Broken Frontier

It’s no cheap trick when your dreams turn on you. So who ya gonna call when it’s more dangerous to be awake than asleep? The Dream Police.

On the flipside of sunny Los Angeles is a city of night where a million people fall asleep every hour and dreams come all too true. But dreams can be as malevolent as those who dream them, and when they come true in the worst way, the dream police get the call to restore order. Detectives Joe Thursday and Frank Stafford patrol a surreal, neo-noir landscape populated by echoes, changelings, and ethers who conjure everything from nightmares to all manner of things that literally go bump in the night. On this particular night they encounter a nun plagued by nocturnal naughtiness, a woman who loves the son of her dreams more than the real life one gone bad, and a little boy who unleashes the monster under his bed on his little suburban neighborhood, and then the whole city.

The Dashiell Hammett meets Neil Gaiman premise of this 38 page one-shot is fresh and intriguing enough to go in any number of unexpected directions. Craftsman that he is, J. Michael Straczynski chooses two seemingly contradictory story elements, then plays one off the other to produce a solid, engrossing tale. On the one hand there’s the stark realism of noir fiction, what it’s like to be a beat cop policing the dreamscape presented as straight ahead and no-nonsense as an episode of Dragnet. On the other hand, there’s the dreamscape itself, the city of angels also a city of the chaotic unconscious, where Edgar Allan Poe would feel right at home. The balance makes for great atmosphere. Straczynski has the rat-a-tat music of hard-boiled patois down cold, and it’s the deadpan rhythms of Joe Thursday’s narration that makes Dream Police a pleasure to read. Those beats and rhythms in Thursday’s voice, riding shotgun with hard-edged dialogue that pushes the plot more than it fleshes out characters, also keep the story moving at a crisp pace. And once the story comes to its surprising and clever end, the reader might find that 38 pages aren’t enough.

Those not familiar with Mike Deodato’s artwork should be. While his style in Dream Police differs from the work he’s done on The Hulk and Wonder Woman, the essence of what makes him an artist to watch out for is all there. Like Straczynski’s script, in Dream Police Deodato effectively combines gritty and moody realism with an ethereal and dreamy impressionism. If he’s depicting Thursday and his partner, he keeps his lines tight; but he also knows how to let his panels sprawl across the page as the dreamscape gets out of control. And thickening his pages with black, inky shadows, he displays his talent for capturing subtle facets of character, as well as those seemingly minor details that give depth to panels.

Lately Marvel has had little to offer mature readers searching for smart, edgy fiction on the racks of their local comics shop. Along with the other Icon titles, Dream Police bucks the trend. Hopefully, this one-shot isn’t the last we’ve seen of Detectives Joe Thursday and Frank Stanford.