First post, kind of.

Update: Robot 6 linked to this page the same week I got news regarding my plans for this project so i thought i sould make a note about it here:

I have been planing to relaunch RevolveR this fall featuring Dream Life as the main entry in a personal Anthology series ala Eightball or Acme Novelty Library.

IDW, who published Therefore Repent! were really suportive of the project and i thought i'd finaly found a home for my dream book, somewhere i could put my stories and work at a pace that fit me. Without being too much a babay about it, 08' did not go super well domestically and professionally for me and a lot of 09' has gone into recovering from that.

As that was going on, plans for RevolveR were pushed back after contracts failed to get sent out in time, the release date changed from this fall to May of 2010 - which coincided well with TCAF10, so i was down with this. I kept mum waiting for the contract but was happy about it really. Nice timing i thought.

But the dotted line to ink never did show up in the mail and I now have been told IDW does not feel able to take the risk on a creator owned book like this right now. F***.  

So it goes in comics. Fortunately i have more than enough material to put together a package to pitch to other publishers; unfortunately i suspect i may find a similar degree of caution elsewhere for the kind of project i really want to do.

We will see.

Will continue to get RevolveR ready, and if need be, do a POD edition for TCAF. I've also started talking with writers about doing things more in the commercial vain - as much as Dream Life and the rest of the RevolveR projects are what i want to be doing long term, i really want to keep working in my field and making a living making comics! And getting stuff in print! Web is great but i crave ink and pulp.

For now though, going to keep posting the story here as i get it done, and further news when i have some. 

Hope you enjoy Dream Life, you can look up my other endeavors on my site, and if you would like me to bend my brush to your needs, i do take commissions [email], and my professional illustration site is here.

cheers!
max -aka Salgood Sam

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...