Beyond The Panels #6- The Sandman And Why You Should Care
So, I feel like most of you have heard of The Sandman. If you haven't, you've probably heard of Neil Gaiman, the writer of The Sandman. He's probably one of the best fantasy writers of the last fifty years and without The Sandman, we wouldn't have him.
There's a lot of reasons why The Sandman is such a seminal comic. It came around at just the right time- Alan Moore had knocked the flood gates open for both British writers and a more mature, poetic flavor in American comics. DC was all in on the this new British Invasion and used it's energy to revitalize a lot of old concepts- Shade the Changing Man, Kid Eternity, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and Black Orchid. Neil Gaiman was part of this wave. A British journalist at the time, he was friends with Alan Moore. Moore taught him how to write a comic script and got him a meeting with Karen Berger, where he and his friend Dave McKean got the Black Orchid job. He would eventually pitch The Sandman (a character concept which had been around DC since the 1940s and evolve over the years into something that was unrecognizable to the gas masked crimefighter the character began as) and history would be made.
Now, as far as it goes, I read The Sandman waaay before I read Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing. I like it better than Saga of the Swamp Thing- I was able to internalize it more and found more emotional resonance to it (that said, after reading Saga of the Swamp Thing, I can see how indebted Gaiman's early style was to Moore's- the first couple of volumes of The Sandman feel like Saga of the Swamp Thing, both tonally and visually). As great as it is, Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing doesn't really feel like a story with an ending- it's just the continuing adventures of Swamp Thing. The Sandman is definitely a story with an ending- the story of Morpheus coming to terms with who he is and how he fixes it.
Now, there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff about the comic and it's creation that I can go into, but I'm not- for that, you should get Hy Bender's excellent Sandman Companion, which is Bender interviewing Gaiman about the book for over two hundred pages. It's great. If this blog somehow convinces you to get into The Sandman, you should probably look into getting it. I think it's still in print (upon checking Amazon, it is still in print).
Let's get into the nitty gritty of why you should read the book.
So, The Sandman is the story of Morpheus. Morpheus is the anthropomorphic personification of dreams, also known as Dream (in the comic, it's said he accumulates names like others accumulate friends). Dream is the third oldest of a family of other anthropomorphic personifications. Here they are in order of age- Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium (who was once Delight). They all appear in the comic, as do all kinds of historic figures and gods and original characters. They are called The Endless. Each of them govern that thing which they are- destiny and death and dreams and so on would go on without them, but with them there, it makes things... well, I guess more controlled would be the best way to put it. They exist because deep down, we know they do.
And then it gets weird. And beautiful.
See, Gaiman packs the story with so much strangeness and horror and beauty and magic and emotion, that it sucks you in. I kind of hate Shakespeare and his plays, but there are two Shakespeare centric issues of The Sandman, and they've made me re-evaluate the way I look at Shakespeare. It's also weird in that sometimes, the title character doesn't even appear. There's an entire story arc (volume five, A Game of You) where he doesn't appear til the very end. Some of the stories seem to have no bearing on the over-arching story until you look back at them after reading them and then you suddenly understand why they're there. Usually, these are from the one off issues stories- between story arcs, Gaiman liked to do groups of one off stories with very little narrative connective tissue (only one really has any and that's volume eight, Worlds End and that's from the framing device- it's also another one of those arcs where Morpheus barely appears). It was his ways of giving new readers something to pick up to get them into the book.
Gaiman's fantasy works because it's contemporary and he has a marvelous way of blending the fantastic and the mundane. So many times, he introduces us to a human character in the real world and starts to edge their lives with the world of The Dreaming (the home of Dream and where we all spend our nights dreaming) and the various supernatural beings moving through our world, blurring those edges and slowly eroding them, until the mundane is the fantastic and the fantastic is the mundane. He also has an amazing command of emotion and how to use it to farther the story. One of my biggest complaints with Alan Moore is while he tells a great story, his emotional work can be rather deficient or cliche. Gaiman, on the other hand, writes characters whose emotions feel very real. They make sense. He humanizes even gods and monsters. If you don't cry while reading The Sandman multiple times, you probably aren't as human as you like to think you are.
Another strength of The Sandman that at first doesn't seem like a strength is that it has a revolving cast of artists. One of the strengths of Image books now is a continuity of art- it builds a world and a visual language for the books that is just as important as the dialogue and plots. However, in The Sandman, the tone changes on each story arc (much like when you dream), so, ergo, should the look of the world and the visual language. It gives each arc a freshness and sets them apart from each other. You can read most arcs of the book as a standalone, if you so chose (perhaps not volumes nine and ten, The Kindly Ones and The Wake, because they are pretty much the fulfillment of the over-arching story, so you'd have to read all the other ones to get them) and because of the different art in each one, you'd get a different feel. Different tones and different emotions. The only real visual continuity the books has is the covers- multimedia pieces by Dave McKean that are beautiful, haunting, and whimsical.
