Bad Dream
A Dreamer Story
by Nicole Maines
art by Rye Hickman
2024
Bad Dream is an origin story for the transgender superhero Dreamer, written by the actress who played her in the Supergirl tv series. It's part of DC Comics' series of YA graphic novels, which seems to include more origin stories than ongoing adventures. The version of Dreamer we meet here is very similar to the one on Supergirl, although here she's presented as a high school student rather than a young adult like on the show.
Nia Nal and her older sister Maeve are both half human, half alien, and they live in a secret small town where aliens can live on Earth without attracting attention from the broader public. Their father is human, and their mom used to be one of the Seers from the planet Naltor, a kind of psychic matriarchy who use their visions of the future to both protect the planet militarily and police it internally. Their mom had a vision long ago that her daughter would inherit her powers, so Maeve's spent her whole life training to receive dream visions ... but they haven't started yet. Nia is trans, idolizes her big sister, and wishes the other alien teens would stop bullying her.
Nia has also started having dreams with strange, prophetic imagery. She's afraid that she's stealing Maeve's powers from her, so she runs away to Metropolis to ... well, she doesn't actually seem to have a plan. She turns off her cellphone and then just wanders around the city drinking coffee and energy drinks to keep from falling asleep.
Eventually, she happens to run into Galaxy, an alien teen we met in Galaxy: The Prettiest Star from this same series of YA comics. Galaxy is metaphorically like a trans girl because she was forced to disguise herself as a human boy for most of her life. Galaxy has a Black girlfriend and a Black trans best friend. They're all older teens and recognize that Nia is a kid in trouble, so they bring her to a queer community center that includes a shelter. The trans friend wears a cool space-themed outfit in a ballroom walk-off and wins the night. Nia learns a bit about Black trans and queer culture in the big city and embarrasses herself a bit with her small town ignorance, but eventually befriends Galaxy and her friends enough that she agrees to let the older girls drive her back home.
One of the other Seers of Naltor was also in Metropolis. She follows Nia and Galaxy back to the secret town, reveals that (quelle surprise) the psychic leaders of a planetary surveillance state are not actually nice people, and executes Nia's mom for desertion. Nia inherits her mother's full powers in that moment, and uses them to defeat the other Seer. Afterward, we're shown that Nia and Maeve's relationship is now quite strained, and that Nia has become a sometimes superhero.
I have a sense that DC intends the graphic novels in this series to serve as entry points for new readers, and maybe acts as self-funding market research to find out which characters spark those readers' imagination. I'm glad that effort seems to include trying out multiple trans and trans-adjacent characters, and I've seen that Galaxy and Dreamer have gotten to appear in some of DC's regular monthly comics too, Galaxy in a Hawkgirl run and Dreamer teaming up with Superboy.
Nia Nal and her older sister Maeve are both half human, half alien, and they live in a secret small town where aliens can live on Earth without attracting attention from the broader public. Their father is human, and their mom used to be one of the Seers from the planet Naltor, a kind of psychic matriarchy who use their visions of the future to both protect the planet militarily and police it internally. Their mom had a vision long ago that her daughter would inherit her powers, so Maeve's spent her whole life training to receive dream visions ... but they haven't started yet. Nia is trans, idolizes her big sister, and wishes the other alien teens would stop bullying her.
Nia has also started having dreams with strange, prophetic imagery. She's afraid that she's stealing Maeve's powers from her, so she runs away to Metropolis to ... well, she doesn't actually seem to have a plan. She turns off her cellphone and then just wanders around the city drinking coffee and energy drinks to keep from falling asleep.
Eventually, she happens to run into Galaxy, an alien teen we met in Galaxy: The Prettiest Star from this same series of YA comics. Galaxy is metaphorically like a trans girl because she was forced to disguise herself as a human boy for most of her life. Galaxy has a Black girlfriend and a Black trans best friend. They're all older teens and recognize that Nia is a kid in trouble, so they bring her to a queer community center that includes a shelter. The trans friend wears a cool space-themed outfit in a ballroom walk-off and wins the night. Nia learns a bit about Black trans and queer culture in the big city and embarrasses herself a bit with her small town ignorance, but eventually befriends Galaxy and her friends enough that she agrees to let the older girls drive her back home.
One of the other Seers of Naltor was also in Metropolis. She follows Nia and Galaxy back to the secret town, reveals that (quelle surprise) the psychic leaders of a planetary surveillance state are not actually nice people, and executes Nia's mom for desertion. Nia inherits her mother's full powers in that moment, and uses them to defeat the other Seer. Afterward, we're shown that Nia and Maeve's relationship is now quite strained, and that Nia has become a sometimes superhero.
I have a sense that DC intends the graphic novels in this series to serve as entry points for new readers, and maybe acts as self-funding market research to find out which characters spark those readers' imagination. I'm glad that effort seems to include trying out multiple trans and trans-adjacent characters, and I've seen that Galaxy and Dreamer have gotten to appear in some of DC's regular monthly comics too, Galaxy in a Hawkgirl run and Dreamer teaming up with Superboy.
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