Robot Dreams

AUTHOR: Varon, Sara

ARTIST: Sara Varon (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: First Second

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2007

Publication History

Robot Dreams, published in 2007, is Sara Varon’s first book with First Second, but it draws from themes and story lines with which she has worked since her first published book of comics, Sweaterweather (2003). Sweaterweather included friendships between various creatures, including dogs, as well as a story about the temporary nature of a snowman’s existence. With Robot Dreams, Varon has drawn on her previous work but has been able to create a longer and more focused and nuanced narrative.

Plot

In August, Dog literally makes a friend when she assembles the robot kit she ordered through the mail. Dog and Robot spend quality time together, going to the library and watching movies, but events turn tragic after a trip to the beach. Though initially wary, Robot joins Dog in the water; but after Robot has rested on his towel for a while, instead of drying up, he has rusted solid. Robot is too heavy for Dog to carry, and as night falls, Dog has to abandon Robot on the beach. Robot stays behind on his beach towel.

In September, after a dream about Robot on the beach, Dog reads about robot repairs and returns to the beach. However, the beach is closed for the season, and though she can see Robot in the distance, she has to leave him behind again. Over the following months, she makes various new friends, but none of these relationships quite work out. The ducks with whom she goes camping migrate to Florida for the winter; she has fun in the snow with a pair of anteaters, but their food disagrees with her. In January she makes a snowman (who borrows a coat, hat, and scarf from her), and Dog and Snowman meet a new friend in Penguin. In March, however, the penguin returns Dog’s scarf, hat, and coat: Snowman has melted.

All this time, Robot stays on the beach and dreams of escaping or of being saved. One of his toes is taken by some rabbits that use it to fix their boat, and all winter he is covered in a blanket of snow. In April, after the snow melts, a robin builds a nest in the crook of his arm, and Robot watches as the eggs hatch and the chicks eventually fly off with their mother. In May, a monkey scavenging for metal on the beach finds Robot and sells him to a scrap yard. Consequently, when Dog returns to the beach in June, she finds no sign of Robot except for the leg the rabbits broke off. Lonelier than ever, Dog buys another build-it-yourself robot kit.

In July, Raccoon is building a radio, but when it only produces garbled sounds, he visits the scrap yard to look for more parts. There, Raccoon finds Robot’s head, arms, and one leg, and he buys these to fix his radio. At first, it does not work, but when Robot makes some adjustments to his new radio body, the result is music. Raccoon and Robot dance and become good friends. In August, Dog takes her new robot friend, Square Robot, to the beach. This time, she knows better than to let Square Robot in the water, and after a relaxing day, they head home together. Robot happens to look out the window at Raccoon’s house and sees Dog and Square Robot walk by. His first reaction is sadness, but then he reconsiders. He tunes his radio to let the music follow Dog and Square Robot along the street, and as the sounds reach them, Dog walks off wagging her tail and whistling.

Characters

•Dog is an outgoing city dweller with a light-blue collar. She is lonely from time to time, and so she sends out for a mail-order robot kit. Though the drawings of Dog are relatively gender neutral, it is appropriate in this case to refer to Dog as “she” and “her.” Varon has mentioned that this story was partly inspired by the death of her own dog, a close companion, and furthermore, many of Varon’s stories are at least partly autobiographical. Therefore, it is possible that Dog functions as an alter ego for Varon.

•Robot arrives at Dog’s house by mail, as a build-it-yourself tin robot kit. He has a bullet-shaped head and body and very long arms. He and Dog share an interest in movies about robots and music. Once he gets a new lease on life after Raccoon salvages him, Robot discovers new aspects of his personality: Like Raccoon, he loves music and dancing and is a fan of alternative comics.

•Raccoon enters the story toward the end. He is a DIY enthusiast and needs parts for a radio he is building. When he goes to the scrap yard, he finds pieces of Robot and decides to use them for his project.

•Square Robot is Dog’s second robot pal, built from a store-bought tin robot kit. The catalog at Modern Robots: Robots and Robot Supplies claims that this Robot is a “fine companion . . . tells good stories [and] knows a lot of jokes.” She is also supposed to be “Improved!” Dog has learned from experience and now knows how to take care of Square Robot.

