chapter 3

sequential art

The narratives of the Myst comic book and the Sandman series are much more graphically oriented than the books. In the comics, words, images and the orientation on the page carry the story forward. Like the novels, the Myst comic serves as a backstory to the Myst CD-ROM, giving us more of the history of the story grand.

The Sandman story sprawls across seventy-five and one-half monthly comic issues. There are several groupings of various storylines that take place across several issues, but the story grand is revealed over the entire Sandman collection. The representation of Myst is stock comic book format (panel, picture, dialogue, repeat) while the Sandman series is much bolder. The medium of sequential art becomes a dance between words and images that are used to convey the story. Again, the Myst comic reveals more about the characters in the story grand. In Sandman, Neil Gaiman introduces us to the Endless, a family of beings who have played a part in a myriad of our ancient myths.

The Myst comic book, the Book of the Black Ships, falls in the Myst story grand in between the first Myst novel and the Myst CD-ROM. It was supposed to be a 4-part miniseries, but, in the end, due to lack of success, only the first comic was released. Not too surprisingly, it was the one part of this narrative venture in which the Millers did not have any direct involvement. Instead they agreed to let another team (Lovern Kindzierski, Chris Ulm and Doug Wheatley ) work with their characters. Their absence shows in the comic's lower level of narrative quality when compared with the CD-ROMs and the novels. This is the narrative low point of the story grand of Myst. The quality and consideration found in the CD-ROMs and novels is sorely lacking here.

As I mentioned earlier, the line that is echoed at the end of the Book of Atrus and the beginning of the Myst CD-ROM illustrates that there are many events that occur in the story grand between these two points. It seems rather appropriate, that while this comic attempts to flesh out this part of the story grand, it ends up incomplete and therefore, leaves the Mysterious events unexplained and only to be discovered by a reader's sleuthing in the CD-ROM Myst. This comic is the beginning of the tale of Atrus, Catherine and their two sons Achenar and Sirrus. Mainly, it is an attempt to show how the sons end up evil but it does so in such an unrealistic way that it pales in comparison to the rest of the story grand of Myst. In two fleeting pages, it summarizes three novels worth of narrative and then plunges headlong into the disgruntled sons' adventures. There is little explanation for why these two boys are so unhappy other than a stern father. Sirrus and Achenar go off to rendezvous with the Black Ships (again, no explanation as to why or who these people are on the Black Ships. They're just evil, cause they are some alien form of pirates who steal and have slaves). Over the course of 3 pages we see the sons become evil like the pirates they are with (no explanation yet again, they just start being amazingly cruel) and they hatch a plan to trap their father and become gods over all the ages (echoing Gehn's god-fixation and desire to rule all). Atrus and Catherine are basically nonentities, only appearing to reprimand the boys when they return. The boys then steal a book (unbeknownst to Atrus) and the last panel of the comic shows Achenar offering the book to the leader of the Black Ships: end of book one. Comic book two (which is never produced) is hinted at in the last words, "Next: Betrayal," so we can guess that the sons are going to betray their father soon.

Thus ends this slight thread in the story grand of Myst. While being the least fulfilled part of the story, it is related through the medium of the comic book that gives us some new narrative issues to discuss in relationship with the novels and CD-ROMs. With this comic, setting comes into play a little more, the theme from the story grand is almost totally lost (other than some odd reversals about strained father-son relationships) and the plot is such a rushed mishmash that the characters have little or no substance. Now, I believe that the narrative elements of these comics has less to do with the medium itself, and more to do with the authors' choices (for better, or in this case, for worse) within this medium.

The Sandman is the realization of what comics can be: complex, beautiful art and literature combined together to create a story that could only happen with words and images sharing a page. Gaiman, along with a bevy of artists, uses the medium of comics to relate the story of Dream, an anthropomorphic personification of consciousness, in particular, of our dreams.

First, a summary of the Sandman collection. It exists across 75 issues that were released monthly (and one special edition released during this run) that were later collected together into 10 graphic novels that housed the various longer storylines as well as the other shorter individual stories. There also is a book collecting the art from all the covers that includes a short Sandman story, as well as a recent illustrated prose Sandman story published on the tenth anniversary of the launch of the original series (all told there are more than 2000 pages). For sake of clarity, I am going to discuss the overarching story grand and also go into some specific details to illustrate the wondrous narrative evoked in this medium of comics.

To begin, not with the beginning of the story grand of Dream, but with the first issue which was rereleased in Preludes & Nocturnes. In this issue we see a bit of horror and magic as an Englishman runs through some strange incantation in an attempt to summon and imprison Death. Instead he captures Death's younger brother, Dream (the Sandman) and strips him of his symbols of office and confines him is magic sphere. The Englishman will not free Dream unless he offers the Englishman immortality. Dream refuses even to speak with the man and spends seventy-odd years (from the early 1900's to 1998) imprisoned in this sphere. During his stay, we see how the dreams and sleep of humanity are disturbed; many suffer from sleeping sickness and two world wars occur. Finally one of his captors accidentally breaks the circle and Dream escapes. Upon his escape he returns to the Dreaming, his realm, gaining sustenance and clothing from people's dreams. He has been weakened by his captivity and slowly makes his way back, taking refuge with Cain and Abel (the first murderer and first victim who live in the houses of Mysteries and Secrets respectively). As he regains his strength, he vows to regain his lost possessions (his bag of sand, his helm and his amulet), thus he begins a quest, an adventure.

