Dreamtoons - Softcover

Reklaw, Jesse

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1570625735 ISBN 13: 9781570625732

Publisher: Shambhala, 2000

Synopsis

Anyone who has ever had a weird dream—and the desire to tell it to others—will enjoy this collection of dream cartoons. It features the best of a weekly comic strip illustrating dreams that real people from all over the world have sent to artist Jesse Reklaw. Reklaw takes written descriptions of dreams and turns them into three or four cartoon panels. The result is a surreal excursion into the underworld of the psyche—just for the fun of it. These concise, hilarious little stories are strangely familiar, showing that whatever our external differences, at night we were all united in the absurd world of dreams, where we can quietly and safely go insane.

About this title

About the Author

Jesse Reklaw was born in 1971 in Berkeley, California, where his hippie parents sold bread from a cart on Telegraph Ave. He studied painting and digital art at U.C. Santa Cruz and has an M.Sc. in computer science from Yale University. Jesse's dream-cartoon strip, Slow Wave, started on the Internet in 1995 and is now published in ten weekly papers across the U.S. and Canada. He currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and frequently oversleeps.

Reviews

YA-Dreams are seen here not as earnest messages, but as marvelously creative, often hilarious, and always nonthreatening adventures. Reklaw understands that dreams are hard to share: "unlike last night's hit show, even the best dreams often leave friends and family bewildered." Happily, he has overcome the difficulty of describing dreaming in the usual way ("with only clumsy words and gestures")-through expressing its visual quality. For several years, he has maintained a Web site (www. slowwave.com) where people can view his work and send him their own dreams, along with pictures and descriptions of themselves. With a clear, uncluttered, pen-and-ink style, he takes this highly subjective and usually surrealistic content and transforms it into zingy, black-and-white, four-panel cartoon strips with titles like "Heavenly Paper Bag," "Super Blueberry Woman," and "Love and Darth." An apartment house turning into a chicken ("It still had windows and stuff, but it was definitely a chicken") would seem to be a difficult thing to explain with any clarity, but, as a glance at the front cover shows, Reklaw has the talent to do just that. Dreamtoons gathers Reklaw's favorite strips, organizes them loosely around a variety of quotations about the topic, and concludes with a list of "Dream Resources," in print and cyberspace, for readers who wish to pursue the subject further.
Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Shambhala
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1570625735
• ISBN 13: 9781570625732
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 126