Strange Sad Superhero Dreams

I had a very odd and rather sad dream last night, and while I realize that dreams are generally not terribly interesting for anyone but the dreamer, this one actually had a very straightforward narrative, beginning to end, and it was in the style of an old-school superhero comic. The dream was mostly made of panels printed on cheap grayish paper, circa How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, and it was quite short–sixteen pages, maybe? You wouldn’t need a lot.

The heroine was a dark-skinned woman of indeterminate ethnicity, her hair rendered in the dark blue characteristic of the era. She had a couple of aliases, but was going by “the Purple Phantom” at the time of the comic. Her origin story (I suppose it was an origin story?) had her married to a police officer, and picked up for some crime or other. He was driving her in the squad car to the station when they were caught in an (earthquake? bomb? unrelated superhero battle?) and buildings started falling down on them. Her husband yanks her out of the back of the squad car and tells her to run, and when she looks back, the last she sees is him standing next to the squad car while bricks and chunks of masonry rain down around him.

The comic then skipped forward a bit, where our heroine has become a vigilante for social justice. She was, however, strictly bottom of the bag superhero-wise and was mostly tipping off reporters and whatnot. (You didn’t see her actual superpower until the very end.) At some point, she bites off more than she can chew, messes with the wrong crime-lord, something. In the comic (and I can still remember the panels so clearly!) she said that she felt like a fox who had wandered into a fight between bears. She was seriously out of her league, but she shows up to the last fight anyway, where the villain had brought, among other things, a war elephant* and finally reveals her superpower, which is to turn into an eight-headed serpent.

Actually, it was eight giant serpents with human heads, all joined at the tail, sort of like a cross between a naga and a rat king. Different people’s heads, too. It was both kinda awesome and exactly the ridiculous things that a comic writer in the early 80’s would come up with when they had completely run out of ideas.

The eight-headed serpent kicks elephant ass, kicks all kind of ass, gets very beat up in the process, and for a couple of minutes, we kinda think she might win this one. But as soon as he sees the tide going against him, the villain yanks out his trump card, which is a set of three vaguely Tibetan-looking demons. (I have no idea what they were—my subconscious didn’t render them terribly well—but the Tibetan underworld is full of such extraordinarily nasty creatures that it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what our non-existent comic artist was going for.)

The demons have a very specific power. Whenever you think a good thought, they get to attack you. So if you think “Hey, I’m winning!” the demons get you. If you think “Wow, I might live through this!” the demons get you. If you think “Happy bunnies, fluffy kitties!” I assume that they are allowed to tear your head off and wear it as a hat.

So the heroine has to get through the rest of the fight while only thinking about how tired she is, how much this hurts, how stupid it all is, etc—and this gets worse over time, so that eventually you have to actively be thinking bad thoughts to keep the demons off. She beats the villain, but flees into the night, pursued by the demons.

The last sequence has her curled up on the floor of  hotel room, with the demons crouching over her, reliving the moment where her husband is killed by the falling buildings over and over again, because it’s the only memory bad enough to keep the demons at bay.

Needless to say, I woke up and immediately checked under the bed for Frank Miller.

It was strange. And sad. And no, there is no chance that I’ll draw it, it’d be far too depressing. But wow, weirdly specific narrative there, brain!


*It’s still one of MY dreams, obviously.

5 thoughts on “Strange Sad Superhero Dreams

  1. Jehanne D'Arc says:

    Needless to say, I woke up and immediately checked under the bed for Frank Miller.

    …caused me to fall out of the chair laughing.

  2. Chelsea says:

    Eee, I was just thinking how much I’ve missed dream theater from you!

    Have you ever read the adultish Grimm Fairy Tales graphic novels? This would fit riiiight in with the tone of those.

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