The Sandman/Nightmare Fuel: Difference between revisions

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''[[The Sandman]]'' has a lot of deliberate nightmare fuel. Several of its characters ''are'' nightmares, and several stories are ''set in'' nightmares -- andnightmares—and the bits involving real people in the real world can be even worse.

* ''The Sandman'' #6, "24 Hours", by Neil Gaiman. John Dee, aka Doctor Destiny, was a somewhat campy [[Justice League of America|Justice League]] supervillain who controlled people's dreams and emotions with a special ruby, but he dropped off the radar for about five years in the '80s. When Gaiman revisited the character, we learned that his dream-powers had robbed him of his own ability to sleep, and he had withered away into a shrivelled wretch. He spends the first five issues getting out of Arkham Asylum through no effort of his own and wandering around being creepy but not nightmare-inducingly so. But then he gets his old ruby out of storage. {{spoiler|He walks into a diner--after casually murdering the woman who gave him a ride--and proceeds to use his powers again, bringing out the negative emotions of the six people in the diner with him. It starts with simple aggression and proceeds to graphically-depicted physical violence and willing torture, with the six eventually murdering each other for Dee's pleasure. Dee eventually starts manipulating everyone in the world the same way, but this is actually ''less'' horrific because it isn't shown directly. (We ''do'' see a kid's show recommending that the viewers all slit their wrists... ''along'' the arteries, to make it impossible for them to be bandaged up. Luckily, we don't see any kids actually do this.)}}. It's not at all different in concept from the kind of things supervillains do in regular comics, but the way it was drawn ''so graphically'' made it the single most terrifying comic book {{[[User|Filby]] this editor}} has ever read.

** The speech he gives before a hotel meeting room full of serial killers, stating that what they do is the real meaning of the [[American Dream|American dream, because they 'kill to kill' rather than for a legitimate reason.]] He seems so God-damn proud.

* ''Season of Mists''. The entire thing with the [[Boarding School of Horrors|Boarding School Of The Damned]]. Childhood abandonment issues and problems with school settings, back to play. All standard fair until the dead start coming back to life, speifically the three older students from World War One, discussing how life isn't fair-- andfair—and how they did the whole Satanic-rite thing, killed another student and drank the blood and everything, and when they died, ''Hell didn't care.'' {{spoiler|(That and the last panel with them in it in that story, with just the legs.}}

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