The Strange World of your Dreams, 1950s comic book by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon

"We will buy your dreams!"

About 30 years ago my friend loaned me couple of copies of Simon and Kirby's early 1950s The Strange World of Your Dreams. I hate it when people tell me their dreams, but Kirby and Simon were able to convert reader-submitted dreams into great comic book stories.

Download issues 1-4 here. (Via Beware, There's A Crosseyed Cyclops In My Basement!!!)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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powellb

Downloaded the four issues. They are in .cbr format. What is this? Can’t read these files on my G5 or Mac Book Pro. Please help.

I love Kirby. He influenced my art.
http://artboxproject.net/artbox_store/BIO-POWELL_BURNS.htm
Anonymous

See also: my friend Steve Saffel (full disclosure here) recently edited The Best of Simon and Kirby for Titan Books. It’s an authorized collection “covering every genre in which they made their mark.” The pics I’ve seen from it look beautiful.

And I might as well plug my own dream logs, if you’re so inclined.

Alan P. Scott
not so anonymous as all that
Anonymous

Im doing a art project at the Moment (been slack last couple o months)where i do a single panel collages of my dreams using only google images.

http://www.deniedinfull.blogspot.com

using mixed resolution images relects that chopped up feel.

i dont like hearing peoples dreams unless they express it as if it actually happend, ie not “I had this crazy dream last night…”

dreams are awesome.
Anonymous

@14

you can use comicbooklover or comical or ffview to read cbr.

or you can just change the extension to .rar and extract it and use iphoto to view the jpg files inside.
nerdcoreblog

It seems like the cbr/rar-Files are corrupted (for me at least, can neither open nor destract them), can anyone who has the JPG-Files up them on Twitter? Would be great! Thanx.
nil8r

Can anyone remember the name of the novel about the guy who theorized that, since dreams are the brain’s housekeeping, where you work through your problems, therefore, hearing other peoples’ dreams is actually detrimental to you, because you now carry the weight of their problems and work, and slack off on your own?

I think the novelist was Irish, and it contained an icky scene using a pen to touch a dead mouse.
License Farm

Another masterfully done dream comic is “Roarin’” Rick Vietch’s RARE BIT FIENDS. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it on here before, but as it’s been a while since I’ve commented I just noticed that it seems my profile’s become unhitched from previous comments. That’s mildly annoying.
Maddy

I love to listen to people’s dreams. Beats their list of maladies. Here’s the great site Slowave, which illustrates dreams:

http://www.slowwave.com/submit.php
jjasper

I remember that episode of Max Headroom :-)
Michael Burton

The files inside this archive are named with a .cbr suffix, but they should be .cbz files. Rather than being rar files in disguise, they’re really zip files in disguise. I hope this helps anyone who was having trouble opening them.
kaosmonkey

Glancing at the cover, my first thought was “That asshat is totally aping Jack Kirby. I wonder who it is.”
arlopickens

I’m all alone. I’m rolling a big doughnut and this snake wearing a vest…
ssll

Jesse Reklaw does this currently – His comic is called Slow Wave
http://www.slowwave.com/
carriem

hahahahaha THANK YOU, Mark.
I also hate it when people tell me their dreams.

Usually because the dream teller says something like, “I had a really weird dream last night!” Well, duh, yes, all dreams are weird. And if you’re not in the dream, they are inevitably boring as hell. Then you have to make some sort of pleasantry indicating your gratitude for having your time wasted.
lackofoptions

Was it the dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun god robes on top of a giant pyramid with thousands of naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?
Anonymous

>> About 30 years ago my friend loaned me couple of copies of Simon and Kirby’s early 1950s The Strange World of Your Dreams.

Don’t you think it’s time to return them?
minamisan

Why do you hate it when people tell you their dreams? It’s where I get most of my best ideas.
Brother Provisional

I’m a big fan of art, literature, music, etc. inspired by dreams. I like the old trick Dali used to mine his hypnagogic mind for surrealist imagery. He would precariously hold a spoon by its tip, so that at the moment his muscles relaxed do to entering sleep, he would drop the spoon, which would then wake him as it hit the floor.
My wife often blogs her dreams, if anyone is interested. http://mimsybuttons.blogspot.com/
ill lich

Weird. . . I dreamed about this comic last night! Of course I was also naked and late for an appointment and my car was full of fish, and . . .
Talia

I donno. If you feel your time is wasted if they’re telling you their dreams, wouldn’t your time be wasted talking to them at all? I mean, people tell you stories about their lives you arent in.. if you arent even interested in that, why be friends with them at all?
Davinder

#22:

Not at all, I (usually) love hearing stories about people’s lives, because those stories have a PLOT. When people start describing their dreams, it’s almost always a collection of disjointed experiences coupled with imagery that only has significance for them. I listen actively when people tell me about their lives, but I never care as much about dream stories as the teller does.

I even loathe dream sequences in movies, books, and comics. So while I love Simon and Kirby, I’m reluctant to read the comics at the link above because of my dislike of the type of material they contain.
Talia

#21: that wasnt a dream. Look down.
tuckels

I wish i had interesting dreams. The dream I had last night was that all my friends & i were hexagons. We had to tesselate.
buddy66

A note from my Dreamshop…

I quit writing poems twenty years ago. I don’t really remember how they were done, except that they almost always happened in the early morning. It was my belief that the inner critic was still asleep and the metaphorical language of dreams was free for an hour or so from the chains of logic and causality…

In that brief sliver of time between morning wakefulness and sleep is when language comes unbidden, fractured and surrealistic, the result of my brain attempting to create order out of the jumble of unfiltered dream imagery. I love it when that happens. It gives me a glimpse of how great poetsâ€™ minds must function when, awake, they dream the poem into the world. The results, in my case, are never much good, but they are nonetheless the stuff of creation … and of delight. If nothing else, they provide me a glimpse, however brief, of the muse at play; and my waking laughter is her tribute.

This morning I felt myself teetering towards wakefulness out of a dream where I was the skipper of a fishing dory lost in the fog, my Radio Direction Finder broken, my ears straining for the ominous sound of surf. At the same time the boat was my dog, a border collie I used to take for walks on the beach. True to her breed, my little dog would obediently heel and follow me on our walk out, but once I turned to go back she would then take the lead and guide us home. Dreaming, I conflated dog with dory, two stories into one, as dreamers (and poets) do, and turned the boat in the direction where I imagined the harbor channel to be. Waking up, I laughed aloud and said to no one (I live alone):

Ever the good girl, she nudges toward home,
eager to serve her master’s blind insufficiency.

For a few ridiculous minutes this morning I was again, however briefly and insufficiently, a poet. That’s how that stuff works.

Poems begin in dreams.
Sceadugenga

Wittgenstein:

People on waking tell us certain incidents (that they have been in such-and-such places, etc.). Then we teach them the expression “I dreamt”, which precedes the narrative. Afterwards I sometimes ask them “Did you dream of anything last night?” and am answered yes or no, sometimes with an account of a dream, sometimes not. That is the language-game.

I don’t mind people telling me their dreams; it’s kind of fun. But it’s just a story they feel like telling when they wake up.
Senna1

@ #7
“Why do you hate it when people tell you their dreams?”

cuz they’re never filled with ukulele nor steampunk
mwschmeer

These are in the public domain now. You can also grab individual issues in CBR format at:

http://goldenagecomics.co.uk//index.php?cid=255

There’s a whole treasure trove of golden age comics that have fallen into the public domain on the site.
Talia

#12 a dream full of steampunk and ukeleles would be RAD.

Going to bed shortly, going to meditate on those two things shortly beforehand! :D