Here’s the new “Man of Steel” trailer, and it looks pretty good.

Daniel D. Snyder takes stock of the current state of superhero movies in the wake of the release of The Dark Knight Rises” and discusses what’s next.

When The Dark Knight Rises leaves theaters (probably sometime after the sun has gone out), it will mark the end of arguably the most commercially and critically successful comic-book movie franchise of all time. Save for Marvel’s loosely connected Avengers films, no series will have grossed more money at the box office, been subjected to more acute critical analysis, or garnered such devotion from both genre aficionados and outsiders.

This is all great for comic-book movies, which have now proven themselves not only to be a source of revenue but of genuine artistic worth. But what happens now? Has the genre peaked? In the wake of The Dark Knight Rises, it’s time to look at the future of comic book movies and see where they might go from here:

The DC/Warner Bros. partnership is screwed

Warner Brothers, which owns DC Comics, is in no danger of folding, but their stake in the comic-book movie market is about to shrink dramatically. Looking at the somewhat surprising success of Columbia Pictures’ Spider-Man’s “unnecessary” reboot ($500 million so far worldwide) a mere five years after its last installment, it may be tempting for Warner Bros. to get Batman back in theaters as fast as possible. But The Amazing Spider-Man had the benefit of following the commercially successful but critically reviled Spider-Man 3 (it wasn’t exactly like most fans felt director Sam Raimi’s legacy would be spoiled by the reboot). Considering the success and inevitable enshrinement of the Dark Knight trilogy, Warner Bros. would be wise to put as much distance as they can between Christopher Nolan’s final Batman film and the Caped Crusader’s next adventure.

Warner Bros. execs’ best hope for the future is next year’s Superman reboot, Man of Steel, but they’ll be relying on an iconic brand to overcome the deficiencies of its director, Zack Snyder, whose stock took a major hit in 2011 after the misogynistic boyhood fantasy flick Sucker Punch.

Check out the whole article for the rest of his take.

Note: “As I Go Along” is a new feature in which I review and discuss the best graphic novels and series that I haven’t yet had a chance to read. These are the titles your comic-loving friends have been trying to push into your hands for years, only now I’ll be doing the pushing (or telling you not to bother). The post will include spoilers for those who have not yet read the work.

“Dreams are composed of many things, my son. Of images and hopes, of fears and memories. Memories of the past, and memories of the future…”

Much like the third “Sandman” collection, “Dream Country,” “Fables and Reflections” is a collection of one-issue short stories. Most of these tales don’t contribute to the series’ major story arc other than to provide background and subtext, the exception being the collection’s middle story, “The Song of Orpheus.”

Aside from “Orpheus,” the stories in “Fables and Reflections” are divided into two groups (thematically, not in the paperback). The first group is labelled “Convergences.” Each of these issues is structured as a story within a story and explores the relationships between story and storyteller, which are often convergent, get it? The second is “Distant Mirrors,” which focuses on rulers, or more specifically, emperors, and the nature of power. I spent a whole lot of time on Wikipedia reading about his Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton I, Maximilien Robespierre and Saint-Just,Augustus Caesar, and  Hārūn al-Rashīd after reading these stories. Gaiman will do that, get you interested in things you’d otherwise never give a second glance.

The four “Distant Mirrors” stories show Dream (and sometimes his relatives) influencing those rulers and their actions. Everything ends up the same way we learned in history class, but in this universe the things in the middle happened a bit differently. It turns out failed businessman Joshua Abraham Norton didn’t just go mad and name himself Emperor of the United States. In fact, it all happened because Despair challenges Dream to keep Norton in his realm for the rest of his life. Rather than let Norton wallow in his pity and fall into his sister’s control, Dream allows him to believe he’s in charge. Normally, such insanity would mean the “Emperor” would be Delirium’s property, but as she points out in one of the most poignant lines I’ve ever read in a comic book (or anywhere, really), “His madness keeps him sane.”

