Note From The President, Cerebus 112 / 113, July / August 1988

Copyright 1988 Dave Sim

Well now. Here's a familiar feeling.

Sitting down to write a Note from the President and just wishing the lines would fill up by themselves because I want to be writing the story instead. Last time, I was finishing all of the notes and letters pages so I could get to the actual finished scripting of "Walking on the Moon". This time I can't wait to write Jaka's Story.

Maybe I'll tell you a bit about it and that will fill a few lines right there.

Maybe I'll do short lines.

Like this.

But no.

That would be cheating.

For those of you running out of patience with me getting to the meat of the story-line or at least tying up the not-inconsiderable number of loose ends left dangling over the last ten years, we do have a bit of bad news. Jaka's Story will be as close to a self-contained novel as I'm going to get. There are very few characters in this one. You've met two of them before and the others don't play a key role in the over-all story-line later on. The scene is (again) lest. One of the many small communities which dot the side of the mountain that is Greater lest. Like the cul de sac of Church and State but even smaller. Two two-storey buildings face a pub/grocer's across the way. At the end of the short laneway between them is a small chapel partially demolished by a rock-slide (about a half dozen good-sized demon 'eads and skuwws) dislodged when the tower split off from the base in 102's "Sudden Return of the Melodramatic Narrator". It's about a half mile down the road from the pub depicted at the end of this issue. A fortnight or so has passed in Jaka's life since that final wave goodbye at the end of issue 75. It has been an eventful month but

I'm out of room.

it begins in 114.

See you then.

*****

Ha ha.

It's been so long since I've done one of these I thought one page of hand-written notes constituted a Note from the President. The typesetting just came back and there's a whole lotta white going on.

Okay.

Well, I've had a chance to rough in the whole novel and write the first three or four pages of 114, so I'm not nearly as twitchy as when I wrote the above.

The first issue of Jaka's Story is either half prologue or all prologue. I haven't really made up my mind yet. We'll see how the writing goes next week before making a final decision. Scratch that. I just looked at the cover sketch again and it begs for a whole issue.

Jaka's Story is in itself a prologue for the next novel, much as High Society was largely a prologue to Church and State. It's also the shortest novel thus far, clocking in at a mere four hundred and sixty pages.

It's also the first novel that Gerhard has been here for the beginning of. Consequently, we're paying much stricter attention to the designing of the environment than before. What else? It ends in Cerebus 136 (July 1990). The first book "Pogrom's Progress" is six issues long (114 to 119), "The Poet" is eleven issues (120 to 130), Mystery Achievement is also six issues long (131 to 136). We're having a lot of fun so far.

See you at the Prologue.


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