First, he returns to the waking world and with the help of John Constantine, he tracks down his pouch, which has fallen into the hands of a woman who has been barely subsisting on the sand, and is on death's door. Once he regains his pouch, he finds that a demon of hell has his helm, so he travels to hell and battles the demon, wins his helm, then stands down Lucifer and the hordes of hell with the promise of dreams of heaven (thus offending Lucifer). After this battle, the Sandman goes in search of his ruby, which has come to be with the former Doctor Destiny, who has physically altered the ruby for his own purposes. We see Dee (as he now calls himself) make gruesome use of the power of the Ruby as he takes control over a diner and its patrons and causes them all to slowly kill themselves. Dream catches up with Dee and they battle over the ruby. Dee insures his defeat by destroying the Ruby (thinking that he is also destroying Dream) but instead releases all the power stored in the ruby back in Dream himself. Thus, ends Dream's quest (and the first storyline). He is free and has regained his symbols and begins to set his kingdom back in order. In the very next scene we see Dream sulking in a park, feeding the pigeons. He is joined by his older sister, Death, and she tries to cheer him up, by inviting him to join her for her day as she visits those who have just died and helps them move on to the next phase of their existence (which is never explained because you only get to see it when you die). Their time together helps Dream feel a little better as he remembers the duties and responsibilities to which he has to attend.

In the following storyline, Dream takes more of a peripheral role as we watch stories that revolve around the dreaming and its inhabitants in The Doll's House. It begins with a story told by an old African tribesman, to a younger nephew, a story that is only told once and heard once. So, it is the older man's first telling and the younger's first hearing. And this is a story told only among the men; there is a women's version that is not told. In this story we see a beautiful princess from the past at the height of her kingdom's glory in a city made entirely of glass. But the princess is bored. She has yet to find a man worthy of her. Then one day Dream walks by and catches her eye and she falls in love. But he has disappeared. She sends out men to find this Mysterious man, but noone finds him. Finally with the help of a small bird who fetches her a magic berry, she visits the Dreamlord in his realm within dreams. Here she discovers that he is one of the Endless, an ancient, immortal and powerful group of entities, and it is forbidden for the Endless to traffic in love with mortals. Needless to say, Dream has fallen in love with the princess as well, but she runs in fear of what may come. He chases her in her dreams and finally they lie together. When the sun rises and sees what has occurred, it sends fire down and destroys the city. So the princess, seeing what she has done, commits suicide. But in death, Dream follows her and she spurns his request for her hand in marriage, and he condemns her to hell. Thus ends the story told by this tribe's men. The two walk back to their village. Following this small prologue we get to meet two more of the Endless (Despair and Desire, who elude to a dream vortex).

The story then revolves around Rose, a young woman, who unbeknownst to her, is the vortex, a person with the power to merge everyone's dreams into one big mess. We are made aware that Dream knows about Rose and is having her watched by a raven named Matthew. It turns out that Rose's Grandmother was a woman who had suffered from the sleeping sickness mentioned in the first storyline, and was raped in her sleep and had Rose's mother in her sleep as well. We then follow Rose as she searches for her family (her brother Jed, is trapped in a gruesome situation, being beaten by foster parents and his mind has been walled off from the Dreaming by two servants of the Sandman who have brought a pregnant women named Lyta Hall into Jed's dreams with them).

Dream, who has been rebuilding his realm after his long absence, is in search of these two and finds them. He frees Jed both in dreams and in the waking world and tells Lyta that she has a child who has been carried in dreams and is his to claim when he sees fit. This leads to Jed being kidnapped by the Corinthian, another nightmare fashioned by Dream who has left the realm in his absence (these coincidences are all explained by the fact that Rose is a dream vortex, so she is pulling pieces of dream to her wherever she goes). The Corinthian turns out to be the source of human serial killing and is a man with two mouths for eyes (mouths that he likes to feed eyes). We get to see the Corinthian attending a cereal convention, a collection of serial killers gathered together to share in their common interests. And Rose just happens to be at the same hotel with a friend named Gilbert. Gilbert, who is actually a piece of land in the Dreaming called Fiddler's Green, is walking the waking world as well. He senses trouble and gives Rose a name to call if she is in danger (Morpheus). She does get in trouble with a serial killer and does summon Dream who comes and destroys the Corinthian and banishes the killers by taking away their dreams that they are special. Rose then falls asleep and begins to break down everyone's dreams together. Dream comes to stop her, which turns out to mean he has the kill her. But Rose's grandmother shows up and says that she was supposed to have been the vortex, but couldn't because she was in a dreamless sleep all of her life (I know it's really twisted...) So, Rose does not have to be killed. Unity dies in her place and the Dreaming is returned to its regular state of flux. Dream then goes and visits Desire in her/his realm (which is a huge human body, because Desire is under our skin). It turns out that Desire is the one who raped Unity and was hoping to have Dream kill Rose (killing a family member and "all that that would entail"). Thus ends the second storyline. In the middle of this arc, there is a tale about a man from 1389 who gets drunk and decides not to die. Dream and Death overhear this and decide to see what it would be like to grant him immortality. With this, Dream approaches the man, Hob Gadling, and offers to meet him 100 years hence. The rest of this story continues with Dream and Hob meeting once every 100 years up to the present day and forming an odd friendship across the centuries as the Dream king and a man who doesn't want to dies, so doesn't, share their stories across the ages.

