Et Tu, Subconscious?
My dream last night (This morning?) was one of surreal, cutthroat comics competition. As with all the best dreams, the details are fading now so that only instants and greatest hits are left, but from what I can piece together, there was some kind of underground comics bullpen – by which I mean, a studio that was literally underground, in a bunker; I remember having to climb up a ladder in order to leave it – where the competition for attention and pages was so cutthroat that there was theft and eraser abuse and even… murder. Yes, that’s right. Murder.
What I can remember from my dream makes it seem like a comic industry version of Whiteout – the good comic, not the ehhhhhh movie – right down to chase sequences in the snow (In a great moment of dream logic, the underground comic bunker seemed to have ladders that magically led to many different places in the world, so there was a chase in a blizzard, but when we’d solved the case – and don’t worry, we solved the shit out’ve that case, it was the bitter old pro stealing ideas from the exciting newcomer and then erasing her pages so no-one would know – I climbed up the ladder with my detecting accomplices and it was a bright, sunshiny day). I was called in to investigate a comic-related murder and stepped into a world where everything was comic-related, and everyone had pitches and dream projects and motives and bitterness that they wanted to share.
The clearest memory from the dream is the end of it; I was climbing back to the real world accompanied by my two fellow detectives, who happened to be (former?) BBC Radio 1 DJs Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley, and we were lamenting the way in which basic human decency had been lost in the hothouse world of underground comics bunkering. Steve asked why I didn’t work in comics, and I offered up embarrassment and my usual excuses, and then he admitted that he, in fact, was working on a pitch that he hoped to shop around soon. It was for a crimefighting squirrel, and it’d be named after her: Hazel Nut Frittata.
As soon as I “heard” those words, I woke up. Apparently, my subconscious knows when it’d entirely run out of ideas.
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