Dream Life

Had wanted to post a few pages today, but with a trip out of town on Friday, and an episode of ISR to edit [2hours of Ted McKeever! it's a follow up to the first one with him i edited.], I'm a bit backed up.

But i thought i'd share some of the works in progress. I keep a fairly comprehensive collection of the work in progress on Flickr, but i don't know if folks reading this page would like it more if i posted stuff like this in the future? let me know.

The first 9 pages of Dream Life

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Next posting in about a week!

Hey, so i had this page for a while, but never really found a good use for it. But now I have, I'm going to make this the primary site i present my latest book on as i complete it. So for at least the next 6 months, I'll be posting as often as i can, the pages for Dream Life : a late coming of age.

The book is a project started a long time ago, and has taken it's time maturing. I received a grant last year to complete it, and was able to finish the script while i was working with Jim on Therefore Repent! Now that Repent is out in stores now, i've been plunging away at the art full time for Dream Life, and I'm really getting excited about how it's coming out - I think its my best work in ages, and it's been a pleasure to do something i wrote myself, and have totally control over every aspect of the story. Here's a description i included in my grant proposal.

Dream Life is a coming of age story, pulp crime novel, odd to Charles Schultz, an exploration of spirituality, and the search for personal truth all in one.

A look into the heads and lives of 5 childhood friends in their late 20’s to early 30’s, Dream Life began life as a conversation between friends. We had just had a good laugh reading an underground plunder comix called "You're short, bald, and ugly Charlie Brown". Three anonymous artists sporting pseudonym masks [Dr. Casey "Sparky" Finnegan] took classic Peanuts strips and re-scripted them with their own deeply black and surreal humor.

After enjoying the zine, one of the friends revealed to the other an old deep-seated romantic attachment to, and identification with the bald lead of Schultz’s cartoons. The other friend remarked that this explained a lot.

After cracking wise about what kind of adults the peanuts characters might make we were inspired to play with the idea of using the cast as a constraint for a contemporary black comic narrative about our peers, and ourselves; Each character beginning as a peanuts archetype that we would then age and play with, borrowing from our own lives and our friend’s to flush them out. We wrote a number of interesting scenes, but life took us down different paths and the project was shelved for a time.

Some years later I found the old rough partial script, and seeing in it ideas worth exploring I set about with the long knives to do so. Little is left of that first round of writing now, a few brilliant monologues is all. And I learned a lot about writing along the way. It’s evolved into something quite tasty, after a lot of molding and shaping the plot is ripe and ready to be completed and turned into a rich, paced, thoughtful and thought filled Graphic Novel.

In preparation for this project, I’ve been studying and exploring dream imagery, advanced iconography and symbolism, rhythmic structures in poetry and writing, themes of belonging and loss, politics and social decay, emotional turmoil and [in]sanity, friendship and intimacy, relationships and interpersonal dynamics. Our sense of purpose, and our perceived place in society. And of course, the Peanuts strips – but this aspect is meant to be deep background, not advertised or immediately obvious at first glance. Also in the name of write-what-you-know I’ve been delving into my own experiences with the issues our characters explore, including the fringe culture, mental health, and drug culture aspects with which I have some personal experience. In short I’ve been writing and sketching, thinking and reading, a lot.

So, that hopefully gives you an idea of where this is going. So here's were the story begins...