When it comes right down to it, there are books I like more than The Sandman. There are books that I think are more revolutionary. There are books that are better drawn or written. However, they'll never mean more to me than The Sandman does. I read it at a perfect time- I had just turned twenty and was just beginning to find myself as an adult and a person. My tastes were expanding- I wanted more than just people in tights beating on each other. I wanted my comics to be more complicated. more emotional. The Sandman gave me all of that. It also helped that in a lot of ways, my life was paralleling Morpheus's- we were both learning to change and grow, both becoming something different than we were. I think that it's sort of a perfect book for anyone whose life in flux, for anyone who feels like things are changing. Even when it isn't out and out dealing with that sort of thing, you're still getting amazing stories, which is always nice. Hell, it's even good for you if you just want to try something new. The Sandman starts as a horror book- the first two volumes (Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll's House) are very much horror books in the Alan Moore vein. As it goes on, Gaiman finds his own voice and begins to tell his own story (a lot of that was because it was at this point that he knew the book wasn't getting cancelled).
I think if you're serious about loving comics or just stories in general, you should probably read The Sandman. It's a story about stories and it really has to be experienced. There are twelve volumes- the first ten are the original story and the last two are a collection of stories about The Endless (Endless Nights) and a direct prequel that tells you how Morpheus was weakened enough to be in the situation he was in during the events of the first issue (The Sandman: Overture). You don't have to read the last two; once you read the first ten, though, you'll probably want to, though. Reading them in order of publication is the way to go, so, here's how I did it and how I think you should do it: Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House, Dream Country, Season of Mists, A Game of You, Fables and Reflections, Brief Lives, Worlds' End, The Kindly Ones, The Wake, Endless Nights, and Overture. Dive in. You won't be disappointed.
Next Issue: Remember how we all thought I was gonna shit talk Marvel when I talked about how I felt about the companies I read right now and I didn't? Well, this next one, I'm gonna shit talk Marvel hard. Do you want to know why and what I'm gonna say? Well, join us next time here at....
Beyond The Panels!!!!!
There's a lot of reasons why The Sandman is such a seminal comic. It came around at just the right time- Alan Moore had knocked the flood gates open for both British writers and a more mature, poetic flavor in American comics. DC was all in on the this new British Invasion and used it's energy to revitalize a lot of old concepts- Shade the Changing Man, Kid Eternity, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and Black Orchid. Neil Gaiman was part of this wave. A British journalist at the time, he was friends with Alan Moore. Moore taught him how to write a comic script and got him a meeting with Karen Berger, where he and his friend Dave McKean got the Black Orchid job. He would eventually pitch The Sandman (a character concept which had been around DC since the 1940s and evolve over the years into something that was unrecognizable to the gas masked crimefighter the character began as) and history would be made.
Now, as far as it goes, I read The Sandman waaay before I read Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing. I like it better than Saga of the Swamp Thing- I was able to internalize it more and found more emotional resonance to it (that said, after reading Saga of the Swamp Thing, I can see how indebted Gaiman's early style was to Moore's- the first couple of volumes of The Sandman feel like Saga of the Swamp Thing, both tonally and visually). As great as it is, Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing doesn't really feel like a story with an ending- it's just the continuing adventures of Swamp Thing. The Sandman is definitely a story with an ending- the story of Morpheus coming to terms with who he is and how he fixes it.
Now, there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff about the comic and it's creation that I can go into, but I'm not- for that, you should get Hy Bender's excellent Sandman Companion, which is Bender interviewing Gaiman about the book for over two hundred pages. It's great. If this blog somehow convinces you to get into The Sandman, you should probably look into getting it. I think it's still in print (upon checking Amazon, it is still in print).
Let's get into the nitty gritty of why you should read the book.
So, The Sandman is the story of Morpheus. Morpheus is the anthropomorphic personification of dreams, also known as Dream (in the comic, it's said he accumulates names like others accumulate friends). Dream is the third oldest of a family of other anthropomorphic personifications. Here they are in order of age- Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium (who was once Delight). They all appear in the comic, as do all kinds of historic figures and gods and original characters. They are called The Endless. Each of them govern that thing which they are- destiny and death and dreams and so on would go on without them, but with them there, it makes things... well, I guess more controlled would be the best way to put it. They exist because deep down, we know they do.
