big box of comics: The Sandman — Overture

Tags

big box of comics, Dave Stewart, DC Comics, Dreaming, dreams, JH Williams III, Neil Gaiman, overture, sandman, Vertigo Comics

I am a child of Time and Night,
and this place will prove my end.

—Morpheus; Overture #5.

Last month’s Big Box of Comics featured Sandman: Endless Nights. This month, thanks once again to this blog’s readers, I filled in another gap in my Sandman collection with the superbly illustrated Overture. While I enjoyed Endless Nights, it didn’t quite earn a place among my all-time favorite Sandman stories, but Overture definitely made my top five. Let me share with you why.

First, the art by J.H. Williams III—assisted in no small part by colorist Dave Stewart—is probably the most awesome art to ever grace the pages of a Sandman story. It has incredibly inventive panel layouts that re-imagine what is possible with the very concept of panels and are perfectly suited to this story’s journey through numerous levels of reality and dreams. Williams employs a variety of art styles for the various realms and characters, even going so far as to draw multiple styles in a single panel, such as the four-page fold-out mega-splash page in the first issue where many incarnations of the Lord of Dreams gather in a single place.

Longtime fans of Sandman since the 1980s might recall the days when the original issues were printed on cheaper paper with more primitive printing processes and the colors often lacked vibrancy. But in Overture, with Dave Stewart’s colors on high-quality paper, the vibrancy is turned all the way up to eleven. Overture is a visual feast that must be seen to be believed.

Second, Overture brings back all the elements that made so many of the original long-form story arcs into instant classics. We travel through all kinds of fantastic realms, meet fascinating characters whose infinite depths we barely have time to explore, converse about weighty and poetic concepts, re-imagine mythologies, and create new mythologies on the fly as only Neil Gaiman can do.

Some reviewers have posted negative comments about the story, but those reviews only make me wonder if the reviewers remember story arcs such as the wandering Brief Lives from the original series. Sandman was always content to spend a lot of time on journeys that at first appeared aimless, was never in a hurry with the build-up, and reached unexpected and often quiet conclusions that left you scratching your head thinking, “WTF was that about?”—until you re-read the entire thing and grasped the meaning of it all.

Some reviewers complain about a lack of dramatic tension, since you know that somehow all of Overture’s complicated plot must eventually resolve into the events of the first issue of the original series. After all, it’s obviously a prequel. But I found the high stakes kept me engaged in wondering how Morpheus could simultaneously succeed on his quest and yet find himself captured at the end, and the outcome was anything but predictable.

One of the joys in reading Overture is how it connects to so many ideas and stories that were alluded to in the original series but were never fully explored or explained. Some reviewers say Overture is a bad place to start with Sandman because it requires you to know a lot about the original series for context. I disagree. I would absolutely recommend this as a starting point, because even though a new reader won’t totally understand all the context, the same could be said about starting with Sandman #1 and saving Overture until you finish the original seventy-five issues.

Sandman always had a lot of unexplained back-story about major events that were only alluded to in a couple of panels of dialogue. Overture gave Gaiman a chance to go back and fill in or expand on what might have seemed like throwaway concepts forty years ago. After reading Overture, I re-read the original series and found a new appreciation for so many small moments. Here are a few examples.

Overture gives us a more complete tale of Alianora, a former love of Morpheus who only briefly appeared near the end of A Game of You. Reading her scene in A Game of You made so much more sense to me after Overture. Likewise, when Morpheus recalls in just two panels of The Doll’s House how he failed to properly deal with a Vortex a long time ago, you know what he meant after Overture.

In Brief Lives, Delirium tells Destiny there are things that don’t appear in his book that contains the entire universe, and there is a single panel which mentions how Morpheus was weakened after some major episode that left him vulnerable to being captured in the first issue of the original series. Both of these brief moments are explored in much greater detail in Overture.

