The Sandman Universe: House of Whispers

*From House of Whispers – Watching the Watchers*

(Spoiler warning, obvs)

I’ve taken forever to review this part of the Sandman Universe run for two reasons. The first is that I wanted to reread them all, from beginning to end, before doing so, rather than the truncated reaction posts I sometimes do. The second reason is that the story told in the House of Whispers trilogy feels extremely personal to me. While I have no African heritage, I did grow up practicing an ethnically-inherited spirituality. I still do.

This personal resonance also drew my attention to how Neil Gaiman has handled concepts common in both The Sandman and American Gods. I remember, when American Gods the novel was published, the curious lack of dream-kind avatars of currently-practiced religions. Like, where are all the Yawehs and Jesuses and Satans and angels (distinct from Lucifer and the Silver City) that are dream-kind, animated by belief? Emanations of celebrity worship were mentioned in the novel, like Marilyn Monroe and Micky Mouse. Then there’s the modern-day abstractions like Technology and Media and World.

To illustrate this point a bit: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie could easily exist in the world of American Gods…except, you know, occuring mostly in Bombay and Britain, with dream-kind expressions of Islamic concepts. Which was enough for a nation-state to sic a million theocratic would-be assassins on him.

The TV adaptation (of American Gods) addressed a few of these oversights. Still, though: you wonder just how busy a fictional universe with these rules would be if every prevalent belief you can think of was accounted for, with zero threats aimed at the author?

Survivors from antique pantheons are where the action is at in a lot of these stories, yet the internal consistency requires that there be dream-kind that are currently worshipped. House of Whispers not only pulls this off but beings like Erzulie Freda and Ananse feel natural alongside other familiar faces like the Corinthian, Mazikeen and Papa Midnite.

There is also an intersting timelessness in the perspective of the loa characters that reminds me a lot of how Mike Carey characterized Lucifer (speaking of- House of Whispers is co-authored between Nalo Hopkinson and Dan Watters, the latter of whom authored the Sandman Universe Lucifer). Erzulie Freda, her relatives and her husbands hit rock bottom fast, lash out fast and move on fast. Erzulie Freda is also the only character in the world of The Sandman whom we are allowed to follow into annhilation other than Morpheus himself. In Overture, non-existence is a torpor that Morpheus gets shaken out of by Destiny (which may have been possible simply because the multiverse was deteriorating). In House of Whispers, Erzulie Freda experiences personal annhilation as an infuriating, painful problem that needs to be solved.

Both of them get out of it in similar ways. Morpheus gets summoned back into existence by Destiny, who points out a ship, made of dreams, offering escape to those whose worlds are crumbling.

Remember that boat from *Sandman: Overture*? Made of dream-substance, created by Despair’s twin? This is from *Watching the Watchers*, btw

Erzulie, meanwhile, relies on the faith of a small handful of believers. Even after her subjective point of view is wiped out and all knowledge of her vanishes from the waking world, there is still at least one worshipper left: Alter Boi. Alter Bois workings enables Erzulie to manifest once more as Marinette of the Dry Bones.

This happens in book two, ‘Ananse’, which was when I realized this was one of the best stories in the Sandman Universe run. The appearance of Marinette got me right in the pathos but there’s just as much awesome craft bells and whistles. The Sandman Universe comics haven’t really been big on the anthology books (such as ‘Dream Country’, ‘Fables and Reflections’ and ‘World’s End’ from the original Sandman). Out of the few anthologies that have appeared in the Sandman Universe run, ‘Ananse’ is easily the best. I put it on the same level as ‘World’s End’ or ‘The Wake’.

‘Ananse’ begins with Shakpana (the loa that presides over disease) in the waking world, following up on plot threads from ‘The Power Divided’. These chapters alternate with a nightmare that the Corinthian is torturing a dreamer witih. For awhile, it’s not altogether clear that this person is dreaming and it is way too tempting to think that Shakpana’s psychic disease from ‘The Power Divided’ has gone completely ape shit and unstoppable.

Specifically: bloodshot, terrified, bulging human eyes have spontaineously appeared on animals. There is a wave of veganism, which rebounds when people realize that the eyes, with their concentrated agony, are delicious. This dreamer, who is likely an environmentalist in her waking life, is horrified to see that vegetarianism is now redefined as those who eat normal animal meat minus the eyeballs. Later, everyone realizes that eyes taken from humans taste better than any others. Restaurateurs come to the conclusion that the people have spoken: if society in general loves to eat human eyeballs, who are they to say no? The ethical Overton window shifts a little more and vegetarianism now includes people who eat animal eyes but abstain from human eyes.

