Reading Comics #105 "The Annotated Sandman Volume 1 #14"

We continue our series on The Annotated Sandman!

Sandman #14 is thirty-eight pages long.  That's how I'm going to start this reading post.  This is not usual, for an extended issue to appear in a series for a fairly random reason.  That would be an indication of the growing significance of the series at that time for DC (it wasn't until 1993 that the Vertigo imprint existed), and Neil Gaiman's growing ability to do exactly what he wanted.

For instance, this issue is all about serial killers.  The "Cereal Convention" mentioned previously is held.  We know about it because Rose Walker and Gilbert have stumbled into the middle of it, which ends up being something of a problem during the issue.  Part of the reason the issue happens at all is because Gaiman noted even in 1990 (or I guess 1989 when he would have written it) that serial killers were becoming a fairly uniquely American phenomenon.  Sure, Jack the Ripper was British, but that was a hundred years in the past.  Well before the rest of us really started to appreciate it, Gaiman was writing about it in an issue of Sandman.

These days, every other TV show is dedicated to crime and some of them serial killers, including Criminal Minds, which is fascinating but also follows the formula of solving the crime and capturing the killer by the end of each episode.  A lot of people also seem to be fascinated by Dexter, subject of a TV show and series of books.  There's also Hannibal Lecter, the most famous serial killer in American fiction and the screen, now in his first TV show.  Clearly serial killers fascinate us, their unique psychology.

The creepiest thing about the issue is that it doesn't judge serial killers, at least not outright.  You could read most of it and not even realize that you're reading about serial killers.  They're referred to as "collectors" more than serial killers throughout the story.  They're odd personalities with quirky interests and opinions.  They, uh, also kill people.

Leslie S. Klinger's notes, as always, provide insight into Gaiman's mindset, right from the first page, transcribing from the script.  Gaiman appears to be one of those writers who analyzes his own story as he explains to the artist what's supposed to be happening.  He also explains how the issue delves into a certain horror type, the way a few select other issues have, including the Doctor Dee diner episode in the sixth issue, which is the first instance where Gaiman is creating his own horror genre, including this one.  Sandman is sometimes very easily defined as horror, but not in the Stephen King way, or even Edgar Allen Poe.  It's very much existentialism, which I guess is why it became so easily associated with the emerging Goth culture, because Goths like to think they're existentialists.  But the South Park episode pretty much exposed that for what it really was, a lot of posers just looking for an alternative social group.  Sandman is the real deal.

It's funny that Klinger keeps identifying a singing serial killer as not intending irony in his song selections, because it's really only Klinger who can make that distinction.  It doesn't read one way or the other on the page.  Maybe Gaiman said something about it in the script?  Or we're just supposed to assume that serial killers really don't connect with even a basic level of reality as most of us know it?  In notes on another page, he muses on the nature of psychopaths, which is a type that exists outside of the serial killer framework.  Psychopaths, I might add, who are not as awesome as the ones featured in the movie Seven Psychopaths.  I'm talking the controlling kind who dominate every bureaucratic structure.  But we're here to talk about Sandman.

On the third page we have our first reference to the absence of a particular serial killer, the Family Man (unrelated to an underrated Nicolas Cage film, although Nic might be considered an entirely different kind of psychopath).  The Family Man is absent, as Klinger notes, because he was dispatched in an extended storyline from Hellblazer, the series that featured John Constantine.  We also meet convention organizer Nimrod for the first time.  Klinger never explains the significance behind Nimrod's name, but it comes from the Bible.  He was a great-grandson of Noah who was known as a mighty hunter.  There are ironies there.

There's also a character who refers to Nimrod as "bub" on the fourth page.  Klinger doesn't make a note about that, either, but clearly in comics that's a reference to Wolverine, another version of the classic psychopath archetype.

Rose, the girl who's unwittingly here because she's looking for her brother, who was being held by humans of other despicable characteristics, makes her first appearance in the issue on the fifth page.  It's funny that her companion, Gilbert (whom Gaiman modeled on G.K. Chesterton, remember), is casually referenced by Klinger on a later page as Fiddler's Green, the final monster Dream will have to recover, even though as far as I know this hasn't been revealed yet in the comic, even by the end of the issue.  The others include Brute and Glob, dispatched last issue and the ones who were holding Jed, Rose's brother, and of course the Corinthian, who becomes the showcase of this issue.

As Klinger notes without spoilerage on the sixth page, Chesterton was known for theological paradoxes.  Apparently he was known for indicating that a paradox is the truth getting attention by standing on its head.  That's true of all the best fiction.  If you stare at a Christopher Nolan movie long enough, you realize that this is exactly what he does with all of them.

