The Sandman, Volume One, Preludes and Nocturnes

The Sandman, Volume One, Preludes and Nocturnes-Neil Gaiman

How I found this book: A lot of my friends were very into Sandman when I was younger, and so I wanted to check it out. One day on a whim I purchased the first one, and was hopelessly hooked.

Setting: Through the 20th century, but nominally the 1980’s.

Main Characters:

Morpheus: The Sandman of the comic books, Morpheus is really Dream, one of the Endless, the anthropomorphized entities that are greater than any other power in existence. Morpheus is both the Lord of Dreams, and Dream itself. Trapped accidentally by an alchemist in the early 20th century, he is released in the 80’s and must rebuild the Land of Dreams and regain his powers. He is depicted as a tall, gaunt, angular man, with eyes as black as night, save for tiny pinpoints of light, and wild, black hair. His appearance can change from time to time, but usually his eyes remain the same.

Roderick Burgess: A magician who attempts to prevent his own demise by capturing Death itself, (Death happens to be Morpheus’s older sister). Instead he captures Dream and holds him prisoner until he ironically dies, never knowing that he had captured the wrong sibling.

Alexander Burgess: Roderick’s son, he realizes his father’s mistake, but refuses to let Dream go until 1988 when he makes the mistake of falling asleep in the Dream Lord’s presence. He is cursed for his crime with a lifetime of never ending nightmares

John Constantine: Another DC Comics Character, (he has his own series); one of John’s former girlfriends is in possession of Morpheus’s magic bag of sand. He is impressed by the Dream Lord to help him get back one of his sources of power.

Lucifer: The lord of Hell, he has possession of Morpheus’s helmet, and isn’t too happy with the way the Dream King gets it back.

John Dee: AKA. Doctor Destiny, another DC Comics character, he was a supervillain who was locked up in a mental institution years before. He has possession of Morpheus’s ruby, which holds much of his stored power.

Death: Dream’s older sister, Death is both the personification of death and death itself. She is pragmatic and down-to-earth, with a fun side to her personality, (she has a teddy bear and she likes Mary Poppins.) Death is also the voice of reality for her often mournful, angsty brother. She is depicted as a girl dressed in the goth style, with pale features, black make-up, and black, gothy clothes, with her symbol, an ankh. Despite her ‘gothy’ appearance, she’s actually quite cheerful and fun for the most part, in sharp contrast to what she is.

Plot: Morpheus, otherwise known as Dream, is one of the Endless, beings of great power in the universe. He is the king of the Land of Dreams, and it is from him all dreams and nightmares begin, (and stories as it so happens). He is accidentally trapped and captured by a magician, who seeks to prevent himself from dying. Instead, he captures Dream, preventing people from dreaming properly for decades. When Dream finally escapes in the late 80’s, he returns to a domain and a world that has been drastically altered by its lack of ability to dream. He must find his talismans, the keys to his power, and restore himself, so he can begin fixing everything that has gone wrong all these years.

Themes:

The importance of dreams: When Dream is locked up, the world isn’t right, not in the dream world, and not in the real world as well. People fall asleep at random, or they never wake up, doomed to sleep for decades, unable to participate in the real world. Nightmares are unleashed on the real world, and people who shouldn’t be handling such power suddenly have it and misuse it. It is only when the proper lord of Dreams gets things back in order that the world seems to come back to normal again. Dreams are just as important as reality in this universe.

Don’t mess around with powers you can’t control: Much of the trouble that occurs in this initial Sandman story centers around the fact that people are messing with things that they can not control. Dream is captured by someone who thinks he can ‘control’ Death, and thus captures one of the Endless…only he captures the wrong one. It doesn’t prevent his death in the long wrong, because he was an idiot, but it does cause a lot of harm. John Constantine’s girlfriend gets into Dream’s bag of sand, thinking it was a harmless drug, and it sucks her and everyone else into her own dreams, from which she can never wake. And then John Dee, who destroys the lives of so many innocent people, because he is insane and has a toy he little understands, but is making use of. So many people are hurt by a power that they shouldn’t be messing with to begin with.

Life sucks, get over it: Death has to be one of my favorite characters in the series, if for nothing else, she is the big sister I try to be. She is frank with Dream, who is often angsty and depressed, (stemming from his secret romanticism I’m thinking), and Death often has to come and slap him upside the head. Yes, life sucks, but you learn to deal, and you move on. There are better things to life than being mopey.

Every book sucks somewhere: This is a ‘graphic novel’, read ‘comic book’, and for anyone like me who likes to speed read through books, this will drive you batty. I hate pictures in books normally, but the story is compelling enough, and the art work good enough, that I don’t mind so much with this one.

There’s also not a great description of the Endless and what they are and what they do. Granted, this is fleshed out a bit better in further issues, but still, it was a bit confusing at the beginning figuring it out, (I cheated and looked it up on Wikipedia first).

Also, as I preface many of Gaiman’s works, it takes a certain kind of taste to get into it. If you don’t like that wickedly dark fantasy out there, you aren’t going to like Sandman.

What did I like: The story is unique and imaginative in terms of comic books. It isn’t about a tight-wearing superhero that has women trouble and a dark neurosis, which is refreshing. It’s a new twist on an old DC Comics character, and one that is both dark, but compelling, and full of a weird sort of magic that Gaiman is famous for in his works. And have I mentioned before how much I love Neil Gaiman?

How would I rate this wormy book: I would rate this as a FAT WORM. Preludes and Nocturnes is a great, new take on the comic book, both dark and fanciful, but with all the familiar themes you find in the good, old-fashioned, tight wearing kind. And the sad part is, it’s sort of like eating Oreo cookies, you can’t stop yourself at just one.