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It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book for the next ten weekdays.

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, letting us see why he’s 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 proves 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 retroactive explanations of what happened between another book’s panels. Gaiman doesn’t do clumsy. Here we’ve got the sense that a mythology is being built — not a make-it-up-as-you-go-along mythology, but a true, coherent, densely interwoven, real mythology.

For instance, this prologue, “Tales in the Sand,” appears to be the story behind a brief encounter Dream had while in Hell, as shown in the first volume. It was nothing more than a fleeting interaction with a lover who’d 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 a 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-esque Preludes & Nocturnes.

Gaiman shows himself to be adept at creating strange, surreal characters here — and I don’t mean the murderers! Our protagonist, Rose, who’s searching for her missing kid brother, is exactly the sort of intellectual young everygirl who’d be likely to find herself amid a posse of weirdoes, and indeed, her roommates are an odd but interesting and likable bunch. Though, yeah, those serial killers are well realized, too. Gaiman has a knack for establishing character without needing lots 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 three fifths 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, albeit a very good one, and feels out of place in the midst of this extended arc. (Of course, once again, it’s not really a standalone: this one is later 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.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book for the next ten weekdays.

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 Comics 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 stuff. Good, but in the years since it came out we’ve seen a TON of stuff like this (a lot of it from Vertigo, the DC Comics imprint that built upon Sandman’s success). 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 Dream’s sister 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, Cerebus and others were all on my reading list before I ditched 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? It sure did. This was very strong, stronger than I remembered … which means I can’t imagine how good the later stuff will be.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

The new Weird Tales #352 features an exclusive interview with bestselling fantasy author Neil Gaiman. This fall saw the release of Gaiman’s new novel The Graveyard Book, and January 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of his comic-book masterpiece The Sandman — so WeirdTales.net will spend the next two weeks revisiting The Sandman in “Recurring Dream,” a daily retrospective column by correspondent Eric San Juan. Take it away, Eric…

It may sound melodramatic, but The Sandman changed my life. No, not in an after-school-special, inspired-me-to-join-the-Foreign-Legion kind of way. But it sparked something in me. A new understanding and appreciation of something I had long cherished, but didn’t necessarily take pride in: comic books.

A childhood love I continued to enjoy into adulthood, comics were filled with fun adventures, great characters, and boundless imagination. All wonderful things, to be sure — but as with so many young fans, there eventually came a time when comics and I no longer saw eye to eye. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a dreadful time for the medium; the shelves were littered with the worst sort of empty-headed rubbish, and I, being a young man who fancied himself worthy of reading something with a bit more smarts, began drifting from the four-color pages.

Comics and I parted ways.

No one who grows to love the medium, though, ever truly abandons it. It’s just one of those things, like Bazooka Joe bubble gum, Pop Rocks, and lawn darts: you know it’s no good for you, but damnit, who cares? So by the time the late 1990s were upon me I found myself wondering what was happening in the world of comics. Wondering what I had missed. Wondering if maybe, just maybe, I could rekindle the love affair.

It turns out I had missed a whole lot. There was this thing called The Sandman, apparently, that had very quietly become one of the most critically acclaimed comics of all time. I completely missed the boat! Just as I had left, this guy Neil Gaiman had come along and given the medium something remarkable.

So I figured I’d give it a shot — I’d try out a few books, see how I might feel about yielding once again to their garish delights. I bought Preludes and Nocturnes, the first Sandman collection.

…and the next several volumes quickly followed. It was a revelation. Comics could do this? They could be this? I knew the medium was capable of great things — after all, my mind had been blown in the ’80s by Watchmen, Frank Miller’s incredible Elektra: Assassin and Daredevil: Born Again, and Dave Sim’s Cerebus — but those had seemed like fleeting aberrations. Flukes. Surely no creator could be allowed to sustain such genius. I mean, these were comics, meant to be disposable. Fun but unimportant. Yet here I was, reading an epic work for the ages. Sandman spanned seven years and 75 issues (subsequently collected into ten novel-sized stories), growing in mythic grandeur with each new piece. I would never look at comics — what they were, are, and can be — the same way again.

I still don’t. I expect more from my comics these days. I expect good writing and smart stories and something more meaningful than Guy beats up Other Guy. I’ve developed a deep love for the nature of the medium; the things it can accomplish and the unique ways in which it can tell stories. I am no longer the same reader I was, and I owe that to Sandman.

