Dream is dead.
(Here at Long story; short pier we continue our exhumation of the corpse of one Anodyne magazine [1996 – 1999, requiescat in pace]. Why? Damned if I know. An attempt to distract myself, perhaps. —Tonight, spurred mostly by an email from a friend idly wondering in what order, exactly, one ought to read it, we present my review of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman written on the event of its completion, back in November 1996. It’s impossible to overstate the impact Sandman has had on comics, but even as I type that sentence I realize I have no idea how it’s regarded in the here and now. History moves fast, these days; even faster in a world at once as fickle and monomaniacal as comics. People still know it, yes; people still read it; editors and publishers still fling together er-you-dite UK writers and this or that upstart cartoonist and a mishmosh of julienned Bullfinch’s and double-handfuls of Golden Age continuity in the hopes of bottling that much lightning again. But—but. Comics is also still enthralled [though there’s hope for the first time in years] to the longjohn [pervert-suit] superhero set, to a bewildering degree. Insular tropes that make no sense to readers not steeped in their mysteries derail the highest of concepts, while the stupid exigencies of 22-pages-a-month like [gummy] clockworks that dictate industrial cartooning pretty much put the kibosh on consistency in art and storytelling over any long haul. —All this, you see, is what makes good comics so miraculous to the embittered fan. [Imagine, say, what might have happened to the vital American prose short story, if it had squandered its rich variety of genre and marketplace by focusing tightly on, oh, closely observed, naturalistically quotidian epiphanics, produced to the increasingly bewildering dicta of insular journals and dwindling grants programs.]
(—That bit of savage irony riffed shamelessly off of Michael Chabon’s semi-coherent, ill-reasoned, and doubtless mistaken but nonetheless delightful introduction to McSweeney’s No. 10, a mixed bag—which was, one imagines, rather the point.
(I’d thought of a weblog for myself as a way of getting back into comics criticism [among other things]. This was back when I was thinking of calling it something else, like Blue Elephant Gun. Like a lot of other things, that’s been sidetracked. [I’m still tickled to see this blog-thing listed under “political sites” or the equivalent on this or that blogroll.] So maybe this is also a way to get back into the harness a little; toss the pill in the backyard with the old man or something. There’s a lot going on in webcomics, you know, and a lot to be said about it—a lot of people are linking today to Patrick Farley’s “Our Leader Speaks,” and more power to ’em, but fewer are clicking into the site itself to read [say] the richly strange and [now] bleakly haunting road-not-taken, “The Spiders” to note the amazing metatextual games he’s playing with Salon mockups and message board debates; fewer still would get any Colin Upton references I’d make regarding it.
(I should maybe get out of my own way, except to note that I was mad not to list A Game of You as among the best of the “books” of Sandman, and that some little credit for “surviv[ing] the debilitating collaborative process” is due to Karen Berger, without whom, I do not doubt. And one last note: for more old Anodyne comics fun, I can’t let pass an opportunity to recommend Barry’s Pre-Structuralist Funnies. Go, see what he was like back in the day.)
Neil Gaiman is not God. We’d best get that out of the way up front.
Not that this claim has (yet) been made in print, but some have come awfully damn close—like Mikal Gilmore, who writes, “To read The Sandman is to read something more than an imaginative new comic; it is to read a powerful new literature, fresh with the resonance of timeless myths.” (One imagines he had not yet read the wooden “Orpheus” issue.)
Or Frank McConnell, who claims that “Gaiman has invented, out of whole cloth, a mythology not just of comics but of storytelling itself.” (Really. This patchwork of pastiche and Shakespearean reference and obscure etymologies was invented out of whole cloth? I don’t think we were reading the same thing.)
So when one encounters something so bald-faced as Peter Straub’s assertion that, “If this isn’t literature, nothing is,” the temptation to do a little debunking becomes overwhelming.
But that would be the easy way out. Gaiman isn’t responsible for what people say about him or his work, merely the work itself: The Sandman, the comic he’s been writing for eight years, which just came to an end with its 75th and final issue. I gathered together the disparate volumes which collect the entirety (Preludes & Nocturnes, The Doll’s House, Dream Country, Season of Mists, Fables & Reflections, A Game of You, Brief Lives, Worlds’ End, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake) and sat down to read them all in one fell swoop. I went in intending to poke some holes in this grandly gloomy balloon I turned the last page feeling immensely satisfied, sated, full—the sort of feeling you get after finishing a good, meaty novel, and feel so rarely when reading comics.
One could state impishly that the moral of the story is, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Sandman is about Dream, the anthropomorphic incarnation of dreams and stories, one of the seven Endless—Destiny, Death, Dream, Despair, Desire, Delirium, and Destruction—who are patterns, ideas, echoes of things older than gods. They have their realms and their responsibilities, and they touch the lives of every living thing.
Which doesn’t make them nice people. Dream, for instance, is a cold, unfeeling bastard, who takes his responsibilities far more seriously than the lives and feelings of the people around him—or seems to: “What does it mean to you?” asks Delirium once, when Dream mutters one too many times about his responsibilities. “The things we do make echoes,” she tells him. “Our existence deforms the universe. That’s a responsibility.” But Dream is so callous that he once condemned a pickpocket to spend the rest of his life dreaming of the gallows-tree. Nada, a queen in prehistoric Africa, once spurned his affections; he damned her to ten thousand years in Hell, and three black women die during the course of the comic, in falling buildings and in fires, echoing the destruction of her city and her damnation. Dream never notices.
