The Stupidest Comic Yet: Nightmare and Sleepy
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ต.ค. 2024
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Today is a look at a goofy Golden Age superhero called Nightmare and Sleepy. It starts with a cool costume and interesting job, a professional wrestler. But it quickly devolved into repetitive fights, a more generic costume and eventually a total reboot.
Fun fact: Nightmare and Sleepy stayed together until Sleepy formed a mining company with six other short guys.
I absolutely love the idea of someone dressed in a Halloween skeleton jumpsuit doing wrestling moves on bad guys
Sounds like a good time!
Street fighter's Skullomania.
La Parka loved the idea too.
One for me, and one for my homies
@@seculartapes Bob White should add a folding steel chair to his Arsenal of Justice
"I'm in trouble! I better summon Sleepy!"
( starts Vaping )
"wow, a corpse stealing faces? That sounds great -"
"They put a mirror on their face and fooled everyone"
"..... jeez"
Scooby Doo level bait-and-switch there. Very disappointing.
It doesn't even pass the "little-kid logic" test.
I mean, there was a 90s wrestler called IRS that was just a jacket away from a full business suit. And he's Bray Wyatt's dad.
That image of Nosey desperately crawling on the ground to puff on his cigar is priceless.😂
Gotta get your fix !
Artist had some kind of fetish thing going on there. Marston would have approved.
Nosey gets high from his cheap cigars and hallucinates Nightmare.
"My oral fixation!" -Dale Gribble.
Sleepy passed away from a tragic neck injury/suffocation. While trying to apprehend a criminal Sleepy went for his signature move and that's where things went wrong. The coroner wasn't sure if the neck injury did him in or if was being stuck in that gentleman's rear end for 2 hours, but either way he died doing what he loved - plowing head first into crime.
No Morbious sequel?!? What a nightmare, I cant imagine living in such a world.
As Darth Vader would say: “NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”
I’d really like Sony to release Morbius back to the MCU. I mean we know we have Blade and other supernatural stuff coming. And there’s been references to vampires in She-Hulk.
@@justingoers No.
@@wellesradio Do it for the lulz.
the skeleton exploits your deepest fears
I like to imagine that Sleepy got trapped in a sea captain's pipe and keeps getting accidentally summoned, only to discover that there is no crime and he's still on a ship. Feeling awkward, the captain just gives him odd jobs to do.
Wait! A Luchador that fights crime? Dude. You just described El Santo.
Hero of movies and comics for more than 30 years
The custome becoming a skeleton when everything is dark, and Just being a reg custome in the light is a really nice touch from the artists
It was absolutely the cherry on the top of a very big cake of craziness
Honestly I think that would be a really fun change up for Nightmare as a character. Where he's just cursed, but unlike Ghost Rider it doesn't give him these amazing powers, it just makes him hard to kill in the dark.
I put public domain superheroes in my share universe. Just to fill the reality with characters other than my creations and not have to make randoms. Nightmare is definitely in it (reinvented, tho).
There's Project Superpowers, with a similar premise.
You know, Nightmare and sleepy have a lot of potential, even now.
A very weird premise that could be a lot of fun if you go the Mike Mignola rout and let the world be as weird as the characters.
@@LupineShadowOmega Have you ever read The Goon? That's what your comment reminded me of.
@@TheEndKing I haven't, but I've heard good things.
@@LupineShadowOmega The Goon is worth a read. The sooner the better.
I remember seeing these two in the “Book of Regrettable Superheroes” and then doodling a redesign of them and leaving it in the book. I definitely think these two have potential, it’s always good to look for the promise in ideas that might not have been executed too well.
I think someone had the same idea, Black Hammer's Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy come to mind.
I read that book and somehow I do not remember them lol guess that makes millions of us.
"Maybe Sleepy wrote that issue." I don't know why but that one got me good!🤣
I work nights and just got home from work. Time to crack a beer and enjoy the latest episode of Comic Tropes, life is good!
Yo, have a great morning
I work nights too. Its a rough gig.
There's a character in manga called Skullman (sort like a Punisher type of anti-hero avenger) , but also has a similar costume motif. Since it was the inspiration for the character Kamen Rider, there's another character featured in Street Fighter EX games calles "Skullomania" which is a parody of both Skullman and Kamen rider and it's very similar looking to "Nightmare" , he actually does some wrestling moves.
