The votes are in. I am reading Sandman. I was hesitant to read it right away, since I just came off the entire Lucifer series, but what the hell? I've been meaning to reread Sandman for a long while now, and when the first Absolute hit two years ago I vowed to reread the series once I had all four. I do. So I should.

So, this is a reread for me. I've told the story before, but it's Sandman that brought me back to comics. It's also what turned me away from monthlies and towards trades, a move that made me a more voracious comic reader than ever. So, it looms large in my status as a comic reader.

But it's been years since I've read it ... so how will it hold up? Will I still look upon it with great esteem? Will it still seem like one of the Greatest Things Ever?

It will be fun to find out.

Though I am reading the Absolute volumes, I'll post and comment on the chunks that make up the 10 collected editions. (I have not yet decided if I will reread Endless Nights as part of this.) I figure that's what most people have or will be inclined to get, it will make things easier to follow, plus it makes things more manageable. Otherwise there would be way too much to comment on if I were to discuss the whole series in just four posts.

So, there you go. Feel free to read along with me.

I am reading Sandman.

It will hold up. Though you may not remember exactly why until the fourth book or so.

For discussion fodder, here's the thread where I was reading it. Though it's not a review thread, it's a thread that asks which volume was when the series peaked (if at all).

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=28985&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=sandman+thread

I never returned to post that I finished the series (I finished it while on beach vacation in June -- sitting on the beach near sunrise and reading a Sandman volume was awesome). As it stands now, the thread has Sisko as a thread killer in May.

Sleepwalker is Sandman done right.

So go bump it, bitch.

Problem? Solution? Time to choose.

I like the way it displays your threadkillah status for all the world to see.

You love me more than you want to.

The 4th trade was the first book of Sandman i ever read and it hooked me..in retrospect the first tarde is uneven but has moments of brilliance (the DCU characters seem forced in there)..but Gaiman's brilliance shines through by the second year. Eager to read your comments Taft!!

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1563890119/?tag=imwan-20

Sandman Vol. 1 - Preludes and Nocturnes

I would be exaggerating if I said I approached a reread of Sandman with trepidation. Sometimes you read something, think it’s great, but years later you wonder if it was really as good as you remembered. I had no such feelings when thinking back to Sandman. I knew what I had read was brilliant and was confident it wouldn’t lose its luster over the years.

So, I wasn’t surprised when Preludes and Nocturnes remained an excellent read. What DID surprise me was that it was far better than I recalled. The first volume is often seen as the weak link in the Sandman chain, the shaky start readers must get through in order to get to the truly brilliant stuff. Maybe in our desire for people to read those remarkable high points, in our eagerness to share the awesome with them, we forget how good this first set of stories truly is.

Thing is, for all the depth we attribute to Sandman, Gaiman’s grand saga begins with something very simple. Dare I say, a cliché. Our protagonist must Go On A Quest and retrieve Items Of Great Power.

Wait, no. It doesn’t start there. It starts with the titular Sandman naked and huddled in a cage. Weak. Powerless. A captive. But he is Endless, and patient, and he will wait. Even as the world of dreamers falls apart, he will wait.

It’s a pretty ballsy way to open a series, really.

Gaiman is smart. He doesn’t inundate us with information. He doesn’t outline his whole mythology right out of the gate. We’re left to guess at aspects of Morpheus’s nature and power and personality. This not only involves us in the story by forcing us to invest a little of ourselves in it – smart stories almost always do this – but it also leaves him wiggle room to invent, create and interpret over the course of the next 75 issues.

But I’m getting into big picture stuff here when really I want to discuss Preludes and Nocturnes. Yeah, it’s better than I remembered and isn’t at all the just “okay” start Sandman fans (including myself) sometimes insinuate. Right off the bat we’re getting heaping helpings of mythology, dark magic, and a clear sense that Dream isn’t a humanlike figure with godlike powers. He is something other. Something alien. A being who can be many things. This is utterly vital to what the series would come to be.

