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dogtrax's review
4.0
This is an odd book -- the illustrator takes people's dreams (they send them in) and turns them into illustrations. Pretty freaky stuff here. But fascinatingly freaky.
magnetgrrl's review
2.0
Dreamtoons is a short trade paperback collection of four-panel daily comic strips drawn by Jesse Reklam. All of the strips are based on dreams submitted to Reklam by readers. His strip started online and is now syndicated in several print newspapers.
It's a pretty neat idea, but in practice it gets old really fast. Some of the dreams are intriguing, others just plain boring. All of the dreams get the same four-panel setup, which is too bad when one of the dreams is really interesting and you just know there is more. Many of the dreams could really benefit from being expressed more thoroughly in the language of comics, rather than the limited conventions of newspaper cartooning. Also, some of the wonder of a really weird dream is lost somehow in its retelling by someone other than the dreamer.
The book is peppered with grey-tone pages containing large print quotations from various sources on the nature of dreams. That's actually the best part of the book.
While it's not a bad end table or bathroom book, I think I would much rather read these strips as strips. Sadly, there just really isn't that much to them.
It's a pretty neat idea, but in practice it gets old really fast. Some of the dreams are intriguing, others just plain boring. All of the dreams get the same four-panel setup, which is too bad when one of the dreams is really interesting and you just know there is more. Many of the dreams could really benefit from being expressed more thoroughly in the language of comics, rather than the limited conventions of newspaper cartooning. Also, some of the wonder of a really weird dream is lost somehow in its retelling by someone other than the dreamer.
The book is peppered with grey-tone pages containing large print quotations from various sources on the nature of dreams. That's actually the best part of the book.
While it's not a bad end table or bathroom book, I think I would much rather read these strips as strips. Sadly, there just really isn't that much to them.
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