Absolute Sandman: Volume 1
For some reason, I am very slow when reading comics. I know that others breeze through comic books at a lightning pace, considering them easy, disposable reading... but I cannot. I go through them slowly, because I cannot simply blow by the pages--I have to take in each panel, my eye gets caught by the details. I pause and consider the dialogue timing, the layout, the lines and coloring, the focus and perspective. As such, I have only recently finished the first volume of Absolute Sandman. It's interesting--I have heard so much about it before, and am obviously familiar with much of Gaiman's other work, but it was in many ways not what I expected.
The first thing that tripped me up was how comicky it was. American comics speech writing is always difficult for me to deal with, and I tend to have to acclimatize myself to it slowly. At first brush its insistence on over-dramatic emphasis is always grating: "She DREAMS of a tall, dark MAN. His EYES burn like STARS in her HEAD." I mean, really? Do any of those words need to be emphasized that much? No. I could see how someone even less accustomed to comics than I would be put off from reading it entirely due to this, because it is a little hard to get past the style to the story at first. However, the story really is worth getting to, at the end of the first issue already the strangeness fades.
The second thing that surprised me was how full of other DC comic characters it was. Due to its being hailed as such a great and seminal graphic novel literary work, “a comic strip for intellectuals,” according to Norman Mailer, etc etc, I had assumed it to be fairly self-contained and independent. I thought it would be, well, just a story in comics form, as most other “literary comics” are. But no. I suppose it goes along with its being traditionally “comicky” in some ways-Gaiman is clearly a comic book fan, and it shows. He pulls in various villains, heroes and minor characters from all over the DC universe, and it does require at least a minimal familiarity with comic-superheroes to not be thrown by their appearances. I just barely skimmed by on the scant peripheral knowledge I have, and even so, I had to wikipedia a few things.
This is an interesting technique, this tying-in of the universes. Some of the characters he borrows come from universes really quite different in tone, setting and scope from Sandman, and though Gaiman does re-imagine most of these, it does not always work. Using John Constantine worked perfectly well, because he seemed to have been from a very compatible universe. Classic Batman characters also work fairly well, due to its being a fairly gritty, noir, horror-influenced, and thus in some ways “realistic” universe. However, using Dr. Destiny as the primary villain for the first 8 issues was a bit complicated. It seemed to work most of the time: Gaiman started finding his legs halfway through that story arc, with more and more moments that sounded specifically like him rather than like him-trying-to-do-someone-else. (Which, funnily enough, has a recognizable voice of its own, since it’s something he enjoys doing a fair amount.) I loved the way he wrote Dr. Destiny, and the little subplot-interaction between him and Rosemary in “Passengers” is great and one of the first things that made me go “Ah, yes, that’s Gaiman in the driver’s seat all right.” Nevertheless, it was hard to get past the absurdity of Morpheus of the Endless, King of Dreams, an entity of a level above gods, fighting Justice League’s Dr. Destiny as his main antagonist. This is a being who’s just gone up against Lucifer and won-and who, in his full powers, seems to be on equal standing with Lucifer-and he has to seriously entertain the pretensions of a skull-faced garden-variety comics villain? Really? The fight scene between the two was equally problematic, mostly because it was a fight scene: again, something that I felt belongs in the more mainstream superhero comics, but should not really be something for Morpheus to deal with. I am curious to see how the comic-character integration is handled in successive volumes, because the first volume definitely had a “testing-out-the-waters” feel to it. Even so, even the later “A Doll’s House” chapter, which generally felt very full-bodied Gaiman indeed, there was a cameo from 1970s comic Sandman that, to me, was very jarring and inappropriate to the general mood. I read some spoilers and apparently it sets up something very important to come later on indeed, but I think that if it had to be there, it should have been part of another arc, and incorporated in a different way.
Speaking of this volume having a “testing-out-the-waters” feel, one of the most interesting things in reading it was following the story’s growth and development, in both the art and the writing. Before I read Sandman, thegreatmissjj told me that she felt the first few chapters were basically just Gaiman-doing-straight-up-horror, and it’s not till later in the volume that it switches over to fantasy and acquires a greater breadth of story. This is very true (and Gaiman characterizes the volume much the same way in the author’s note at the end). What happens specifically though, as far as I’m concerned, is not so much that Sandman shifts from horror to dark fantasy, but that if shifts from a collection of short stories to an epic.