The Shakpana chapters are so blinkered that you can’t help wondering if the eyeball restaurants are literally springing up everywhere. We only know that this is a dream when the Swan Prince, at the behest of Erzulie, tracks down the Corinthian.

In ‘The Power Divided’, the loa Agwe (one of Erzulie’s husbands) becomes trapped in the House of Whispers, slowly but surely blending with the vessel itself. Ananse may be able to extract Agwe but he is famously mercurial. In the absence of any other options, though, she rolls the dice. The Swan Prince happens to know that the Corinthian has something of a friendship with Ananse and catches the mouth-eyed gent mid-nightmare.

The Swan Prince sheepishly approaches the Corinthian and informs him that “Mistress Erzulie would like a word.”

Corinthian: “What? I’m nothing but a humble nightmare– and a GOD seeks my help? This I have to –ahem– see.”

Swan Prince: “I must say, that was an amazing nightmare you were pestering that woman with.”

Corinthian: *cheekily grins* “Lord Dream destroyed the last Corinthian for his lack of imagination. I’ve been working on my own.”

I love that exchange. The Swan Prince seems intimidated but also earnestly appreciative. Come to think of it, I don’t know if the Swan Prince had any speaking roles in the original Sandman. Off the top of my head, I can only remember one or two background appearances, usually in the company of the white rabbit from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I think, in ‘The Kindly Ones’, they’re briefly visible sneaking around a staircase. The white rabbit also showed up in ‘Empty Shells’, book two of the Dreaming reboot.

Once the Corinthian brings the House of Whispers to Ananse, negotiations develop into a storytelling contest between Ananse and Erzulie.

Like ‘World’s End’, there are a succession of self-contained stories until the final chapter of the wider frame story becomes the final vignette. A disagreement about the rules of the contest pushes Ananse over the edge and he moves in for the kill. Erzulie disappears from the minds of humanity except for the devout Alter Boi, whom had previously served Erzule as her willing horse (one who consents to carry a loa in their body- from what I could find online, such a person is typically called a chwal).

Alter Boi, in hir grief, recreates the sacrificial working from January first, 1804 in Haiti, that preceded the Battle of Vertières: the slave revolt that won Haiti her indipendance. The only slave revolt in recorded history known to have led to the founding of a nation.

First, there is only Alter Boi. Then a few of Alter Boi’s house mates. Not unlike the bones of a religion…and bones are more than enough.

*The Power Divided*. Uncle Monday is both an alligator and a crocodile, which I find evocative of the location of Cécile Fatiman’s 1804 working: Bwa Kayiman, meaning alligator forest.

So. What is left of Erzulie, in Ananse’s web, after her flesh and her spirit are picked clean? Her bones, newly infused with a burnt offering. Her bones begin to stir with the fury of the vanquished and the hapless.

It’s powerful poetry but it also ties back into the timeless simplicity of the loas- and perhaps all beings whose existence does not occur on mortal terms. It even reminds me of a fundamental reality of the Endless, spelled out in ‘Brief Lives’: an Endless embodies both their purpose and its reflection. Even the Corinthian, musing on the prospect of claiming the House of Whispers for himself, echoes this.

In all the decades I’ve been reading and rereading Sandman comics, it never occurred to me to look into the linguistic roots of the Corinthian’s name. I figured there was probably something to find there but dream-kind exist according to dream-logic: an explicable cause is not necessarily called for. I finally got around to it, though: one meaning derives from the New Testament epistles, in which the people of Corinth are described as sinful and impulsive. Another possible meaning of corinthian is athletic rigor. The Corinthian does what he wants, whenever he wants and he’s a perfectionist about it. This even sheds some light on the function Morpheus originally envisioned for him: a dark mirror of humanity. Did he not recently craft a nightmare in which ordinary appetites drive people to devour each other’s eyes?

Like all Sandman stories- both original and post-2019 -subjectivity is central. Alienation, of course, puts one directly in touch with subjectivity. Not unlike how Despair crafted the House of Whispers from dreams or Desire used dreams to craft hir own ship in hir brother’s absence. Book one, ‘The Power Divided’, begins with Shakpana’s journal of imaginary diseases going missing in Lucien’s library and ending up in the hands of children, playing a game of telephone. A game of telephone changes a little with each repetition yet this one leaves a uniform mark on each participant: the removal of their soul.

