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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. (Day 9 of 10.)

SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t yet read this climactic volume of the series, you may wish to do so before reading our review.

We make choices. With those choices come consequences. Some unforeseen, some inevitable, some just, some unjust. The fates do not care about human concerns of “justice,” and destiny is no more predictable than my cat’s moods.

Morpheus, the King of Dreams … he made choices. Consumed with a profound sense of duty and pride and, to some extent, even an aloof sense of arrogance, he did the things he thought he had to do. His ends were not necessarily noble, but nor were they evil. They just were.

Yet we’ve all got to face the consequences of our actions, even Dream of the Endless. So it is that all roads led him to The Kindly Ones, a tale in which Dream’s choices bring pain, death, and ultimately the change in himself he could neither admit to nor accept in Brief Lives. He resisted it. Denied it. Brushed aside his brother’s comments. But Dream was changing. It all comes to roost here.

In Season of Mists, Dream made the mistake of letting Loki, God of Lies, go free. Loki, ever a maker of mischief, steals the child of Hippolyta Hall, whose husband Dream killed in The Doll’s House. Hurt, angry and on the verge of lunacy, she seeks out the Furies of Greek myth, who are empowered to take revenge upon anyone who has spilled family blood. Dream, of course, did exactly that in Brief Lives. All this is complicated by the interference of the witch Thessaly (from A Game of You), who protects Hippolyta Hall from Dream, thus preventing him from breaking the cycle of violence the Furies bring upon the Dreaming. We initially assume Thessaly is simply bitter about Dream’s curt treatment of her in A Game of You, but we later learn (in The Wake) that Thessaly was, in fact, the unnamed lover who had scorned Dream just prior to the start of Brief Lives. She had not forgiven him for being so cold.

No matter our intentions, our choices can come back to destroy us. And when lives are as complicated as Dream’s, many are the opportunities for things to go ill.

If The Kindly Ones is the largest and slowest moving Sandman arc — and it is undeniably both — it’s easy to understand why. It serves as the culmination of all that has come before. A trial of sorts. A purging by fire. An ending. In addition to the stories cited above, we also see the continuation of Puck’s tale (Dream Country), the culmination of Nuala’s story (the faerie who was gifted to Dream in Season of Mists) as well as her brother, Cluracan’s (from the same arc and also from World’s End), along with Rose Walker (The Doll’s House), Lucifer and Mazikeen (a tale that spins off into Mike Carey’s acclaimed series, Lucifer), and others.

Most of all, The Kindly Ones serves to bring into focus just how much we’ve come to like the characters who reside in the Dreaming. Fiddler’s Green, better known to us as Gilbert. Mervyn, the pumpkin with an attitude. And most of all Matthew the raven, who is the heart and soul of this tale and, to a greater extent, of The Wake. He is the human element of these otherworldly tales. As we watch the chaos brought upon them, we can’t help but feel as if we never spent enough time with these “people.”

As the Furies tear apart Dream’s realm and lay to waste all he has created, Dream himself is strangely calm. To the end, he remains near emotionless. By now, though, we know much of that distant demeanor is a lie. Not a lie to us as much as it is to himself. So married to the idea of his responsibilities is he, so driven by the notion of being the aloof Lord of Dreams, he cannot allow himself to do as he truly wants. To despair of the pain being caused. To desire a different end. To destroy those who attack him. To seek refuge in delirium. To bring death to the Furies. To change his own destiny.

He is Dream. And even if it means the destruction of all he is and all he created, he will be Dream until the end. Stubborn. Resolved. Proud.

And so he accepts his fate, knowing he cannot change it, knowing what is done is done and that the choices he made he would make again. And maybe somewhere in his heart he also knew he was not strong enough to accept the changes he must undergo, and so he allowed them to be forced upon him by the only means possible.

Dream dies.

And Dream is reborn.

I can still remember that mix of being stunned and relieved and befuddled and more when I first read the end of this tale. To kill off your main character is a bold move, especially when the death isn’t predicated on shock value but is instead the natural place the story needed to go. At the time I also wondered if maybe Neil Gaiman wasn’t trying to have it both ways; if giving birth to a new personification of Dream wasn’t something of a cop-out. That old comic-book trick: “He’s dead. Wait, just kidding!”

