The Dreaming

In contrast to popular visions, Death was a really cute goth who enjoyed her existence; she duly helped to capture the comic-reading public’s imagination until the end of the run at issue 75 in 1996. The individual comics were gradually collected into complete storylines in the graphic novels, introduced by writers such as Stephen King, Peter Straub and Clive Barker, which helped The Sandman do the supposedly impossible: cross into mainstream reading consciousness. It received acclamation from luminaries such as Norman Mailer while one issue, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, went on to win the World Fantasy award.

Through the early 90s, the Sandman brought a new audience to comics. Alisa Kwitney served as editor at DC during that time, overseeing the writing and the artwork, and The Sandman: King of Dreams offers a useful and sometimes intimate perspective. As Neil Gaiman notes in his introduction, it is difficult to see what more can be brought to the series after all the websites, dissertations and companions. In between some previously unseen sketches and a collection that gives the less familiar reader a sense of the artistic imagination, Kwitney delivers a fine overview of what the series is about and many of its sources. This is a book primarily about the relationship between the creators, and between script and illustration, with some useful background information. However, as she admits, the finest book for the reader committed to uncovering more about this world is still Hy Bender’s Sandman Companion

After concluding the Sandman stories, Gaiman concentrated on novel writing, most notably in the widescreen vision of American Gods, in which old-world gods roam the US, and in his chilling children’s novel, Coraline. Though Gaiman had always shied away from returning to the Sandman (barring The Dream Hunters, his take on Japanese folk tale), Karen Berger, his editor at DC Comics, repeatedly asked him to create a new collection - eventually calling his bluff by asking which artists it would take to lure him back to the series, and then lining them up.

The result is a collection of short stories, each illustrated by a different artist. Gaiman takes us on a wild ride through a night of the Endless, from the portraits of Despair to the gardens of Destiny, via a party at the beginning of the Universe and the islands off Venice. Each tale is exquisitely layered and repays careful reading: the reader is introduced to each of the Endless in turn as they flit in and out of the stories. The Sandman has always experimented with form, theme and illustration, and Endless Nights continues the tradition. The mood changes with each illustrator, from Barron Storey’s gallery of portraits of lives fracturing in “Despair”, a tale reminiscent of Kathy Acker, to Milo Manara’s eroticism in “Desire”.

This collection explores the illusions around which we construct our lives. In Death’s tale, we are shown how a count held Time back from his doors, only to have a rude awakening; in Dream’s tale his vision of love is shattered when he sees his lover in another’s embrace. Destiny’s story harks back to “The Tempest”, which concluded the original run, and the notion that creation is itself an illusion. The book ends with a sense of peace: Destiny (or Gaiman) is content to close his book and move on to other tales. Yet with Endless Nights, it is clear that Gaiman’s creation is still more potent and vibrant than the industry that surrounds it.

American Gods, his best-selling adult fantasy from 2000 and the only novel to win all four major sci-fi awards (Hugo, Nebula, Stoker and World Fantasy) has been released in trade paperback. He’s working on Anansi Boys, something of a follow-up

The Wolves in the Walls, his morbid, funny children’s book with his frequent illustrator-collaborator Dave McKean, hit the best-seller charts, while the paperback of last year’s young adult best seller, Coraline, has been released.

MirrorMask, a fantasy film Mr. Gaiman has written, is in post-production with Mr. McKean directing. He has also finished an adaptation of Nicholson Baker’s erotic novel, The Fermata, for director Robert Zemeckis, while he’s slated to make his own full-length directing debut next year with Death: The High Cost of Living.

Neverwhere, the story of a quest through a dark, fantastical version of London’s Underground, was originally a BBC miniseries he wrote. It’s finally out on DVD, complete with low-budget, Dr. Who-quality special effects but with Mr. Gaiman’s own, often sardonic, commentary track.

Don’t Panic, his 1999 literary biography of Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) has just been updated.

And 1602, a new comic book series that began in August, will be out as a graphic novel next summer. It presents Elizabethan-era skullduggery with early ancestors of such Marvel Comic heroes as the X-Men and Daredevil.

“Bear in mind,” Mr. Gaiman cautions from his home near Minneapolis, “that I’ve gone from about a year of ‘that lazy Neil Gaiman, he never does anything anymore’ to this, when everything I’ve done in the last four years seems to be coming out in three weeks. I’m getting sick of me, too. If it’s any consolation, I really am lazy.”

