Sarah Becan's Shuteye

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Sandman ruled the realm of dreams in his 1940s stories in Adventure Comics, and Simon & Kirby delved deeper into the topic in their Strange World of Your Dreams series in the 1950s. Dreams (together with hoaxes and imaginary stories) were an every-month occurrence in Mort Weisinger's Superman family of comics in the 1960s. And of course Neil Gaiman's Sandman raised dreams to a new level of cool starting in 1989.

Chicagoan Sarah Becan mines this same rich ore in her Shuteye. Originally self-published as mini-comics, the series has been collected in a softcover edition thanks to funding Sarah got from her fans on Kickstarter.com. The book is beautiful, and the brown tones of shading make the artwork very welcoming. I especially like how there are pages devoted to showing the character of one chapter morphing into the character of the next chapter.

It was a pleasure meeting Ms. Becan at her recent signing at Chicago Comics. I found out that Sarah is a big fan of brush markers, as I am. And home-baked cookies for everyone! You'll want to visit http://www.sarahbecan.com/ for more information.