The Sandman: Overture #3

"Chapter Three"
written by Neil Gaiman
art by J. H. Williams III

We are, for the most part, no longer people who long for apocalypse.  We are fearful for the end of the world, which comes in awful tragedy and unimaginable suffering, leaves us to die slowly in a devastated landscape.  It is difficult for us to imagine those who would long for it, but those Gaiman gives us.  They are the races come to participate in or observe the death of the universe.  They come with reverence and awe and even love perhaps, but not fear.  The world is ending and they are confident in its beauty and rightness.

The rules are unknown, if they are knowable at all.  In his quest through a desert of skull-rocks and ghost towns, Dream meets the Fates, the weavers of destiny, and yet even they—the spinner, weavers, and cutters of fate's thread—did not see him coming with Cat-Dream.

Spinner:  "Perhaps he will give us his cat."

Cutter:  "What cat?"

Weaver:  "There's a cat with him?  I wasn't expecting that, my truffle-dumpling."

Spinner:  "How can you not expect something?  You spin the thread of their lives."

Weaver:  "I only spin from the thread you give me, my dove-bucket, and I didn't see any cat in the thread.  That's new, that is.  Cats."  (Sandman: Overture #3: 5)

They may each rather travel alone, but it is perhaps their partnership that can thwart their own deaths.  But it is the Cutter's, the eldest of the three, who makes the most tantalizing observation:  "Kindness would be telling him not to look under the bed.  And I'm not going to tell him that" (6).  As soon as the next town, Dream finds her, a young orphaned girl hiding from her father's butchers under the bed, suggestively named Hope.  And she becomes the third of their party.

At the end of the world, we look back on our beginnings, our youth.  After all, "They say every story must be told at least once, before the final nightfall.  And we are nearing the end of the Bridge…" (16).  Dream was captured before, held prisoner in his own palace in Dreaming.  And though he called on all his siblings,  still proud in their youth, Desire was the last and only one to offer aid, a young woman as his lover, a creature of light.  Despite his promise—"My heart.  My constancy. My love for all of time" (19)—Dream, as ever he does, fails as a lover, grows alien and uncaring even as the world made from himself surrounds and oppresses his lover.  He is cruel and cold and unrelenting, but he gives her the rose-quartz dreamstone to make her own world.  And as he remembers Alianora, exiled to a lonesome skerry, he seems to regret.  And he does not tell Hope all his story, perhaps even for shame or sorrow.  Not yet the strangely human Dream he would come to be, but not the entirely cold-blooded abstraction he once was.

[September 2014]

The Sandman: Overture #2

"Chapter Two"
written by Neil Gaiman
art by J. H. Williams III

"Chapter One" was an enigma.  An opulent, well-formed and graceful enigma, but an enigma all the same.  The strange and so-far unexplained death of Flower-Dream precipitated the gathering of the Dreams, an omen of trouble and war.  The final suggestive promise of the Concatenation of Dreams is finally realized here, a council of sorts among the many guises Dream takes for all the dreamers.  And there are many, each with his own voice among the throng.  And it is here, in this council, that The Sandman: Overture begins to show its shape.

Old echoes, the themes of Gaiman's original series, reverberate through this one:  fate and destiny matched against free will, mercy counterbalanced with regret, responsibility and obligation in overwhelming and inhuman cosmic matters.  New and old Dream—the Dream Lord captured in 1916 and his white-cloaked successor Daniel—are ensnared in an apocalypse of time, peoples and worlds and Dreams with them are disappearing.  Dream must undertake a journey to rectify the universe, a journey, it seems, to meet his father.

Tellingly, it is Cat-Dream whose speech bubble most resembles Dream's own, speech in his own tone and timber spoken without saying a word.  And it is Cat-Dream that chooses (probably chooses) to go with him where the Endless may not go.

No comics series has ever quite looked like Sandman, not even any of its numerous spin-offs.  It was a series that cultivated a unique aesthetic which carried across multiple pencilers, inkers and colorists over several years.  Williams has convincingly resurrected this style, forging an unexpected but welcome visual continuity with the original run.  Layouts are simultaneously geometric and organic and smooth, inspired by art nouveau design, vascular architecture, and Escher-esque construction.  The Vortex's panels, in particular, blend the plant-patterned and the cosmic, as she herself bathes elegantly and languorously in a pitch-black pool.  Most of Dream's journey bleeds color, a stylish and psychadelic saturation, which—along with the dense, busy illustrations—overwhelms the page with impressive detail.

[May 2014]

The Sandman: Overture #1

"Chapter One"
written by Neil Gaiman
art by J. H. Williams III

In 1916, a cabal of occult elitists sought to capture and enslave Death, but instead they summoned her younger brother Dream, weakened and exhausted and dressed for war.  Overture is the story of how he came to be so.

Chronologically, Gaiman's return to Morpheus' world may antedate the events of Dream's imprisonment, but the full weight of Sandman's epic 75-issue run bears down the details of Overture.  It grants Gaiman's lyrical but circuitous opening a gravitas it perhaps hasn't yet earned, but it also casts a long shadow.  Like the musical form from which Gaiman derives his title, it's a small piece that presages the themes and tone of what's to come.  Unlike the music, most of us can only presage Sandman, so to speak, in retrospect.

Nevertheless, the notes are beautiful.  It begins with a dreaming plant on a strange planet in a far distant galaxy.  Dream, as he is accustomed to do, appears in the form of the dreamer, a dark, elegant flower with a white bloom.  Something, though it is impossible to determine exactly what, is wrong.  So we begin.  It's a fine, dramatic, orchestral opening, but it's the grace notes that color Gaiman's fantasy so wonderfully.  Destiny, for instance, reads about himself reading about himself in a narrative mise-en-abyme that threatens to unravel narrative logic if not for his characteristic dogmatism and certainty.  Dream keeps a London office, in no particular time or place—though at any moment they seem so absolute—and attended by dreamers who become someone else in their duties, as changeable and absolute as the place itself.  But it's Dream's death, perhaps, that would have been the issue's most tantalizing mystery.  Though we know death to be possible for him, he appears by all accounts still to live.  But instead, we get many Dreams each with his own ruby, summoned together against their resisting, though our own Morpheus seems the only one desirous to resist.  And the only one to show up prepared for battle.

J. H. Williams III's artwork is characteristically gorgeous, echoing the tenor of the original series with crisper, cleaner notes.  Like Gaiman's lush language, there's relish in Williams' designs.  The Corinthian—one of Gaiman's more nightmarish creations—is introduced in teeth of a sinister grin, a twisted and appropriate analogy to eye-reflection artwork (6-7).  Similarly, Mr. George Portcullis is introduced through portcullis windows (11).  He even works in enigmatic messages into the wood grain along the borders:  "Where dreams live now, but sometimes some dreams die."

[December 2013]