Notebook One: Cerebus #27 Part Seven

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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We’re getting closer. Only 21 pages of Dave’s first Cerebus notebook left to look at. Will we finish it before 2024 ends? Nope. Sorry. I’d blame it on boss man only giving me Thursdays to post, but something tells me he’d let me post every single day so he can take another one of his extravagant vacations. . .so nope.

Last week we ended with page 168 of notebook one, so this week we’ll start with page 170. Why?  Well, if you remember last week’s entry, we already saw pages 169 and 171 in Playing Diamondback with Onliu Freelancers. So page 170:

Notebook One, page 170

Yup, that is the Albatross. Well, not really. A preliminary sketch of the albatross. The symbols beside it? Dave sad this about them in the AV High Society: “Albatross sketch with the symbols (which I remembered from the Ben Casey TV show) for Man, Woman, Birth, Death and Infinity carved into the base.”

Then there is, as Dave put it, a lot of over plotting. Basically a list of what each fraction – Orthodox Tarimite, Cirinist, and Illusionist – think of each of the symbols. Then below that list, those same fractions answer questions about the albatross – what is it? Where is it? Who made it?

We’ll skip a page as it was Dave writing up material on the game of diamondback or Howard the Duck. So on the next page, we get more plotting for Cerebus #27 pages 4 through 6. 

Notebook One, page 172

We’ll skip pages 173 & 174. Why? Because we already saw them back in June of 2022, but as you will see, I was an idiot. I mislabeled them. Yah, yah, I go back and relabel them. At some point. But you really want to see page 175 don’t you? 

Notebook One, page 175

Oh, you said you wanted to see page 175. And that is all there is. Some random doodles and what looks like Henrot. Or maybe it is just Frank Throne. 

Come back next week for more thrilling pages like these. Or not, I’m not your supervisor.