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Never to Wake:
In Continuing Praise of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman In a previous work, written in a time of far more innocent, starry-eyed academia, I likened Neil Gaiman's Sandman title to a watermelon - an odd comment, yes, but entirely meant as a compliment. Similarly, I created a related, awkward metaphor for Alan Moore's brilliantly multi-layered Watchmen as an onion. My reasoning for the former ugly comparison was as follows: "The levels to The Sandman do not form the metaphorical onion […] its levels weave and feedback upon each other so marvelously that it would be better to liken them to a watermelon with little seeds acting as checkpoints to the complex whole" (46). Now, over three years later, I can rectify my gaffe and speak both more eloquently and more precisely about Gaiman's 75-issue series. It is neither a watermelon nor an onion - it is a feast unto itself. Sandman is a banquet. And, of course, the master chef behind it all is Neil Gaiman. Gaiman, trained as a journalist and once a strictly prose-writer, was lured back into the comics of his childhood by fellow Briton, Alan Moore. According to Hy Bender, author of The Sandman Companion, "Moore's work was so remarkable that it inspired Gaiman, who had ignored comics for years, to start reading them again…and eventually to write comics himself" (9). Bender also notes that, even prior to Moore's Watchmen, Swamp Thing , or 2001 A.D. work, Gaiman has "pointed to the writings of [science fiction authors Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany as being especially influential" (8). But, this melting pot did not cook up Gaiman as this generation's foremost New Wave specialist; instead, it produced the inventor of arguably an entire comic book cottage industry, if not the genre itself. For, before Sandman there was no Vertigo-imprint at DC Comics. And, if one attributes the formation of DC's critically and commercially successful mature-readers line to Sandman's impact, then Vertigo's heritage can be traced back even further: to Gaiman and Dave McKean's Black Orchid mini-series. Technically Gaiman's second comic book work, Black Orchid was written before Sandman, yet released after; the Powers That Be of DC felt that the expensive mini-series would have more buzz if Gaiman were already a known commodity and writer of a monthly title. In essence, says Bender in his interview of Gaiman, "Sandman resulted from an effort to promote Black Orchid" (23). And, Black Orchid was spawned from the new, fertile soil of superhero deconstruction unearthed by both Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, allowing its tale to exhibit darkness and its audience to exercise their intelligence. Sandman, however, would mine this ground further, extending beyond just depressing gloom and twisted superheroics. Its first story-arc, the collection Preludes and Nocturnes, would feature mainstream DC personalities and certain abandoned characters from yesteryear - some informed by E.C. Comics, but many from "mostly 1970s DC horror comics," says Gaiman. "I've always had a deep and peculiar fondness for Cain and Abel, the Three Witches, and all those other odd DC mystery characters" (Bender 34). But these familiar elements were merely to give the series (and its readers) a common ground from which to begin. By issue 8, says editor Karen Berger, "the element of humanity and interpersonal relationships […] started coming through in Neil's work" (Introduction). The book leapt from its moorings in either the horror or 'grim and gritty superhero' genres to mythology, children's fiction, historical fiction, mutlicultural folklore, mystery, and Chaucerian narrative, just to name a few (though, interestingly, never science fiction itself). Sandman made good on the promise of comics' depth made by Moore, Miller, and Art Spiegelman's Maus - "Sandman's popularity and success" says Berger, "helped me make an argument for forming a new imprint […] a place for the provocative and personal visions of comics' best talent" (Introduction). But Gaiman did not just discover new sources from which to steal; he created a whole new recipe with those raw ingredients. "The Sandman violates all the rules about what makes a character popular in the super-hero-dominated comics industry" (Bender xi). First, Gaiman envisioned one series-sweeping plot, yet one that was required in order to savor the individual story-arcs or, in some cases, even just individual stand-alone issues. Second, Gaiman employed varied artistic teams and approaches to undertake each episode. At first, this was a matter of accident as the original illustrator, Sam Kieth, amicably opted to part ways with the title. However, in time, Gaiman would match a artist's drawing style to the story-arc's content. Therefore, we have from tangled expressiveness of Kelly Jones in Season of Mists to the jagged, thick lines of Marc Hempel in The Kindly Ones to the soft, detailed touches