Overture

With its first issue published in 2013, Sandman: Overture arrived many years after Neil Gaiman's original Sandman run concluded in 1996. Overture is positioned as a prequel to the justly celebrated Sandman saga; it aims to flesh-out the previously hinted at conflict that left Morpheus weakened and vulnerable to capture by the occultist Roderick Burgess in the first issue of The Sandman series.

As a physical object, the deluxe edition of Overture is a fairly lavish affair. The hardcover is protected by a nice slipcover, there are multiple pull-out spreads, and eye-popping color-saturated psychedelic-inspired art--although sometimes the art crosses over into the realm of the garish.

Overture's story involves Morpheus attempting to undue a problem that he helped to create--a running theme of Sandman in general. In a galaxy other than our own, Morpheus let a dream vortex develop into a destructive state that claimed countless lives. This first dereliction of duties is followed swiftly by another; after Morpheus finally cleans up the mess create by his reticence to kill the vortex, he neglects to destroy a star that has become infected with the vortex's calamitous intent. The chaotic residue left over from Morpheus's failure to deal with the vortex in its entirety spreads like a cancer through multiple worlds connected by the Dreaming, threatening to destroy the universe as a whole.

And thus, a hero's journey is called for. In the company of a cat-ish aspect of himself (or so he thinks) and an orphaned girl named Hope, Morpheus must finish what he left unfinished, a feat compromised by other stars who bar the Sandman from his goal, and a host of other complications that encompass both external resistance and his own internal grappling with the responsibilities of his position and purpose. The connection to the previous Sandman comics is well-made; this Morpheus is one who again grapples with duty, the importance of storytelling, the nature of dreams, etc.

Where we have seen Gaiman pattern his own mythopoeia after Greek tragedy and Shakespeare drama, we now see him again return to Classical appropriation--but in Overture this takes a Freudian turn. His most direct route to resolving the dilemna of the mad star stymied, Morpheus must return to both Father and Mother for aid that hardly feels like aid. This, in itself, gestures to the most under-theorized aspect of the Oedipal complex--not the need to best the father and possess the mother, but rather the need to reveal both father and mother as intrinsic and inescapable elements of the self. When Morpheus deals with his father's stoic briskness and fetish for obligation and his mother's morbid consumption and blank satiety, he's really addressing those sides of his own personality and weighing his flaws against his own merits. The Oedipal call was coming from inside the house all along because Mom and Dad were never home to begin with.

Overture's unveiling of a new epic tangent that the Sandman series had yet to plumb is compelling, but also partially a misstep. Part of the power of myth is in the gaps--the spaces between the stars grant us telemetry by which to chart a course. By filling in some of the gaps of The Sandman--providing Morpheus with parents, especially parents as cliched as Time and Night--we lose a little mystery. Similarly, Overture is too apt to explain itself in ways that myths never do. For example, we are shown that the cat accompanying Morpheus was Desire all along, even though this was something that a mildly-astute reader would have surmised for themselves without the need of a reveal. Guessing at how a magic trick is performed is far more satisfying than getting confirmation. Overture is more successful when it lets the reader put the pieces together, as it does by not stating that his brief time with the orphaned Hope later inspired the finishing blow in Morpheus's battle in Hell.

Not everything can be Greco-Freudian, of course. In the end game, Morpheus must go biblical or go home. At Desire's prodding, he builds an ark and fills it with dreamers who can dream reality back into existence after the now-unavoidable catastrophic flood. And then we're back where we started, quivering within a summoning circle in the basement of an English manor house.

* * *

Many thanks to Scott Martin, who bought me a copy of Overture purely because he wanted me to talk about it. That's both generosity defined and an uncommon willingness to hear me natter. This one's for you, Scott.

The Wake

The King is Dead! Long Live the King! The death of Morpheus is, ultimately, a costume change as Daniel Hall assumes the mantle (and dialog font) of the departed Dream.

Having, at this point in its run, amassed an ensemble cast of characters, it's time for the curtain call and final bows. Among the break-out stars are Nuala, Rob Gadling, Lyta Hall, Rose Walker, et al. Everybody really. Even you.

And so it's Whatever Happened to King of Dreams, before that style of wake became a thing--a precursor to the notion of a wake as a celebration not of life but rather as a celebration of the surrounding mythology. Goodnight Dreaming, Goodnight Matthew the raven, Goodnight, Goodbye, Goodnight.

Having exhausted mythic Greek tragedy, the final act had to bend the knee to Shakespeare--covering both ends of how a British man forges the links between his epic and what we might think of as The Epics. Of course, the Shakespearean reference in the denouement has to be to The Tempest; if you fancy that you've written something lasting, you must also fancy yourself to be a (if not the) Prospero. You don't go into this business if you haven't enslaved Ariel only to set him free, if you aren't a bit afraid that Caliban is your reflection in the glass, and if you don't have a deep and abiding need to set things to right and be seen as the real hero for doing so.