Artistic Style

Varon creates deceptively simple drawings. Her figures are friendly, the pages are open, and her lines are slightly uneven, but the results are clear, emotionally expressive, and nuanced. The book is done in a soft palette, with occasional bright colors. Publishing with First Second also allowed Varon the use of color, which Sweaterweather did not have. Robot’s dreams are set apart stylistically from the rest of the narrative through the use of wobbly panel lines (straight ones are used elsewhere) and, initially, by the use of sepia tones in the dream sequences. Once Varon establishes the wobbly panel for dreams, later dreams introduce bright colors.

Like most of Varon’s previous work, Robot Dreams does not contain dialogue, so that the panels are not broken up by word balloons. A constant in Varon’s work is the minimal use of text: Varon does not use dialogue, and her comics generally do not contain text balloons. Instead, the body language and expressions of her characters convey their emotions and intentions. That is not to say that her comics are completely mute, since words for various sound effects appear next to actions throughout; also, she uses “iconotexts” copiously, where words appear as part of the image. Store signs, book covers, and newspapers are examples of this. Varon has mentioned that she has not felt the need to use dialogue; but because her stories are getting more complicated, writing dialogue may be the next step in her development as an artist.

Varon uses a fairly regular three-tier page structure, with one or two panels per tier. She varies this with bigger panels, switching from lined panels to panels without borders, and occasionally using full-page illustrations that run to the edges of the paper. The book is broken into months rather than chapters, and Varon uses pages with single, small panels to bridge chapters and transition between scenes. Varon’s style has remained remarkably consistent since her first book was published in 2003, with the main development being the introduction of color.

Themes

Friendship is a recurring theme in Varon’s work and is central to Robot Dreams. Dog searches for friends throughout the book and experiences the many obstacles to creating close friendships: incompatibility, drifting apart, carelessness, and even death. Using animals and mechanical beings as her characters enables Varon to explore some of the most painful aspects of friendship and its mutability, without making these observations too direct or painful. Readers may recognize their own experiences in some of the events. For example, Dog’s shame and guilt over having to abandon Robot are clear, but they are also softened by the fact that she is not human.

The second, though less explicit, theme of Robot Dreams is loss. Dog loses the friend she made, and Robot’s dreams enact loss and mourning. When, in his dream, he sees Dog with a new robot friend, Robot returns to his beach and buries himself under sand and snow. Later, after he has been rescued by Raccoon and sees Dog walk by with Square Robot, the loss strikes him again, but he quickly moves beyond his sadness, sending Dog on her way with music. The book shows that loss can be felt acutely, but that it is something that can be lived with and through. This is also evident from Snowman’s fate. Snowman melts at the end of the winter, but both Dog and Penguin understand this to be part of snowmen’s life cycle. Furthermore, with Snowman’s “death,” Dog and Penguin also cease to be friends. It seems it was their mutual affection for Snowman that drew Penguin and Dog together.

Impact

Varon writes illustrated children’s picture books as well as comics. Much of her work, including the Scholastic publications Chicken and Cat (2006) and Chicken and Cat Clean Up (2009), is a crossover between the two genres. Stylistically and narratively, they are clearly suitable for young readers; formally, they fall between the larger illustrations of picture books and the sequential panels of comics. Robot Dreams is clearly a comic book and is suitable for children age eight and older, but it has strong appeal for more mature readers as well. Varon’s work demonstrates that comics that are appealing to children do not have to be simplistic. This work carries an emotional impact that perhaps comes across best for older readers who have experienced loss. It is hard to say whether this book will have a lasting impact, but it is a good example of the renaissance of comics publication for children. First Second is one of the publishers becoming increasingly interested in publishing well-made comics specifically for children.

Further Reading

Crane, Jordan. The Clouds Above (2008).

Tan, Shaun. The Arrival (2006).

Thompson, Craig. Good-bye, Chunky Rice (1999).

Bibliography

Bush, Elizabeth. “Robot Dreams.” Review of Robot Dreams by Sara Varon. Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books 61, no. 3 (November, 2007): 155.

Postema, Barbara. “Mind the Gap: Absence as Signifying Function in Comics.” Ph.D. dis., Michigan State University, 2010.

Roback, Diane. “About Our Cover Artist.” Publishers Weekly 254, no. 28 (2007): 1.