Comics, Monthly Comics

The Jon Hamm Dream

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A Will Eisner-inspired spiral with no panel borders to start off the first comic I had drawn in probably five years or more.
A Will Eisner-inspired spiral with no panel borders to start off the first comic I had drawn in probably five years or more.
The bottom panels are totally my attempt at a Chris Ware-esque diagram.
The bottom panels are totally my attempt at a Chris Ware-esque diagram.
This page was probably the most fun to draw of this series.
This page was probably the most fun to draw of this series.
The reveal
The reveal
The repeated, digitized face is very inspired by xeroxed indie comics of the 80's.
The repeated, digitized face is very inspired by xeroxed indie comics of the 80’s.
This page is an experiment in moving from a style rendered with brush to one rendered with ink in an attempt to differentiate between the dream and the waking world. I'm not entirely sure it was successful, but this is a technique I will likely revisit.
This page is an experiment in moving from a style rendered with brush to one rendered with ink in an attempt to differentiate between the dream and the waking world. I’m not entirely sure it was successful, but this is a technique I will likely revisit.

This was a bizarre dream I had shortly before I moved to Chicago last year. I was living in Ohio, feeling stuck, sad over a breakup, and worried that I was taking on too much by moving to a new city where I only knew a handful of people with no job lined up and only a few thousand dollars in the bank.

This was probably the first comic work I had done in five years and I essentially saw it as my chance to experiment with the form again. I won’t claim all of the experiments here were successful, but this is what rekindled my love of making comics.

I was quite tempted to go back and redo these pages (including doing a hand-drawn version of Jon Hamm’s head for the repeated image), but decided to leave it exactly as it was the day I scanned it about a year ago.