Marlene N. O'Connor

This short comic is the beginning of a story that explores the concept of monsters who haunt our nightmares, specifically the blood monster, a being that enters the house by taking over one of the house’s normal occupants. As with most things, only the children in the story can see the blood monster, and their parents are unaware of the danger it holds - a concept that Gaiman explores further in stories like Coraline and The Wolves in the Walls, where children become responsible for show more ridding the house of the supernatural dangers ignored by adults. The real dichotomy in this story though is that the father tells the story in what seems to be a completely serious tone, while the mother asks him to stop multiple times because she “hates stories like that.” Neither parent seems to actually accept the potential reality of the blood monster, but their respective reactions are still potentially telling; the mother’s dislike of the story may reveal an unconscious belief in the monster even though her concern is on the surface a reaction to stop her children from getting nightmares, but the father’s matter-of-fact telling of the story seems to imply that he does believe in the monster and his actions are therefore a warning to his children and instructions on how to deal with it. The question then becomes whether the mother’s preoccupation in not telling the story to her children is to hide her own role as the invading monster or whether the father’s warning is about strangers in general, specific to certain people, or even a candid reveal of his role as the successful invader in an unbelieving household. show less

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3494356.html

This one's only five pages, a father tells his kids a gruesome bedtime story and their mother is not amused, especially not by the consequent nightmares. That's it.