It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book for the next ten weekdays.
The Doll’s House picks up seemingly throwaway threads from Preludes and Nocturnes and creates story out of them. Builds mythology from stuff that appeared to be mere tone and atmosphere building.
This is what Gaiman does. This is what Sandman is. And even at this early stage, when he’s still getting a feel for the world he’s creating, it’s brilliant.
When we caught glimpses of troubled sleepers and people struck into dreaming comas in the first story arc, it appeared to be little more than attempts to vividly paint the impact of Dream’s captivity. Gaiman was showing us a world without Morpheus, letting us see why he’s important and using a series of tiny arcs to do it. We saw people caught in an endless slumber, a woman tragically raped while in a coma, a man destined for insanity, and more. These were passing references to a slew of people, unimportant to the main story save for adding texture to it. Just the stuff of atmosphere building. Or so it seemed.
But we were wrong. One of those little “atmosphere” arcs becomes central to The Doll’s House.
We begin with a prologue that feels as if it’s a standalone story, something largely unrelated to the whole. This is an illusion, of course. Nothing in Sandman exists in a vacuum. Throughout the series Gaiman proves to be a master of using even the smallest of story elements and passing references as springboards to larger tales. I’m not talking clunky comic-book stuff, either, those “gotcha!” revelations or retroactive explanations of what happened between another book’s panels. Gaiman doesn’t do clumsy. Here we’ve got the sense that a mythology is being built — not a make-it-up-as-you-go-along mythology, but a true, coherent, densely interwoven, real mythology.
For instance, this prologue, “Tales in the Sand,” appears to be the story behind a brief encounter Dream had while in Hell, as shown in the first volume. It was nothing more than a fleeting interaction with a lover who’d allegedly wronged our protagonist, a hint at something in Dream’s past. In “Tales in the Sand” we learn this lover’s tale and why she is in Hell. It seems like this prologue is unconnected to The Doll’s House, but what we don’t realize is that this story will also serve as the roots for one of the most important arcs of the entire series, the forthcoming Season of Mists.
Are you sensing a pattern here?
Anyway, The Doll’s House. You can feel Gaiman starting to shake the Alan Moore dust off his bones with this arc, breaking free from his mentor’s influence and juuust starting to create his own voice. (It’s not a stretch to call Moore Gaiman’s mentor. It was Moore, after all, who showed Gaiman how to write a comic script.) The influence is still there in the way Gaiman handles his serial killers and in the lyrically self-aware narration, but it’s a big step forward from the very Moore-esque Preludes & Nocturnes.
Gaiman shows himself to be adept at creating strange, surreal characters here — and I don’t mean the murderers! Our protagonist, Rose, who’s searching for her missing kid brother, is exactly the sort of intellectual young everygirl who’d be likely to find herself amid a posse of weirdoes, and indeed, her roommates are an odd but interesting and likable bunch. Though, yeah, those serial killers are well realized, too. Gaiman has a knack for establishing character without needing lots of strokes; any one of these side figures could probably sustain a story in their own right.
We also see some playing with the comic form. Nothing groundbreaking, but stuff that keeps us on our toes. Typewritten letters as narration; lettering being used in creative ways; pages being turned on their side to represent Rose being turned on her side (figuratively, not literally); a twisted dream sequence that puts us into the psych of her roommates.
Lots and lots of good stuff.
There is an interlude here about three fifths of the way through the arc, “Men of Good Fortune,” that I can’t help but think should have been moved to Dream County in the collected editions. It’s a standalone story, albeit a very good one, and feels out of place in the midst of this extended arc. (Of course, once again, it’s not really a standalone: this one is later extended in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and a part of it comes up in Season of Mists. Let it be a lesson learned: take nothing in Sandman for granted.)
The arc wraps up with a satisfying resolution that never feels cheap and leaves us without any doubt: We’re reading the start of something special.
The astonishing thing is, Gaiman isn’t even there yet. He’s not yet firing on all cylinders. With this arc, he’s still working to move away from his influences and to find his own voice. And yet it’s really quite good. Not yet UTTERLY BRILLIANT, as this series will soon become, but quite good indeed.
Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”
Tags: bizarre, comics, cthulhu, dc, dream, fantasy, freak, gaiman, goth, gothic, horror, lovecraft, mckean, morpheus, neil, neil gaiman, poe, sandman, sci-fi, science fiction, scifi, surreal, vertigo, weird, Weird Tales
January 6th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Eric
I’m really enjoying this, as I plan to start re-reading them soon too. A really intelligent commentary. Can I ask, how are you keeping track of the mini-tales within alleyways that Gaiman is sooo good at? Are you making notes or do you just remember? I find that I enjoy the immediate ride and don’t spot stuff like what you’ve mentioned until pointed out to me!
Keep going and thanks
January 8th, 2009 at 12:39 am
Norman,
Thanks for reading. I’m not doing anything overly special as I read. Taking a few minor notes on things I’d like to touch on, but I’m largely writing from memory and going with whatever my immediate impressions were. The wonderful thing about Gaiman’s work is that you can’t help but come away with some vivid impressions. You read and have a wealth of stuff to talk about.
Of course, the difficult thing is that there is SO MUCH to digest. I find it impossible to talk about everything I’d like to talk about, and invariably I find that I’ve forgotten something.
Which, of course, only means that I’ll have a good excuse to re-read this again, doesn’t it? Hah!
Thanks again for your comments, Norman. It’s been a pleasure to dive back into this magical world, and even greater pleasure to share my thoughts with folks.
Eric
January 14th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Apparently those out of place, in-the-middle-of-story-arcs solo issues like Men of Good Fortune are used to distill the themes of those arcs and present them in another, contrasting form. I haven’t figured out just what those themes are supposed to be, myself, but that’s Gaiman’s own explanation which I suppose is why it’s in this book rather than the next.
January 15th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
[...] Loki, ever a maker of mischief, steals the child of Hippolyta Hall, whose husband Dream killed in The Doll’s House. Hurt, angry and on the verge of lunacy, she seeks out the Furies of Greek myth, who are empowered [...]