Overture also harkens back to one of my favorite standalone issues: Dream of a Thousand Cats. Morpheus appears differently to different species, such as when he appeared as a fox to the fox in Dream Hunters, and Dream of a Thousand Cats showed that he appears to cats as the Cat of Dreams. Overture explores this idea in its opening pages where Morpheus appears as a sentient carnivorous plant to an alien lifeform, and it also features the Cat of Dreams. Plus, a major plot point centers on having one thousand beings dream the same dream to create a new reality—a central concept in Dream of a Thousand Cats.

Overture builds on the idea of stars-as-conscious-entities from Endless Nights, giving the stars an entire cosmic city you don’t want to mess with, and developing the antipathy Morpheus feels for his androgynous sibling Desire as a result of that story.

You also discover the origin of the weird gasmask-plus-spinal-column thing Morpheus sometimes wears, another item whose origin was only ever mentioned in a couple of panels of the original series. DC Comics geeks know the real reason for the gasmask is that the original golden-age Sandman wore one while he was gassing his foes with chemicals that made them sleepy, but Gaiman took an old idea and ran with it—much as he did with the subsequent Jack Kirby version of Sandman in The Doll’s House.

Those are just a few things I picked up on, and other fans of Sandman will undoubtedly find more. So, as to the question of whether this is a good place to start with Sandman, I say it is. New readers won’t always understand what is going on, but that’s the same experience they get if they start at Sandman #1. To read Sandman, you must be willing to not have everything explained to you, to put together pieces of a puzzle, and to read the stories more than once to pick up all the clues and see how everything ties together. You must also be ready to indulge Gaiman’s love of leaving many mysteries unsolved, and many endings ambiguous.

I loved Overture, and it made me love the original series even more than I already did. The art will blow your mind, the story will deepen your appreciation of the original series, and it works not only as an overture but a coda to one of the finest examples of what can be accomplished in comic books. A huge Thank You to this blog’s readers for helping me add this missing gem to my big box of comics.

Collector’s Guide: Get the Sandman: Overture 30^th Anniversary Edition on Amazon in Kindle or paperback formats. It’s a little harder, but not impossible and certainly rewarding, to find all the original single issues in stock.

Big Box of Comics: The Sandman – Endless Nights

Tags

big box of comics, book review, dreams, endless nights, Neil Gaiman, sandman, Vertigo Comics

With all the talk about the Sandman thanks to his being adapted as a Netflix show, I realized I’d never read Endless Nights. Published in 2003, years after the original 75-issue series by Neil Gaiman ended, Endless Nights is a collection of seven stories. Each one focuses on a different member of the Endless: Death, Dream, Desire, Delirium, Destiny, Destruction, and Despair. As Gaiman recently mentioned in a video about mythology, the Endless are not gods, because gods die when no one remembers them anymore—but the Endless are forever.

Thanks to this blog’s readers, this month I added the hardcover edition of Endless Nights to my Sandman collection, and it was a good read. I would not recommend it as a starting point for getting into Sandman, because it will be confusing to readers who don’t already know the characters and concepts. But for those of us who read and loved the original series, it offers interesting vignettes and wildly creative artwork.

Each of the seven stories employs a different art team, and the pairings of artist with story feel very well-matched. Who but Bill Sienkiewicz could have created such wildly demented illustrations of a team of mentally ill people gathered for a mission to rescue Delirium?

Barron Storey’s non-sequential illustrations for 15 Portraits of Despair are truly disturbing.

Frank Quitely’s painted artwork for the story about Destiny shows a side of the artist I don’t recall seeing before; it’s recognizably Quitely, but with a very different vibe compared to his work with Grant Morrison or on The Authority.

Dave McKean—who did the multi-media covers for the original series—did an amazing job designing this book and all its various title pages and front matter. Todd Klein, the letterer of the original series, also shines by giving each story its own style.

My favorite chapter deals with Dream, also known as Morpheus—the Sandman himself. It’s like so many of the original Gaiman stories in that, yes, there is a “plot”, but it’s more about concepts and characters than action or adventure. Sandman is one of the few comics I enjoy even when there seems to be little more happening than characters talking to each other.

