Notebook 29: Cerebus #241 Plot Outline

Dave Sim’s “Notebook #29” contains materials used for Cerebus #240 to #250. The notebook started out as a 300-page notebook broken up into three sections, and only 150 pages were scanned: section 1 had 63 pages scanned, section 2 had 65 pages scanned, and section 3 had 22 pages scanned. There were only 11 pages missing, and the rest were blank. We’ll be looking at this notebook page by page until we’ve seen all there is to see. To see past posts, please use the Notebook #29 tag.

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Last week we started our journey with Notebook #29 and left off with page 11 as we had already seen many of those earlier pages and the only two left were as I said, “walls of text”. Fun text, but still text. So guess what we have for you now? Yup, another page of text. But once again, it is written by F. Stop Kennedy. And boy oh boy, he really writes Cerebus Jozan as using words I don’t think Cerebus even knows. . .you know, due to him being a barbarian from the north:

Notebook #29, page 16

And yes, that text appears word for word in the Going Home phonebook on page 187, aka Cerebus #241 page 1. The text is sized differently and some has been formatted differently – italicized – but other than those small differences, it is the same. The word balloons have the same text as well. Though, some of the formatting of them is different as well. 

If you look closer at it, Dave crossed off the chapter title of Patching Anthony wrote the book title above it, probably thinking it would end up on a different ‘side’ of the phonebook and therefore need the book title and not the chapter title. We can see this as well just to the right of the crossed out Patching Anthony: the page number 21 is there in typed text, but crossed out and replaced with either a 1, 2, 12, or 11. . .or perhaps 1? Some back and forth happened with the page number.

And yes, the text is cut out from another page and pasted to the notebook page. The word balloons and mark-ups are all in ink.

The next page of the notebook is the “batting order” for Cerebus #241. Dave starts with a circled 1 indicating page one and an arrow pointing at page 16 of the notebook.

Notebook #29, page 17

If you get your copy of Going Home and start with page 187 – or just get Cerebus #241 – you can follow Dave’s outline for the issue page by page. Some of the dialogue is slightly changed here and there, but it follows it pretty closer. The note for page 14 (page 200 of the phonebook) it says ‘cocktail hour’. If you flip to that page, it is another page from Pleasure’s Simple Life with the header ‘cocktail hour’ on it. 

The pages only go up to 15, though we do get some talk of F. Stop’s wife Gloria being in the . . .nuthouse down at the bottom of the page.