DREAM GANG Jung At Heart
released OUT NOW! Publisher dark Horse Comics Writer/artist Brendan McCarthy
Brendan McCarthy may be better known now for co-writing and designing Mad Max: Fury Road than for his equally impressive work on series such as 2000 AD’s Sooner Or Later; comics’ loss is movies’ gain.
Originally serialised in Dark Horse Presents, Dream Gang’s episodic nature harks back to Strange Days, his seminal ’80s anthology with Peter Milligan and the late Brett Ewins. It centres on a man who’s transformed while he sleeps into the blue-skinned, Bowie-esque dream avatar Dream Voyager, and inducted into the surreal ranks of a psychic super-team. It’s pretty heady stuff, with McCarthy channelling Carl Jung’s theories as well as Steve Ditko’s original Doctor Strange.
Indeed, McCarthy owes such a debt to Ditko that the story features a fictional comic by the Spider-Man co-creator and fellow ’60s pioneers Jack Kirby and Carmine Infantino. There are also wry nods to The Beatles, and Love’s 1967 album Forever Changes.
There’s a pulpy simplicity to the script. The real draw is McCarthy’s phantasmagorical art, vividly coloured by Len O’Grady, which also references European masters like Moebius and Druillet. Mind-bending bedtime reading from a true visionary. Stephen Jewell
McCarthy first pitched a different version of the tale to Vertigo in the ’90s. Back then it was called Z-Men.