Don't forget the "Radiant Armor" set in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
If Nightmare had been a supernatural hero without a sidekick and in the original skeleton costume he would have been a home run. Especially if he had been in the mold of The Spectre or Doctor Fate 💀✨
Honestly, I'd go the inverse and have him be a regular guy, have Sleepy be the one with a power, something like the aforementioned Sleepwalker, but maybe let it be kind of evil and Nightmare is the one that keeps it under control. Basically Nightmare is a badass normal that fights crime and uses it to keep his sidekick's more bloody tendencies in check.
I work at a Target and thus am faced with that very Halloween setup in seasonal. That voice-over was frighteningly spot-on 😆
I was already familiar with these as they're featured in the rather good reference book The League of Regrettable Superheroes, alongside other classic characters like Doctor Hormone (A scientist with a wide range of body altering hormone pills), the Puppeteer (Who was a superman knockoff who inexplicably named his superhero identity after his day job), and Madam Fatal (A man who dressed up as an old lady to fight crime)
I want to see a Madame Fatal movie though. Got to be a comedy
That Madam Fatal sounds pretty awesome
"Call an ambulance.... But not for me!"
@@curleyqreviews9793 The character appeared in a pretty good issue of The Shade limited series. The 2nd one 12 issue series
2 things struck me as I watched this. First his change from cool costume to generic reminds me when the Golden Age Sandman went from his trench coat and gas mask to his plain purple and yellow costume. Second everytime you mentioned Sleepy, all I could think of was Winky Man from those old Howard the Duck comics. Fun stuff!
Love the Golden Age “throw every idea against the wall to see what sticks” episodes! Lot of fun, Chris!
Nightmare has to waken Sleepy and throw him into a fight. Explains why Sleepy gets the crook from behind.
I'm thinking of Skullomania as a character who would wear something similar to Mr Nightmare, only in a potential manga where we'd get to see all his zanny fighting moves.
As I get older, I really love the golden age more & more. Creativity over continuity. Unique art.
Most of it is just schlock stupid/funny ideas. Almost a bit too stupid for me sometimes.
@@Gatorade69 yeah, I get where you both are coming from and I think what you guys are hitting on is that either extreme doesn't work.
These days, you can't claim either happens. There's no creativity, either they are terrified at potentially offending someone somewhere so they go for as blend as possible, or rather than create a new character they adapt an existing one and make whatever changes they want that should have been in their own character. As far as continuity goes, DC has rebooted so many times at this point it's ridiculous, with a dark crisis now occurring. And Marvel does everything in five issue arcs, dropping things at the drop of a hat and hiring seemingly at random.
The era of something like a Chris Claremont managing an entire brand for a decade, of a comic company allowing a low seller to continue and gradually build its audience, and of hiring people who have a deep knowledge of their existing lore is a thing of the past.
Grant Morrison actually sort of took a jab at that in his recent Green Lantern run. Towards the end of the run, how Jordan encounters golden beings of energy that treat all of the DC Universe as their plaything, discarding things when it doesn't interest them and behaving horribly towards the product. It's hard to not see a parallel there
@@cthulhupthagn5771 Well said.
And I I don't hate the golden age, I just think sometimes It's a bit too silly, but that's also part of it's fun and I can see why people enjoy it.
@@cthulhupthagn5771 marvel has had loads of creative output recently. Krakoa massively changed the X Men. Al Ewing completely redefined Hulk. for continuity minded people, MacKay's Moon Knight has loads of deep pulls. new writers are being given chances through the voices anthologies and the infinite comics. it's just not accurate to say there's no creativity or continuity.
@@Gatorade69 The Silver Age was too ridiculous for me at least. At least with Batman. It's not terrible but it's basically Brave and the Bold and Adam West show
1:57 That cover of Air Boy and Valkyrie attacking a castle is a classic.
Terry Wake is actually a brilliant name for a superhero with a sleeping theme.
