It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book. (Day 9 of 10.)

SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t yet read this climactic volume of the series, you may wish to do so before reading our review.

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It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book. (Day 8 of 10.)
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It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book. (Day 7 of 10.)

With all the gods and demons and twisted mythology of Sandman, it’s easy to forget how warm and inviting Neil Gaiman’s work can be. In the years since my last reading, I had certainly forgotten.

Brief Lives is a cute, tragic, utterly human tale that might stand as the very best story arc of this magnificent series. Gaiman’s writing certainly accounts for a big part of that, but a huge chunk of the credit has to go to artist Jill Thompson. By and large, the artists of this series are well matched with their respective stories, but none more so than here, as Thompson brings the whimsy of Delirium to life like no artist before or since. Thanks to her work, it’s impossible not to fall in love with the youngest of the Endless. Unceasingly inquisitive and forever existing on the edge of confusion, Delirium twists and turns and smiles and enthuses her way in your heart like no other character in this series. It would be easy for a character like this to become annoying, but she never crosses that line; she is the heart and soul of Brief Lives, and it is Thompson’s “acting” with the pencil that makes us love her.

But if Delirium is endearingly cute, Brief Lives as a whole is not. It’s a bittersweet story about choices and consequences, family and responsibility. Destruction, the missing brother of the Endless, chose to leave behind his cosmic chores for a simple hermit’s life spent painting, cooking, and dodging insults from his wisecracking dog, Barnabas. Delirium is intent on finding him, but Destruction does not want to be found. Mankind does a fine job destroying things without him, he explains late in the story. Why does he need to oversee it all? It’s something that calls into question the very purpose of the Endless. After all, if they need not do their duties, to what end do they continue?

None of this matters to Delirium, who only wants her family to return to the way it was in the good old days … but, of course, that’s not to be. Destruction cannot help observing that Dream has changed. Ever stubborn, Dream denies this. He can’t see the changes he has undergone — but we can. From the moment he agrees to journey with his deranged sister, we know he is not quite the same cold, heartless entity he was. Behind those dark eyes and the unsmiling face he is developing a heart.

Ultimately, the great tragedy of Brief Lives — and the event with consequences to the entire series — is the resolution of Dream’s relationship with his son, Orpheus. The two finally come to terms with one another, but there is a cost to both. And unlike some of Dream’s past relationship choices — such as the time he doomed a lover to torment in Hell — this time he is driven not by a wounded ego, but by compassion. The stubborn, bull-headed Dream we met at Sandman‘s outset would never have agreed to the request Orpheus makes of him here, but now he does, and it leaves him spent and emotionally broken, forced to confront feelings long suppressed. He returns to the Dreaming a changed man (or being, or entity, or god), unable to wash away the memory of the mistakes both he and his son have made.

So, the Brief Lives of the title? Those are our own: the small time even those who are Endless have to spend with those they love, and the awareness that, aside from our responsibility to others, enjoying our time on this Earth is the most important job we have.

Most affecting here, and the thing that makes this the most enjoyable and effective Sandman arc, is the mixing of tragedy with humor. We get a hint at what is to come early. At the end of an awkward dinner, Delirium walks away from her sweets, a pair of chocolate people—and we see the food has been inadvertently given a fleeting taste of life through her transcendent touch. As the Endless brother and sister turn their backs, unaware, Gaiman writes: “Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.” Aside from being a wonderful line, the humor tinged with sincere pathos is a microcosm of Brief Lives as a whole. We are given time. Not much of it. So we’d better love one another before Hell comes crashing down on us, because life is equal parts joyful, absurd, and awful.

It’s really impossible to overstate how much I love this story. More than any other Sandman story, more than even the brilliant Season of Mists, it is filled with memorable scene after memorable scene. The sadness we feel for Despair, who desperately misses her brother. The dinner scene. Delirium’s antics in the travel agency. The death dance of Ishtar. Pretty much every conversation Destruction has with Barnabas. Dream’s return to the Dreaming after parting with his son. And so many more.

It’s a tall order, standing out among the brilliance of Sandman, but Brief Lives manages the trick. In the roughly 16 years since this arc was first published, it still manages to stand head and shoulders above all but the elite of the comics medium.

We say that now on the 20th anniversary of Sandman’s first issue. I imagine we’ll still be saying much the same when the 40th comes around.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book. (Day 6 of 10.)