One reason is that Gaiman can achieve more in a couple of panels of dialogue than some writers can do in a single issue or even a whole series. For example, in only two panels of the story about Dream, Gaiman completely recontextualizes the origin of Superman and the planet Krypton.

Despair tells Rao, the star around which Krypton orbited, how artful and poetic it would be to have an unstable planet that would eventually die, and how wonderful it would be to leave only one survivor to despair over its loss. Millions of people have seen Superman as a symbol of hope, despite his tragic origin. By making him a character whose life was meant as an homage to despair, Gaiman adds a layer of poignancy and complexity to Superman and makes it all the more meaningful that he became something else entirely. Pretty heady stuff for two panels of conversation.

Overall, Endless Nights is a little too fragmentary to earn a place in my all-time favorite Sandman books. The story about Destruction, for example, never really gets explained and feels like an unfinished tale. But competition is stiff when it comes to Sandman favorites. The story arcs Season of Mists (which led directly to the masterful Mike Carey series Lucifer) and The Kindly Ones are epic in scope, and the original series is loaded with gorgeously written and drawn single-issue stories. The two limited series starring Death are also masterworks (The High Cost of Living and The Time of Your Life, now collected in a single volume).

But my all-time favorite is The Dream Hunters. It first appeared as a prose novel with incredible painted illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano, then was re-imagined as a four-issue comic book drawn by P. Craig Russell—whose work also appears in Endless Nights. The Dream Hunters is presented as an ancient tale from Japanese mythology, but Gaiman just made it up! It tells the story of a fox who fell in love with a Buddhist monk, and the dramatic sacrifices they made for each other. I’ve read it many times, and I don’t think I ever made it through either version without crying. If anyone asks me where to start with Sandman, that’s the story I recommend. There’s now an inexpensive ebook edition along with paperback and hardcover collections.

The fox perceives Morpheus as a fox in the Dreaming.

Still, Endless Nights is an artistic addition to the Sandman canon, and well worth exploring for fans of the series. You can find it in hardcover or paperback editions, or snag a $4 ebook of a more recent edition. A big Thank You to the readers of this blog for helping me add this book to my Sandman collection.

ocean

Tags

dreams, meteor mags, Moon, ocean, poems, poetry, writing

art generated by Midjourney

OCEAN

We are small things
unlike the stars that birthed us

or the Moon who pulls the ocean
without ever touching her,

an infinite depth of azure and obsidian
swallowing dreams

dissolving them for centuries
before setting them on the shore

polished as smooth and featureless
as a mystery without end.

This poem now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent.

indie box: Rare Bit Fiends

Tags

black and white, dream journal, Dreaming, dreams, indie box, Indie Comics, King Hell Press, Neil Gaiman, Rare Bit Fiends, Rick Veitch

What’s in the short-box of indie and small-press comics this week? It’s Rare Bit Fiends by Rick Veitch! Here to introduce the descent into the dreamworld is a strange and nameless beast who begins every issue of this unique series.

In Rare Bit Fiends, Rick Veitch made his dreams into pages of comic book art. Don’t look for traditional stories in Rare Bit Fiends. You’ll only find the psychedelic language of dreams and the weird workings of the inner mind. Veitch’s artwork is in top form.

Below is a sample of an illustrated dream whose narrative comes from a special-guest dreamer Neil Gaiman and rendered by Roarin’ Rick in ultra-cosmic perfection!

Collector’s Guide: From Rare Bit Fiends. Collections include Crypto Zoo, Pocket Universe, and Rabid Eye. King Hell Press.

