FROM RICK'S NOTES

..."At the time I was illustrating the Crypto Zoo material, I was in a particularly heady artistic space. Further enough along in my journey to perceive at least some of what was going on in my dreams 22 years earlier [1974], I was also in a constant state of surprise over how these same dreams intersected with my waking life at 44...

Powerful dreams set in the Sacred Landscape came to me... in one I was reaching my arm into a crack in the foundation of The Bridge abutment, in search of a great secret. In another I saw works inscribed with many thousands of petroglyphs. I saw gatherings of weird shaman guys dressed in furs and feathers. I met dead friends. I saw a transparent version of the earth flowing in the night sky with illuminated points on all the continents linked by glowing ley lines...

I had always known about the petroglyphs in my home town of Bellows Falls... but I really didn't know much about their history... Many of the glyphs are of simple heads with horns. When growing up, I was told the horns were the feathers on the Indians' headresses... [but the] dream of my friend Alan Moore and a horned shaman... raised another possibility... When I told him [Alan] my suspicions about the petroglyphs, he suggested the local library... Boy, was he right.

EDITOR'S NOTES

This is the only one of Rick's dream-comics I've ever seen in color, though he notes the tones as published in Crypto Zoo weren't entirely satisfactory. To my eye, skin tones and brick reds had shifted to Barbie pinks & magentas; I hand-tweaked a few pinks to make them less eye-searing. And light areas were a bit washed out; I was able to recover some of his delicate hand shading, though probably not all. My apologies to purists (and Rick). In the end, what I admire here isn't the color but the content:

This set of dreams shows the substantial continuity between Native shamans and modern dreamworkers--despite generations of yahoos (academic and otherwise) trying to sever it. And yes, advanced shamanic dreamwork gets paranormal, no matter how much that rankles skeptics out there--skeptics who (in my experience) haven't bothered to put in the years and hard work shamanic dreaming takes. You might as well scoff that virtuosos in math, music, sports and dance are all fakes just because you can't do that. Sorry, it just means you're lazy. Or tone-deaf. Rick is not appropriating Abenaki shamanism here; he's doing it. Exactly as a shaman from any culture should.

SOURCE: Rick Veitch's Crypto Zoo, 2004, King Hell Press (a collection of his comics series Rare Bit Fiends, issues 15-20), pp.127, 130 & 145-52.

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