Also, you want the privilege of being the one to tidy things up in the end, I reckon. Sometimes that cleaning of one's own doll house means killing off your protagonist, your proxy, your shadow-self in the shadow box you built with your own two hands.

Death is not the end, we're told. And it isn't. It's exile from life and from dreams. But never an exile from stories, no, never that. For that is the kingdom and key, even after you have abjured your rough magic, broken your staff, and drowned your book.

Stories end, and go on.

* * *

Previous installments in this series:

Preludes and Nocturnes
The Doll's House
Dream Country
Season of Mists (part 1)
Season of Mists (part 2)
A Game of You (part 1)
A Game of You (part 2)
Fables and Recollections
Brief Lives
Worlds' End
The Kindly Ones

The Kindly Ones

There are few things I can tell you that are true of all works of literature, but I'm on solid ground with this one: if a story starts with three women--one young, one motherly, one bent with age--snipping a skein of thread short, well, the story in front of you is about fate and death.

At this point in its run, The Sandman is well and truly an epic--which dictates that the narrative must resolve itself according to the rules of the epic. Indeed, Sandman enshrines the idea of following the rules of story. Morpheus is made to face the ultimate price levied by the Furies because he has shed familial blood. Granting Orpheus an asked-for death may have been the kindest of boons, but it is an act that must be punished because that's the rules, that's how the game is played, that's what duty calls for.

The rules that guide the narrative conclusion of Gaiman's saga are drawn from the most classical of sources, the Greek tragedy: not only do we have the introduction of the Furies as a grand nemesis, we have Lyta Hall's transformation into a bereaved gorgon, Morpheus's enlarged and cosmic hubris, and a chorus of side characters who provide both counterpoint and collectively voiced commentary to the unspooling drama.

And so The Kindly Ones comes on like a beloved band on their farewell tour. All the greatest hits get played, and a few deep cuts sneak into the setlist to please the obsessive fans too. We revisit Rose Walker, Nuala & Cluracan, the Corinthian, Lucifer, Fiddler's Green, Matthew the Raven, Desire, Odin, Thessaly, Delirium, Lucien, Titania, Cain & Abel, Loki & Puck, etc, etc. &c. The audience can't leave without feeling sated. That's a rule too, and it must be followed.

But if The Kindly Ones is a Greek tragedy, whose tragedy is this? Who stands at the center watching everything fall apart around them?

Morpheus is the obvious choice, but his inevitable death is confronted with a stoic indifference--shot through though it may be with moments of pathos--that derails the utmost gravity of the events that have unfolded. 

What of Lyta Hall, then? She plays both the villain and the tragically condemned; she pursues revenge against Morpheus because she believes he has stolen her son (he hasn't), invoking the incessant Furies against him. But at the realization that Morpheus isn't the guilty party she's been seeking, this new gorgon would call back the Furies, but she cannot. The Furies do not pursue Morpheus for the crime Lyta accuses him of; rather, they pursue him for different transgression--a transgression of which he is guilty and must answer for. Those are the rules, and Lyta realizes too late that she can't change them. 

We etch commandments into stone for a reason--once set down, there is no revision possible. Only the slow erasure afforded by time allows for the rules to eventually be rewritten. When the slate is clear, we can start over afresh. Never before.

Lyta feels the injustice of that, and it turns into self-condemnation. Lyta has gross, glaring flaws, flaws that is often blind to, and it is the unseen flaws that ultimately consume her. Even the act of becoming a gorgon resonant with mythological structures of revenge partially erases who she is; reshaping yourself to fit an archetype means losing personal identity. Gaiman pairs her mythological ascension with earthly madness for a reason: whether high or low, both states are changes that deprive her of access to who she was and who she could have otherwise continued to be.

Worse yet, her single-minded quest to avenge her son sets in motion the events that will forever part him from her. After Morpheus's death, Daniel Hall assumes the mantle of the Sandman. This is a loss doubled, then; if Lyta loses part of herself in becoming an archetypal avenger of wrongs, that process ensures that Danial will lose part of himself as he is in turn transformed into the archetypal King of Dreams.

We've already learned Morpheus's lesson in the previous issues. Now we learn from Lyta's mistake, her tragic placement within circumstances she doesn't fully understand--and which we, as readers, are left to puzzle over because it is not clear who manipulated events to bring this ending to pass. And that's the song the chorus sings, in the end.

