Albert Grass: The Adventures of a Dreamer

The 25 pictures in this book comprise the dream journal of Albert Grass, founder of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society, an organization that might have been, which was created by Zoe Beloff as part of her project The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle. Beloff created this hand-drawn prototype for a comic book as the work of Grass, made from perhaps 1936 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. It seems possible that Grass originally intended “The Dreamer” as a comic-book hero in the mold of The Spirit or Superman, but this conception quickly changed. By chapter three “The Dreamer” loses his ability to fly, remains earthbound and the work becomes a more serious investigation into his own psychic life, many of his anxieties speaking directly to us today. This edition proposes an early attempt to use the language of the comic book to graphically manifest the unconscious.