Delinquent Commissions

MORNING OF MARCH 21, 2011

In real life I've recently been enduring a months-long period of the "creative doldrums", in which my usual passion for drawing and cartooning has been hard to muster. Not only does this create a lack of new art for my own purposes, but it slows down commissions people have asked of me, which creates guilt. Plus, I watched a movie with a "RiffTrax" commentary last night. Hence, the following short dream...

I suddenly remembered that the three guys from RiffTrax (formerly Mystery Science Theater 3000), Michael Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, had commissioned some art from me. They'd been waiting so long that I had almost forgotten the project altogether! I couldn't believed I had received the honor of someone I was such a huge fan of commissioning work from me and had just sat on it!

Stricken with combination of panic and guilt, I began hurriedly working on the commissions, some of which had already been in various stages of work. Each of the three guys had commissioned a parody comic book cover, though I can't remember the details. Most of the dream just consisted of me sitting at my desk working away on these things. I knew I had to leave and be at work soon, which created the sense of more need to hurry.

Near the end of the dream, I received an e-mail from a random "fan" who was also requesting a commission. Based on their description, I began roughing out an idea for how I'd draw theirs when I got to it. The weird things is, I was using a canvas. In real life I only draw and ink with more traditional pencils/pens/paper and then color in Photoshop, but here I had a huge canvas and was painting on it with oils--but only a rough outline! This wasn't even to be the final product!

All of this was taking place in the bedroom I had as a teenager.