Yet even that long list doesn’t contain the one item some of his fans had been anticipating for months: The British-born author has released Endless Nights, a new installment of his Sandman comic book series. First published monthly from 1988 to 1996, The Sandman was Mr. Gaiman’s brooding revision of an old superhero � akin to what Frank Miller and Alan Moore did two years before with Dark Knight and The Watchmen, respectively. In Mr. Gaiman’s hands, the Sandman became a device to strip-mine classic myths and re-mix them with modern tales, combining the cosmic and contemporary-seedy.

This macabre ‘new mythology’ has been the essential Gaiman approach: injecting ‘real’ people into fables (in Neverwhere, a young man finds that London subway stops such as Knightsbridge and Blackfriars have actual knights and friars) or, conversely, bringing the legendary to modern life (in Mr. Punch, still one of his best works, a British lad learns about sex and death from the living puppets in a sordid seaside arcade).

In various packagings, The Sandman has sold more than 2 million copies. Perhaps more significantly, it brought female readers into comic shops and tapped a very “goth” sensibility.

That loyal goth core was evident at Mr. Gaiman’s appearance earlier this year at BookExpo in Los Angeles. Amid the usual middle-age booksellers, the goth kids stood out � as is their wont.

Mr. Gaiman himself is rarely seen in public without a black leather jacket and black jeans. But because the goths are the most obvious element in his audience, “back in 1994,” he says, “I could tell which person at one of my signings was a young fan and which was a fan’s mother � the 30-ish, responsible member of society who’d been asked to get a signature. But I can’t do that anymore.”

This isn’t just because the early goths grew up and put aside the black nail polish, he claims. American Gods attracted mainstream readers, for example, while even older romance fans, he says, liked Stardust, his 1999 fairy tale.

One can hear the goths shuddering from here. But the fact is that Mr. Gaiman has been pursuing a wider, mainstream audience for more than a decade. One good reason: According to Publishers Weekly, American Gods has outsold Mr. Gaiman’s previous efforts more than 2-to-1.

Yet sadness suffuses Gaiman’s return to the dark, groundbreaking Sandman series he authored for DC Comics from 1987 to 1998. Although reviewers received advance copies of only three of Endless Nights’ seven projected stories — one of them only partially inked and colored, leaving a rare glimpse at Miguelanxo Prado’s unadorned, exquisite pencil work — the results augur Gaiman’s triumphant return to form.

In the interpretation of “Dream,” wherein a mortal meets the family of her immortal lover and finds a new flame, Prado’s Disneyesque delicacy — his Lady Killalla recalls Snow White — betters Gaiman’s abstruse prose. Illustrating Gaiman’s “Death,” P. Craig Russell brings a capable if uninspiring comic book style (reminiscent of Curt Swan, Superman’s longtime and least exciting exponent) to the intertwined stories of a decadent 18th-century Italian count and a latter-day army assassin troubled by a childhood experience outside the count’s desiccated palazzo.

The true standout here is “Despair,” broken down into 15 disjointed meditations by, among others, a crippled ranch hand who spends his disability checks on cat food before suffocating 70 tabbies in his trailer; a TV personality’s dejected gay lover, doomed to sporadic trysts in outskirt hotels; and a man who murders his female companion and waits to be arrested at home, “the sound of the sirens coming closer.” Most timely is Gaiman’s alcoholic Father Dermot Byrne, purged from his diocese after a long-gone female student suddenly accuses him of molestation. What would Jesus do? Dermot asks the bishop’s aide. “If he had to deal with the insurance companies,” the aide replies, “he’d probably hang you out to dry, same as the rest of us.”

The Sandman and his six immortal siblings — Desire, Death, Destiny, Destruction, Delirium and Despair — are collectively known as the Endless; they aren’t so much gods as incarnations of their eponymous concepts, and the seven stories in the collection are devoted to exploring each of these abstract ideas. While Gaiman’s longtime collaborator Dave McKean contributes the cover art and overall design, Gaiman enlists a dream team of international cartoonists and artists for the stories themselves.

The opening story, Death and Venice, features the Sandman’s perky goth-girl sister, Death. (Resembling Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice, Death is notably the undisputed reader favourite of the Endless, particularly of its significant female following.) In a fable that moves from present-day Italy to a 19th century count’s Venetian palazzo and back again, illustrator P. Craig Russell chronicles decadence, fate and the eternal recurrence of the same. Russell is known for his lavish adaptations of Oscar Wilde fairy tales and operas, and there is attention to detail in the opulent period costumes and architecture, and even the modern episodes are suitably baroque.

