By Shaenon K. Garrity
There was a time in my life, when I was in high school, when all the good comics seemed to be about dreams. Like many nerdgirls of my generation, I became a comic-book junkie through
Sandman, which sucked me into its kingdom of dreams and romantic yet mega-emo Dream King.
I borrowed the
Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics from my school library and discovered Winsor McCay's
Little Nemo in Slumberland and
Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. I was awed by Jim Woodring's surrealistic work in
Jim, painstakingly sculpting comics from images he dreamed or hallucinated.
Somehow I made the transition to autobio dream comics, comics about actual dreams. I can't remember exactly why or how I started picking up
Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends, wherein Rick Veitch drew dreams he'd had about his comics-industry friends, but I bought every issue and savored the weird adventures of Dream Neil Gaiman and Dream Dave Sim (the latter often more coherent than Actual Dave Sim).
The letters column in
Roarin' Rick's, my all-time favorite letters column in a comic, consisted of readers' descriptions of their own dreams and occasionally their own dream comics. Through that column I made my way into the under-underworld of dream minicomics, particularly Ashley Holt's lovely, funny
Bedbugs. And somehow I found Jesse Reklaw's
Slow Wave.
Slow Wave is an odd duck. It's a weekly dream strip, which is not, believe it or not, such an unusual thing, but it may be the only such strip that's not a chronicle of the cartoonist's own dreams. Instead, Reklaw solicits dreams from readers and interprets them visually.
In addition to appearing in a dozen or so print weeklies,
Slow Wave is one of the oldest webcomics, running online since 1995. It was arguably the first webcomic designed to take advantage of the instantaneous communication possible on the Web, the intimate give-and-take with readers. People send their dreams to Jesse Reklaw and he turns them into comics. It's a simple idea, which is why it's worked for over ten years.
I've been telling people about
Slow Wave for a long time, so I'm very happy about
The Night of Your Life, Dark Horse's big new hardcover collection of
Slow Wave strips. The dreams are often funny, always bizarre, occasionally unsettling.
Reklaw's art has an old-fashioned illustrative look, clean and attractive but a bit impersonal, which gives the surreal dream images a grounded, matter-of-fact quality. He draws a woman talking to a Jell-O mold in the forest, a dog with a crank in its side that causes puppies to churn out, and Prince transforming into "a funk-emitting robot" as if they were utterly mundane.
And in fact
Slow Wave revels in the mundanity of dreams. We think of dreams as hallucinatory roller-coaster rides through the unconscious, when in fact they're usually more like slow rambles through the disorganized back closets of the brain.
Slow Wave strips tend to take place in nondescript homes, on nondescript streets, and feature the perfectly normal dreamer and his or her perfectly normal friends.
The dreamlike quality comes from the one detail that's out of place—the talking cat, the ten-foot-high unicycle—or the characters' illogical responses to situations. "I was having some ice cream when I noticed two friends in my living room," runs the narration in one strip. "But there wasn't enough to go around. I put what was left in my hair, so they could see I wasn't wasting it." What else can you do?
Comics may be the ideal medium for depicting dreams: visual enough to give them form, to draw you into the dream, but not so solid as to impose the logic of the waking world on the dream reality, as often happens with depictions of dreams in movies and TV shows.
Or maybe comics are just closer to the unconscious, the animal hindbrain, than the other arts. Most great comics are about childhood fantasies or old memories, about images and impressions and crude caveman emotions. They're equally powerful in color or black-and-white.
There was a time in my life, a few years ago, when I dreamed in comics: my dreams took the form of sequences of still panels. Afterwards, I could often remember the specific art style of a dream, and sometimes it was even the work of an artist I recognized (once I dreamed in Vera Brosgol, once in Kevin Huizenga).
This went on for a year or so and then stopped as suddenly as it began. Maybe it was evidence that sequential art is the ideal way to map that royal road. Or just a sign that I read too many damn comics.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