But no, it’s not a cop-out. It is the end Sandman was fated to have. Sandman is layered with themes; among them is that of change, of transformation. The unchanging and the changing: the ceaseless tides of lives come and gone; the way in which people’s choices dictate who they are and who they can be. How even the most unmoving stone can be worn away over the course of long years by the soft kiss of wind and water. The Kindly Ones is the culmination of that theme, the slowest to take root and flower of all the themes Sandman gives us.

But then, the most important changes do not happen overnight.

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. (Day 8 of 10.)

Stories, storytelling, and storytellers. What is dreaming but an elaborate, unconscious means of storytelling, one in which we are the storyteller weaving tales we could never imagine while conscious? Stories and the people who tell them have been a recurrent theme in Sandman, a vital part of the essence of what Neil Gaiman constructed. World’s End, the last of the series’ three short-story collections, takes the idea of telling stories to its logical extreme.

Unlike the two earlier collections (Dream Country and Fables & Reflections), this one uses a framing device to hold the stories together as if they are all one narrative. World’s End deposits us in an inn of the same name, a place that exists outside of time and reality. A pair of ordinary people find themselves eating and drinking with all manner of strange beings — faeries and centaurs and others — and to pass time they tell one another stories. So, essentially, we’ve got stories within a story.

If he didn’t do it so damn well, I’d almost be inclined to accuse Gaiman of showing off here. See, he’s not content to stop with mere stories within stories, or even stories within stories within stories. No, at times he takes it to an extreme, building a stack of stories atop one another almost, but never quite, to the point of toppling. Shades of One Thousand and One Nights — better known as Arabian Nights and almost certainly one of Gaiman’s influences, seeing that “Ramadan” was completed shortly before these narratives. At one point we’ve got a guy in the inn telling a story about some folks conducting a funeral, who in turn tell a story about a visit from Destruction of the Endless, who himself tells a story about the creation of a city. Throughout this collection, tales are nestled inside other tales, brief dramas curled up warm and cozy under the wings of their larger mother story, and all of them set inside a larger tale that serves as a harbinger of what is to come in the tragic The Kindly Ones.

But the thing is — and this is what impressed me so much, especially now that I’m more attuned to examining how stories are put together — it’s not just showing off. These are good stories. Stories worth telling. Stories with thematic and narrative elements that play off one another. Some are old stories, tales far more ancient than either the author or the medium of comic books. Gaiman has never been shy about wearing his inspirations and influences on his sleeve, though, and nearly every element he appropriates from other sources, he makes his own. “Hob’s Leviathon,” for instance, is an age-old tale about a woman posing as a man in order to serve on a sailing vessel, and seeing a massive serpent while out at sea. To make it his own, Gaiman weaves Hob Gadling, Dream’s undying human friend from early in the series, into the scenario, and uses the fable to make points about truth, secrets, identity, and desire.

The tales here aren’t as consistently great as the previous two collections. “Cluracan’s Tale” is an unmemorable adventure featuring one of Sandman’s least enjoyable characters, and “The Golden Boy” is a bizarre attempt to make a morality play out of an ill-conceived, short-lived 1970s comic series called Prez, about an idealistic teen who becomes President of the United States. Yet it’s hard to complain when the same collection gives us the wonder of a dreaming city, a bizarre look at a city of gaunt funeral directors, and a dozen other little gems.

The thing that makes World’s End most worth reading is the moving finish to it all. One did not have to be paying terribly close attention during Brief Lives to know that the story of Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, would not bring a happy ending. Brief Lives was merely the dark horizon before the storm; a faint rumble before the lightning and thunder begins. In this volume, the final episode is devoted to the Sandman story itself when the sky fills with a vision: a haunting, moving glimpse at what is to come for Dream. (As we learn later, World’s End takes place concurrently with The Kindly Ones, and climaxes during The Wake.)

There is something more subtle at work here. Whether intended or not, World’s End is something of an extended commentary of the future of the series and its characters. Its stories are about endings and new beginnings; deaths and rebirths; about being ensnared and coming away a different person. Taken as a whole, these serve as a companion piece to the themes of Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, adding to the already rich fabric of Gaiman’s world.

