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.
The Challenge is a Cerebus story that never got past the layouts and script format. That material was published in The Comic Buyer’s Guide #977, published August 7, 1992. From Dave’s introduction:
This is an unpublished Cerebus story which was commissioned by Comely Comix for The Captain Canuck Summer Special #2 (summer 1981). Comely went out of business shortly after approving the script and layouts for the story. A small blessing: his last letter suggested coloring Cerebus purple so that he would stand out in the color story! The last page of the script is missing but I have reconstructed it.
You can see the story – well, layouts and script –
here at my site. I looked through Dave’s first Cerebus notebook, used in the create of issues #20 to 28, and found five notebook pages that have material for the seven-page story. Pages #113 – 117. The next page, 118, starts off material for Cerebus #25.
Looking at the notebook pages, Dave starts with a quick overview:
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| Notebook 1, page 113 |
Then puts down a page listing with what needs to happen on each page, and then starts in on some dialogue:
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| Notebook 1, page 114 |
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| Notebook 1, page 115 |
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| Notebook 1, page 116 |
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| Notebook 1, page 117 |
Not all of the dialogue is the same word for word, but the gist of it is what appears in the semi-finished story.
