Sigh. Y'all weren't taking up enough of my reading & listening time with Wolfe? Needed to snatch some more?
I kid, I kid. I saw this forthcoming on your patreon feed (while not being a sufficiently munificent donor to get the early access to it) and am delighted to get to hear it. It's a lot of fun! I love Gaiman, although I don't think he is quite in a class with Wolfe — certainly not in the infinite depth of his stories. But I do love this series & am delighted to read along.
Brent mentions briefly that this was a horror comic, and you both mention that this is a horror story, but I think you undersold the degree to which this was promoted as a horror comic. (One of the earliest posters for it had as its tagline a bit from T. S. Eliot, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", with (IMS) a picture of Dream holding sand on it.) One of the meta-stories of Sandman is how it began as a horror comic and then morphed; you can't quite capture that, and how startling it was (thus magnifying the effect it had on comics more broadly) without pointing out that beginning.
Incidentally, in his afterwards to Prelude and Nocturnes, Gaiman talks about the first issues as a deliberate tour of the horror story:
There was a definite effort on my part, in the stories in this volume, to explore the genres available: "The Sleep of the Just" was intended to be a classical English horror story; "Imperfect Hosts" plays with some of the conventions of the old DC and E.C. horror comics (and the hosts thereof); "Dream a Little Dream of Me" is a slightly more contemporary British horror story; "A Hope in Hell" harks back to the kind of dark fantasy found in Unknown in the 1940s; "Passengers" was my (perhaps misguided) attempt to try to mix superheroes into the SANDMAN world; "24 Hours" is an essay on stories and authors, and also one of the very few genuinely horrific tales I've written; "Sound and Fury" wrapped up the storyline, and "The Sound of Her Wings" was the epilogue and the first story in the sequence I felt was truly mine, and in which I knew I was beginning to find my own voice.
So Gaiman was clearly quite self-conscious about its being a horror comic — with issue 8 being, in many ways, the first serious step away from that.
Overall, I liked the episode a lot, but I thought it seemed unevenly paced — extra slow at the beginning and then rushing past cool details at the end. Here are some neat things you left out that I thought I'd just touch on:
• The bottom of page 24, where Alex just reads one page — that with the picture of Dream — over and over;
• the art on that same page in the middle panel of the third tier, where we see Alex only as a silhouette, and from the interior POV of the slashed painting;
• The top tier of p. 25, where we see, in the art, the visibly aging Alex, with the visibly aging henchmen behind him, including one ending up in a wheelchair, and the implication of the continuing monologue (great dialogue there), with him getting angrier & more threatening as he gets older;
• The hilarious silly henchmen reading the paper, talking about page 3, dreaming of a vacation;
• Dream's hand reaching into the frame from the bottom of the page on p. 27;
• More comedy: the dialogue in the dream that Dream raids for food, "that's the first time a naked man ever turned up to raid the buffet";
• The art on p. 33, with three zooms, one away from Ellie, the other two both in.
• The amazing dream sequence on the bottom of page 34, where Gaiman really caputres the feel of dreams, and you see Alex as he follows the cat through a weird, dream-logic version of his mansion, de-aging in reverse of the aging (from p. 25, above, and from the story in general), until he is the boy we first met;
• "Cat got your tongue?"
• The stars in the hole in the wall (on p. 37), mirroring Dream's eyes, particularly as described several times in the issue;
• The extraordinary familiarity and horror of the nightmare on pp. 38-39, and the way that each page reproduces for the reader the experience of Alex: you think that each page is the "real world", only to find it isn't.
Great stuff in this issue. And this is before it really gets good!
A few miscellaneous thoughts:
• I hope you'll talk, at some point, about the switches in artists: which begin as unintentional swapping around (Sam Keith felt like "Jimi Hendrix in the Beatles" and left after issue 3), but then eventually starts to match the artist to the story & storyline in really interesting ways, making conscious use of the changes in story styles.
• You didn't say which edition you are using, but while listening I opened up both my old paperback of Preludes and Noctures and my copy of The Absolute Sandman, Volume 1, and boy is the latter different. It's recolored (I don't know that this is true in the other Absolutes, but it was a selling point for volume 1), and you can really, really tell. For the most part, I think it looks a lot better. (Compare, for instance, p. 19 — very different.) If you haven't seen it, and get a chance, check it out.
• You may be technically right that the title of the series is The Sandman — it's on at least some of the covers — but boy it sounds weird. Most people seem to refer to it as just "Sandman". [/Jack Black in High Fidelity impression]
• Given your other podcast, you can't skip Gene Wolfe's introduction to the trade volume Fables and Reflections; it's great.
• Brent Helt needs to be added to your 'about' page! The masses demand a bio!!
This is my first time reading through, maybe this changes later, but I got the impression from the first comic that it was meant as a way to show what wasn't going to happen later. The first story was a quick way of defeating any treat that occultists might pose. Much like how Stephenson novels begin with characters in the genre of his last novels being killed off.
I had forgotten about those ads, so thank you for posting them! The smirk that Dream has in the first one, coupled with his red eyes, does evoke quite a bit of horror. Which is somewhat in contrast to how we first encounter Dream in the comic itself (trapped in his globe).
As to the versions we are working off of, we both have collections from the late 90s and early 2000s as well as the Omnibus. I think the Omnibus has the same re-done art as you are seeing in the Absolute collections. In some later episodes we do talk some about the difference that some of the coloring makes (it can change the tone in many panels, I think), although I agree with you that generally the re-color tends to look better in many instances.
Here, I found the picture with the advertisement I was talking about:
Note the "he controls your dreams" tagline, clearly marking it out as something scary as well as mysterious. Although I grant that, even here, it is already "horror-edged fantasy" and not straight horror. But still.
In contrast this ad — from the very end of the series — while using the same line, was clearly an ironic call-back to that first ad, showing (by contrast) just how far the series had come:
...I hope the formatting on this post isn't too off. Not sure I'm doing the images right!
Stephen, I'm so glad you'll be joining us for this one! And yes, Brent needs a bio on the page ... and we need to get some photos up, too. Brent, however, is more elusive than the Loch Ness Monster. Fortunately, we've (probably) got a con appearance next month, so we'll have plenty of opportunities.
Yes! It actually pains me to say THE Sandman ... but that really is what it says on the cover. I'm so glad you brought up the marketing materials. I've never seen them, and by the time Brent and I got into the Sandman (about halfway through), it was clearly not being marketed at horror fans but at Goth kids (like us). We haven't really addressed that (or the morph), but we also still haven't recorded our wrap-up episode for The Doll's House, so we can make that one of our big discussion topics for that episode (look for it in early 2021). Next week, by the way, we do have a bonus episode of Elder Sign where Brent joins me and Brandon to talk about weird fiction in comics, and we do talk a little bit about early horror comics; and we're definitely interested in doing some Patreon episodes looking at specific issues or collections, so let us know if you have any suggestions.
We will absolutely devote three to four episodes to Gene Wolfe's introduction! And there will be much more overlap in years to come, too, and it's something I'm really eager to do. And that's all just phase one in our nefarious plan to get Neil Gaiman as a guest on The Gene Wolfe Literary Podcast. It's definitely going to happen!