INTRODUCTION

As a teen, before World War I, Albert Grass worked at the "Insanitarium with Blowhole Theater", in the Pavilion of Fun on Coney Island in New York. As biographer Zoe Beloff puts it, "It was a world where the id ran wild, where dwarves manhandled women over hot air vents that blew their skirts into the air for the amusement of onlookers, a world to overheat the imagination of any young boy."

Grass survived trench warfare in World War I; while in France, he was exposed to Freud and perhaps Marx. Postwar, he designed Coney Island rides; his interpretation of the dream below links his war experiences and his day job as a theme-park designer.

In 1926 he founded the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society. He launched an annual "dream film" competition, inviting members to restage their dreams on film and analyze them. He wanted to build a theme park called Dreamland to help the public grasp Freud's ideas, but never raised the capital.

Around 1936-39 he shifted to a medium requiring no capital at all: comics. He drew/painted "The Adventures of a Dreamer." Usually these are four-page tales, with (as here) the first two-page spread telling the dream, then slipping, sometimes gradually, into associations and analysis. He abandoned the project in 1939, probably due to the war.

ON DREAM-COMICS

Grass's cartoons flow without panels, unlike the blocky American comics of his era; more like some modern manga. My first dream-comics in the 1980s (Sushi Circus, below) used this format and had the same problems. A page or spread easily becomes a confusing mass of images vying for attention. To structure without panels needs a dominant image, some space to breathe, and lines leading the eye through a clear time-sequence. After all, dreams do happen in time; dissolving that to create a "dreamy" effect is false to the source material. This style's hard to master, and it works (if at all) on ultra-high-resolution display systems, like the printed page. Online, low-resolution, it's hard to follow.

World in Wax p2, Albert Grass; cramped

One image lost in clutter

Sushi Circus p3, Wayan; equally confusing

Also, like his predecessor Winsor McKay, Grass treated lettering as an afterthought, often writing over dark backgrounds or black lines; "A Creature" took an hour per page of manual cleanup so the text was fully readable online.

All in all, it's murky--but real insight and poetry lurk in the stew. I chose this tale because of that lovely splash page of the hotel where the little creature whispers to Grass "Je t'aime"; for once Grass gives a key scene enough space, and it works. Less is more?

The interpretation pages are insightful: Grass sees that the little creature echoes the ambulance driver he met on Armistice Day, while the hotel echoes his workplace, and the animal race is one of the rides he sees daily. A classic Freudian fusion of today and the deep past.

But the sequence is clunky. Had I drawn this, I'd have put the workplace stuff first (as the race is in the dream) and shrunk the racetrack and drafting table to fit the left page--they're less intense--then ended with the story of his afternoon with that ambulance driver, who surely deserves the whole right-hand page, as her strange incarnation does in the dream. End with a bang! (No pun there, Dr. Freud.)

JUST KIDDING?

All my comments above assume "biographer" Zoe Beloff didn't make up Albert Grass and paint his notebook herself, as Emil Ferris (more openly) drew the ruled 1960s notebook of Karen-the-wannabe-werewolf in My Favorite Thing is Monsters (not a dream project, but highly recommended). I haven't asked Beloff--or taken my time machine to Coney Island to fact-check--but Wikipedia and her online interviews imply Albert's just her mask.

Still, I'll let this posting stand, since the artistic challenge of presenting dreams intelligibly is real, and well-addressed here, even if the dream's a (lovingly crafted) fake.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Albert Grass: the Adventures of a Dreamer by Zoe Beloff; pages 33-36.

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