of Michael Zulli in The Wake (which, Gaiman notes in the afterword, was further informed by Zelanzy on the occasion of his death). Virtually no style, save perhaps absolute realism akin to Alex Ross, goes unused, and no convention remains unemployed. The only constant is the very unpredictability of Dave McKean's visceral covers for each issue. Gaiman's third and most compelling innovation lay in the writing itself. As Rolling Stone writer Mikal Gilmore says in the introduction to The Sandman's final collection, The Wake: That's how The Sandman works: It opens some truths and conceivabilities for the reader, then lets you figure out the others - the best ones - for yourself It is a work that engages the mind and the heart without trying to manipulate either. That's a neat trick in this - or any - time. Whether it is the closure created by two adjacent panels, the end of a page, the end of an issue, or the marked conclusion of a collection, Gaiman never tells all, leaving the reader to delve even more deeply for a character or event's significance. At the risk of being repetitive, I also choose to include two telling quotes from my chest-pounding, watermelon-work on comics being accepted as literature: Speaking of Neil Gaiman's work, Peter Straub said that "if this isn't literature, nothing is." [Frank] McConnell echoed that by praising The Sandman series as "the stuff of which literature is made: Learned, complex, straightforward, funny, melancholy, and irresistibly humanizing." (45) In short, Gaiman approached the comic as no different than literature - in fact, he may have ultimately given it greater respect for being, as Wil Eisner put it in his Comics & Sequential Art, "the cross-breeding of illustration and prose" (8). Gaiman's friend and mentor Moore had "virtually reinvent[ed] comics by infusing old, tired situations and genres with sharp, witty, and contemporary point of view;" likewise, Gaiman began by "employing a similar pioneering approach" but went further in granting his readers not only an intelligence on par with his own, but deep and complex emotions as well (Bender 9). While it involved immortal beings and starred anthropomorphic entities, The Sandman was wonderfully and touchingly human. At its core, The Sandman series is about stories; while, certainly, Bender is correct in saying that the title focuses on "where they come from and how they shape us," it is just as much about how we shape them (2). This latter point is best manifest by the story's main plot: the death of Dream of the Endless. For time untold, the seven anthropomorphic Endless siblings (Destiny, Death, Dream, Desire, Delight/Delirium, Destruction, and Despair) have existed in our universe, quiet rulers of their respective boundless kingdoms. In essence, they are symbols themselves - the personalities given to representations of universal order. And though the series does jump back and forth through time, its starting point must be the mortal ensnarement and imprisonment of Dream (aka the titular Sandman, Morpheus, the Story-King, the Lord-Shaper, etc.) for over seventy years. Dream regains dominance of his kingdom, the Dreaming, in which beings from all worlds and dimensions - including, in theory, our own - spend their sleeping existence. But the abduction has not left the stoic slumber-sovereign unaffected; after eons of rule, his responsibilities, miseries, and new-found compassion lead to his end, a conclusion for which, it seems, he may actually have been longing. A new manifestation of Dream, one of human origin, is appointed to take his place and continue as the revised King of Stories. One particularly salient point made in my otherwise-unwieldy collegiate paper is that sometime the immortal can be more fragile and human than humans themselves. I will not overstate my high regard for The Sandman and say it is appropriate for all readers - in fact, that would totally compromise what I have been striving over the last three years to communicate. The series contains gore, rape, nudity, religious content, suicide, cross-dressing, transgendering, fratricide, and a host of other red-flag issues; in a related vein, it draws from Shakespeare, the Bible, science, anthropology, mysticism, world history, and an even lengthier list of remarkable sources. The Sandman is, in short, an adult work of literature, and manages all the responsibilities of that lofty designation with aplomb. While it may be first accessible and comprehensible to the high school student, like any great work, it will continue to challenge and reward its older readers with each revisiting. It will not only overturn and expand one's perceptions of the comic book medium - as it did for me those scant years ago - but it will also widen one's conceptions of literature and the world all around us. It confounds and encourages the mind. It feeds and nourishes the soul. The Sandman is - and, I find with each re-reading, remains - a banquet. Works Cited
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