Crypto Zoo

Description

CRYPTO ZOO Forty years ago, Rick Veitch was a young man on the verge. Physically and emotionally exhausted from a wild and misspent youth, he’d fallen into a deep depression. Unable even to get out of bed, Veitch experienced a series of dreams that were so overwhelmingly powerful and rich in archetypal content, he was compelled to write them down in detail. Instinctively using the raw material from his own unconscious as a guide, Veitch worked his way out of depression and found the path he needed to realize his life goal of becoming an artist. Decades later, as a well known cartoonist and dreamworker, he revisited these early dream journals, illustrating them as chapters in a graphic novel for his Eisner-nominated comic series, Rare Bit Fiends. Collected for the first time in book form, Crypto Zoo is a deeply personal, harrowing and ultimately life affirming triumph of comic art that places the reader inside the maelstrom of what Carl Jung called a “confrontation with the unconscious.”

Rain Taxi: Veitch marries the clarity of graphic storytelling to the nonlinear, heavily iconic narratives of the oneiric mindset—a winning combination, since the grammar of comics is uniquely suited to the recounting of dreams. It’s a better medium than just words, just images, or even the word-image art form of film, because comics allows for the simultaneous presentation of dialogue, thought, and exposition. the result is an unusual and intriguing graphic novel. This partly, of course, derives from his particular skills and inclinations as an artist—without question the surrealistic impulses and penchant for nonlinear narrative we’ve found in Can’t Get No find a natural home in dream telling—but the comics here are also well informed by Veitch’s reading in archetypal psychology, which seems to have offered an enabling theoretical background for his thinking about the framework of relating dreams; in the book’s introduction he talks, for example, about deciding how to render the “sacred landscape” in which his dreaming self seems to exist. Whatever the cause, the effect is an art full of sharp and interesting edges—perhaps more fascinating for its formal delight than for the personal mythology it excavates, but fascinating nonetheless

152 pages. First King Hell Edition. Signed by Rick Veitch.