Or rather, Dream was. The story begins with his imprisonment for almost seventy years by a Crowleyesque mage; when he escapes and begins to reclaim his realm, it slowly becomes apparent that something changed, somewhere. When he gets his hands on Dee, the rather silly villain of the first few issues, who has perverted one of Dream’s own tools and driven the world mad for a night, Dream merely returns him to the asylum and tucks him into bed. Not quite the epicly petty revenge one might have expected.
Dream spends much of the rest of the comic coming to terms with who he is, and not liking what he sees; two important stories revolve around his attempts to set right something he had thoughtlessly done in the past. “You’ve changed,” he is told more than once by friends and acquaintances. “I doubt it,” is his response. He is one of the Endless, after all, who are merely ideas, patterns, echoes; echoes can’t change, can they? This seeming paradox—that he does not like what he is, but feels he cannot change—ultimately drives Dream to destroy himself, to obliterate his own existence, his “puh-point of view,” so that another Dream, a different Dream, can take his place. A better Dream.
“I don’t know if it’s good,” Gaiman is fond of saying about Sandman, “but I do know that it’s long.” Which is precisely why it’s good. The length, the space, the luxury of two thousand pages of comics give Gaiman room to explore, play, to set up echoes of his own: Lucifer, who retires from Hell and becomes a night-club piano player; Haroun al-Raschid, who gives up his magical city of Baghdad to Dream to keep it safe from history; Shakespeare, who lays down his pen for the last time upon writing The Tempest (a play, of course, about a magician who sets aside his magic forever) to try to live life instead of merely writing about it. He has the space to do something like Worlds’ End, a collection of travelers’ tales of happy endings, narrow escapes, destinies averted; a tantalizing glimpse of roads not taken before turning down The Kindly Ones, the final act of Dream’s tragedy. He has room for not one, but three elegiac epilogues, three last shimmering echoes of the story to savor before closing the book for good.
Sure, the beginning is weak. There is an air of self-indulgence about much of the comic. The art, in places, sucks (Dick Giordano inking Colleen Doran with what looks like a scratchy ball-point pen, or Robbie Busch’s colors, at once muddy and garish). But there are beautiful moments, in both writing and art—Charles Vess’s issues, or John J. Muth’s, or the gorgeous Erté-esque designs and colors of Marc Hempel and Daniel Vozzo; “Sunday Mourning” or “The Golden Boy,” Brief Lives or The Kindly Ones as wholes. I understand the adulatory impulse which drove those reviewers to such giddy excesses: comics require more labor, and of more intensity, than just about any other medium. The fact that something as long and as structured and as cohesive as Sandman survived the debilitating collaborative process of today’s industrial comics is startling enough; the fact that it is good seems miraculous. But to refer to this story as “among the most extraordinary of all time in any medium” (Gene Wolfe, but he was writing an introduction, and so we will forgive him) is silly—and more than a tad defensive.
Gaiman isn’t God. He just wrote a good comic book.
Which is enough.
Some unconnected notes:
24 Hours from Preludes and Nocturnes is the only comic that's ever given me the turn-on-all-the-lights-I-don't-want-to-go-bed-now shivers.
I totally agree that the length of Sandman is one of it's virtues. It really is a graphic novel. I've always wished that some enterprising publisher would reprint Sandman in one (or possibly two) volumes, on good paper, nicely bound. I'd buy it.
See, I managed not to get the screaming meemies from "24 Hours" (though it was pretty scary, certainly); "The Collectors," from Doll's House, on the other hand, is quite another story. I think I spent three hours with the light on and my head under the pillow trying to get to sleep after I read that one...(note to self: do not read very scary Neil Gaiman comics after 3 AM...not a good idea).
I read Spiders today. To be concluded... and I thought, okay, I can handle that. Then I looked up and saw the date.
I pray that I'm a clueless dork who didn't notice or didn't realize or didn't something, and it is actually concluded, and someone can point me to the conclusion. Please?
Patrick's been, um. Distracted. He swears he'll finish it soon, though. Soonish? Email him and let him know how you feel, okay? --And spread the word.
I'm Colin Upton and I don't get the Colin Upton refernce either.
As regards the Honorable Colin Upton: I’m starting to think maybe this is like the time I said to Chris Baldwin, when discussing his influences, and of course there’s Gahan Wilson, and he frowned at me and said, who? —Thinking about it after the fact, the Gahan Wilsonny exaggeration you see in Chris’s (especially earlier) stuff was sorta kinda reverse-engineered out of his love for Phil Foglio; a sort of backwards convergent evolution or something.
Anyway. There’s something about Patrick’s approach (especially in Spiders) that reminds me of nothing so much as Colin Upton’s : the big-nosed cartoony look and an almost-slapstick applied to deeply serious political issues of life and death. I have no idea whether Patrick is familiar with Colin’s stuff, but I’m not so much speculating as to influence on this one as I am saying that: if I were to write a piece about Spiders, say, and if I were able to pry some of those early Colin minicomics out of Barry’s hands to supplement my memory (those heroic Albanians, carving an internal combustion engine out of wood; the German soldier at Stalingrad who can see angels and devils; good ol’ Socialist Turtle, though that really plays more into Patrick’s more absurdist pieces than Spiders, per se), I’d note the connection that I see and back it up with some specifics and either enrich y’all’s cognitive maps of cartooning or convince y’all I’m an utter loon. Or both.
(Memo to self: compare and contrast minicomics boom of the ’80s and early ’90s in general to webcomics boom today. Subset of the zines/blogs debate, yes, but a clearer comparison; less apples and oranges and more apples and other, strangely colored apples that might actually have been hybridized with tangerines at some point. —In my copious spare time, natch.)
Anyway. That was my point, is all.