The title Rare Bit Fiends is a nod to the early 20th Century comic strip Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend by Winsor McCay, who created Little Nemo in Slumberland.

weightless

Tags

dreams, gravity, poems, poetry, weightless

art generated by Midjourney

weightless

let us remain weightless
high above earth’s orbit
intangible spirits
untroubled by time
and its disasters

do you see how they scurry below us
frightened by storms that find them
terrified by a future they cannot predict
but arrives in solid armor
crushing everything in its path

is that what you wish for us

to be physical and real
to empty every drinking glass eventually
to wither away and become nothing
untraceable specks in a landscape
no one remembers
not even our children

consider
my counteroffer

let us remain weightless
and only touch them in their dreams
where we do and say what we please

let our only gravity be emotions
they remember for moments in the morning
then disregard

let us live more lives than one
an endless stream of biographies
we shape and redefine
only temporarily imprisoned
in a parade of faces
and memories
that never happened

let us meet them
in gardens untended
in buildings unconstructed
never becoming as real
as those we encounter

let us remain weightless
only touching life at its edges
like tourists who long to see a country
without immersing
in its wars or politics

when you and i become dreams
we will swim vast oceans
with no more commitment
than dipping our toes in the surf
without ever leaving
this place beyond it all

where we are forever unknowable
always seen
and never
ever
touched

mirage

Tags

dreams, mirage, poems, poetry

mirage

later we recall the memory in a dream
leaving us uncertain
how much of it was real

every time we dream it
you seem farther away

like heat waves bending
the asphalt horizon in the summer
forever receding

something always comes after starlight
but tonight i can’t remember what

now in print: The Baby and The Crystal Cube

Tags

books, dream fiction, Dreaming, dreams, lucid dreaming, psychological thriller, science fiction, self publishing, sleep lab

Two lucid dreamers meet in recurring dreams, fall in love, and conceive a dream baby; but the unreality of the dream world leads them to distrust each other—with nightmarish results.

A paranoid exploration of two minds dreaming the same dream, and fighting to control it.

On Amazon in paperback and Kindle. On Barnes & Noble in paperback and Nook Book. On Apple iBooks.

watercolor

Tags

animal inside you, dreams, painting, poems, poetry, watercolor

Watercolor

Painted butterfly bushes
and permanent flowers
whose colors never fade.

Here, a panther can dream
or a child, even children
whose bodies time has aged.

Some verdant forests are
denied the waking and only
grow in starlight, real

or imagined. When you look
with your heart and not your eyes
you see a different truth.

—for CK

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

demo 1 by brian wood and becky cloonan

Tags

becky cloonan, black and white, Brian Wood, Dark Horse, DC Comics, demo, dreams, first issue, indie box, Indie Comics, Vertigo Comics, waking life of angels

These page come from the beginning of the first issue of DC/Vertigo’s Demo series by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan. AIT/Planet Lar published a twelve-issue Demo series in 2003-2004 before Wood and Cloonan began with a fresh number one at Vertigo in 2010. DC/Vertigo published both series in two Demo paperbacks, and Dark Horse put them together in a single Demo Complete Edition which is 464 pages softcover.

I love Becky Cloonan’s black-and-white artwork and how she brings to life this dramatic first issue where dreams and reality intersect. Brian Wood is the author of DMZ, one of my favorite series. I did not feel like the target audience for the romantic drama of Wood’s New York Four and New York Five, but I have seen a few issues of Northlanders which interested me, and I enjoyed the three pointless punk-rock issues of Pounded.

sketchbook sundays: dream journal nine perfection

Tags

art, comic book collage, comic book dreams, dream journal, dreams, painting, sketchbook sundays

Sometimes you have those dreams where everything feels perfect. As a tribute to the numerous dreams we’ve had flipping through boxes of never-published comic books, the colors and textures of Dream Journal Nine contain vintage comic books in their depths.

This little 8×10 canvas has been a companion in the painting studio for two years, the object of many small-scale experiments we would later apply to larger canvases. It was once a light-hearted collage called “Perfect! The Master Will be Well Pleased!“

We’ve had much time to consider the idea of perfection, and we have a new perspective on it now. Perfection is a process, not a static state. Perfection is a verb, not a noun. Perfection is how we shape the world ever closer to an ideal we have in our minds. In reality, nothing is ever truly perfect, but that should not disappoint us too much. We are not trying to attain a state of perfection; we work to perfect our less-than-ideal world and make it more ideal.

