The Endless Thread: Appreciating "Sandman"

Cafe Society
41

I am, of course, already aware of this. I’ve long been a big fan of comics, both traditional superhero books and non-traditional books.

What my admittedly brief comment was meant to say was that Sandman, to me, transcended the medium itself in a way that no other comic I’ve read has, before or since. While I feel that the comic medium was really the ideal form to tell this particular tale, and the story played well to the strengths off the comic format, Sandman became, in the end, more than “just” a comic, more even than the best comics I’ve read.

To put it another way… I’ve read Strangers in Paradise, Bone, Hellblazer, Preacher, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Arkham Asylum, Miller’s Batman and Daredevil stories, and many, many more. These are all what I would consider good, some even great, examples of what a comic can be. Sandman, however, frankly stands above all of these. To me it represents more than a “great comic” (which is not to denigrate great comics at all… I love great comics) – Sandman is a great story, possibly one of the greatest stories I’ve ever read.

So, yeah, it’s told in a comic format, but as much as I love comics, Sandman accomplishes what no other comic has – it has gone beyond what the medium is traditionally capable of.

42

Two works I’d recommend would be Cerebus by Dave Sim and the Love & Rockets series by Gilberto and Jaime Hernandez; two other series that many regard as standing beyond the medium.

43

I read Cerebus for a loong time, but after a while Sim’s misogyny and general wackiness got to me. I couldn’t read any more, so I dropped it. There’s another thread about Sim somewhere around here where I described my reasons a little more deeply, but I’m too sick to go find it.

The old issues, however, are great, and while Sim is great at exploring the limits of the medium, and even stretching them, I always still felt like I was reading a comic with Cerebus. Sim was an excellent example of a comic creator, and a visionary but in the end it never really got any farther, to me.

A great many people recommended Love and Rockets to me, given my taste in other books. I gave it an honest try, and I sort of wanted to like it, but I really couldn’t get into it in the end. It was several years ago and I really can’t remember exactly what the problem was… just that I never looked forward to reading it the way I did my other “regulars.” Which isn’t to say it wasn’t well-done, just not to my taste, I guess.

44

Curses. The second paragraph was meant to say: “… and a visionary for the medium in some ways, but in the end…”

I’m too tired to be posting.

45

That brings to mind an anecdote. A couple of years ago I attended a book reading by Neil Gaiman in Pasadena (part of the promotional tour for “American Gods”). Naturally during the question-and-answer period someone asked about the possibility of a Sandman movie.

Gaiman’s response was that people kept proposing the idea to him and that preliminary scripts had been written to pitch the idea, but the scripts were so uniformly awful that the idea kept getting shelved. He gave an example too; he quoted us Dream’s first line from the latest script he’d seen…

…imagine the next line said in an booming, British-accented voice…

“Foolish mortals!!! Did you truly think your puny weapons could harm ME, the King of Dreams, the Sandman?!?”

Needless to say, Gaiman passed on that one. :slight_smile:

46

Good point. On the other hand, it doesn’t address the fact that most of the people killed during the quest weren’t mortals. On the other other hand (apparently, I’m Kali ;)), given the nature of the Endless (and Destruction in particular), they may consider immortal humans and gods little more permanent than mortals.

This is debatable; it clearly took him some time (millions or billions of years!) to reach this conclusion. In fact, by the standards of the Endless, it was a recent development. There’s a flashback scene in Brief Lives where Destruction talks to Dream about how, within a brief few centuries, humanity will invent nuclear weapons:

Okay, that was a longer quote than I thought it’d be, but it illustrates my point anyway: I suspect Destruction didn’t just want to do something else, he was also deeply weary of his current job. The fact that he finds all the coming violence regrettable indicates that he does care a little about mortals, in a distant way, although that doesn’t contradict your original point–just because he finds wholesale slaughter dismaying doesn’t mean he cares enough about people to avoid getting them killed for his own purposes.

But to get back to my own point, the above quote would seem to indicate that Destruction’s abandonment of his post had more to do with relentless boredom with his current activities than a need to do other stuff. Of course, I’m splitting hairs here, but I tend to do that during literary analysis. I’m so pretentious. :wink:

The thought occurs to me: why don’t the other Endless get bored and feel the need to leave? Because Destruction is the only one who’s all about change and transition. But the nature of the Endless is such that change and transition are alien to them–so Destruction left, and his actions seemed alien to his siblings. You can also argue that Dream is, in a sense, all about change and transition: stories, by their nature, tend to describe some kind of change in the status quo (or in a person’s character), and they are often the catalysts for personal change. But the stories themselves remain essentially the same even when they change on the surface over time. I suppose Morpheus’s tragedy has something to do with this.