Worlds' End

Of course, after the momentous Brief Lives arc, the narrative of the Sandman Saga needs a pause to regroup before pushing forward--and that pause comes in the form of self-contained, single-issue stories that connect to the main plot in only minor ways. The conceit of the stories in Worlds' End is that each issue is a story told by a traveler who finds themselves stuck at the Worlds' End Inn while they wait out a "reality storm." The tales told, as well as the tellers themselves, are remarkably varied; we get a man who falls into the dreams of a city, a tale of faerie trickery, etc. Morpheus makes brief appearances in the stories, but none of the stories are really about him. 

And, at first blush, the stories don't seem to be about anything in particular. They don't connect, they don't cohere into a larger narrative moment. In a sense, they make the reader feel like they too are stuck in the Worlds' End Inn, waiting for something greater to happen.

But that feeling of suspended moments whiled away--in which stories told help us to kill time--might be the larger point in itself. What if, despite our best pretensions to the contrary, stories are only ever about passing time? What if all that muck about "expanding our point of view," "enlarging our ethical sympathies," and "coming to self-knowledge through the mirror of fiction" is all just empty justification for what we're up to when we give and receive stories? Maybe we're not making sense of the world at a fictional remove, maybe we're just watching the hour hand move round the dial at a glacial pace.

If that's what Gaiman wants us to realize, then Worlds' End is provokingly placed since it comes just before the big climax of his now epic-length series. A moment of self-doubt perhaps? (Why have I spent all this time working on this story if it has just been a distraction for the audience?) A dire warning to the reader? (This all means nothing, in the end. We're just passing the time, each and every one of us.) Toying with expectations? (I'm telling you this is a waste of time, but maybe the big stuff will start to happen and you'll have to reconsider the importance of storytelling for yourself...)

My money's on that last one.

Brief Lives

In Brief Lives, Dream is approached by his sister Delirium; she has been petitioning members of the Endless to help her find their lost brother, Destruction. Surprisingly, Dream agrees to help her on her quest. He doesn't do so altruistically; he acquiesces to her request mostly to forget that he was recently spurned by a lover.

Before Delirium asks Dream, she asked their sister Desire for aid. Desire's refusal is expected, but cruel. It's also unsurprising. Desire has been portrayed as cruel, petty, vindictive, and heartless throughout the series. (The irony of Desire's heartlessness is that it lives within a gigantic heart and the heart is its gallery sigil.) Desire is clearly set up to be one of the great villains of Sandman, a libidinal antagonist set against Dream's mopey ego-driven romanticism. Indeed, Dream is suspicious that Delirium's mania to find Destruction has been caused or inspired by Desire as some sort of trap. Desire swears a weighty oath that it isn't responsible for Delirium's fixation on uncovering the whereabouts of their errant brother, but what Dream expects is enough to color our perception of Desire's place in the narrative. Setting an early precedent, Gaiman tells us in The Dream House collection, "Desire is always cruel."

Each of the Endless hovers in the gray area between character and abstract concept. As such, the very idea of Desire seems tainted in Gaiman's story--if Desire-the-character is forever plotting and scheming for malignant ends, then it follows that desire-the-concept is a similarly corrosive motivating force. The correlation is odd, but informative. In reality, few of us think of desire as a pointedly negative thing. We believe that desire is powerful (1). We know that desire leads us toward pleasurable fulfillment (2). It's not even bad as a consolation prize (3).

But, if Desire/desire is more often damaging than not in Gaiman's fictive universe, surely Dream is established as the antithesis? No, Dream is a collaborative; the strife between Desire and Dream isn't due to their difference, it's caused by their congruence. What are dreams, after all, than manifestations of desire in the unconscious mind? Desires are ephemeral and fleeting, as are dreams. We wish each other "sweet dreams," and advise each other to "have a good time" in the company of others because we place a value on pleasure both solitary and communal. Both carry the connotation of aspiration--what do you desire, what do you dream of?

If Desire's flaw is an inherent streak of cruelty, consider that Dream is frequently guilty of the same error: his treatment of Nada and Orpheus evidence an abundance of that fault. The Sandman, then, is not really a tale about a clash between cosmic principles; it's about Dream's growth as a character through the purgation of cruelty from his own oneiric form of desire--a process only made possible by Desire's cruelty. This idea was threaded into the story early in the saga; Gaiman writes, in Dream Country, "But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted" (emphasis mine). As it turns out, mortals aren't the only ones who do not understand the price of this growth. Dream will pay the price for this newfound self-knowledge as well.

* * *

(1) - “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” ― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

(2) - In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

(3) - “Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Fables and Reflections

Some things we lose, and some things we just give away.

It's always a choice, though, when you look narrow-eyed and shrewd upon it. A choice that shapes the direction of things, a choice that gives purpose to the story as we tell it or as we will someday come to tell it.