Of Sandman’s short-story collections, World’s End is the one about which I had the fondest memories. I now remember why. The framing device feels like a fable as old as the hills (it is) and the stories are consistently inventive, but more than that, World’s End is a celebration of storytelling. And what better place to celebrate storytelling than in the pages of Sandman, which itself has been a celebration of the form?

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. (Day 7 of 10.)

With all the gods and demons and twisted mythology of Sandman, it’s easy to forget how warm and inviting Neil Gaiman’s work can be. In the years since my last reading, I had certainly forgotten.

Brief Lives is a cute, tragic, utterly human tale that might stand as the very best story arc of this magnificent series. Gaiman’s writing certainly accounts for a big part of that, but a huge chunk of the credit has to go to artist Jill Thompson. By and large, the artists of this series are well matched with their respective stories, but none more so than here, as Thompson brings the whimsy of Delirium to life like no artist before or since. Thanks to her work, it’s impossible not to fall in love with the youngest of the Endless. Unceasingly inquisitive and forever existing on the edge of confusion, Delirium twists and turns and smiles and enthuses her way in your heart like no other character in this series. It would be easy for a character like this to become annoying, but she never crosses that line; she is the heart and soul of Brief Lives, and it is Thompson’s “acting” with the pencil that makes us love her.

But if Delirium is endearingly cute, Brief Lives as a whole is not. It’s a bittersweet story about choices and consequences, family and responsibility. Destruction, the missing brother of the Endless, chose to leave behind his cosmic chores for a simple hermit’s life spent painting, cooking, and dodging insults from his wisecracking dog, Barnabas. Delirium is intent on finding him, but Destruction does not want to be found. Mankind does a fine job destroying things without him, he explains late in the story. Why does he need to oversee it all? It’s something that calls into question the very purpose of the Endless. After all, if they need not do their duties, to what end do they continue?

None of this matters to Delirium, who only wants her family to return to the way it was in the good old days … but, of course, that’s not to be. Destruction cannot help observing that Dream has changed. Ever stubborn, Dream denies this. He can’t see the changes he has undergone — but we can. From the moment he agrees to journey with his deranged sister, we know he is not quite the same cold, heartless entity he was. Behind those dark eyes and the unsmiling face he is developing a heart.

Ultimately, the great tragedy of Brief Lives — and the event with consequences to the entire series — is the resolution of Dream’s relationship with his son, Orpheus. The two finally come to terms with one another, but there is a cost to both. And unlike some of Dream’s past relationship choices — such as the time he doomed a lover to torment in Hell — this time he is driven not by a wounded ego, but by compassion. The stubborn, bull-headed Dream we met at Sandman’s outset would never have agreed to the request Orpheus makes of him here, but now he does, and it leaves him spent and emotionally broken, forced to confront feelings long suppressed. He returns to the Dreaming a changed man (or being, or entity, or god), unable to wash away the memory of the mistakes both he and his son have made.

So, the Brief Lives of the title? Those are our own: the small time even those who are Endless have to spend with those they love, and the awareness that, aside from our responsibility to others, enjoying our time on this Earth is the most important job we have.

Most affecting here, and the thing that makes this the most enjoyable and effective Sandman arc, is the mixing of tragedy with humor. We get a hint at what is to come early. At the end of an awkward dinner, Delirium walks away from her sweets, a pair of chocolate people—and we see the food has been inadvertently given a fleeting taste of life through her transcendent touch. As the Endless brother and sister turn their backs, unaware, Gaiman writes: “Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.” Aside from being a wonderful line, the humor tinged with sincere pathos is a microcosm of Brief Lives as a whole. We are given time. Not much of it. So we’d better love one another before Hell comes crashing down on us, because life is equal parts joyful, absurd, and awful.

It’s really impossible to overstate how much I love this story. More than any other Sandman story, more than even the brilliant Season of Mists, it is filled with memorable scene after memorable scene. The sadness we feel for Despair, who desperately misses her brother. The dinner scene. Delirium’s antics in the travel agency. The death dance of Ishtar. Pretty much every conversation Destruction has with Barnabas. Dream’s return to the Dreaming after parting with his son. And so many more.

