A cop named Finch (that's him with his bare ass showing) is investigating a string of murders, each by a different person, all of whom claim it wasn't them. But each murder is marked by similar messages and symbols. The trail leads to a woman named Stetson, who advertises as a "Dream Healer", who helps people with issues by using a device that lets her physically enter their dreams and kill the memory that's causing the problem. Of course, Stetson is hunting for something else in the dreams of others. . .
The mini-series feels like a pitch for a Netflix show. Smith does some interesting things with the concept of entering someone's dreams, but in ways that would have been easy to translate to a moving screen. He and Cardinali don't really do anything with weird perspectives or the floors becoming the ceiling or locations looping back on themselves impossibly. The strangeness is relegated to the things they see, spider-turkeys and having some sort of goblin/zombie thing I assume she befriended in someone's dreams as a partner. Cardinali's art is very good at that; it's loose and scratchy cartoonish style, easily exaggerated for Stetson wearing Finch's skin as a suit to infiltrate his memory of a funeral, or a possessed teddy bear.
But Stetson's response to basically any situation is to shoot it, or threaten to shoot it unless it gives her answers. And despite apparently having a closet full of stuff she's likely pulled from people's dreams, she sticks to regular guns or maybe a flamethrower if she's feeling exotic.
As for the interesting things, first, the way Stetson's shtick works. If she kills the memory causing the nightmares, the person forgets it entirely. Bad experience with a clown? She kills the clown and you don't remember the clown ever existed. Except this isn't the best approach when the person that's the cause is someone the patient doesn't want to forget.
Second, the fact that even if the patient forgets what was traumatizing them, Stetson remembers, tying the mocking title of "dream eater" to the "sin eater" notion, I think. Whether it's because of that, the psychic damage of walking through a man-made portal into someone's dreams, or her not sleeping to avoid her own dreams, Stetson's waking hours are a surreal experience in themselves. She hallucinates a lot, seeing giant bugs in trucker hats at the convenience store, or random ostriches, and has internal conversations with a voice that isn't identified for a long time.
The book ran six issues in 2022, and ended on a number of cliffhangers. One character's under arrest, one's lost in someone's dreams, and Stetson got what she wanted, but it isn't clear what that's going to mean for her. I've not heard anything about the book continuing, so the answers may never come.
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