There’s no time to talk about all the stories, so instead I’ll focus on “Thermidor,” which, along with being  my favorite, and serves as something of an introduction to “The Song of Orpheus.” Dream charges the Lady Johanna Constantine, who first appeared in “Men of Good Fortune,” with the task of removing his son’s (body free but nonetheless immortal) head from France. The leaders of the revolution seek to destroy it because they are “remaking the world… creating an age of pure reason,” and such an “object of superstition” has no place in their new “utopia.”

“Thermidor” is far and away the most political entry of the “Sandman” series thus far. Gaiman’s scathing critique of those who oversaw the “Reign of Terror” is clear. He mocks these Robespierre and Saint-Just, who had tens of thousands killed, “lost the saints and burnt the churches” in the name of reason. The juxtaposition is quite obvious: they’re seeking to destroy a single head in the name of logic as a guillotine, irrationality incarnate, sits outside the window.

Anyhow, onward to “The Song of Orpheus,” a double-issue in which we finally get the backstory of Dream’s oft-mentioned but never shown progeny, up to and including just how he ended up as an immortal head without a body. Behind the classic Greek myth of Orpheus, Gaiman layers his own characters and their motivations. In the “Sandman” version of the tale, Orpheus is the son of Dream and Calliope, the muse who you’ll recall was set free by her former lover back in “Dream Country.”

The story begins with Orpheus’s wedding to Eurydice. Following the mythology, the young bride dies and Orpheus sets out to the underworld to take her back. After singing a song, Hades tells him (more or less), “sure your wife will be resurrected and you’ll both be allowed to leave the underworld on one condition: don’t look back.” Orpheus looks back, of course, because if he didn’t there would be no conflict and thus, no story.

The most important part of the story, perhaps, is the way it displays Dream’s coldness at this point in time. When his own son, whose bride has just died on the day they were to be wedded up and dies, pleads for his help, Dream flat out refuses him. Now, the Dream we’ve come to know still might not have helped, but he may at least have thought it over for a second or two. Dream has changed, and one of the best ways of displaying that is showing us a “before” picture. His growth and development will be an area of interest in the next collection, “Brief Lives,” as well.

Note: “As I Go Along” is a weekly feature in which I review and discuss the best graphic novels and series that I haven’t yet had a chance to read. These are the titles your comic-loving friends have been trying to push into your hands for years, only now I’ll be doing the pushing (or telling you not to bother). The post will include spoilers for those who have not yet read the work.

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”

In the fifth “Sandman” collection, Dream once again took a backseat, watching the stories’ events from afar, only intervening at the end. Once again, Gaiman takes a tiny thread from an earlier work and weaves it into an beautiful and intricate quilt.  “A Game of You” is centered around Barbie, who we first met as a resident of the same house as Rose Walker in “The Doll’s House.” At the time, she was married to a man named Ken (imagine that), but they’ve divorced, and Barbie’s moved to big, bad New York City, where she lives with many of the interesting cast of characters who make up the story. But more has changed than Barbie’s marital status and place of residence. Chief among these changes: she no longer dreams.

From the outset, it appears this is a story about Barbie’s dreams returning, and as a result, her return to The Land as Princess Barbara, and eventually the skerry’s demise. “A Game of You” is that story, but more so it is a tale, as the title implies, about the question of identity. The reader must consider who and what each character in the collection is, as the characters do themselves.

Barbie, of course, is two different people, depending on whether she is awake or asleep. In the real world, she is a New York tenement dweller struggling to find her way in life following her divorce. No one depends on her but herself, and she is having a hard time keeping even that much responsibility in line. Yet in her dreams Barbie is quite the opposite. She is a princess on a magical quest to save the known world. Everyone and everything needs and depends on her.

Each of the characters has their own “game.” Wanda is a pre-operative transexual, born Alvin Mann in what she’d likely think of as a previous life. However, Wanda is scared of surgery, or perhaps just one surgery in particular, that which would make her a woman in body as well as mind. Throughout the story, Wanda struggles with her gender, and the question of her identity, or “game of Wanda” ends with her being buried in the Midwest by her traditional, God-fearing parents, who refuse to acknowledge the existence of their “son’s” other life, shunning all mention or hints to it. Or does it? Barbie dreams of Death whispering in Wanda’s ear, only she’s in the “perfect female body.” Whatever Death whispers, it makes Wanda smile.

