Reading Comics #110 "The Annotated Sandman Volume 1 #19"

This penultimate issue in The Annotated Sandman Volume 1 is all about Shakespeare!  Want to know how it's obvious Leslie Klinger is a fan of the Bard?  He fairly vomits trivia all over the issue!  (It can't hurt that Gaiman is part of this obsession as well.)

We're talking about Sandman #19, based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in fact titled as such.  The play is being performed throughout the issue, as the actual fairy creatures serve as audience, making comments about how weird people are (wait, is this all some sort of meta observation about people making notes?!?).  All of this is possible because Neil Gaiman previously had Dream converse with Shakespeare during the Hob Gadling episode making a still-undetermined bargain, possibly linked in Gaiman's mind to the Madoc episode a few issues back.  It's still odd to me that there must be some sort of explanation to the genius of Shakespeare outside of his own abilities.  As this presentation of Midsummer more or less proves, it's not so different from Much Ado About Nothing.  All great artists are aware of the variations and patterns in their work, and know how to use them to their advantage.  You can see that in the strands of the Bard's work, whether in the tragedies or the comedies or histories.

I think I'll be sparing you an extended look for a change.  Plenty of people have talked about Shakespeare, and I'm not really up to do much of that myself.  I am but a poor player upon the stage.  A couple things worth noting, however, are Gaiman's presentation of Shakespeare's son Hamnet (which makes me wonder if a story however fictional like Shakespeare in Love about the Bard himself won't always be almost as fascinating as his plays) and the fact that his version of the "real" Puck later becomes a major player within the Sandman narrative (although of course not in this volume).

It's pretty funny, though, that of all the anxieties I've been detecting in previous issues it's this one where Gaiman discusses in his script (as related by Klinger) apprehension about how well a particular story works. I think it works well enough, certainly nothing that could possibly embarrass him (to be read about on the twelfth page, for the record).

One other thing that was pretty interesting to read about was the Long Man of Wilmington, details of which are explained on the third page (an actual image appears on the fifth page).

That's it for this issue.  Amusingly, it concludes with the sort of these-people-ended-up-this-way notes that movies based on (or sometimes if they just want to be clever) real events include just before the credits.