Dream Life

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Dream Life is a story in which i'm using a fair bit of photo ref:

For example the cast are based on people i know, or have taken pictures of for the charicters. Not shooting the book, don't have time for that kind of crap and it takes the fun out of it I imagine.

But rather than doing charicter sheets - which i never end up doing anyway - I have mug shot sets and old photos to work with. I use them to keep the players on model.

Also the story is set in my old neighbourhood in toronto, and in other places i've been.

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The first 9 pages of Dream Life

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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.