ROARIN' RICK'S
WORLD COMMUNITY
DREAM JOURNAL
By Jeremy Taylor
A couple of months ago, I received a plain brown envelope containing the premier issues
of "Roaring Rick's Rare Bit Friends, a comic book devoted to the sharing of dreams,
in both written narrative and graphic visual form. I immediately wrote to Rick Veitch, the
artist/ publisher of this fascinating new community dream journal, and in the
correspondence which followed, Rick remarked: "I'm convinced that comics are the most
perfect form of art to recreate the dream experience in another person's head..." I
couldn't agree more. Film animation and special effects are also great dream art media,
but they are really technological extensions and elaborations of comic strip form. The
cartoon strip is the most cross-cultural and egalitarian art form, All of us, old and
young male and female, rich and poor, are free to write and draw our own "dream
comics", even if we don't have the urge or the economic means to make films.
The panel reproduced here (with his permission) is Rick's rendering of a dream of his
in which he crosses he archetypal "almost vertical bridge"(with his waking life
friend Neil Gaiman, of Sandman fame) and actually manages to get to the other side to the
"refugee camp". It is also my experience that when that nerve-racking car trip
over the bridge can be accomplished, the dreamer does usually arrive at the place where
the "dispossessed and fugitive" energies for transformation and change are
gathered and where the greatest creative possibilities are "just around the
corner"...
The first seven issues have drawn emotionally moving, dynamic contributions from around
the world. One particularly poignant contribution (in issue #6) comes from Sarajevo in the
Balkans, demonstrating that dreams persist in their healing, transformative magic, even in
the face of the horrors of civil war.
Readers familiar with the history of American cartooning will recognize the playful
tribute to Wjinsor McKay, whose early dream oriented newspaper and magazine comic strip
was entitled "Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend". Dreams are indeed "rare
bits"/ McKay also produced another strip called "Little Nemo in Slumber
Land", and the fascinating "Letters..." section in Rare Bit Fiends carries
the puns into anagrams with the evocative title "Little Omens". The letters from
readers and subscribers are particularly interesting and revealing. Roarin' Rick's Bit
Fiends provides an endlessly interesting and beautiful open forum for sharing a very wide
range of dream experiences, all of which point to the deep shared common humanity that
binds us together, even across the barriers that appear to separate us.
Subscriptions to this new world-wide community dream art sharing journal are $24.00 for
65 issues. Make checks payable to "King Hell Press", POB 1371, West Townsend,
Vermont, 05359-1371
'Nuff said.