On the flip side, you have imperfection. The crackled textures of Dream Journal Nine suggests cracks and imperfections. In dreams, the imperfections sometimes alert the dreamer that yes, this is a dream. You notice something that doesn’t seem quite right. And when you pause to think about it, it becomes clear you are dreaming. The imperfections of the dream world make perfect signposts on the road to lucid dreaming and greater awareness in the dream.

Dream Journal Nine could just as easily bear the title Imperfection, for perfection and imperfection form two sides of the same coin, two halves of the same whole.

We recently published three years of dreams from our dream journals in a 148-page paperback, and also Kindle format, called Three Years Dreaming.

Puma Blues: The Dreaming!

Tags

aardvark-vanaheim, Dreaming, dreams, Indie Comics, Michael Zulli, nature, puma, Puma Blues, wildlife, wildlife art

Puma Blues #13 brings together many of our favorite themes here at Mars Will Send No More, from wildlife art to dreams and silent issues. If Michael Zulli’s art appeals to you, we have more samples of Zulli’s wildlife art in our archives. Let us also recommend to you, again from our archives, John Totleben’s wonderful fish-filled issue of the Vertigo series The Dreaming.

Collector’s Guide: The Puma Blues; Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1986. Reprinted in The Puma Blues Book One and Book Two; Mirage Studios, 1988. Reprinted in 2015 without the original covers in The Puma Blues (Dover Graphic Novels) in paperback, hardcover, and ebook.

Dream Journal Eight: Night at the Lake

Tags

abstract, acrylic, art, collage, dream journal, dreams, mixed media, painting

Dream Journal Eight: Night at the Lake. Acrylic paint, varnish, and mixed media collage on canvas
12 x 12 in. heavy duty frame, 1.5 in. deep.

Our Dream Journal series combines collage, print media, found objects, and acrylic paint to make deeply personal expressions.

Night at the Lake recalls a memory of a dream, a dream written on pages collaged into the layers of this piece. At night, you and your love swim in this lake. Silent fish drift by in the deep waters. The clouds part their fingers to reveal the full moon at its apex above the forest. The two of you tread water together, then dive.

Tiny metal beads adorn the surface of Night at the Lake, finished with several coats gloss varnish for durability and protection, resulting in a glass-like finish. The signature appears on the back of this original piece.

I Was Trapped in the Nightmare World!

Tags

dreams, Jack Kirby, Paul Reinman, Steve Ditko, Strange Tales

 
Collector’s Guide: From Strange Tales #74; Marvel, 1960.

“Gorgolla! The Living Gargoyle!” with pencils by Jack Kirby; “Beware the Hands of Hundu” (art by Don Heck?); “I Was Trapped in the Nightmare World” with art by Paul Reinman; “When the Totem Walks!” with art by Steve Ditko; and a two-page text story, “The Whirlpool of Gairloch.” Kirby cover pencils. Cover price $0.10.

Seven Things Dreams and Poetry Have in Common

Tags

David Chorlton, dreams, poetry

A few years ago, I attended a writing workshop on dreams and poetry. David Chorlton presented us with seven similarities between dreams and poetry.

Seven Similarities of Dreams and Poetry, from David Chorlton.

1. Appeal to the Senses.

2. Vivid Imagery.

3. Structures to Create or Communicate an Emotional State

4. Uncensored Communication

5. Subconscious Sources

6. Central Images: What details are left in, and which are left out? Ask yourself, “If I had to draw this room tomorrow, what details would I remember or choose to represent?”

7. Juxtaposition of Strikingly Different Objects and Images. A high level of surreal contrast.

The Scorn of the Faceless People!

Tags

Bill Draut, Black Magic, dreams, golden age, Headline Publications, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Mort Meskin

In this nearly forgotten issue of Black Magic from 1950, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby again tackled a subject of great interest to them in those years: dreams. Mort Meskin and Bill Draut also contribute to this issue. We saw their work alongside Kirby & Simon in Strange World of Your Dreams and other golden age gems.