It’s interesting too, because even the short horror stories are good, and then it continues to get, as Alice would say, gooder and more gooder. As stated before, after Dr. Destiny is introduced, the story begins to gather more to itself (initially it is too much a simple quest-object-retrieval narrative), and reading it I’d think “Ok, I see where we’re at now,” and then it would go up another step. “24 Hours” for instance, was quite wonderful, but it didn’t feel like it tied to anything enough-just a brilliant little interlude dropped in from nowhere, for no real reason. With “The Doll’s House” and the ensuing chapters though, the stand alone interludes became much more clearly defined, and everything else got gathered together (and even the stand-alones would be returned to and touched upon again). And this is, to my eyes, Gaiman’s main strength: the fact that at his best, he can spin a story that is just amazing in its scope and intricacy, and where everything ties together like a cobweb. Characters that one thinks are introduced just as mood pieces or as incidentals-and who’d work just fine as nothing more than mood pieces or incidentals-reappear later in the story with additional significance, and suddenly whole disparate strands of narrative are woven together. And once woven together, patterns might form, and threads might acquire greater or lesser prominence, but they are not dropped, not cut off. Even when not at the forefront, they remain quietly but persistently in the body of the tapestry, and they help hold up whatever happens to be at the center.
And so the story coils and uncoils, gathers into itself and branches out, and at the end of the volume what started out as a loose collection of tales centering vaguely about a character both sharpens and slackens in focus, expands, and suddenly we have the makings of one loose tale that has the potential to hold all other tales within it. A story that’s no longer necessarily about one character, or even any set of characters, but about the impact of the idea of that character on the world. An epic.
The evolution of art is almost equally fascinating. I have to say I am not at all fond of the initial artist’s work on it, and the beginning art, as much as the comicky-punctuated dialogue, was something I had to grit my teeth and get through. However, the art begins to improve by/after the third story-chapter (there’s quite a juggling of artists there but I don’t feel like going into it), and with the last pages of “24 Hours” we officially enter upon a style that switched me from putting up with the art, to actively enjoying it. (Yes, it’s when Morpheus gets hot. I’d say I’m shallow but no, really, that’s where the art markedly improves.) And soon after we enter onto the phase of Sandman where each story is done by a new guest artist, and that, although a bit whiplash-inducing sometimes, is interesting in its own way. Guest artists aside, however, at around the same time that the art gets better in general is when the layout also becomes increasingly innovative. In the first few issues, aside from a few interesting techniques, the layout is mostly pedestrian, or rather, workmanlike. It does what it needs to do. I thought at first that this was due to the comic being not very new, and to my having been familiarized with most creative layout techniques via manga and newer graphic novels. But soon I realized that it was really just due to Gaiman’s (and his artists) initial timidity.
Just as the story comes more under a steady hand and acquires a vision, so do the layouts, and some of the tricks here really caught me off guard. There’s just a general increasing mastery of the flow of the page, of course-nothing I can easily describe or pinpoint here, but an overall intensified visual interest-and then there are the more easily specified tricks. One of the techniques that most impressed me was the segue into a dream in “The Doll’s House” that flipped the dream-world interludes in a horizontal page layout, as opposed to the vertical one of the everyday world. A character falls asleep, and the next page shows her in a vertical panel, but in a position that should really be horizontal. The next speech bubble in the panel below is, as is the panel, at a bit of an angle-and the next one even more so, and the next one even more, and before you know it you’ve had to flip the entire book around to read the rest of the panels. And just as you realize with the next page that the story has now indeed been flipped over to a horizontal format (and you wonder if it’s just for these one-and-a-half pages or if it’s a more permanent change), you open up the next page and see… a wonderful double-page spread of the interior of Morpheus’ castle in the Dreaming.
The perspective on the castle, pulling you in, and the very act of opening the page upward rather than flipping it to the side in the usual way, slightly unsettling and wonderful in its un-usualness, like unwrapping a present-all of that combines to make the entrance to the Dreaming proper an extremely effective one. I just love the idea of making the reader interact not just with the drawings and words, but with the material of the book-using that to create part of the reader experience. And then after a few pages of this, there’s a word panel printed “sideways” exhorting the dreaming character to wake up, and we’re back to the normal layout position again.
A similar device occurs later, when the same character dreams a vortex, and the panels on the side of the page are each oriented in a different direction. The change between each panel is sharper than the gradual curving of the first dream, and the panels themselves are more spread out, so I found myself turning the book around faster and faster to keep up with my previous reading speed-so that by the time I arrived at the last panel, I was a little bit dizzy. Just so-after all, this was all taking place is a swirling vortex. Again, the physical material of the book, and the actions that the reader has to take to take in the content are used to create an experience that augments the content itself. Lovely.
