Comics Review: "The Sandman: Season of Mists"

There's a certain part of me that wishes I had never read "The Sandman."

Because if that were so, I could read it for the first time and have my mind blown all over again.

"Season of Mists," the fourth volume in the "Sandman" series, is my favorite. I love the shit out of this story. It's hard for me to even articulate why it's just so goddamn awesome. Can I just scan every page of the comic onto this page and you can read it yourself, and then at the end we can clap our hands and dance around and screech about how wonderful it is?

Quick google search confirms that's illegal. I guess I'll have to write the review. Oh, and even though it's been like, twenty years, SPOILERS below.

So remember back in "Preludes and Nocturnes" that Dream had to go to Hell and battle a demon to get back his helmet? While he was there, he ran into an old girlfriend he'd condemned to everlasting torture for reasons made clear in "The Doll's House." The woman, Nada, was a queen who fell in love with Dream. He loved her in return and offered her immortality, co-leadership of the Dreaming, deification, anything she wanted, if she would stay with him forever. But Nada refused him because mortals shouldn't get involved with the Endless (more about this in "Brief Lives," coming up in a couple weeks). She killed herself to end the relationship, and Dream sentenced her to Hell as punishment for rejecting him.

As Death says to him at the beginning of this story arc, "Condemning her to an eternity in Hell, just because she turned you down... that's a really shitty thing to do."

This is why big sisters are so great: they call you on your bullshit. I'm glad I've got one.

Speaking of families, meet the Endless! "Season of Mists" begins with an incredibly awkward family reunion in the garden of Destiny, the oldest Endless (say that five times fast). We met Destiny very briefly back in "Preludes," Death we know, and of course Dream; then there's the twins, Desire and Despair, who were both introduced in "The Doll's House"; one brother, called the Prodigal, is missing and won't be coming to the party; and for the first time, we meet the youngest of the Endless, sister Delirium.

I was Delirium for Halloween once. The hair dye all came out during apple bobbing.

She's the personification of mental illness and bad drug trips, and she really doesn't want to be here. None of the Endless siblings do, actually. There's a great moment when Destiny says everyone must have a lot to talk about, since it's been three hundred years since they were last together--and they all just stare at each other in silence. And then they start fighting.

Maybe they don't get along because they have too much influence over each other, in the sense that not even the Endless are exempt from the magical influence of the other Endless. When Dream tries to leave the party, Destiny won't let him because "that won't happen yet"; when Delirium makes butterflies to amuse herself, Desire makes the butterflies go into a candle flame, and Death takes them away. It must make them all very uneasy to be around each other, because it brings up uncomfortable questions of how much of what they think and do is based on their own choices, and how much is based on the influence of their family.

Dream gets especially pissed at Desire when Desire starts listing all of Dream's failed romantic relationships, and it's unclear if Dream is angry because he thinks his love life is none of Desire's damn business, or because he knows that his love life is exactly  Desire's business. Love is in Desire's job description, not Dream's. But Death reminds Dream that even if Desire is the reason all of his relationships end badly, Dream is still responsible for his own actions. He was the one who sentenced Nada to Hell, not Desire, and maybe instead of being angry at Desire for bringing it up, he should take a long, hard look at himself and the choices he made in his own life that bring him to this point.

Begin the Overarching Theme!

"Season of Mists" is about choices, specifically the question of what a person does when they find themselves in a mess of their own making. After Dream realizes that he's been a massive twatwaffle to Nada, he decides he needs to free her, even if it means facing Lucifer and all the hordes of Hell in combat. The last time Dream and Lucifer faced each other, Lucifer vowed to destroy him, so Dream is understandably nervous about going back to Hell. But when he gets there, he finds that Lucifer is sick of being the Devil and instead of fighting Dream, he's quit his job, closed up Hell, and is going to do something different with his life.

This is one of my favorite plot twists in fiction. We've just spent an entire issue building up to the confrontation between Dream and Lucifer. Dream has said good-bye to all the subjects in his realm, and even paid a special visit to his best friend Hob in case he can't make their next meeting in 2090, so certain is he of either defeat or imprisonment in Hell. Lucifer, meanwhile, is disturbingly excited that Dream is coming, and makes an announcement to his own realm that in all the ten billion years of Hell's existence, no one has seen anything like what's coming.

