Reading Comics #109 "The Annotated Sandman Volume 1 #18"

After this there are only two issues to go in this extended look at The Annotated Sandman Volume 1...

The great thing about this installment, looking at Sandman #18, is that it's all about cats.  People who don't like cats are obviously bad people.

It's not only about cats but strictly from a cat's perspective.  The storytelling here is a little tricky, balancing one cat with their recollections of another cat's call to revolution.  It's a little trickier without color, I think.  Still, it's like Neil Gaiman's We3 (the great comic from Grant Morrison), with art again by Kelley Jones.  Considering I've previously referenced Jones as best known for his human figures, it's quite a revelation to think he could just as easily have made a career of doing stories with animals.  Apparently this is not his last work in Sandman, but it is in this volume.

I wrote a story (or two) myself that involved dialogue from animals, although it was in prose (you can read it in Monorama), but I sympathize with Gaiman's desire to distinguish it from human speech and not particularly wanting it to be considered thought, as Leslie Klinger's notes explain on the first page.

On the sixth page is a wonderful rendering of a cat's head in close-up from Jones.  Klinger makes reference on a later page to Gaiman's instructions to Jones about making a standout portrait that will make other artists jealous.  To my mind, this one's more striking.  Perhaps owing to the black and white nature of my edition's depiction, it looks like woodcut art.

There's a spare amount of notes in this issue.  It's funny that notes meant for the thirteenth page are printed on the twelfth's.  The twelfth page is also noteworthy for the beginning of a travel narrative that works exceptionally well, with variations on the phrase "and I walked on" concluding the captions in most panels.  I tend to be a reader who appreciates a writer's grasp of distinctive storytelling.  This is the sort of thing I eat up.

This sequence leads us to Dream, who in this story naturally is a cat (as discussed before he tends to take the form expected of him).

Another terrific sequence from the issue involves a vision of the past where cats were large and men were small, a complete inverse of their present relationship.  This is what the issue is all about, since it was a dream of men that reversed it, and subsequently the vision of the cat I mentioned earlier to cause another dream to reverse it again.  Not only did man's dream reshape reality, but it caused the previous one to no longer exist at all, like it never happened.  This I think is a pretty big idea on Gaiman's part.  I wonder if he explores it more in Sandman.  It's metaphysical and glorious.  Yes, we have a hard enough time convincing people to believe the same things about science and religion.  To through something like this in the mix?  I guess that's what great fiction like this is all about.

The twentieth page, for the record, references Gaiman's directions to Jones about the cat rendering.

The end of the story is the main cat sleeping, and its owners wondering what it can possibly dream about.  I should explain that the big development that causes the cat to go on its quest is having kittens and the humans cavalierly taking them away, like the cat can't possibly have any real concern about that (much like what Madoc does to Calliope when he gains possession of her in the previous issue).  The cat I know is usually pretty discreet when she sleeps, hidden away from public consumption as it were.  My sister's dog, however, regularly twitches in his sleep, so it's not hard to imagine that he's dreaming about something.  In Gaiman's view it must be profound indeed...