It’s been a decade since I was first exposed to the series, and 20 years since The Sandman #1 was first published. With four gorgeous new Absolute Sandman hardcover collections sitting on my shelves, now seemed like the perfect time to revisit this series. How would it hold up? Would I still hold it in such high esteem? I’ve read a lot of really great comics since I first discovered Sandman, after all. I like to think I’ve become a more discerning reader. Would Neil Gaiman’s amazing series still read like it was working on an entirely different level, given all the comics and graphic novels I’ve read since?

As you’ll see over the course of this 10-part retrospective, the answer is yes. A resounding yes. Sandman remains a high-water mark not just for the comic medium, but for fantasy literature in general. It is every bit as vital today as it was 20 years ago when it first began publication.

I hope you enjoy reading along as I again plunge back into the world of Dream, Desire, Delirium, Death, and the rest of the Endless. Even better, take the plunge with me and re-read Gaiman’s masterpiece. You’ll be glad you did.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

The new Weird Tales #352 features an exclusive interview with bestselling fantasy author Neil Gaiman. This fall saw the release of Gaiman’s new novel The Graveyard Book, and January 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of his comic-book masterpiece The Sandman — so WeirdTales.net will spend the next two weeks (starting Monday) revisiting The Sandman in “Recurring Dream,” a daily retrospective column by correspondent Eric San Juan.

But first, we asked Seattle-area WT contributor Lisa Mantchev to tell us what it was like when Neil visited her neck of the woods — specifically, the University of Washington — on The Graveyard Book tour this past October.

* * *

He’s signing. Books in stacks of eight await his signature, rendered in red-brown ink that flows from a fountain pen. Everyone here in the backstage green room keeps a close eye on Neil Gaiman and a closer eye on his right hand, which sports a splint on the middle finger: a souvenir from a recent trip to China. (The first rule of author signings is that you don’t ask the author how he ― or his hand ― is holding up. The second rule? See rule one.)

In passing, Gaiman wonders aloud why there is a clip-art leaf on the title page, when a bat or a tombstone would have been more thematically appropriate to a tome entitled The Graveyard Book. Everyone within hearing offers their suggestions (“Perhaps it’s meant to be the ivy near the Egyptian Walk?”) but there’s no denying that other things might look more like actual ivy, and Gaiman only shakes his head and moves on to the next title page in the next book.

A lot has changed since his first signing at the University of Washington Book Store years ago, where twenty people were in attendance. Tonight’s venue holds nine hundred, and by the time the reading starts at seven, the only seating available is in the balcony. Attendance didn’t jump fiftyfold overnight, though; there’s never been a lightning bolt or thunderclap in Gaiman’s career. Instead, a gradual storm has built one raindrop at a time: a cult following for Sandman whose membership jumped with the publication of American Gods and again with the release of the Stardust movie. No doubt the same will happen again when the Coraline movie opens in 2009. Hand-selling by supportive booksellers has been as vital as word-of-mouth by readers who each came to the Road of Gaiman by a different gateway work, as evidenced by the shifting piles of personal items now moving across the table: old review copies of Good Omens, co-written with the estimable Terry Pratchett; a Mirrormask DVD; a pamphlet of Snow, Glass, Apples; a hardcover copy of the Fragile Things collection.

In the chapel where the reading will take place, the audience is just as diverse: a beauty in full goth attire complete with crinoline and top hat; a young married couple with a toddler; people of various ages and means who arrive singly and in small groups. It’s Seattle, so they waited in the rain, in some cases for more than an hour, until the doors opened. It’s their chance to see the man many consider the rock star of the speculative fiction genre, the uncrowned king. Yes, he’s an award-winning, bestselling, internationally-acclaimed author, but he’s still “Neil for short”: amicable, approachable, and still very much one of us.

Before long, the moment has come: The sconces and chandeliers dim, the applause begins, and a single spot pours white light over Gaiman as he enters Stage Left. A ripple of laughter passes through the room when Gaiman informs the audience they will be seeing special advance footage of Coraline after the intermission, and he would appreciate it if no one would videotape it and put it on YouTube, because he knows he can trust them. Upturned faces smile and nod. With a smile that says, Good. I’m glad we understand one another, Gaiman launches into Chapter Four of The Graveyard Book: The Witch’s Headstone.

