loonyblog.

A handful of dust.

(This post is the third in a series looking back at some of my favorite comics of all-time. The first installment covered Watchmen, and the second looked at "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?")

I first discovered Neil Gaiman's Sandman many, many moons ago when I was a somewhat impressionable adolescent, obsessively attempting to read everything Alan Moore had ever written. My Moore-addiction didn't go unnoticed by my local comics retailer, who suggested I check out this relatively new series called Sandman. Being the trusting sort (this was the same store owner who pointed me towards Swamp Thing, so I'd have bought Casper the Friendly Ghost if he told me it was dark and brooding) I purchased a slipcase containing the first two collections, with a space for the third. I still have that slipcase...it was designed by Dave McKean (of course), and while it's been beaten up more than a little over the years, it's still pretty cool.

Regardless, The Sandman turned out to be more than just another horror comic. As a teenager with odd obsessions with mythology, religion and comics, it was in many ways The Perfect Comic for me. Read on for my full thoughts on a fresh re-read through the entire series, from Preludes & Nocturnes straight through The Wake (and beyond).

The Sandman, much like Cerebus, started a bit rough. The writing was spot-on from day one, but Sam Keith, for all his talents as an artist, simply didn't fit with the book. He admitted as much when he left (according to Gaiman, he told the other contributors that he felt like "Jimmy Hendrix in the Beatles"). Regardless, the 75 issue series began with a strange little story about a cult that attempted to trap the incarnation of Death, but somehow wound up with Dream instead. From that beginning, Gaiman would go on to tell stories about life, death, love, writing, Shakespeare, storytelling and of course, dreams, both literal and figurative.

And what a stable of artists the series amassed! The artistic high point of the series as far as I'm concerned is issue #74 ("Exiles") featuring sumi-e style art by Jon J Muth. It's really phenomenal artwork. I was lucky enough many years ago to see all the original art for this issue, and almost every single panel was painted separately, and then the story itself compiled from those illustrations. It's stunning work. The story itself is, oddly enough, nothing particularly special, and as short Sandman stories goes, it's not nearly as good as some of the others in the series (such as "August" or "September" from Fables and Reflections). But that artwork is just stunning.

Some of the artists that did longer stints on the book did some great work as well. As a general rule, anything illustrated by either Charles Vess or Michael Zulli is going to be something special, but Jill Thompson did some very nice work on Brief Lives, Shawn McManus and Colleen Doran both did solid work on A Game of You, and Mark Hempel did nice work on The Kindly Ones (with occasional pitch-hitting from Teddy Kristiansen, who has a similar style).

The most recent book, Endless Nights, is a feast for the eyes. The stories themselves are all fine and good, but they are all completely standalone, and require no real familiarity with the series (which no doubt played some small part in this book becoming the first DC graphic novel to break the NY Times best sellers list). Neil Gaiman's even said that the only reason this book exists is because he wanted to work with some of the best artists in the industry, and there's nothing wrong with that, especially not when the artists are this good. While other artists have come close (Jill Thompson comes to mind), nobody but Milo Manara has ever managed to capture the asexuality of Desire this well (for what it's worth, he's more or less been drawing that character for decades in one form or another). P. Craig Russell has done work on the series before ("Ramadan" is one of the best short stories in the run, IMHO), so his presence is more or less a bonus, and Glen Fabry seemed like an odd choice to put in the book, but he's a solid artist, so whatever. The late Miguelanxo Prado and Sienkiewicz both do excellent jobs on their stories, but Barron Storey's contribution is odd at best, feeling more like a series of captioned paintings than an actual sequential story (actually, that's what it is -- Dave McKean did the layouts on the story).

Pinning down my overall favorite book is really hard, because there are so many great moments, but I'm going to have to go with either The Doll's House (book 2) or A Season of Mists (book 3). The Doll's House over the course of the series gains importance as even the minor characters return in one form or another, and Season of Mists is just such a great self-contained story that it's hard not to love (plus I have a replica of the key to hell on my wall staring at me as I write this, so it's always fresh in my mind).

The low point for the series in my opinion is World's End (book 8), a collection of unexciting stories paired with a pretty unexciting framing story. Don't get me wrong, the Gaiman/Allred resurrection of 70's cheeseball character Prez is entertaining, but that's hardly enough to save the book when it's saddled with such duds asa "A Tale of Two Cities" (I think Alec Stevens is an interesting artist, but this story just fails across the board) or "Cluracan's Tale" (the Jim Watkiss illustrated story that proves that at least when it comes to The Sandman, the faeries are much more interesting when they're out of the lands of faery). But as dull as World's End is, it's not enough to detract from the series as a whole. It's a slight stumble, and when you're talking about a 75-issue series, one dud of a book's not bad at all (and it's not like it's terrible or anything...it's just not as good as the rest of the series).

Each book is designed by the incomparable Dave McKean, who over the course of the series' run must have switched between at least a dozen different artistic styles. That experimentation has been reigned in somewhat by the new uniform design in the collections, but if you're curious, you can always pick up Dust Covers, the collection of all of McKean's Sandman work.

As much as I like The Sandman, I must confess to having never read any of the (non-Gaiman) spin-offs. This includes the Destiny book illustrated by (the great) Kent Williams and the much-acclaimed Lucifer. Of all the spin-offs (and there have been quite a few, some a little sillier than others), I'm most curious about Lucifer, if only because the series has a good chance of running longer than the original series (issue #58 came out this month), and also because that's one of the few characters I think actually deserved to be spun off. (Plus the assistant editor on the series told me I'd like it, and why would she lie to me?)

The Sandman is a landmark comic series. It's nicely self-contained, and while the overall arc of the series is a bit disjointed, it's the kind of comic it feels nice to have complete on my shelf (especially as it is on mine right now, nestled between my complete runs of Swamp Thing and Transmetropolitan).

Posted by jason at January 24, 2005 11:26 PM | TrackBack | Read more: Comics , Reviews