| Product: |
Sandman Comics in general |
| Date: |
11.04.01 (111 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Very well written, at its best this is great
Disadvantages: Loses direction badly towards the end
Sandman was one of the most popular mainstream comics to emerge from DC in the late 1980s. Neil Gaiman, the writer, was one of the generation of British writers who found success in the States on the coat-tails of Alan Moore, revamping old characters in radical new ways. Sandman started life as a horror comic much in the style of Hellblazer, but soon evolved into something quite different, an enormously elaborate fantasy saga rich with references to mythology and folk tales. Gaiman's ability to write dialogue is exceptional, and the characters he created were both memorable and complex. His writing was matched by extremely skillful artists during the series' run, and an attractive series of greaphic novels collects the entire run in ten volumes.
It had a lot going for it. It could, potentially, have been the greatest comic book of all time. Unfortunately, it goes badly off the rails after the first few complete stories (always referred to as "story arcs" for reasons that are quite lost on me).
The basic premise is that there is a family of seven godlike beings (Dream, Desire, Death etc.) who personify various aspects of the human condition. Or something like that. Their true relationship to the universe is never made entirely clear. At the start of the first graphic novel, "Preludes & Nocturnes", Dream, also known as Morpheus, also known as Sandman, is trapped by a Crowley-esque occultist and imprisoned for almost the whole of the Twentieth century. Finally escaping, he has to rebuild his kingdom (The Dreaming) and recover certain magical artefacts that have been lost.
The first part of this story isn't terrribly good, and the art, for possibly the only time in the series' run, doesn't really match the writing style. The whole thing starts to come alive in the 6th episode when the omnipotent Dr Destiny takes control of a diner full of normal people, and makes them act out their most base, sub-consci
ous desires. From this point on the comic really comes to life. The second, third and fourth graphic novels ("The Doll's House", "The Dream Country" and "Season of Mists") are all generally excellent. Dream's sister, Death (a cute Goth chick - Gaiman seems to like cute Goths) is introduced, there's a superbly macabre story about serial killers, an award-winning Shakespeare story, and some fantastic squabbling between various deities, amongst many other things.
Sadly, from this point on, things go downhill fast. "A Game of You" is partly a compelling story set in The Dreaming, and partly a tedious tale of badly-written transvestites and lesbians in New York (was the author trying to prove his "alternative" credentials?). "Fables and Reflections" is a series of short-stories, some OK, some boring. "Brief Lives" is dull soap opera, although it is considerably livened up by the presence of Delirium, the most screwed-up of Dream's family. "World's End" is yet more short stories.
"The Kindly Ones" is the climax of the whole series, and as such should have carried real emotional weight, but it's so long that by the time the denoument is reached most readers will simply be relieved that it's over. And then "The Wake" finishes the series off, containing probably the series' worst ever story, "The Tempest", again about Shakespeare. Where the first Shakespeare story was genuinely innovative and readable, "The Tempest" is predictable and tedious. The dialogue falls into the classic trap of having historical characters tell each other things they already know for the benefit of the readers, and the moral of the story (that for great art you have to suffer terribly) is so glaringly obvious that I have to wonder if Gaiman was as sick of the whole thing as I was by this point. He seems to have serious problems end
ing his stories properly. While that's OK at first, by the fourth or fifth time it becomes rather irritating.
It's difficult to see how this series, which started out so well, ended up becoming such a disappointment. It was rumoured that Neil Gaiman had wanted to end the series much earlier but was persuaded not to by DC, which could account for all the padding towards the end. Or maybe Gaiman just started to believe in his own genius a bit too much.
The series, at least at first, was very influenced by Alan Moore's work on Swamp Thing. The concept of The Dreaming comes from an issue of Swamp Thing, Sandman's raven Matthew was a character in Swamp Thing, and an ST episode about a serial killer is referenced in Sandman's serial killer story. More important than these obvious links are the more general ways in which Moore dealt with magical characters and Hell in Swamp Thing, which seem to have heavily influenced Gaiman in both Sandman and another of his works, The Books of Magic. Perhaps Sandman lost its sense of direction when Gaiman felt he was able to be less influenced by Moore and strike out on his own. This may be an unfair remark, but I definitely prefer Sandman when Moore's influence is most obvious.
A major problem is that the series is a bit too insular. It never references anything outside of the framework it's created for itself. No issues outside of Gaiman's fictional world are addressed except in the vaguest of terms. Even Terry Pratchett manages to address real-world issues through his Diskworld series; Sandman never does. Obviously I'm not suggesting that art always has to try to be "relevant", but in this case I feel that there's nothing substantial enough to justify the time it takes to read the later graphic novels.
In spite of what seems to have turned into a bit of a rant, I'd still wholeheartedly recommend the first four Sandman graphic novels. It's ju
st a shame that the high standard is lost as the series progresses. I'd recommend reading other comic writers of (more or less) Gaiman's generation, like Warren Ellis or Grant Morrison, or better still, Alan Moore. They know how to sustain stories over a long period of time, and how to develop narratives without losing the elements that made them interesting in the first place.
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