I am pleased to say I have recently obtained a copy of the last of the
Phantasm rarities, the comic book written by Stephen Romano and published by XMachina in 2002. First things first: the cover identifies it solely as
Phantasm, with "NUMBER ONE OF FOUR" in the lower left corner. The front matter, however, identifies it as "PHANTASM: OVERMINDS (number 1 of 4)." The title of the story itself appears later as "OVERMINDS."
As with most comics, there are no page numbers. All the text in the comic is written in majuscule and italic, but I have transcribed it below in regular lettering.
Summary:
Mike narrates the final scene of
Phantasm, in which he and Reggie discuss Jody's death and Reggie proposes a road trip. Mike is pulled through the mirror, and he says that this should have been the end, but it wasn't the end: "Instead, I was cursed to live with the vision. For ten years it haunted me," and "I spent a lot of time in a mental hospital." He talks about meeting and fighting alongside Rocky, until she "quite while she was ahead and left us to face The Tall Man. Alone." He talks about having "traveled through The Tall Man's spacegates, tumbling between worlds and alternate realities… searching desperately for some answer to it all," until "in my final battle with him… when he ripped open my skull to show me that nothing is ever truly as it seems…" He mentions seeing "a glimpse of something beyond the lightning-glare of the spacegate poles… …some higher power… …something controlling The Tall Man…"
Mike wakes up in an underground bunker and meets a man who introduces himself as Dr. John Andrew Quezada, a dream specialist, who claims that "you were admitted to this facility and left in my care in 2021," having been in a "dreaming coma since 1979," six years before Quezada was born. Quezada tells Mike that both Jody and Reggie were killed in a car accident, and that Mike has "remained in a private health care facility for nearly twenty years," and the "coma-dreamer epidemic" became an epidemic "at the beginning of the twenty-first century."
The United States Government built a hospital in a bunker nearly a mile below the surface for Quezada to conduct research on Mike and other dreamers while civilization collapses. Quezada developed serums and hyper-dreaming consoles allowing him to view and record dreams. He says he has been recording Mike's dreams for "nearly fifteen years," and began having visions himself in 2030 and sealed himself in the research facility to try to determine what was happening. In 2047, he tests a reanimation process on three dreamers, resulting in two suicides, and then brings Mike himself out of the coma.
Three weeks after Mike is reanimated, he meets Rocky in "the Nightmare Factory," dreaming about fighting Sentinel spheres and The Tall Man. They recognize one another. Rocky tells Mike that she just woke up there, with no memory of how she got there. They agree that they do not trust Quezada.
Quezada tries an experiment with Mike in the Nightmare Factory, trying to map his sub-conscious mind. His subconscious appears to him in the form of Reggie, who tells him that the situation with Quezada is not real, but a dreamed reality. He says that he is "the voice of your own sub-conscious that has the power to manipulate reality. You've always had this power, Mike. You've been dreaming up new scenarios for years. One on top of the other. And those dreams have affected the flow of time and space. That's why the Overminds wanted you in the first place, Mike. And now they have you. You've been imprisoned and your power has been harnessed. You're trapped in a new reality with its own set of linear rules." Mike's Reggie avatar tells him that The Tall Man has conquered two-thirds of the real world, destroying the major cities and fielding "whole armies of Gravers and Sphereheads." Mike forces his way out of the dream in the Nightmare Factory using one of the spacegates.
Mike confronts Quezada and suggests that the "coma dreamer epidemic" is because humanity has a "collective ability to determine his own reality by what he dreams," "some ancient connection with the space-time continuum." Quezada proposes instead that God "created man and beast in its own image," but that "God wishes experience itself through all forms of conscious life. That means manifestations of benevolent malevolent and ambivalent [
sic]," but "what fascinates me the most is the idea of this ripple in creation being the product of a cosmic consciousness. A nightmare dreamed by God." Mike asks him, "What if this force wasn't unconscious at all, but was seeking to control man's ability to dream reality?" Mike adds that "now that we know this, you and I… …things can never be the same s they were before, can they?"
Quezada replies, "Naturally. That goes without saying… …
bo
oyyyy."
Notes:
- This version of Mike (Mike-2047) does not appear to be the same person as the Mike seen in the films (Mike-1978), based on his relationship with Rocky and his explicit experience of having used The Tall Man's spacegates to travel to alternate realities as well as other worlds, having already done so before The Tall Man radically trepanned him in the desert.
- Mike remembers being "nineteen years old" and holding "the flame-thrower I built out of spare parts in the Morningside Hardware Store" (as seen in Phantasm II).
- Mike's sub-conscious mind refers to The Tall Man's "armies of Gravers and Sphereheads" (the latter presumably referring to Sphere-bearing agents like those seen in Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead and Phantasm: OblIVion).
- Mike's sub-conscious mind appears to identify the Sentinel spheres as "The Tall Man and his Overminds," "The Overminds of the Red Planet," and that they are holding him captive because of his ability to alter reality by dreaming.
Obviously, in that context, a worldwide zombie apocalypse DIDN'T happen and it was just a temporary incident in 1968. I wouldn't personally like tossing it in though, it just feels messy.
