By Randall C
Sleepyheads exists in a suitably dreamlike state, working upon you surreptitiously, wave after wave of quiet, beautifully rendered panels and pages that build and build. Into what, I’m still not entirely sure, but this is one book where the joy of reading is the experience of the journey.
Nothing really happens, not on a major level. It’s a collection of dream strips linked by the participants. Nothing, yet everything happens.
We venture, we experience, we become enlightened. It’s surreal, absurd, engrossing.
(One of the last wakeful moments in Sleepyheads until the ending. But dogs, the sea, the journey East – all that will reappear later. From Randall C’s Sleepyheads, published by Blank Slate Books.)
Sleepyheads may well be a complete dream, it’s never really certain. There’s certainly dream imagery all through it, as a man and a woman wander through a dream landscape replete with bizarre imagery; walking underwater, visiting dinosaurs, impossible shifts in time and space and much more.
Anything is possible here in Sleepyheads, we’re dealing in the logic and the landscape of dreams.
(The endless iteration - dreams within dreams. From Randall C’s Sleepyheads, published by Blank Slate Books.)
And all along, we watch the pair; him talking, explaining, questioning. Her very much the silent partner. Yet her silence and her expressions tell us so much about their relationship. They may be together, but it doesn’t really seem like she’s all that happy where she is. And her silence coupled with his overly talkative nature merely points out the gulf, the emotional void between this pair.
Along their way they cross paths with a dog (or is it a wolf?), as they’re all quite literally in the belly of a beast, with the dog still pondering a question of his own fragile reality, the seemingly ridiculous and simplistic idea of where his wrist ends and his hand begins.
Randall C’s dream-like tale deliberately blurs all sorts of boundaries, as dreams so often do. It may prompt mockery – physical boundaries are surely easy to define – try telling someone in an accident to define the boundary between kerb and road and they’d scoff.
But philosophy is all about questioning boundaries. And, because it’s the way my mind works, I can’t help thinking that science, with Chaos Theory, covers all this as well – the iterations, the endless repetition, the imagery – and in Randall C’s artwork describing his boundary question I saw that loosely yet perfectly captured. The drilling down into substance reflecting another organic fractal. Or maybe that’s just me? And maybe that’s what Randall C wants here – take your own reading from his dreaming tale?
(Olav and Igor – our comedy double act between dream sequences. But is what they say any less dreamlike for being awake? From Randall C’s Sleepyheads, published by Blank Slate Books.)
In between our adventures with the man and the woman (and the dog) our focus shifts to a desert island and Olav and Igor – the two bumbling Russian sailors marooned there. These vignettes gradually tell the sailor’s story – set adrift from their submarine after an adventure with a pod of sleeping sperm whales. They spend their time on the island idly daydreaming, staring at the cloud-forms, fighting, arguing back and forth about nothings. Again, Randall C’s dialogue lends itself to comedy, to playful imaginings.
All along Sleepyheads put me in mind of a film I love; Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead – with it’s isolated, snatched conversations, dream-like situations, the verbal sparring throughout, saying so much but getting nowhere. All beautifully done. And never more so than with the seeming nonsense of Olav and Igor.
Eventually all of our players come together on the island and, with dream logic let loose they make their way home, but not before Igor simply solves the dog’s quandary over the question about the endless boundary between wrist and hand by pointing out that the question only exists if you acknowledge that there’s a boundary point.
Admit that there is merely a continuum and it’s resolved. At which point the dog vanishes: Poof. Dreams, Quantum Physics, all so impossible to truly understand that it blurs.
(Randall C’s art mutates to illustrate the dog’s realisation of the lack of boundaries in his reality. Infinite iteration leads to ever more detail, the boundary simply ceases to exist – and hence, so does the dog. Dream logic and science – not so different after all? From Sleepyheads by Randall C, published by Blank Slate)
Randall C is a Flemish cartoonist and a stand-up comic, and you can see that with his work here. There’s an element of performance in his work, his characters, like Stoppard’s may not be aware of it, but they’re written as characters in some unfolding play to which we’re the audience.
Sleepyheads is such a strange book. Very beautiful, and Randall C’s artwork is something I could look at for a very long time. Full of simple tonal colours, flat on the page, his character’s indistinct, but so beautifully realised despite that.
And there’s such playfulness in his imagery, as he takes us from one dream-like flight of fancy to another until we have no clear idea what is real, what is dream, what is anything. He blurs reality, with his words and his art. It’s a strange journey, but a very engrossing and pleasant one by it’s end.
Sleepyheads as a reading experience is confusing, yet very enjoyably so. Thus far, I’ve heard various artists praise it to the hilt. And various non-artists criticise it equally. The book certainly has no real discernible storyline bar that of an extended dream – complete with all the meandering, surreal logic jumps taking us instantly from one thing to another, and I can certainly see where it’s critics are coming from.
When I look back to why I enjoyed it, I find myself unable to pin it down. It drifts along, describing so very well the fluid unreality of the dreams it seeks to illustrate. It’s not perfect, but, late at night, when sleep wont take hold, it’s something beautiful, capturing a mood, a spirit of a dream so perfectly and so beautifully.
Mon, Feb 7, 2011
Comics and cartoons, Propaganda, Reviews