And then it gets weird. And beautiful.
See, Gaiman packs the story with so much strangeness and horror and beauty and magic and emotion, that it sucks you in. I kind of hate Shakespeare and his plays, but there are two Shakespeare centric issues of The Sandman, and they've made me re-evaluate the way I look at Shakespeare. It's also weird in that sometimes, the title character doesn't even appear. There's an entire story arc (volume five, A Game of You) where he doesn't appear til the very end. Some of the stories seem to have no bearing on the over-arching story until you look back at them after reading them and then you suddenly understand why they're there. Usually, these are from the one off issues stories- between story arcs, Gaiman liked to do groups of one off stories with very little narrative connective tissue (only one really has any and that's volume eight, Worlds End and that's from the framing device- it's also another one of those arcs where Morpheus barely appears). It was his ways of giving new readers something to pick up to get them into the book.
Gaiman's fantasy works because it's contemporary and he has a marvelous way of blending the fantastic and the mundane. So many times, he introduces us to a human character in the real world and starts to edge their lives with the world of The Dreaming (the home of Dream and where we all spend our nights dreaming) and the various supernatural beings moving through our world, blurring those edges and slowly eroding them, until the mundane is the fantastic and the fantastic is the mundane. He also has an amazing command of emotion and how to use it to farther the story. One of my biggest complaints with Alan Moore is while he tells a great story, his emotional work can be rather deficient or cliche. Gaiman, on the other hand, writes characters whose emotions feel very real. They make sense. He humanizes even gods and monsters. If you don't cry while reading The Sandman multiple times, you probably aren't as human as you like to think you are.
Another strength of The Sandman that at first doesn't seem like a strength is that it has a revolving cast of artists. One of the strengths of Image books now is a continuity of art- it builds a world and a visual language for the books that is just as important as the dialogue and plots. However, in The Sandman, the tone changes on each story arc (much like when you dream), so, ergo, should the look of the world and the visual language. It gives each arc a freshness and sets them apart from each other. You can read most arcs of the book as a standalone, if you so chose (perhaps not volumes nine and ten, The Kindly Ones and The Wake, because they are pretty much the fulfillment of the over-arching story, so you'd have to read all the other ones to get them) and because of the different art in each one, you'd get a different feel. Different tones and different emotions. The only real visual continuity the books has is the covers- multimedia pieces by Dave McKean that are beautiful, haunting, and whimsical.
When it comes right down to it, there are books I like more than The Sandman. There are books that I think are more revolutionary. There are books that are better drawn or written. However, they'll never mean more to me than The Sandman does. I read it at a perfect time- I had just turned twenty and was just beginning to find myself as an adult and a person. My tastes were expanding- I wanted more than just people in tights beating on each other. I wanted my comics to be more complicated. more emotional. The Sandman gave me all of that. It also helped that in a lot of ways, my life was paralleling Morpheus's- we were both learning to change and grow, both becoming something different than we were. I think that it's sort of a perfect book for anyone whose life in flux, for anyone who feels like things are changing. Even when it isn't out and out dealing with that sort of thing, you're still getting amazing stories, which is always nice. Hell, it's even good for you if you just want to try something new. The Sandman starts as a horror book- the first two volumes (Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll's House) are very much horror books in the Alan Moore vein. As it goes on, Gaiman finds his own voice and begins to tell his own story (a lot of that was because it was at this point that he knew the book wasn't getting cancelled).
I think if you're serious about loving comics or just stories in general, you should probably read The Sandman. It's a story about stories and it really has to be experienced. There are twelve volumes- the first ten are the original story and the last two are a collection of stories about The Endless (Endless Nights) and a direct prequel that tells you how Morpheus was weakened enough to be in the situation he was in during the events of the first issue (The Sandman: Overture). You don't have to read the last two; once you read the first ten, though, you'll probably want to, though. Reading them in order of publication is the way to go, so, here's how I did it and how I think you should do it: Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House, Dream Country, Season of Mists, A Game of You, Fables and Reflections, Brief Lives, Worlds' End, The Kindly Ones, The Wake, Endless Nights, and Overture. Dive in. You won't be disappointed.
Next Issue: Remember how we all thought I was gonna shit talk Marvel when I talked about how I felt about the companies I read right now and I didn't? Well, this next one, I'm gonna shit talk Marvel hard. Do you want to know why and what I'm gonna say? Well, join us next time here at....
Beyond The Panels!!!!!
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