The Sandman: How Neil Gaiman Revolutionized Serial Comics! Here Everything Explained
This brief exchange can give you an idea of the spirit and tones that permeate The Sandman, a serial comic created by Neil Gaiman in the 1980s who, with apodictic and lapidary jokes, made one of his stylistic figures. It is not only for the fulminating dialogues that Gaiman’s imposing oneiric work is remembered, not even “only” for having changed the rules of the game, narrative and editorial, of the American serial comics, imposing the figure of the Author. The Sandman was a unique, coherent, magnificent, visionary, original, destabilizing, and irreverent visual-literary narrative that revolutionized the world of serial comics. He has grasped and, at the same time, perfectly anticipated the spirit of the times, dealing with new and burning themes that appeared for the first time in the drawn stories, reworking ancient mythologies with a post-modern sensibility.
He practically invented a genre, a horror-cut fantasy (as it was presented in the first issue), with peculiar modalities and atmospheres, which would be imitated, at least as inspiration, countless times, not only in comics but also in cinema and seriality television. Taking advantage of the release of the homonymous series for Netflix, which sees Allan Heinberg as main showrunner and executive producer, flanked by David S. Goyer and Gaiman himself, let’s see in detail how Sandman has revolutionized American serial comics.
The Sandman Plot: Dream and the Eternals
Morpheus, also called Oneiros, or simply Dream, is overseeing the kingdom of Dreams, indeed he is the Dream. Depending on the eras and cultures in which he manifests himself, he is displayed in different forms by the mortals who have the honor of meeting him. Not by chance also called the Shaper, Morpheus, weaving the dreams of men, also influences their lives and destinies. Among other things, he is one of the seven Eternals, in charge of certain spheres of human feeling and existence in general. With him are Destiny, Death, Despair, Destruction (also meant as change), Delirium (which was previously Delight), and Desire (with ambiguous sexuality). These are not mere anthropomorphic representations, but those same concepts or emotions, with all that, go with them.
At the beginning of the series, Morpheus was imprisoned, via a spell, by an English wizard, Roderick Burgess, who wanted to summon and imprison Death. The dream will free itself and will have a great deal to do to regain its powers after 70 years of imprisonment and, above all, to put things right in the Realm of Dreams which, left without care, has caused great damage and imbalances in the dream life of humans. Not to mention some nightmares that have gotten out of control (remember this name, the Corinthian) and circulate undisturbed among humans.
Numerous adventures occur to Morpheus and his brothers, with whom, as in any self-respecting dysfunctional family, he has a contradictory and conflicting relationship, especially with the unpredictable Desire. Only with Death, brilliantly outlined by Gaiman as a dark-punk girl with a refined sense of humor, extreme wisdom and unsuspected compassion, does she have a true and affectionate relationship. However, great upheavals await Morpheus in his relations with humans, with the gods, and, above all, with the sense of his action in the world, having to come to terms with those cosmic, unwritten laws that regulate the kingdoms of the Eternals, and that he has followed all too literally for billions of years. At the end of the series, nothing will be the same again.
The Sandman: A Story That Ends
If we think of the works that revolutionized comics, the first titles that usually come to mind are Watchmen by Alan Moore and The Return of the Dark Knight by Frank Miller, both released in an incredible decade like that of the Eighties, fundamental for the leap. forward accomplished by the drawn stories. However, Moore and Miller’s graphic novels were mini-series that ended in a dozen books, then collected in volumes. The Sandman was instead a real serial comic, with (almost always) regular cadence, which came out on newsstands for 8 years, from 1988 to 1996. What, however, distinguished Gaiman’s work from the other serial products of DC Comics (in whose universe it initially entered) was that, from the very beginning, an end was foreseen.
It was therefore a programmed narrative that, through a defined number of narrative cycles, would have led to the end of the story, without aftermath and above all without rebirths or retcons typical of American serial comics. This meant that when something happened in the series, any more or less dramatic and/or traumatic event was definitive and there was no possibility that, later on, some other author would resurrect some characters, or change things to re-read events of the post below. an unprecedented light, at times, jarring concerning the original setting.
