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 last saw pages from Dave Sim’s 22nd notebook, which covers Cerebus #186 through 201, back in February of 2019 in Leftovaries Feast Fer Evryone Eltz. The notebook started with 80 pages of which 71 pages were scanned, the rest were missing or blank.
I noticed that other than the cover, the first page from the notebook was #37. So I took a look at the first 36 pages. All but one was just a wall of text. Page #36 had a sketch and then some text. Ahh, the tiny type of Reads. Going through those 36 pages, I noticed that swiggle that shows up in Reads, that separates bits of the story. The decorative flourish:
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| Notebook 22, page 12 |
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| Notebook 22, page 13 |
The text doesn’t quite match up with what is on the finished page. There are some other bits added. A few removed, but it is interesting to compare them:
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| Reads page 219, aka Cerebus #185 page 13 |
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| Reads page 220, aka Cerebus #185 page 14 |
I wonder if he wrote all 36 pages at once, or went back over time to complete it? Looking at the notebook pages, it appears he went back after he wrote it and did some mark ups, though of them do appears to be done as he was writing. And yet, with the mark-ups, there are still differences from the finished text.