The Golden Age comics are to modern comics what the 50s monster movies were to modern horror films. Goofy pulp with some useful tropes, and scattered genuine reflections of narrative innovation. Also: Bob White was the Low Ki of wrestling in the Golden Age? Awesome👌
describe the word "modern"
should had made Bob White a Mexican that would fit more as a Lucha Libre!
@@eddiejoewalt7746 modern as in the "modern age" of comics. American comics history is divided up into different eras called "ages" with the 40's being called the "golden age" and the past 20 years or so the "modern age."
This is my favorite part about your channel you get the most obscure funny stuff I would've never known about nightmare and sleepy without you thanks Chris
I've seen images of Nightmare and Sleepy before but I never experienced their true greatness until now !
Great review and you're right, Chris. Nightmare and Sleepy was a good idea that just wasn't executed properly. Maybe if they had better and more consistent writers it would have lasted longer than it did. BTW, there was a pro wrestler that wore a shirt and tie when he wrestled: the evil accountant Irwin R. Shyster! Get it? I.R.S.? (His finishing move? The Write-Off!)
Just when you think guys like Speedy and Bucky have silly sidekick names, in comes Sleepy saying, "I got this!"
Oh hey I own this very brief run via Gwandanaland comics. They collect and reprint golden age comics, mostly forgotten stuff except for the Dan Garrett Blue Beetle, early Captain Marvel (Shazam), and the Charlton heroes.
Interesting, Nightmare's suit is very similar to that of Fumetti Neri character Kriminal.
The mirror on the face guy broke me. Because not only is this another case of "Why would we have anything interesting actually going on ?", but how are these people so dumbt that they look into a mirror AND THINK SOMEONE STOLE THEIR FACE.
From the opening gag to the finish, had me in stitches. Absolutely hysterical episode lol
"Nightmare and Sleepy?" Sounds like the title of an obscure [adult swim] show 🤣🤣
Also, at 4:48 - he uses his young friend to be his manager so unscrupulous promoters don't take advantage of them? What logic is that? If they're unscrupulous and are likely to try to rip someone off, wouldn't they see a kid as easy prey? They wouldn't say, "Oh man, I was gonna rip these guys off, but I can't do that to a kid..." 🤣🤣 makes no sense
Maybe that means Sleepy is a lot more ruthless and business savvy than Nightmare. Maybe Nightmare is concussed half the time.
I agree. This idea is way too good for this book, lol. Also, maybe Sleepy's name might be better if it was insomnia? Either that or change the name of Bob White's hero to Nightterror with Nightmare being Sleepy's name.
Somehow you find the most crazy comics and I love your flair in describing the absurd!
I thought the tagline to Morbius the movie was 'there will be no refunds'.
A funny place to put a Nightmare sequence in, a Spirit Halloween Store. Now the giant pumpkin of Halloween Express...
Always really appreciate being exposed to stuff I would’ve never discovered otherwise - this is a great diamond in the rough you’ve found. Thanks Chris!
Maybe the wrestler Irwin R. Schyster (The I.R.S.) was influenced by this.
i love the "Yacht Rock"-esque intros to each episode
Sleepy made a deal with the devil to trap nightmare in cheap cigars in exchange for not having to be called sleepy anymore.
There WAS live action TV series about a luchador crime fighter, Los Luchadores. It was on Fox Kids
Now I'm wondering if Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy is a nod to this comic. I know the mini-series is a homage to DKR and Frank Miller, but the skelton costume is sort of similar and the Black Hammer universe is all about mining old obscure golden/silver age comics and turning them on their heads.
Now I have a comic series to check out. Thank you.
Dan Barry’s brother Seymour (Sy) had a very long tenure drawing The Phantom newspaper strip.
And the boring name of Bob White also belonged to an Archie Comics artist who had a lengthy run on the Life With Archie comic in the 60s.
I just want to say I appreciate that this channel covers golden age comic hero shenanigans even if it’s not as popular as newer stuff it’s fun to get an idea of how older stories worked or didn’t in some cases
Nightmare? Sounded like the ultimate spiderman cartoon villain.
That intro was hilarious as always Chris 😂 they are seriously one of my favorite parts of your videos, as well as the informative comic knowledge of course!
They need to revive Nightmare and Sleepy for the modern Comic Industry. Make it darker! Oh! like what Alan Moore did to MarvelMan. That would be awesome ♡!