It’s a tall order, standing out among the brilliance of Sandman, but Brief Lives manages the trick. In the roughly 16 years since this arc was first published, it still manages to stand head and shoulders above all but the elite of the comics medium.

We say that now on the 20th anniversary of Sandman’s first issue. I imagine we’ll still be saying much the same when the 40th comes around.

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. (Day 6 of 10.)

The second of Sandman’s three short story collections, Fables and Reflections, is arguably the most eclectic of the bunch. It may not be the most instantly accessible (that one is Dream Country), or the most focused (World’s End), but it’s probably the most essential.

As in Season of Mists, the nature of wielding responsibility — whether over people, things, or cultures — is a prominent theme here. Rulers grapple with sustaining a culture’s golden age. A troubled man takes responsibility for the fractured remnants of his life and finds solace in insanity. Emperors are pained by the decisions they cannot avoid. And ultimately, many of these people must face the consequences of their choices: a theme utterly essential to Sandman as a whole.

This is best displayed in the story “Orpheus,” an unusual standalone short story in that it’s vital to the series-spanning story arc. “Orpheus” transforms the Greek myth into a Sandman story: Here, Orpheus is Dream’s son, and his tragic mistake — when trying to lead his deceased bride out of the Underworld, he looks upon her before it is permitted, thus losing her forever — is underscored by the involvement of the Endless. In seeking to rejoin his love, Orpheus is given eternal life, yet this is a curse, not a blessing; when he’s torn to shreds by vile creatures seeking revenge upon him for a slight, his head remains very much alive.

Most tragic of all is Dream’s treatment of his son. As ever, Dream is distant and cold, seemingly incapable of real love or compassion. (His own brother will comment on this lack of empathy and emotion in Brief Lives.) Disappointed in the choices his son has made and suffering from a hurt pride, Dream chooses to walk away from him forever. It’s not just a heartless act, it’s yet another moment during which Dream comes across like a petulant child, his wounded ego driving him down an ill-chosen path. Ultimately, these events have a deep, deep impact on the series. (Such a deep impact, this story arguably ought to have been collected in Brief Lives instead of here.)

If the most important story to the Sandman narrative here is “Orpheus,” the most impressive tale in this collection is certainly “Ramadan,” which showcases a gloriously luxuriant city in the midst of its golden age. The presentation, the art, the writing, even the unusual way it was created: all come together for one of the most respected single issues of the series. “Ramadan” is interesting not just because of its poetic beauty — and it has that in spades — but also for the way in which it turns the tables on the usual dream vs. reality fable. Rather than dream becoming reality, reality becomes dream. Wonderful.

The best of the book, though, is the charming “Three Septembers and a January,” which looks at the real life Joshua Norton through the eyes of the Endless. Norton was an insane, albeit harmless, 19th-century San Franciscan who thought he was the Emperor of the United States, and people around town loved him. Here, Dream, Desire, and Despair have a contest of sorts over which of them holds dominion over Norton. The story, equal parts cute and tragic, also manages to be an inspiring look at how we shape our own reality. Happiness and contentment come from within; our hearts, our fates, our hopes and dreams are in our own hands. They are driven by modesty, and by acceptance, and by understanding that greed, desire, and consumption are not the road to inner peace. A simple message — dare I say, quaint — yet handled with warmth and humanity, and yet another example of the multitudinous creative directions this series takes.

Other tales are equally all over the map. We visit werewolves in love, meet a young Marco Polo lost in the desert, and spend more time with Orpheus, who’s being protected by an ancestor of John Constantine (of Hellblazer fame). “August,” one of my favorites in this collection, takes a look at the nature of power and responsibility through the eyes of two men: a dwarf and Emperor Augustus of Rome.

Dream and the Endless are minor players in this volume, mere apparitions that drift in and back out again. Like passing shadows or, more appropriately, dreams. They are not the focus of these tales; rather, they provide the framework around which Gaiman explores the world inside our head, in these stories that examine universal truths and ask very human questions.

