Matt Lowder Reviews SLUMBER, VOLUME ONE

Guest columnist MATT LOWDER reviews . . .

SLUMBER, VOLUME ONE by Tyler Burton Smith and Vanessa Cardinali (Image Comics, October 2022) Matt's Rating: THREE AND ONE-HALF out of a possible FIVE STARS.

We all have nightmares. What if you could pay somebody to enter your dreams and shoot that nightmare in the goddamn face? That’s where Stetson comes in. She’s a nightmare hunter. A dream detective. She enters her clients’ dreams through a door, investigates their dreamscape, and kills their nightmares. Problem is, one nightmare in particular is transferring from host to host, killing people, trying to get into the real world. Stetson’s past comes back to haunt her as she tracks down the nightmare serial killer tied to the mysterious death of her daughter.

Aren't dreams weird, guys? Sure, but never in the wacky fun way entertainment 

tends to depict them. Dream logic is super weird and random, but somehow makes total sense in the moment. My head hurts trying to describe it. Anyway, there's a bad entity haunting people's dreams, forcing said people to murder loved ones, and those people then can't even remember it happening.  

And we have our heroes, who run a company through which they can enter people's dreams and then kill nightmares. Dialog is snappy and clipped like a well-timed TV sitcom. The writers gets it. The bad entity thing looks like most comic monsters these days - black and scratchy, red eyes, not actually frightening at all. But there's also some fun to be had. The story and conflict aren’t as gripping as it hopes to be. 

The art is stylized and messy. It’s memorable though. A bit too sketchy and scratchy for some, but the humor and color made up for it. It’s about dreams after all, so it fit the subject matter and themes and gets a pass.

It all ends on cliffhangers for each of our heroes. MAJOR ONES. So many of these short runs do. Damn comic book business. The concepts and the “stretched-anatomy, animated, surreal” art and colors are the strongest element. The actual plotting not so much. Humor really, really worked well for me. I’d be on board for a Volume Two. A very, very, very strong THREE AND ONE-HALF STARS out of a possible FIVE STARS.