Snapshots
MR. ECSTASY. Dreams are a trap. They comfort and they coddle. They comfort
and they coddle. They give false hope, and false understanding. They are
little fictions that satisfy a man’s hunger for meaning, without providing
anything he can hold in his hands. What matters is chasing the real.
It’s what you can touch. What you can feel. Allow me to demonstrate.
ROBBIE. It’s hideous. but it’s meant to be hideous. It’s aggressive. It clashes with everything. It demands people take notice of it. So I can see why you like it.
MORONI. They’re coming, heavenly father. They’re all coming. I can feel it.
WILLIAM. I don’t mean money. I mean real power. I mean the people and the
things that walk the earth who can break all the rules that we can’t.
MR. AGONY. Can we destroy a dream?
MR. ECSTASY. Can you destroy an
idea?
MR. AGONY. Not quickly.
DREAM. And you, you that call yourselves collectors. Until now, you have
all sustained fantasies in which you are the maltreated heroes of your own
stories. Comforting daydreams in which, ultimately, you are shown to be in the
right. No more. For all of you, the dream is over. I have taken it away. For
this is my judgment on you: That you shall know, at all times, and forever,
exactly what you are. And you shall know just how little that means. Now
leave.
DREAM. This poor child now dreams of her new fate, now that she is bound to
Hell. I am sorry to say her imagination pales in the face of what damnation has
in store for her. Though what is left of her life won’t be much kinder, I fear.
MORONI. We will give the people a dream of the country that must be. A
dream of tomorrow.
Images flash through Jamie’s eyes faster than he can process their meaning.
It’s as though he can feel a thousand powerful eyes turning onto him, suddenly
noticing this small man tugging at the edge of their stories. Their
attention bares down on the writer. For a brief moment, he thinks he
understands how it all connects together. And then a burning pain bursts from
inside his chest. And consumes him.
Character Intros
And in that place lives a man that is not a man. Well… he doesn’t quite
live either. Not in the way that you or I do. Perhaps it is better to say
that in that place walks a man that is not a man. (Mind you, he does not
have to walk, but he often does.) He is called the Corinthian. He is a
Nightmare.
But hadn’t he risked that much already? What other options lay before him?
THE CORINTHIAN. Lord Shaper. A word, if you will.
MR. ECSTASY.
What did you say?
MR. AGONY. You heard what he said, Mr.
Ecstasy. You simply do not wish it to be so.
World Building
Sometimes there are shapes that rise up out of the water. Personal
horrors, half-imagined and half-formed, that skitter up onto the beach before
a gust of wind tears through them and they fall apart. On rare occasions, a
nightmare survives the thrashing of the wind and steps forward, taking more
solid form. These nightmares look to the Corinthian as if he might tell them
how they could continue to live, separate from the dreamers who imagined them.
The Corinthian tells them nothing. But occasionally he sketches then in his
notebook, if he finds their shape particularly interesting. He knows he is
not like them. The nightmares crafted at the hands of the Dream King are not
given the transient half-lives a single dreamer can bestow. They are given
something more. They live in the collective unconscious of an entire
people, where they take deeper meaning onto themselves. They have been
crafted to show us the worst of what we are, so that we can understand
ourselves better.
The kid was new to Hollywood, but Jamie could tell he would fit right in. He
could feel the hunger radiating off of him. And the other predators
could see it, too. They recognized him as one of their own. Jamie caught them
looking from their tables. Guessing who the young attractive man with
the colorful hair might be, and what he might be able to do for them. No one
in this city had ever looked at Jamie like that, until Lamia. She wanted
something from him. He hated how good it felt. He hoped she wasn’t just
another carnivore like the rest. But even if she was, he was in her thrall.
References
- Nightmare Country #01. James Tynion IV; Lisandro Estherren; Yanick Paquette; Patricio Delpeche; Simon Bowland. 2022.
- Nightmare Country #03. James Tynion IV; Lisandro Estherren; Yanick Paquette; Patricio Delpeche; Simon Bowland. 2022.
- Nightmare Country #04. James Tynion IV; Lisandro Estherren; Yanick Paquette; Patricio Delpeche; Simon Bowland. 2022.
- Nightmare Country #05. James Tynion IV; Lisandro Estherren; Yanick Paquette; Patricio Delpeche; Simon Bowland. 2022.
- Nightmare Country #06. James Tynion IV; Simon Bowland; Maria Llovet; Reiko Murakami. 2022.
- Angel Moroni. en.wikipedia.org . Accessed Aug 6, 2023.
- Eisner Awards Current Info | Comic-Con International: San Diego. www.comic-con.org . Accessed Aug 6, 2023.
Tynion IV won Eisner’s “Best Writer” award for 2023.