Author Control
The entire series has always been under the complete control of Neil Gaiman who conceived, elaborated, and programmed the narration from beginning to end, using numerous designers who had to respect the vision. Each illustrator was chosen to give a particular emotional tone to the stories, according to the themes dealt with, the tones, and the expected atmospheres. We are therefore far from the often inevitable standardization of the American superhero comic, but we are faced with a real serial authorial project, complex and stratified, unprecedented for the time. It was thanks to the success of The Sandman that, in 1993, DC Comics launched the Vertigo line, dedicated to author comics that went beyond the narrative lines of super-heroes, of which Gaiman’s creature,
Even in the details, Gaiman’s revolution was like an avalanche: Morpheus, the owner of the magazine, was never present on the covers (a real trademark by Dave McKean), except in the first issue. Imagine a Batman or Superman comic without the superhero on the cover: unthinkable, at least at the time. Not only that, but Morpheus is not always present in all stories either. Sometimes, in the self-concluding narratives, he intervenes only as a deus ex machina, influencing the destiny of other characters, which Gaiman explores very well, making us love, hate, or otherwise know them in their lights and shadows. Finally, it is no coincidence that an issue of The Sandman, the Shakespearean “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, won the 1991 World Fantasy Award in a literary and non-comic category.
The stories of Morpheus and the Eternals are not unique, they do not have a traditional trend and, above all, they are not explained at the end. Some elements of the narrative and of the world of which they are part, remain deliberately indeterminate, leaving readers, at times, without precise answers regarding the universal mechanisms that inform and shape the world of Sandman. And that’s the beauty of it: those stories remain within the reader’s conscience and work within them. It is not unusual for anyone who has read The Sandman to return sooner or later in his life, driven by an irresistible call, to find those characters and those dreamlike and disturbing atmospheres, which bring into play the conscience and his moral sense of him. who reads them?
The Sandman: The Deconstructed And Reworked Myth
A unique and peculiar feature of Neil Gaiman’s narratives, both in terms of comics and literature (think of American Gods), is the unscrupulous (in a good way) and original use of the myth. In The Sandman, there are characters from the most disparate mythologies, from Thor and Odin to Orpheus, from Lucifer (later taken up in a series dedicated to him, from which the homonymous television series was born) to the Eumenides (otherwise called Erinyes or Furies). The beauty is that each of these characters while respecting the original characteristics present in the mythological stories of origin, acts and compares with the others credibly. Myths stripped, in a certain sense, of the epic of which they are naturally clothed and immersed in emotionally plausible stories. They act as three-dimensional characters,
With this, however, do not believe that those stories lose in opacity: Gaiman could insert those characters coherently and organically in the world of The Sandman where, in the general framework, they take on new, sometimes titanic and tragic values, others more human. Above all, we remember a memorable monologue by Lucifer, the fallen angel, in which he claims that he is not at all the one to force men to do evil, and finally concluding thus, about humans: ” They speak of me as someone who goes around buying souls. Like a fishwife on market days, never wondering why. I don’t need souls. And how can you have a soul? No. They belong to themselves, they just hate having to admit it. “
Female Characters And Adult Themes
The women in Sandman are not semi-naked girls, with statuesque bodies, simple female alter-egos of male heroes but with the addition, often, of the romantic element. The female characters in Gaiman’s work are real women, taken from ordinary life, who face everyday problems and who do not have the physique of models, nor the features of goddesses (there are also goddesses and fairy creatures of incomparable beauty). They are well-rounded characters who live, suffer, and, by strange synchronicity, find themselves at the center of cosmic plots, crossroads of destiny that can influence the entire universe.
Rose Walker, Hyppolite Hall, Foxglove, Hazel, Thessaly, Wanda. The latter in particular represents a small revolution in comics: it is Alvin, a man who has changed his sexual identity, finding a new life and new friends who have become his new family, beyond the one of origin that he never accepted. Exciting and moving the narrative arc of Wanda, present in the cycle of The game of life, on which we do not anticipate anything. This is just one example of the many adult themes dealt with in The Sandman and which include, among others, loneliness, insanity, maladjustment to society, pedophilia, psychopathy (memorable the congress of serial killers), as well as topics, treated tangentially, such as history, philosophy, cosmology, physics, mythology,
The Sandman: The Power Of Stories
Sandman is a great celebration of the performative power of stories or the power they have to shape reality. Never before have we been aware of the fact that narratives influence the collective perception of an event or a character. Neil Gaiman told us this 30 years ago through his protagonist Morpheus, who, governing the realm of Dreams, also presides over the way we perceive reality and, consequently, how it is encoded. How an individual, or an entire people, dreams, and conditions the surrounding world, starting from the mythologies, is born in the dark magma of the collective unconscious, which has shaped rituals, religions, and worldviews over the ages. Up to the stories, we tell ourselves to escape ourselves,
Even the gods, in Gaiman’s vision, are nothing more than stories shaped in the realm of Dreams, to which they will return once men no longer believe in them, offering them prayers or offerings. But all, humans, gods, and Eternals, in The Sandman, do not escape the confrontation with themselves and a desperate search for their own identity. Or, in other words, of a place in the world. Even the Eternals can have doubts about the meaning of their actions and thus come to terms with their responsibilities, perhaps even deciding to abdicate the kingdom assigned to them by Destiny.
