Review: ‘The Night of Your Life’ by Jessie Reklaw
The Night of Your Life
By Jessie Reklaw
Dark Horse, September 2008, $15.95
For the last thirteen years, Jessie Reklaw has been turning dreams – mostly those of strangers – into comics, on his website and in a growing number of alternative weeklies nationwide. (Not to derail my own train of thought, but are there any non-alternative weeklies, to which those “alternative weeklies” are the actual alternative?)
Each comic is a four panel grid, two over two: distilling a dream to its essential elements and telling however much of a story there is to tell. The stories are all bizarre and strange – they’re all dreams, after all – but, boiled down to four panels, they also have a lot of similarities. There’s a reason people call it “dream logic;” that’s the way the human mind organizes itself, so the same kind of transitions and imagery come up in many different people’s dreams.
[[[The Night of Your Life]]] collects about two hundred and forty of those “[[[Slow Wave]]]” strips, in black and white. The strips are printed one to the page – large enough to be clear and readable, but only slightly larger than on the web, so they don’t look blown up in the book. The strips are divided into ten parts, each part named for the first line of text in the first cartoon in that part…but the strips don’t otherwise seem to be organized. It’s clearly not by theme or imagery, and the strips aren’t dated, so there’s no way to tell if they’re in chronological order.
I recommended this comic to a friend of mine. She wrote back that her office’s content filter blocked it as "tasteless and offensive."
I know way too much about comics. Far more than is healthy. But there are, understandably, a few characters here and there that I either know very little about, either because I never really came across them or I did but found them terribly uninteresting and so dismissed them, soon forgetting what I had learned.
Marvle this morning released a teaser for a new event in the Marvel Universe. No creators, timing or content was released with the teaser. We’re going to guess that it maybe a part of the 2009 Dark Reign event spinning out of the end of Secret Invasion. It does not resemble the future Iron Men seen in last week’s New Warriors. Any guesses?
While Tony Stark is drunk on booze, Robert Downey Jr. is drunk on Tony Stark. 
This past weekend I was in California to attend my brother’s wedding. It was a lovely afternoon; they held the ceremony in the upstairs loft apartment attached to the back of their house, and the reception in their back yard. I still can’t figure out how they fit 120+ people in that space, but they did. And my brother looked so ecstatic, and my new sister-in-law so beautiful, and I remember thinking, “He’s finally paired off the way Robin and I are! Another happy ending!”
Total Drama Island is getting a spinoff as the Cartoon Network has announced the addition of Total Drama Action. According to 
After poor reviews and worse ratings, CBS has given up on the Elizabeth Reaser-starring vehicle The Ex List. The Friday night dramedy, based on an Israeli television series, was a creative problem for the network. Show runner Diane Ruggiero left the series when it was clear she and CBS couldn’t agree on a direction. Rick Eid replaced her but his efforts hadn’t aired in time to change its fortunes.
At long last, the 1968 written The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test from Tom Wolfe 