Sure, in the context of the smart series that is Sandman Dream’s fetch quest is kind of a dopey fantasy trope, but it works. It works because it’s a great excuse for allowing us to begin exploring this world. It doesn’t always work. Gaiman makes a misguided effort to tie Sandman into the main DC universe, something thankfully all but forgotten as the series goes on, but by and large Dream’s quest shows us slivers of the kind of realm in which we’ll dwell. And I’ll be damned if the execution isn’t excellent right off the bat. The writing is VERY strong. His ear for dialogue is not perfect, but his narration is poetic and moving even at this early stage.

That said, much of this first volume is kind of standard dark fantasy/Vertigo stuff. Good, but in the years since it came out we’ve seen a TON of stuff like this. The Alan Moore influence is pretty heavy in the early going, and at times it’s distracting. “Listen,” Gaiman writes as a repeated motif over a few issues, and every time he does so I think of Moore. “24 Hours,” the story set in the diner with Doc Destiny, was a somewhat misguided effort to delve into the kind of disturbing darkness Moore dabbled in with Swamp Thing. Gaiman can do better than this sort of gimmicky thing. It’s disturbing, yeah, but it’s also a bit cheap and easy. Gaiman at his best disturbs us with smarts, not shocks. At his best he gives us interesting characters in extraordinarily magical situations, not cheap shock.

It all ends well, though, and we get the sense that this whole story arc was nothing more than a grand beginning.

And it was.

When we get to the coda featuring Death, we fall in love. We realize we’re reading something that might turn out to be very special indeed. We realize that maybe we’re in store for something that won’t be an ordinary comic book.

Rereading these initial stories reminded took me right back to when I first got sucked into Sandman. I had read non-tights books before – Hate, Cereus and others were all on my reading list prior to ditching comics in the early 1990s – but these were the books that told me I could keep reading and loving comics even if I no longer cared about superheroes.

Did this first volume of Sandman hold up? Hell yeah it did. This was very strong, stronger than I remembered … which means I can’t imagine how good the later stuff will be.

#3 is one of my favourite Constantine stories ever, and I'm a big Hellblazer fan. Gaiman really gets what makes that character work, and it's a shame he only ever wrote two full issues with him.

The only reason I have a hard time recommending the first Sandman trade is the art. I love Sam Kieth's art, but he's definitely an acquired taste, and when I first started reading Sandman I had to look past the art to enjoy it.

This is why I've never checked it out. I've had the first trade for years.

To not check it out because of the art is to deprive yourself of lots of wonderful.

There is honestly a part of me that's never forgiven how hoodwinked I felt when I read Moore's "Swamp Thing" after having first read "Preludes and Nocturnes." So much that I thought was innovation on Gaiman's part were lifted from Swamp Thing --

The powering up of an obscure DC villain with powers that parallel the protagonist? That was Jason Woodrue in Swamp Thing.
Cain and Abel -- not originally from Swamp Thing, but the incarnations we see in "Sandman" are obviously Moore's versions
Constantine -- from Swamp Thing
I can't remember when the raven that was actually Matthew Cable first showed up -- was that in later volumes? But that eventually annoyed me too.
That whole final Dream vs. Doctor Destiny thing was SO much a reprise of Swamp Thing vs. Woodrue.

I have re-read Moore's Swamp Things many times since the first.

Gaiman's stuff has been a bit tainted ever since. Never got too far with Sandman, and most likely never will. (I will still read this thread, though, because Taft is so goldarn addicting.)

Brief Lives is fantastic, and remains my favorite "chapter" of the Sandman story. But, I'm a sucker for brother vs. brother stories.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0930289595/?tag=imwan-20

Sandman Vol. 2 - The Doll's House

The Doll’s House picks up seemingly throwaway threads from Preludes and Nocturnes and creates story out of them. Builds mythology from stuff that appeared to be mere tone and atmosphere building.

This is what Gaiman does. This is what Sandman is. And even at this early stage, when he’s still getting a feel for the world he’s creating, it’s brilliant.

When we caught glimpses of troubled sleepers and people struck into dreaming comas in the first story arc, it appeared to be little more than attempts to vividly paint the impact of Dream’s captivity. Gaiman was showing us a world without Morpheus, telling us why he is important and using a series of tiny arcs to do it. We saw people caught in an endless slumber, a woman tragically raped while in a coma, a man destined for insanity, and more. These were passing references to a slew of people, unimportant to the main story save for adding texture to it. Just the stuff of atmosphere building. Or so it seemed.

