Notebook One: Cerebus #27 Part Eleven

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 back to looking at the last few pages of Dave Sim’s first notebook used in the production of Cerebus, Albatross One. We left off with page 184 which dealt with Cerebus #27, which is where we’ve been for at least ten entries so far. We won’t start with page 185 because we’ve already seen it in First Look at Astoria back in April of 2022. As you can see on that page, it has a bit for Cerebus #27 (page 13), but it also looks forward at issues #28 – 35 with the title “Trail of the Albatross” and then a bunch of sketches of a prototype of Astoria.

The next page is a mix of forward planning – ‘Fleagle and Drew are painting propaganda slogans in Iest’ to ‘Magic is just short has just vanished. Cerebus is like a turbo charger. . .last continuity.” Which in the AV version of High Society Dave has this to say about it: “Cerebus’ magnifier quality explains a lot of what happened just prior to High Society.”

Notebook One, Page 186

Some of the other items on the list of future planning items in case you can’t read Dave’s handwriting:

• Villager from where Cerebus came from writing about Cerebus’ origins
• We’ve been up this high in the evolution of civilization before. Estarcion will cease to exist with famine shortage wars a hundred years of Cerebus dies, just about the time the joint develops a publish or perish mentality with widespread development of movable type.
• There is the simultaneous invention of movable type in many of the Southern City States. Palnu will be one of the last to allow it.

In the AV version of High Society Dave says he did use this in Minds: "We’ve been up this high in the evolution of civilization before." He didn’t use the second part of that item, but moveable type did make its first appearance before the end of High Society. The final item was used. As Dave said: “Lord Julius was willing to subject Iest to competitive broadsheets but not his own city-state.”

Then under the forward-looking items we go back to listing the pages 12 – 20 of Cerebus #27. Way down the bottom Dave starts some writing that continues onto the next notebook page:

Notebook One, Page 187

Dave had this to say about the text: “Writing my own Hansard was a lot of fun.” Having no idea what a Hansard is, I looked it up and Wikipedia says it is a transcript of parliamentary debates in Britain and many Commonwealth countries and it is named after the first official printer to the parliament at Westminster. But this Hansard doesn’t appear to be used in Cerebus.

The next page starts with a calendar for May and June 1981:

Notebook One, Page 188

Dave has this to say about the calendar: “I’d make up my own calendar to make sure I had enough time to do the issue while taking most weekends off. Here, writing May 29, 30, and 31 and June 1 – 5. By the time I actually got to the weekend I usually still had to work most or all of Saturday.”

Then after Dave’s calendar we’re back to Cerebus #27 material. Did we finally wrap up Cerebus #27 with this page or will there be more next week? If you had your own copy of Albatross One, you’d know.