Dreaming of comics, sorry "graphic novels"

I often have terribly vivid dreams. While sharing a flat with the Ruminator I’d often regale her with vaguely disturbing and convoluted tales of my dream life over breakfast. The only way I stood any chance of remembering them was to tell them to someone.

So, I forgot to take a book on the train this morning and found myself recalling three of my dreams of last night.

I was at a restaurant that I’m fairly confident was Betollucci’s in Curtin, Canberra. I am not certain who I was with, but there was a long table nearby where a birthday was being celebrated. The birthday girl appeared to be a uni girlfriend who was there with her current partner who I’ve met in passing a few times. They’ve been together some years now. She came over to say hello, and was very visibly pregnant. I an uncharacteristic gesture for me, I laid one hand on her bulging stomach.

Don’t touch the baby! she cried.

That was by far the most disturbing, principally because of her reaction. In another I was at my parent’s property outside Canberra. Except that it wasn’t. It was a replica of their property at the bottom of the ocean, the sea-water held at bay by a cracking dome. Somehow I was convinced that I and my sister’s only chance of survival was to float away in a bathtub. Yet the water was gushing in in such waves that to just get into the tub on the ground was not going to be any good. We had to haul it to the top of a barb-wire fence and balance there, then get in as a wave caught us. I knew it wouldn’t work.

The prospect of drowning seemed much less traumatic than being yelled at by a pregnant woman.

In the third dream I was reading bound anthologies of some of the greatest comics ever printed. I recall nothing about them, other than that they concerned golden and silver age super-heroes who have never existed, in any form, anywhere. I was captivated.

So, yesterday missjenjen outed me as having a standing order at Minotaur. I don’t know why, but here in the nerdosphere of bloggers and those who read them I’ve been a little reticent about discussing my penchant for graphic novels. Probably just the suit side of me speaking ...

So, a self-outing. Presently I collect Mike Carey’s “Lucifer”, based on Neil Gaiman’s arch-bastard from the breathtakingly excellent “The Sandman”; Brian Azzalero’s excellent crime series “100 Bullets”; the interesting, but possibly not entirely successful “Fables” by Bill Willingham; and “Hellblazer”, the long-running (and sometimes patchy) misadventures of the cockney occultist and meddler John Constantine. (More links will follow as I find ones I’m happy with. Some of the official sites are disappointing.) The greatest drawback of “Hellblazer” at present is the regularity with which the writers change – making for an interesting, but uneven series of tales within an established genre, but limited continuing plot. Azzalero is, I think, a really impressive crime-writer, working in a different medium. Carey’s Lucifer may even deserve a blog review of its own sometime.

Anyway, the amount of money I’m spending on this potentially very expensive hobby has been contained by Darebin public libraries. In a refreshingly broad-minded approach to literacy, their adult science fiction section includes a wide range of graphic novels (though they also file Azzalero’s crime works as ASF).

The scary thing is, there are perhaps even more geeky hobbies in my metaphorical closet …