Nightmares and Daydreams A.C. 2020. Mirko Ilić. SelfMadeHero. 2026. Hardback, 152 pp, $26.99
Where were you when the lights went out all over the world? COVID. It feels like a lifetime ago and only yesterday. It put our collective daily existence on a surreal landscape. Artists and creative people of all kinds felt compelled to respond. Mirko Ilić, a Bosnian-born comics artist and graphic designer based in New York City chose to go back to the comic strip format in order to frame his reflections. Mirko, instead of sheltering in place, concluded he had no choice but to continue his routine of leaving his home and walking to his art studio. In his case, his regular walk took him down once bustling New York City streets, now quiet as a ghost town. He set out to express his turmoil. The result is 70 chiaroscuro drawings, hung together by the angst and anguish of COVID and the comics medium.
Many of these sequential images, sans words, depict humans stripped bare. Perhaps clad in pajamas but more likely just naked: various characters ponder, meditate, toil, and engage in a multitude of mysterious activities. COVID was a time to be by one’s self. But isn’t that really true of all time? Selfhood. It’s always there. But it can get lost, covered up by mounting distractions, noise, clutter, random activity and self-denial. With COVID, all seemed to go quiet, pared down, stripped bare. The emphasis seemed to be placed upon the self in a new way, or in a way all too often ignored. You needed to be naked with yourself and deal with the bare bones of life . . . and death. It seems that, for some people, perhaps a fear of self was entangled with a fear of the unknown, this silent killer we were all trying to avoid and to understand. Would we someday understand it, and ourselves? The hot, and cold, caress of the body. The unflinching dark. Mirko, an artist up to the task, confronts it all.
Mirko takes us down many paths, both personal and universal. He deftly weaves many stories into a tapestry that he seamlessly unfolds, effortlessly going from one vignette to another. One such stopover is a tribute to Egon Schille and his wife, Edith, both died days apart from each other, from influenza during the last global pandemic one hundred years ago. It’s a chilling story. Edith was six months pregnant when she died from the Spanish Flu (1918-20). Egon would last only three more days. In that time, Schiele drew a few sketches of Edith. Mirko refers to this with a haunting series of panels of Edith taking a bath. She looks contemplative, resigned to her fate.
Keep on Tumblin’
Perhaps to drive the point home, Mirko channels Winsor McCay’s comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which debuted in 1905, over a decade before the Spanish Flu. We see Mirko take a classic tumble out of bed, just like in the original comic strip. Although, in Mirko’s case, he’s already out of bed, on the floor, when he undergoes a disturbing set of poses. Was he a little too eager to tumble further out of bed?
Ah, that is part of what was going on during this time: a collective tumbling further and further out of bed, only to return all the more firmly right back into bed. The doors to one’s inner world were opened wide, there was nowhere to go but further inward. Mirko, known for his work as a poster-maker and illustrator as well as his work in comics, appearing in Heavy Metal and the Marvel Comics anthology, Epic Illustrated, is uniquely suited to share his COVID nightmares and dreams in the comics medium. There is an ongoing interest in Mirko’s work in comics that this new book will surely satisfy. Mirko even gives a tip of the hat to a past masterwork of his, Shakti, from 1977. In his new installment, the great stallion is now long gone, only a skull remains in remembrance.
Ultimately, there is something very striking and wise about the work I see here. Such a perfect storm for self-reflection. You begin with an artist who is already sensitive to issues of the self. Then a global pandemic descends upon all of us, whether you’re creative or not, and we all must find a way, creative, reflective, spiritual or productive, to deal with ourselves. For added measure, the artist, now 70, is at an especially interesting time of life, a time all about reflecting upon a life and setting about finding some resolutions that make sense, tie up lose ends. I feel this book is a perfect testament to this process. Like it or not, COVID or not, naked and unapologetic, Mirko Ilić confronts the goals, passions, and desires we all have, as well as our nightmares and dreams.