The second of Sandman’s three short story collections, Fables and Reflections, is arguably the most eclectic of the bunch. It may not be the most instantly accessible (that one is Dream Country), or the most focused (World’s End), but it’s probably the most essential.

As in Season of Mists, the nature of wielding responsibility — whether over people, things, or cultures — is a prominent theme here. Rulers grapple with sustaining a culture’s golden age. A troubled man takes responsibility for the fractured remnants of his life and finds solace in insanity. Emperors are pained by the decisions they cannot avoid. And ultimately, many of these people must face the consequences of their choices: a theme utterly essential to Sandman as a whole.

This is best displayed in the story “Orpheus,” an unusual standalone short story in that it’s vital to the series-spanning story arc. “Orpheus” transforms the Greek myth into a Sandman story: Here, Orpheus is Dream’s son, and his tragic mistake — when trying to lead his deceased bride out of the Underworld, he looks upon her before it is permitted, thus losing her forever — is underscored by the involvement of the Endless. In seeking to rejoin his love, Orpheus is given eternal life, yet this is a curse, not a blessing; when he’s torn to shreds by vile creatures seeking revenge upon him for a slight, his head remains very much alive.

Most tragic of all is Dream’s treatment of his son. As ever, Dream is distant and cold, seemingly incapable of real love or compassion. (His own brother will comment on this lack of empathy and emotion in Brief Lives.) Disappointed in the choices his son has made and suffering from a hurt pride, Dream chooses to walk away from him forever. It’s not just a heartless act, it’s yet another moment during which Dream comes across like a petulant child, his wounded ego driving him down an ill-chosen path. Ultimately, these events have a deep, deep impact on the series. (Such a deep impact, this story arguably ought to have been collected in Brief Lives instead of here.)

If the most important story to the Sandman narrative here is “Orpheus,” the most impressive tale in this collection is certainly “Ramadan,” which showcases a gloriously luxuriant city in the midst of its golden age. The presentation, the art, the writing, even the unusual way it was created: all come together for one of the most respected single issues of the series. “Ramadan” is interesting not just because of its poetic beauty — and it has that in spades — but also for the way in which it turns the tables on the usual dream vs. reality fable. Rather than dream becoming reality, reality becomes dream. Wonderful.

The best of the book, though, is the charming “Three Septembers and a January,” which looks at the real life Joshua Norton through the eyes of the Endless. Norton was an insane, albeit harmless, 19th-century San Franciscan who thought he was the Emperor of the United States, and people around town loved him. Here, Dream, Desire, and Despair have a contest of sorts over which of them holds dominion over Norton. The story, equal parts cute and tragic, also manages to be an inspiring look at how we shape our own reality. Happiness and contentment come from within; our hearts, our fates, our hopes and dreams are in our own hands. They are driven by modesty, and by acceptance, and by understanding that greed, desire, and consumption are not the road to inner peace. A simple message — dare I say, quaint — yet handled with warmth and humanity, and yet another example of the multitudinous creative directions this series takes.

Other tales are equally all over the map. We visit werewolves in love, meet a young Marco Polo lost in the desert, and spend more time with Orpheus, who’s being protected by an ancestor of John Constantine (of Hellblazer fame). “August,” one of my favorites in this collection, takes a look at the nature of power and responsibility through the eyes of two men: a dwarf and Emperor Augustus of Rome.

Dream and the Endless are minor players in this volume, mere apparitions that drift in and back out again. Like passing shadows or, more appropriately, dreams. They are not the focus of these tales; rather, they provide the framework around which Gaiman explores the world inside our head, in these stories that examine universal truths and ask very human questions.

Collections like this one illustrate what a shrewd decision it was to conceive and structure Sandmanin such a way that the series could go anywhere and be anything. Gaiman himself called this the best choice he could possibly have made, and that’s the truth. While my heart resides most closely with the saga’s central tale, these short stories are each gems of their own — jewels in the crown that is one of comics’ greatest creative achievements.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book. (Day 5 of 10.)

Small breasts. A seemingly minor thing, yet in reality rather important. But more on that later.

A Game of You was not my favorite story arc when I first read Sandman, nor does it leap to the front of the pack here, re-reading it many years later. Oh, it’s a fine story, a kind of nightmarish fairy tale plucked from the things we leave behind in childhood and draped in the garb of a directionless adult who doesn’t know what she wants to be. But it doesn’t sing to me the way the vast majority of Neil Gaiman’s 2,000-page epic does.

