By Clyde Hall — Where is there greater need for a winning bedside manner than in a sleep clinic? Maybe that’s just unwarranted expectation. An account I recently read (Jenny Lawson’s Furiously Happy) described one such facility as being at the end of a back alley both dark and rife with sketch. The interior, however, boasted good illumination and proper sleep study equipment. Her blunt, unceremonious dismissal at 4 a.m. into the same shady back alley after the study, however? 

Well, Lawson’s experience came to mind during the opening encounter with protagonist Stetson in Slumber #1. She helps people with sleep issues, just like a clinic doctor. She has a lab of sorts with a technician who monitors your brain waves using sophisticated equipment while you sleep. Their ‘lab’, however, appears kit-bashed by someone with access to a pawn shop selection of old Windows 95 monitors and a doctorate degree in Inadvisable Science.

As written by Tyler Burton Smith, Stetson’s gruff and direct, but the service she provides is more than worth any downside for those who suffer parasomnia or night terrors. She, her tech Ed, and her colleague Jiang, can enter a client’s dreams and put down the nightmares which plague them. Permanently and for a fee. She’s getting steady work if the first issue’s any indication, and it may explain some of her brusque manner. Digging around in all manner of strangers’ dreamscapes would wear on anyone.

Think about it. Would you want even a loved one having access to your dreams and the things living there? Secrets, fears, fetishes, past traumas, and more make it a very vulnerable, personal position. Now imagine strid with the express purpose of battling the denizens giving their nightmares psychic fangs and claws. Their collective PTSD could easily become your own.  

If such visions as arachno-fowls and zombified rock stars aren’t scary enough, Smith also chronicles a series of murders dubbed the Sleepwalker Killings. The count’s up to seven victims, seven different but matching crime scenes, and seven different killers, all of whom claim they have no recollection what happened. They fell asleep in their own homes but woke elsewhere with a freshly massacred resident. 

It’s the sort of case one Detective Finch gets called on for a consult, a suspension from his regular duty notwithstanding. No wonder he dresses very casually for the midnight call-out. Apparently whenever Finch is on suspension, so are his trousers. But he does recognize scrawled clues about a ‘dream eater’ as pertaining to baku, supernatural entities from Chinese folklore who protect the realms of slumber by dining on nightmares. 

Stetson and these serial killings are linked by her business card being found at the last victim’s home as well as symbols, scrawled along with the dream eater graffiti, which are markings of someone called Valkira the Shadow Walker. She and Stetson have history. And unfinished business. Tracking her down over hill and dream-dale is apparently the underlying reason for our hero’s line of work and her greater quest.  

There’s an effective narrative twist in the final act of the opening issue, and Smith leaves plenty additional story hooks for reeling us back when #2 hits LCS shelves. Baited barbs like Stetson’s own dream of searching for someone lost to her, how Ed’s cobbled machinery helps make the dream portal possible and even allows for transfer of waking world weapons, and why Jiang has elfin ears and an appetite for human feet. One of the Jenny Lawson chapters in Furiously Happy questions the total carb intake of a foot, and it seems possibly homage more than coincidence. Which makes me appreciate this new title even more. 

Smith’s twisted sense of humor and horror is twined into absurdist dream imagery married to grisly visions of fright by artist Venessa Cardinali. Her stylized imagery embodies a cartoonish quality, but only if it’s an Adult Swim animation, guilty chuckles punctuated by masses of quivering viscera and clots of dried blood. There’s a version of M.C. Escher’s Penrose Stairs here, often the case with comic stories of altered realities, but Cardinali makes it her own with a lens of childhood nightmare overlaying a Beetlejuce film set. 

Overemphasis on garish colors or perhaps too much focus on monochromatic aesthetics would be tempting, yet colorist Simon Robins suspends the palette between both extremes nicely. The police procedural portion of the story, a setting anchored in flawed, everyday tints, works best this way. But Roberts still notches up the vibrancy in superbly disquieting fashion as needed. His strikes a natural, effective tonal balance.  

Letterer Steve Wands also maintains a realistic flow of words and noises in the prosaic portions of the story but indulges himself when it’s time for dreamscape gunshot echoes and closing portal thwoops. There’s cartoonish font work in these more fanciful sound effects across dreamscapes and within mad labs. But crime scene messages brushed in blood and Shadow Walker chants rendered with Dutch-looking sigils allow Wands a lettering muscle flex further solidifying elements both surreal and commonplace before gleefully blurring the boundaries between. 

Snarky wit coupled with lethal mayhem, all wrapped in a bizarre strata twixt wakeful and drowsy, this premiere issue may kindle a Freddy Krueger aura. However, it’s closer to another 1984 film, one with equal potential but less explored: Dreamscape. Dennis Quaid as a nightmare-naut inserting himself into other people’s dreams and helping them combat their fears with Kate Capshaw as his anchoring tech. Both become aware of a variation on their research, a program aimed at assassinating high profile targets by placing literal ‘sleeper’ agents into their dreams and scaring them to death. 

It was an intriguing concept and not dissimilar to this ongoing series. Heroes with a necessarily gray moral ambiguity in stopping the true evil at work. Protagonists holding back the horror with a gallows humor. Field work fashioned from tactile make-believe, as unpredictable and dangerous as anything the human mind can envisage. Readers will show appreciation for the wide-ranging possibilities this creative team cultivates in Slumber #1 with recurring trips into its dreamscapes over the coming issues. 

Overall: Chasing our dreams is supposedly a good thing. But when your dreams stalk you back? Then you need someone riding shotgun who sees those frightful phantasms, too.  Someone carrying their own shotgun and unafraid to use it. In Slumber #1, Stetson’s that hero we’ve been dreaming for. 8.5/10

Slumber #1

Slumber #1
Writer: Tyler Burton Smith
Artist: Vanessa Cardinali
Colorist: Simon Robins
Letterer: Steve Wands
Publisher: Image Comics
Price: $3.99
Stetson is a nightmare hunter. A dream detective. She runs a shoddy back-alley business where she helps clients sleep at night by entering their dreams and killing their nightmares. But Stetson’s past comes back to haunt her when she tracks down a literal living nightmare—a serial killer that murders people in their sleep. SLUMBER is an ongoing series from the twisted minds of writer TYLER BURTON SMITH (Kung Fury, Child’s Play) and rising-star artist VANESSA CARDINALI.  
Buy It Here: Digital

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Clyde Hall (He/Him) lives in Southern Illinois. He’s an Elder Statesman of Geekery, an indie author, a comics fan/reviewer, and a contributing writer at Stormgate Press. He’s on twitter at: (@CJHall1984)