In the next collection of stories are four individual ones sprinkled in between two longer storylines. They are collected together under the title, Dream Country, and each story deals with myths. In the first, "Calliope," we see that an old man, Erasmus Fry, has captured a muse, and is ready to pass it on to another writer, Richard Madoc. So, they make an exchange and Madoc gets Calliope, who reminds Fry that he promised to let her go and he replies, "Writers are liars, my dear. Surely you realized that by now?" So, Madoc imprisons Calliope, rapes her and becomes a juggernaut of creative success, writing, books, plays and screenplays - poetry and prose. Calliope ends up calling to Dream for help (they were once married). He comes to her and then visits Madoc in his dreams and asks for her to be freed. Madoc refuses on the pretense that he needs her for ideas. In turn, Dream floods Madoc with so many ideas that he can't keep up with them. Dream frees Calliope and she then asks him to release Madoc, which he does, leaving Madoc with "no idea at all.'

In the second story, "Dream of a Thousand Cats," we see a kitten gathering with other cats to go hear an almost infamous Siamese Cat who is traveling the world telling cats what they must do to change the world they live in. This old cat tells the story of losing her kittens to humans, and in her dreams she prays for a way to seek freedom from humans. She goes on an arduous search through Dreamland to find Dream (in the form of a cat) and he tells her a story of how cats were the size of people and people were just mice, and then one day a man preaches to his fellow humans that "dreams shape the world," and that if a thousand humans can dream of a different world where they rule over cats, then it will happen. One night it does, and Dream tells the cat that the humans' dream made it so that humans had always been bigger than cats. But to make the change, she must go and convince a thousand cats to dream their dream on the same night. So, the great cat leaves and the kitten leaves with one other cat who says the story may or may not be true, but to get a thousand cats to do anything at the same time is impossible. The kitten, undeterred, naps that day, and her owners comment on how she must be chasing little mice in her dreams.

In the third installation, we get, "Facade," a story about a superhero woman, Rainie, who went before the Orb of Ra and is turned into an immortal metamorph. She is now a being not even remotely human, who can change her body into any element. Rainie, is depressed and alone in this story. She feels that she can no longer go out in public because she looks so hideous. She can grow silicate faces that look normal, but they fall off soon thereafter (she does try once to meet a friend, but her face falls off at a restaurant, and she flees). She has the faces strewn all over the apartment and is using one as an ashtray. Death happens to walk by, and pops in to chat with Rainie, who hopes this means she can die. Death says yes, but notest that she isn't Rainie's death, merely someone else's who happened to be nearby. She then tells Rainie to talk to Ra (by talking to the sun). Rainie does and asks to no longer be a metamorph. Ra asks her to look at him. She does and dies petrified by the sun.

The last story in the collection is "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and it shows Shakespeare to fulfill half of his bargain with Dream, by presenting the play to the Fairie out in Wendel's Mound in the English countryside. This story is the only monthly comic to win a literary award, the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. It is a lovely piece that shows the workings of theatre at the time, and interweaves the play with conversation from the Fairie (many of whom are in the play). As we go through, we see the Queen of the Fairie seduce Hament, Shakespeare's son, foreshadowing his death (or kidnapping to Fairie). And we see the real Puck abduct the actor playing him and then replace him on the stage, playing the final lines as himself and escaping into our world, not returning with the other Fairie to their land. The story ends with the actors awakening in the field the next day. Their gold payment has turned to flowers. Shakespeare and company prepare to return to London, and we learn that Hamnet is thought to have died and that Robin Goodfellow's whereabouts are unknown.

The next storyline, Season of Mists, involves Sandman returning to hell. It begins with the three fates visiting Destiny and telling him that the story starts here. He denies this, but then checks his book and sees that it is so. Destiny then calls a family reunion (the first one since the Prodigal left the family). Here is where we get to truly meet the other members of the Endless family (they've been here and there throughout the previous stories). We even get poetic descriptions of each member attending the meeting. During the meeting, Desire irks Dream by reminding him how poorly he has managed his love life and reminds him of how he banished Nada to hell since she refused him. Dream, offended, storms from the room, followed by Death who calms him down but agrees with Desire that he has mistreated Nada for too long. Dream sees that this may be true, so he decides to return to hell to free Nada, and thus this storyline has begun. Preparing for a battle from which he may not return, Dream puts the Dreaming in order, stops by and names the dream baby, Daniel, says a toast with Hob Hadling and goes to hell. When he gets there he notices that not only is Nada no longer there, but no one is. He finds Lucifer, who gleefully tells him that he has quit his job and is abandoning hell, closing it up. Dream follows Lucifer as he locks up the last few entrances to hell. They discuss how hell is a place that people come to if and only if they believe they deserve to be there. The moment they realize they do not need to be punished, they are free to leave, but their own believe that they need to suffer keeps them there (along with various and sundry demons and devils to help run the place). As he finishes, Lucifer gives Dream the key to hell and Dream cuts off Lucifer's wings. Lucifer fancies that he may lie on a beach or learn to play the piano, and thus leaves Dream sole proprietor of hell.

Word gets out that Dream now has hell and people come to the Dreaming to bargain and try to obtain it from him (gods galore: Odin, Thor, Loki, Bast, Chaos, Order, Azazel, and others). Meanwhile, on earth all the souls ejected from hell are trying to find new places to inhabit and we get a small glimpse of this chaos (and its effect on Death's duties) as ghosts come back to rule over an English boarding school. We see a young boy alone at school, surrounded, and finally killed, by the returned souls. The young boy decides that he doesn't need to stay, and that hell is only a place, or a state of mind, and that while he can, he is going to go exploring.

