Neil Gaiman has often said that Morpheus, the Dream-King,
had always been in my mind, like that Michelangelo analogy about a sculpture already being in the marble.
A thin man, perfectly white, naked and silent, imprisoned in a glass globe, a figure of archetype, you might say. Actually, many have said it. The man with the burning eyes, not a figure of nightmare, not exactly—but someone dangerous and evocative. Someone who leads your dreams, an animus whose representation is determined by your expectations. What a cool idea.
The Sandman was not the first great graphic novel, nor the first great comic book series. But it opened doors that had been closed—to women especially. It established the graphic novel as literature worthy of critical study (Art Spiegelman’s Maus was a cultural phenomenon first, but Maus’ importance is usually grounded in its historic and sociological values). The Sandman’s following built slowly, flying very much under the critics’ radar, and became a powerhouse cultural blockbuster that fundamentally changed comic books as an art form. It set off seismic cultural shifts that still reverberate. Parts of it are terrifying, parts comic, pathetic and tender, brutal and cruel, moving, exhilarating, perilously exotic and painfully familiar.
And we’re not covering it all in one week. If you haven’t read The Sandman, please do yourself a favor and run—don’t saunter—to your nearest bookstore and get the whole thing. It’s not cheap, but you won’t be sorry. The Sandman established Neil Gaiman’s reputation as a great literary writer—and comic books are not usually the medium through which great literary forces are revealed.
The Sandman began in 1989 when Gaiman was hired by DC Comics to write a new storyline about a character who had been bouncing around in the DC universe and had never really caught fire. The series ran until 1996, stretched over seventy-five issues and formed itself into a grand novel that was serialized in ten volumes published by Vertigo, starting with Preludes and Nocturnes.
The story begins with a cult of would-be magicians led by an Aleister Crowley-type figure named Roderick Burgess, or the Magus, who attempt to capture and imprison Death. However, they blow it, snaring instead a mysterious figure they eventually deduce is Dream. Afraid to release him, Burgess and his son Alec keep Morpheus imprisoned….until he escapes. But by then, seventy years have passed—the king of Dreams has been away from his realm, and all kinds of unpleasant things have happened in his absence.
In the first eight episodes (anthologized in Preludes and Nocturnes) Gaiman pays tribute to the Sandman’s different incarnations. The original 1930’s Sandman, you may remember, was Wesley Dodds, created by Gardner Fox and Bert Christman.
Dreaming continues, even without the lord of the Dreaming to run the show. Some people can’t fall asleep; others can’t wake up. Still others unknowingly try to fill Dream’s shoes (Brute, Glob and Hector Hall all show up in Vol. 2, The Doll’s House), but there no substitute for Morpheus himself. Pompous, rules-bound, emotionally bottled up, Morpheus is our hero. The world has been without him for seventy years, and it has suffered. But Morpheus, too, has suffered, and his captivity has changed him in ways he doesn’t expect or anticipate. This crisis sets the story moving, gathering steam and driving toward its tragic/cathartic conclusion.
For Morpheus, after escape the first order of business is to re-establish his power and authority, which takes us on a breezy tour of the DC Comics universe, as we meet figures like John Constantine, Mister Miracle (aka Scott Free), J’onn J’onnz, Doctor Destiny, and the Justice League International, as well as Professor Crane and the rest of the denizens of Arkham Asylum, all ingeniously woven into the story lines.
Through his interactions with the existing DC Comic universe, it feels almost as if Gaiman is checking one box after another, advancing his plot, taking the elements of other writers and melding them irresistibly into something else, something new and wholly different. Because along with the DC characters, we meet some new faces and other familiar ones, all of whom will return and grow: 247-year old Mad Hettie, Lucifer Morningstar, Nada, Cain and Abel—the characters from the First Story, who live in the Dreaming along with Lucius the librarian, Eve in her cave, and Matthew the Raven who was once a man and a taxi driver. From the first issue, it’s obvious that this is not your standard superhero comic.
Nor are the figures who live in the Dreaming, even the stock characters, what you’d expect of story elements. These are full characters. Although they’re created and manifest in the Dreaming (in the unconscious) and subject to Morpheus as their creator and their lord, they have their own ambitions and secrets, as well as the capacity themselves to dream of things that will never happen. In one of the most (at least to me) devastating moments in Vol. 1, in Episode 2, “Imperfect Hosts,” the recently-murdered and resurrected Abel tells his pet gargoyle Goldie,
a secret story. It’s a story of two brothers. And they, uh...they loved each other very much. And they were always nice to each other. And the elder brother would never hurt the younger brother. Never. And they lived together in the same house. And they were… hnh. uhah. Th-they were, uh, v-very happy. I’m sorry. I wasn’t—I’m n-not crying. I’m really not crying. It’s only blood, little brother. Only blood. [1]
Gaiman has written that occasionally he can go back to the first issues of The Sandman and read a phrase that doesn’t make him cringe. The first volume has a perfunctory air, a clearing of the throat, a sense of closing other writers’ tabs and sketching out the next incarnation. Preludes and Nocturnes sets the table, but we don’t really know what the main course is going to be, at least not until the last installment of Vol 1, “The Sound of Her Wings.” Karen Berger, who edited the series, wrote of the beginning,
In rereading the first storyline of the series, I was struck by a dichotomy. On the one hand, the first seven issues were a simple quest tale about the once-captive ruler of the dreamworld, featuring known DC characters and their haunts in known roles. Revenge, battle, quest fulfilled. Conventional stuff? Perhaps. On the other hand, the opening story also introduced a mysterious and powerful yet harebracined bunch of occultist and hangers-on, a bizarre ‘sleeping sickness’ that affected seemingly random people — in an ambitious tale that took these characters through several decades of strange and tumultuous changes. Conventional stuff? Not at all. Still, in the hands of a different writer, the seeds that were planted in this fertile story ground could have borne a B-level fantasy/horror title.
