A Nightmare on Elm Street #4

[cyberghostface]

Today is Robert Englund's 75th birthday. To celebrate, here's a comic where Freddy Krueger gets his ass kicked by a little girl.

One of the comics published by Wildstorm's 'New Line Horror' imprint was a Nightmare on Elm Street series by Chuck Dixon. It was a mixed bag but it had some good moments, the highlight of which was the fourth issue. 

In the first three issues, there was a subplot with a little girl who, being in a coma, could lapse back and forth between Freddy's world and ours without being hurt. At the end, she got a heart transplant and came out of the coma, but as this issue shows, her abilities didn't go away.





So the issue goes like this for a bit, with the little girl constantly harassing poor Freddy and generally making his life miserable and preventing him from carving up teenagers.









Cut for legality (the entire issue wasn't about Lacey's antics, after all) was a subplot with Freddy selecting a teenager on the "outside" to kill Lacey for him. He fails, and is mortally wounded by the police. The teen considers his fate to be a better alternative than falling asleep and risking Freddy's wrath.

At the end of the issue...

Comments

[shakalooloo]

Wait, so Freddy Krueger's power over the world of dreams is limited to a physical area? All anyone has to do to avoid him is just leave town?

[cyberghostface]

More or less. At first he was confined to the children of the parents who killed him and then to Springwood in general. ‘Freddy’s Dead’ had him trying to escape to the world at large after killing all the kids in Elm Street by latching onto a family member. ‘Freddy vs Jason’ had him able to leave though but the rules were unclear.

[blues32]

I think he killed all the kids in Springwood, not just Elm Street.

As for Freddy vs Jason, I think the only reason he was able to leave was because Jason was in Springwood. He hitched a ride in Jason, taking him back to Crystal Lake.

[blues32]

The only way he can leave is by latching on to the mind of someone and that person leaves the area. And since he has a habit of just murdering the people whose dreams he enters, he rarely gets the opportunity.

[blueprintstyles]

Freddy getting his ass kicked by a kid is kinda cathartic considering what he was doing that got him burned alive in the first place.

[sean_613]

I'm amazed that this comic was made at all. Freddy being humiliated and taken down a peg by a little girl is most definitely cathartic. Especially since originally, they wanted to make Freddy into a child molester but chose to make him a child killer instead.

[icon_uk]

I remember watching the movie for the first time and thinking that he was both, that he killed the kids he molested so they couldn't tell on him, but they didn't dwell on the molestation because it was the 80's

Also I felt that there was a bit of a hint (only in the first movie of course) that he might not actually have been the guilty party at all and the parents killed him, based on circumstantial evidence, because he was a weird outsider. So his anger and desire for vengeance was so extreme that he became in death what he had been accused of in life.

But I was raised on Claremont X-Books, where reading the subtext was as important as the text