(no subject)
“How to tell a good story.”
Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman
How does one begin to describe The Sandman? One could easily go with Neil Gaiman’s brief summary of it in the epilogue of the series Endless Nights, “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die and makes his choice.” However this summary although true is almost too succinct to fit such a magnificent work. The Sandman, during its run from 1988 to 1996 took ideas and dreams from those of all walks of life and all cultures; it has influenced subcultures and has even won awards and praise from prestigious organizations. The range of people who are Sandman fans range from the stereotypical comic book geek to people like Clive Barker, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Claire Danes and Tori Amos. The ability of Gaiman to weave such a tale so masterfully shows that the art of storytelling is not dead. It is entering its renaissance.
Neil Gaiman’s stories are so laden with references and cross-references that Stephen King said in his introduction to the eighth volume, World’s End, “This is necessary stuff, and Gaiman knows pretty well what he’s up to. Check the names of the places and characters if you don’t believe me; there’s so much referral - self and otherwise - and so much cross-referencing going on here it’s damn near Joycean. Or Proustian. Or ovarian. Or one of those damned things they’re always nattering on about in English 202.” This is coming from Stephen King, one of the best storytellers in the world today, he praises the work as an example of masterful storytelling that he himself is a fan of.
The Sandman also speaks of the power of dreams, not Freud’s view of dreams as Kent Worcester writes in his critical essay, “The Graphic Novels of Neil Gaiman,” but a new view. “Dreams, Gaiman suggests, are a kind of "shadow-truth" that haunt and inspire entire societies, rather than highly individualized experiences.” (Worcester, Contemporary Literary Criticism, 195) Dreams and their counterparts, nightmares play a very important role in The Sandman from a serial killing nightmare with teeth for eyes known as The Corinthian (The Doll’s House, Sandman volume 2) to the aspirations of a struggling actor and playwright by the name of William Shakespeare (Dream Country, Sandman volume 3). The main character of the series Dream, The Sandman of the title, uses dreams to punish those that wrong him, for example, in the very first collection Preludes and Nocturnes, he curses the son of the man that imprisoned him for seven decades with the curse of eternal waking, an affliction in which the sufferer dreams that he has woken up only to discover that he is still dreaming, the dreams are horrible and frightening and the dreamer must suffer them over and over and over ad infinitum.
Now to begin to delve deeper into that which is The Sandman. There are several ways to go about this, one could go with the tried and true method of listing important events throughout the series but this not only ruins the story but it also causes the receiver of this “summary” to miss important little details upon which The Sandman thrives. Another way to introduce a reader to The Sandman is to give them little hints as to what happens, what they might like, what they might find interesting but this again fails to bring up those little details. The best way, I think, is to let the readers read the work themselves, this allows for the absorption of the story and all those little details and the nuances of the act of storytelling.
The characters of the Sandman are extremely important to the story. The eight main characters of import are The Endless, from oldest to youngest they are: Destiny, Death (a foxy gothic chick), Dream, and Destruction (who left), Desire, Despair and Delirium (who was once Delight). Each of these characters plays an important role in the story. Destiny reads the book of fate, he knows everything that happens as it happens. Death is well, Death. She shuffles us of our mortal coil. Dream weaves dreams and nightmares, giving them to the sleeping. Destruction is the source of war, plague, famine all those things that we consider horrible, he left due to his feeling that humanity no longer needed him to destroy. Desire is a hermaphrodite, he/she makes people want things, be it power, wealth, sex, whatever. Despair is the twin sister of Desire, she is the source of melancholy and sadness. Delirium is the embodiment of mania and is also frequently adorable. The relationship between Dream and his sister Death is relatively close even though they do not see each other often but their jobs are closely intertwined as Steve Ericsson wrote in his article “Dreamland” for the Los Angeles Times, “A sense of loss has gripped the comic from the beginning, when Dream lost his freedom within the prison of that English cellar. Ever since, it's been one loss after another: loss of faith, loss of friendship, loss of love, loss of innocence, loss of certainty, loss of identity, loss of
the past, loss of the soul, loss of our dreams every time we wake, with Dream the agent of all our life's losses, until Death transacts the last and greatest loss of all.” It is through all these relationships that the story is told.
The comic itself is filled with stories; they are stories within stories within stories within the whole story of The Sandman. Theses stories can be encapsulated in one issue or an entire series of issues, for example the tale of Dream’s human friend Hob Gadling is found in the middle of A Doll’s House and there are entire volumes of individual stories as in Dream Country. Each of these stories can give way to new stories and it is through these stories that The Sandman is told.
The influences that The Sandman has had are numerous. “Tori Amos wrote “Precious Things” and “Tear in Your Hand” after reading Sandman.” (Erickson) It has had a huge impact on the Goth subculture, especially Dream’s older sister Death. Death is, to girls of this subculture, everything about the feminine side of the Gothic lifestyle, she’s sexy, funny, esoteric but prone to seriousness. Dream has a similar effect on the men on this subculture; he’s a loner with a temper that has few friends and is notoriously bad with women. (Bender pp 10-11)
The Sandman is more than a comic book. It is more than a piece of fiction. It is a masterfully told story that belongs in the highest echelons of literature. It allowed for millions of comic book readers to come out of their rooms and yell at the top of their lungs that they liked comic books and they were proud of it. It is not something that is collected, it is read and re-read simply because it is that enjoyable. It is important to modern comic book readers and writers, it allows them to go into places that before The Sandman were otherwise unreachable. As Frank McConnell wrote in his essay, "Epic Comics: Neil Gaiman's Sandman." “If Sandman is a "comic," then The Magic Flute is a "musical" and A Midsummer Night's Dream is a skit. Read the damn thing: it's important.”