Welcome to the first official post/newsletter of 2020. As of this writing I have 193 subscribers. A few of you folks are subscribed directly from this website. The rest of you follow my posts on Tumblr and Twitter. At least, that’s what WordPress tells me.Quite a few of you are probably Russian bots. Welcome anyway. The basic format of these posts will be a little art and a bit of writing.

Artstuff

In my first unofficial post on New Year’s Day I said that I’d made new image banners for this site. I made a dozen of them. They load randomly whenever you refresh a page or move to a new page. Rather than ask you to reload the site a ridiculous number of times to see them, I’m posting them all here –

Back in 2013 I tried to do something with my twitter account by posting story ideas. With twitter’s word limits it seemed like a good use for the site – idea summary with a longer commentary at a blog I called Storythinking. I posted 24 ideas before I got distracted by other things. That blog got rolled into this website and I collected the “story seeds” onto a page here called #99Stories. This newsletter seems like a good spot to release some new ideas into the wild. If any of these ideas spark something for you, feel free to take them.

Story Seed #25
Little Nemo in the Dreamlands

I’ve looked and, so far as I’ve been able to find, no one has mashed up Winsor McCay and H.P. Lovecraft. I’m kind of surprised.

Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay is one of the greatest comic strips of all time. It’s also kind of boring. Yes, it’s visually stunning and inventive. But the strip’s formula means that nothing of consequence happens. Each strip ends with Nemo waking up. Storylines and adventures may carry over from strip to strip but that beat of Nemo walking kills suspense and reminds me that he’s just dreaming. I know that I’m reading the strip differently than it was intended. It was meant to be read once a week not sequencially in a book or online.

But it’s 2020. Daily comic strips have mostly been simple gags for decades. The Sunday installments are only slightly more complex. In 2014 Locust Moon Press kickstarted Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream, a massive collection of new one-off Nemo strips by over 100 different artists. Little Nemo was again revived as a graphic novel by Eric Shanower and Gabriel Rodriguez in 2016. Both of those projects were beautiful.

My dreams are mostly pretty boring. My imagination seems most active when I’m awake. Asleep it tends to send me wandering through endless corridors or driving around delivering mail. Lots of other creative folks have very vivid dreamlives. H.P. Lovecraft was one of those folks. His Dreamlands stories (as well as many of his other writings) were inspired directly by his dreams.

Both McCay’s and Lovecraft’s works are in the public domain. How would Little Nemo fare in the more hostile environs of the Dreamlands? How would it work if he couldn’t wake up every time danger loomed? Would King Morpheus send help? The strip could be charming and funny and childfriendly – Nemo meeting more benign versions of Lovecraft’s horrors. Or it could be raw and terrifying and adultsonly – Nemo barely escaping and going gibbering mad. Or a perhaps one could come up with a middle ground.

For added flavor one could blend other dream worlds into the mix – Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland comes to mind. What adventures could Alice and Nemo have together, especially when pursued by Night Gaunts?

Perhaps it’s a 21st Century Nemo trapped in a technologically advanced Dreamlands? Steampunk ghouls? Industrialized Celephaïs? Slumberland, Wonderland and the Dreamlands are rooted in the early 20th Century. What we imagine and dream evolves with our culture. What would these places be like today?

Lifestuff

It’s 2020. New Year. I’m not one for resolutions. I try to make changes as needed rather throughout the year rather than in one big push. The one change that seems necessary this year is cleaning up and moving my studio from one part of the house to another. Entropy has claimed far too much of the current space and only a move will create new order.

At USPS (my day job), the big change I expected is apparently only happening to other carriers. Our station covers four zip codes – 98146, 98136, 98126 and 98106. I have route 0633. Last year management did route inspections on all the routes in the 06 zip code with the intention of eliminating one of those routes. That was a bad idea. Fortunately, they figured out that a better idea would be to more fairly distribute the work load of the current routes. So the routes in my zone are getting adjusted so that, on the average, it takes a carrier eight hours to prep and deliver a route. My route is the one route that’s staying unchanged. I can keep doing it in my sleep.

Fine by me.

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