“One night while rooting through the recycling bin for magazines, I found all the confidential Ph.D. applicant files for the biology department at an Ivy League university from the years 1965-1975. Stapled to many of the yellowed documents were photographs of the prospective students. They were treasures! I tore through the folders and rescued every portrait I could find. I had to have them. Only later did I realize I had to publish them”.

So begins the preface to Jesse Reklaw’s Applicant. A priceless time-bomb of pop culture, Reklaw serves a compelling and secret look into an impossibly lost era. The book collects photos from the 1970s paired with accompanying comments from employers and professors. The results are absurdist, confusing, often hilarious and disturbing.

Applicant provides unique insight into outdated 1970s social attitudes and ephemera (under one girl’s photo: “Weakness: she is a female, and an attractive, modest one, so is bound to marry”). Much of the book’s appeal however is found in what the book fails to say: the blank and despondent stares of it’s subjects, the outdated fashions and hairstyles and it’s understated text. Equal parts Ann Taintor and Found Magazine, Applicant is one of those books you read once and then want to show everyone. In fulfilling Jesse's dream, we've republished this as a tiny paperback book! ISBN 0-9770557-6-0

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A series of long lost history from Jesse Reklaw's youth - some mean kids who killed some goldfish, a crazy dream about him and his sister buying a VCR from Al Gore, and some illustrated letters from his grandmother that were ten years apart and have very different tones to them. Overall, it's a great slice of life into a real person and flows quite naturally.

A series of long lost history from Jesse Reklaw's (Applicant) youth - comics about his childhood cats and dreams (and dreams about cats). More than that though, it's about growing up and growing apart from his sister due to age difference and all of the kinds of memories that I can't recall about my own childhood. Overall, it's a great slice of life into a real person and flows quite naturally.

A series of long lost history from Jesse Reklaw's (Applicant) youth - comics mostly revolving around him and his friend Brandon making their own decks of cards, vandalism, prank calls, recording music, toliet papering houses, and their obsession with a man who lives in their town, Fred Robinson. They mail him packages, they make comic books about him, and eventually create his assumed persona. More than that though, it's about growing up and the kinds of antics that all of us are a part of. Overall, it's a great slice of life into a real person and flows quite naturally.

Send Jesse Reklaw a description of one of your dreams, and he just might make it come to life . . . in comic form. This book collects the first few years of these 4 panel drawings of dreams. Jesse Reklaw manages to magically convey the essence of his collaborators' dreams. Some are disturbing; some are very funny;, all have the twisted logic and unsettling creativity of authentic dreams. Reading them is not only a pleasure, but oddly reassuring: It's nice to know that other people have dreams just as, if not more, bizarre as mine.

The giant-chicken building gracing the cover, the bacon on the communion plate, and the class taught by death are just a few highlights from the sleeping landscapes; all breaking down our barriers between "normal" reality and our dream creations. Peppered with quotes from luminaries like Marcel Proust, the book also has a few pages of dream information resources appended. Dreamtoons draws its readers into other peoples' minds and keeps them there just long enough.