Darker, maybe. I kind of like the juxtoposition of the gothic costumes, with them being very jovial and lighthearted. Playing baseball with the gear they pick up off of the KOed baseball thugs is great, for example.
Slowly making my way up to the more modern episodes. Still working on the episodes from 3 years ago. But I saw this and just had to watch it now and make a few comments/suggestions.
That glow in the dark costume was a really good idea. I agree that it's too bad that they lost it.
Had just finished the Tigerman episode you did of Atlas/Seaboard and you mentioned how weird it was that the guy would inject tiger serum into himself to see what would happen. You need to look over the origin of the Whizzer from Timely Comics to compare stories. He is a young man bitten by a cobra and a mongoose rushes out and fights and kills the cobra but is bit and is quickly dying. Young man's dad, a scientist, need some anti-cobra venom to save his son and decides the blood of the dying mongoose will do, somehow thinking that mongooses have immunity to cobra venom. So he injects the blood into his son who gets superspeed as a result.
Also take a look from Clue Comics, Zippo, who uses an invention of gears and pistons to give himself superspeed.
Actually, doing a comparison of the various superspeedsters of the Golden Age and how they get their powers might be a fun episode in and of itself.
My idea for this character (which is also Public Domain) is: You know how Batman lost his parents very young and then devoted his to learning to scare and beat up criminals for when he grew up? Well what if he just hired a guy for the scaring part, and /he/ was the one who did the fighting? That way you can maintain the gimmick that the kid is the manager while also publicly being "the sidekick".
And of course Bob is helping partly because it's a job but also partly to keep the kid from going down a really dark path.
I also think having a chess supervillain is pretty rad.
Speaking of skeletons I’m surprised there hasn’t been an episode on golden bat
I love when you talk about goofy comics like this 😂
"Wrestlers in suits and ties don't work!"
*COUGH* IRS *COUGH*
I love pretty much everything you do on this channel Chris, but your deep dives into golden age comics, (particularly the bad ones) is my favorite.
A wrestler in a skeleton costume? It's La Parka! (A Mexican Luchador,).
Was just about to sleep but saw a notification for this, thanks Chris!
Mr Hughes, and his partner wrestled in full-suits, and they were badass!
Hmmm, “homemade cigars” that make a superhero appear? Sounds like a blunt to me.
We need more channels like this one instead of all the ComicsGate channels.
The later, more generic outfit reminded me of the transformation of several characters. The Sandman is the one I think of most easily, who went from a trench coat, hat and gas mask to a more standard leotard affair. Around the same time, the Atom went from his multicolored, circus strongman-inspired suit to something that looked like a recolored Sandman leotard melded with a few pieces of Atom's old outfit. I think that it was explained in canon that Dian Bellmont, love interest of Sandman Wesley Dodds, designed the overall look for Dodds, but thought that Dodds might now use her design and gave it to the Tarantula. He hadn't started the hero thing yet, but writer Jonathan Law did indeed use the design for the Tarantula's first uniform. Wes did use the design in his new Sandman outfit, and I believe that Atom Albert Pratt appropriated the design himself, and they all did their own tweaks, with Tarantula and Atom both sporting capes instead of the epaulets worn by the Sandman, for example.
Nosy really do be like "There's trouble, now let me take a hit of that."
The Nosey stories sound like a combination of the Golden Age Vision and the "Percy Popp, the Super-Cop" era of The Spectre!
You should check out the hundreds of Mexican and Argentinian Santo comics for after-hours luchador wrestling crimefighting action!
I'm gonna see if Nightmare is in the public domain. (I'm sure it is) I have some interesting ideas about how to continue his adventures, and even maybe explain some of the weirder aspects of his character. It looks like they left a lot of room to expand the lore
Yay! I'm glad you brought back the "Oh hi, you caught me..." introductions :)
Hack/Slash used Nightmare and Sleepy, along with some public domain heroes and villains.
You mentioned in passing that you would like the idea of a wrestler turned crime fighter in a luchador mask. Check out the Mexican El Santo and Blue Demon movies of the 60s and 70s. They featured real life masked wrestlers fighting criminals and supernatural beings. The two heroes appeared in separate movies as well as several in which they teamed up to fight Aztec mummies, Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein, zombies and more.
