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.
For the last couple of weeks we’ve been looking at Dave Sim’s 21st notebook, which contains his notes for Cerebus #164 though 187. We’re doing this because of Jeff and big walls of text or something. I can’t even remember now. Last week in Dialogue From Reads Part Two we saw several pages of dialogue between Po, Cerebus, Cirin, and Astoria. This week we’re skipping ahead over small pages that are walls of text to some different walls of text. This time, from Viktor Davis talking about writing the Victor Reid part of Reads.
The page opens up with some familiar dialogue. Dave has repeated this line many a time, but I don’t think it ever made its way into the actual Cerebus storyline. Reading this page it appears to me that Dave was practicing getting the voice he wanted to use for the Viktor Davis character as I don't remember any of this showing up in Reads the way it is on the notebook page.
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| Notebook 21, page 170 |
As you can see, the page opens up with that familiar line of dialogue first spoken by Deni to Dave in Now & Then Books, Dave even calls himself the “twenty-year-old beard and bespectacled . . . unenthusiastic clerk.” One line started off as ‘He (Viktor Davis) had been attempting to compose then his pure auto-biographical segment’ but cross off that last bit and changed it to ‘compose the complete non-fiction which would mirror it.’
The next page talks about his life prior to the 1992 US Tour, past loves and being manic depressive:
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| Notebook 21, page 171 |
He also says “It would not, of course, be the complete story of Viktor Davis. Thirty-eight years of life could not be distilled nor compressed into a couple of dozen pages. He would attempt merely, to touch on those episodes which had the greatest effect upon him, which had served to make him the person that he was today.” Yes, he originally wrote thirty-seven and crossed out the seven and put eight.
The next page includes that list of episodes.
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| Notebook 21, page 172 |
I looked up Superman #165, the title of which is ‘Beauty and the Super-Beast’, and for volume one, that was published in November of 1963, so I’m not sure why Dave wrote down 1979 beside it. I had to look up what the Heatwave Festival 1980 was a reference to. And amazingly enough it has its own entry on Wikipedia. A music festival held in Bowmanville, Ontario – a town on the other side of Toronto from Kitchener, about a 1.5 hour trip (according to Google Maps). Sounds like a question for Matt’s next call to Dave, as I don’t remember Dave ever mentioning it before.