Scenes from a new graphic novel

Posted above is a wee video trailer, expertly edited by Robbie Busch, for my graphic novel adaptation of Strindberg’s A DREAM PLAY, although note that for my purposes, I’m just titling it DREAM PLAY.

Yes, I am adapting August Strindberg’s 1901 A DREAM PLAY as a graphic novel.

Seriously.

In fact I have been adapting it for the last couple of years, and am nearly finished drawing it. I will begin rolling it out on Patreon very soon.

You may be asking yourself, why would the guy who worked on Ren & Stimpy, ‘Mazing Man, Mickey Mouse, and Primal—-why would the Popeye-guy draw a graphic novel adaptation of a 124 year old Swedish play?

Seriously, I’m doing it because I thought it was a funny idea.

But not like funny HA HA funny, funny like odd. Funny like arresting, like an unexpected turn.

Adapting a Strindberg play is the last thing you’d expect the Popeye-guy to do; that’s the joke, that’s why it’s funny.

Initially the inspiration came from my love for Ingmar Bergman’s films. Bergman references the play in FANNY AND ALEXANDER, and in fact I think Bergman had even adapted the play for Swedish television. I’d been intrigued by it, and just happened to come upon a used paperback of Strindberg’s plays. I read A DREAM PLAY, and didn’t really like it, honestly, but I liked something about it, I liked what I thought could be done with it. I started thinking about how I could turn it into comics.

At first I WAS going to present it as a joke, thinking I’d draw it in my standby Fleischer Studio style. But after I’d done a few character sketches Chester Gould entered my head. I realized I might try presenting it as a bit of a German Expressionist film. Of course, Bergman’s films were certainly going to be an inspiration, but as I began laying out pages, so was the “slow” cinema of Chantal Ackerman and Bela Tarr. While drawing I started watching the experimental films of Maya Derek, Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, and they all had a strong impact on what I was seeing for the play. I weeded out any of my initial jokes that might muck up the play and decided to simply present it straight. But not straight. Dreams aren’t straight. They are until they aren’t.

I’m telling you I think this may be one of the better things I’ve ever done.

Which maybe means my earlier work wasn’t all that good and is easy to beat in terms of quality, or, you know, it could possibly mean that my efforts here aren’t all that bad and worth looking at.

But you’d have to be the judge of that for yourselves, really, so I do hope that when I start posting pages, you’ll look at it and let me know what you think. Maybe you’ll think it’s one of the better things I’ve done as well.