And so it is with Fables & Reflections, a collection of self-contained issues before the next big arc of the Sandman Saga. The pace of Sandman is one that needs space and time to gather up steam for the next big advancement of the plot; the issues that allow for that building of momentum are slight, but generally serve to foreshadow the importance of themes that are about to lurch into prominence. In Fables & Reflections, those themes are all about what we lose, the consequences of that loss, and our role in making the choices about what we will lose and what we will just give away.

"Fear of Falling" is about a playwright on the verge of losing his chance at success and the act of giving away your fear of fulfillment.

"Three Septembers and a January" recasts the historical Emperor Norton as a gambit in a bet between Dream and his younger siblings, illustrating the importance to holding on to dignity as a communal act instead of grasping at baser, personal desires.

"Thermidor" tells of one of Lady Johanna Constantine's adventures during the Reign of Terror. (Yes, she is the ancestor of that other Constantine.) This story introduces Dream's son Orpheus, and also links Orpheus to loss in a myriad of ways--he has lost his father, his body, and his head becomes "lost" to the people actively searching for it. Or are any of those things truly gone? Or has Dream simply chosen to toss them aside?

"The Hunt" is a fairy tale in the Eastern European style told by a werewolf grandpa to his thoroughly modern granddaughter. The old tales, too, are things we might lose sight of--either willingly or by failing to see their value.

"August" shows Augustus Caesar donning the attire of a beggar so that he might think in peace without the interference of the gods. What he thinks on: should he choose to let the Roman Empire decline and fall? Has he lost himself to the trauma inflicted upon him by the rapist Julius Caesar?

"Soft Places" finds Marco Polo discovering that man's thirst for mapping, exploration, and putting a name to the mysterious places of the earth might strip them of their particular arcana--is it better to know or to dream?

"The Song of Orpheus" retells the Greek myth of Orpheus, but in terms of Gaiman's own developing Sandman mythology. What else could it be about but letting go or being forced to let go? Love, life, faith, family, everything.

"The Parliament of Rooks" returns to Lyta Hall and her son Daniel (remember them from The Doll's House arc?), and Daniel's encounter with Matthew the raven, Eve, Cain, and Abel in the Dreaming. Much like "The Hunt," we're stuck in a cycle of telling stories and choosing which ones we keep and which we do not.

"Ramadan" takes us from Baghdad as the jewel of all cities to a modern war-torn version of the same--do we discard the glory of the past for an enduring present?

There are cycles at work in these seemingly unrelated stories: rulers who go among their people and must make choices about what will remain of their kingdoms and what will not ("Three Septembers and a January," "August," "Ramadan"); stories that fade or lose their mystery ("Fear of Falling," "The Hunt," "Soft Places," "The Parliament of Rooks"); familial belong as a decision that is made over and over again ("Thermidor," "The Song of Orpheus," "The Parliament of Rooks").

Some things we lose, some things we just give away.

A Game of You (part 2)

To reiterate the question posed by A Game of You: what is a woman? This question echoes in a multitude of ways throughout this arc of The Sandman. We see it in the various ways that Wanda is judged not to be woman enough--how she's drawn, how others perceive her, the shape of her own nightmares, how her family chooses to remember her after her death. We have it in Barbie's neighbors, who struggle to maintain their identities as they attempt to rescue her--Hazel and Foxglove must cope with managing their identities as lesbians as they also deal with an unexpected pregnancy, Thessaly must drive herself with thoughts of revenge to continually reconstruct her self-identity as someone powerful and not to be trifled with. And of course the question defines Barbie's quest in the Dreaming--it turns out she is not there to save the land she has dreamed of (it is inevitably destroyed in the end as part of a compact that cannot be mitigated), but is instead there to find out who she is and what she can be. A Game of You is literally the "game" of figuring out who You are, but it's a game with ferociously high stakes when you're a woman.

The villain of the arc, the Cuckoo, is not an external threat. She is instead a part of Barbie's identity, a malicious refashioning of the inner child. The Cuckoo is a remnant of Barbie's rich childhood fantasy world, but she is a particularly feminine remainder of the imagination. We're told by the Cuckoo that there are differences between the fantasy worlds created by boys and girls: boys dream of themselves as empowered heroes, while girls dream of familial belonging and domestic happiness. Although we might wish to disbelieve this way of defining imagination according to a gendered binary--it comes to us, after all, from a seemingly insane villain--the surrounding fictive world of the comic goes some length to reify that idea. It is Wanda (never woman enough) who reads superhero comics; Barbie, on the other hand, has a terrible experience when she goes into a comic shop because she is too obviously a woman in a space that caters to products for and by the male imagination. (And damn, that scene is one solid punch Gaiman aims at the jaw of mouth-breathing comic guys. FATALITY.)

