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 are continuing with our look at Dave Sim’s last Cerebus notebook, notebook #36 (see all notebook #36 posts using the tag of the same name). Notebook #36 covers material for Cerebus #265 through #300 and had 58 pages scanned in. Many of those pages were just the notebook page with the Cerebus issue box number in the top corner. I scanned those pages in. I didn’t scan in the many blank pages that followed some of those pages. So far we’ve seen 42 out of those 58 pages. Only 16 pages left. Will this week be more of the same as the last couple of weeks – just pages of text? Or will they be those pages with just the issue box number? Lets jump in and take a look with the next sequential page:
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| Notebook #36, page 61 |
The cover box number says #286, but at the top we get more of Dave’s writing on Jung. Or more like Dave writing as Konigsberg writing about Jungfrau. The Names Elisabet Vogler and Alma are from the movie Persona which goes into some Jungian theory.
And then the next page of the notebook is Dave taking notes and writing about the book The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung.
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| Notebook #36, page 62 |
Note that the top left corner says page 72 and last week on page 59 of the notebook we saw a reference to page 58. Either there were pages of the notebook which were ripped out or Dave just didn’t find anything interesting enough, or relevant enough, to write down notes. I’m leaning towards the latter as the issue box numbers were put in the notebook first, and those are still in order with each having three pages.
But yah, having only taken intro to psychology in college, this text is not my cup of tea. Do we get something more interesting on the next page? Eh, looks like more of the same.
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| Notebook #36, page 63 |
Since I don’t have a copy of the book Dave was reading, I can’t match up his notes to the book. Does any of this show up in Cerebus #286? If it did, it was in the small teeny tiny type that I only skimmed. As far as I recall the Jungian theory material was used in Cerebus #284 and #285. So this is just Dave’s notes extending past is previous self-imposed limit of three pages per issue. If you want to readd more on Dave’s writings on Jungian theory, check out the ‘Notes on Latter Days’ in the Latter Days phonebook.
For this week’s Latter Days tracing paper page is for Cerebus #276 page 15. Well, the top two panels of the four panels on the page:
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| Cerebus #276, page 15 tracing paper front (click for to see it bigger) |
I only call it the front since Dave signed it on this side. Both sides of the tracing paper have pencil on them. On the above page you can see the rough for the top panel and at the bottom you can see the tighten sketch for the panel.
Then we flip the tracing paper over:
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| Cerebus #276, page 15 tracing paper back |
Along with flipping the tracing paper over to show the other side, I also rotated it to put the finished sketch by the panel it corresponds to. (Yes, this never gets old for me. I love looking at Dave’s process material. Just holding the tracing paper with the phonebook or issue beside it makes me ‘ohhh’ and ‘awww’ as I look at the differences between the two).
And yes, there are differences between the two looking at them. Even the text has slight differences between the finished page and the tracing paper prelim.
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