Just so you know, I’m going to get a little personal here.

In my experience, spiritual events can be perceived on a level close to mental and emotional ones. Getting swept up in something like pain can deafen you to the music you are dancing to. The kind of personal inventory that can reveal these things can also reveal spiritual events within yourself.

While Shakpana is walking around in an escaped convict, he encounters a coat-rack supporting a bunch of bottles. Each one contains a soul killed by Madame LaLaurie- a real, historical serial killer who tortured and murdered her slaves. The convict, having been spiritually aroused by Shakpana, hears their wailing and is unaffected. Like a lot of people, he caught the soul-removal plague. He says he hears the ugly but can’t feel the ugly. This is the kind of personal inventory I was talking about. Simply asking yourself what you are feeling and why. Discrepencies point straight toward things that bear investigating.

Before wrapping this up, I have to mention Papa Midnite, who gets roped into the story by Aesop. In D&D terms, a sorcerer is someone who is born with supernatural powers. A wizard or a witch is someone who acquired them through study and application. John Constantine is a wizard. He relies purely on deduction and prior experience and the patterns he recognizes. This means that he is also usually one push away from total disaster.

Papa Midnite- born Linton, with the difference sometimes split with Linton Minuit -is also a wizard. he exists on the same precarious basis as Constantine but he has also been doing it longer than him. Hundreds of years longer. Also like Constantine, Linton Minuit is dogged by the wrath of those he has wronged in the past. I don’t know if the story of his sister was ever fully told in Hellblazer but it is absolutely central to what happens to him in ‘Watching the Watchers’.

Linton Minuit brings a mercurial counterpoint to the timeless simplicity of the loa characters. There was a time when he was tortured by his immortality and wanted to lift the curse that caused it…until Ananse got him burned at the stake.

See, he cheated some early American anti-slavery guerillas with a fake immortality concoction, leaving them to die in battle. At the moment of their demise, they cursed Linton: he would never be free to die so long as “whites…own(ed) the Earth”.

He of course can’t die but he can burn and regenerate. This is never spelled out in so many words but the insinuation is that this experience- in addition to creating a vendetta with Ananse -cured him of his yearning for death. Remaining corporeal is then both a game and a motivator, which causes a succession of different attitudes toward the curse that made him immortal and the debt on his soul. His debt could be a purpose but his grudge against Ananse has a way of making the idea of purpose a little academic. Immediately after the curse, he wanted to end white supremacy. A plan along those lines was what brought him into contact with Kwaku Ananse. After suffering Ananse’s treachery, he cracks a little more.

His sister Luna, meanwhile, plans to avenge her own murder. Papa Midnite says that he killed his sister to spare her the same fate as him. I detected a vague implication that the curse of the dying freedom fighters was somehow on Linton Minuit’s bloodline…but Nalo Hopkinson used a third person omniscient voice during the prior narration. She referred to Linton in the third person singular “him”. In that omniscient moment, the narration limits the curse to him alone.

Could Linton Minuit (while smoking weed with Aesop with a bong made from his sister’s skull) have been referring to something else? The ambiguity begs questions. I haven’t read any Hellblazer that wasn’t part of the Sandman Universe run but- from what I’ve gathered -his sister’s skull usually represents a magical focus, offering (as she does in ‘Watching the Watchers’) access to other planes. So Linton had a definite functional role for her, after her death. Self-interest muddies the waters even more. To say nothing, of course, of the fact that Luna was affianced to one of the freedom fighters.

Nalo Hopkinson on creating Papa Midnite’s backstory:

https://www.nalohopkinson.com/house-of-whispers-vol-three

Aand here’s some stuff that occurred to me, regarding both Ananse and Daniel

Swamp Thing: the ancestor of The Sandman and Lucifer

There are a handful of factual reasons why this is true. Neil Gaiman grew close to Alan Moore in the early eighties, having recently discovered one of these very comics. Gaiman even worked on supplemental prose in Moore’s Watchmen. The more fun reasons, though, come through within Moore’s ’84-’87 run on Swamp Thing (titled The Saga of The Swamp Thing for the first year, even though the six volume collection of Moore’s four year run is also sold under the same name).

