Comics Review: "The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes"

About a month ago, I walked into the comic book store and recognized the person J checking bags at the door. It was a glorious moment, and not just because I was coming from seeing "Iron Man Three" and it was free comic book day.

J used to worked on my floor in a now-defunct department, which meant that in addition to her job at the comic book store, she was in need of another work study gig at the school. And we had just lost a round of work study employees to graduation.

Worlds were colliding.

J gives me the opportunity to bring my hobbies into the office. I gave my coworkers fair warning that she was coming and that her presence would reveal depths to my nerdery I've only hinted at before. Though how could any warning ever really prepare the uninitiated for listening to a two-hour conversation about "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine"? (Survey of office-mates indicates it can't.)

Anyway, J and I are re-reading Neil Gaiman's groundbreaking "Sandman" comics together this summer. Reading with others opens you to fresh perspectives on familiar works, and since summer is the time when a lot of my geek websites run fresh reviews of old/classic television shows, I'm going to take this opportunity to review the first comic books series I ever read.

"The Sandman" was published by DC's Vertigo imprint from 1989 to 1996. Its seventy-five issues were collected into ten volumes, which I will now type from memory (you'll have to trust me that I can do this trick, as there's no way to confirm that I didn't just open a wiki-page on another tab): "Preludes and Nocturnes," "The Doll's House," "Dream Country," "Season of Mists," "A Game of You," "Brief Lives," "Fables and Reflections," "Worlds' End," "The Kindly Ones," and "The Wake."

I think I got all the apostrophes right, but some of those "and"s may be ampersands.

As I said, this was the first comic series I ever read. I'd always loved the comic strips that ran in newspapers, especially back when "Calvin & Hobbes" and "The Far Side" was still being published and the funnies page was worth a damn. Everyone knew to set the funnies aside for Rachel to read with the intensity of  a medieval scholar deciphering an illuminated manuscript. I rarely laughed (except at "Garfield," fat cats are hilarious). The jokes didn't interest me as much as the interaction between words and pictures, how they could tell a story over time and suggest movement and speech where there were only static images on newsprint.

I was primed to make the leap from the funnies to comic books, but unfortunately, it was the 90s, which was kind of a nadir in the mainstream comics industry.

It didn't help that the only comic book store I ever encountered was Android's Dungeon on "The Simpsons," and that establishment wasn't exactly a bastion of culture and good life choices.

Without holding a single issue of a comic book in my hands, I knew that it was shameful to like comic books. When I went to the library to check out a "Garfield" or "Calvin & Hobbes" collection--always with a couple of real novels, like a teenager trying to disguise a pack of condoms with Slim Jims, paper towels and discount Halloween candy at the drug store--I'd see the "Batman"s, "X-Men"s and "Avengers" collections. I'd see them. I'd want them. But I didn't touch them, not even to flip through. Not because they were "for boys," though I know that turns a lot of little girls away from comic books. I didn't pick them up because comics were stupid trash for stupid people. They were low class entertainment, and I was too smart to waste my time on them.

Like a lot of nerds, smart was all I had. I wasn't good a sports, I wasn't popular, and I wasn't pretty, but damn, was I smart. And like a popular girl whose life can come crashing down around her if she gets a bad haircut, I wouldn't be caught dead with some "picture book" in my hands. Every book I read, I wanted people to see me reading it and be impressed by how advanced my reading tastes were. I didn't even read the Harry Potter series when it came out even though it was written for people my age, because I read adult novels, not kid-stuff. (Yes, I was also kind of insufferable. Who isn't at 13?)

I had a friend who was just as insufferable as me, if not more so because she was also kind of goth-y. And she loved "The Sandman," as is the goth's wont. She uttered the gateway words that have seduced many a pseudo-intellectual down the dank and musty aisles of the poorly-ventilated comic book store:

"It's not a comic book. It's a graphic novel."

Graphic novel I could handle. It had the word "novel" right there in the title, which meant it was literature. It helped that the cover of "Preludes and Nocturnes" is one of artist Dave McKean's fabulously surreal constructions of wood, flowers and madness, with not a pair of tights or a cape in sight. You don't question the intelligence of a girl reading a book like this.

"If you have to ask what it means, you don't get it."

McKean did most of the covers for "Sandman" (though he didn't do the interior artwork), and he did them in the pre-Photoshop era, which meant he literally constructed them. This is a photograph of a sculpture that actually stands about four feet high, as I learned the first time I saw Neil Gaiman speak.

I bring this up because even though I was a pseudo-intellectual who had to justify my love of the comics medium by couching it as this alternative art form that you had to be sophisticated to understand, the people who created "Sandman" actually were intellectuals. They were groundbreaking alternative artists pouring their hearts and souls into this massive, sprawling epic that strove to do nothing less than illuminate the nature of imagination itself.

