Amanda A Dream Come True Cartoon By Steve Strange →

If you’re certain you saw or heard of this cartoon:

The origin of Amanda: A Dream Come True is almost as surreal as the cartoon itself. Following the commercial decline of Visage in the mid-80s, Steve Strange found himself struggling with addiction and the fickle nature of the music industry. In a 1994 interview with The Face magazine, Strange revealed that during a period of rehabilitation in Wales, he began having recurring vivid dreams about a young girl with mismatched eyes and a talking silver fox. Amanda A Dream Come True Cartoon By Steve Strange

"I couldn't escape her," Strange said. "Her name was Amanda, and she was lost in a world that looked like the inside of a music box mixed with the backstreets of Berlin. I started sketching her to exorcise the dream, but instead, it became an obsession." If you’re certain you saw or heard of this cartoon:

Using the modest fortune he had saved from his "Fade to Grey" royalties, Strange founded Strange Magic Productions. He hired a small team of disillusioned Disney animators and European graphic novelists. The goal was simple, if daunting: create a fully hand-drawn animated film that looked like nothing else on Earth. The keyword, as Strange would later scrawl on the production bible, was "Amanda: A Dream Come True"— a title that served both as a plot summary and a personal manifesto. The origin of Amanda: A Dream Come True

The choice of the name is critical. Amanda represents the generic aspirational woman—the girl next door, the romantic lead, the object of projection. In Strange’s punk-inflected worldview, the “dream come true” for Amanda is usually defined by external forces: a wedding, a promotion, a purchase. The cartoon would subvert this by showing the aftermath. One panel might depict Amanda receiving the award, the ring, or the check, while the next panel shows her alone in a sparse, newly cleaned apartment, the object of her desire already obsolete.

This is where Strange’s musical legacy with Visage (specifically the anthem “Fade to Grey”) informs the visual art. The cartoon isn’t cruel; it is melancholic. It posits that a dream come true is not an ending but an existential vacuum. The grey that fades in is the realization that the pursuit of the dream was more vibrant than its attainment. Amanda’s face, in the final frame, isn’t sad—it’s blank. And in Strange’s lexicon, blankness is the truest expression of modern longing.

On its surface, a cartoon titled “Amanda: A Dream Come True” by an artist named Steve Strange seems destined for saccharine predictability. The name “Amanda” (from Latin, meaning “she who must be loved”) combined with the cliché of a “dream come true” suggests a greeting-card illustration of rainbows, romantic fulfillment, or personal triumph. However, the inclusion of the creator’s moniker—Steve Strange—radically recontextualizes the work. As the lead singer of the 1980s new wave band Visage and a seminal figure of the New Romantic movement, the real-life Steve Strange was a performance artist of alienation, glamour, and the stark gap between fantasy and reality. Thus, a cartoon bearing his name cannot be a simple celebration; it must be an anthropological dissection of the dream itself.