The Bogeyman, from the cereal convention in ‘The Doll’s House’ Sandman story? He started out as a Swamp Thing character. This person believes they killed the actual bogeyman and therefore inherited the chance to fill the role. Swamp Thing kills the successor, in the end. That wouldn’t stop someone from taking up the moniker afterward, though- just like he did.

Before Matthew Cable dies, he manifests the power to make dreams and imaginings real. When he dies, he receives a mysterious reassurance of a purpose waiting for him beyond the veil. Perhaps a cawing, eye-ball-gulping purpose.

Yes, Cain and Abel in their twin Houses of Secrets and Mysteries existed in the world of D.C. comics before then. But a fan of the original Sandman would recognize them exactly in Swamp Thing. Their appearance and behavior are identical…which meshes with something that’s been on my mind since I read Promethea and Sandman: Overture. The mother of the Endless- Night -looks almost exactly like a being called the Lady in Promethea. Considering the role of these figures in both stories and the closeness of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, I find it hard to believe that the resemblance is coincidental.

(Speaking of: there is a brief Swamp Thing story about aliens aboard a ship which they named Find The Lady. This usage of the word ‘lady’ refers to a planet)

In Swamp Thing, Cain and Abel dwell in a collective psychic space between worlds. Travellers between different planes sometimes encounter Cain and Abel. Cain and Abel are also capable of perceiving cosmically significant events before they make contact with the material world (even if they bicker over it like a homicidal sit-com duo).

Another piece of relative common ground: the Phantom Stranger, Boston Brand, Etrigan and John Constantine. Constantine and Etrigan are the only direct Sandman links out of those four but Neil Gaiman’s Books of Magic is directly adjacent to The Sandman. Both Constantine and the Phantom Stranger are major characters in Books of Magic. Dr. Occult, Boston Brand / Dead Man, Zatana, Zatara, Baron Winter, Doctor Fate and the Spectre also appeear in both Swamp Thing and Books of Magic.

To say nothing of the importance of John Constantine in both of those and The Sandman. What’s funny: I originally had the desire to read Moore’s Swamp Thing run because I had just finished the SU story Hellblazer: Dead in America. What do I find? The first ever appearance of John Constantine as a fictional character. In a story arc which ‘Dead In America’ echoes very closely.

Alan Moore basically invented Constantine to connect Swamp Thing with the wider plot threads in the American Gothic arc. My wife recently showed me the early nineties TV show. I vaguely remember that my mom used to watch it but nothing about what it was actually like. I also suspect that the TV show was addressing an audience with a broader awareness of the character than mine. I just read the Alan Moore stuff. Before the early eighties, Dr. Arcane was a big enough re-occurring villain for him to be filed away as the obvious big bad. The early nineties show also decided to make Dr. Arcane British and gave him a few lines making vegetible jokes. Swamp Thing and John Constantine have this romantic American / snarky Brit dynamic…which they couldn’t have been trying to shift onto Swamp Thing and Arcane…could they?

Arcane definitely matters in the Alan Moore stuff but mostly by the consequences of previously depicted actions. His pro-active involvement in Moore’s Swamp Thing starts when he manages to rope Abigail Cable into Hell, sending Swamp Thing on a Divine Comedy-like journey. Like Timothy Hunter, Swamp Thing’s quest across dimensions puts him in touch with both Boston Brand (in the realm of the recently dead) and the Phantom Stranger (in Heaven). Etrigan, of course, shows up in Hell.

The long, interdimensional treks are some of the more chaotic and interesting moments in the comic and the Divine Comedy themes are never altogether gone from that point forward.

Like Dante and Beatrice, a lot of the astral travel (at this point and elsewhere) is catalyzed by the romance between Swamp Thing and Abby Cable. It’s interesting to me how often the journey of the Orphic pilgrim is prompted by the need to find someone- usually a lover, even if Hans Christian Andersen did his best to blunt those edges in The Snow Queen.

Alan Moore did a sympathetic version of The Creature from the Black Lagoon decades before The Shape of Water. The Dantean themes add something to this. Regarding the woman whom he modeled Beatrice after, Dante said that he wanted to write about her in a way that no woman had ever been written about.

I just remembered- there are three prolonged journeys across dimensions in Moore’s Swamp Thing. The first is rescuing Abby from Hell, the second is confronting the menace at the heart of the American Gothic story and the last is a long, hard journey toward reunion after a painful separation. Three journeys across worlds, like the Divine Comedy. Also like the Divine Comedy: the last one happens mostly in space.