Back in the Dreaming, two angels, Duma and Remiel, come down from the silver city and take back the key. They have been designated the new keepers of hell. Remiel panics and denies it, but Duma silently accepts the burden of the key and Remiel decides to follow him. Needless to say, this turn of events upsets all those in attendance who were hoping for the key and Azazel reveals that he has Nada and attempts to destroy Dream. Dream, being at the center of his realm and power, easily frees Nada and imprisons Azazel and wishes the rest of his guests well. Most leave, except for a few. Nuala, is a gift from the Fairie Queen Titania, so Dream feels compelled not to scorn the gift so he allows her to stay. The second guest is a hidden Loki, who has sneaked away from Odin in hopes of not being placed back in the cave at the center of the world again. Dream offers to place an image of Loki there, so none will be the wiser, if Loki understands that he will be in Dream's debt. Finally, Dream meets with Nada again. They have an awkward meeting where he finally and truly apologizes for what he has done, and she forgives him as best she can and they part on better terms. Dream offers Nada a place at his side. She refuses and asks him to join her, which he refuses. She asks for life again, which he grants, and she is born anew in a Hong Kong hospital. The story ends with the three angels. Lucifer is down in Australia looking at the sunset, and he admits to God that he does do bloody marvelous sunsets. And Remiel and Duma are the new rulers of hell. Duma is silent as ever, while Remiel decides that maybe it won't be so bad, maybe he can make hell a place where they torture out of love, and maybe it can end, "happily ever after, in hell." And we see Destiny, reading of this in his book and reading a fictitious passage from G.K. Chesterton, "October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find. 'It is simply a matter,' he explained to April, 'of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft, somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.'"

The next storyline, A Game of You, dips away into one particular dreamer's dream. It is a story about stories, about how our stories have lives of their own and sometimes supersede our lives. In this storyline, we explore the dreamworld of Barbie (from the Doll's House arc). The Land is in trouble and it is missing its princess, Barbie, so Martin Tenbones goes to get her and bring her back to help save the land from the Cuckoo. We then switch to New York City and Barbie is living in a building filled with a cast of characters. She has separated from Ken and is hanging out with a pre-op transexual named Wanda. A floor up is a lesbian couple Foxglove and Hazel, then there is Thessaaly (a 3,000-year-old witch) and George (a servant of the Cuckoo). Barbie and Wanda are window shopping when they bump into a homeless woman who is scared of dogs. As they wander, they see a crowd and police gathering nearby. They stop to see and it turns out that Martin Tenbones made it to teh waking world and he leaps to Barbie, causing the police to open fire. Before he dies, he gives her the Porpentine and asks her to save the Land. Barbie puts on the Porpentine and is whisked away to dreamland where her adventures begin. She is with Luz, Wilkinson and Prinado. They must journey to the Isle of Thorns and use the Hierogram to free the land for Murphy's sake (Murphy being the god of the Land). Back in New York City, Barbie is basically comatose, and the rest of her friends are asleep as George sends nightmare birds to deal with them.

Everyone except Thessaly is lost in deep nightmare. Thessaly awakens and kills the bird and goes and kills George. She then gathers everyone else and is determined to understand what's going on. She cuts off George's face and speaks with his dead soul to get an idea of the Cuckoo's plots (to capture Barbie of course). Since the Cuckoo has messed with Thessaly, she wants revenge, so she summons down the moon (literally) to open a path into Barbie's dreamworld. Wanda cannot go, because she is a man, and the moon is a goddess. Incidentally, the calling down of the moon wreaks havoc with the weather, steering a hurricane straight for New York City. Wanda takes the homeless woman in to get her out of the weather. Meanwhile, Barbie has journeyed far in her dream, reaching the Brightly Shining Sea. The Cuckoo captures her and reveals itself as Barbie when she was a kid (and her kidlike dream self has been living in this dream every since Barbie quit dreaming because of Rose and the vortex in the Doll's House). The cuckoo then explains that she is like a real cuckoo left in the nest of another bird to kick out and kill the other chicks. And she's stuck in Barbie's dream and wants to escape now. She hypnotizes Barbie and they go to destroy the Hierogram. While there, Thessaly, Foxlove and Hazel arrive. The Cuckoo tricks and hypnotizes them as well and then gets Barbie to destroy the Hierogram and Porpentine. This triggers the appearance of the maker of this land, Murphy, or Dream of the Endless. It turns out that Dream made this land for a former love, Alianore. And now that the pact has been fulfilled, he unmakes the world and all of its inhabitants. Since Barbie is the one who ended the compact, Dream offers her a boon. Barbie decides to not punish the Cuckoo and instead asks that she and her friends be safely returned to the waking world. So, the Cuckoo flies away to other worlds. Back in New York City, the hurricane hits full force and demolishes the building. Wanda and the old woman are killed, although Barbie survives because she was under the woman. The storyline concludes with Barbie attending Wanda's funeral in her/his Midwestern town. It turns out Wanda's family never approved of her decision, so he has been made up to look like a man on his deathbed. Barbie sits through the funeral and then after everyone else has left, scrawls, Wanda, on the tombstone in hot pink fuschia lipstick. On the bus ride out of town, she dreams of Wanda and death, and they wave goodbye to her. We end with Barbie's realization that "everybody has a secret world inside of them."