And now I really have to order the second volume.
The first thing that tripped me up was how comicky it was. American comics speech writing is always difficult for me to deal with, and I tend to have to acclimatize myself to it slowly. At first brush its insistence on over-dramatic emphasis is always grating: "She DREAMS of a tall, dark MAN. His EYES burn like STARS in her HEAD." I mean, really? Do any of those words need to be emphasized that much? No. I could see how someone even less accustomed to comics than I would be put off from reading it entirely due to this, because it is a little hard to get past the style to the story at first. However, the story really is worth getting to, at the end of the first issue already the strangeness fades.
The second thing that surprised me was how full of other DC comic characters it was. Due to its being hailed as such a great and seminal graphic novel literary work, “a comic strip for intellectuals,” according to Norman Mailer, etc etc, I had assumed it to be fairly self-contained and independent. I thought it would be, well, just a story in comics form, as most other “literary comics” are. But no. I suppose it goes along with its being traditionally “comicky” in some ways-Gaiman is clearly a comic book fan, and it shows. He pulls in various villains, heroes and minor characters from all over the DC universe, and it does require at least a minimal familiarity with comic-superheroes to not be thrown by their appearances. I just barely skimmed by on the scant peripheral knowledge I have, and even so, I had to wikipedia a few things.
This is an interesting technique, this tying-in of the universes. Some of the characters he borrows come from universes really quite different in tone, setting and scope from Sandman, and though Gaiman does re-imagine most of these, it does not always work. Using John Constantine worked perfectly well, because he seemed to have been from a very compatible universe. Classic Batman characters also work fairly well, due to its being a fairly gritty, noir, horror-influenced, and thus in some ways “realistic” universe. However, using Dr. Destiny as the primary villain for the first 8 issues was a bit complicated. It seemed to work most of the time: Gaiman started finding his legs halfway through that story arc, with more and more moments that sounded specifically like him rather than like him-trying-to-do-someone-else. (Which, funnily enough, has a recognizable voice of its own, since it’s something he enjoys doing a fair amount.) I loved the way he wrote Dr. Destiny, and the little subplot-interaction between him and Rosemary in “Passengers” is great and one of the first things that made me go “Ah, yes, that’s Gaiman in the driver’s seat all right.” Nevertheless, it was hard to get past the absurdity of Morpheus of the Endless, King of Dreams, an entity of a level above gods, fighting Justice League’s Dr. Destiny as his main antagonist. This is a being who’s just gone up against Lucifer and won-and who, in his full powers, seems to be on equal standing with Lucifer-and he has to seriously entertain the pretensions of a skull-faced garden-variety comics villain? Really? The fight scene between the two was equally problematic, mostly because it was a fight scene: again, something that I felt belongs in the more mainstream superhero comics, but should not really be something for Morpheus to deal with. I am curious to see how the comic-character integration is handled in successive volumes, because the first volume definitely had a “testing-out-the-waters” feel to it. Even so, even the later “A Doll’s House” chapter, which generally felt very full-bodied Gaiman indeed, there was a cameo from 1970s comic Sandman that, to me, was very jarring and inappropriate to the general mood. I read some spoilers and apparently it sets up something very important to come later on indeed, but I think that if it had to be there, it should have been part of another arc, and incorporated in a different way.
Speaking of this volume having a “testing-out-the-waters” feel, one of the most interesting things in reading it was following the story’s growth and development, in both the art and the writing. Before I read Sandman, thegreatmissjj told me that she felt the first few chapters were basically just Gaiman-doing-straight-up-horror, and it’s not till later in the volume that it switches over to fantasy and acquires a greater breadth of story. This is very true (and Gaiman characterizes the volume much the same way in the author’s note at the end). What happens specifically though, as far as I’m concerned, is not so much that Sandman shifts from horror to dark fantasy, but that if shifts from a collection of short stories to an epic.
