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've looked at Dave Sim's notebook #11 twice before. Once in the beginning of 2015 in "
A Gold Coin?" and once near the end of 2015 in "
Jaka and Missy". It covers Cerebus #113 through 117. Issue #117 of Cerebus has a cover date of December 1988, which is also the cover date of the first Cerebus Bi-Weekly issue.
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Cerebus Bi-Weekly (1988-1992)
Art by Dave Sim |
On page 60 of notebook #11 we see Dave's notes for the Cerebus Bi-Weekly series:
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| Notebook #11, page 60 |
While the notebook was supposed to be issues #113 to 117, the top of page 60 has dialogue for issue #118 pages 2 and 3 or in the phonebook, pages 92 & 93. Then we see the outline for the Cerebus Bi-Weekly series down the bottom of the page, getting a page count for the issues.
On page 61 we see a thumbnail of the front inside cover, along with the text that would accompany it. We also see another page count for the series.
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| Notebook #11, page 61 |
It looks like the page count goes from 34 to 32, with Dave reducing the intro from 3 to 2 pages and getting rid of the Beavers strip.
