I first picked up a Sandman graphic novel when I was about thirteen. The collection was Dream Country and I devoured it in the comic book shop. Over my teenage years, I read and reread every Sandman issue and I have returned to this comic throughout my life; over the last several weeks I reread the series from beginning to end. The Sandman has been called "the greatest epic in comic book history", up there with Alan Moore's Watchmen and some would say even better. During its run, the author Neil Gaiman, working with a variety of different illustrators, invented his own mythology, seemingly inspired by William Blake's maxim "I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's". He made it all up as he went along and, unsurprisingly, there are often internal inconsistencies: occasionally the inconsistencies are bothersome but more often in some strange way they make the work deeper and more interesting.
The Sandman concerns the anthropomorphic personification of Dream, who goes by many other names but is often simply called Morpheus. Morpheus rules the realm known as the Dreaming and is the third eldest of seven siblings, collectively called the Endless – the others being Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium. Dream's siblings, who all have distinctive personalities, frequently feature in the comic. The Endless have existed since the beginning of time and will continue to exist until time's end. In the first issue of The Sandman, published in January 1989, Dream is captured by an English magus in 1918 and held prisoner until he escapes in 1989. Towards the end of the series, which finished in March 1996, Morpheus effectively commits suicide – and is replaced by another incarnation. That is, the personification of Dream continues to exist but as a different person with a different personality, a different point of view. During its seven year run, the series told many other stories about many other characters, often featuring Morpheus only incidentally, but taken altogether, a unified narrative with a clear character arc, pivoting on the idea that sometimes people must either change or die, emerges. It was an immensely popular comic. Since the official finish of the series in 1996, Gaiman has returned to the universe he created occasionally, for example in the one-off series Endless Nights and more recently in Overture.
The Sandman is set in the DC Universe and so, apart from the characters Gaiman created, other DC Superheroes occasionally feature. These include John Constantine from Hellblazer, the Martian Manhunter and a couple of Batman villains early in the run, and Batman and Superman themselves towards the end. But Gaiman went beyond the DC Universe. Often he incorporated genuine historical figures, such as Shakespeare and Marlowe, the Roman Emperor Claudius, Marco Polo, Robespirre and Joshua Norton among others; he also included figures from older mythologies, such as Orpheus and Calliope from Greek mythology, Bast and Anubis from Egyptian mythology, Ishtar the Mesopotamian Goddess of love and war, the Norse gods and so on… These historical and mythological personages do not appear just as cosmetic allusions, they interact with the Endless and play roles in the tales Gaiman is telling. For example, Norse god Loki and woodland sprite Puck team up in The Kindly Ones to try to destroy Morpheus. Gaiman is always, importantly, immensely respectful of his source material (unlike, say, the Thor films), but there is also a kind of historical and mythological revisionism at work, a postmodernism much like that of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. Whereas traditional Fantasy writers following Tolkien have set their stories in worlds conspicuously different from and other than our own, Gaiman's work is set in a world that is almost but not quite ours. It is as if knowledge of the Endless is a Hermetic mystery into which the reader is being initiated. Gaiman is creating a mythology for the real world rather than for a fantasy one.
One of the functions of religions and mythologies is to give some kind of account of the afterlife. Most people are conflicted about this, torn between a hopeful belief in a life after death and the knowledge that death is the end – a tension explored so well in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Even committed Christians who have faith in Heaven look both ways before crossing the street. It is interesting to approach The Sandman with respect to its approach to death and the afterlife. Gaiman commits his fictional universe to the existence of the afterlife in a very early issue when Morpheus visits Hell to recover his helmet. If there is a Hell, there must also be a Heaven. However, despite the existence of a Heaven and Hell, The Sandman's mythology is not at all typically Christian. In Season of Mists (a storyline in which Lucifer quits his position as Lord of Hell), it is suggested that the damned in hell are there because they consciously or subconsciously expected to go there when they were alive, not as the result of divine judgement. At the end of Season of Mists, Morpheus's ex-love Nada is given a choice of afterlives and opts for reincarnation. This idea, that the afterlife differs from person to person, and that people effectively choose what happens to them after they die, is reminiscent of Terry Pratchett (with whom Gaiman co-authored the novel Good Omens). The perfect word to describe Gaiman's approach to the afterlife, and to mythology and religion generally, is syncretistic. On the one hand, again and again, particularly in moments featuring the vixenish character Death, Gaiman implies that death is the end; on the other hand, he also wants to present all religions and mythologies, all views of the afterlife, as equally valid, equally true. The world is shaped by our beliefs about it - an idea not only associated with Pratchett's comic fantasies but more broadly with Postmodernism generally.
