Maybe it’s the zeitgeist of the moment or the state of the world, but Becky Cloonan’s goals following her latest are very straightforward: “I just want to make cool shit with my friends,” she says, laughing.
The Eisner Award-winning artist (Somna: A Bed Time Story) is engrossed in drawing a skull in the din of Artist Alley when she takes the interview. Over October, her latest project, Fever Dream, a sequential sketchbook, has gone live on Kickstarter, and as of NYCC, it is a few short weeks away from its campaign run.
Becky Cloonan at NYCC 2026.
Currently working on writing for Baldur’s Gate, she is slated for covers in the current arc for Batman, but Fever Dream is the big push. It’s also the project that brought Cloonan back to social media after having signed off since January.
Although it has sequential art, Cloonan says Fever Dream is not a comic. Structured like a collected sketchbook story, with sequential pages tucked in, it’s full of process art and concepts, while conveying a story through moods on the page.
It’s for ‘anyone who has ever rage-quit’ a project, and it’s definitely for mature audiences that are fans of the artistic process and have arrived for the vibes.
“I love process-stuff more than anything. It’s some of my favorite stuff that I get to see from other creators. I love sketchbooks,” says Cloonan. “I love when I buy a piece of art, and it has pencil marks on it or eraser or things cut out and pasted in. I like that proof of handmade–kind of tactile quality–art. Where you can see the history and the passion people put in.”
As for being a rage-quit, cursed comic, Fever Dream is a rescued passion project first created in the void of lockdown.
As the world shut down in the pandemic, so did the book Cloonan had been working on with Marvel. With extra time on her hands and a desire to create a new mini comic, she immersed herself in the work and produced art at a feverish pace.
“I jumped in and just started drawing, and I was just off to the races. Eight or nine months later I had over 100 pages that I had drawn,” said Cloonan. “Some pages were inked, some were penciled, some were just layouts.”
And then she says she woke up.
“And I was like, this makes no sense, what the fuck have I done?”
And she judged herself harshly.
“It was like waking up from a dream, and you see what you’ve done in the cold light of morning and you’re like–oh no, I’ve made a mistake.”
She hid it away in a drawer. Life happened. Other work did too. She moved. Then sometime last year she pulled the pages from their hiding place and considered a new life for them, facing her own inner critic.
“I felt so bad about it. It sucks when you feel like you failed at something. I went about it in this crazy hectic way,” said Cloonan. “So I let go of this idea of this story as something I had to be precious about, I let it go.”
From there, with a loosened grip on the project, Cloonan says it evolved into the sketchbook she’s excited about.
“It does take you on a journey. It’s a little sexy, a little weird.”
Readers are invited to support the Kickstarter, Fever Dream. You can access the kickstarter below: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kineticcollectibles/feverdream
Quotes were edited for clarity.
