Reading Comics #107 "The Annotated Sandman Volume 1 #16"

Stories originally collected in the first printed Sandman collection (secondly chronologically) The Doll's House come to an end in this latest installment in our look at The Annotated Sandman...

Dream takes center stage, which is a tad unusual really, as he confronts the vortex, Rose Walker.  He's just informed her that he is going to have to eliminate her, which is to say murder her.  She's not happy about it.

Much of the issue doesn't feature any notes from Leslie Klinger, mostly because it's very much a matter of resolving elements that have already been introduced and discussed by himself and Neil Gaiman, the author of this rich tragedy.

On the second page Rose tries to convince herself that because the subject matter is dreams she can't really be in any trouble.  All she has to do is wake up.  Well, normally.  But she is in fact dealing with the king of dreams.

On the fourth page we catch back up with Fiddler's Green, who was pretending to be an ordinary human named Gilbert when we first meet him.  He's talking to Matthew the raven, who was once a human (but not in this series).  He confesses that prior to assuming the Gilbert identity (which did not, alas, grant him awesome fighting ability, like Jason Bourne), he wasn't a person but a place, within Dream's realm.  It only makes sense.  Gaiman patterned Gilbert after G.K. Chesterton, who as discussed in prior installments wrote about paradoxes of faith.

Dream rambles a bit about what a vortex of dreams is supposed to be, but it's never really clear, then Gilbert/Fiddler's Green (naturally he's still got the Gilbert form at this point) appears, offering to replace Rose.  He's not an adequate substitute.  Of course, then the story cuts to Rose's mother Miranda, who is holding vigil over Rose's grandmother Unity Kinkaid.  Again, this is only fitting, but we'll explain that in a bit.

Gilbert says goodbye to Rose and becomes, once again, Fiddler's Green, sort of like a Sandman version of the Elysian Fields from Greek mythology.  As far as I remember, Klinger never explained where Gaiman got the term from, but the somewhat inadequate Wikipedia page suggests that it came from 19th century America, sailors and soldiers.

On the eleventh page, Unity shows up and begins the argument that she's going to replace Rose as the sacrifice.  She makes a solid argument.  During the time she was sleeping, which is also during the time Dream was imprisoned, as depicted in the very first issue, she was prevented from becoming the vortex herself, and thus her fate was passed on to her granddaughter.

Anyway, on the fourteenth page Klinger gets to reference something nifty, an artistic allusion to Sandman #9, in which Dream pursued his one and only love interest, which may be the origin of the whole concept of the vortex, an unconscious desire on his part to reunite with Nada.

Once Rose is deposited, she picks up her life, and for the next few pages explains how she reclaims it.  Klinger helpfully explains some of the books she begins to read, some of it recently published at the time of the issue's original release.  There's Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker, Sleeping in Flame by Jonathan Carroll (which sounds fascinating, so I'll have to track it down at some point), and a few that the artist didn't depict: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (which directly reflects what Rose herself is like in the first six months following her adventure), Ghosts of an Antiquary by M.R. James (which was quoted in the previous issue), and A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman (which I've read, and you can read my thoughts here).

Klinger further explains that Carroll reassured Gaiman to write what became the A Game of You arc after he'd initially decided against it because it was so similar to Carroll's story.  "Go for it, man.  Ezra Pound said that every story has already been written.  The purpose of a good writer is to write it new.  I would very much like to see a Gaiman approach to that kind of story."  That's exactly my philosophy, even directly retelling specific narratives.

Last issue there was a reference to the classic "It was a dark and stormy night" opening line.  Rose concludes her story with "And then she woke up," how she makes that phrase her own.  I wrote a story last year that evoked the "stormy night" line, and was reamed in part because I dared use it, because it was a trope those readers kind of automatically assumed must be the work of a hack.  It's not the words but the intent.  It's the emotion but the act.

Anyway, Dream ends the issue talking about or rather with Desire, part of his family in the Endless.  He's not so happy because he's realized that it was meddling from within the family that caused all of his recent troubles.  Part of this is picked up in a later issue.  This one, however, ends on a meditation of the nature of dolls.  It may be a little on the nose, but then there's probably a good deal of depth that has already sailed over a lot of heads in the preceding pages.  The whole intent of the arc was Gaiman's exploration of being manipulated and not having any real control or say, often associated with the plight of women.  If this is to be reduced to the concept of playing with toys (and it's curious that none of the issues featured toys, or perhaps he left it to Bill Watterson, beloved cartoonist behind Calvin & Hobbes) then perhaps it's better to be shocked worse than Sid in Toy Story, the way we casually manipulate those in our own lives, which is something you can't do without reversing the metaphor.