WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Marvel #3's story "Overture" by Alex Ross, Steve Darnall, Kurt Buseik, and Josh Johnson, on sale now.

Marvel just brought together multiple cosmic entities to take on an upstart who dared to threaten their power. On the final page of Marvel #3, Nightmare is confronted by the combined forces of Galactus, three Celestials, Surtur, and Ego the Living Planet. These cosmic powerhouses have gathered together to stop Nightmare from becoming a living god by feeding off of the dream energy of every person he has forced into a magical slumber.

Since the first issue of the Marvel anthology series, Nightmare has been taking over the world, placing everyone on Earth into a magically induced slumber so that he could feed off of the never-ending dreams, memories, and nightmares they produce. But he did not do this alone. Nightmare was only able to accomplish this feat by trapping Doctor Strange while he was astral projecting, preventing the Sorcerer Supreme from fighting back.

In a supreme act of cunning, Nightmare realized that Strange's magic connected him to all living things, giving the mystical villain the perfect opportunity to cast a worldwide spell that would force the Earth's denizens into a deep sleep through which he could browse and feast off the various stories their collective imaginations and memories brought into existence. This act would empower him to heights he had never experienced before.

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Nightmare is normally empowered by the dreams of others, but it is a temporary thing, lasting only a few hours at best. For a creature as twisted as Nightmare, this is not enough to satiate his hunger for more power. So to trap everyone into an eternal slumber is to create a constant source of sustenance, fueling him to a level of power previously unseen in him. And it is this increase in power that brought him to the attention of the new God Squad.

Strange is the only other being still conscious following Nightmare's takeover. But his astral self is chained to a post and helpless to fight Nightmare by himself. Nightmare for the most part, keeps Strange around both as his conduit for the magic and as someone to taunt about his growing power. This might have been the mistake that brought him to the attention of Galactus and his cohorts.

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Doctor Strange is not the Sorcerer Supreme by chance, but rather because of his skill and cunning. In his desperation to get free, Strange realized that he had one way to fight back and that now was the time to do it. So while Nightmare was traipsing around through everyone's dreams, Strange most likely used his remaining magic to inform Galactus of what was happening on Earth. In his astral form, Strange does not have access to his other magic, but he is still performing a type of magic typically used to contact others with little to no range limit. This means he could summon help from beyond the planet Earth.

Nightmare's rise to power is terrifying to say the least. To have an unending fuel source means Nightmare has no limit to his power. Theoretically, if the villain was left to feed off the dreams of his victims long enough, he could become more powerful than any of the cosmic titans challenging him now. It's no wonder these six entities have come to immediately deal with the problem. But Nightmare seems almost eager to fight them, hinting at how far along in his evolution he is. The God Squad appears poised to do whatever it takes to stop the villain...and hopefully the world will survive the inevitable battle to come.

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