And then Dream gets to Hell and Lucifer tells him, "I've quit." No grand battle, no clash of immortals, just an empty Hell and a fallen angel who is tired of his job. Fucking brilliant.

Dream and Lucifer walk around Hell while Lucifer locks up the last few gates and talks about the circumstances that led him to this point. He speculates on whether or not he rebelled against God because he wanted to, or because it was part of God's plan to have a fallen angel rule a realm that was "Heaven's dark reflection." But whether it was free will or destiny that put him in Hell, he realizes that he himself is the only thing keeping him in Hell, and with that realization, he decides to just walk away. He's the second-most powerful being in the whole of creation--who's going to stop him?

Almost as an afterthought, Lucifer gives the key to Hell to Dream, barely concealing his glee as he does so. "Perhaps it will destroy you, and perhaps it won't. But I doubt it will make your life any easier."

Mic drop. Lucifer out.

Immediately, realms across the cosmos spring into action. Everyone, from the gods of Asgard, ancient Egypt and Shinto Japan, to the agents of Chaos, Order and Faerie, to the displaced demons who served under Lucifer, wants that key. They all gather at the gates of Dream's palace, demanding entrance and an answer to the question of what will happen to Hell now that Lucifer is gone.

Whew, this is getting intense. Let's check in with all of the dead people who were kicked out of Hell.

The one-shot in the middle of this story arc is about a boy named Charles, alone in his boarding school over the holidays until all of the dead schoolchildren and headmasters come out of Hell and take over the school. The dead make it into a nasty place of repetitive self-punishment, and Charles concludes after his own death that "Hell is something you carry around with you."

It's interesting to pause and get a mortal's perspective on this cosmic upheaval, as the rest of "Season of Mists" is the gods, angels and demons vying for possession of Hell. They're squabbling, bribing, begging, and threatening each other--and Dream especially--for something that wasn't really created for them. It's "a place for dead mortals to punish themselves," as Lucifer says, but the mortals don't have any voice in the proceedings. Nor does it really seem like they need one; if mortals can't punish themselves in Hell, it seems they'll do it wherever they end up--that Hell is a state of mind brought on by guilt, shame and desire for punishment for perceived transgressions.

But Hell is also a very real place in the "Sandman" universe, which brings up some tough questions about this whole "choices and free will" theme "Season of Mists" explores. Yes, Lucifer can leave Hell--but he can't go back to Heaven, and when he leaves Hell he upsets the balance of the universe, leaving a mess someone else has to clean up. And young Charles can leave the school grounds for the wide world--but he has to die first in order to gain his freedom. Dream can free Nada from her prison--the story even implies that she could have freed herself if she stopped blaming him for her situation--but he had to upend the balance of the universe to do it.

Choices cut both ways. You can walk away from a situation at any time, but the situation will still be there, waiting for either you or someone else to come along and see it through to the end. Hell didn't just end when Lucifer walked away. He gave Hell to Dream, because Lucifer is an asshole and knew that he was leaving Dream to clean up the biggest metaphysical clusterfuck since Lucifer rebelled against God. We exists in a universe of consequences, not a universe of free will unchecked by laws and reactions.

So what happens in the end? God sends two angels to take back the key to Hell and Dream is happy enough to give the rule of Hell back to the entity who created it--even if the angels are less than thrilled to have such a task forced on them. The demon Azazel, who had hoped to rule Hell itself, tells Dream that it will consume Nada's soul to punish him for giving the key to the angels.

Here's another great twist in the story. Thus far in "The Sandman," Dream has feared the power of Hell. In "Preludes and Nocturnes," Dream has to bluff his way to Lucifer's throne room, pretending to have more power than he does, and then he has fight a demon in fair combat to get his helmet back because he doesn't have authority to just demand its return. The second issue of the "Season of Mists" story arc is Dream going around say good-bye to everyone because he isn't sure he'll make it back from Hell alive, and in the third issue he tells Lucifer to his face that he's afraid of Lucifer's power.

But get him on his home turf and threaten the woman he swore to save?

Dream traps the demon in a bottle. Forever.

Up to this point in "The Sandman," Dream hasn't been portrayed as an especially powerful individual. The series begins with him imprisoned by hedge wizards by seventy years, and both "Preludes and Nocturnes" and "The Doll's House" stress the fragility of his realm, especially for the sleeping humans therein. He's a hard-working and responsible individual, much like his sister, Death; and very unlike his sibling Desire or his foe Lucifer, who have the air of effortless achievement about them at all times.

