Maybe it was portrayal of
the Lord of the Dreaming as a mopey loner, ambling through the universe’s
subconscious. Or the idea that the personifications of Destiny, Death and
Destruction were a squabbling yet loving family like yours. Or the way that rotating
art teams seemed to capture different facets of Sandman’s fictional universe. No
matter why you liked it, Sandman was great. Then the seminal comics series was gone. It’s back now, in a new miniseries
full of reminders of why you loved it in the first place.
The Sandman: Overture #1
celebrates the 25th anniversary of the original run by going back
before the beginning of the series’ first story arc, which saw Dream imprisoned
by human sorcerers. In case you’ve never known or have just plain forgotten
about the Sandman comics, it was a much-lauded series by Neil Gaiman, Dave
McKean and an honor roll of comics’ best artistic talents about Dream, the
eons-old ruler of the subconscious. He’s a member of the Endless, a family of
entities who embody various existential concepts like Desire, Delirium and
Destruction. Over eight years, Sandman told the story of Dream’s life with unabashedly
literary flair, detailing the loss of his great love and attempts to usurp his
power.
This first issue recaptures
so much of what made Sandman
wonderful over its long lifespan. Let’s start with the utterly beautiful art. Not
only does J.H. Williams III deliver dizzying page designs with his signature
flair, but he does it in a myriad of styles, too. There’s a ton of detail on
each page but the visual feast doesn’t take away from the expressiveness of the
character’s faces and body language. It’s clear that you’re in the hands of a
master artist.
Even better, those myriad styles
bleed into each other, serving as a signifier for just how sprawling Dream’s
purview and influence is. Look at the page above, where the color and skewed
perspective of an otherworldly dimension intrudes on the black-and-white of
early 20th Century London. Dream presides over the realm where ideas
are born and images like that let readers know that this is a comics series
concerned with the power of imagination.
One of the best things about
Sandman is how Gaiman creates clever,
circular micro-mythologies inside of his larger stories. But the pioneering
Vertigo series never explained everything at once. It gave you just a taste of
a concept—always wrapped in dour lyricism or funny little truths—to be
intrigued but left enough unsaid to make you wonder about the unfilled spaces.
So it was with the Corinthian, when the serial-killing nightmare-made-flesh
first appeared and so it is with Dream’s attendant George Portcullis in this
issue. You may never see him again but the contact you get makes you want to
know more. Overture spreads
additional layers of honey onto an already rich confection of lore, weaving in
new landscapes to sweeten things even further. But old friends are here, too,
and there’s a sense of excitable reunion about the whole thing.
Speaking of wanting more, Overture #1 makes me wish this were the beginning of a new ongoing
series. That’s because the beauty of Sandman was always in the knowledge that
you’d be traveling down a long, sinous skein of mysteries and imaginings. It
can be scary when beloved creators come back to signature works. But the only
scary thing about this new Sandman is
that it’s going to stop and we’ll be bereft once more.
