Flashback Friday: A Nightmare of a Villain

Names carry a lot of significance for comic characters, so with a guy called Nightmare, it’s safe to assume that he has some scary powers.

Nightmare is a Stan Lee and Steve Ditko creation who is both a conceptual entity and part of all existence. Introduced in Strange Tales #110 (April 1963), the character can capture a sleeping person’s astral form, then take them to his realm where they are tortured, or he can possess people. Though he can’t directly affect people when they are awake, his images and creations can still haunt them. He can summon lower beings from his realm and use them to do his bidding.

He played a significant role in the 2011 Fear Itself crossover event. Once the Serpent War had ended, fear energy from the Asgardian god of fear had infected many people, including Kid Loki. Nightmare started targeting the infected sleepers with the plan of funneling their fear energies into a crown that he could use to channel more power into himself.

On the hunt, he found a lot of fear energy in Loki, but the god of mischief woke up before Nightmare could harvest it. Discovering what Nightmare was up to, Loki enlisted Hellstrom and Leah to reach infected sleepers and destroy the fear energies before Nightmare could take them. Exhausted by how hard it was to stop Nightmare, Loki offered to give Nightmare his fear energies to spare anymore innocent people.

After draining Loki, Nightmare had enough fear energies to go to the dream dimension and create the Fear Crown. As this was happening, Loki alerted the other Fear Lords about what Nightmare was doing and they engaged Nightmare in battle for the crown. Mephisto entered the fray and absconded with the crown, then Kid Loki sacrificed himself to end the crown’s existence.