But we were wrong. One of those little “atmosphere” arcs becomes central to The Doll’s House.

We begin with a prologue that feels as if it’s a standalone story, something largely unrelated to the whole. This is an illusion, of course. Nothing in Sandman exists in a vacuum. Throughout the series Gaiman proved to be a master of using even the smallest of story elements and passing references as springboards to larger tales. I’m not talking clunky comic book stuff, either, those “gotcha!” revelations or explanations of what happened between panels and the like. Gaiman is not so clumsy as that. Here we’ve got the sense that a mythology is being built. Not a make-it-up-as-you-go-along mythology. A real, true, coherent, densely interwoven mythology.

For instance, this prologue, “Tales in the Sand,” appears to be the story behind a brief encounter Dream had while in Hell shown in the first volume. It was nothing more than a brief interaction with a lover who allegedly wronged our protagonist, a hint at something in Dream’s past. In “Tales in the Sand” we learn this lover’s tale and why she is in Hell. It seems like this prologue is unconnected to The Doll’s House, but what we don’t realize is that this story will also serve as the roots for one of the most important arcs of the entire series, the forthcoming Season of Mists.

Are you sensing a pattern here?

Anyway, The Doll’s House. You can feel Gaiman starting to shake the Alan Moore dust off his bones with this arc, breaking free from his mentor’s influence and juuust starting to create his own voice. (It’s not stretch to call Moore Gaiman’s mentor. It was Moore, after all, who showed Gaiman how to write a comic script.) The influence is still there in the way Gaiman handles his serial killers and in the lyrically self-aware narration, but it’s a big step forward from the very Moore Preludes & Nocturnes.

Gaiman shows himself to be adept at creating strange, surreal characters here – and I don’t mean the serial killers! Rose’s roommates are an odd but interesting and likeable bunch. And yeah, those serial killers are well realized, too. He has a knack for establishing character without having to use a lot of strokes. Any one of these side figures could probably sustain a story in their own right.

We also see some playing with the comic form. Nothing groundbreaking, but stuff that keeps us on our toes. Typewritten letters as narration; lettering being used in creative ways; pages being turned on their side to represent Rose being turned on her side (figuratively, not literally); a twisted dream sequence that puts us into the psych of her roommates.

Lots and lots of good stuff.

There is an interlude here about 3/5 of the way through the arc, “Men of Good Fortune,” that I can’t help but think should have been moved to Dream County in the collected editions. It’s a standalone story (but as always, not really), albeit a very good one, and feels out of place in the midst of this extended arc. Why not collected with the volume that’s all about standalone stories?

(Of course, it’s worth noting once again that in Sandman even a standalone story is not as standalone as you think. Characters, people, places and events can still touch other tales. This “standalone” tale, for instance, is extended in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and a part of it comes up in Season of Mists. Let it be a lesson learned: Take nothing in Sandman for granted.)

The arc wraps up with a satisfying resolution that never feels cheap and leaves us without any doubt: We’re reading the start of something special.

The astonishing thing is, Gaiman isn’t even there yet. He’s not yet firing on all cylinders. With this arc, he’s still working to move away from his influences and to find his own voice. And yet it’s really quite good. Not yet UTTERLY BRILLIANT, as this series will soon become, but quite good indeed.

I love how all the characters in the Doll's house come back at some point in the series...very cool...great reviews..keep em coming!

I'm enjoying these reviews too. But as for Gaiman pulling this series out of the DCU as the series goes on? Definitely underplaying the connection, but the DCU rears its head in a few interesting and critical ways.

True, there continue to be sly references here and there, such as using Element Girl from the Legion in "Facade," the story from Dream Country. Stuff like that is so subtle, though, that it's very, very easy to ignore the connection to the DCU.

It's been long enough that I do not recall the critical connection you hint at. Rather than check into it, I will allow myself to be surprised and see how it strikes me on a natural re-read.

By and large, though, I feel like Sandman is a thing apart.

Agreed! I still need to get the last two volumes in Absolute format.

I was just about to ask Dave to spoiler-text it for me, since I didn't remember anything connected to the DCU proper that was critical to the development of the series. But then...



(Don't read that, Taft.)

Frank hit the jackpot.