What I love about the resolution of this storyline is that it shows how Dream could, if he wanted, fuck with people beyond all comprehension. He could drive everyone and everything who ever fell asleep completely insane; he could erase imagination and stories from the world; he could make it so no one ever slept again. But he doesn't do anything of these things. He fashions a very orderly realm, with bureaucracy and employees, and doesn't really throw his weight around like he could.

Except with those who wound his pride, like Nada. He's not above using his powers to horribly punish those who hurt him on a personal level, and then immediately absolves himself of guilt by falling back on his status as the Dreamlord to justify his actions. He had to punish Nada, because she was just a mortal and not an equal of the Endless. He's gotten better since the series began. Comparing the present-day storylines to the flashbacks, we see him trying to rectify his mistakes and be kinder to those around him. He helps Calliope gain her freedom, he admits to Hob Gadling that they're friends (oh the bro-loves!), he tells the cat-prophet how to gain freedom for her and her people--you can really see the freedom-from-imprisonment theme growing out of Dream's experiences in "Preludes and Nocturnes"--and he frees Nada.

After she schools him on his self-righteous attitude, though, because at first he can't even bring himself to admit to her face that he shouldn't have been such a dick. Change comes hard, y'all.

Oh, and Dream frees Loki at the end of "Season of Mists"! If you don't know your Norse myths, Loki is a god of mischief who was deemed too dangerous to be in the world, so Odin imprisoned him in a cave under the earth, only to be released when Ragnarok (the apocalypse) occurred. Now he's just sort of wandering around, Loki-ing it up. If you've seen "The Avengers," you know this can only end badly.

Do not read "Sandman" expecting Loki to look this good.

So that's "Season of Mists." Lots of good, complex themes, a ripping good storyline, great art, callbacks to earlier issues, and foreshadowing galore! For example, the cat goddess Bast knows where Dream's missing brother can be found. Interesting plot development, that.

Final Grade: A+.

Comics Review: "The Sandman: Dream Country"

Even though I'm reviewing Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" in collected volumes, it's worth noting that "The Sandman" wasn't meant to be read like this. It was originally published as single issues of comics, not as books/graphic novels, and I've been wondering lately if I'm doing the body of work a disservice by treating it like all my other book reviews instead of going issue by issue.

However, I'm going to stick with this format because "The Sandman"--and comic books in general, actually--are discussed among fans in collective terms. People speak about the Civil War story arc in Marvel Comics; or Warren Ellis's run on "Hellblazer": or Grant Morrison's multi-title "Batman" saga. Comics are published as single issues, but they're also published sequentially as multi-part story arcs. And while readers of comics historically didn't have the option of reading anything but single issues, today's comics readers rely as much  on collected editions of story arcs as they do on single issues for consumption of the material.

Digital distribution has further blurred the lines between the single issue and the collected arcs, as you have an option of purchasing one issue at a time, getting a whole arc, or even mixing and matching to create your own narrative interpretation of a work. Comixology, for example, lets you choose to read your comics by publication history, a development I'm looking forward to discussing when I get up to "Fables and Reflections."

That said, not all issues of comics are part of story arcs. In the biz, we call these "one shots." A one shot is basically meant to be viewed as short story rather than a chapter in a novel. "Dream Country" is a collection of four "Sandman" one shots, issues 17 to 20 if you're keeping track: "Calliope," "Dream of a Thousand Cats," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and "Facade."

I was only five when these issues were hitting the racks in stores, but I can imagine how exciting it must have been to scurry on down to the local comic book shop, pick up an issue of "Sandman" and get one of these. Each of them is a gem. "Dream of a Thousand Cats" is my favorite "Sandman" story, and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" won a World Fantasy Award for short fiction in 1991 (more on that later). I don't want to say that "this is where Sandman got good," because again, it's all better than most anything else in the medium. But I do think that the stories in "Dream Country" are where "Sandman" became consistently brilliant. They hit a high note that Gaiman & Co. sustained until the very end of the series' run.

And a note about Gaiman's "& Co." I really like the edition of "Dream Country" I have because it has a table of contents that lists the different artists for each of the issues, which my editions of "Preludes and Nocturnes" and "The Doll's House" don't do. "The Sandman" became known for its wide variety of artists and styles, but sometimes it's surprisingly difficult to discern who drew which issue, especially if you have the older collected editions. I have a mix of old and new in my collection, and it's irritating to have to squint at the fine print in the copyright info to find out who drew what. Table of contents is the way to go.