Of course, this leaves us with some room to postulate that the gendering of imagination is wholly culturally-constructed, but I'm not convinced that A Game of You really hammers that nail into the coffin. If this arc is about Barbie's search for an authentic self in the wake of her divorce, she plays an amazingly passive role in the resolution of it; it's Morpheus (absent for the majority of the arc) who swoops in to make the big changes. Barbie earns a boon from Morpheus for her role in fulfilling the compact, but she spends it on protecting her new "family" of neighbors--reaffirming that her imagination is still defined by domesticity and belonging. And though there is a sense of Barbie honoring Wanda as a woman by painting over the birth name etched on a tombstone that forcibly re-inscribes her as essentially male, it's worth noting that the lipstick Barbie uses to write "Wanda" over "Alvin" is temporary--it will wash off, and the name cut into the cold stone will surely outlast it.

What is a woman?

It seems like we still don't know.

A Game of You (part 1)

There is always a point where every imaginative author wants to try their hand at riffing off the classics of "children's fantasy." Gaiman isn't exactly shy about his inspirations for the A Game of You story arc: one of his characters directly alludes to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland by noting that things seem to have slipped "down the rabbit hole"; the Yellow Brick Road of Oz gets a mention and the strange animal companions that rally around the protagonist of the arc rewrite Dorothy's companions; the perils faced by Bilbo in The Hobbit give shape to Gaiman's protagonist's fears.

Gaiman's iteration of a fantastique tale involves Barbie (a character last seen in the apartment building that Rose Walker lived in during the Doll's House arc) being drawn into her dream world--a children's fantasy realm that faces destruction at the hands of a calamitous being known as The Cuckoo. While Barbie lies in a coma-like state in the real world--her dream self is free to adventure--the other residents of her apartment building find themselves attacked in the night by powerful nightmares set loose by an agent of the Cuckoo. In a nice bit of fairy tale logic, the Cuckoo's agent can't directly destroy the dream stone that allows Barbie to enter the Dreaming, but he can potentially use Barbie's neighbors as the tools of its destruction. The Cuckoo's strategem is foiled by one woman living in the apartment: Thessaly. Yes, she is one of those Thessalians from Greek myth.

After gathering the other residents of the apartment, Thessaly convinces them that they need to venture into the Dreaming to aid Barbie on her quest. Being a witch of remarkable power and experience, Thessaly calls down the power of the moon so that they might enter the dream world. (She also notes that they could enter with the permission of Morpheus, but the reason why she chooses the Moon Road instead become clear later in The Sandman.) Gaiman takes a jab at New Agers (and Wiccans in particular) with his depiction of Thessaly's witchcraft; Thessaly's magic is of the old tradition: it is all blood, violence, and unflinching sacrifice. And it gets results, whereas Foxglove notes that her more modern flirtations with a fluffier form of witchery had no real effects.

One of the Barbie's assembled friends cannot travel along the Moon Road; as a transgender woman, Wanda is apparently not woman enough to make use of magic so closely associated with the feminine. This is an interesting distinction, though not entirely a comfortable one. Compounding that is the slightly grotesque way that Wanda is drawn throughout this story line: the line work of her face tries too hard to convey that she was born male. There are also a number of panels in which she is in her underwear and a masculine bulge is ever-present. It's a bit odd that the art isn't allowed the space for its own interpretation by the reader. Rather, the comic does not let this stand as a subtle distinction; one of the neighbors points out that Wanda's body fails to be stereotypically womanly--the "irony" being that the lump in her underpants is pointed out by a butch lesbian who functions as the most outwardly-masculine character in the building. And yet, because of biology (and a weird tangent by which the butch lesbian has become pregnant after having a drunken fling with a "mostly gay" man [!!!]) she's allowed the space to be a "real woman."

But what is a woman? That is the question to be resolved (perhaps unsatisfactorily) in A Game of You, and one we'll turn to in the second installment on this part of the Sandman saga. 

Season of Mists (part 2)

Now that he possesses the key to Hell, Morpheus finds his dream kingdom visited by gods, angels, faerie, demons, and abstract concepts who wish to possess Lucifer's recently-abandoned domain. (Thor and Loki come calling and there isn't a damned thing Marvel can do about it! Thor is especially played for laughs as a drunken lout.) Of course, this cohort of spiritual powers is itself a kind of Hell, especially for the archly isolated Morpheus. Making matters worse is the fact that accepting the bribe or acquiescing to the threats of one party interested in taking over Hell means alienating and angering the others--therein lies Lucifer's trap.

Everyone has something to offer Dream in return for the key to Hell, but the demons bring the most leverage: they would trade Choronzon (a demon Morpheus once had to duel) to torture as he sees fit, and more importantly they offer him Nada (and threaten to devour her soul if their bargain is refused). Ultimately, though, Dream grants the key to the angels, who expressly do not want it but have been commanded by their Creator to oversee Hell in Lucifer's absence. It makes sense: no one who wants Hell for themselves is fit to tend it. 