Microface: Throw your voice. Fool your friends. Fun at parties.
i cant believe summoning your stand via home-made cigar isn't a gimmick that survived to today.
I always enjoy comic stories from that era. They bring me back to days at Grandma's when I was a kid. She kept my mom and uncle's old comics with heroes like the Black Terror and the Phantom, and I got to pull them out and read them when I visited Such great memories!
The unseen dialogue
Nightmare "You'll be know as....SLEEPY!"
Sleepy "Aw gee whiz I think maybe 'Reaper' would be far more intimidating to crimin...."
Nightmare "Very good! Sleepy it is!"
Reaper is a good name but it has nothing to do with their theme, which is dreams and nighttime.
You used a clip from my favorite Police Academy movie, so this is already the best video I've seen today 😆
Krent Able did a nightmare and sleepy parody comic in that oversized anthology one shot he did with Shaky Kane. I think it was called Kane/Abel.
Hey! Nightmare and sleepy showed up in krent able and shake kanes semi-recent anthology from image Kane and Able! They were in a short called “creep zone” I had no idea they were actual golden age characters!
I’m lucky enough to have met the guy many times here in Chicago. Real sweetheart of a guy and an amazing artist.
In the Alan Moore origin, you were supposed to pick up that he was referencing other muck monsters that appeared in the comics before Swampy, like the Heap (Hillman, 1942). Wikipedia gives his origin:
The original Heap was formerly Baron Eric von Emmelman (his last name also sometimes spelled Emmelmann), a World War I German flying ace who was shot down in 1918 over a Polish swamp. Clinging to the smallest shred of life through sheer force of will (and, as it was later revealed, with the mystic help of the goddess Ceres, later to be referred to more generically in the series as Mother Nature), through the decades his body decayed and intermingled with the vegetation around him, becoming one with the marshland itself until at last a shaggy, shambling half-world creature neither animal nor man arose from the muck during the early years of World War II, a creature which would become known far and wide as The Heap.
Resembling a huge humanoid haystack whose most visible facial feature was a dangling root-like snout, the mute monstrosity first battled the lupine-cowled Blackhawk-style Allied ace SkyWolf before turning against its fellow Germans who were now fanatical followers of the evil Nazi cause. Then it took to wandering the globe, helping in its semi-mindless and often misunderstood way those in need and battling those monsters more malevolent than itself.
Heap was probably based on Theodore Sturgeon's swamp creature "It," a short story published in 1940 (and later adapted by Marvel Comics). Solomon Grundy has a similar origin, but without the element of fire involved.
I wonder if Nightmare changed his costume around the same time as Sandman, another character who went from great to generic.
Whoa, I've had that exact same nightmare...to think, no Morbius sequel?!? Terrifying!!!
Gotta love your hellboy shirt
someone needs to revive nightmare, sans sleepy for a serious take, with sleepy for a comedic take. That costume design is iconic and I love the idea of him being a wrestler who moonlights as a vigilante while travelling the country for various matches. Extra points if he's reimagined as a Mexican luchador.
YES! I love all your videos, Chris, but the goofy, forgotten Golden Age heroes are my favorite!
Aesthetically, it just made me think of Golden Bat, from a video calling him Japan's first superhero. Nice video!
This character is public domain, anyone can revive him if they like.
Idea: Nightmare is a wrestling persona of Bob White, until he decides to start fighting crime - first as a wrestling gimmick, but then it gets serious.
Cigar could be a special signal that Nosey uses to show Nightmare that he needs to talk to him - at first by literally taking a smoke break, later changed to a cigar being some kind of high-tech signal device.
I swear these get better and better
I love these golden age comics you put on here. Also didn't IRS in WWF wear a shirt/tie to wrestle? It was the lat 80's so My memory could be faulty.
This was a fun episode! I wonder what some more talented writers could have made of the characters.
Also, great Hellboy shirt! I just got mine yesterday!
Nightmare and Sleepy! I've heard of those guys! Years ago I read Clue Comics #1 - it was on the Net somewhere. The story that stood out the most to me was The Boy King and that crazy statue, but Nightmare and Sleepy were also very memorable. Mainly because of the crazy assumptions that seemed to underlie the story.