Morpheus is the Shaper of Stories and it is difficult often to know if he is in charge of the stories he features in, or a pawn in them. What power relation exists between Morpheus and the various gods and demigods he encounters? At one point (I forget where) Gaiman has Morpheus say that all gods begin in his realm (the Dreaming), walk the Earth for a while and then return to the Dreaming – when people stop believing in them. The gods gain their strength, their existence, from the faith people have in them, like the god Om in Pratchett's novel Small Gods. Morpheus, however, has existed since the beginning of time and will continue to exist, in some incarnation or another, until the end of the universe – he does not draw his power from belief and arguably seems higher up the mystical hierarchy than the various gods and goddesses he encounters. Yet, in Season of Mists when preparing to go to Hell to fight Lucifer, he tells a servant that Lucifer is by far more powerful than he, Morpheus, is. The implication is that Lucifer's adversary, who is more powerful than Lucifer, who is called the Creator by Gaiman but is unmistakably the Christian God Jehova, is where the buck stops. There is a contradiction or inconsistency here. On the one hand all Gods and mythologies are stories and thus subordinate to Dream; on the other, it seems here that Dream is subordinate to the Christian narrative. Is Christianity then ontologically distinct from other mythologies, does it transcend them somehow? Gaiman is vague here. Neither Jehova nor Christ feature in The Sandman and I believe that Gaiman changed the way he wanted to situate Christianity within his mythology as the mythology evolved. In a later story,The Golden Boy, Gaiman presents an alternative USA, the USA of an alternative dimension, ruled over secretly by a deity known as Boss Smiley. Boss Smiley is a kind of satiric caricature of Jehova who presides over his own heaven. When the protagonist of the story, Prez, dies, Boss Smiley suggests that Prez should sit at Smiley's right hand and sing praises. Prez is thus a kind of Christ figure. Morpheus intervenes, saying "I am Prince of Stories. The boy is under my jurisdiction not yours." Despite Boss Smiley's impotent threats ("I will destroy you!"), Morpheus removes Prez from his home dimension and when asked about Boss Smiley says, "He would not be the first to threaten me. But I have no fear of Boss Smiley". The implication, here, is not only that Dream is more powerful than any local God but, more than that, that Christianity is also just a local story. Is Christianity really any more true than Greek or Norse mythology? The Sandman is ambiguous it its attitude towards Christianity and this ambiguity is never resolved.
There are other inconsistencies that run through The Sandman but probably the main one is simply this. How powerful is Morpheus? Sometimes, on some occasions, Morpheus is all-powerful; on other occasions, his puissance is bounded, circumscribed. In The Kindly Ones, he is brought low by the Eumenides, daimons from Greek mythology. We can compare Morpheus to another famous comic book hero, Superman. Superman is God-like in his power but stories require conflict and so Superman requires weaknesses. The possibility that Superman can be defeated must exist and so the Superman mythos requires kryptonite. In The Sandman, Morpheus's weakness is that he must abide by rules; the Eumenides have the power to drive all those who spill family blood to repentance or suicide and this law is somehow more ancient than Dream himself. Where in the Sandman universe do these laws originate? Gaiman does not tell us but it as though Morpheus, as the Lord of Stories, must himself adhere to the rules of narrative. He is a creature of story as much as an author of them.
This post only touches on the many interesting aspects of The Sandman. When I was completing my MA in English, I met a couple of people who wanted to write theses on this comic book. I had considered it myself. And why not? Some comic books are arguably more literary than most prose works. I'd wager there are many universities that offer courses in graphic novels. As they should. If film and popular culture can be deemed worthy of critical scrutiny, why not comic books?
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