SANDMAN, BY NEIL GAIMAN ET AL.

I’ve been re-reading Sandman and am overjoyed to find it just as wonderful for me as it was 10 years ago. I defy you to find a more original, intricate, brilliant, finely-wrought work of fantasy published in the last twenty years, in any medium.

For those unfamiliar with it, Sandman was a series of comics published under the DC / Vertigo imprint in the late 80s and early 90s. Conceived of and written by Neil Gaiman, and featuring an ever-changing cadre of artists, the series described a world where gods and myth had tangible reality, reality that extended into and melded with modern life. As long as belief remained, gods, stories, and imaginary places, could sustain itself. Behind gods and stories, though, stand the Endless, personifications of some fundamental aspects of sentient life: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. The series focuses on Dream, beginning with his imprisonment by a mortal man, and ending in his convoluted demise.

As usual I’ve depicted one of my favorite things in the world as a crude rag the unsavory might read to break the monotony of diet composed strictly of glossy porno and greasy Fritos. I assure you, it is not!

It was cool to watch the series evolve. The first collection, Preludes & Nocturnes is fantastic, but a little crude. Sam Kieth’s wild and wacky pencil work is wonderful, but creates a sense of kitschy horror that usually compels me to counsel patience for first-time readers. “Don’t worry, it’ll get better.” I think Dringenberg’s work in the later issues of the book are more appropriate in tone, its realism a little more unsettling. When crazy things happen in a crazy fashion, well, that’s just what you’d expect. But crazy things in a realistic style are a little more unsettling.

Even some of the writing seemed a bit crude to me, all the way through Season of Mists (the fourth collection). Gaiman adopts many, many voices over the course of the series, from modern conversational tones, to affected period voices, to what I guess I would describe as “storyteller” style. Most of my cringing moments were the result of Dream speaking. He gets this sort of absurdly arch diction that makes him seem ridiculous at times, like a kid obsessed with the language in Tolkein. He says things like “mislike.” That bugged me. But aside from that, Gaiman’s versatility is a pleasure. The conversational dialog in Game of You seems a far leap from the wistful magicality of the language in the one-shot Ramadan, but they both work very well.

Ramadan, by the way, is a work of perfect comics. The same is true of all of Marc Hempel’s work in The Kindly Ones. These later stories see everything coming together perfectly, from line work to inking to colors to typography to prose. With it’s huge diversity of styles, you could probably teach a whole course on comics criticism using just Sandman.

One of the things I like so much about Sandman is that it’s not just perfection of craft, or its intricate and believable world, but that the plots and characters are very finely woven. Rose Walker seems like a real person. Dream, though completely unreal, has strange and compelling motives and impulses. The whole final portion of the series is a wonderful, massive perspective shift that ties the diverse and disparate antecedent stories into a single cohesive one. It’s a truly great story.

I guess I just spent several paragraphs saying a whole lot of nothing other than, “I still really like it!” Oh well. Looking forward to buying the “Absolute” editions coming out this fall. My collection is gappy after years of forgotten lending, and the current runs have terrible covers.