Let's break it down.

"Calliope" is about writers and where they get their ideas. Richard Madoc gets his inspiration from the muse Calliope, who he keeps as a sex slave locked in his attic. Several years pass. He wins critical acclaim, audience love, money beyond his wildest dreams, all from raping and abusing the mythological goddess of epic poetry. Dream eventually shows up to rescue her, because they were once lovers and even had a son together, and also because he had just been imprisoned for several decades and knows how awful it is. When Madoc refuses to release Calliope, Dream curses him with so many different ideas for stories that Madoc goes insane. Madoc frees Calliope to make the ideas stop torturing him, leaving him a shattered, idea-less shell of a man.

One aspect of "The Sandman" that waned as the series progressed was its horror element, and I think this story was the last one you could categorically define as "horrific." "Preludes and Nocturnes" had the visit to Hell and the diner slaughter, and "The Doll's House" had the serial killer convention. But after "Calliope," though "Sandman" was frequently scary in the psychological sense, it never really veered back into true "Hellblazer"/Clive Barker territory. And even "Calliope" resonates more for its quieter moments, like when Dream and Calliope say good-bye at the end, than for images like this:

He had no pen or paper. He wrote his ideas on a brick wall with his fingertips.

"Calliope" is a great story, and it's the first time Gaiman references Dream's son. That's going to be important later on.

What can I say about "Dream of a Thousand Cats"? I love cats. I love "The Sandman." I love that "The Sandman" did a story about cats that did for cats what "Watership Down" did for rabbits.

For death! And the world ending!

"Thousand Cats" is another frame story that features Dream as a supporting character, like "Tales from the Sand." A group of suburban housecats gather in a graveyard to hear a cat-prophet preach. The Prophet tells a story about her former life as a pampered housecat, when she was just like all of them. Her owners drown her newborn kittens in a pond because she got pregnant by a stray and the owners wanted to breed her with another purebred. She goes to the Dreaming and meets with the Cat of Dreams for guidance and advice. He tells her a story about the former Age of Cats, when cats were the size of humans and hunted little cat-sized humans in their gardens for sport.

Good times.

But the Age ended when one of the humans told the rest to dream of a world in which they were the dominant species, and one day everyone awoke to the world that we know now, where cats are just our little pets and humans rule the world. Even worse, the humans had dreamed it so that there never was an Age of Cats. They had altered reality to retcon the cat kingdom out of existence, because such is the power of a shared dream.

The Cat of Dreams tells the Prophet to spread the word among cat-kind that if they can share a dream, they can bring about the Age of Cats again. So she walks the world, telling cats to dream of a better reality, in the hope that enough of them will dream one night and they will all awake in the Golden Age again. Most of the housecats in the graveyard scoff at her story as just an entertaining bit of nonsense from a famous crazy-cat-person, but one cat in the crowd... well:

I'm crying. You can't see it, but I'm literally crying as I post this.

I love the shit out of this story. My friend R has often bemoaned the portrayal of cats in fiction, especially children's fiction, because they're almost always villains, enemies of the truly heroic animals, or sniveling, cowardly assholes ("Watership Down," "The Secret of NIMH," "Cinderella," "Homeward Bound"). This is one of the few portrayals of cats in fiction as heroes, and the fact that the Prophet is female is just icing on the cake for me.

In terms of where it fits into the "Sandman" mythos, it's a great example of what the series is getting at when it talks about the power of dreams. Dream as a character has his own set of powers, and while it's interesting to spend time with him and watch him struggle and scheme, I find "Sandman" more interesting for how Dream's existence affects those around him. This issue is the beginning of the ongoing discussion in the series: why are stories important? What do stories mean for the tellers of the tale, and for those who listen?

The discussion continues in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which has one of my favorite conceits for a story ever: William Shakespeare and his actors put on "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for the fairies referenced in the play.

So no pressure or anything.

Will entered into an agreement with Dream, wherein Dream will give him the ability to become the greatest storyteller in the English language, and in return Will will write two plays specifically for Dream. One is "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the other (which we don't learn until the end of the "Sandman" series) is "The Tempest."