Fables & Reflections is another collection of various stories. It starts with a small one about a young writer/director who is on the verge of quiting his big production out of a fear of failure. That night, he dreams he is climbing up a mountain (he is scared of heights). He gets to the top and meets Dream. He tells Dream about a dream he had, where he was chased up to his roof by witches and fell, but he knew it was a dream, so he stopped the dream, but he couldn't wake up, so he was stuck in limbo for hours, and ever since he's been scared of falling. Dream offers him a third alternative when you fall (the first two being you wake up or you die) and Todd falls. We see him the next day, up and ready to go, he tells a cast member of his dream, that sometimes when you fall, you fly.

Then we move into four connected stories, "Distant Mirrors." The first is "August." We follow the Roman emperor, Augustus Ceasar as he masquerades as a beggar with a midget and tells his friend of his hopes and dreams. We see Augustus' life, how he was raped by his uncle Ceasar and how he brings Rome to greatness and is now secretly plotting its downfall (because he feels Rome is too bloody a culture). This dream was one in which he met Dream and sought his advice. Dream told him to do as he will as a beggar, that way the gods won't know. Augustus followed Dream's advice and followed his dreams that ruled the world.

Next we have "Thermidor," a tale in which lady Johanna Constantine rescues Orpheus' head from out of Paris during the 1794 French Revolution (she does this at Dream's request). She gets caught and to free herself and Orpheus, Orpheus sings a song and is joined by all the severed heads from the guillotine, thus ending Robespierre's revolution.

Thirdly, we have "Three Septembers and a January," a tale about Joshua Abraham Norton, the first and only Emperor of the United States. We meet him while he is with Despair and she issues a challenge to Dream, from her and Delirium and Desire, that he must keep Norton out of their realms for the rest of his life. Dream accomplishes this by giving Norton the dream of being an emperor and Norton takes to it with gusto, meeting Mark Twain and living in San Francisco. Delirium notes that Norton is not hers, that "his madness keeps him sane." Norton finally dies and Dream wins. And Death declares that Norton was a wise ruler, "the first and last Emperor of the United States of America."

Then we have "Ramadan." A story of the magical city of Baghdad. In it, we meet caliph Haroun Al Rachid, ruler of the finest city ever. The caliph becomes distressed that the city will one day fade, so to save all the magic and wonder he bargains with Dream to take the city into dreams and the caliph asks in return to live forever. Dream agrees and we see the caliph in an ordinary city. Unwittingly, he bumps into Dream who has the city in a bottle. The caliph looks into the bottle and then wanders off filled with wonder. The next panel shows us a young boy in contemporary war-torn Baghdad. He has been listening to this tale from a ragged storyteller who shoos him away. The boy wanders through the rubbles his eyes alight with the magic of stories and dreams.

We then come to another collection of stories called "Convergence." We see an old story in "The Hunt," one of werewolves in Eastern Europe, told by an old man to his granddaughter. The hero of the tale chases after and finds a princess, but in the end leaves his dream untouched to return to the woods he knows.

In "Soft Places," we follow Marco Polo as he gets lost in the desert and wanders in a soft place where the dreaming and the waking world ebb and flow within each other. So, Marco gets to meet Gilbert, Fiddler's Green. But then he wakes up, recalling his mother's tale that the Sandman throws sand into your eyes that sends you off to Dreamland, and "that's the sand you find in your eyes when you wake up."

The final tale in "Convergence," is "The Parliament of Rooks." We see Daniel (the baby from the Doll's House) as he wanders around in the Dreaming. He meets Cain and Abel and Eve and Matthew. They invite him in and tell him stories. Eve tells of Adam's three wives - Lilith, the unnamed one and Eve. Abel tells the story of a young Death and Dream meeting Cain and Abel and that they lived happily ever after. Cain is disgusted by this trite tale and in the banter that follows says, "They didn't even look remotely human. None of us did, back then." To which Abel replies, "Oh, this wasn't on earth." Finally, Cain tells the story of a parliament of rooks, and how rooks gather in a field, one surrounded by all the rest. And the one caws to the silent group for hours on end, and at some mysterious point the group either all flies away or pecks the lone rook to death. As Daniel leaves (he's waking up), Abel reveals the secret, that the lone rook is telling a story and it finds out in the end if the others like it or not. Cain then murders Abel and says, "I keep telling you, it's the Mystery that endures, not the explanation... Nobody really cares who-done-it. They'll peck you to pieces if you tell them... [but] a good Mystery can last forever."

To end this collection of stores, we have the "Song of Orpheus." It is told straight, except with the Endless substituting themselves in the Greek pantheon where appropriate. We have Orpheus marrying Eurydice, and then she dies. He fights with Dream over how to deal with her death (Dream advises that he move on: in anger they renounce each other). Orpheus goes to get her (visiting Destruction and Death), makes the Furies cry, turns around, and loses Eurydice forever. He then gets attacked by the Furies and has his immortal head severed from his body. Dream, his father, comes and lets Orpheus know that he has arranged for him to be cared for, and that he has come to say goodbye. He then walks away, and unlike Orpheus, he never looks back.