Anyway, Rose doesn't want a paradox.  She wants a story.  Gilbert obliges her with an original version of Little Red Riding Hood.  Before the Brothers Grimm there was Charles Perrault, who restated classic morality tales a century before them.  If you know anything about the Brothers Grimm, you'll know that the stories you know from them are very much Disneyfied, and Perrault is even more grim than Grimm.  The seventh and eighth pages are grim indeed, though recognizable enough.  The dirty details are hid in words, like the rest of the issue.

We've already met the character whose presence will match this story, by the way, signified by a shirt with a wolf on it.  His name is Funland.  He appears again on the eighth page.  The Corinthian, meanwhile, finally arrives on the tenth page.  The shades he's wearing kind of look similar to the ones Jack Knight sports throughout James Robinson's Starman (to bring that up again), or can also be found in the underrated indy comic The Victorian.  Like most of the characters in the issue, then, he looks like anything but a serial killer, or maybe exactly like a serial killer.

Nimrod, in case you were wondering, is definitely a serial killer himself, as the twelfth page makes clear.  He just seems like he isn't.  But again, that's how they all are.  He tells a bad joke.  On the thirteenth page he continues the opening address of the convention by making it clear that the assembly will not pursue its shared activities during the convention.  It would risk drawing attention, which these guys probably shouldn't do when they're all gathered together like this.  Naturally, I don't mind spoiling, killings are eventually done.

For movie fans, Klinger provides explanations for the film festival mentioned on the fourteenth page.  Thankfully, I'm not familiar with most of the films that appeal to this crowd.  Although one of them, Compulsion, stars Orson Welles.  Manhunter, the original film version of Red Dragon, the first appearance of Hannibal Lecter, is among them.

The page also includes the first appearance of the Bogeyman.  Klinger soft-spoils that his fate in the issue reflects the fact that he's a fake in a collection of very real psychopaths.  Unlike other conventions, this one's definitely not for fans.

Rose's experiences at the convention begin on the sixteenth page.  Gilbert is careful that he isn't identified by the Corinthian.  He becomes skittish enough as a result to abandon Rose, which is not a good thing.

The eighteenth through twentieth pages are the only ones besides a sequence that follows them to feature the serial killers engaging in their natural behavior.  If you believe serial killing can somehow be considered natural.  It's the fake Bogeyman getting his due from his idols.  The real Bogeyman was dispatched in an issue of Swamp Thing some five years earlier.

Funland enters the spotlight as it were on the twenty-first and -second pages when he runs into Rose.  Klinger notes that Gaiman originally scripted him as Disneyland.  It's just as well that the name had to be changed, because otherwise it would have made the character very stupid rather than simply very disturbed, because he explains that he has a very special secret place where he "collects," that would just have been obvious to anyone if he went around calling himself Disneyland.

Klinger explains the insanity defense on the twenty-sixth page.  This and the following page are Gaiman's only real attempt to explore the psychology of his subjects for the issue.

On the twenty-eighth page, Funland's real name is revealed to be Nathan Diskin.  Now, I know I could extrapolate from that name.  Klinger is either discreet or doesn't see its significance.  He does, however, realize that Funland is finally acting out the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

For mainstream comic book fans, a version of Little Red Riding Hood might be said to exist in the Red Hood persona, in some versions the original criminal identity of the Joker and in recent comics the current heroic identity of Jason Todd, the second Robin and the one murdered by Joker in the classic "Death in the Family" story arc.  I don't think anyone's explored the psychology of this, or the connection to Little Red Riding Hood.  Consider this some food for thought, as it were.

Gilbert at least left Rose with a calling card, the name Morpheus, which of course is one of the ones Dream uses.  The title character makes his appearance in the issue by rescuing Rose and disarming Funland, which as detailed on the thirty-first page and as explained by Klinger involves an allusion to an Oscar Wilde story.

The Corinthian, who has replaced the absent Family Man as the keynote speaker of the convention, has his real moment following this, but when he sees Dream, who has stuck around, he knows as well as we do that this particular nightmare is finally coming to an end (in more ways than one, as the length of the issue that I previously indicated would have been something readers even then would have found remarkable).

The conclusion makes Dream into very much a deus ex machina, who magically undoes the horror of the lives of all those serial killers.  Klinger lets us in on Gaiman's direction for the faces of these maniacs as they realize what's happened on the thirty-sixth page, though the artist didn't really pull it off.  For whatever reason, when Klinger explains what Gaiman's script was supposed to indicate, the artist rarely pulls it off.

This page also sees Gilbert return, with the body of Jed.  Jed is not dead, by the way.  But the issue is finally done soon enough.

Very entertaining in a very Sandman way, though.