This also discloses some very interesting truths about the duality of existence in Gaiman's fiction: for Heaven (err, "The Silver City") to exist, its antithesis must also exist. Since Heaven and Hell are reflections of each other, both are needed and thus Hell must be opened for business once more. Ponder the fate of the angels assigned to Hell's governance; it's fascinating that Heaven must manufacture its own rebels, embittered by the task given them, for its own maintenance. 

Of course, Morpheus eventually does battle Azazel for Nada's return--and win. His reunion with Nada--after what has to be the world's weakest apology for condemning her to ten-thousand years of Hell--is brief and bittersweet: he rejects her offer of becoming mortal to be with her, she rejects his offer to make her a goddess, and she decides upon being reborn as an infant in Hong Kong. Loki manages to trickster his way out of returning to his Asgardian punishment, and Lucifer learns to love life on the beach. Oh, and along the way Gaiman drops a piece of canonical lore that will become the fulcrum of the saga: the current Endless are but aspects of what they represent. They can die, and can abdicate responsibility for their realms as Lucifer did, but there will always be another aspect to replace them. The choices made on the path of destiny have consequences, even for the Endless.

Season of Mists (part 1)

Season of Mists opens with Destiny, one of the Endless and brother of Dream, musing about his eternal purview. A destiny is not a straight line; rather it is a series of choices that create the contours of a path. As such, moving forward means bearing the weight of past choices. And so, because fate demands it, Destiny calls a family meeting of the Endless--a meeting in which Desire makes some cutting remarks about Dream's relationship with Nada, a human woman whom he loved but would ultimately reject him and be sentenced to Hell. (Remember when I said that the events of "Tales in the Sand" would factor into the future of the series?) Desire's blatant attempt to get under Dream's skin works effortlessly; he confers with Death, who confirms that what he did to Nada was unjust, and finds himself moved to enter Hell to free her. Of course, this figures to be easier said than done, as Dream's last visit to Hell to retrieve his helmet left Lucifer nursing a grudge against him.

And so Morpheus descends to Hell, expecting a fight. What he finds is far more treacherous: Lucifer has expelled demons and damned alike and is abdicating his lordship over Hell. As a parting "gift," Lucifer gives Dream the key to Hell, making its stewardship his problem.

The expulsion of the damned from Hell leaves Death with a problem: souls she had previously separated from their earthly lives are now free to go back to their old haunts, as dramatized in the digressive story "In Which the Dead Return; and Charles Rowland Concludes His Education," a Gothic-satirical take on the turn-of-the-century boarding-school genre. Amid the horrific and comedic antics of ghostly bullies, headmasters, and the like, the unlikely duo of a newly-dead schoolboy and his long-deceased chum muse on the nature of Hell. Perhaps it isn't a metaphysical place of punishment, maybe it is a metaphysical state we inflict upon ourselves. 

This idea is evident in the actions of the ghosts at the boarding school--they repeat their past crimes and punishments seemingly without considering any other options granted by their new-found freedom--and also rings true in Lucifer's account of the damned; according to Lucifer, the dead were under no compulsion to go to Hell upon death, and the form of their individual punishments are manifestations of what they feel they deserve.

But if Hell is a state of being, what of Heaven? Curiously, the "Silver City" doesn't seem to possess that nuance--which becomes a point of contention when angels are sent to vie for the key to Hell.

(I've made the executive decision to start breaking these posts about the Sandman collections up into multiple parts, as they were getting a bit unwieldy and long.)

Dream Country

Since Dream Country collects four stand-alone issues of The Sandman, it doesn't contribute an arc to the overall saga. But each story does add threads of narratives or backstory that will be explored in more depth later or actively works to reinforce the larger themes of the series.

"Calliope" tells the tale of an author desperate to follow-up on the success of his debut novel. So desperate, in fact, that he acquires the muse Calliope, imprisons her in his home, and rapes her for inspiration. While it's clear that Gaiman is saying something about the often troubled relationship between artists and the sources of their ideas, I'm honestly surprised he hasn't caught more flack for the prevalence of rape as a recurring plot point in Sandman. Alan Moore, perhaps Gaiman's closest contemporary in the world of modern comics, has been taken to task repeatedly for the predominance of scenes of sexual violence in Watchmen, Neonomicon, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and especially Lost Girls. The tonal difference between how rape figures into Gaiman and Moore's plots, or if there is one, bears thinking about--as does a consideration of differing public reaction. But this humble blog post is not that place.