We then get another long storyline, Brief Lives, which follows Delirium and Dream as they look for their brother, Destruction (the Prodigal, the one who left his realm to run on its own). This storyline is pivotal in the story grand. It is about change and it's where we see the beginning of Dream's ultimate change. We start on a small Greek island with the a caretaker, Andros, who watches after the head of Orpheus (a tradition in the caretaker's family that goes back for generations). Andros is an old man who loves life, whereas Orpheus is tired of his immortality and merely wishes to die. The story shifts to Delirium who is with an old beggar woman on a rainy street in London. Delirium decides she needs a change and wants to go find her long lost brother. She goes in search of family members to enlist their help. Desire and Despair both choose not to help Delirium in her quest. So, she goes to Dream, who agrees (mostly to distract himself from his latest failed relationship). So, they go to travel the waking world, using certain immortals to help them with transportation and looking for other immortals who are old friends of Destruction. As they search, we see that people are dying. Ruby, their chauffeur, goes up in flames. Bernie Capax (who remembers the smell of woolly mammoths) has a wall fall on him. Ishtar, a former goddess of love and now exotic dancer, dances and literally blows a strip club up. Etain of the Second Look barely escapes being blown up in her apartment, and the Alder Man turns himself into a bear and has his shadow replace himself as a human. Throughout their search we get glimpses of Destruction and his talking dog, Barnabas, as they come to realize someone is searching for them.

Upon observing all the chaos that is caused by their search, Dream decides not to continue. Delirium gets so upset she seals herself in her realm (while Dream continues to look on his own, talking to the lady Bast, who doesn't know of Destruction's whereabouts). In seeing how he has upset Delirium, Dream goes and apologizes and they continue onward. They go visit Destiny, who advises them to forget the search, but if they are to continue they need an oracle, one of the family, in other words, Orpheus. This realization upsets Dream greatly and Delirium gets upset with Destiny and reminds him that she knows of things that are not in his book. Delirium makes the effort to pull herself together and help Dream. Together they go and visit Orpheus. Orpheus reveals where Destruction is and asks in return that Dream end Orpheus' life. First, Dream and Delirium go and visit Destruction. They meet him and Barnabas for a meal and conversation. We learn that once upon a time, Despair had died and the current Despair is the newest incarnation. We learn why Destruction left his realm when he realized that humans were beginning to learn science and that would inevitably lead to the means of their own destruction (the bomb) and he realized that change happened without him, so he left changes to themselves. They talk of Death, who existed before the first living thing. She has a conversation with each living being twice, one right when we're born (a conversation we never remember) and one when we die. Dream gets impatient and really doesn't hear (or doesn't want to hear) that Destruction is saying the Endless can change as well. Dream doesn't agree, but Destruction says that the Endless are merely ideas, waves functions, repeating motifs found in the consciousness of mortals. And they recall another conversation with Death, in which she tells Destruction that everyone actually does know all there is to know and more than that. It's just that we tell ourselves we don't in order to make life bearable at all, and hints that mortals all may also live forever. In the end, Destruction declines to return and leaves Dream with their conversation and the advice to remember what he did and why. He leaves Barnabas with Delirium to help her through her next change. He then walks off to the other side of the sky. All that's left is for Dream to grant Orpheus his wish, which he does, killing a family member. As Dream leaves, the blood on his hands drops to the ground and turns to flowers, life from death. Dream returns to the Dreaming to mourn and think. And the story ends where it began, with Andros, who gracefully buries Orpheus, hoping he is at rest. Andros then looks forward to another beautiful day.

World's End is another collection of stories, tied together within the stories told in an inn during a reality storm. We have travelers from all times and worlds collected together in a cosmic inn that exists as a safe harbor during reality storms, which shake the fabric of reality. Two people from our world are driving late at night and are run off the road by some mythical creature. As they stumble from the wreck they get lost and end up at the Worlds' End inn. They gather with other guests, and stories are told to pass the time.

The first is a tale of two cites in which a man who loves the city he lives in one day gets on a otherworldy train, with Dream, and when he gets off, he is in a strange shadow of his former city, just ghosts of people, and nothing looks quite right. He runs into an old man who says they are trapped in the city's dreams, and then he sees a door he recognizes, runs through it and is back in the waking city. Since then, he has lived in the country for fear of cities that will one day wake up.

The second story is told by the Faerie Cluracan. He recounts a swashbuckling adventure where he goes and brings down an evil religious leader (with a little help from Dream) and was returning when he ended up here.

We then hear a story from Jim. A story about a young girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to sail the seas on the tall ships. She runs into Hob Gadling and they take a voyage together. At sea they see a huge Sea Serpent and then crashed ashore.

The fourth story we hear is of an alternative United States. In this United States, a boy named Prez Rickard grows up and becomes president at 18-years-old and basically lives up to the Dream of America as is should be. Then one day his wife is assassinated and he disappears and dies himself. In death, he meets Dream and moves on to other worlds that need him to fix them.

We then hear a story of the necropolis Litharge. A necropolis is a city where they are devoted to the ceremonies of the dead. And a student from this city tells of the underground cavern that houses the cerements for the Endless when they die.

The last story we hear in the inn is of the woman from our world, who says she doesn't have a story. She says she is just a lonely, unhappy woman, and she ends up deciding to stay in the inn. The stories close with the ending of the reality storm and we see a huge, solemn funeral procession across the night sky. We see the Endless and a host of gods and characters from the earlier stores, and Death. We end with the man from our world, telling a bartender this whole tale, his whole life has been transformed by the tale related. We see the magic and power that stories have in our lives.

