of the notebook starts with Cerebus #26 and High Society material. Finally.