No Substance #98: Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, A Re-Read, Part 2

After the completion of The Doll’s House story line in The Sandman, Neil Gaiman tells a story about the muse, Calliope, the muse who was said to have inspired Homer.

Some time in 1927 Calliope returned to Earth briefly and was captured by a writer called Erasmus Fry. When we met Fry, he is an old, unpleasant man whose work is out of print and who, as a writer, is largely forgotten. Fry trades Calliope to a young writer by the name of Richard Madoc. It’s a strange trade, one that if you think too hard about will not make much sense, just as Fry’s own position is, but it’s a minor moment in the issue and you can move past it quickly. The focus of the issue is on Madoc. In the years that follow, in the years that follow after Madoc has imprisoned Calliope in his home and rapes her regularly, the years provide a great deal of success to Richard Madoc. You’re probably not surprised. A writer and a muse. You know how it goes. It’s an old story, one that has been done and done and which, frankly, I wouldn’t mention if it were not for the fact that Dream’s decision to rescue Calliope is a character development that will echo through the next section of our reread, and throughout the series as a whole.

You see, Dream has changed. That is the outcome of his imprisonment at the hands of Burgess, but the question that lingers, is just how has Dream changed?

Dream is one of seven immortal beings of immense power. He is not all powerful, but he is very powerful. We have learned that. We have also learned that he views his work seriously, that he loves and has been loved, and that he takes slights against him poorly. In many ways, we have been shown an immortal figure from an older age, an immortal who is not outside humanity, but part of it, and the inclusion of figures such as Calliope, and later Loki and Orpheus, work to tie him to an immortality that is similar to those you hear about in old Greek tales and the like. But even such immortality as the one Dream has is not free of change. Like humanity, immortals change as well, and Dream, we learn in this section, is changing.

(In many ways, this idea is at the heart of Gaiman’s novel, American Gods. I think of American Gods as a work that sits thematically and conceptually beside The Sandman, and believe that if you’ve enjoyed one, you’ll enjoy the other. Of course, the same works if you hated one or the other, I suspect. Still, of all Gaiman’s novels, I like American Gods best.)

Change is a powerful thing. It happens to you whether you like it or not, and it can be force within you that results in growth, just as it can also show you the limits of where and how you can change. This idea is brought to the centre of The Sandman in the next major arc that takes place, Season of Mists, where Dream goes back to Hell to free a Nada, a woman he imprisoned there after she spurned him thousands of years before. To free Nada, Dream will have to confront Lucifer, who he slighted in the opening issues of the series, when he travelled to Hell to reclaim his lost helm (and where we saw Nada, briefly, in a cell). Dream expects a fight in Hell and he does not expect to win, but when he arrives he finds that Lucifer has decided to leave Hell. He has Dream cut off his wings, and hands him the key, giving him responsibility of the realm.

Art wise, Season of Mists is mostly Kelley Jones’s work, though the prologue and epilogue is done by Mike Dringenberg, who gave The Sandman much of it’s early visual tone. It’s the last we’ll see of Dringenberg, sadly, though Jones isn’t a bad replacement for the arc. He does lacks some of the more interesting page designs and character work that Dringenberg can do and you do feel it, especially when Dream visits Hell. However, if I’m being fair, Dringenberg could be a touch static on the page, and Jones is much more fluid and composed in terms of panel to panel transitions. Unfortunately, Jones has the unfortunate task of following on not just from Dringenberg, but also from issues done by Charles Vess, Colleen Doran and is later placed against artists like Bryan Talbot. They are all hard acts to follow and precede, but Charles Vess’ issue, where A Midsummer’s Night Dream is staged for the Faerie King and Queen, is such a lush and beautiful thing that you feel a little pity for anyone who did work around it. The issue rather famously won a World Fantasy Award for short fiction, and which resulted in the rules being changed shortly after, so that a comic couldn’t win, but it’s of such quality that to even read it now is to read a wonderful thing. It’s one of the highlights of the entire run.

Art aside, Gaiman has truly found the ground he wants to tread here, in this arc, and he sets up the rest of his run with Lucifer’s decision to abandon Hell. In doing this, Lucifer leaves his responsibilities and offers the reader a foreshadowing of the decisions that Dream himself will have to make should he wish to leave his position. Because of this Season of Mists becomes an important centre piece for the series as a whole. It occupies this space not just it distils the concerns that will trouble Dream over the next fifty odd issues, but because it also offers a solution that Dream himself could not countenance. Dream is not able to give up his realm. He is not able to give up his duties. The very final issue of The Sandman, wherein Gaiman and Vess return to tell a second story that involves William Shakespeare, finalises this idea through the use of The Tempest and it’s a wonderful moment, but to reach that moment, you must first begin here, in Hell.

What follows after Season of Mists is a series of single issues that focus on Dream in the past and help establish the kind of figure he was before his imprisonment. You see the story of Orpheus, presented here by Gaiman as Dream and Calliope’s son. You see Gaiman’s retelling of Orpheus’ decision to go to the Underworld to find his wife. You see Johanna Constantine hundreds of years later, in revolutionary France, rescuing Orpheus’ still living head. You see the story of Joshua Norton, the first and last emperor of The United States of America, who is but a pawn in a game that Dream and the younger members of the Endless, Desire, Despair, and Delirium are playing. You see in these issues how Dream conducts himself, how his own code allows for action and inaction, how far he can bend, and how far he cannot.

Ben

(Benjamin Peek is the author of seven books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various year’s best books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He once wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)