Reading Comics #92 "The Annotated Sandman Volume 1 #1"

(via vertigocomics.com)

If any mainstream comic book besides Watchmen will ever be acknowledged as a literary classic, it'll be Neil Gaiman's Sandman.  Perhaps one of the first signs is the existence of Leslie S. Klinger's The Annotated Sandman, which is now the version of the series that I hope to read in its completeness.  As the title suggests, this is Gaiman's comic book, reprinted in its entirety, with annotations from Klinger, who is an old friend of Gaiman's.  It is reprinted in black and white, but Sandman is a series that is more than capable of selling itself with or without color.

My previous experience reading the series is wholly incomplete.  I've read the first regular collected volume, Preludes and Nocturnes, as well as the first issue itself, and barely anything beyond that.  It's another series that I kick myself for not reading when I originally had the chance, because it was still in regular ongoing print when I was reading comics for the first time in the 1990s.  Still, this is a malady that can be corrected these days.

This series of posts will feature my thoughts as I read through at least the first volume of The Annotated Sandman, with thoughts both on Gaiman as well as Klinger.  (The second volume was released last November and the third is scheduled for January next year.)

It strikes me, first off, that Klinger provides something of a historical archive with the note on the cover of the first issue, since I would probably have never known without seeing the issues themselves that Sandman was originally subtitled Master of Dreams.  Few comic book readers ever think about life after the single issues (although famously, The Dark Knight Returns was originally just The Dark Knight, with different subtitles for individual issues), although of course the collection culture has grown over the last decade.  What we'll have in a few decades more, especially as it becomes more and more standard to have and to keep collections in publication, is a disconnect between the readers of the original series and the story as it emerges in history.  (Which means that the sometimes bitching I do about DC's lack of a letters column really doesn't matter all that much.  I find even myself not really caring about that feature as much as I once did.)

Another key feature of Annotated Sandman that I want to put on record before I forget is that each page is numbered, and more than that, each page of each issue is also recorded.  It's a continuing pet peeve of mine that this is less and less standard, whether in a single issue or a collection.  So that's something that this work absolutely gets right.

I also want to detail the approach I will be taking as I read the collection.  This is not my first time reading an annotated work.  Whether it's history books or Susanna Clarke's excellent Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a work of fiction that cleverly incorporates notes into the narrative process, I've done plenty of trying to read a main text and the extras meant to further illuminate it.  The trouble is that editors don't usually know how to present the notes.  Sometimes they crop up at the bottom and sometimes they're stuck in the back (which is incredibly laborious unless you develop a method).  Here, though, the notes are presented alongside the pages they reference.  (This is a hugely oversize volume width-wise.)

I intend to read the page and then read the notes, which reference the exact panel in question.  So far it seems to work, and keeps me at a measured pace, not to mention putting a greater emphasis on just what Gaiman accomplishes page to page.

A lot of Klinger's notes are historical in nature, at least in this first issue, explaining what Gaiman might have taken for granted as far as the knowledge of his readers is concerned.  Some of it also points readers in the direction of where characters are headed, where they pop up again.  Some of it simply explains the arcana incorporated into the narrative, the particular tapestry the characters who trap Morpheus, otherwise known as Dream of the Endless Ones, rely on in order to believe they have an understanding of things.

As far as the story of the issue itself goes, Dream is trapped for seventy years, drastically affecting his ability to regulate that human activity, with a particular effect on several subjects who end up suffering from the "sleepy sickness" that you might know from the excellent Robert De Niro/Robin Williams film Awakenings (which is duly noted by Klinger).  This will be at least my third time reading the opening chapter of the saga, so at this point I'm developing a familiarity with it, almost a fondness, the dopey stupidity of the men who think they have any bargaining space with Morpheus, who finally frees himself when a guard finally falls asleep in his presence.

In an odd sort of way, Klinger's notes will force me to read the collection in much the way it was originally presented, issue by issue.  This first one is forty pages, but subsequent ones are the more tradition twenty-four.

This should be fun!