Not that there isn’t a lot to like here. There is. A Game of You focuses on Barbie, the painfully plastic blonde from The Doll’s House. She left Ken and now lives in an apartment building populated by an assortment of semi-misfits. Sound familiar? Yes, we walked this ground a few story arcs ago — but the approach this time is much different. Further, to cement the idea that nothing exists in a vacuum in Sandman, some of these characters also have ties to Preludes and Nocturnes, specifically the young lady featured in the episode inside the diner. The references are fleeting and subtle — one of Gaiman’s great strengths is trusting the reader to put the pieces of his puzzles together — but they serve to connect this vast world of seemingly disjointed stories.

And playing with childhood toys in an adult, often sinister way? Sure, it’s been done before. Yet few have managed to make it seem so perfectly sensible.

Barbie is worth discussing for a moment. By the end we come to realize that it’s Wanda, not Barbie, who is the central figure of A Game of You’s thematic core: that of identity. Wanda is a transgender character, a pre-op born male and living as a woman, and her struggles with who she is serve to underpin everything the story is about. But Barbie is more interesting to me — not just because we discover that she’s more than the one-note gag we see in The Doll’s House, but because what we find is a woman without any real sense of who she is or what she wants. The way she paints her face; the way those masks are barriers between her and the world, a kind of very extroverted security blanket scrawled onto a very introverted person. That’s really strong stuff.

So if this is the one arc that doesn’t speak to me on the same level as, say, Brief Lives, I beg your forgiveness. It’s not a matter of not recognizing its strengths, it’s simply one of taste. We spend six issues in this world when it feels like three or four would have better suited the story. Despite the rich thematic material around which she is built, we’re not nearly as invested in Barbie as we are in her neighbors (Wanda and Hazel especially), so our time with her seems overlong. Further, once the initial oddness of the fairy tale characters wears off — this by the end of the first issue — so, too, does their novelty. The story overstays its welcome.

That said, small breasts.

No, I’m not having a fit of Tourette’s. One of the most noteworthy achievements of Gaiman’s Sandman was crossing the gender line. Comic books are a medium that, in the United States, has been decidedly dominated by males. Over the years, the adolescent power fantasies of superhero comics all but bullied other genres out of the mix, leaving caped, muscle-bound men and empty-headed, big-breasted women to rule the roost. (Yes, the real history of American comics is more complex than that, especially the impact Seduction of the Innocent had on the popular medium, but for simplicity’s sake the point stands.) These days, the rise of manga, graphic novels, and concerted efforts by some publishers has meant growth in female readership — yet even with this in mind, the comics world remains a boy’s playground. And in 1989, when The Sandman first began publication? Forget about it. Women were nowhere to be seen.

But Sandman did a lot to chip away at the testosterone wall built between women and comics. Gaiman tapped into something important for readers: His women were not male fantasies. They weren’t models or hourglasses or one-dimensional stereotypes — which, by and large, had been pretty much the extent of female comic characters. I mean, let’s face it, most male comic book writers can’t write nuanced, believable characters of their own gender, much less the other.

So here comes Gaiman and his cast of female characters: real people with real depth and real character and real thoughts, feelings and emotion. They are painfully naive about sex and accidentally get pregnant and have foolish prejudices and neuroses. Of course, comics, being the visual (and historically shallow) medium they often are, draw our attention to how things look. Visual clues tell us a lot. Thus, the small breasts we see here. These women are sometimes chubby and frumpy, and sometimes thin and flat-chested, and sometimes awkward and unattractive, and yes, sometimes quite gorgeous. In other words, they’re women. Not alien species, not unobtainable trophies — just women. They’re people as varied and different as our friends and mothers and selves. Even better, none of these factors are special story elements shoved in our face with clumsy, show-off writing, they just … are.

It’s hard to overestimate how big a factor this was in Sandman’s wide appeal and longevity. My wife devoured it. Lots of wives and girlfriends devoured it. Sandman proved to many people that comics didn’t have to be adolescent power trips; that they could feature characters — female characters — as complex and real as those in any work of literature. We longtime comic readers may have suspected this all along, but the general public didn’t. For most, comics were disposable rubbish with the worst sort of one-dimensional characters, ESPECIALLY with regard to women. Sandman, along with some other notable works, kicked at those barriers. A Game of You is a good example of how and why.

No, it’s not my favorite story arc in the series, but when a series features material as strong as Season of Mists, Brief Lives and World’s End, that’s hardly an insult. And yeah, favorite or not, there’s obviously a broader message to take from this arc, and a pretty important one at that.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”