Next, What I’ve Tasted of Desire is also drawn in approachable traditional European clean-line style, but this time by Milo Manara, the Italian master of musky eroticism, known for his sexy women and X-rated comics. Manara renders a folk tale of desire, passion and revenge set in a medieval Nordic tribe with inky aplomb and lush depictions of the female form (not to mention pouty lips).

Spanish artist Miguelanxo Prado illustrates the wittiest of the pieces, Heart of a Star, a science-fiction romp that explores the Endless’s secret origins through Dream. The story is Gaiman’s sly wink to longtime Sandman readers — a rare glimpse of Delight (before she became Delirium), Dream’s first love, and the first instance of androgynous Desire meddling in her brother’s romantic affairs. Prado imagines stars and other cosmic beings as colourful glowing humanoids with evocative facial expressions. Set at the dawn of the universe, the story assembles the beings at a floating space palace for intergalactic parliamentary meetings on protocol and galactic boundaries. When Dream meets Earth’s awkward Sol, drawn as a teenage sun whose planets are still asleep, the latter wistfully muses aloud that he hopes one day his planets will be able to foster life.

While the first three stories are typical Gaiman fare, his trademark high fantasy then veers into the more interesting realm of the obscure with Fifteen Portraits of Despair, pairing Barron Storey’s experimental artwork with prose poems and fragments in what becomes a gallery of concrete poetry. Bill Sienkiewicz’s work on Delirium in Going Inside conjures a hallucinatory, and strangely poetic, rescue mission with stream-of-consciousness monologues, flying tropical fish and all the internal logic of a Rorschach inkblot. The dark, computer-enhanced collage depicts the chaotic interior landscape of a traumatized young woman, with five mad voices differentiated by Todd Klein’s distinct lettering styles. Two more beautiful stories drawn by Glenn Fabry and Frank Quitely round out the collection, and although the tales are helpfully expository, they are otherwise unremarkable.

The best-selling fantasy novel, originally written as a miniseries for the BBC, explores the mythical realm of London Below, which exists in the sewers and subway tunnels beneath the city. Canadian director Vincenzo Natali (Cube) has signed on to direct, with screenwriter Matt Drake revising the script originally written by Gaiman. “We’re actually just about to go out with a script that no one’s seen,” she said. “We’re going to approach everybody in town and see if they want to finance it.”

The Sandman is the story of Dream of the Endless, tapping into mythology, religion, folklore, history and literature to create a vividly imagined and richly human tale that is, unlike most examples of the medium, more widely read today than when first published.

The Endless are seven siblings, anthropomorphic personifications of aspects of consciousness. The eldest, Destiny, existed before life appeared. Death appeared with the first life and the other Endless - Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delight (who became Delirium) - followed.

When Death, usually depicted as a warm, funny and attractive goth girl, turns out the light on the last living being, be it a human being or a universe, Destiny will close his book and disappear.

The glossy, hardcover Endless Nights features seven stories, each self-contained and largely self-explanatory, depicting each of the Endless. Newcomers to The Sandman will miss the references in which long-time readers will revel, but it’s a good best opportunity to meet the family.

Gaiman picked seven artists, tailoring his storytelling to their artistic styles. The results are never less than appropriate, at times sublime.

“Death And Venice,” about an island where a single day is repeated endlessly, its participants inured against Death, serves as a straightforward entry to the volume. The story is complemented by P. Craig Russell’s rich yet realistic artwork.

Baron Storey’s dissonant, abstracted images are a sublime mirror for “Fifteen Portraits Of Despair,” probably the strongest story here, a breathtaking evocation of misery in a few of its guises. Deeply troubling, it will resonate and haunt long after the volume is closed.

The fast-selling original graphic novel, released on Sept. 17, is a collection of seven short stories - addressing the themes of death, desire, despair, delirium, destruction, destiny and dreams. Seven artists have illustrated these stories.

“We are extremely proud to have this extraordinary graphic novel mark the growing importance of the category to book buyers across the country,” said Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics.

Graphic novels are a growing category in bookstores and comic shops. As a result, book wholesaler Ingram Book Group (LaVergne, TN) has seen an emergence of new opportunities in hobby stores and other similar outlets selling graphic novels.

“The growth in graphic novels has been explosive,” said George Tattersfield, director of merchandising for Ingram Book Group. “I expect to see consolidation in this area among publishers until there are a few major players.”

Ingram developed its first catalog devoted to graphic novels last year, and has published two in 2003.

DC Comics, one of the top U.S.-based publishers of graphic novels, has high expectations for several of its upcoming titles, including Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place by Brian Azzarello and Joe Kubert, which will be published on Nov. 5.