This is the most famous issue of "The Sandman," because it won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction and was the first comic book to do so. Now, the story goes that after "Midsummer" won the award, the World Fantasy Award rules were amended so that comic books were ineligible to even be nominated in that category. I've read this on the Internet and even in some very well-regarded scholarly works (yes, scholars discuss "The Sandman," what of it?). It makes a great story because it shows how comic books are actual works of art but are still relegated to a lesser status by snobs who are out of touch with the zeitgeist.

And it's not true.

From the World Fantasy Award website:

All Fantasy is eligible, High fantasy, horror, sword & sorcery, supernatural, children's and YA books, and beyond.
Comics are eligible in the Special Award Professional category. We never made a change in the rules. 

Italicization theirs. I think they got sick of angry "Sandman" fans  bombarding them with requests to make comics eligible for regular awards again. I gather that it was like the year when "Beauty and the Beast" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. It wasn't that there was any specific rule preventing animated films from getting nominated for Best Picture, it just hadn't ever happened before.

I'm not arguing that comic books aren't still kind of pushed into this artistic ghetto and sneered at by intellectual types. That totally happens. But comics fans have got to stop repeating this story about the World Fantasy Awards changing their rules to exclude comic books in the wake of the "Midsummer" win, because it's not true, and false claims hurt the cause more than they help it.

Now I've had to spend all that time talking about the politics surrounding the story without getting to the story itself. How very meta.

So, the story--do you like Shakespeare? Because there's a lot of Shakespeare dialog in this story. I have to confess that I enjoy Shakespeare when it's being performed, but I can't seem to follow it so well on the page, and I tend to gloss over the parts of this story that are the actors performing "Midsummer." However, what I do really enjoy in this play is the relationship between Will and his son, Hamnet, who's been feeling rather neglected since his father made a pact with the immortal anthropomorphic manifestation of dreams. Hamnet is traveling with Will and the theater troupe so that father and son can become closer, but all Will cares about is his stories. Hamnet even jokes with one of the players that if he died, his father would just make a play out of it.

That's on one side of the curtain. On the other side, the audience side, the fairies and Dream enjoy the night's entertainment. Some common fairies in the back row provide a bit of comic relief, as one of them can't follow the story and thinks Dream just brought the troupe there to be the fairies' dinner. Robin Goodfellow, called the Puck, is so excited by the play that he puts the human player to sleep and takes his place on stage. King Auberon gives a sack of gold coins to the head actor, which of course turn into dead leaves when the sun rises because fairies are assholes. And Queen Titania gives an apple to Hamnet while telling him how great life is in her kingdom, an interaction Will ignores because he's too busy watching his own play.

If you know a bit more than the average person about the life and works of Shakespeare, you may get a chill watching Hamnet and Titania together. In the play "Midsummer," one of the early plot points is that Titania adopts a human child. Hamnet plays this part in the comic's version of "Midsummer." And in real life, William Shakespeare did have a son named Hamnet who tragically died when he was just eleven years old. The implication in Gaiman's "Midsummer" is that Hamnet was stolen by the fairies, because again, fairies are assholes.

One more significant development in "Midsummer." Dream has a rather one-sided conversation with Titania, who was maybe his lover at one point (implied rather than stated). He's having doubts about the pact he made with Will, a crisis on conscience in the wake of gifting the man with stories. Dream made the pact because he wanted the old stories to live on through the ages, which is a high priority from Dream's perspective--he has a job to do as the Prince of Stories and he's going to do it to the best of his abilities. But he didn't tell Will what such a gift would cost him and Will didn't bother to ask, which is pretty typical of mortals. Not just because mortals are short-sighted, but because (as Dream fears) they wouldn't understand the costs even if they were told. Their minds aren't meant to comprehend someone like Dream.

It's a rare moment when Dream ponders his impact on people's lives and suddenly doubts that what he does is right and fair. Dream isn't usually a character who looks to the past or thinks very deeply about the decisions he makes. He's been doing this job for a long time. He knows what he's doing, thank you very much, and he will not be criticized by those who think they know better just because a couple of mortals get trampled along the way.

This is going to come back around in a big way in the next volume, "Season of Mists." Get ready.

Okay, I've spent a decent amount of time talking about the most famous (and perhaps best) issue of "Sandman." I have more to say, but there's one last story in "Dream Country" to get through, so let's move on to "Façade."