The next storyline is the Kindly Ones. In it we see the death of this incarnation of Dream. The story starts with the Kindly Ones, the three women who weave the tale we are experiencing. We see Lyta Hall who is possessed with caring for Daniel and finally one night Daniel is kidnapped while being babysat by Rose Walker (from Doll's House). Lyta goes on a quest through the real and imaginary realms. She is after Dream (she remembers his promise to take her child) and in search of the Kindly Ones for revenge. Her friend calls the police but instead we get two tricksters in disguise (Loki and Puck). When Lyta finds the Furies, they let her know that Dream has spilled family blood so they can use her to get to him. Loki and Puck are burning off Daniel's mortality and the Furies are on the move. These changes have repercussions. Queen Titania sends for Nuala to keep her safe (Dream wishes her well and offers her a boon). And Dream himself reacts by recreating the Corinthian and sending him and Matthew off in search of Daniel. They do find Daniel, and the Corinthian battles and defeats Loki. Puck scampers away (and Matthew is magically drawn back to the Dreaming, which is overrun by ravens who are gathering for the slaughter as the Kindly Ones start destroying the Dreaming and its inhabitants). Dream attempts to end this by killing Lyta Hall, but she has been magically protected by Thessaly (now going by Larissa).

So, Dream returns to the Dreaming where he assumes he will be able to weather this affair with little irreparable damage. But Nuala has heard that Dream is in danger so she uses her boon to summon him to Fairie, and he honors his word and comes. He tells her what is happening and how his coming has caused great trouble and she replies, "You want them to punish you, don't you?" He returns but the Kindly Ones have taken over the Dreaming and threaten to destroy it all. He decides to confront them instead of losing all, so he and Matthew fly to meet them. We learn that Matthew is not the first raven, Lucien was, and was the one who became human. Death shows up and calls off the Kindly Ones and she and Dream talk. She offers that he could have left, he replies that he could not, and she agrees. A moment later, they touch hands and Dream dies, but Death comes from life and the story ends with Daniel transforming into the new incarnation of Dream in white.

The climatic storyline is The Wake. In it, we get to see the new Dream and watch as others mourn the passing of the old. The five remaining Endless are visited by birds and they all meet at the necropolis Litharge. Together they create a messenger, a man named Eblis O'Shaughnessy, who walks down in the catacombs and collects the cerements for Dream. Meanwhile the new Dream is creating the Dreaming anew while Matthew is sulking and not quite certain what is going on. He doesn't really trust this new Dream but is gradually warming to him and feeling protective. We then see the wake as it is attended by gods and characters from throughout the series and dreamers galore (of course this all occurs in a dream). Everyone mingles and watches the Endless prepare. Lucien, Cain and Abel are talking and we hear that there is a new Dream but nobody died. Cain says "How can you kill and idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?" And Eblis asks, "Then what died?" Abel answers," A point of view." We see everyone speaking at the funeral and then people begin to leave. We see Destruction visit the new Dream and say hi and then go on his way. The new Dream forgives Lyta Hall for what she did. And Matthew helps Dream get ready to meet his family, saying, "The king is dead. Long live the king." And Dream opens the door. We see the family and then we read, "and then, fighting to stay asleep, wishing it would go on forever, sure that once the dream was over, it would never come back... you woke up."

We then get three epilogues. In the first, we again meet Hob Gadling, who is hanging out with his girlfriend and getting drunk. He meets with Death and they talk and Hob decides he still wants to live, and then he has a dream where he and the old Dream and Destruction walk and talk on the beach. We then have a tale of a Chinese wise man who is traveling across a desert and gets into a soft place and meets with both the old and new Dreams and the new Dream offers him a place in the Dreaming, but the man gracefully declines and goes on living his life. Finally, we end with Shakespeare, as he is writing the second play, the Tempest, to finish his deal with the old Dream. And we see Shakespeare ask Dream why he wanted this play, and Dream replies that he wanted a tale of graceful ends. And thus ends the initial story grand of the Sandman.

Subsequently, Gaiman has written two more Sandman stories. The first is a short one titled, "The last Sandman story." In it we hear Gaiman talk of telling stories and how the stories haunt the teller and how he and Dave McKean and others did meet some of the characters from the stories. And he relates that deep down he believes in the power of stories and in the idea of the Sandman.

We then get an illustrated prose piece that Gaiman wrote to celebrate the Sandman's tenth anniversary. It is essentially a retelling of an old Japanese myth, "The Fox, the Monk and the Mikado of All Night's Dreaming." In it, we see a fox and a monk who slowly fall in love and a scared wizard who wants to live in peace and learns of the serene monk. The wizard wants to steal his peace (thus killing him, but only without harming him so it is a death in dreams). The fox learns of this and visits Dream and pleads with him to help the monk. With his advice she decides to hunt down the monk's dreams and catch them unto herself, which she does (and dies in her dream). The monk then also visits Dream and wishes to free the fox. The monk frees her and dies himself (although they had time together in dreams). The fox then goes and seeks revenge on the wizard, destroying him and all that is his. And we see Dream and a raven talking of the events and the lessons to be learned. We see that in dreams there may be a fox and a monk together or there may not. Dreams are strange things and none but the Mikado of All Night's Dreaming can say whether they are true or not, nor what they can tell us of times to come.

With that, we come to the end of the story grand of the Sandman. The above is a merely a quick summary of the themes and occurrences through this narrative. Now we will explore and explain how the medium enhanced the story and the story enhanced the medium.

