Notebook One: Cerebus #27 Part Five

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. Wait, why am I pushing this, boss man is on vacation. . .I should just take off. . .

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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In our sequential journey through the pages of Dave Sim’s first notebook, we last saw pages #160 & 161 last week, and we already saw pages 162 & 163 back in 2019. Those pages showed the first looks at the McGrew Brothers and items from Cerebus #27. And unsurprisingly, Dave continues with Cerebus #27 material on page 164:

Notebook #1, page 164

This page has more meat on the bone so to speak, with a page-by-page plot outline for Cerebus #27 and as Dave said in the AV version of High Society, this “Page by page continuity, pretty close to what I went with.” There is some McGrew Brothers dialogue down the bottom right of the page along with where they are from.

The next page of the notebook is where, as Dave says, he is “fleshing out the continuity”:

Notebook #1, page 165

In this fleshing out page, we see the McGrew brothers names for the first time: Dirty Armand? No, cross that out, Dirty Fleagle McGrew and his brother Dirty Drew. Armand? I can see why Dave crossed that out. 

This fleshing out of the continuity on though page 166 of the notebook:

Notebook #1, page 166

Dave had this to say about page 166: “Stray thoughts, usually going in the direction of ‘over-plotting’ all of which needed to be thinned out. Occasionally, I’d come up with a finished gag in the notebook (‘You SIGNED the ransom note’) but most of the time I’d come up with finished dialogue on the page while I was laying it out and penciling it.”