'the sandman'

 Read it, loved it, and I quit too. FIrst thing I remember consciously agreeing with the Morningstar on.

I've had a few friends and colleagues with similar disdain for comic books, but I keep winning them over. I regularly buy my wife the "Strangers in Paradise" trades because she can't get enough of them,and a friend of mine from WCN Newspapers is now well and truly hooked on Sandman. I just lent him "Fables and Recollections" and "The Kindly Ones" to get him on the home stretch. Working at WCN, Brian doesn't have the money to buy them, but he loves a good horror story and figures he probably will buy them later on.

And of course, he was hooked enough that I was able to get him to read "V for Vendetta" and since has started looking up other comics on his own. So I claim him as another convert to appreciating comic books as a latter 20th-century art form.


"A Doll's House," since it's set at a "cereal convention," does suggest some fairly graphic stuff, although most of it is left to the reader's imagination (thereby making it worse). Still, it's important because of what happens with Rose Walker toward the end of the collection; it introduces the majorly significant Lyta Hall and her son, Daniel; it relates the story of Dream's relationship with Nada; it introduces Hob and sets up Shakespeare's indentureship under Dream; and also contains the first appearance of the Corinthian, Fiddler's Green and Matthew. Each of those ends up playing a vital role in later stories.

The dead return in "Seasons of Mist," which includes the story of Edwin Paine and how he continues his education. (At least I think that's his name -- my copy is on loan to another friend.) That volume had some disquieting parts, but nothing that gave me nightmares. Mostly I got a kick out of the idea of Morningstar quitting as the Adversary, and I loved the irony of Duma and Remiel being told by the Voice to take office at hell -- especially when Remiel complained it was unjust and how he would rebel, and then realized there was nowhere else for him to go but into hell if he chose to reject the Presence.

The collections generally stand well independently. They're self-contained and give you enough information to figure out what's going on -- something made necessary by the medium, since "Sandman" originally was published over something like a seven-year period in monthly 30-page installments. I can understand a reluctance to read it -- one of the stories in "The Kindly One" actually gave me nightmares -- but the English degree-holding part of me still has to underscore the significance of the volume for the overall series.

Because it is a single cohesive work, and not merely episodic like many superhero titles, it has a certain cadence that reaches a tremendous climax in "The Kindly Ones" before tapering off into the denoument of "The Wake." Without question, it's the finest comic to come out a mainstream publisher in ages. (It's also deservedly recognized as resurrecting horror comics and breathing new life into the comics medium as a whole.)

From what I heard, Gaiman kept expecting to get canceled each issue because of the content.

I've also discovered a certain odd thrill in discovering the depths of literature and comics that Gaiman plumbed for Sandman. Cain and Abel once were the hosts of two of D.C.'s other, long-canceled horror comics, called "House of Mysteries" and "House of Secrets" respectively. I even owned a copy of an issue of the former, at one point. No idea what's happened to it since then. Prez appeared in a miserably conceived comic about 30 years ago.