Unlike the Myst comic, the Sandman story takes full advantage of the medium employed to orchestrate the telling ,and the receiving, of the story. Again, the main characteristics of narrative are plot, setting, character and theme. Like the novels, the comics explore and illustrate all of these characteristics, but therein lies a main difference - comics literally illustrate them. The visuals in comics do the load of the work. The words are rather important but serve in collaborative tension with the graphics. So, it would be a gross misuse of the medium to put a lot of description in words, where a drawing can do it much more gracefully and succinctly, freeing up the words to dance with the images in exciting ways when the dance is executed well, as in the Sandman. To be honest, the Myst comic is of such low quality that it is hard to discuss which narrative element is foregrounded and why. Even so, the comic is driven by character, the two sons to be exact, and they are whisked through scenery with such rapid pacing that the events and their setting seem rather unimportant. In the space of a couple of panels the brothers have gone from mischievous boys to evil young brats. Granted, speeding up time can be used in a variety of interesting and pointed ways, but when events are so willy-nilly and disjointed they lose any meaning, and their seems to be no development of an overall theme at all. Maybe this is due to the fact that this was the first comic of four, and the other three were never completed, so there is a sense of lacking in general that may have been solved with an entire run of the comic's storyline. Even so, this first comic is a stumbling beginning that does little to further the story grand.

That said, I would like to move with great anticipation to a discussion of the Sandman comics. These comics push the edges of the medium into a dance of words and images that is unbelievably wondrous and overflowing with subtle and deep meanings. It is a work that centers around themes, the theme of storytelling in particular. Gaiman deftly weaves this theme into his characters, settings and plots. As a medium, comics favor the visual, which in turn builds up the characters and settings more than the plot and themes (in general). Gaiman takes the theme of storytelling and makes it his palette from which he gives us an enigmatic character, Dream, the Sandman, and all of his siblings - Death, Destiny, Desire, Destruction, Delirium (who was once Delight) and Despair.

Each is an "anthropomorphic personification" of consciousness. Dream is the personification of our stories. So, this theme of the power and beauty of story is given a mercurial shape in the character of Dream (who often is not even present - or at most is in the background of other's stories - in the stories being related across the series). From this theme and character we get the wonderful setting of the Dreaming, Dream's realm that is the astral land of our dreams. And from Dream and our dreams we get the various storylines across Sandman that culminate in an intricate (and pheonix-like) suicide and rebirth of Dream and of storytelling itself.

Again, the narrative elements of these comics has less to do with the medium itself, and more to do with the authors' choices within this medium. Gaiman takes the medium of comics and pushes it to tell a unique story that needs the dance of images and words in order to be related. He plays with standard conventions and goes beyond them. For instance, a strength of comics is the iconic quality of the images. This is often seen in our superheroes (we all know what Superman and Batman look like). So, across artists and writers, Superman is easily recognized as a character and with this recognition comes a framework that shapes the story for the reader. Gaiman bends this with the character of Dream. Outside of pale skin, black hair and black clothes, the visual representation of Dream is endlessly varied. He shifts and melds from panel to panel and from context to context. The one visual consistency is the bold and wiggly textual style used to represent the words he speaks. Otherwise he is mercurial and ever changing in appearance, undermining the graphic iconography, but strengthening a thematic iconography. He is he Morpheus, king of our dreams and stories, the Mikado of All Night's Sleeping.

By allowing the strengths of images and words combine together, Gaiman creates an intuitive reading experience that draws us into the visuals and places the words on the pages so that or eyes find the pacing of the story. Unlike most novels, comics rely heavily on the page layout in order to convey the story. The panels within the pages set out a grid for our eyes to follow and then the writer and artists have to place the images and words together in the panels in such a way as to suggest (or control) where the reader's attention goes from one spot on the page to the next. Slightly like novels, the flow generally goes from left to right and works its way down the page. And like novels, this convention can be subverted to push the medium and/or the reader. Gaiman is a writer who collaborates intensely with his artist on page layout. He uses the layout to help relate meaning within the story. The layout can often give a visual and temporal beat to the pacing of the story. When a character sits there across a couple of panels without saying anything, we get a palpable sense of the silence and the moments passed within that silence (Gaiman, personal interview). It would be hard to so eloquently describe this silence in words, but it is seamlessly illustrated with images. This beat can be used in many other temporal ways. Panels can be close together and crammed on the page, giving a sense of claustrophobia and increased speed, or they can be stretched across the page, slowing time down, or you can turn the page and there is just a single, large image that spreads across two pages, making for an amazingly significant moment. And it is not just what happens in the panels. Like film, comics have the strength of what they do not show in between the panels. The gutter (the space between the panels on the page) can often be where the action occurs off screen as it were. In one panel, we can see that someone is about to die a horrible death, and the next panel can be a gravestone, opening up our imaginations to exactly how gruesome that death may have been. Concurrently, what does get illustrated can be graphically compelling to a story. The powerful imagery can haunt the words of the story, adding depth and resonance to the dance.

And Gaiman does a lot with what he and the various artists choose to show. They use the plastic, elastic medium of comics to wonderful effect. Dream may be the most perfect comic book character ever, living in the dreaming, the landscape of our collective unconscious where everything can blur and melt and shimmer and drift away into the dark corners of the panel and the story and our minds. And he uses these images and words to weave a metamythical framework that encompasses stories and storytelling. Dream and the rest of the Endless are manifestations of consciousness. As such, they been around since there has been life in the universe.

And these perspectives span across myths and cultures encompassing Greek, Roman, Norse, Asian, Egyptian, Faerie, Native-American and Western and Shakespearean mythologies and religions. In this speculative word, the gods did walk the earth and the Endless were always already there as a perspective of our consciousness. So, we see a story that includes the truth of old myths while coloring these truths anew with associations and illustrations across cultures and eras. Gaiman is using the dance between words and images, the heart and soul of this medium, to explore the very nature of storytelling and our abilities to share meaning and experiences through our dreams and stories.

chapter 4 ->