Collector’s Guide: The first three issues of Black Magic are now collected in a Kindle version! Originally from Black Magic Vol. 1, #2, Headline Publications, Dec. 1950. Produced by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby

Cover art by Jack Kirby. The Scorn of the Faceless People!, art by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby; dream analysis story. The Cheerful Old Lady in Black!, art by Mort Meskin. The Cloak!, art by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby; Paul Darvas orders a new cloak, only to receive a cursed cloak from Asmodeus himself. Out of Your Mind text story. I’ve Seen You Before, art by Bruno Premiani. Yesterday You Died!, art by Bill Draut; When Grace Hanley is looking to buy a house she sees a ghostly image of a murder that has yet to happen in that house. 52 pgs. $0.10. Cover price

Dreams by John M. Pound

Tags

dreams, first issue, Indie Comics, John Pound

Check out this single page of dream images arranged as comic book panels. It doesn’t tell a story like the Rick Veitch things we’ve shared with you, but we dig the style. Especially cool is the hidden face… Do you see it?

Collector’s Guide: From Ground Pound Comix #1; Blackthrone, 1987. Art by John M. Pound, 1978

dream journal 7: fun

Tags

art, collage, comic book collage, dream journal, dreams, painting

 
Some of our dream journals have addressed pretty heavy emotions, but this one is lighter and happier. This is a dream of laughter and sunshine, pretty colors and shiny things. It’s fun – a dream you wake from, smiling.

We often have all kinds of fun in our dreams. We’ve seen the moonrise on an alien planet and rocked out on stage with Mudhoney. We’ve gone for rides in flying cars and played baseball, made love and attended cocktail parties. We’ve discovered the secret of flying, cuddled kittens, and taken epic treks through panoramic landscapes. And many, many times we have spent what seems like hours going through longboxes full of comic books that have never been published.

This has everything from a latex cast of a toy snake to wire from a fan, drawings from our art teacher to a Marvel Value Stamp, tin foil to jewelry, keys, stickers, and flowers. The stencil for the spray paint, the flowery black shapes, is part of the casing of a fan motor. The loose wires on the left got the staple gun treatment to hold them on the back of the wooden frame.

Dream Journal 5: Disappointment

Tags

art, collage, dream journal, dreams, painting

All the objects in Dream Journal 5 come with associations of disappointment. Despite its small size and simplicity, this collage/painting was perhaps the most difficult to work on thus far. Memories of potentially wonderful times marred with bitterly disappointing outcomes seem especially heavy — like leaden weights holding you down. Everyone knows the feeling of disappointments in romance, finance, health, travel — any time we expect great things but end up feeling let down by ourselves, others, or circumstance. Feelings of disappointment, if left to linger, can become feelings of chronic failure.

In this dream, however, we can see the beauty of these things. Even the dead plants and beetle, painted silver, suggest the value in things we experience as transitory. Life goes on. And in this dream, all these memories are caught up in a gust of wind. It lifts them up, almost animating them, into the light. Here, held up before us, we can appreciate their beauty. Here, we can set free our attachments to the negative feelings that plague them, and remember why they shone so brightly for us in the first place.

You awake from this dream more at peace with yourself and your past. You feel more alive, refreshed. You know something sad happened, but somehow it doesn’t drag you down. You feel ready to move on today, to appreciate the wonder in small things, and make new memories.

Dream Journal 3: Love

Tags

acrylic, art, collage, dream journal, dreams, heart, love, painting

A glow surrounds the heart in Dream Journal 3. It glows white for healing and pink for passionate love. For this heart, if you look closely, is rough. It has scars. It has sustained damage in the past. It carries a lot of memories, not all of them pleasant, but all of them very intense.

This piece is that heart’s dream of healing. Even the scarred heart can be beautiful, its unique texture inseparable from its personality. It has witnessed death and loss, but also creativity and joy — even bliss. This healing dream surrounds the heart in loving warmth. You wake from this dream feeling protected, content, and ready to embrace the day.

