Reading Comics #106 "The Annotated Sandman Volume 1 #15"

Continuing our series on The Annotated Sandman...

Sandman #15 is a little odd.  Not unusually odd, because Neil Gaiman specialized in odd for this series, but odd in the sense that it's really only our second look at the residents in the place where Rose Walker has been staying while she tracks down her lost brother Jed.  It's odd because the issue is an exploration of these characters and their psyches.  Technically speaking, this is as much the first time we meet any of them.  Gaiman hadn't really bothered doing much more than introducing them previously.  So everything here is like doing that all over again.  It's worth noting that he already indicated that each of them was strange enough in their waking lives.

So they only seem weirder now.

Leslie S. Klinger includes a confession Gaiman made in his script that he had begun finding it difficult to sustain a continuing arc.  Not to worry, Neil.  Most of this one could very easily be read individually.  He then goes into detail about the nature of the dreams we'll be experiencing.  Whether the reader, then or now, chooses to adhere to his interpretations is still very much open.

On the second page Klinger references a famous Christian poem that Gaiman references, but doesn't really go into detail as to what that poem is.  It's another of his odd oversights.  Anyway: a man is walking along a beach and talking to Jesus, who explains that the extra set of footprints that the man observes belonged to him, and when the man notices one particular period, which was a dark one for him, only features one set he asks why he was abandoned in his hour of greatest need.  Jesus replies that during that time he was carrying the man.

The dreams commence on the fourth page.  Ken, as in the couple who are named Ken & Barbie and are meant to represent exactly the archetype embodied by their namesake dolls, apparently dreams of having great power, while Barbie has a fantasy dreamland very reminiscent of the fantasy movies of the 1980s (The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth).  Apparently Gaiman found the concept so fascinating that he based an entire later arc around it, though it cannot be found, alas, in this volume.

The so-called Spider Women, one of them evokes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, while the other looks far more conventionally feminine (although in their waking lives both sport veils, so it's hard to judge them on that score), and as described by Gaiman is having a relationship with a sentence (whatever that means).  I assume it's about trying to make a connection, the way some people only find solace in literature about people whose lives reflect their own.

Klinger, thanks to Gaiman's script, also gets to reference Gothic literature like The Castle of Otranto, which I only learned existed thanks to a free book listing in an e-reader I hawked for a bookseller.

On the eight page, Klinger also misses a chance (perhaps because it also didn't occur to Gaiman) that there's another reference to the Hecate, the trilogy of women who've been appearing throughout the series, mostly because he's busy identifying the faces as being derived from the Judy Garland Wizard of Oz.

Rose is a vortex.  She intersects dreams.  That's as much as why there's been a whole arc about her, and why this particular story is about dreams.  That's how Dream himself appears, because he's finally getting around to addressing the matter.  Yet it's Matthew the raven, and Gilbert, Rose's protector who also happens to be Fiddler's Green, escaped from Dream's realm, who inform the ending of the story.  Apparently there was a whole alternate conversation between the two compared to the one they share in the issue.  I know this because of Klinger.  I appreciated seeing that one, but the one in the issue is probably better.

Klinger's other notes for the twenty-third page are more compelling.  He explains where exactly Matthew came from.  As with a lot of what Gaiman was doing with the series, he came from what others had been doing, and this time once again from the adventures of Swamp Thing, the character Alan Moore helped shape into the formative Vertigo aesthetic.  Moore is known for a lot of things these days, but by the time Sandman and Vertigo came around he'd moved on from that kind of storytelling.  A lot of his later stories are far more evocative of incredibly traditional superhero storytelling, ironically enough.

I'll conclude my discussion of this issue with a reference to G. Willow Wilson's Air.  I twice named it the top comic in my annual QB50 list, and the first year it was in publication at the bottom only because I'd only just become acquainted with it.  In a lot of ways it's a series that's very familiar to Gaiman's dream work in Sandman, with a main character who often had to wonder if what was happening to her was real or an allusion (which has also been a theme in Paul Cornell's Saucer Country, and even Mike Carey's The Unwritten), only to learn that there was great significance indeed to what was happening to her.  I still have no idea why I seem to have been in an extreme minority appreciating it.  If there was ever to be a new Sandman at Vertigo, that would have been it.