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.