Dream Journal 2: Touch

Tags

acrylic, art, collage, dream journal, dreams, painting

Dream Journal 2 features a latex cast of my right hand, affixed to the canvas. This piece deals with touch: human contact. In these days of email, instant messaging, blogs, comments, and social media sites, we all have a lot of “Contacts.” But how many do we actually touch?

Touch causes a chemical and an emotional reaction that is essential to our well-being or, you might say, to the ideal calibration of the human “machine.” Babies who are denied loving touch develop a host of psychological disorders, many of which are painfully evident in our culture and society today. Perhaps our entire culture suffers from a lack of touch.

The tactile aspect of the hand also suggests that the dreams not only involve touch but can be touched. You could put your hand to mine and feel my dream, says this piece. Perhaps you and I can even dream it together that way.

The jewelry, buttons, and broken snail shells layered into the canvas have all been touched. They relate to powerful memories of tactile experiences — some sad, but mostly happy in this piece. This is an intense dream, full of touch and contact, physical intimacy and the joy it brings. You wake from it feeling loved, refreshed, at peace, and smiling. You look forward to dreams like this.

Dream Journal 1: Anger

Tags

abstract, acrylic, art, collage, comic book collage, dream journal, dreams, painting

Dream Journal 1 deals with anger. The bottom layer of comic book panels reconstructs a nightmarish sequence in which two friends fight violently. The anger of this dream traps them in a vortex of repeated panels, their conflict echoed over and over again, surrounded by angry faces like a series of funhouse mirrors gone wrong. This is a dream where you wake up feeling terrible, tense, and on edge all day.

The layers over this collage deal with that anger. It still glows red, almost like a wound, through the diagonal ‘rift’ across the painting. The greens and blues seek to sooth this angry wound. There, there, they say. Ssshhhh. It was only a dream. That’s all it was. Just a bad dream. It’s okay now.

This piece also deals with letting go of that anger. This isn’t denial. It is acknowledgement and then working through uncomfortable feelings to the other side of them, moving through both light and darkness. Anger is just one thing we cling to in our lives.

Many times we feel anger as a way of protecting something we care about. Anger is a shield we put up around us to keep something valuable from being hurt or threatened. It may form a defensive barrier against feeling an underlying sadness. If we hold on to our anger, though, it becomes a disruptive force in our lives. Sometimes we have to dig deeper and ask ourselves, what are we hurting about — or trying to avoid hurting about — underneath all that anger? By getting to the source, we can diffuse its negative energy.

This painting moves through the process of considering anger, identifying those underlying sources, and releasing that energy in a creative, transformative way. In one of the panels, now buried under layers of paint and collage, the Human Torch shouts to Spider-man, “You’re a free man, Spidey!” It became our mantra for the rest of the piece. Free. To do anything we want. To experience anything. Free to let go of anger and open up to life. Free to create and destroy. You’re a free man, Spidey. Don’t waste that.

I Cannot Deny What I Know to be True!

Tags

Caitlin Kiernan, Dreaming, dreams, fish, John Totleben, Vertigo Comics

Fans of the classic Swamp Thing and Miracleman tales know the artwork of John Totleben. Here is a more recent Totleben classic that might have slipped under your radar. In this issue of the Sandman-related series Dreaming, author Caitlin Kiernan tells a compelling story about one woman who challenges her society’s notions of truth.

The woman is a fish named Lady Tethys, after the single great ocean that surrounded Earth’s land mass when it was all gathered into the super-continet Pangaea. An object from the realm of dreaming falls into her sub-oceanic environment. But the leaders of her city refuse to even admit its existence, as it is forbidden to speak of there being anything “above” the ocean. Totleben’s masterful artwork nails the bittersweet emotional tone of Kiernan’s tale.

Collector’s Guide: From Dreaming #33; DC Comics/Vertigo, 1999.

Jack Kirby Draws Your Dreams #10

Tags

dreams, Jack Kirby, Strange World of Your Dreams

In 1952, comics legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created four issues of a unique series about dreams. Also on board for the trippy ride were Mort Meskin and Bill Draut. Strange World of Your Dreams contained fictional dream-themed stories with an EC Comics or Twilight Zone vibe. But, each issue also featured one or more “You Sent Us This Dream For Anaylsis” segments. Lucky readers got their dreams drawn by Jack Kirby (or Draut, in some cases) along with an analysis by “Richard Temple.”

