DC revitalized its lesser-known character Dream Girl in the CW's Supergirl as Dreamer (AKA Nia Nal) as played excellently by Nicole Maines. And now, DC and Maines are bringing Dreamer to comic books and telling her origin story - in the original graphic novel Bad Dream: A Dreamer Story.

But what's a hero without a villain? Recently on Enter the Popverse, Maines talked about the new villain she's creating to be Dreamer's foe.

“This [book is about] a 15-year-old Nia realized that she has the powers her sister was always supposed to get, and she’s sort of resigned to being a supporting character in her own life. Her sister Maeve is the star, she’s going to be to be the superhero, she’s going to get mom’s powers and ‘I’m gonna be the guy in the chair, I’m gonna design the super suit.’ When she realizes that she got them, she’s like, ‘I can’t do this to my sister, I can’t ruin my life. So she runs away to Metropolis, and finds community, and girls like her, and for the first time, the facets of her identity aren’t at war with each other. Also, because it’s me, I had to throw in cosmic space destiny, and explosions, and villains… because I like it flowery!”

About those villains… don’t expect it to be a character anyone has seen before.

“We’re world building, we’re expanding, we are drawing on things, we are revamping, rebooting, and remixing — that was one of my favorite parts of writing the graphic novel,” Maines said, revealing that the villain of the book is an all-new character. “The bad guy I’m really excited for… The villain’s name is Sybil, and she is an evil Naltorian who has come to track down Dreamer and her family and secure her place and her position of power on Naltor.”

Asked about the origin of the book, Maines said that she’d originally thought of it as an ongoing series — and not one that she’d write herself.

“I went to DC, I was like, ‘This is a hero that means a lot to a lot of people, she’s really cool, she’s stupid powerful’… this whole pitch for an ongoing thing — this truly illustrates how little I know about comic books,” she jokes, “and they were like, ‘okay, well, that’s a lot.’ They told me that their young adult graphic novel line was taking off and they didn’t have a story about sisters. I was like, ‘well, Nia has a sister who sucks, so that’s a story.’”

Bad Dream: A Dreamer Story, illustrated by Rye Hickman and written by Maines, will be released April 2, 2024. Watch the full interview with Maines from San Diego Comic-Con 2024 on Enter the Popverse at this link, or by clicking on the video below.

Maines was one of the guests on DC’s Young Readers panel at San Diego Comic-Con this year.