Dream Thief #1

written by Jai Nitz
art by Greg Smallwood

Wow!

"What would you do if you woke up in a strange room and didn't know where you were, or what you'd done the night before to get there?"

What begins as a familiar motto for any hangover-blurred, morning-after daze turns into something genuinely sinister and uncomfortably electrifying by the end of Dream Thief's first compact, thriller of an issue.

Despite disposing of it with the body of his dead girlfriend, the mask finds him again, like a supernatural bad penny, which transforms its wearer into a conduit of vengeance for dead men.  While the mask seems to play some role in John's weird and violent actions in his sleep, Dream Thief is innovative in its inclusion of several possible triggers for his change:  not only the mask, but a mysterious letter from his estranged father, now incarcerated in a state prison for unspecified crimes.  John himself blames the weed, the most unlikely to have been solely responsible, but a possible contributing factor alongside a supernatural mask, especially in obtaining it, or paranormal genetic trait.

Most impressively, Nitz pulls off some deft character reveals, more jarring—but still perfectly credible—than his plot twists.  John Lincoln is mostly a good guy, but opening a series as the protagonist wakes up after cheating on his girlfriend and then hops out to buy weed, doesn't exactly scream "hero".  But it turns out John's instincts about his girlfriend's weirdness and paranoia after their break-in are bang-on.  She's a mistaken and not a little bit racist murderer, who'd apparently been planning an escape to Belize to evade prosecution, but who ends up in the trunk of a car sinking into the Okefenoke Swamp thanks to John, his mask, and the spirit of the man she killed.

Note:  Never has punctuation been more seamlessly incorporated or concisely used in comic art.  Certainly the exclamation point/question mark hybrid used with the same face frame in each of John's wake-up scenes is appropriate, but it's the two-page spread on pages 12-13 whose use is particularly clever, as John moves from early-morning disorientation to full realization as he's confronted with the body of his dead girlfriend.