Notebook 21: Viktor Davis With Gerhard

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. 

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Lots of walls of text. It is interesting if you can read Dave’s handwriting. Always makes me chuckle that the best letter in comics has handing writing that while better than a doctor’s is to the point that some folk could have trouble parsing it. 

But I digress (RIP Peter David). 

Notice on this next page in the notebook in the second paragraph Dave crossed out Reid and wrote Davis. Viktor takes the audience down a concealed flight of stairs and we see ‘Gerhard’:

Notebook #21, page 189

In case you can’t read it:

At the bottom of the stairs he had paused and was looking to his right. 

‘Gerhard’ he said in a whisper, pointing across a darkened living room studio in the direction of the dining room area. There was a squeaking sound of someone shifting his weight on a chair that badly needed oiling. Discernable on the wall were four rows of pages. The seventh, and the fifteenth through the twentieth were blank. ‘He’s doing the background on page seven of the part you just read.’ Pointing to the bottom row he added. ‘That’s us down there.’

He flashed another grin. ‘Weird, eh?!’

Down the bottom of the page – the crossed out material – is Viktor talking about how he thinks it was Neil Gaiman who said that all writers are liars. Or all stories are lies. The crossed out material continues onto the next page of the notebook:

Notebook #21, page 190

Down the bottom of the above page, the material that isn’t crossed out is Alan Moore’s thoughts on stories. This continues onto the next page:

Notebook #21, page 191

And that is all for this week’s post. Just three pages. Why you ask? Because I think I saw some material for Minds on page 192. Did I? We’ll see next week.