As the series branched out in unexpected directions, SANDMAN developed into one of the most atypical books in comics. For me, the turning point was issue #8, “The Sound of her Wings.” [2]
Which is a long way of saying that Sandman became something that not even the series editor expected. Even so, the entire story arc is grounded in the beginning, establishing the universe and defining it, introducing some of the essential story-drivers. From the first, Gaiman says, “I knew the shape. The whole of Sandman was written like that: I had an idea of the shape of a story that I wanted to tell and the details grew in time.” Even though Gaiman didn’t expect to be given license to build the story over its fifteen-year run, he put all the mechanisms in place to bring the great themes and devices of the novel to fruition.
We know that Morpheus, the Dream-Lord, is the powerful ruler of his own realm and that realm is our collective unconscious, but we don’t get a whiff of who he is—younger brother of Destiny and Death, and one of the Endless. The Endless really don’t come into the story until we meet Death, who shows up to check in on, chastise, and lovingly set straight her broody brother, calling him “utterly the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane! an infantile, adolescent, pathetic specimen!”[3]
As only a loving sister can do, she sets him on his feet again. She is the most humane of the family, protective of her little brother, and as sensible as she is powerful.
The Endless are
a set of seven beings who have ruled the universe since the beginning of time. They are not gods, although the mistake could easily be made....They are more than gods, and existed before the first god was born, and will be around after the last god is dead. Rather, they are are manifestations of consciousness, and their names are their functions. They are, from oldest to youngest: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, twins Desire and Despair, and Delirium, who was once Delight. In a sense they are the reason we have gods, for they are the constituents of consciousness, for in Gaiman's world the gods come from dreams. [4]
In time we’ll get to know the whole family. It can be argued that eldest to youngest is also their ranking relative to essential human qualities: one’s destiny is paramount; next comes death, then the ability to dream, then the impulse to destroy. Desire and despair are closely linked (twins), and Desire is one of the most interesting personifications imaginable—entirely androgynous, devious, short-sighted and selfish—as most desires are. Delirium has changed; the world has changed her, as people are no longer capable of delight. Through the series we see them adapt, interact with the world, and grow as a bickering, difficult and supremely dysfunctional crew.
The Endless point up an interesting relationship that Gaiman weaves into his powerful characters: as the Endless need sentient life, the way gods needs believers if they are to exist and exert agency (we see a lot of this developed in American Gods and elsewhere in The Sandman), sentience, consciousness itself, needs the Endless. Last of all in the universe will be Death, whose last act will be to turn off the lights and close the door. The seven manifestations of consciousness define existence—our relationship with them is reciprocal: to exist, they need us. And we need them in order to be conscious, to make sense of what it is to be alive.
You might think a comic book is an odd place for such metaphysics, but it’s a natural fit. You don’t read a comic the way you read a novel. The process is every bit as demanding, but the skill set is a little different. Gaiman has described the process as “magical,” a collaboration between writer, artist and reader. A threesome, if you will:
[T]he really important things in comics are occurring in the panel gutters, they're occurring between panels as the person reading the comics is moving you through, is creating a film in their heads. You're giving them magic, you are allowing them in, and they are contributing and they are creating the movement, they are creating the illusion of time passing.
Reading a comic book, he explains, is not at all like film; watching a film, the viewer is passive, absorbing the narrative and the director’s vision like a sponge, very much along for the ride. Interpreting a comic requires an active reader; it requires an engaged imagination.
Engaging imagination is where it all starts. Likewise, Gaiman gives us a Morpheus whose appearance is determined by who’s doing the dreaming.
One of the other great benefits of The Sandman in general is the quality of the artwork, which meshes flawlessly with the writing. The illustrators and cover artists Dave McKean, Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Kelley Jones, Charles Vess, P. Craig Russell, Shawn McManus, Jill Thompson, Vince Locke, J. H. Williams II, Dave Stewart, and others provide looks that range from delicate line-drawn and shaded images to edgy Matisse-like cutouts and trippy color orgies. Something for everyone, and all of it works. Each artist brings a different vibe to the act of interpreting the text itself. The lettering for the different characters’ dialogue also assists reader interpretation. Lucifer’s voice is particularly lovely, and Episode 4, “A Hope in Hell,” is particularly visually rich).
Next week: perhaps something about Gaiman and mythopoeics, as well as Lady Joanna Constantine and the French Revolution [that’s an Easter egg].
References
1. Neil Gaiman. “Imperfect Hosts,” In The Sandman, Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes, NY: Vertigo, 1991, p. 78.
2. Karen Berger, “Introduction.” Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes, NY: Vertigo, 1991.
3. Neil Gaiman. “The Sound of Her Wings,” In The Sandman, Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes, NY: Vertigo, 1991, p. 219.
4. Stephen Ruach. Neil Gaiman's The Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of Modern Myth. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2003, p. 18.