Or, at least, you could be forgiven for thinking Il Paradisio happens in space. He describes Heaven as a bed of stars, surrounding a central light. Different souls are like planets unto themselves. One travels between stars and planets by looking at them.

Before entering Heaven, Dante must drink from the waters of Lethe, to cleanse himself of his human fallibility, which causes a fundamental shift in his perspective. He romantically loved Beatrice while she was alive but in Heaven spiritual love reaches full maturity and the mortal perspective is removed by Lethe.

Swamp Thing is driven from Earth by a weapon devised by Lex Luthor. Yes, he is a plant elemental with the ability to manifest anywhere that plants live (Swamp Thing, I mean). But what Luthor’s weapon did was separate his subjective point of view from Earth’s plant life, forcing Swamp Thing to look for a manifestation vector outside of Earth.

He makes a few different stops before he is able to manifest long enough to set out for Earth. The love between Swamp Thing and Abby deepens. This is, however, far from pleasurable. Swamp Thing wrestles with the prospect of total separation. Abby goes through the same thing and a mysterious encounter with John Constantine occurs.

I wondered if this related to the entanglement referred to throughout ‘Dead In America.’ That, it turns out, occurred after Moore’s work on Swamp Thing.

Swamp Thing and Abigail both experience an interrogation of their love. Swamp Thing tries to abolish the whole thing from his memory, then tries to embody a museum of nostalgia on another world, including his own lifeless recreation of Abigail.

A demonic echo of Abigail’s uncle- Dr. Anton Arcane -briefly reaches out to her from Hell. Because of his psychic contact with Abby, Arcane turns into a blocky, Frankenstein’s-creature-type-wight embodying Abby’s buried and sublimated feelings toward various masculine figures in her life.

With all the older, male, broad-shouldered remembrances, it is difficult not to notice the subtle resemblance to Swamp Thing. As if Abby is beginning to shake off her “daddy issues” and is now re-evaluating her relationship. In the end, she finds that her love and loyalty are still justified.

This really reminded me of the 2019 Alejandro Jodorowsky comic Angel Claws, which tells a similar story with more dream logic and sex.

Relationship problems were not the only way in which Dream of the Endless echoed Swamp Thing.

I wondered if, given the range of Swamp Thing’s abilities and domain, Dream must necessarily have some connection to him. This is demonstrated in Moore’s run on the Swamp Thing comics but it was made explicit and canon in the recent Hellblazer story ‘Dead In America’.

As expressed in ‘Dead In America’, Dream rules over dreaming sentience (the Dreaming) and Swamp Thing rules over dreaming non-sentience (the Green). The living non-sentience Swamp Thing communes with are (obviously) either plant life or things directly adjacent to it, like mycelial networks.

At the very least, there’s got to be some aspect of the Green that overlaps with the Dreaming and some aspect of the Dreaming that overlaps with the Green. I find it easy to think that they are different emanations of one another, perhaps like how the shape of an Endless depends on who is looking. Swamp Thing may literally be Dream in the plant world.

There are serious differences in perspective, though.

Dream is a monarch, with duties set in stone, as a perpetual condition of his existence. Swamp Thing exists within the same holistic network as all plant life and this connection compels his love and loyalty to the planet. He defends it as a champion and is capable of preventing outside threats. He feels obliged to take a protective stand when necessary but does not identify completely with his custodial authority, as Dream does.

I wonder if a lot of those existential ‘purpose’ questions disappeared with the realization that he is his own being, rather than Alec Holland.

Also on the overlap between Dream and Swamp Thing: Swamp Thing’s protective duty to the planet carries him all the way through the American Gothic arc, leading up to the confrontation with the primordial darkness outside of creation, charging into battle alongside the Phantom Stranger and Etrigan. It is important enough for Swamp Thing to bet his life and his sanity on it.

However, Abby Cable re(?)entered Swamp Thing’s life after he realized he wasn’t Alec Holland. He fell in love with Abby at the same time that he was coming to terms with his true nature. Her love has anchored much of his stability, up until that point. The loss of this anchor is also reminiscent of Dream’s mortal relationships in The Sandman. Swamp Thing is different, though, in that he never flinches from the long, hard road toward reconciliation.

This split in loyalties does not haunt or paralyze Swamp Thing like it did Morphius. What haunts and paralyzes Swamp Thing is losing Abby. Morpheus will agonize over an ex but his priorities are always crystal clear: the Dreaming above all.

