Cherry Bomb Comics

Oliver
Jennifer Daydreamer
Top Shelf Productions: 2003

I once got one of my stories sent back to me from a publisher with the note 'your dreams may be of interest
to you, but nobody else wants to read about them'. I found this a little bit crushing at the time but hey,
what do they know? I still think that the exploration of dream-life is one of the most fascinating things to
write, read and draw about. Too often dreams are cast off from “rational” human experience and seen in simplistic
Freudian terms as unconscious animal drives. However, there is a growing culture in graphic novels -
where real and surreal often intersect - of giving weight to dream material, such as in the disparate work of Julie Doucet,
Neil Gaiman and Jennifer Daydreamer.

I first read Jennifer Daydreamer: Oliver one evening when I was stoned and it was a good way in, though
not essential(!). The book feels soft and deep and lonely, and is filled with a cast of characters who are
maladjusted yet highly lovable. Oliver is a little devil and a fallen dream “He opened his eyes to find the world in a
peculiar way... What was inside his head was now on the outside. He meets an angel and traverses landscapes
and reaches a tented circus, which seems to be the apex where all the characters emanate from or are attracted to.
A second book - Jennifer Daydreamer: Anna and Eva (published in 2004) - develops Circus Zazel and begins to name more
aspects of the ethereal world of Oliver .
The drawing style manages stillness and dynamism all at once and the spaces are huge whilst belonging
inside the encephalon of characters who are tiny and delicate. Over everything a dream-like quality prevails -
a sense of loss and unease, a sense of discovery and fate, and a sense of the theatrically absurd.
TG 17/9/04