While this volume was missing perhaps my favorite part of the “Sandman” series: the growth and development of the immortal Dream, “A Game of You” offered up some great elements of its own to separate it from previous collections. Most notably, the pacing of the plot and its various cliffhanger endings. While every “Sandman” book begs the turn of the page and “just one issue more before bed” turning into 3, I don’t know if any of the others has made me so desperate to find out what happens next in terms of plot. Furthermore, although it seems like it’d be difficult to expand the series’ mythology when Dream’s not really around, we did learn about the “distant skerries of dream,” places like The Land, where some people return every night, as well as further proof of Dream’s power, albeit indirectly. When Thessaly brings Hazel and Foxglove into the Dreaming, she does so with witchcraft that moves the moon and has dire consequences on Earth: changing the tides and bringing an apocalyptic hurricane into New York City. Clearly, the Dreaming and “reality” are not so separate as they appear.

Note: “As I Go Along” is a weekly feature in which I review and discuss the best graphic novels and series that I haven’t yet had a chance to read. These are the titles your comic-loving friends have been trying to push into your hands for years, only now I’ll be doing the pushing (or telling you not to bother). The post will include spoilers for those who have not yet read the work.

“To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.”

After a bit of a wait, the latest collection of “The Sandman” I’ve gotten to put the focus back on Dream as the central character, with, of course, a few of Neil Gaiman’s trademark jumps elsewhere mixed in. “Seasons of Mist” begins with Destiny, the oldest of the Endless, calling a “family meeting.” One member is absent, and although we don’t know anything about he/she/it yet, other than that it is sometimes referred to as “the prodigal,” I’d wager its name starts with “d” (the six members present are Death, Destiny, Dream, Desire, Delirum, and Despair).

The happy family reunion quickly turns into a family argument, as Desire tells Dream he was wrong in sending Nada to Hell for thousands of years. Recall that we saw Dream walk past his former lover during his first trip to the underworld, and that we got the full story of their relationship in the prologue of “The Doll’s House.” Dream is outraged, until in a private conversation, Death says, “condemning her to eternity in hell, just because she turned you down… That’s a really shitty thing to do.”

Think about that, the Endless, the only immortal beings in the universe, use language as colloquial as “really shitty thing to do.” Well, Death does anyway. But it’s these kinds of odd juxtapositions that make “The Sandman” so great. Anyway, the argument leads to a sequence of events that make up the bulk of the major story arc: Dream returns to Hell only to find Lucifer is busy closing it down. It seems Satan is done ruling the underworld, and he puts Dream in charge of figuring out what the hell to do with the place (see what I did there?). As such, the story sets out to answer one question: What would happen if Lucifer up and left? Or, storytelling being what it is, what would you do if you had to decide who to give the key to Hell to? Dream ends up putting a couple of angels in charge despite the pleas of a plethora of deities, demons, and demi-gods (shit, Gaiman’s got me doing the d thing now). Of course, Destiny knew that was going to happen along, it’s kind of his thing.

The main story in “Seasons of Mist” was fantastic, but my favorite issue in the collection was doubtless one of those trademark jumps. It’s the fifth story, “”In Which the Dead Return; and Charles Rowland Concludes His Education.” Charles Rowland is left at his boarding school when most everyone else has gone home. Unfortunately for Charles, this happens to be at the same time Lucifer has kicked the dead out of hell, so those that died at the school (or just didn’t have anywhere else to go) return to haunt it.

Early on, Charles sits in front of a memorial for the boys from his school that died during the “Great War.” Two of those boys end up returning to St. Hilarion’s to torment Charles. He’s rescued by one Edwin Paine, who just so happened to have died when the same boys sacrificed him to the devil in 1914. The boys thought they would get special treatment in Hell because of their actions, “but when we went to Hell… They didn’t even care. They hadn’t even known. They–they laughed at us.”