Dream isn't in this story at all. It's about a day in the life of Urania Blackwell, also known as Element Girl, a DC comics C-list superhero who now lives as a miserable shut-in because she's too ashamed to show her hideously misshapen face and body to the world. All she wants to do is die, but she's basically indestructible and can't think of any method of death that would actually destroy her.

So Dream's sister Death comes by and gives her a bit of good advice, leading to possibly the only happy ending in fiction caused by the main character's successful suicide.

It's weird to read this story right after "Midsummer." "Midsummer" is so grand and weighty, stuffed full of important historical and mythological personalities. "Façade," by contrast, is a much slower, more intimate story about an insignificant nobody dying alone in a filthy studio apartment. But I feel the two stories are thematically connected and actually flow quite well together.

First, they are both about immortality. Will enters into a pact with Dream so that his stories may live forever; and Urania enters into a pact with Ra, the Egyptian sun god, so that she too can live forever. Neither Will nor Urania understand the true costs of their pacts at first, but one of the immediate consequences in alienation. They are no longer ordinary mortals, they are special. Will becomes distant from his family in order to focus on his work, and Urania cuts herself off from the world entirely.

(An aside: I'm not familiar with the character of Element Girl in the regular DC comics, so I don't know why she isn't out there fighting crime like a regular superhero. It isn't explained in this story, and I have to assume that she just didn't have the temperament for it, as she seems like a gentle soul who maybe cracked under the pressures of crime-fighting, but that's pure speculation on my part.)

Another way these stories are connected is that both are about loss. Dream commissions "Midsummer" from Will because the fairies aren't going to visit Earth anymore, and Dream doesn't want their contributions to the world to be lost or forgotten. One consequence of this is that Will loses his son twice over, once because he neglects the boy to write the play, and then again when Hamnet dies/is taken by the fairies. When Urania becomes Element Girl, she loses her humanity and any hope for a normal life, and most of her story is her dealing with that loss.

However, what makes "Façade" special is that Urania's story has Death in it instead of Dream, both in the literal and metaphorical sense. Dream as an entity is all about stories, and Urania's story has ended. Nothing happens to her and nothing ever will, so she's beyond Dream's notice and influence. The only left for her is the end. She needs to meet her death, and Death. 

Death, when she comes, tells Urania that in the end, all things die, and Death is there to meet all of them at the end. Again, this is in contrast to Dream, who is rather discriminating about those he meets directly, and very choosy about who gets his special attention. But whether you're a mortal, a god, or a galaxy, Death is there for you. But not in an ominous way, like "there's no where to hide"; more like "you don't have to go through this alone." Death holds Urania when she cries, comforts her about her miserable wreck of a life, and mediates between Ra and Urania so the former can release the latter from her immortal existence. She's quite friendly, this Death, and just wants you to get where you're going. 

It's quite a feat of narrative to end a story with a suicide and still leave the reader feeling uplifted. You don't hear about "Façade" very much in "Sandman" fandom (I imagine it comes up more among fans of the Death spin-off series), but it's as good and profound as anything else we'll see moving forward.

Final Grade: A. It's the shortest of the "Sandman" volumes, but "Dream Country" is a winner all the way around.

Next time: volume 4, "Season of Mists." We return to Hell.

Quick Hit: "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut

At this point in the summer, it should be time for another "Sandman" review, but I'm out of town this weekend--as I was last weekend because I'm very popular and important--and there isn't time.

I'm going to do a very quick review of Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions," which I read in a single sitting on the Fourth of July, Independence Day, America's birthday, the best of all days etc.

This is the second Vonnegut book I've reviewed. The other one was "Slaughterhouse-Five" if you want to relive the magic. I thought it would be appropriate to read Vonnegut on Independence Day because he always has such cutting things to say about American society, and "Breakfast of Champions" is no different.

This is the first work of his I've read that deals explicitly with racism, and I was pleased to discover that he does it right, for lack of a better term. Not to be down on the genre, but scifi writers, especially male ones, tend to hold some troubling views about sex, gender, and racial politics ("John Carter of Mars"). It always bums me out to read something racist or sexist in a book I've been enjoying up to that point, because I'm not a person who can sweep aside the more problematic elements of a work and enjoy the rest of it at face value. Once the author has revealed himself as racist or sexist, the work loses credibility in my eyes.

