Eve of Extinction by Salvatore A. Simeone

And he sets off on this quest to find the person he fell in love with, against all odds. He makes this profound, heartbreaking effort not to frighten anyone. He is as terrified by his own darkness as a dreamer would be.

He’s soft, he’s shy, he’s awkward, he’s eager to please. Ruin, on the other hand, isn’t very good at his job. He’s very different from the other nightmares we’ve met in the Sandman Universe, all of whom live up to their names-they’re malicious and sadistic. That was the genesis of our ‘lanky lavender lad,’ as Nick (Robles) put it. It raises tantalizing questions from a storytelling perspective-if you have power that is inherently malevolent, can you simply choose to use it for good? Or is there more work involved? What do you have to sacrifice to become something better? A nightmare who doesn’t want to be a nightmare and tries to change, who aches for a kind of human connection he might never have. A nightmare who falls in love with the person whose dreams he was sent to haunt. Then came the epiphany: what if we put a nightmare at the center of the story? What does it mean to have a bad dream as a protagonist? And then Ruin came tumbling out faster than I could write him down. I found myself awake at 3am thinking about how delighted I would be to have a horrific nightmare right about then, because at least it would mean I was asleep. I’m talking about nights when I’m lucky to get three or four hours of rest. We needed a walking plot twist.Īround this same time, I was going through one of my occasional bouts of really, really bad insomnia. It’s hard to do the unexpected in a world built on the unexpected. The Dreaming is a vast landscape, and over the years we’ve traveled through it with faeries, angels, demons, muses, myths, sentient environments, personified ideals, and the occasional Shakespearean escapee. Ruin evolved from a question I wrote down as I was plotting out The Dreaming: Waking Hours: who haven’t we heard from yet? To get there, you have to ask the right questions.

You want to honor the stories that came before, stories in which readers have a huge emotional investment, yet at the same time, you want to say something new. Willow Wilson has penned an essay about this new character spinning out of the Sandman Universe. People’s History of the Marvel Universe.

Eve of Extinction by Salvatore A. Simeone