Charles ends up dying, but Death’s far too busy to take him. Charles and Edwin decide they’ve learned all they’re going to at school and leave. Although they’re dead, they plan to “see what life’s got to offer.”

Note: “As I Go Along” is a weekly feature in which I review and discuss the best graphic novels and series that I haven’t yet had a chance to read. These are the titles your comic-loving friends have been trying to push into your hands for years, only now I’ll be doing the pushing (or telling you not to bother). The post will include spoilers for those who have not yet read the work.

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.”

In more ways than a few, “Dream Country” differs from the two collections that preceded it. The four issues it contains are not “chapters” in a story line in the way those of “Preludes and Nocturnes” or “The Doll’s House” were, as they are independent of the overarching “Sandman” tale. “Dream Country” would be more aptly compared to a collection of short stories than a novel, but those of us who have read Gaiman’s short fiction know that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

However, just because these stories are unrelated to the overarching plot doesn’t mean they’re not self-referential and chock full of Gaiman’s trademark intersection.

Much like in “The Doll’s House,” the theoretical protagonist, Dream, took a backseat in “Dream Country.” In fact, Dream doesn’t even appear in the final issue, “Facade,” but that’s more than made up for when Death, his spunky older sister, shows up.

The first story, “Calliope,” centers around Richard Madoc, a novelist suffering from writer’s block. Madoc trades a trichonobezoar, a hairball found in the intestine of someone with Rapunzel Syndrome, for Calliope, the muse of epic poetry in Greek mythology. At its outset, this appears to be another “be careful what you wish for” cautionary tale. But Gaiman being Gaiman, it’s turned into so much more.

More than anything else, “Calliope” is a story about human nature, and as a result, greed. In mythology, the best way to get a muse to grant an artist inspiration was to woo her; to be humble and gracious, thankful for any and everything she grants. Erasmus Fry, from whom Madoc gets Calliope, had no time for such things. “They say one ought to woo her kind, but I must say I found force most efficacious.” Like Fry, Madoc rapes his muse, justifying his actions because his second novel is nine months overdue. Neither writer had time for courtship. In effect they said, “give me inspiration, or else.”

Of course, as was the case with Fry, a second successful novel was not enough for Madoc. Nor was a third, or a poetry collection, play, or a deal to write and direct the film adaptation of one of his books. The film gets nominated for three Oscars, by the way. For Madoc, as with any human being given absolute power, inspiration, or anything else, it will never be enough.

Enter Dream, who puts an end to all that. He floods Madoc with so many story ideas that it drive the writer insane, compelling him to release Calliope. Similarly, Fry is found dead, supposedly poisoned, despite the fact that bezoars are meant to protect against any poison.

Dream’s actions display the way he changed and matured during his imprisonment, which occurred largely at the same time as Calliope’s. We learn that Dream and the muse once had a relationship which resulted in a son, the mythological figure Orpheus. Now, we know Dream can hold a real good grudge. After all, Nada, is still in hell. Both Calliope and Dream note his maturation, the former says, “You have changed Oneiros. In the old days, you would have left me to rot forever, without turning a hair,” before asking, “Do you still hate me? For what I did?” Dream responds, “No, I no longer hate you Calliope. I have learned much in recent times and… No matter. I do not hate you, child.”

It’s pretty incredible that there’s so much room for growth in the saga of one of the seven immortal beings in the universe. Remember, in this diegesis, even gods can die when the living stop believing in them. As Chuck Palahniuk put it in “Fight Club,” “On a long enough timeline, everyone’s survival rate drops to zero.” In “Facade,” Death explains this is true even of the seven Endless, saying “When the first living thing existed, I was there, waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I’ll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.”

It seems Dream’s development will continue in the next collection. The synopsis for “Seasons of Mist” indicates that Dream travels to Hell to free Nada after millennia of incarceration and torment. We’ll just have to wait and see whether or not that means he’s forgiven her. I know I’m excited.