Reading Comics #104 "The Annotated Sandman Volume 1 #13"

My series exploring The Annotated Sandman continues!

Before we get into the actual issue, Sandman #13, to be discussed today, let me just drop some of my own emerging thoughts.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman is very close to a modern Canterbury Tales, or 1001 Arabian Nights if you will.  It's a story about stories.  As long as there are readers, there will always be an audience for this kind of material.

It also strikes me for the first time that The Shade, the mini-series concluded last year by James Robinson from his own Starman, is very similar to Gaiman's Sandman, almost a twelve issue condensation of the series.  I've been wondering why more people didn't care as much about The Shade as I did.  I loved it, and I started loving it even more.  I haven't read the complete Starman.  I've gotten a comment here at Comics Reader before when I talked about The Shade that reiterated the emerging opinion that Robinson may after all be more miss than hit.  (Although Earth 2 seems like another hit.)  It's a shame, really, because when he's on, Robinson is undoubtedly among the best writers in comics, and The Shade as with Starman was very much Robinson at his best.  Maybe it's a testament to the fact that Starman was not only not at all relevant to the New 52 that had just launched when The Shade debuted, and that Starman was in nearly a decade in the past at that point.  Comics fans typically have a long memory, but they can also be a little "what have you done for me lately" as a crowd.  But time will be more kind.

I mention all this because Sandman #13 is all about time.  It concerns Dream's visits with Hob Gadling every hundred years, starting in 1389.  It has nothing to do with the arc that's been going on the last few issues except maybe a metaphorical connection.

Leslie S. Klinger's notes are at their most extensive in the issue as they explain what was going on circa 1389, Black Death and such.

Hob is conversing with Geoffrey Chaucer when we first meet him.  Not the Chaucer of A Knight's Tale, in which the brilliant Paul Bettany portrays him as a lively individual who frequently ends up nude, but the guy getting ready to write, well, The Canterbury Tales.  Hob is less concerned with the flux that's about to take place in the general spread of reading than with his notion that people only die because it's what they expect to happen.  He argues that if he refutes that concept, he won't.  Dream decides on a lark to allow him to do just that, stating simply that he'll see him in a hundred years.

Gaiman associates the result with the Wandering Jew, a figure of legend who denied Christ and was thus condemned to wander the earth until the Second Coming.

Some of the story is a commentary on how the old adage, "the more things change the more they stay the same."  Still, things are different with each visit.  The 1489 visit is mostly about the cosmetic differences.  The 1589 is Gaiman's chance to talk about Shakespeare.  In fact, Shakespeare himself appears prominently in this sequence.  It's curious that Gaiman suggests Dream is somehow responsible for the great works that follow this early period in Shakespeare's career.  We all know it was really Gwyneth Paltrow and her "bibbies."

By the way, Dream looks awesome in this sequence.  The issue is a little like the Sandman version of Blackadder, the great Rowan Atkinson sitcom not called Mr. Bean.

It's also worth noting that it's very possible for a greater artist to be inspired by great art.  Critics in the Shakespeare Identity debate don't seem to take that into consideration.  Christopher Marlowe wrote The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus.  Putting aside whether or not he might have done something better had he not met an untimely end, it's still fairly obvious and not just because the culture has since gravitated toward Shakespeare that his best doesn't compare to Hamlet.

Klinger cleverly notes on the twelfth page that Gaiman references the famous summary of Fred Astaire from early in the Hollywood icon's career: "Can't act.  Slightly bald.  Also dances."

In 1689, Hob has fallen in fortune.

In 1789, Hob and Dream have been identified as the Wandering Jew and the Devil by locals who've caught on to the fact that they meet each century.  It's Lady Johanna Constantine who dares to call them out.  Apparently she comes back, but not in this volume.

She's also one of several oblique references to John Constantine, who himself previously appeared in Sandman.  Also referenced is Jason Blood, human counterpart to Etrigan the Demon, who has also himself appeared in the series.  Blood is one of several DC characters who don't age.  Vandal Savage is another famous example.  A slightly less orthodox version of this type is Resurrection Man.  He's had a few chances in the past twenty years to have an ongoing series.

In 1889, the obligatory Jack the Ripper reference is made.  Klinger has remarkable restraint concerning this. He instead speaks at some length about a famous whore.

Hob at this point has assumed the real point of these encounters is that Dream is in fact lonely.  In 1989, he doesn't exactly refute the idea.