Collector’s Guide: The first three issues of Strange World of Your Dreams are now collected in a Kindle version! Originally from Strange World of Your Dreams; Prize, 1952.

Scans courtesy of the Digital Comic Museum

mystery mix 042013

Tags

dreams, mystery mix

The gods demand sacrifices.

It doesn’t really matter if you believe in a god or gods or goddesses. It doesn’t even matter whether god is “real” or not, and religion is completely irrelevant. The psychological and artistic truth of the statement remain. Once you realize that the gods demand sacrifices regardless of the so-called facts, you can get about your business.

For some reason, most people think I mean human sacrifices. That seems rather morbid, don’t you think? Sacrifices can be anything it hurts a little to say goodbye to. And you’d be surprised what those things are. Meaningful things. Things full of your personal memories, bursting with the emotional landscape of your past. A cherished photograph. A necklace. A dream.

Sometimes when we hold too tightly to mementos of the past, our psychological and emotional energy gets bound up in them. For most people, that gives a sense of comfort and security. We know who we are, because we can define where we’ve been. Some of us even like to stay there, in that comforting space, and resist moving forward.

But the creation of something new, innovating and transforming in life or art, requires that energy. And here is the sacrifice. You take that thing and in a sense you kill it… but the meaning is not in the death. The meaning is in unlocking its energy and setting it free to become something else. It’s accepting perpetual change – and consciously making a decision that the time for change is now.

After living in the same place for the longest period of my adult life, I found myself doing what many of us do: hoarding. Hoarding little treasures from the past, and clinging to them. I noticed that just having them around wasn’t really making me any more happy – although it was great, great fun to spend some time with them for a while. I got some canvasses and did a series of Dream Journal paintings, mixed media works that incorporate all kinds of objects full of personal memories for me. It was, in a sense, a meditation and a weaving of these things into something new, weaving their energies into the canvas.

In the process of this physical and psychic “spring cleaning,” some things around the house were liberated into their new futures courtesy of the United States Postal Service. This included some CD’s – and the only reason our entire mailing list didn’t get them was that we ran out of discs! If you got one, it has no label. No track list. Nothing. Don’t you think it’s fun to just listen to music without any preconceptions sometimes? To not know at all what’s coming next? To have no reference points about artists and so on, and just listen?

If you’re just dying of curiosity, here’s the track list for you. You will see links to the albums on Amazon, if you liked the track enough to want to download more like it. They’re all digitally available except the Screaming Trees and Rashied Ali albums, which are pretty rare even as CDs.

Until the next time the gods of art demand sacrifices, enjoy!

MYSTERY MIX 042013

1. Mamas & the Papas: Dream a Little Dream of Me album

2. Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin: Naima (John Coltrane) album

3. Bill Laswell & Lori Carson: Kala album

4. Prasanna: Sri Valli Devasenapathe album

5. The Doors: Horse Latitudes album

6. The Screaming Trees: I Have Seen You Before album

7. Radiohead: Everything in Its Right Place album

8. Rashied Ali Quintet: As Salaam Alikum album

Jack Kirby Draws Your Dreams #9

Tags

dreams, Jack Kirby, Strange World of Your Dreams

In 1952, comics legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created four issues of a unique series about dreams. Also on board for the trippy ride were Mort Meskin and Bill Draut. Strange World of Your Dreams contained fictional dream-themed stories with an EC Comics or Twilight Zone vibe. But, each issue also featured one or more “You Sent Us This Dream For Anaylsis” segments. Lucky readers got their dreams drawn by Jack Kirby (or Draut, in some cases) along with an analysis by “Richard Temple.”

Collector’s Guide: The first three issues of Strange World of Your Dreams are now collected in a Kindle version! From Strange World of Your Dreams; Prize, 1952.

Scans courtesy of the Digital Comic Museum