Blinded by consciousness, dreaming we see. (Sandman Comics in general)

Member Name: mpeh

Product:	Sandman Comics in general
Date:	04/10/01 (75 review reads)
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Sandman was originally a comic book, published biweekly I think written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by a group of various artists. They all have one common theme running through them of the fantasy realm called dreaming and the way it affects the 'real world'.

Now these comic books have been collected into book books and are published in ten volumes each of about 120 pages, some a bit longer, some a bit shorter. They center around The Endless, a group of seven immortal beings who watch the fate of mankind unfold. Death, Fate, Dream, Desire, Despair, Delerium or maybe that was just another name for Delight, OK I'm going to have to admit that I can't remember all seven of them . The 'main' character is Dream, the Sandman whose realm is the dreaming. He guards the dreams of mortals and copes with threats to his realm invoking the help of his brethren when necessary.

Each book is either one complete story, several stories that all link together or a group of separate stories that have a common theme. All of these formats work very well together and it offers some variation as you read throgh the books.

The magic of the Sandman books is that they mix visual imagery, deep concepts, fantastical 'plots' and the deep unknown, unansweable questions about consciousness, life and other imponderables. The artwork is always good, sometimes sublime, especially in the 'eleventh' book, Dreamhunters. Not originaly published as a comic book but a story by Gaiman written in prose and illustrated by a Japanese artist whose name escapes me, I might fill this in when I can look it up. Anyway the artwork for this is fantasic, it is a beautiful book that just looks pretty sat on your shelf.

Trying to put the themes of the Sandman series down in a short form is very difficult. The best way I can describe it is to paraphrase the introduction from one of the collections. It goes something like this; 'You know
when you wake up to early in the morning and can't get up yet as it's too early but can't really go back to sleep fully as then you'd never wake up properly when you have to? So you return to a sort of half slumber where your conscious mind is merely an observer, watching the things your subconscious deals with all the time. In this meta-reality where dream becomes real, tangible and inseparabe from conscious thought is where Sandman is written. Neil Gainman inhabits this realm all the time.' That is a loose paraphrasing of it but it gets the poit across: What Gaiman does so well is bind his 'dreaming' the world of all subconscious thought to reality as we the readers know it.

I think the best volume of the whole series is probably book three which is a collection of four or five unrelated stories bound together with a common theme. We see an author who has writers block obtain a muse, the possibilty of changing reality via group dreaming, the way Shakespeare received his inspiration for A Midsummer Night's dream and the price he paid for it a well as many other things. Gaiman takes us to the edge of the believable and then throws his stories well over that edge in such a way that as we follow, knowing that this is all purely fiction we are forced to examine the way our own minds work and the way we relate to our dreams and our perceptions as compared to other people's.

Some of the books really do open your mind and force new thougts upon you whereas others are easy to follow through as one story and one set of characters. All of them contain the most incredible concepts, some just as throwaway comments: The man who inherits a library card to the great library in Alexandria. The man who discovers that dying is a choice and simply chooses not to. Some are easy to miss the first time you read the book but on return you will find someting new, even if you've read them ten times before.

Thae fact that th
ese are graphic novels, comic book presentation and text delivery, i.e. speech bubbles and short captions by each frame all adds to the atmosphere and the way the stories work on you. Gaiman uses this medium brilliantly, he is obviously aware of the way he wans the finished product to look as he writes. That should probably have been in past tense as they are all finished now but you knew what I meant.

If you've read any other books by Gaiman, especially Good Omens written with Terry Pratchett then you'll know the way the man writes. Nothing is ever left unexplored but on the other hand nothing is ever fully dealt with, this means that the reader is exposed to all of the ideas that the author had when writing and then left to deal with them on their own.

If you've never heard of these then they really are worth a try, especiialy if you like anything else by Gaiman. It is advisable, although not necessary, to read the books in order. There are exceptions, book three stands alone quite happily, but in general if you follow the endless from beginning to end but picked up a later book first there may well have been spoilers in it.

If you've picked up one of these and been dissapoitned then the chances are you picked up one of the slighty weaker ones. Try the first one and then work through, each will seem better when based upon the foundation of the universe laid down in the first few books. I will still be reading these in ten years and still discovering new stuff and exploring new concepts.

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