A collection of comics on the duality of dreams and nightmares - with a twist! Collects comics from over 50 indie creators.

The anthology has launched on Kickstarter!

Dreams and Nightmares is the latest group project from WIP Comics, a UK-based collective of indie comic creators. Every year, the group comes together to produce an anthology based on a single concept; this year's book is focussed on the duality of "Dreams and Nightmares" with each creator having a double-page spread to tackle the subject. This year, there's a twist - literally!

We want to involve the reader in the storytelling, so each comic incorporates some sort of page turn where the reader will need to rotate the book in their hands. It's opened up a whole range of fun layouts and techniques from the group’s many talented artists and writers!

My two page spread collaboration with artist Asia Kazub is titled “To Hades and Back”. Our take on the theme is in the form of a Roman floor mosaic, a spiralling retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice’s stories viewable form many angles, divided into overworld and underworld by the River Styx (the spine fold).

There are then main panels telling the story, and for that sequence of events I created a themed playlist while we were working on the comic!

To Hades and Back, the playlist

Please have a listen and enjoy the early sketch of the layout! I loved matching the soundtrack of KAOS, another modern Orpheus and Eurydice retelling, with my script. Alongside that instrumental, I included BOLT STRING’S piece “Orpheus”, in its forms as three parts of a composition and then a live version. And I included two versions of the song “Eurydice” Dan Smith of Bastille wrote for KAOS: his demo, and a version I saw in person, with the added BOLT STRINGS quartet and other talented artists. There’s also a bonus song!

So, ten main story moments, but Asia went above and beyond, as those ten sections are broken down into thirty-two panels with extra illustrations surrounding! I had a lot of fun researching and imagining ways of portraying all tangential aspects to the main story mentioned in different ancient texts!

It was an idea of Mike Armstrong to also include some text to help guide the reader’s order around the mosaic. I found two on-theme verses, from Shakespeare and Bourdillon, respectively:

Orpheus with his lute made trees

And the mountain tops that freeze

Bow themselves when he did sing:

To his music plants and flowers

Ever sprung; as sun and showers

There had made a lasting spring.

I followed through the cavern black;

I saw the blue above.

Some terror turned me to look back:

I heard him wail, O love!

What hast thou done! What hast thou done!

And then I saw no more the sun,

With those around the border, maybe you can imagine how the whole piece can read as sequential (first read around the edges then either side of the central circle) but also viewed as one mosaic. And in that form as one piece of art, it’sd a poetry comic, an endless loop to Hades and back over and over, a choose your own adventure and a series of symbols and imagery to research further if so inclined.

I hope this is whetting your appetite to see the finished piece! It’s so special to me. This would be my first comic story in print, but only if the anthology reaches its funding goal of £2,500 bu August 31st!

"Dreams and Nightmares" will be an A5 book with 112 pages (plus cover) - 100 pages of comics and illustrations from more than 50 creatives. If we can hit £3000 then we'll upgrade the book from paperback to hardback!

Pledging just £1 can credit you in the book’s ‘Thank You’ page. If all you readers just did that, it would be a worthy sum towards the goal.

£5 will grant you thanks and a digital copy of the anthology!

And £10 for the above and a physical copy of a hundred pages of comics is quite a deal - I would so appreciate the support towards this milestone on my creative journey.

There are many more combinations of rewards for your donation too, including the wonderful WIP backlogue, other options, bundles and special pieces.

Here’s the link again to the Kickstarter campaign!

And if you can’t plegde, please share with your art-loving friends! Many thanks, and may the prophecies of Orpheus’s severed head be in your favour! I hope you’ll join me and Asia “To Hades and Back”.