But we're not talking about those authors, we're talking about Vonnegut, who I feel to be the greatest American satirist since Mark Twain. His books are basically, "This is bullshit, and this is bullshit, and this thing here that you've never thought that deeply about, it's bullshit too, and fuck the wealthy and the awful people with too much money and power, and fuck you for putting up with it, you poor doomed bastards."

But, you know--literary.

"Breakfast of Champions" is the least scifi book of his that I've read. There are no aliens, time travel, post-apocalyptic scenarios, or crazy inventions. A wealthy man in a Midwestern town is going mad; an aging and unsuccessful scifi author is hitchhiking to the Midwestern town to attend an arts festival there; they briefly collide; and eventually the scifi author is going to win the Nobel Prize in medicine for his theories on ideas as viruses.

There's also a few subplots about writers as the Creators of small universes, since the narrator of the story is the writer of the story. It gets a little meta in places, for example when the author explains that he gave this character's mother these traits because the writer's own mother had them, and it scarred the writer in the same way that it scarred the character. And yet, even though the book tells you several times that this is all made up and even pulls back the curtain to show you how its crafted, the story never stops feeling meaningful. It's an amazing thing that I don't feel I've described very well here. You just have to read it yourself and experience the genius that is Vonnegut.

Final grade: B. I always enjoy Vonnegut, but this isn't one of his stronger works. Recommended for fans of the author and those who like biting social commentary. Happy Independence Day!

Comics Review: "The Sandman: The Doll's House"

Here is the growing pains story arc of Neil Gaiman's award-winning, critically-acclaimed "The Sandman" comics series.

Personally, I think this is the weakest volume of the bunch. "The Doll's House" has a lot of cool ideas and some genuinely good single issues within the larger arc, but overall, it's a bit of a mess. It suffers from some truly bad dialog, lack of cohesion to its central theme, unclear explanations of its larger mysteries, and honestly, the worst coloring I've ever seen in a mainstream comic. I wondered if it was just my copy, but J, who you'll remember is reading this series with me, said that her copy has terrible coloring, too. Maybe it's just the re-prints and the original issues looked okay, but man alive, in some places it looks like a four-year-old took some frayed felt markers to the artwork.

The awfulness of that dye job haunts me.

I'm going to get tired of saying this, but this volume is still good, because it's still "The Sandman," which is better than most anything produced in the medium. But there are 10 books in the series and someone's got to be the bottom of the heap, so I'm going to call "The Doll's House" the worst of the bunch and dive right in.

"The Doll's House" is an immediate sequel to "Preludes and Nocturnes." Dream has returned to the Dreaming with his tools and sets himself to the task of repairing the damage done while he was imprisoned. Four major citizens of the Dreaming are missing and running loose in the real world, and a phenom known as the Dream Vortex has manifested itself in the young American, Rose Walker (she of the awful colored hair). Dream has to locate and subdue the missing dreams and deal with the Vortex before the dreams do any more damage in the real world and the Vortex destroys the Dreaming. In the meantime, lurking in the background is the second of Dream's siblings we've met: Desire, a being of indeterminate sex who lives in a giant scale replica of itself.

It's a house--and a doll! Symbolism!

Desire has a hand in Dream's current troubles, although we don't know the extent of its involvement until the very end of the story. And this is my major problem with "The Doll's House." I have no clue what actually happens in the story. Individual plot points are fairly easy to suss out, but I don't get the larger significance behind those plot points and what repercussions they have in the "Sandman" universe as a whole.

The volume opens with a single-shot issue called "Tales in the Sand," which explains how Dream came to have a girlfriend he condemned to suffer forever in Hell (we met her in the previous volume). Bad breakup, basically. Desire admits that it had a hand in all that pilikia, because Desire is an asshole and likes to fuck with Dream for shits and giggles. So Desire has a hand in Dream's present troubles, too, though damned if I can figure out what it is.

I get what Desire did, and even why it did the thing (I'm trying to avoid giving spoilers for a 20 year old comic). What I don't understand is how Desire knew that doing the thing would result in a Vortex. Dream says to Rose Walker that he doesn't understand how or why a Vortex happens. If Dream himself doesn't understand Vortexes, how does Desire know? Dream is the elder sibling and Vortexes happen in his realm, clearly he's the expert on them, yet Desire understands them better and is even able to predict when and how one will appear?

And seriously, what is up with her hair?

