Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes

How does one write a story about a god? This has been the central question of a large part of Neil Gaiman's work. He writes stories about incredibly powerful things, whether they're deities, legendary heroes or the keepers of secrets so important that they could unravel the very fabric of existence. Making a compelling narrative about even a partially omnipotent character is almost impossible. It's no fun to read about a hero who can't die, permanently lose anything of value or fall prey to mortal frailty. Perhaps that's why Gaiman's approach is so thoroughly postmodern. His gods are powerful, but they're also at the mercy of the very beliefs that surround them. It's this core of pop culture deconstruction that makes DC Vertigo's Sandman series so interesting.

In the world of comic books there are a number of disparate characters all called Sandman. DC alone has seven different Sandman titles in its history, the most prominent of which is Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's character from a 1974 book aimed at younger comic fans. This Silver Age Sandman was a standard crusader of justice, using sleeping gas to knock out criminals and deliver them to the police. More than a decade later, Neil Gaiman expressed an interest in reviving the Sandman character as a part of DC's push to give their biggest properties a gritty update. While Sandman never got the same treatment as Batman in The Dark Knight Returns, DC ultimately commissioned Gaiman to create an entirely knew character using the Sandman name. By 1988, DC Vertigo had the beginnings of a postmodern masterpiece on its hands.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman isn't just a gritty, gothy comic, it's a deconstruction of the entire DC universe. Its main character, most commonly called Dream but referred to throughout the series with a host of other monikers, is the eternal personification of dreams and nightmares, the god-like king of a surreal realm of living fictions. The entire series was later collected into ten volumes, the first of which is Preludes and Nocturnes. Those first eight comics find Dream on an epic quest to reclaim three artifacts of his throne after a period of imprisonment that takes him around the world, through his ruined kingdom and into Hell itself.

But it's not as grand as all that. Preludes and Nocturnes shows Neil Gaiman's flair for turning the grandiose into something far more subtle and even familiar. His take on the supernatural in Sandman, as it is in other notable works of his like American Gods and Neverwhere, is that magical creatures aren't dazzled by magic the way normal people are. They can afford to be flippant and dismissive about the forces that govern the true nature of existence, so they often are. Sandman closes its focus on small sets and microcosms, whether it's a crowded bar in Hell rather than the entire realm itself or a small diner that demonstrates an entire world's brush with the apocalypse. These tight, oddly familiar scenes put the otherwise epic story in a context that makes sense when gods are the protagonists.