Reading Comics #101 "The Annotated Sandman Volume 1 #10"

Before we get into the pages, let's do another title-of-the-post ditty.  I would not be upset if you misread that as Reading Comics 101, like I'm teaching a class.  Because that's what this whole blog be about, yo!

Ego deflated once again, of course the real topic is The Sandman #10 as presented in Leslie S. Klinger's The Annotated Sandman Volume 1.  This issue marks the start of "The Doll's House," the eponymous arc from the original second collection from Neil Gaiman's fantasy classic.

On the very first page, Klinger explains a little of the background for the title of the arc for anyone particularly interested, which eventually concludes with a rumination on the origins of Superman's Fortress of Solitude.  Hey, Sandman may not be a traditional superhero comic, but it's still a comic book, and what else is prominently known about comics than all things Superman?

Technically the page also introduces Desire, another of the Endless, Dream's family, each member of which has a name starting with the letter "d."

Anyway, the issue calls to mind some of those pesky details from the earliest issues of the series, before Gaiman felt he had a good handle on what he was doing, returning to one of the victims of the sleeping sickness as depicted in the very first issue, when Dream's kidnapping led to all sorts of irregularities.

Unity Kinkaid gave birth while she slept for decades.  Kind of creepy, yeah (especially when you know she wasn't pregnant before she fell asleep).  Well, that's just life.  A lot of this issue is a way of humanizing the story, which until this point tends to have sensationalized, well, everything.

Of course, before you get any funny ideas, much of the issue also sets about establishing some of the more mundane aspects of Dream's reality, revealing the talismans of the entire Endless.  Klinger explains all of them in his notes for the third page.  More of the mythology is explained on the fifth page.

By the sixth page, we catch up with the humans who will occupy most of the issue, Rose Walker (already seen briefly previously) and her mother Miranda.  Gaiman's script apparently went to great lengths in describing Rose's intended appearance to the artist.  Klinger also notes that another bit of intrigue about Rose, other than her grandmother Unity, is her brother Jed, who was actually introduced by the late great Jack Kirby in a previous incarnation of Sandman.

The seventh page is pretty amusing, because it features the very much American Rose and Miranda attempting to understand the differences in the English culture they'll be experiencing as they visit Unity.  Gaiman, of course, is English, but he tends to write American characters, so if you for some reason had no idea (he was in fact part of a vast British exporting of comic book talent in the 1980s that included Alan Moore and Grant Morrison) there you go.

I like layers like that!

The art turns sideways for a few pages, possibly because Rose has fallen asleep and in fact Dream appears in a dream (she's lying across the backseat of a car at the time) as we catch up with some of his housekeeping.

The eleventh and twelfth pages feature a spread that is more or less Gaiman's gift to his emerging Sandman fanatics.  Yes, only ten issues in and they not only exist but he's able to write for them in a script.

Anyway, a bunch of monsters, including the pivotal Corinthian, are introduced on the thirteenth page.  The Corinthian is notable for having tiny mouths where his eyes are supposed to be.  These monsters slipped away while Dream was gone, and so like the first arc this second one will feature cleanup duties.

Gaiman by way of Klinger explains Unity's curious appearance on the sixteenth page, how she's very old but doesn't look very old because for most of her life she didn't exercise any facial muscles, and her fashion sense is affected by what she remembers from her youth.  Although most old people I know are similarly in a perpetual fashion time warp.

It's fun that Klinger gets to explain the '45 Rebellion Unity references on the seventeenth page, since it's not 1945 but rather 1745.  A country like English would have people talk like that, while Americans tend to only think about wars in its past, or patterns of settlement and migration.  This is a fine instance of Klinger helping readers to do some migrating of their own, from what's probably an American mindset to another entirely, which is basically what Gaiman does with Sandman as a whole.

The Hecate, the trilogy of women seen in previous issues, speak with Rose, guiding her and the reader into the dawning awareness that her story is far from over.

By the end of the issue, it's the Corinthian who drives the story forward, however, and Klinger guides the reader again to something particularly clever in the comic.  Well, first, he also has to explain something that's lost in a black-and-white reproduction, an effect involving the Corinthian's shades.  Then he points out how a couple of word bubbles in the last panel in fact come from the separate mouths from the eye sockets, which is a fine way to remind readers that this dude has at least a visual gag working for him...