It’s interesting too, because even the short horror stories are good, and then it continues to get, as Alice would say, gooder and more gooder. As stated before, after Dr. Destiny is introduced, the story begins to gather more to itself (initially it is too much a simple quest-object-retrieval narrative), and reading it I’d think “Ok, I see where we’re at now,” and then it would go up another step. “24 Hours” for instance, was quite wonderful, but it didn’t feel like it tied to anything enough-just a brilliant little interlude dropped in from nowhere, for no real reason. With “The Doll’s House” and the ensuing chapters though, the stand alone interludes became much more clearly defined, and everything else got gathered together (and even the stand-alones would be returned to and touched upon again). And this is, to my eyes, Gaiman’s main strength: the fact that at his best, he can spin a story that is just amazing in its scope and intricacy, and where everything ties together like a cobweb. Characters that one thinks are introduced just as mood pieces or as incidentals-and who’d work just fine as nothing more than mood pieces or incidentals-reappear later in the story with additional significance, and suddenly whole disparate strands of narrative are woven together. And once woven together, patterns might form, and threads might acquire greater or lesser prominence, but they are not dropped, not cut off. Even when not at the forefront, they remain quietly but persistently in the body of the tapestry, and they help hold up whatever happens to be at the center.
And so the story coils and uncoils, gathers into itself and branches out, and at the end of the volume what started out as a loose collection of tales centering vaguely about a character both sharpens and slackens in focus, expands, and suddenly we have the makings of one loose tale that has the potential to hold all other tales within it. A story that’s no longer necessarily about one character, or even any set of characters, but about the impact of the idea of that character on the world. An epic.
The evolution of art is almost equally fascinating. I have to say I am not at all fond of the initial artist’s work on it, and the beginning art, as much as the comicky-punctuated dialogue, was something I had to grit my teeth and get through. However, the art begins to improve by/after the third story-chapter (there’s quite a juggling of artists there but I don’t feel like going into it), and with the last pages of “24 Hours” we officially enter upon a style that switched me from putting up with the art, to actively enjoying it. (Yes, it’s when Morpheus gets hot. I’d say I’m shallow but no, really, that’s where the art markedly improves.) And soon after we enter onto the phase of Sandman where each story is done by a new guest artist, and that, although a bit whiplash-inducing sometimes, is interesting in its own way. Guest artists aside, however, at around the same time that the art gets better in general is when the layout also becomes increasingly innovative. In the first few issues, aside from a few interesting techniques, the layout is mostly pedestrian, or rather, workmanlike. It does what it needs to do. I thought at first that this was due to the comic being not very new, and to my having been familiarized with most creative layout techniques via manga and newer graphic novels. But soon I realized that it was really just due to Gaiman’s (and his artists) initial timidity.
Just as the story comes more under a steady hand and acquires a vision, so do the layouts, and some of the tricks here really caught me off guard. There’s just a general increasing mastery of the flow of the page, of course-nothing I can easily describe or pinpoint here, but an overall intensified visual interest-and then there are the more easily specified tricks. One of the techniques that most impressed me was the segue into a dream in “The Doll’s House” that flipped the dream-world interludes in a horizontal page layout, as opposed to the vertical one of the everyday world. A character falls asleep, and the next page shows her in a vertical panel, but in a position that should really be horizontal. The next speech bubble in the panel below is, as is the panel, at a bit of an angle-and the next one even more so, and the next one even more, and before you know it you’ve had to flip the entire book around to read the rest of the panels. And just as you realize with the next page that the story has now indeed been flipped over to a horizontal format (and you wonder if it’s just for these one-and-a-half pages or if it’s a more permanent change), you open up the next page and see… a wonderful double-page spread of the interior of Morpheus’ castle in the Dreaming.
The perspective on the castle, pulling you in, and the very act of opening the page upward rather than flipping it to the side in the usual way, slightly unsettling and wonderful in its un-usualness, like unwrapping a present-all of that combines to make the entrance to the Dreaming proper an extremely effective one. I just love the idea of making the reader interact not just with the drawings and words, but with the material of the book-using that to create part of the reader experience. And then after a few pages of this, there’s a word panel printed “sideways” exhorting the dreaming character to wake up, and we’re back to the normal layout position again.
A similar device occurs later, when the same character dreams a vortex, and the panels on the side of the page are each oriented in a different direction. The change between each panel is sharper than the gradual curving of the first dream, and the panels themselves are more spread out, so I found myself turning the book around faster and faster to keep up with my previous reading speed-so that by the time I arrived at the last panel, I was a little bit dizzy. Just so-after all, this was all taking place is a swirling vortex. Again, the physical material of the book, and the actions that the reader has to take to take in the content are used to create an experience that augments the content itself. Lovely.
And now I really have to order the second volume.