The ending of the American Gothic arc also makes me wonder about the cosmological relevance of Lucifer.

This is going to get into the weeds of my interpretation of Mike Carey’s run on Lucifer. The story begins with the Silver City approaching Lucifer with a big payment for a big favor: get rid of an emerging deity.

This being once belonged to a pantheon called the nameless gods. These are divine spirits that respond to non-specific or non-linguistic prayers. The ones who respond to spirits reaching out with no point of linguistic contact.

Later, another group of beings enters the plot: the Jin En Mok, who were the deities that remain from an earlier universe, who typically see our universe as an obstruction or an enemy. One group are the survivors of a defunct pantheon and the other are the gods of those with none in particular. Those sound like two groups that could easily overlap- potentially two societies within the same race.

The latter arc of Mike Carey’s Lucifer concerns a character called Fenris Yggdrasil. Fenris entered existence as the Fenris from Norse mythology. Since Lucifer takes place within the continuity of The Sandman, we can assume that this Fenris is an emergent dream-construct, like the deities throughout both The Sandman and American Gods. In other words, he sprang from the oneiric energy of believers, from when his existence was more widely credited. By the time he shows up in Lucifer, Fenris is trying to tear down the multiverse. If he ever succeeded at doing that, it would make him a refugee from another universe like the Jin En Mok.

The human family that the nameless god from the beginning of Lucifer incarnated into begins and ends Mike Cary’s story, what with Lucifer holding the destiny of the soul of the nameless deity over one of the members of the family he incarnated in (Rachel Begai).

At the culmination of American Gothic, Swamp Thing, Dead Man, Etrigan, Phantom Stranger and other astral combatants meet the darkness outside of creation in battle.

This was the opening of a cosmic floodgate, enacted by the Brujeria. This is the darkness outside of creation encountering existence for the first time. Existence and definition. It learns to identify as evil, from the blandishments of Etrigan and Phantom Stranger. Swamp Thing recalls the words shared with him by the Parliament of Trees: “Where, in all the forest, is evil?” Swamp Thing tells the darkness (after being absorbed by it) that evil is the best and most nurturing companion of good, which makes an impression on the young mind.

Smitten, it turns to embrace its cosmic opposite. A giant finger rises from the astral battle field, bringing with it a great, dark hand, reaching out in affection to a golden hand of light.

The menace represented by the primordial darkness was described, by Constantine, as a threat to the multiverse. It existed before creation, being either the space that creation was built within, the substance of which it was made or perhaps both. The origins and manifestations remind me of both the Jin En Mok and the silent gods.

Then…there’s my ususal stalking horse with anything connecting to the Sandman universe.

Both The Sandman and Books of Magic take place within the same multiverse. Punctuated, as usual, with things like timeless regions- ‘soft spots’ and skerries of the Dreaming. The Dreaming itself is beyond space and time. Both Sandman and Books of Magic also include monsters that reach across planets and timelines. I’ve talked a lot on this blog about my theory that the mad star from Sandman: Overture also includes the extradimensional region called the Gemworld mentioned in Books of Magic. As in: they are different facets of the same infernal, eldritch conglomerate.

It seems possible, to me, that this conglomerate might also include the primordial darkness from Swamp Thing. Given the behavior and origins of the Jin En Mok in Mike Carey’s Lucifer run, it is fair to assume that they share interests with the conglomerate. Then there’s the second camp (or another name for the same one, if you prefer- I do)- the nameless gods. They are the quiet layers of divinity sensitive to inarticulate prayerful yearning. The primordial darkness in Swamp Thing behaves a lot like a divinity that has either never learned to talk or was never before able.

All that is incidental to how great these comics are, though. The chemistry between Moore and Gaiman was such that their works do not feel like they have the derivative relationship that they must necessarily have. The common ground is seamless enough to feel like the same continuous, simultaneous creation.

Alan Moore himself, contributing to Sister Anne-Marie’s permanent nose-wrinkle amid the “filthy Soho night clubs that stank like toilets”.

The Sandman Universe: Hellblazer

Dead in America #6 cover art by Aaron Campbell

The 2020-2025 Hellblazer are the best stand-alone comics in the Sandman Universe run since the first four were cancelled.

(Big fat spoiler warnings for ‘Marks of Woe’, ‘The Best Version of You’ and ‘Dead in America’, btw)

Outside of the nexus stories like The Dreaming and Nightmare Country, the Dan Watters’ Lucifer is still my favorite. Right now, though, Hellblazer: Dead in America is tied for second place with House of Whispers.

