Dream Jobs and Sobering Realities

My Subconscious and Real Journeys to Comedy, Angst, and Comics.

Before today’s comic, let me celebrate my followers and thank you all for getting me past that 200 mark!

Now let’s get down to it.

Sorry for the delay in funnies. I’ve been a pretty busy at work (more on that below the comic).

Speaking of work here’s a comic that is based on a dream I recently had.

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You know you’ve got a touch of work anxiety when you start having dreams about different careers in strange locations.

In the last few weeks I’ve had career dreams on such subjects as:

1) I was substituting as Peter Tork at a state fair performance with a Monkees cover band.

I was actually relishing the prospect of this dream gig. That is until I learned the Davey Jones role was going to be played by that portly prima donna, Steven Seagal.

2) I got a job as band conductor for the Jimmy Kimmel show.

On my first day of work, Kimmel told me the band was lazy and needed to be ruled with an iron fist. Somehow I thought speaking in a German accent and demanding they play waltz music would shape them up. “Vee don’t vant any Lazzee muzik, you dumbkofs! Now, Von, Two, Three…Von, Two, Three…Von, Two, Three!”

I must have mused Kimmel was angling for that Lawrence Welk audience.

3) I was a window washer on Mars.

Let me tell you, dusty windows is a non-stop problem on the red planet! Especially when you’re in a perpetual dream loop of cleaning the windows on Elon Musk’s 1000 story Martian skyscraper. Actually this dream is classified more as a nightmare.

These were the more memorable dreams. The rest were just flashes of working in chaotic offices or operating dull toll booths.

I’m sure a Jungian psychologist would tell me all these are signs of needing a change in my life’s direction.

A Freudian headshrinker might put it in terms of needing a new cigar, or banana, or (insert any sexual repression here.)

Whatever the case, my subconscious anxieties are probably no different from any other person with a mid-life crisis. After all isn’t that now just part of living in the United States?

Which just brings me back to the current way I earn my keep.

I have the thankless Sisyphean

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task of Website Front End Development. It’s a job where you’re stuck between Google’s endlessly ever-changing, agonizingly obscure SEO demands and a client’s non-stop panic over meeting those demands. It’s the perfect job for a masochist.

However in my non-paying hours during my dream states, in the back of my mind, under all those layers of surreal imagery and angsty nonsense, I know it’s really the artist in me screaming out and urging me to do what I really love, which is of course, make art.

Now if I could only reach a few thousand more subscribers maybe I can attain that goal?

Or is THAT just a dream?

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Has it really been 25 Years?

Speaking of art and comics…and film, my pal Joe Mauceri

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let me know that there’s a 25 year Anniversary IMAX screening of the Darren Aronofsky movie Pi happening on March 14th. The special one-day only event will include a live Q&A with Aronofsky, cinematographer Matthew Libatique, composer Clint Mansell, actor Sean Gullette and other special guests live from Los Angeles followed by a screening of the restored film. A must see for any fan.

For those of you who don’t know, thanks to Darren and his vision, Pi is where I got my first real experience making comics.

When he was filming Pi he ran an ad on Craigslist looking for an artist to create a comic based on his Pi script. I answered the ad and we struck up a friendship.

As Darren liked to put it, “Either I’m going to be a Movie Director or a Graphic Novel Writer! But one way or another, I’m getting my story out there!”

I created sketches on and off until he completed the film. At the time I wasn’t sure whether he was going to finish the film, or that he was serious about the comic book.

Once he finished the film at least I knew he was resolute in his previous statement although I still wondered about the comic.

But that all changed, one afternoon while I was at work, when he called me and excitedly told me over the phone, “Flynn! I sold the movie to Artisan pictures at the SXSW film fest! The comic book is a go!”

After getting off the phone I walked into my boss and told him that I needed to take a month off “to…uhh…help my parents…um…move …west!”

Thankfully my boss was too distracted with twirling around in his hands the latest CD from Massive Attack to actually hear what I told him and he said, “Sure thing, no problem.”

I walked out and spent the next month, from 8am to 12am, producing a 32 page comic book for Pi. This was a feat of sheer madness since I committed to do it in scratchboard.

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I spent a solid month scratching like a chicken on clay tablets and basically existing on Dominoes Pizzas and Coke.

When I finished the book and delivered it, I fell into a shivering four-day diseased mono coma.

Despite pushing my body to the point of near death, it was still an enjoyable job creating this book for such a great film and director.

And that was a dream come true.

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What’s your dream job or your nightmare job? I’d love to hear about it.

Until next time, I am eternally grateful you’re here.

Cheers,
Ed

1. See Sisyphus. as in Rolling a ball up a hill only to have it roll back down over and over again.

2. Best damn movie reviewer and fanboy on the planet!

3. A drawing technique for those with either OCD or obsessed with negative space.

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