Why review just one volume of the Sandman series? Why not review all ten? I haven’t listed reasons in ages, but here I will do it because it seems the best way to explain:

1) I haven’t read the whole series, due to familial confiscation of the last five books. There is little chance that I will in time for a review. Therefore, I must review what I know and remember from the five volumes that I read.

2) The first Sandman volume, comprising of the first eight issues of Sandman, was a lot different from the rest of the series.

3) Each volume has its individual story, or collection of stories. Only running subplots exist to connect these along with the characters involved in the stories.

These are my reasons. Please accept them with my humblest apologies.

Neil Gaiman is not my favorite fantasy writer, but he’s one of my favorites. From comic books to novels to short stories, he can create the humorous, the surreal, the disturbing, the thought-provoking, and the realistic depth that many writers can lack by not following their instinct and pursuing Tolkien conventions in fantasy. The last book I read by him, Good Omens, was co-written with Terry Pratchett, author of the hilarious Discworld novels. Even though the book seemed to be mostly Pratchett, several serious scenes I could tell were by Gaiman; they were philosophical and bizarre at the same time. Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes was one of the strangest graphic novels that I had read. I had picked it up because I had heard that Sandman was good, and I wanted to see for myself. I finished it the night I checked it out. Now looking at it about a year or two later, I see elements that I missed or forgotten. Again in a mood for nostalgia, I reread the comic book by flipping through and reading certain sections.

This is what I aim to do with the other Sandman books that I have read. The story is technically simple enough: several magicians in attempting to summon Death got her brother Dream instead and imprison him for about half a decade. By the time he gets out, Dream’s kingdom is close to ruins, people are just waking up from the “Sleeping Sickness”, and his tools are scattered. So Dream has to get those tools back in order to fix the dream world. These are his helmet, his pouch of “dream sand”, and his amulet. Like I said, this is a pretty simple premise. Do not be fooled, however. Neil expands on the idea of the Sleeping Sickness by showing certain people who fell victim to it, including a woman named Unity Kincaid who gives birth to a child while asleep. (She doesn’t wake up until she’s in a nursing home, for the record.) The dream world is even stranger and bloodier than you can imagine, and America itself is one strange place. (Around this time Neil hadn’t moved to the US yet, so what he knew of America was based on visits and imagination. Do not be offended if he portrays it differently than what you know. Think of it as an alternate universe.) A diner becomes an insane asylum for people being “tortured”(I use that word literally and figuratively) by dreams. Hell is not exactly how you picture it, but it’s close. Such a world should not exist in the DC Universe; that’s a world where action heroes fight villains.

This is a world where the supernatural is a part of daily life. However, Neil Gaiman decided to try incorporating the DC World into his Vertigo world. Martian Man-hunter from the Justice League makes a cameo, as does John Constantine, although I’ll excuse Constantine as he was a Vertigo character and appeared in The Books of Magic, a miniseries by Neil that also starred Death. Incorporating DC heroes, he agrees with his editor, was a mistake. I mean, if the Sleeping Sickness had hit the US, wouldn’t the League have known? If not, wouldn’t there have been some hero to fight it as the world passed into the 40s? How would it have affected non-Earthlings like Superman or Martian Man-hunter? Was Green Lantern immune because of his power ring? What happened to the heroes who tried to fight it? The man who possesses the amulet escapes from Arkham Asylum and goes back to Arkham Asylum. I am happy to say that after this volume, it’s clear that the Vertigo universe is different from the DC Universe. The series does not show the signs of being what it will later become until the last chapter, a story where Dream follows his sister Death as she performs her daily rounds. (If you need to ask what her rounds are for, then you have no common sense.) Death, unlike the serious and melancholy Dream, is the way she appears in her own miniseries. She’s funny, sensitive, philosophical, and sisterly.

She knows when to put Dream in his place and remind him that despite the fact that he is feeling depressed, he still has a job to do. (The only well-intentioned humorous part of the whole graphic novel is a three-panel scene with her.) The story, since it revolves around her, is funny, depressing, philosophical, and has a lot of heart. It gives an answer to the problem of how gods cannot be human because they’d interfere in human affairs; they still have duties to perform, just like Peter Parker has to risk getting fired to save New York from the Green Goblin. This was where Neil claims to have finally “found his voice,” as he put it. Art for the book is as interesting and gory as the story itself. Humans look human except when they’re psychotic; demons and other beings have their own look. Dream looks like a thin starved human with anemia, but on a second glance we realize that he is pretty powerful, if not omnipotent. The Martian and Constantine look like they were ported out straight from another comic book.

The backgrounds are beautiful and reek with the supernatural and surreal. There are occasional discolorations, but DC will fix that with Absolute Sandman. Preparation goes a little beyond standard. Like Jeff Smith, Gaiman’s Sandman stories in this volume are best not to be read chapter by chapter. Just take a deep plunge and sacrifice several hours to read it in one go. Some are pure action, and most of these stories had cliffhangers at the end. One was a true horror story (“24 Hours”, in case you’re interested) and when I finished reading it I felt cheated by the fact that Dream doesn’t appear until the very end. Is it filler or a connecting story? I don’t know. But at least these stories are long. If they weren’t, then I’d dislike Sandman the way I hated Rose for its short chapters. There is an introduction by Karen Berger, the editor who suggested that Neil do Sandman, and an afterword by Neil himself.

There was more to come of Sandman when it was once a running comic book series. It did eventually end, but stories only end when no one longer reads them. I loved the first book, but what is to come is better. But that’s the way the best series are. They start out as little “time-wasters” as Kevin termed it, and then spun into complex webs. There are exceptions, like Peanuts and Real Life, but the ones that prove the rule are One Piece, Magic Knight Rayearth, Sailor Moon, Yugioh, Calvin and Hobbes, Love Hina, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Card Captor Sakura, and Othello. Sandman is a template for how American comics should really be; don’t make them go on forever and ever, and END the series when it’s supposed to end. I hope to read the rest of the series when I get the chance not because I need material to review, but because it’s so compelling you go, “Gimme!”

- -Review By Jaya Lakshmi - -