Dreams and Daydreams

I got a great question on Bluesky recently.

Someone asked "I’m trying to find a piece that I believe you’ve posted before, featuring an Everyman reading and imagining himself Conan-like, iirc. It is similar to this Rockwell. Do you recall it?"

I didn't know what image it could be, but it reminded me of Victoria Poyser's 1981 cover art for Dicing With Dragons, by Ian Livingstone. Obviously a different scene, but it uses the same concept, ie. people doing something creative, with their daydream depicted above.

Oddly enough, the answer wasn't this suggestion from a commenter: Joe Jusko's homage to Rockwell, but with John Carter of Mars. It looks like it's a 2011 cover to issue five of the comic Warlord of Mars.

But another commenter found the one! It's "Everyman," 1984, by Boris Vallejo.

Boris created it as interior art for "Mail Wars," a May 1984 Games magazine article about playing RPGs through the mail. You can read it online here.

The mystery's solved, but I'm still thinking about this type of format for depicting someone's imagination. Here's a John Berkey that's somewhat similar, his 1981 cover to Stephen Goldin's And Not Make Dreams Your Master.

I'm not sure if any dreaming is actually being depicted on John Schoenherr's cover art for the 1963 edition of John Brunner's The Dreaming Earth, but the title mentions dreaming and the general format of "guy with eyes closed below, weird stuff above him" still holds.

Artists also often depict the concept of dreaming by showing the "everyman" figure floating through outer space or a trippy world.

Here's David B Mattingly's "Deep Space Dreamscape."

Gino D'Achille's 1977 cover to Case and the Dreamer and Other Stories, by Theodore Sturgeon:

Here's an uncredited cover for the same title, done three years earlier for a 1974 edition.

Philippe Caza's 1979 cover to a French translation of Christopher Priest's A Dream of Wessex illustrates the idea of a dream by overlapping the destination over a traveller's sleeping head – The novel tells the story of a group of people who can travel to the same shared virtual-reality future while sleeping.

Contrast that with Bob Pepper's classic 1971 cover for Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – he's illustrating a dream in a similar but more visceral manner, with the sheep emerging straight out of a robot brain.

Cool Links

A love letter to cassette futurism - Twisted Wonderland

Cyberpunk and cassette futurism are increasingly popular as younger folks get tired of modern tech and prefer to imagine a physical-media future without the fingertip novocaine of touchscreens. This article gets into the details, and even includes a caveat that this may be a performative trend, an important point that similar articles leave out.

It also features a trailer for a 2027 video game that features a red spaceship that's so obviously inspired by Peter Elson my jaw practically dropped. Sure, Chris Foss is the more famous example of this type of colorful ship, and I'm sure his work was an influence, but Elson loved trim hulls and thin fins, while Foss would go for bulbous much more often, though not all the time.

Frazetta/Whelan - My Adventures as an Illustrator

I shared David B Mattingly's art earlier in this post - he's had an interesting art career since the late '70s, and is likely best known for his iconic '90s Animorphs covers. Anyway, he now has an email newsletter!

This one has plenty of cool insights into science fiction illustration history. One example: "I became friends with Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, and one of Boris's comments about Frank’s painting was 'I wish he would finish his paintings.'"

Music rec: Revenge of the Ninja (1983) OST, via the Vintage RPG newsletter, which you should check out if you like this one.

Next Time: Gold Key's Twilight Zone