Collections like this one illustrate what a shrewd decision it was to conceive and structure Sandmanin such a way that the series could go anywhere and be anything. Gaiman himself called this the best choice he could possibly have made, and that’s the truth. While my heart resides most closely with the saga’s central tale, these short stories are each gems of their own — jewels in the crown that is one of comics’ greatest creative achievements.

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. (Day 5 of 10.)

Small breasts. A seemingly minor thing, yet in reality rather important. But more on that later.

A Game of You was not my favorite story arc when I first read Sandman, nor does it leap to the front of the pack here, re-reading it many years later. Oh, it’s a fine story, a kind of nightmarish fairy tale plucked from the things we leave behind in childhood and draped in the garb of a directionless adult who doesn’t know what she wants to be. But it doesn’t sing to me the way the vast majority of Neil Gaiman’s 2,000-page epic does.

Not that there isn’t a lot to like here. There is. A Game of You focuses on Barbie, the painfully plastic blonde from The Doll’s House. She left Ken and now lives in an apartment building populated by an assortment of semi-misfits. Sound familiar? Yes, we walked this ground a few story arcs ago — but the approach this time is much different. Further, to cement the idea that nothing exists in a vacuum in Sandman, some of these characters also have ties to Preludes and Nocturnes, specifically the young lady featured in the episode inside the diner. The references are fleeting and subtle — one of Gaiman’s great strengths is trusting the reader to put the pieces of his puzzles together — but they serve to connect this vast world of seemingly disjointed stories.

And playing with childhood toys in an adult, often sinister way? Sure, it’s been done before. Yet few have managed to make it seem so perfectly sensible.

Barbie is worth discussing for a moment. By the end we come to realize that it’s Wanda, not Barbie, who is the central figure of A Game of You’s thematic core: that of identity. Wanda is a transgender character, a pre-op born male and living as a woman, and her struggles with who she is serve to underpin everything the story is about. But Barbie is more interesting to me — not just because we discover that she’s more than the one-note gag we see in The Doll’s House, but because what we find is a woman without any real sense of who she is or what she wants. The way she paints her face; the way those masks are barriers between her and the world, a kind of very extroverted security blanket scrawled onto a very introverted person. That’s really strong stuff.

So if this is the one arc that doesn’t speak to me on the same level as, say, Brief Lives, I beg your forgiveness. It’s not a matter of not recognizing its strengths, it’s simply one of taste. We spend six issues in this world when it feels like three or four would have better suited the story. Despite the rich thematic material around which she is built, we’re not nearly as invested in Barbie as we are in her neighbors (Wanda and Hazel especially), so our time with her seems overlong. Further, once the initial oddness of the fairy tale characters wears off — this by the end of the first issue — so, too, does their novelty. The story overstays its welcome.

That said, small breasts.

No, I’m not having a fit of Tourette’s. One of the most noteworthy achievements of Gaiman’s Sandman was crossing the gender line. Comic books are a medium that, in the United States, has been decidedly dominated by males. Over the years, the adolescent power fantasies of superhero comics all but bullied other genres out of the mix, leaving caped, muscle-bound men and empty-headed, big-breasted women to rule the roost. (Yes, the real history of American comics is more complex than that, especially the impact Seduction of the Innocent had on the popular medium, but for simplicity’s sake the point stands.) These days, the rise of manga, graphic novels, and concerted efforts by some publishers has meant growth in female readership — yet even with this in mind, the comics world remains a boy’s playground. And in 1989, when The Sandman first began publication? Forget about it. Women were nowhere to be seen.

But Sandman did a lot to chip away at the testosterone wall built between women and comics. Gaiman tapped into something important for readers: His women were not male fantasies. They weren’t models or hourglasses or one-dimensional stereotypes — which, by and large, had been pretty much the extent of female comic characters. I mean, let’s face it, most male comic book writers can’t write nuanced, believable characters of their own gender, much less the other.

So here comes Gaiman and his cast of female characters: real people with real depth and real character and real thoughts, feelings and emotion. They are painfully naive about sex and accidentally get pregnant and have foolish prejudices and neuroses. Of course, comics, being the visual (and historically shallow) medium they often are, draw our attention to how things look. Visual clues tell us a lot. Thus, the small breasts we see here. These women are sometimes chubby and frumpy, and sometimes thin and flat-chested, and sometimes awkward and unattractive, and yes, sometimes quite gorgeous. In other words, they’re women. Not alien species, not unobtainable trophies — just women. They’re people as varied and different as our friends and mothers and selves. Even better, none of these factors are special story elements shoved in our face with clumsy, show-off writing, they just … are.