Calliope is ultimately set free at the behest of Morpheus, who attempts a bit of poetic justice by giving the author a surfeit of inspiration that drives him to madness. As it turns out, Calliope was a former lover of Morpheus's, and the two had a child together--Orpheus, of Greek mythological fame. This is an instance where a future narrative strand is being seeded, and it is interesting that Gaiman does so without much fanfare. The mentions of Orpheus, and the violence of the Furies, occurs almost in passing, but will certainly factor into the series in a more profound way in later issues. Speaking of comments that are slipped in slyly, there is a commentary about the continual difference in cultural cache afforded to "real literature" and the disapproval that often meets genre fiction in this story that sits neatly alongside the commentary about authors and their muses. Note the shout-out to Clive Barker; oh, to be back in the early 90s again.

"A Dream of a Thousand Cats" is one of the most beloved Sandman stories. It features a gathering of cats to hear one who is like a wandering prophet of their kind: she preaches the idea that if enough cats dream of a world where they are the dominant species--not merely the pets and prey of human beings--they can effectively make that alternate world a reality. The theme of the story puts a slight spin on the idea of dreams shaping the world around us: the story isn't really about individual change achieved through a private dream, but rather it is interested in how a communal dream can change the world. The story reminds me a bit of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Queen Mab and his essay "A Defense of Poetry," but with a twist; whereas Shelley claims in his poem and essay that the power of imagination is the inherently human quality of effecting positive change in the world, Gaiman expands this faculty to all the creatures of the world--well, at least those capable of dreaming.

Often cited as one of the best issues of the series, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction in 1991. The story concerns the debut of Shakespeare's play of the same name; in Gaiman's version of events, the play is performed for an audience of faerie folk--including Auberon, Titania, and Puck (who puckishly sneaks his way into the performance). Like "A Dream of a Thousand Cats," this story meditates on the power of dreams; specifically, the story toys with the idea that things that aren't true (such as fictional drama) can still function as markers of truth by telling a story that possesses an essential verity. 

Shakespearean allusions in fiction are always interesting because they never seem to be used without a distinct purpose. Of course, this story isn't the first time Gaiman has drawn on the work of Shakespeare in Sandman; quotes from Shakespeare's plays appeared in some of the earliest issues of the saga, and we have previously seen Shakespeare strike a bargain (two plays in return for access to "the great stories") in the issue "Men of Good Fortune." It strikes me that the use of Shakespeare is different in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and that allusion is used here as a force of literary alignment. Since Shakespeare is often regarded as the foundational man of British letters, a patron saint of the epic in English, I'd argue that Gaiman weaves his story into Shakespeare as a way of subtly saying that Sandman, his epic, belongs to the same artistic lineage as the Bard himself. In fact, this has long been a strategy by which authors of fantastical fiction claim alignment with Shakespeare to forestall criticism of their creations as "genre work." You see it in Horace Walpole's statements about his comedic borrowings from Shakespeare, as well as in Ann Radcliffe's appropriation of Shakespearean quotations as chapter headers in her oft-derided Gothic novels. In a sense, this story is Gaiman feeling himself and feeling that his story has (finally, perhaps) taken shape and is headed in the majestic direction he had always hoped it would. You could call that presumption, but as Sandman is regarded as a modern classic it's not too hard to excuse the man for it, really.

Of course, now that I've just puffed Gaiman up a bit, I have to knock him down directly after because I just don't like "Facade," the story that concludes Dream Country. "Facade" doesn't feature Dream at all--though Death is a character in it; this is instead another story that takes an obscure DC superhero (in this case, Element Girl) and attempts to elevate the source material. The problem is that the story essentially plays out like a vampire story, something-something the pain of immortality, but without the bite. I've always felt that the Sandman stories that try to work-in bits of the DC universe were on shaky ground, but this one just doesn't go anywhere. Yes, it plays with the theme that even immortality might have an end (which could be important for Dream and his fellow Endless), but the ironic O. Henry-style ending just rings a bit false.

The Doll's House

Ah, how the memories come flooding back! The Doll's House was definitely my starting point with The Sandman. I read the issues that comprise the Preludes & Nocturnes tpb as back issues after working my way through The Doll's House. 

After repeating "The Sound of Her Wings," which closed out the last collection, we get "Tales in the Sand," which adds a crucial bit of ancient backstory to Dream's saga. Told as an African folktale passed down through the oral tradition as part of a coming of age ritual, the story of Morpheus's forbidden love for the human queen Nada will come to have larger consequences in the overarching narrative--but we'll get to that in later issues as it comes up. 

