Notebook 21: Cerebus #174 pages 1 - 3

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.

We’re continuing our look at Dave Sim’s 21st notebook used during the creation of Cerebus #164 to 187. We’ll be looking at this notebook, which there were 260 out of 300 pages scanned, until we’ve seen every single page of it. Well, the pages scanned. If you want to see all of the notebook #21 posts to date, just use the Notebook 21 tag. 

~*~~~*~

For the last few months we’ve been making our way though Dave’s 21st notebook, and last week ended with page 92 that had material for Cerebus #173. More specifically the Astoria and Cirin dialogue with their individual followers. So this week we should be looking at page 93, but we’ve already seen pages 93 through 95 back in March thanks to a request from Boss Man and the Please Hold for Dave Sim podcast. So you can go back and read that entry: Notebook 21: Cerebus #173.

And with that, we’re jumping to Cerebus #174 on page 96 of the notebook. Along with flipping the page of the notebook, we’re rotating it as well:

Notebook #21, page 96

And yes, as the notebook says, this is a rough for page one of Cerebus #174. It has both the Swoon dialogue – hidden between the 1 and the 174 – “No! Must uh” and the other Roaches. If you want and have the time, feel free to compare all the Roach names listed on the notebook to those on page 227 of the Women phonebook.

On the next page of the notebook we get two more page roughs:

Notebook #21, page 97

Page two in the notebook is very close to page two in Cerebus #174 (aka page 228 of Women). Page three has one long panel with Swoon to open up, and then it has four small panels, but those small panels are vertical not horizontal, and they also have different content:

Cerebus #174, pages 3 and 4

The material in the notebook slotted for those four smaller panels of page four was stretched out a bitin the issue.