It’s hard to overestimate how big a factor this was in Sandman’s wide appeal and longevity. My wife devoured it. Lots of wives and girlfriends devoured it. Sandman proved to many people that comics didn’t have to be adolescent power trips; that they could feature characters — female characters — as complex and real as those in any work of literature. We longtime comic readers may have suspected this all along, but the general public didn’t. For most, comics were disposable rubbish with the worst sort of one-dimensional characters, ESPECIALLY with regard to women. Sandman, along with some other notable works, kicked at those barriers. A Game of You is a good example of how and why.

No, it’s not my favorite story arc in the series, but when a series features material as strong as Season of Mists, Brief Lives and World’s End, that’s hardly an insult. And yeah, favorite or not, there’s obviously a broader message to take from this arc, and a pretty important one at that.

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. (Day 4 of 10.)

Season of Mists is widely considered one of the best Sandman arcs, if not the best, and for good reason. I remember loving the heck out of this one first time around, and sure enough I loved it all over again.

Neil Gaiman manages to take eight issues that are, when you boil it down, mostly talk — and spins something engrossing out of it. Plenty of drama, intrigue and trickery; not only important for the overall saga, but just plain making for a gripping tale. Season of Mists was a chance for the author to flex his mythology muscles, playing with characters from a variety of cultures and seeing if they fit. The intrigue here comes not from the stunning events unfolding in Hell — events that would lead to a spinoff series featuring the Gaiman version of Lucifer — but from the interaction between mythic beings from differing pantheons.

They all want something from Dream, you see. They want the keys to Hell, which Lucifer has abandoned, and Morpheus has got to give them to somebody. And while these gods and demigods from around the world will beg, borrow, cheat, lie and steal to get their prize, the core of the story is really the audience Dream gives them all. Their machinations are secondary to Dream’s reactions to them — and from this perspective, we realize that while Season of Mists is a very, very key event in the overarching Sandman saga, it’s perhaps even more importantly the deepest examination of the Morpheus character to date.

It all begins with a family meeting: the first issue of this story and one of the single best Sandman issues overall. Gaiman’s Endless are a superb mix of deviousness and otherworldliness and the typical squabbling of human families we all know and love. What makes these personifications of concepts like Desire, Despair and Death so powerful aren’t the concepts themselves, but the very relatable personalities behind each one: Destruction the black sheep, Desire the attention whore — even Delirium, a loopy LSD victim of sorts, has an endearing little-sister quality. This family interaction is the heart and soul of Sandman. It’s also what kicks off Season of Mists.

This volume’s title refers to the time during which Hell is empty, a time when restless spirits descend upon the world and the dead seem to live again in their ghostly way. We get an inside glimpse at this in Chapter 4, a fine story though a needless distraction from the arc: Chapter 3 leaves off with Dream welcoming the aforementioned host of divine supplicants to his realm, and then abruptly we get this interlude about a student stuck at boarding school while dead students repopulate it. It’s a poignant little vignette, but its timing is maddening.

But otherwise, what’s not to like? Morpheus isn’t the most likeable chap in the world, yet the reader can’t help but he drawn to him. He’s rather curt, the sort who tells it like it is without much emotion. (Unless his pride is hurt… but that’s another discussion.) He suffers neither fools nor politics. That’s why seeing him deal with the likes of a decidedly less grand Odin, a falsely humble representative of an Asian deity, a horrible demon in the guise of an adorable little girl, and many others is so — well, endearing. Sure, Dream is kind of a cold and distant bastard, but he’s just the sort you want to see these manipulative folks facing. In other stories they would play their victims like fiddles. Not here. Dream does not get played.

Not by these people, at least.

That’s it. That’s the sum total of Season of Mists. Lucifer bails out on Hell, leaves Dream to make the decision on what to do with it, and Dream spends a load of pages listening to entities make their pitch. And it’s fantastic.