"Tales in the Sand" also has a more immediate effect because it potentially changes how we view Dream as a character. When Morpheus condemns Nada to torture in Hell for what he perceives as her rejection of him, it both adds to what we know about his character and diminishes him in our view. While the Dream of past issues seemed aloof, angsty, and somewhat unknowable, it was still easy to forge a line of sympathy between him and the reader. "Tales in the Sand" changes that; here we see Dream acting petulant, demanding, and cruel. We see that he is more than just the brooding hero of the series. He is flawed, deeply so. Our sympathy for him has to alter because it is touched by now knowing that his passions can run self-centered and imperious.

Is Dream a full-fledged Byronic hero? It's a possibility well worth keeping in mind as the series progresses. 

After the prologue of "Tales in the Sand," The Doll's House sets upon two intertwined plots: Morpheus tracking down four errant dreams who escaped his realm while he was imprisoned by the Burgess family and Rose, who is a a "dream vortex," tracking down Jed, her missing brother. These two plot lines are intertwined because Rose is the granddaughter of Unity Kincaid, a woman who succumbed to the "sleepy sickness" when Morpheus was trapped in the Burgess's house; both the escaped dreams and Rose's status as a vortex are tied to Dream's captivity.

The narrative strands converge at a "cereal convention," which is really a clever, dark ruse for what is, in fact, a convention of serial murderers. (The latest season of American Horror Story, Hotel, "borrowed" the serial killer party idea something fierce.) I love the cheeky send-up Gaiman gives to serial killer fanboys; the real serial killers catch a wanna-be 'zinester (who I am pretty sure is a pointed mockery of Peter Sotos; the fictional counterpart writes a 'zine called Chaste, while Sotos wrote an infamous serial killer 'zine called Pure) in their midst and show him what cold-bloodedness is really all about.

Since Rose is the dream vortex--a force that threatens to undo the chaotic order of the dreamworld--it is Morpheus's duty to kill her to keep his realm from collapsing and taking humanity along with it. Until, of course, Unity Kincaid steps in and assumes her rightful place as the vortex in an act of self-sacrifice that preserves Rose's life. As it turns out, Rose being positioned as the sacrificial vortex was a stratagem on the part of Dream's sister-brother Desire, another of the Endless. 

After the fact, Morpheus learns a horrible truth: Desire had fathered Rose's mother on the sleeping Unity, and if Dream had killed Rose he would have been guilty of killing one of his own blood. Why that crime is so portentous isn't clear at this point in the series, but there are two items of Sandman lore worth keeping in view after the events of The Doll's House: taking the life of one of Endless blood is an unpardonable crime and the three witch horror-hosts of The Witching Hour have appeared in this section of the story to hint at another function they serve--that of avenging furies, the Kindly Ones.

Preludes and Nocturnes

I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, but when I do set one I like to keep the bar nice and low. This year's resolution is to re-read the original run of the Sandman comics. I'm pretty sure I never read every single issue as they came out in the 90s, and I'm also fairly sure that I didn't read it in a strict order at the time.

The Sandman was the first comic series that I at least read semi-religiously; prior to that, I read a comic here and a comic there, but was never really devoted to picking up every issue as they came out. Will Sandman hold up to my amber-colored memories of being engrossed in it? Let's find out.

Aesthetically, I love the way the early sequences in which Morpheus is held captive by Roderick and Alex Burgess adopt the style and look of DC's horror comics from the 70s, and then effectively segues into Morpheus encountering Cain, Abel, Destiny, and the hosts of The Witching Hour. 

That those cameos are inserted in such an interesting and clever way rubs uncomfortably against the avalanche of cameos that follow. Some of these cameos work well (Doctor Destiny is especially well-appropriated as a villain--his occupation of the diner is easily one of the darker turns in the Sandman series) but others (John Constantine, Etrigan, fucking Martian Manhunter) feels a bit too much like fanservice and inclusions that exist just to let you know that you're in the DC Universe. My memory tells me that as the series progresses it becomes a bit more deft at reinventing DC characters and mixing them with characters of its own inventions, but we'll have to see how that plays out.

One thing I hadn't counted on before starting this re-read was how heavily the specter of AIDS/HIV would loom in the background of the narrative. It's easy to forget it now, but at the time Sandman was coming out the disease was a predominant, era-defining anxiety. I'd hazard to guess that the Death Talks About Life mini-comic taught a lot of people about AIDS awareness and how to put on a condom because that specter was always in the shadows.

Speaking of Death, Preludes & Nocturnes concludes with "The Sound of Her Wings," which was the first bit of Sandman I got hold of. In retrospect, it's a weird place to start: it's a bridge between the just-concluded arc of Morpheus regaining his tools and the next arc about Morpheus chasing down errant dreams. Still, reading it again makes it clear why it inspired me to go back and read what I had missed; "The Sound of Her Wings" was like a revelation that comics could be so much more than how we usually imagine them within the strata of pop culture.