The Black Effect

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Dedicated to Michael ‘Mick’ Comerford (1905–1961), a soldier who survived 3 years 8 months in Japanese PoW camps. And to all soldiers of the Commonwealth both past and present.

By definition, a nightmare is an ethereal thing, something to wake up from with a certain amount of relief. The twentieth century turned nightmares into reality for many people across the globe and the Great War was considered a ‘war to end all wars’ — yet it was not an ending, just a beginning. In 1919, the thought of more serious conflicts would have been the stuff of bad dreams, but that perceived ending had fashioned a man capable of weaving nightmares beyond the subconscious of most. In a mere twenty years, Hitler took Europe to the doors of perdition, wiped out 6,000,000 Jews, and left his homeland, and his people, without hope.

The clearing out of old colonialist empires left the field open to humanity’s first real superpowers, each immovable, each unstoppable. Stasis followed in the form of the Cold War. Though cold, it caused all world leaders to have hot nightmares with bellicose events, caused by mighty powers flexing muscles at imagined sleights and paranoid intelligence, increasing in number as the 1980s approached.

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