Dream Weaver Giant Syze Special // Review
Cutler Carlton is entering the USS Midway late at night. There’s a full moon hanging low on the horizon. The historic San Francisco tourist destination is closed for the evening, but Carlton has other business there as he enters the bowels of the vessel in Dream Weaver Giant Syze Special. Writer Chris Ryall delves into an interesting one-shot story with artist Nelson Daniel. The traditional classic Silver/Copper Age Marvel-style story feels perfectly at home one the page as Ryall and Daniel pass the torch of responsibility from one hero to another in a new story that feel familiar enough to have been around for decades.
There’s a cult operating in the bowels of the Midway. The Dreamweaver is there to halt their activity. He’s aided as always by his magical sprite Speck. Cutler Carlton has been through a lot over the years, thoguh. He’s not quite as spry as he had been in the past and things are bound to get to him if he isn’t able to keep-up with the aggreessive and violant advances of the cultists. Cutler’s going to survive, but Speck is going to find a new champion to work with...
Ryall paces the issue quite well. It’s odd to see something so distant from the mainstream superhero stories of the 1980s while still being so familiar to it. Ryall makes Carlton extremely familiar. It’ like he’s been on the page for decades. It makes the passing of the torch really feel like a big deal even though the character hasn’t made many appearances at all since he was introduced. This is a collection of all the Dream Weaver chapters that appeared in the anthology Tales Of Syzpense along with a bit of added material. It’s nice to see it all collected in its own cover, but it will be particularly cool seeing where Ryall goes with it next.
The collected chapter of the one-shot feel remarkably fluid when collected under one cover without sharing the pages with anything else. Daniel’s art feels like a clasy fusion of a few different styles from the Copper Age and they all work together quite well on the page in a way that feels pretty timeless. It’s like the whole thing got drawn out of some parallel dimension where Dream Weaver had run for over a decade in the 20th century and Daniel was working for Marvel.
Ryall’s writing style feels so firmly-grounded in a 1970s/1980s Marvel feel without actually feeling like a specific rip-off of any one character from the Marvel Universe. In a way it almost feels as though it’s something that could have been happening in San Francisco the early 1980s while the bulk of the Marvel Universe while most of the action was taking place in Manhattan. Really. The style of computer monitors in a library are the only obvious thng to suggest that this might NOT be taking place in the late 20th century. It’s fun to see something embrace that kind of classy, old timelessness.
