Reading Comics #100 "The Annotated Sandman Volume 1 #9"

Just a note before we get on with the festivities:

As the title of this post indicates, this is the 100th edition of this particular regular feature here at Comics Reader.  As the label suggests, it started out as an eponymous tag for the blog itself, and the material that's been covered (which is archived here) has been at times very scattershot.  This latest series under what was finally settled as Reading Comics under consistent numbering months ago has been fun to do and has helped streamline and refine my approach to the entire blog, which will become more and more evident.

Now to have some fun!

Finally past material previously collected in Preludes & Nocturnes, the only Sandman I've had any prior working experience with, the ninth issue begins what might also be found in The Doll's House.  It's also a standalone issue, but resonates with what came before and what will follow, story time in a very Sandman fashion and also familiar to what might be found in a typical Neil Gaiman story regardless of where it's found.

We begin in Africa, deep in the tribal tradition, and in fact a rite of passage that can be found in many cultures, not in this specific form but as a general focus for entering adult life.  Leslie S. Klinger is pretty chatty in the notes, at least early on, before the story simply takes on its own fascination.

On the second page Klinger talks about Nelson Mandela's experiences with such a rite, although not so much the story aspect, which to Gaiman's version is key, and the only way Dream himself appears in the issue.  Perhaps it's entirely fitting that Morpheus is a supporting character after all.  Most of the time when you're dreaming you're not really aware of that fact.  The act of dreaming is always a guide.

The tale the young man hears from his own guide is about an African city of the past, whose queen falls in love with a mysterious visitor who turns out to be Dream.  She goes on a quest to discover who it was, and it's the queen herself, Nada (Klinger explains all about this name and its various cultural interpretations), who rejects Dream as a mate, convinced that the match could never work.

At this point I'm going to be learning quite a bit about what happens next, so the end of this story really is a mystery.  Gaiman ends the issue with the suggestion that Nada's story may not be finished, that Dream's potential love match may not be lost.  Or perhaps it is and this ends up defining him a great deal.  A writer like Gaiman can fold a lot of story into a single narrative, and Sandman is his masterpiece in this regard, and in fact a lot of my writing is done in the method I gleamed from everything I'd come to know about Sandman (in particular a currently unpublished novel entitled Modern Ark).

To my mind, an issue like this one is brilliant in and of itself.  It speaks as much to my memories of American Gods and Anansi Boys as what I've already read of Sandman and what I expect in the future.  I can see why some people would say Preludes & Nocturnes might be skippable, although it really isn't, that The Doll's House may be the true beginning of the story, because this prelude is undeniably what you'd expect from the series if you'd never read any of it before (the first issue itself is like that, too) and only read about it.