Not that you can tell from "Preludes and Nocturnes," which collects issues 1 to 8 and covers the first story arc of the life and times of the titular Sandman, the King of Dreams, also called Morpheus. Re-reading it as an adult, I'm struck by how simple it is, and how unlike it is from the volumes that follow. It's not a bad story--in fact I think the strength of the series is that even when it's not at the top of its game, it's still better than almost anything else in the comics medium--but its clearly going through some growing pains, switching artists after its third issue and relying on some rather clunky voiceover narration from Dream to keep the story going.

Later in its run, "Sandman" would become known for its rotating cast of stellar artists putting their own spin on a character whose appearance changes depending on whose looking. Its hard to criticize the shift in style that comes half-way through this volume when it foreshadowed such good things to come. And the voiceover disappears altogether after issue 10 or 11, meaning that as clunky as it feels as a storytelling device, "Preludes and Nocturnes" is also the closest the reader ever gets to being inside the head of Dream, who actually becomes more distant and unknowable the longer the series goes on. For that reason, it's fascinating to see him narrate his quest, even if it doesn't always work as a storytelling device.

So what happens in this story arc? The King of Dreams is captured by an English magician in 1916 and spends the next seventy years trapped in a glass dome in the magician's basement. Various characters, some of whom we'll meet again, develop sleep disorders resulting from Dream's imprisonment and the subsequent metaphysical distortions through the fabric of Dreamtime. Then Dream escapes and spends the rest of the story trying to recover three lost magical objects that give him most of his power: a pouch of sand, a helmet made from the skull of a god, and a ruby.

As my friend R says, it's basically a video game. Each object he re-acquires levels him up and gives him the power he needs to move on to the next item on the list. He finds the pouch of sand with the help of John Constantine, a character who enjoyed an extremely successful run in the "Hellblazer" series, to which the early "Sandman" owes a great artistic debt.

(Lecture alert! Alan Moore created the character of Constantine for his groundbreaking series "Swamp Thing," which was one of the earliest mainstream comics to publish without the seal of approval from the Comics Code Authority. While the 90s were a pretty awful time for superhero comics, the 80s and early 90s saw the arrival of several British writers and artists who revolutionized the medium and are largely responsible for making comics good again. See Moore's "Watchmen," Grant Morrison's "Animal Man," and of course, Gaiman's "Sandman.")

After the pouch, Dream goes to Hell to recover his helmet from a demon. This was probably the issue that really got me hooked on "Sandman," and remains the point in the volume at which I really become interested in the story. The artwork is superb, and it's the first time the reader gets to know Dream as a character in his own right, not as a shadowy figure humans encounter in the darkness. More than any other issue in the story arc, it also sets up characters and plot points that are part of the larger "Sandman" epic. Dream meets an ex-girlfriend in Hell, is a righteous dick about it, throws his weight around with the Lords of Hell while trying to conceal his lack of power over them, and David Bowie Lucifer vows to destroy him. All of this will come back to bite him in the ass.

I'm less wild about the next chapter, where Dream meets some members of the Justice League  and discovers that a D-list supervillain has his ruby. But the issue after that is about the supervillain spending 24 hours in a small-town diner, driving its patrons mad with the power of the ruby. The reader is trapped within the narrow walls of the diner with the victims, but is also aware, through the TV in the background, that the whole world is succumbing to the same madness. Excepting the violent imagery, this issue could be an episode of the "Twilight Zone," which frequently took place in small-town diners in apocalyptic settings. Dream only shows up on the last page of this story, after everyone has tortured, murdered, fucked each others' corpses, and committed suicide.

"24 Hours" somehow manages to be more horrifying than the issue set in actual Hell. It also set up some of the major themes that run through "The Sandman": the power of self-contained worlds; the existential horror of the Hells we carry around inside of us; and the idea that what we see, however grand or terrifying it seems to our eyes, is just a small facet or a representation of a much larger whole. Gaiman states in the afterward that he didn't feel he found his voice until the last issue of this volume, "The Sound of Her Wings," but for me, the whole thing really starts coming together and feeling like "The Sandman" (in italics with a note of hushed awe) in "24 Hours." In a lesser series, this issue would have been a highlight, but in "The Sandman," it feels more like we've finally reached the status quo and are ready to rock.

The next issue, "Sound and Fury," is okay. It's appropriately climactic. Supervillain and King of Dreams battle for possession of the ruby, laying waste to the Dreaming realm while the world continues to cut, burn, and slaughter itself. The artwork is good and there's enough gravitas to really sell the idea that if Dream loses, all is lost. But it reads more like the penultimate issue of a standard superhero story arc than the type of story "Sandman" would become. When I was younger, I loved it. Now, I tend to shrug, because I know that this isn't the best they can do.

