SAMSARA DREAMIN' Ch 1 | 1-9

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THE NIGHTMARE BEGINS...

Thank you to everyone for your support! I hope you enjoy this prologue :) I think this is in the running for the biggest cold open time skip in comics.

Chapter 1 will span 25 pages to be released over the next 3 fortnightly updates. After this I'll reupload the whole chapter as a single post with an e-zine PDF attached for AU$3 patrons.

TRANSCRIPT

Cover

SAMSARA DREAMIN' Chapter 1: WELCOME TO HELL cover image. Red bares her teeth at the viewer in a pained smile, a hand-drawn third eye on her forehead. Wolf looms over her, pulling his cheeks back into a grotesque grin that exposes his dog teeth.

Inside cover

SAMSARA DREAMIN' title in all caps bold.

"The wounded fall in the direction of their wound." Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

Page 2

A pair of black eyes loom from shadows. Subaru SUV smashed into a tree. Red stumbles through a dark forest, holding her guts back from falling out of her body.

RED: ...I don't...

Page 3

Red struggles to cross the page while, behind her, a sinister presence looms from the darkness.

Page 4

CUE CARD: 1,620,000,000,000 YEAR LATER 

A heavy prison door creaks open. A cyclops prison guard stands in the doorway.

GUARD 1: This one's next. Sweet Amida, it fuckin' reeks in here. 

Red, her hair now cut short and her face unshaven, cowers from the light. 

NARRATOR: DIYU, a.k.a. Hell. 

GUARD 1: Come on, princess. Time to get off your ass.

Page 5

A hand gropes Red's breast and testicles in close-up as if to inspect them with cold objectivity. 

NARRATOR: A twilight scabland where the dead are tortured for their sins, clearing their karma before reincarnation. 

Red being forcibly shaved. 

GUARD 1: He's clear! Prepping for recar. 

Red being led in handcuffs, a collar and lead around her neck gripped by guard 1. She is being escorted by guard 2, a burly gorilla-like demon. 

NARRATOR: Red. Assigned human at birth. Aged twenty-nine at death. Having lived an anodyne life, she has served a standard sentence. The river of oblivion is her final barrier to reincarnation, washing away all memory of life and death, love and sorrow, and inviolable boundary between one life and the next.

Page 6

All three stand on a concrete ramp leading into dark water. 

GUARD 1: Hey, you listening? Get in there. 

NARRATOR: Such is dharma, the holy law. 

Red looking down blankly. 

GUARD 2: Is this guy retarded or something? 

GUARD 1: OI!! 

NARRATOR: ...yet there are those who reject this fate. 

Red's expression changes as the guards lean in to look also. 

GUARD 2: ...the fuck's he looking at? 

GUARD 1: I dunno. What is that? 

A pitch black egg-shaped shadow in the water.

Page 7

Six glowing white eyes open across the egg's surface. It's shell cracks and distorts into a horrible prehistoric wolf skull, rising from the water's surface. 

NARRATOR: Against the laws of God and nature, they cling madly, and painfully, to their precious "selves".

Page 8

Pan across gore and giblets of the dismembered prison guards splayed across the ground. A powerful hand grips on guard 1's decapitated head like a basketball. 

An enormous, muscular form looms over Red's tiny frail body. His head is the silhouette of a wolf with six eyes.

Page 9

Red looks up at this figure, first with shock, then with gladness. Zoom in on Wolf's head reflected in her pupils. Pan around to Wolf from her POV, contrasted against an empty sky, flocks of birds flying overhead. 

NARRATOR: This is the story of two renegades and their wretched love.