Do You Believe In Nightmares
Entry updated 19 May 2025. Tagged: Comics, Publication.
US Comic (1957-1958). St John. 2 issues. Artists include Dick Ayers and Steve Ditko. Script writers include Joe Gill. 36 pages, with 6 strips and a short text story each issue.
According to the Grand Comics Database, these strips were originally produced for Charlton Comics, but when editor Al Fago left the company he "reportedly took the stories and sold them to St John". Most stories are thin gruel; "Why Won't Anybody Believe Me?" (see below) is perhaps the best but is weakened by the need to have a happy ending (seen elsewhere, and undermining what is supposed to be a Horror publication). Besides the cover, Ditko drew five stories in #1 and, though this is by no means his best work, makes them appear more robust than they are (most notably "The Somnambulist"); Ayers did most of the other artwork, which is solid.
#1's "The Somnambulist" opens with a van arriving in a town, from which a sleeping body is taken and put on display. He is "Soro the Somnambulist the Man Who Never Wakes" – and his barker declares he will predict the future (see Precognition). Twice Soro speaks briefly, and the events (a flood and a plague of locusts) come to pass, so a third utterance announcing a "terrible calamity" the next day has the townspeople fleeing. But Soro is a humanoid Automaton with a record player in its chest, built by criminals who wish the town emptied, allowing them to rob a bank undisturbed; they had arranged the flood and locusts. The next day, as they drive through the deserted streets to the bank, an earthquake swallows them: jarred, Soro repeats his prediction. "You Can Make Me Fly" has a convict breaking out of jail and going to his Scientist brother, having read of his "Teleportation experiments" in which a doll was returned to a toy chest, a horse to a stable and a car to a garage – demanding he be sent to South America. Believing his brother's protestations that he cannot do that are due to his law-abiding temperament, he coerces the scientist into using his teleportation Ray: the convict is duly transported back to jail, where he belongs (pre-Comics Code, it would probably have been Hell). In "The Man Who Crashed into Another Era!" that man finds himself in the age of the Dinosaurs; thinking it a nightmare, he is suddenly pulled back to the present by a Time Machine, his fellow scientists explaining a temporary loss of memory is a side-effect ... but then is woken by his wife in his suburban home, having drifted off whist reading a sf novel on Time Travel. "I am Being Followed" concerns a hunter hired to kill a rogue bear, only to be kidnapped by humanoid bear-like creatures who live Underground: they explain he was one of them, but – being a Mutant – was left exposed on the surface to die. Their Telepathic powers told them he had survived and became a renowned hunter, and – now wanting him to rejoin them – they created the bear trouble. The man refuses and escapes, then collapses. Waking, he considers the experience a dream – until a man approaches, who explains he ha's been hired to kill a bear: the first man stares in horror at their hairless but clearly ursine features.
#2 opens with "The Night I Ran for My Life!", where a biochemist completes his "cell growth accelerator serum" but drops it on an ant: it becomes huge (see Great and Small) and he flees in terror; however, the ant continues to grow until it explodes like an over-inflated balloon. In "A Fabulous Firm" an employee's child is unable to walk but has developed Telekinesis; the unpleasant boss agrees to pay for the surgery that will enable him to walk, in return for being allowed to exploit the boy's powers afterwards. The operation is a success, but the child seems to have lost their powers; it is theorized the telekinesis developed to compensate for his immobility. The boss angrily departs, and it emerges that the child simply cannot use his powers selfishly. "Why Won't Anybody Believe Me?" has a man miraculously survive a factory explosion, becoming dour and uncommunicative. One day he reveals to his wife that the event transported him to another Dimension whose inhabitants used their advanced Technology to control his mind and sent him back to spy in preparation for an Invasion, with shifts of Telepathic operators monitoring him – but the current one has dozed off, enabling him to speak. However when she tries to warn people she is not believed – and the now fully controlled husband has her institutionalized (see Paranoia). A half-hearted happy ending is tagged on. [SP]
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