Wednesday 15 April 2015

Assassin

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.

So way back in July 2014 we saw page 72 of Dave's notebook #7. Through that page we could see page 71, which was Dark Roach from the cover of Cerebus #93, Dave's homage to the cover of Batman: The Dark Knight #2 by Frank Miller.  

Dave started sketching some roughs for the cover of #93, a grimacing Dark Roach, on page 69. He had some different mock-ups of the title for that issue 'assassin' along with the different tries of 'Bishop to Queen Two' and 'Vortex'. Note of the three would be the actual title of the book, as Dave went with 'The Prisoner' instead.

Notebook #7, page 69
We also see the thumbnail of page 1 of issue 93 in the above notebook. Page 70 is some floating heads and dialogue for some of the first couple pages of the issue. Then on page 71 we see a couple of roughs of the cover for issue #93.

Notebook #7, page 71

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