CATEGORIES

As I Go Along: The Sandman #8: Worlds’ End

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.

When a world ends, there’s always something left over. A story, perhaps, or a vision, or a hope. This inn is a refuge, after the lights go out. For a while.

After the action-packed collection “Brief Lives,” which revealed some oft-mentioned but (previously) never spoken history of the “lives” of The Endless, we took another step back in “Worlds’ End,” which was a collection of semi-related short stories set in the “Sandman” universe, much like “Dream Country” and “Fables and Reflections.” What sets “World’s End” apart from those collections however, is that it builds to a specific endpoint. From the beginning of the story, we know that something momentous is brewing, and that all the interesting stories we’re hearing are almost meant to distract us and prevent us from remembering that fact.

“Worlds’ End” begins with two travelers from the world we’re all familiar with, Brant Tucker and Charlene Mooney, getting into a car crash when it mysteriously begins snowing in the middle of summer. While still in a daze, a mysterious hedgehog directs Brant to an inn unlike any he (or we) are familiar with—the “Worlds’ End, a free house.”

It’s later discovered that the inn is one of four where those travelling between dimensions, can stowaway during “reality storms,” which come as the result of particularly significant events. What sets “World’s End” apart from the early short story collections is that it builds to a specific endpoint. From early on, we know that something momentous is brewing, and that all the interesting stories we’re hearing are almost meant to distract and prevent us from remembering that fact. That endpoint is the inn’s guests gathering at a window to watch an enormous funeral procession in the sky, which is led by Desire and includes most of The Endless, more than a few residents of The Dreaming, and a number of other characters Morpheus has interacted with over the course of the series. As such, the most prevalent guess as to who lies in the coffin is Morpheus himself. The procession ends with Death stopping and looking through the inn’s window as the crescent moon behind her is covered in what is likely blood.

The thing is, it’s never actually confirmed that it’s Dream’s funeral we’re seeing. At least not yet. Although that big ending is forever chugging towards us, “Worlds’ End” might just be all about Neil Gaiman reminding the reader that what’s important in a really good story is the distance, not the destination (the telling, not the ending or the stakes). Instead of telling us why people (beings is more accurate) from so many realms are caught in a reality storm (or why we should give a shit), the whole “the world is coming to an end” thing is really just a backdrop for the stories the travelers are telling.

In the end, we learn that Brant is actually recounting the stories he heard at the Worlds’ End to a regular bartender, and that Charlene has ceased to exist (as she chose to stay and work at the inn). So it turns out, what originally appeared to be the frame story, all the travelers gathering, was actually wrapped up in another frame story. Frameception.

Although the stories within “Worlds’ End” have little impact on the main arc, they’re still an incredibly diverse, fantastic read. Despite the distinctiveness that each story (and fictional storyteller) brings, these six separate issues ultimately feel like one complete volume. Somehow, the pieces of the puzzle all fit. My two favorites were indubitably the first, “A Tale of Two Cities,” which Gaiman has admitted is utterly Lovecraftian, and “Hob’s Leviathan,” just because I’ve been captivated by Hob Gadling since we first heard his life story in “The Doll’s House.”

“Worlds’ End” had its fantastic moments, but at the end of the day, the stories I most want to hear are those of The Endless. As such, I’m looking forward to “The Kindly Ones,” the longest “Sandman” collection, which fixes the spotlight back on Dream.

 

 

  

As I Go Along: The Sandman #5 ‘A Game of You’

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.

  

As I Go Along: The Sandman #4 “Seasons of Mist”

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.”

 

  

As I Go Along: The Sandman #3 ‘Dream Country’

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.

 


  

Related Posts