Review by Frank Plowright

Nightmares and Daydreams marks a return to comics after 48 years for graphic designer and illustrator Mirko Ilić. It’s his response to the covid pandemic during 2020. During New York’s lockdown he walked the mile from his home to his studio every day, comforted by the streets being almost deserted, which also provided artistic inspiration.

The results are a thorough immersion in a theme, clever, symbolic interpretations of isolation to one degree or another, meticulously composed and digitally illustrated. Some are surreal, others oblique, and as a body of work quite remarkable as an exploration, all the more so for being wordless.

It’s not chance that Ilić reflects the title of Daydreams and Nightmares, a volume collecting the work of comics’ foremost creative fantasist Winsor McCay. McCay is referenced in one strip which repeats the regular ending of Little Nemo in Slumberland with Nemo tumbling out of bed, and despite his illustrative style being more formal and sterile Ilić is equally creative. He has a single man walk between city blocks composed of other people standing on each others’ shoulders, a man at first seen in close-up hacking his way through vegetation before the viewpoint pulls back to reveal it’s impossibly dense and a close-up portrait of a man looking inwards on himself. Toying with form is occasional, while people hunted or disappearing are repeated themes.

Other works aren’t as easily decoded. A lovingly drawn series of panels of a woman in bondage gear ends with one of her decapitated head attached by a chain to her foot. People grow and shrink in relation to each other, or are absorbed into each other, while impeccably drawn figure studies or portraits seem just that. Four landscape panels detail a car driving along a lonely road in winter. The feeling is perhaps that not everything has meaning, and like McCay’s work, sometimes whimsy is its own end.

As seen from the samples, the actual artwork is stunning, and well served by the presentation of each strip being preceded by a blank page. It draws attention rather than having the individual works compressed together, while of course reinforcing the theme of isolation.

Illustrative virtuosity with a point to make is all too rare in comics, and this is a remarkable work.