See, this is one of the reasons I love Sandman–even years after reading it, I still notice new things about it.

47

I started collecting Sandman rather early on, and eagerly awaited each new installment. I actually wept while reading The Wake.

Things I loved about Sandman that no one has mentioned yet:

–Mervyn Pumpkinhead, in a perpetual state of faux pas, the bumbling everyman; there are days when I felt he was a kindred spirit

–The unflappable Lucien (the former raven) tending to the library of books only dreamt of; how I wish I had a borrowing privileges there!

–Nuala, the average-looking, glamorless faerie who loves Dream, much to his regret

–the unholy alliance of Puck and Loki; this pairing was a stroke of genius

–grief for the death of Martin Tenbones, so so sad

–Cain and Abel, in a perpetual state of fratricide, with gargoyles

–How we never found out what happened to the first Despair, and how Delight turned into Delirium (will we ever know?)

–The Borghal Rantipole, Eblis O’Shaughnessy, and other crazily-named characters

–how faeries aren’t just cute and whimsical, but bloody dangerous and scary at times

You get the idea. These were not mere comic books; the Sandman series was the finest example of the graphic novel

48

Veteran screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio wrote a Sandman script that Gaiman is said to have liked – but Warner Brothers didn’t. Since Warner Brothers owns DC Comics there’s not going to be a Sandman movie from any other studio, and it seems unlikely that Warner Brothers will ever go with the Elliott and Rossio script.

You can read the sad history of the script, as well as the script itself, here:

http://www.wordplayer.com/archives/SANDMAN.intro.html

Personally, I think the script is fairly good in and of itself, but I also think it would take another rewrite or two to make it something that could actually work as a mass-market film. I don’t know that it could ever work as a live-action film at all; it seems to me it would have to be animated. But perhaps that’s just because I have this sinking feeling that the studio would insist upon giving the lead role to Keanu Reeves if it were live-action.

49

The series very nearly tok a very different direction. In an early interview, Gaiman mentioned considering the Tooth Fairy as a horrific member of the Endless, a tattered ghost with bloody pliers and a costume festooned with pulled-out teeth. This could’ve been cool:

Sandman–Dream
Tooth Fairy–Dentaton
Santa Claus–December
Satan–Devil
Easter Bunny–can’t think of a good D word

I guess the Endless he went with were a little more universal in their aplication.

50

I love the series. Read a couple of the collections.

Things I want to see/know(if they haven’t already been revealed):

-Why Delight turned into Delirium; is it connected to the kid she loved in the early/late ad/bc?

  • If their are more versions of the endless we don’t know about, or if they were any different from where they are now like Delirium?

-If the perception of the endless changes between different races and cultures, do the endless ever act differently from the way we normally see them do?(like, a dream with a sense of humor for one race, a angry and vengeful death for another)

  • Since we sometimes see tales of victorian sandman, or ancient bc sandman, we’ll we get to see any sandman ad 2010-3000 type stories?

Some of my favourite stories were “The Emperor of America”, very interesting to see Dream and Deliriun play off against each other in a contest(is the rivalry long standing?), or “Ramadan”, which was incredibly beautiful, some of the best comic design/art. Plus it was nice to see some other artists interpretations of dream.

51

Watchmen is, of course, very very good, though not quite the same SORT of story as Sandman.

52

I liked Watchmen a lot too. Not as much as Sandman, but still, it was great. Alan Moore has an amazing gift for the comic book medium–he’s very, very good at playing up the relation between text and images.

53

Wise Sage Cliffy said:

Good theory. Though he SEEMS human, he is still a god. This theory really adds another level of depth.

54

Question for discussion: Did Dream choose his fate? Was going to talk to Nuala in The Kindly Ones an act of giving up?

And also, were Puck and Loki under orders from Dream himself?

55

Yes, no, and yes – although they didn’t know it.

–Cliffy

56

There is one beautiful panel in Ramadan when the king touches the bottle at the end that is among the most beautiful in comics. The king’s expression says volumes.

57

Correction. He’s more than a god. He existed before the gods. He (or another version of him) will outlive all the gods. He will be one of the last beings in the multiverse to cease (the last being Death, or possibly GOD.)