This bugged the shit out of me when I was 13 and it bugs the shit out of me now. A lot of heavy metaphysical stuff happens in "The Sandman," and fortunately Gaiman got much better at explaining the larger ideas and how they fit into the rules of the "Sandman" universe. But this first time around, he sets up some interesting concepts and can't quite stick the landing. There's a little too much left un-explained for both the readers and for the characters in the story, and that bugs me. If I don't get it, fine, but if the characters don't get it either and don't know what lesson to take from it, I'm left wondering what the point is. Considering that Rose Walker reappears throughout the series and is clearly "important," there should have been a better explanation of why she matters and what impact her existence has on Dream.

I'm being awfully hard on a comic that's still better than anything I've ever written. Let's talk about what works in this volume. The issue "Collectors," much like "24 Hours" in "Preludes and Nocturnes," is a wonderfully horrific little story about a serial killer convention. I loved it as a morbid 13-year-old, but I love it even more now, because I've been to comics conventions and I get all of the con in-jokes Gaiman makes.

Also, it's creepy as fuck.

There are two one-shots included in this volume that are as good as anything else in the "Sandman" series. I already mentioned "Tales from the Sand," which is significant because it's the first time we get to see what will become a regular occurrence in the series: the frame story, or the story within a story. These frame-story issues usually have an ordinary person telling a story in which Dream is a side character. If we're going by the hero's journey as set by Joseph Campbell, then Dream appears at the point in the story when the hero ventures to the underworld (the Dreaming) to get advice from the spirits/gods (Dream).

As early as "Imperfect Hosts," the third issue of "Preludes and Nocturnes," Dream is called the Prince of Stories. And as Gaiman expanded this universe, he expanded the meaning of "dreams" to include all stories, storytelling, and storytellers. The Dreaming became not just a place where people go when they fall asleep, but the metaphorical and literal birthplace of all stories, and the best issues of "The Sandman" are inevitably the ones that really explore what stories mean to people and what they mean to Dream. The next volume, "Dream Country," is made up entirely of these frame stories, so I'll discuss this more next time. But "The Doll's House" did it first with "Tales in the Sand" and is therefore notable (and redeemable) for it.

The second single-shot issue in this volume is "Men of Good Fortune," which has nothing to do with the events of "The Doll's House" but is delightful because it introduces Dream's one and only friend: Hob Gadling.  Hob was just a dude in a tavern in the twelfth century, drunkenly bragging to his buddies that death is optional and he never intends to die, so Dream gives Hob immortality.

They meet in the same tavern once every 100 years to have a drink and talk about what Hob's been up to. Sometimes Hob is doing great--has a knighthood, a family, lots of wealth--and sometimes he's alone, destitute and being drowned as a witch by neighbors who notice he doesn't age. At their meeting in the nineteenth century, Hob tells Dream that they only reason Dream keeps meeting him century after century is that Dream is lonely and wants a friend. Dream gets all huffy that the implication that a being of his power and stature would deign to be friends with a mortal, or even have the need for something so base as friendship. However, their meeting in the twentieth century happens shortly after Dream has been imprisoned naked in a glass box for 70 years, which tends to clarify a person's priorities, so he shows up for his meeting with Hob because they're friends!

This is one of my favorite issues of "The Sandman." It's so sweet and optimistic, unlike most of the other stuff in the series, and it shows Dream in the best possible light, as someone capable of forming bonds of trust. "Men of Good Fortune" gets to the heart of why friendship is so important to people's development and growth. Most of the time, Dream does what he does from a sense of duty and barely-concealed sanctimony (which is why he can't hold on to a girlfriend). This is the only time he does something because he wants to, and he's a better, more decent individual for it.

Hob continues to pop up every now and again in the series, and it's always a little heartbreaking when it happens because it illustrates the gulf between Dream and his dreamers. All living things, humans, animals, gods, planets and stars pass through his realm, but he is only friends with one person in the whole of existence. It's a tragedy in the true sense of the word, because it's a situation of his own making, and it will eventually prove his undoing.

Grades: C+ for the main story arc in "The Doll's House." The coloring is distractingly bad, I don't think Gaiman knew many Americans at the time because the American characters' dialog is clunky and forced, and there's so much left unexplained that I can't rate it higher than "Preludes." But the serial killer convention is awesome.

However! Grades of A for the two one-shots, "Tales in the Sand" and "Men of Good Fortune." This is the sort of thing that people talk about when they talk about "The Sandman."

Next time: "Dream Country."