I understand what Gaiman meant about finding his own voice. Most of these early issues are heavily indebted to other comic series, with cameos and references from all corners of DC in order to firmly establish "The Sandman" within that universe. And while they're good--often great--"The Sandman" ultimately ends up going in a very different direction, far away from DC universe continuity and deep into its own mythology. It becomes bigger and grander, pulling away from adventures and quests and addressing more the existential quandaries implied by the existence of Dream and the rest of his family, the Endless.

In "The Sound of Her Wings," we meet his sister Death.

Possibly no other character in this series has had as much impact on pop-culture as Death, not even Dream. She's just a sweet, perky goth girl who happens to be the anthropomorphic manifestation of the darkness at the end of all things. And even though she's super busy, what with all the people dying all the time, she wants to cheer up her little brother, who's kind of been a whiny jerk since he escaped from that glass box and saved the world. I love the relationship between Death and Dream, who may be these powerful cosmic beings but are also, underneath it all, a brother and a sister from a dysfunctional family who have no one but each other to lean on when times get tough.

There is a truthful emotional core to this issue that's somewhat lacking in the rest of "Preludes and Nocturnes." It's a quiet moment of family bonding to round off a parade of horrors and strife. As "Sandman" progressed, it succeeded whenever it hewed to this formula (and tended to fail when it didn't, as we'll see next time in "The Doll's House").

So that's "Preludes and Nocturnes," volume one of the critically-acclaimed "Sandman" comics series. Does it hold up under the scrutiny of the adult reader who doesn't care if her co-workers see her reading Harry Potter in the lunch room? Absolutely. It's not the strongest story arc of the series, but it's also not the weakest. It's very different from the series "The Sandman" eventually becomes, but it's also similar enough that I can appreciate the differences as an interesting evolution and progression of ideas and themes. I still find things to like about it, and not as many things to dislike as I expected.

Final Grade: B. It can't be higher because it is a little clunky and rough around the edges, but it also can't be lower because it's the fucking "Sandman" and it's still better than anything the rest of us chuckle-heads will ever come up with.

Next time: "The Doll's House."

Review: "All Over But the Shoutin" by Rick Bragg

It's been a while since I reviewed a memoir.

There was a time when I was really into this genre and read all the memoirs I could get my hands on. I even wanted to write a memoir myself, but had to put that project on hold because--I don't know if you know this--memoirs are really, really hard! You'd think at first glance that they would be easier to write than fiction because you're drawing from real life events, and the writers who do it well make it look effortless. However, a memoir has a very difficult task to accomplish: take something that is, by definition, complicated and without end (LIFE) (let's pop some bold and underline on that actually) (LIFE) and transform it into a neat, linear story with a beginning, middle and end.

Life is very unsuited to literature. It defies the standard three-act structure, never supplies the satisfying story and character arcs that make for compelling fiction, and has this nasty way of just petering out into the next series of events without giving you any satisfying conclusion. There are no bangs at the end so you know when to clap.

Maybe if they'd shot him out of a cannon at the end?

As proof of my theory, today's author, Rick Bragg, had to win a Pulitzer in journalism before he wrote his memoir, "All Over But the Shoutin." Or maybe that's just a coincidence. Either way, it's quite a good memoir about growing up poor in the rural South.

This describes a lot of offerings in the memoir genre, I know, and Bragg admits at the beginning of his book that his is a very typical story and perhaps of no interest to anyone. He didn't write his memoir to break new ground, but rather because his beloved grandmother died and made him aware of how little time certain members of his family may have left on the earth. He wanted to capture their stories and life experiences before they died, because they'd always been dismissed as unimportant in the eyes of society, but were important to him personally and therefore worthy of memorializing.

I don't think this is best memoir I've ever read, but I found it noteworthy because of how self-effacing Bragg is in describing his life. Memoir writing is inherently a narcissistic endeavor, in that the author assumes that whatever happened in her life is so fascinating that the rest of the world needs to know about it. Frequently the author is correct in that assumption, otherwise why would we read memoirs? But Bragg's memoir is significant because he focuses less on what makes him and his family unique, and more on what makes them the same as all the other people he meets later in life as a journalist, even if those other people are freedom fighters in Haiti or bodega owners in the Bronx.

There's a wonderful universality about Bragg's writing that you don't often encounter in the memoir genre. The book does suffer in  a few places from having a too much emotional distance from its main subject--Rick Bragg--but makes up for it by imbuing even passing characters with liveliness and humanity.

Final Grade: B. Recommended for fans of memoirs, stories about the South, and those interested in journalism.