58

See, Cliffy, I pretty much disagree entirely about Destruction. Especially in Brief Lives, we see how much he dislikes the fact that all he’s responsible for is destruction. In fact, once Dream and Delerium finally do find him, he mentions something about how he couldn’t leave behind his sigil and drop someone else into the same mess (paraphrase; I don’t have my books with me here, unfortunately). Destruction seems to be the only one of the Endless who really didn’t like his job. The eldest three seem to be chained to their duties (in Destiny’s case, literally) and they all have varying feelings about the trappings of said duties (Death seems to wear her lightest of all). The youngest three seem to find that it all amounts to little more than a game. Well, certainly Desire feels that way, and Despair just seems to follow her twin. Poor Delerium, well, no one can really tell what she’s thinking. Destruction, therefore, is caught in the middle. He understands how important their functions are, but he also does not wish to be responsible for the consequences of his function.

As the quotation provided above from Brief Lives indicates, he’s seen this before. Beings realize that light and matter are not incontrovertable and soon (soon is relative when talking about the Endless) nuclear weapons follow, and then it’s a time of complete destruction. This is not something he likes to see, even though it’s essentially What He Does. All the Endless know that life is cyclical, and for this go 'round the cycle, Destruction decided he didn’t want to ride it out. It seems to me that his motivation was not, in fact, hedonistic at all, but more like a man who is giving up. If he left, his reasoning went, it might change the cycle. Or not. Either way, he wasn’t going to be in charge of it all anymore.

I also think it’s unfair to say that he didn’t care about the people that had been killed in his siblings’ quest to find him. He was unwilling to be found, and as such, put in place some safeguards to assure that he wouldn’t be found. The only reason his safety measures didn’t prevent Orpheus from telling his dad the location of his uncle was that Orpheus was family, and Destruction was unwilling to spill family blood. I mean, the Kindly Ones are no joke, y’know? Anyway, he didn’t want to be found. But I don’t think you can say that he didn’t care that people got hurt on the way to find him. In fact, I’m pretty sure that, had the seekers not been his family, his safety measures would have merely eliminated the questers, not everyone around them. Plus, y’know, he was in love with the dancing lady, so he’d have to be incredibly callous not to care that she died.

Anyway, in the end, you have to contrast Dream and Destruction. Destruction could have destroyed himself in the way Dream did, had he had the complete dedication to his duties that his older brother did. But Destruction had the gumption to just get up and leave while Dream, and this is what makes his story truly tragic, could not.

59

Well, you’re right about the bit where Destruction talks about the nukes – indeed, you and ConnieS have convinced me that he’s deeper than I thought. But still, I think he’s pretty selfish; he recognizes that the process of destruction is going to go on without him, but he still condemns to death anyone caught up in a search for him. Such indiscriminate death-dealing would be forgiveable if he thought that by hiding out he’d be preventing the holocaust at the end of man’s destiny – but he knows he isn’t, he’s just no longer got his hand on the tiller. Therefore, his hiding is only for his own benefit, not anyone else’s. As such, it’s not important enough to justify such blatant disregard for the people that ended up dead.

Also, I don’t think Dream escaped Destruction’s safeguards at all; they worked on him the same as they did anyone else. (Why did Delirium escape? I’m not sure, but maybe it’s because she had already been destroyed.)

–Cliffy

60

Wot – no mention of Beyond the Shores of Night?

Er, yes and no. I think the point was that while Dream would never consciously commit suicide or otherwise abandon his responsibilities, he had nevertheless (subconsciously, if you will) arranged things in such a way that he had no alternative, thus absolving him of the choice:

So while Dream didn’t direct Loki and Puck to set the Furies on him as such, by freeing Loki (and pointing out that Loki would thereby be beholden to him), he essentially manipulated Loki into doing it anyway, because it was in Loki’s nature to react in that way (as Odin points out later, and as Loki himself admits after frying Carla). And by giving Nuala her boon, he set himself up to get into trouble by leaving the Dreaming at a crucial time, because it was in his nature to obey the rules he himself had created (in this case, his promise to come to Nuala).

If you reread the whole series, Dream starts sowing the seeds of his own destruction from almost the beginning, setting tiny little chains of events in motion that eventually bring a causal avalance down on his own head, all the while never admitting to himself that that was what he was doing. This is, I think, the epitome of the sheer genius that is Gaiman’s magnum opus.