COMPlicated dreaming

Depending on whether my fickle home modem is working tonight, there will later be two Comic Book Wednesday Panel posts. One features Satan with Sideburns (and they're totally worthy of the Capital), so stick around for that.

For now, though, I just wanted everyone to know I had my first comp-mare for the multimedia exam. As a life-long student, I've resigned myself to the knowledge that I will never entirely leave the phase of my life where my dreams revolve around the classroom. This dream, though, I can do without. For some reason, I was writing the exam back in Wherever, with the rest of my high school class. My Blank professor hands me the exam, and it's a comic book panel featuring Desaad talking to Jean Grey. (It took me a dozen images to find a pic of Jean Grey that didn't feel entirely like low level porn. That concern didn't come up with Desaad, for some reason.) There was no question, just a single word: "discuss."

Now, let's put aside the fact that, belonging to two opposing companies, Desaad and Jean Grey have never and probably will never, have a face-to-face chat. The simple truth is, I should be able to do this. Even putting aside my decades of comic lore, there are some theorists I've read in the past 4 months that help with this. First and foremost, there's Scott McCloud, and Understanding Comics: I can talk about the use of time in comics, the framing, and whether a single panel constitutes a comic or not. From there, I can move on to traditional treatments of image and text, as described in W. J. T. Mitchell's Iconography. Or how this panel works in terms of Edward Tufte's Visualizing Information. Or I could go another direction entirely and talk about the use of vast narratives in multimedia form, ala Third Person. The point is, I have tools for this.

Instead, in the dream, my mind's a complete blank, and I go through a panic so intense that I wake myself up. Ugh. A whole month of this, huh? Well, I could always give up sleep again. Worked for the last comp...

Later Days.