This overview of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman saga was commissioned by The Independent to mark the 1997 publication of its (semi-) final instalment, The Wake.
It also serves as an illustration of a particular heffalump-trap which sometimes yawneth before those who review their mates’ work: sometimes you bend so far backwards in order to remain impartial that you end up being harder on their stuff than you would on that of a stranger.
Is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman the greatest comic book of all time? In your dreams.
For the benefit of those who still consider Norman Mailer to be a major figure in American cultural life, he provided Sandman with the blurb from heaven. “Sandman,” the Great Man asserted in a widely-circulated print-bite, “is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it’s about time.”
So caveat lector? After all, we have no way of knowing whether Mailer has actually read any comics since his days in the US Army over half a century ago. Certainly, successive generations of ‘intellectuals’ have lavished praise upon successive generations of comics: the allusive surrealism of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, the lacerating political satire of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, the innovative graphic ingenuity of Will Eisner’s Spirit, the sheer vitality of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original batch of Marvel Comics superheroes and the scabrous confessionalism of Robert Crumb.
More recently, Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust fable Maus, the Hernandez Brothers’ post-punk soap-opera Love And Rockets, Frank Miller’s breathtaking Batman redefinition The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s devastating superhero critique Watchmen have all attracted attention far beyond the confines of traditional comics’ anorak ghetto. However, nothing produced in the field during the last ten years has even come close to the crucial combination of popular and critical success achieved by Sandman. And the true significance of Mailer’s one-liner is not so much the fact that smart people have enjoyed and admired Sandman, but that, uniquely amongst big-selling comics titles, it is a strip primarily concerned with ideas. Sandman is a story about story, a myth about myth, an oldfashioned postmodern metafiction with word balloons. “If this isn’t literature,” Peter Straub wrote defiantly in an afterword to the Sandman collection Brief Lives, “nothing is.”
Between 1988 and 1996, the Sandman comic ran for 75 monthly issues — not to mention the odd special, spin-off and short-short — and was collected into ten ‘graphic novels’, the last of which, The Wake (Titan Books, £19.99 hb), is published this week. By the time the title was wound down — at the author’s behest — Sandman had accumulated a formidable shelf of awards, was selling over a million copies a year, and had a Who’s Who of fantasy, horror and critical biggies like Straub, Samuel R. Delany, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Gene Wolfe, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell and Mikal Gilmore queueing up to sing its praises in public. Among others, including Colin Greenland and Tad Williams, Barker and Wolfe have also contributed to The Sandman: Book of Dreams (Voyager, £16.99), a hardback anthology of prose short stories set in the ‘universe’ of the strip and featuring many of its principal characters.
Sandman’s beginnings were inauspicious. In a ‘mainstream’ comics world historically dominated by fights in tights, the primary corporate assets are titles and characters rather than artists or writers. Comic-book editors perpetually seek ways to revamp and redefine obscure or faltering characters to attract new audiences. The ‘original’ Sandman was a ’40s no-hoper disinterred from the mouldering pages of Justice Society Of America. A Bruce Wayne-alike ‘millionaire playboy’ in trenchcoat, fedora and gasmask who fought crime by putting villains to sleep with a gas-gun, he unfortunately had an identical effect on readers. DC editor Karin Berger therefore risked little when she handed the poor schlub over to Neil Gaiman, a personable English pop-culch hack with a mere handful of comics scripts in his CV, for updating. Gaiman repaid her percipience a megafold: in a major inspirational coup, he transformed the dullest excuse for a superhero ever to waste woodpulp into the dread figure of Morpheus, Lord Of Dreams, the Prince of Stories himself.
Gaiman’s Sandman was nothing less than the ‘anthromorphic personification’ of the human imagination; his saga being described by one critic as “a secret history of the unconscious.” Morpheus — a.k.a. Dream, or Oneiros — is one of the incarnate archetypes, older than gods but younger than God, self-styled as The Endless: the others being Destiny, Despair, Desire, Delirium (who used to be Delight) and Destruction (who retired in the 17th century because humans no longer needed him). He is a tall, pallid figure with a shock of black hair, somewhat resembling The Cure’s Robert Smith, minus the lipstick, after being thoroughly stretched on a rack. His realm is The Dreaming, an ever-changing Gormenghastean castle surrounded by nebulous landscapes: it’s where we go when we dream. He has absolutely no sense of humour.
Fortunately, his elder sister Death (who nevertheless looks younger) does. An adorable punkette with an irredeemably optimistic outlook, she incongruously became many readers’ favourite character. Her solo story, Death: The High Cost Of Living is about to be filmed with a screenplay by the author.
Gaiman is an omnivorous reader and a formidable researcher; Sandman is packed with pastiche, allusion and greater and lesser arcana of all description. Historical figures, like William Shakespeare, who appears as himself in two key tales respectively based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, rub shoulders with the fictional creations of others, some of whom are derived from the repertory company of DC’s own comics ‘universe’, and others from the entire tapestry of human myth. And the many hands who have illustrated the strip over the past eight years have ‘borrowed’ the appearances of a variety of notables: Lucifer, the Fallen Angel, is the young David Bowie; Delirium resembles the avant-garde novelist Kathy Acker, and Fiddlers’ Green, a place in The Dreaming which decided to get up and walk, does so as G.K. Chesterton.
The most (self-) consciously literary mass-market comic strip ever perpetrated, Sandman is, finally, a conditional triumph. As is appropriate for a dream about dreams, Sandman is gossamer-thin, not always able to support the weight of the anvils of symbolism Gaiman places upon it. The strip rarely stops winking at the reader, and even at its grimmest and goriest it remains oversweet. As demonstrated by his overblown novel and TV series Neverwhere, Gaiman’s weakness is the very same cutesiness which he so archly addresses in A Game Of You. But even if Sandman isn’t absolutely the greatest comic of the century, it is nevertheless good enough to demand to be judged in those terms, and by those standards.
Before Sandman, the Lord of Dreams had no dreams of his own; the Prince of Stories lacked a tale. Neil Gaiman has remedied that. The Wake is a sober, sombre conclusion — literally, a dying fall — to a ten-book sequence which undeniably constitutes a major achievement. There is nothing quite like it anywhere.
Independent, 1997
I don’t always agree with you (thank God, that would be boring), but I have to tell you you are a great writer.