Review: "The Tender Bar" by J.R. Moehringer

Holy shit, did I never post this?! I wrote this review weeks ago and it's just been sitting in my drafts box

So this was not a memoir about alcoholism, let me get that out of the way. When a book is about a childhood and early adult hood spent in a bar, you expect it to be about substance abuse (also, the description on the cover said it was the best book of its kind since Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club," which was about alcoholism).

But "The Tender Bar" is actually about masculinity and how a boy learns to be a man. The author, J.R. Moehringer, was raised by a single mother and had to cobble together father figures from the men at his local Manhasset, Long Island bar, Publicans. The various uncles and neighbors and friends who showed him how to be a good man--and in many cases, how not to be a bad man--are vividly portrayed with both humor and pathos. I didn't learn anything about the masculine identity I didn't already know (as a woman, I already know far too much about the male ego, what makes it tick, and what makes it dangerous, as I discussed in my review of "Wide Sargasso Sea"), but it was a nice change of pace from the kinds of books that I usually read, and a reminder that white males who go to Yale are humans, too.

The star of this work isn't the narrator, though, or the men he gathers around himself to emulate. Publicans is the true subject of "The Tender Bar." The book is as much a history of the bar and the honored place it held in the community as it is about J.R. Moehringer, and I really enjoyed that aspect of the story. The bar, as an active character in the book, was the beating heart of Manhasset, a real public house where everyone, men, women, and children, could go and be welcomed with food, drink, and company. Publicans provided a safe place for the author during the rough times in his life, and also provided a compass for the decisions he had to make as he stumbled toward adulthood, and it's heavily implied that he was only one of many who needed the bar in this way.

Continuing my theme of books that didn't go where I thought they would, the fact that this book wasn't about alcoholism says a lot about how I expect drinking narratives to go. I don't know if it's my latent Temperance Society woman coming out (I'm not going to say my latent Puritan, because they drank like fish), but I do feel weirdly guilty that I expected the author to turn into a wretched drunk who had to reject the bar in order to get sober and live a truly meaningful life. The life he led in Publicans was deeply meaningful, and overall the relationship he had with the bar was a healthy one. This is a rare memoir about a drinking life that isn't about substance abuse.

And he ends the book by realizing that all of the things that make a good man were right in front of him the whole time, embodied in his mother, so take that, patriarchy!

Final Grade: B. Recommended for fans of memoirs, stories about boys and their fathers, and the people you meet in bars.

Book Review: "The Rabbi's Cat"

So it turns out that art schools have a pretty good selection of comics and graphic novels in their libraries. Today I'm reviewing "The Rabbi's Cat," an original graphic novel from French writer and artist Joann Sfar.

"The Rabbi's Cat" was also made into a well-received animated movie that I haven't had a chance to see yet. Maybe the BF will let me put it on the Netflix queue--and maybe he'll finally return "The Seventh Seal" so we can start getting other DVDs in the mail again.

You have had this since February and haven't watched it. Admit defeat and return it so we can get more cartoons.

The story is told from the point of view of a cat owned by a prominent rabbi in 1920s French-colonized Algeria. Kitty is just an ordinary kitty until he eats the rabbi's parrot, at which point he becomes sentient and gains the ability to talk. To the consternation of his owner, the first thing Kitty says is a lie: "I didn't eat the parrot." So the rabbi tries to turn Kitty into a pious, Jewish kitty by teaching him the Talmud, even though Kitty wants to skip all that and go straight to learning the Kabbalah.

This is a story about the Jewish experience, much like "To the Heart of the Storm" by Will Eisner. "The Rabbi's Cat" isn't actually about the rabbi's cat--it's about the rabbi and the people he has to teach and guide in his community, even when he isn't entirely sure where he's going himself. His world is in a constant state of change: modernization of clothing, morals and attitudes among his congregation; changes in French bureaucracy that could remove him from his post; his daughter is getting married to a Parisian Jew from an entirely secular family; and his cat has learned how to argue scripture with him.

It's tricky to incorporate anthropomorphic animals into a story without it becoming childish or overly precious, and I think Sfar did a great job of making Kitty into a fully realized, adult(ish) character without losing the humor and whimsy that cats bring to the lives of their owners. Furthermore, Sfar seems to have a very specific reason for telling the story through the eyes of the cat instead of via one of the human characters. He uses the the outsider perspective of the animal narrator, who neither understands nor conforms to societal pressures and expectations, to great effect to illuminate the various states of separateness and alienation experienced by Algerian Jews both in their homeland and in the land of their colonial overlords. As a free agent, Kitty can observe and question human behavior in a way that the rabbi, who is bound by all the myriad rules of the Torah, has never done before.

Also--kitties!

Joann Sfar with cat. *squee*

Final grade: B. Recommended for fans of cats and those interested in the Jewish experience and life under French colonial rule.