I mean Bob White, professional wrestler, an adult man who takes his young "friend" Terry Wake around the country... No way was that acceptable, not even in the 40s. Terry should've been in school! And they're in this crazy place called "Perfect Town" where buildings rise from under the ground on mechanical supports, a city that was apparently constructed for the sole purpose of frightening outsiders with the disappearing landmarks. And the ridiculous way they got their costumes... They just happened to be wearing them for the celebratory costume party that was going to happen after the match! (Totally a thing that happens in wrestling.) The most sensible part of the whole story is the Checker. Him I get, he's a B List villain working his gimmick as hard as he can, trying to support a gang. It's just his bad luck he got beat by a couple of weirdos who stumbled into crime fighting at the last minute. It's a bland story set in a weird, fascinating acid trip world.
And from your descriptions of the following issues it looks like it got even weirder! Mirror faces, gravity hijinks, Nightmare turning into a tobacco genie (assuming those cigars _were_ tobacco)... I've gotta read the rest of them now.
Having kid sidekicks back in the 30s and 40s who didn't get much schooling was a pretty popular trope then. Dickie Dare and Terry & the Pirates newpaper strips are two various famous examples in print.
Mandatory education wasn't a thing then. I've met lots of old folks who dropped out of school in the 3rd or 6th grade to help out with expenses for the family or became orphans and didn't go to orphanages and had to work for a living.
It's why Bill Batson is selling newspapers on a dark, rainy day - kicked out by his uncle and having to work to support himself.
And Terry Wake and Terry Lee look an awful lot alike.
That's a good point about how education was different back then. My Dad grew up in the 30's and didn't go to high school either.
I was trying to make a joke by alluding to the real reason we don't see adult men traveling with their unrelated teenage friends without actually saying it, but it didn't quite work.
The history of the kid sidekick is kind of fascinating. It's a trope that was only possible in a more "innocent" time like the 30s and 40s, when there were certain things that were never talked about. And it must have been quite successful with readers, since there were so many sidekicks running around with machine guns and batarangs. To modern audiences I think it seems a bit archaic - but then, Batman continues to preside over an ever growing army of Robins, so it's not like the trope is gone. It's just evolved into the idea of the superhero "family."
Wow these characters seem ripe for a modern return! I can imagine a grown Sleepy being haunted by nightmares of his time with Nightmare!
followup idea for another october vibe vid: sleepwalker vs sandman comparison
If this kid is his Manager, He should wear Pajamas to fit his Gimmick, & his Weapon is his Pillow.
Just throwing this out there since you mentioned comic con... I'm in a play about Batman and Bill Finger that's running at the Chain Theater Mon-Wed at 8pm. Comic fans have been loving it so far and it's such a vital story to the history of modern comics. We want to share the story with as many people as we can!
The change from a crime fighting wrestler to some kind of magical tobacco genie reminds me of how when Acclaim took over Valiant Comics, Ninjak went from a bad ass Batman/James Bond mashup to SHAZAM but with a Gameboy instead of a wizard.
If you love the idea of an actual famous Professional Wrestler fighting crime and defeating evil monsters, definitely check out the extensive library of El Santo movies from the 60's and 70's.
Check out the 90s show "Los Luchadores" they're crime fighting wrestlers who's arch enemy is a super intelligent Chihuahua.
Yes! Golden age dumb heroes are my favorite content on Comic Tropes
Same here, for sure
honestly, the Nosey Mcginnis stuff kinda has potential too. Like, I can imagine a lot of situations where Nosey is about to face some gangsters and his last request is to smoke a cigar. OR have him have to navigate a "No smoking" area. Maybe it's raining, and it accidentally puts the cigar out. Perhaps he needs nightmare twice, so he cuts the cigar in half, but that limits the amount of time nightmare can be out. Maybe the different flavor profiles give nightmare different powers. In fact, if you got a really talented artist behind this, you could get some cool smoke effects in the art. Obviously, you would have to re-work the origins and re-name the characters, but it does have potential.
I feel like theres a really good modern show or comic idea that can be built from Nosey, Nightmare and Sleepy.