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.
Let's have another look at notebook #1, which covers issues #20 to 28. We saw it just a little over a month ago, when we saw the cover and page one. I was skimming through it, looking at the pages about to be sent out as a Cerebus Archive Five kickstarter reward and found a couple Captain Cockroach pages I thought were interesting.
We get a couple summaries of past issues, some Elrod dialogue (bottom right hand corner) and . . .is that a Captain Cockroach cover?
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| Notebook 1, page 25 |
Then on page 28 we get another sketch of a splash page for issue #21 along with a start of the issue that wasn't to be - instead of Elrod tripping over Cerebus, Cerebus finds the pair.
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| Notebook 1, page 28 |