It’s a long chapter ― the longest in the book, in fact, and the original source material for the novel. Originally published, almost simultaneously, in the anthology Wizards and Gaiman’s collection M is for Magic, it is the seed that bore the darkly charming flower of The Graveyard Book. Gaiman swiftly renders Nobody Owens (Bod, for short) and his companions:

Abanazer Bolger had thick spectacles and a permanent expression of mild distaste, as if he had just realized that the milk in his tea had been on the turn, and he could not get the sour taste out of his mouth.

This is exactly the sort of thing Gaiman’s audience has come to expect and to love: words that sketch a vivid mental image, colored with his charming inflections. He’s a brilliant reader of his own work, pausing for dramatic effect in exactly the right place, pacing sentences just so, and always properly anticipating the laughter of those gathered in the pews.

“I wanted to hear his voice,” fan Elizabeth Coleman says afterward. “It’s such an expressive, melodious thing, and brings magic to everything he says, profound or mundane. In the Q&A, he turned even the most simple question . . . into a tale, but he was never long-winded.”

It’s all a perfectly balanced tightrope act: an author whose stories for children resonate with adults, whose comic book stories win World Fantasy awards, whose novels become movies filled with both CGI special effects and puppetry. And perhaps that tightrope act is simply one turn at the Mouse Circus, where everything is odd and enchanting and darkly mystical. ―Or, if not a tightrope, then the blade of a very special knife, the sort carried by Jack in opening scene of The Graveyard Book:

The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.

Gaiman walks the edge of that dark knife, weaving tales that cut his readers, that linger and transform their hearts and minds long after the author has departed a rain-drenched city.

Lisa Mantchev is the author of the fantasy novel Eyes Like Stars (forthcoming in summer 2009 from Feiwel & Friends). Her story “Six Scents” appears in Weird Tales: The 21st Century, Vol. 1.

The December 2008 issue of Weird Tales features an exclusive interview with the leading dark-fantasist of our generation, Neil Gaiman — so this holiday season, we’re doubling up on the Gaimany goodness! From now through Jan. 31, all new and renewing Weird Tales subscribers in the U.S. will receive a free copy of THE NEIL GAIMAN READER, a fantastic book of essays about Neil’s work that includes two extensive interviews with the man himself. That’s $47.95 worth of weirdness for just $20!

The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

Few artists have so widened the possibilities for how to create graphical narratives than DAVE MCKEAN (1963– ). And even fewer artists have the ability to pack so much storytelling into single images. Yet McKean, known for his work illustrating writers ranging from Neil Gaiman to Jonathan Carroll to Tori Amos, possesses something rarer still: the uncanny ability to create images that spark an instant visceral reaction in the viewer. Powerful tools for a wielder of weird, these. We thank our lucky stars for his breathtaking body of work.

The Weird Tales team was delighted this weekend to present author Neil Gaiman and animator Bill Plympton — both guests at the New York Comic Con — with plaques commemorating their place in our list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” Neil graciously accepted his award from editorial director Stephen Segal during a VIP reception for donors to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, while Bill received his at an exciting showcase of his latest films.

“85 Weirdest” honoree Grant Morrison was a guest at the con too, but proved elusive — so before passing along his plaque through proper channels, our assistant Renee Farrah did her best to convince the writer’s most famous fictional colleague to accept on his behalf.

(Neil Gaiman photo by Katie Thomson)

Thanks to all those who turned out for the Weird Tales panel at the New York Comic Con — we had a great time and hope you did too. Photos from the weekend — including more than one of our “85 Weirdest Storytellers” honorees — to follow!

The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

Among the great invented mythologies of the 20th century — the Cthulhu mythos, Middle-Earth, the Star Wars galaxy — must also be numbered NEIL GAIMAN’s (1960– ) spooky “Endless” cosmology of the landmark graphic novel series The Sandman. From there, Neil has gone on to become the most beloved weird storyteller of a generation, the Bradbury of the multimedia age, spinning tales like American Gods, Anansi Boys, and Coraline. To top it all off, he seems to have personally actualized the life of Jubal Harshaw. Sir, we salute you.

