Night Mary
Rick Remender, story & script; Kieron Dwyer, story & art
Image Comics, 2022
This reprints an IDW five-issue miniseries from 2006, making it fairly early Remender (published around the time of Strange Girl and the first issues of Fear Agent). The title character is Mary Specter, a teenager trained in lucid dreaming by her father, a doctor who runs a sleep disorder clinic. Mary enters into the frequently disturbing dreams of his patients, so much of the story takes place in nightmares--making both the character name and title (nightmare-y?) a bit on the nose.
One possible problem with the treatment: the patients tend to become violent. When Mary stops by the home of first patient we see (a woman with horrifying Three Little Pigs dreams), she finds that the woman has murdered her family, and proceeds to kill herself in front of Mary. Eventually it is revealed that her father was involved in a research project much bigger than Mary. The group had trained a young man named David to enter the dreams of others: first in the physical vicinity, then anywhere. He became an assassin by warping the dreams of heads of state considered to be hostile, controlling their waking actions.
All of this comes out in a rapid narrative dump towards the end, making it dramatically ineffective, even though it provides a conclusion. In the end Mary's father redeems himself and Mary is able to rouse her mother from a coma. Remender's story contains themes of family dynamics and therapy that have since appeared frequently in his work. Kieron Dwyer's art makes some bold moves. The real-world scenes are done in various forms of monochrome (with bits of color here and there). But the dreams feature various art styles, as well as varied (sometimes lurid) color pallets. A bit too sketchy to be entirely successful, but they do serve the story very well, emphasizing the dreamlike settings.
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