Notebook One: Cerebus #27 Part Ten

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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Last week we finished up with page 182 from Dave Sim’s first Cerebus notebook, Albatross One. With this entry the material for Cerebus #27 has taken the lead for having the most content in Notebook #1:

Item	page count
Cerebus 20	22
Cerebus 21	31
Cerebus 22	22
Cerebus 23	4
Cerebus 24	24
Cerebus 25	14
Cerebus 26	17
Cerebus 27	34
Cerebus 28
Miscellaneous	9

We’ll look at pages #183 and 184 today, and we’ve already seen page #185 in “First Look at Astoria”. So after this week we’ll have 10 pages left in notebook one. At some point we’ll see material for Cerebus #28. I swear. I’ve looked ahead and I promise there is Cerebus #28 material. How much? We’ll see that together. I do know that notebook #2 has material on Cerebus #28 as well. 

Picking up where we left off last week with page #183 of notebook #1 and another page 9 thumbnail. It is pretty close to the final page:

Notebook #1, page 183

The text below the thumbnail for page #9 is the text that appears on page #9, minus the joke about Cerebus actually being the sixth best crossbowman and not the third best. The text down the bottom is for page 10 panel 1, though it was dumbed down a bit more for the final page. As you can probably tell, the dialogue for panel one is the McGrew Brothers and panel two is Cerebus  telling them they aren’t prisoners, he is just getting a cut of the ransom for himself. This text for page 10 continues on the next page of the notebook:

Notebook #1, page 184

That dialogue is pretty much the same as the finished page 10 of Cerebus #27. Even how it is broken down into bits for word balloons. As Dave said in the audio-visual version of High Society: “I would ‘sketch’ dialogue as well. Compare these ‘sketches’ with the finish word balloons.” So here is page 10 of Cerebus #27 for you to compare:

Cerebus #27, page 10