Random thoughts about a little 30-year-old comic book series called “The Sandman”

“The Sandman” by Neil Gaiman is widely regarded as one of the best comic book/graphic novel series of all time and one of the greatest achievements of the medium. Until last month, I did not know that. Soooo, there’s that.

The other thing I didn't know was its run started in the year I was born. That will be relevant to know later.

This is the cover of my 30th anniversary edition of Vol. 1 that I got on Free Comic Book Day. You'll see in the most minuscule writing it says, "Introduced by Patrick Rothfuss." I can't escape him. He keeps showing up in my life. Please help me. I'm stuck in a Rothfussian hellscape and I can't get out.

Also it’s likely going to be the best thing I’ve read all month, and rather than write all of this in my monthly rankings, I’ll just write a separate post here, so you can read my ramblings about it if you feel like it.

On Free Comic Book Day (always the first Saturday of May, in case you didn’t know,) I got the first volume in a BOGO sale at the comic book store that is within walking distance of my house, along with a comic book adaptation of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s “The Strain” and a Daredevil book I had been considering.

So here are 1,500 words worth of thoughts I had about it. I mean, I had many more other thoughts, but they are less coherent.

How I read it

I read all 10 volumes of The Sandman over the course of three days. It was a really intense experience. The whole of the series encompasses millennia, and tells stories about The Endless, seven siblings named Dream, Death, Destruction, Delirium (formerly Delight,) Despair, Desire and Destiny. The stories mainly focus on Dream/Morpheus, and the beings (not always humans) he affects. There are old gods who grow frail because there is no one around to worship them. There’s an inn at the world’s end where transient beings swap stories until the storms of their lives pass.

My favorite volume was No. 5, called “A Game of You,” where there’s a being called The Cuckoo that displaces the dreams of a young woman. It had notes of Doctor Who and Labyrinth, I thought, and a really interesting storyline that had very little to do with the Endless. Part of the conclusion questions whether beings like The Cuckoo should exist.

The more things change, the more they stay the same (and more on my favorite volume)

“A Game of You” in particular could have been written today, but almost any of them could. It was a series that truly stands the test of time. In “A Game of You,” there was a trans character, Wanda, who was aggressively misgendered by her conservative family. When Wanda dies (SORRY SPOILERS), her friend, Barbie goes to a comic book store to get her favorite comic book to place on her coffin. When she goes to the comic book store, the owner objectifies her. I think this is 1.) representative of some elements of comic book culture where a few (mainly white men) make things miserable for the rest of the people who want to enjoy things and 2.) shows how Wanda is accepted as she is in one sphere (the comic book store) where Barbie isn’t, and Barbie is accepted as she is in the world at large and Wanda isn’t. Does that make sense? Probably not.

I think it’s important to see that there is LGBTQ+ representation in comic books written in the late 1980s and early 1990s because of how marginalized groups are still treated today. It’s a horrible travesty and a failure of society that a series like “The Sandman” was ahead of its time in 1988 and is STILL AHEAD OF ITS TIME in 2019. COME ON HUMANITY, GET IT TOGETHER. I think that’s all I really want to say about that. If you know me for 10 seconds you’ll know that I think everyone should be intersectional feminists and fight tirelessly for the downtrodden in solidarity, but I don’t want to turn this blob into my feminist rage. (For feminist rage, you can read April’s book rankings.)

We (and this series) contain multitudes 

The last thing I want to talk about with Vol. 5 is my favorite thing Barbie says at the end:

“Okay. Here goes Barbie’s idea. It’s like, that people… well, that everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world – 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. Isn’t that a weird thought?”

First of all it was about Barbie, who has just had a horrifying nightmare ordeal that affected the waking world.

More broadly, it was about all of the worlds, still within the series, waking and dreaming, beyond Barbie: The places where The Endless live, and where all of the old gods wait to fade out of relevance. And it doesn’t just apply to the physical settings in the books. There are so many tiny threads in the grander story. For example, there were two beings who worked at the Necropolis who told their story at the inn at the end of the world in Vol. 8, and when I read about them, I wondered why their story was relevant until I got to Vol. 10 when they came back for a… gathering. I WON’T SPOIL ANY MORE. But there were so many characters and stories that were so beautifully and artistically woven together. So I don’t think “The Sandman” is just the best graphic novels have to offer, but it’s a shining example of storytelling for those who like books without pictures, too.

On an even more macro level and outside of “The Sandman:” The last part of this is getting a bit personal, but I believe that everyone has a secret world inside of them, and that when books are written, humanity can catch a glimpse of others’ secret worlds. Over time, I’ve mostly softened my judgment of a lot of books and other things because of this realization.

SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare shows up twice in the 10 volumes because he promises Dream he’ll write two plays for him. One is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and the other is “The Tempest.” I’m really annoyed with myself that I’ve never read either of them. “Titus Andronicus” is my favorite Shakespearean tragedy and I played Viola in “Twelfth Night” in my last semester at college, for heaven’s sake! They're both more obscure works! Doesn't everyone read "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest" in high school? Not me, apparently! I took a college class as part of my English major specifically FOR Shakespeare, but somehow those two plays have never crossed my radar. So I wish I could say I appreciated the Shakespeare parts of “The Sandman” better, or what those two plays meant in particular to the story “The Sandman” was trying to tell.

I still have my college copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, so I can read those plays whenever I want! 

Whether you love or hate Shakespeare, comic book writers seem to be obsessed with him. I’ve read about Shakespeare’s perceived ubiquity in an Ed Brubaker interview in the monstrous Captain America tome I read last month. He described Stan Lee’s vision of Captain America as Shakespearean, and why not, because Shakespeare is for the masses, he said, and in his iteration he tried to keep with the theme. And now Shakespeare is here in “The Sandman.” Where else will he turn up?

The blast radius (what I read afterward)

Sometimes when you read something particularly awe-inspiring, it can be difficult to get back into the same genre, or even pick up another book. Book Twitter calls this a book hangover, and I had a major one after finishing all of “The Sandman.”

I took sad naps between volumes. I felt disoriented. I had a headache (though this could be because I was reading it on a tablet in the car – yes, I can read in a moving vehicle.) I picked up books, read a couple pages, and put them back down. I went on walks. I gazed poetically into the middle distance. You know, the usual.

It was all very dramatic.

I read “The Strain,” which was a stupid comic book adaptation of a novel by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (sort of mentioned above.) I don’t know if it was stupid because I just finished one of the most mindblowing pieces of literature I’ve ever read in my life, or because it was truly stupid. That’s the problem with a book hangover. Everything else just has a bland chalky taste and makes you feel sort of sick reading it.

Finally, I listened to Helen Hoang’s “The Kiss Quotient” on my Libby app, and that seemed to snap me out of it. It was a romance novel on audiobook, a different genre and medium, and it also was pretty steamy. After that, I got back into my normal routine.

I still don’t think I’m quite over it, but I’m taking it one day at a time. 

Ok, enough drama. Let's wrap this up.

Final thoughts

I know this is not an all-encompassing look at “The Sandman." The closest thing I can compare this to is my experiences reading both “Saga” by Brian K. Vaughan and “Die” by Kieron Gillen, mostly because both take place in expansive worlds and/or over long stretches of time.

I really like reading literary think pieces, so if you have one you like about “The Sandman” in particular, I’d love to read it. I'm sure there's been a lot written about it. Also, I’m always looking for comic book recommendations to expand my worldview.