Dreams are mostly visual in nature, but they also contain dialogue and other verbal elements. Cartoon art is the perfect means of capturing their magic. Only, I didn’t realize this until 1994.
Upon seeing the first issue of Roarin’ Rick’s Rare Bit Fiends on the spinner-rack, I distinctly remember wondering what yet another comic book about dreams was going to be like. Then it dawned on me, this wasn’t about dreams, these were dreams.
In his letter-column Rick Veitch also published dream art from fans as well as that of other cartoonists like Rick Grimes, Ashley Holt, Bob Kathman, Aleksandar Zograf and others who had been doing dream comics.
For someone like me, who couldn’t write a script to save his life, the notion of comics based on exciting visual scenarios that play out in dreams was ideal.
Technical term: Continuity. Continuity, in comics, is the panel-to-panel storytelling element that makes a comic book more than a series of pin-ups, character studies or cover illustrations. It requires all of the elements that cartoonists tend to avoid when just doing a pretty picture; characters seen in partial views, in the distance, different camera angles, details that set the scene &tc.
A dream, just like a script written by another person, is going to challenge the cartoonist to do further research and draw things that are out of their knowledge-base and comfort-zone.
So in the mid-90’s I set out drawing my dreams.
When I got back into doing fanzines through APAs ( Amateur Press Alliance; look it up, ) I did some more dream comics.
Towards the end of this period, I was starting to experiment with a hybrid “manga” style done in the Japanese comics page size.
And most recently I was doing some to show off at the Creators Social a comics meetup hosted by my local comics shop ( pre-Covid. )
I’ve got more in the pipeline and hope to post about the process and what goes into these.
Note: All my art featured on this page was done in black and white. The red areas and lack of detail underneath are for the benefit of timid tech companies.
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