Neil Gaiman will appear tonight at the New York Comic Con’s fundraiser for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Also, tomorrow at the NYCC: the Weird Tales 85th anniversary panel discussion, featuring Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, WT editorial director Stephen H. Segal, artist Molly Crabapple, pulp historian and horror editor Stefan Dziemianowicz, and more!

Readers wrote us in record numbers when we asked you who, in your book, are the weirdest of the weird: the most influentially strange authors and artists and talespinners of all kinds to work their magic on the world in the 85 years since 1923, when Weird Tales was born. We asked that you not limit your suggestions to just fiction writers, and you responded enthusiastically, naming hordes of filmmakers, songwriters, cartoonists, and more. We took your ideas, added a few of our own, called some top fantasy professionals to put in their two cents, and then dove into the long and arduous process of winnowing the list down to a mere 85 names.

Our 85th anniversary issue — featuring fiction by Michael Moorcock, Sarah Monette, and Tanith Lee, nonfiction by Cherie Priest, and Jeff VanderMeer’s interview with China Míeville, and is still available for purchase online — introduced the 85 Weirdest Storytellers individually. If one of your favorite weirdos didn’t make the list, you can share your weird and let us know! Our 90th anniversary isn’t that far away…

Meanwhile:

WEIRD TALES presents: The 85 Weirdest Storytellers 1923-2005

• DOUGLAS ADAMS
• CHARLES ADDAMS
• LAURIE ANDERSON
• J.G. BALLARD
• NICK BANTOCK
• CLIVE BARKER
• ART BELL
• BJÖRK
• DAVID BOWIE
• RAY BRADBURY
• MARGARET BRUNDAGE
• WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
• TIM BURTON
• KATE BUSH
• OCTAVIA BUTLER
• ANGELA CARTER
• NICK CAVE
• LON CHANEY SR.
• CIRQUE DU SOLEIL
• JOEL & ETHAN COEN
• ALICE COOPER
• DAVID CRONENBERG
• R. CRUMB
• ROALD DAHL
• SALVADOR DALI
• SAMUEL R. DELANY
• PHILIP K. DICK
• STEVE DITKO
• HARLAN ELLISON
• M.C. ESCHER
• VIRGIL FINLAY
• CHARLES FORT
• NEIL GAIMAN
• TERRY GILLIAM
• EDWARD GOREY
• GUNTHER VON HAGENS
• JIM HENSON
• ROBERT E. HOWARD
• SHIRLEY JACKSON
• FRANZ KAFKA
• FRIDA KAHLO
• ANDY KAUFMAN
• STEPHEN KING
• STANLEY KUBRICK
• MADELEINE L’ENGLE
• GARY LARSON
• TANITH LEE
• THOMAS LIGOTTI
• H.P. LOVECRAFT
• DAVID LYNCH
• GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
• DAVE MCKEAN
• RAND & ROBYN MILLER
• MICHAEL MOORCOCK
• ALAN MOORE
• CATHERINE L. MOORE & HENRY KUTTNER
• GRANT MORRISON
• JOYCE CAROL OATES
• MERVYN PEAKE
• PENN & TELLER
• BILL PLYMPTON
• THOMAS PYNCHON
• ANNE RICE
• ROD SERLING
• DR. SEUSS
• ALICE SHELDON, a.k.a. JAMES TIPTREE JR.
• CHUCK SHEPHERD
• CLARK ASHTON SMITH
• STEPHEN SONDHEIM
• REV. IVAN STANG
• OSAMU TEZUKA
• HUNTER S. THOMPSON
• KOOL KEITH THORNTON, a.k.a. DR. OCTAGON
• KURT VONNEGUT
• TOM WAITS
• ALICE WALKER
• KARA WALKER
• ANDY WARHOL
• SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER
• JOHN WATERS
• ROGER WATERS
• WIM WENDERS
• THORNTON WILDER
• ROBERT ANTON WILSON
• WARREN ZEVON

Kudos to them all: creative geniuses whose work, in whatever form and flavor, has shown an affinity of spirit with the brilliantly freaky storytelling that’s been the hallmark of Weird Tales since the magazine was born 85 years ago this very month.

(Don’t see one of your favorites here? Help us compile more weirdness! Go to the Share the Weird page and tell your fellow readers about the weird storytellers you love the most!)