Sandman might be at its best in shorter stories and one-shot tales, but among the longer arcs Season of Mists stands out as one of the very best: a fascinating dose of political drama that could — amazingly, given that it’s fourth in a ten-book saga — be read on its own and still be eminently satisfying. Wonderful stuff.

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. (Day 3 of 10.)

You wouldn’t think a collection of one-off stories would be where Neil Gaiman finds his voice, but that is exactly the case. Dream Country, the third collection of his acclaimed Sandman, is made up of four one-shot stories. Each is different from the last. And each one is excellent.

The real treat here, however, is that this collection pushed Sandman out from its light-horror/dark-fantasy origins and finally showed the world what the series was capable of being. Which is to say, it can be almost anything.

I think that was Gaiman’s idea. The very concept of who and what Dream is was in part to allow him to do a wide variety of stories; whatever suited his fancy at any given time, he could go there. We’re not limited to tales about serial killers and demons. Time nor place nor tone is an obstacle. Sandman can be ANYTHING, and at times it is.

Part of what makes the series special, this.

The first story here is “Calliope,” a tale in which the muse of the same name is kept captive for a greedy, selfish writer. This is probably the weakest of the bunch. That’s no insult, though, as Gaiman manages to blend mythology and horrid people and a satisfying ending. Still, it’s rather mundane, all things considered, with nothing that screams “SANDMAN!” A “careful what you wish for, you just might get it” tale and little more. This could have been a John Constantine story or a Swamp Thing story and you’d not bat an eye. Oh, there is a dream sequence, sure, but it’s not essential.

Of course, as with all things Sandman, seeds are planted here that will bear fruit later. Dream has a son? How interesting …

It’s followed by the wonderful “A Dream of a Thousand Cats,” in which cats ponder ruling the world (and, as in many stories, we see yet another aspect of Morpheus). The art is perfect for the story, a sort of twisted fairy tale come to life, and the writing … well hell, the head kitty’s monologue inspired me to dream of cats ruling the world. Quite poetic. I liked this one because it underlines an important idea: that dreams are potent, world-changing things.

This is a theme that runs throughout the series. Dreams — the stuff of ideas and inspiration, of beauty and love and fear and horror — can change who we are and what we become, and in turn we can change the world around us for good or ill. Ideas are powerful, and even more powerful is man’s willingness to be inspired by them. The world is what we make of it. It is a reflection of who we are.

This is, I think, one of the foundations upon which Sandman is built.

Third out of the gate is the award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which picks up seeds Gaiman dropped in a one-shot story featured last volume. (Again, our refrain: NOTHING is “standalone” in the world of Sandman.) How he manages to hold this one together, I do not know, but he does. The story jumps from scene to scene like a frog on a hot plate. First we’re seeing a brief exchange between two characters, in the next panel it’s something else, and in the third it’s something else yet again. The dialogue jumps back and forth between excerpts from Shakespeare and the story. The whole thing just flips and flops and is all over the map. There is little to no sense of continuity here at all.

Yet it works. Somehow, Gaiman’s approach makes this tale almost dreamlike, like a fevered vision seen at dusk, when the shadows begin to come alive and the day withers in the face of the night. Quite appropriate, given the subject matter.

I don’t think this is the finest of the Sandman one-shots — that one comes later — but it is fine. Overpraised (sorry, folks, it is), but good.

Finally is “Façade,” in which Gaiman scoops up an obscure old DC Comics character (Element Girl, though she’s never named) and … well, I won’t spoil what happens with her, but it’s a tragic tale with a happy ending, an examination of isolation and feeling alone and wanting so badly to end it all but not being able to do it. Quite an affecting work, with bleak and moving artwork by Colleen Doran. There are some truly haunting moments, such as an awkward dinner scene, and Gaiman does an amazing job of getting across this woman’s pain. Though an utterly inhuman character, she’s one of the most human people you’ll ever read. Fantastic stuff.

So: four stories, four wildly different approaches, four entirely different spins on who and what the Sandman could be. Nice vignettes that serve to show us “business-as-usual” Dream before we launch into the world-shaking events of Season of Mists.

Gaiman’s chess pieces are now in place. From this point forward, the game truly begins.

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.

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.”