‘Dead in America’ is only the third act, though.

Coincidentally, I started watching the Netflix Sandman series just as I was finishing the first two collected editions. One connecting moment stands out: Roderick Burgess commands his son Alex to take the three fetishes of Dream. John Constantine makes a similar demand of a trusting and vulnerable youth who is revealed to be his son.

Which is interesting, since this run of Hellblazer takes off from the far-future apocalypse of the Sandman Universe version of Books of Magic. In both the SU story and the original, Books of Magic is centrally concerned with Timothy Hunter’s life in another timeline, in which he became a world-ending monster. The SU Books of Magic thereby fell into an arc about stereotype-threat: Timothy is not as bad as he looks and has not had a chance to make his own mark.

SU Hellblazer sees John Constantine making an inverse journey. Unlike Timothy, John has had a chance and is every bit as bad as he looks.

The first run of Books of Magic began with a group of mages: The Phantom Stranger, John Constantine, Dr. Occult and Mister E. All four had knowledge of what Timothy would eventually become and- over the objections of of Mister E -they decide to educate him in the hope of heading off his reign of terror.

If the full story of evil Timothy has been written, I’d like to read it (That may be a reason for me to look into the rest of the old school Books of Magic). In the picture of things from the SU though, it seems John was part of the dwindling forces of good keeping supervillain Tim at bay.

In the story ‘Bad Influences’ (which appears within ‘Dwelling in Possibility’ from SU Books of Magic and ‘Marks of Woe’ from SU Hellblazer), John has just escaped from the far-future hellscape into a nearby timeline. In said timeline, Timothy Hunter is still a teenager.

At the time of the ‘93 Books of Magic, Timothy was approached by John Constantine, Phantom Stranger, Dr. Occult and Mister E. They launched from the ‘evil Tim future’ under different circumstances than Constantine at the beginning of ‘Marks of Woe’, however.

In ‘Marks of Woe’, John Constantine’s departure from the ‘evil Tim future’ is initiated by a being claiming to be himself from a different timeline: older, happier and without a soul. This apparition wants the soul of his younger self in exchange for safe passage to a version of Earth that’s not about to be vaporized.

The negotiation makes mention of innumerable people whom John has used as meat shields and bargaining chips, for innumerable reasons; both selfish and ethical. The transaction is, according to alleged ‘future John’, nothing more than the consequences of his actions (their actions, actually, since alleged ‘future John’ makes no distinction between his own spiritual destiny and ‘our’ John).

There is even an insinuation that such a transaction may not be the end. According to ‘future John’, “what better place” for the old “ghost” to go, other than back into the “family”? As if ‘future John’ is not dead yet and the soul could still have some time left (even if it would mean subjective annhilation for ‘our’ John).

These are the first actual Hellblazer comics I’ve ever read outside of his appearances in SU Books of Magic, SU Lucifer and a single volume of The Dreaming (to say nothing of the original Sandman). With both the Constantine film and a few animated stories in mind, I could believe that he has a pattern of using people up and spitting them out. This would cast a new light on some things, like John’s rendering of the situation to Morpheus in ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’.

In any case, both John and the alleged time traveler take this past for granted. Once John takes the deal, we see the manifested proof of it in John’s broken life and relationships, upon his return to the relative “present” (2019). The few who have survived his companionship are done with his shit and want nothing to do with him.

In the world of comics, John Constantine and his moral ambiguity are well-known. A major strength of the Sandman Universe comic line is how well it has built its own continuity. Obviously you’ll get a lot out of it if you read the original Sandman but the SU line has deftly handled its macro-anthology structuring. The individual stories that make up the whole (for the most part) stand well on their own.

‘Bad Influences’ cover art by Kai Carpenter

The SU comics, therefore, have their own self-contained set-up for Constantine’s moral arc. SU Books of Magic tells the story of Timothy’s vindication: his innocence and virtue are proven despite influences from the Supervillain Tim timeline. Thereby, the point of departure for SU Hellblazer is set up (even if Constantine had a brief appearance in another SU story in the meantime- more on that later).

Timothy Hunter is validated in the end because all he has to say for himself is his perspective. He cannot claim acts and identities that he never experienced: the fact that such happened in another continuity is beside the point. This works because SU Books of Magic shows us everything Timothy is aware of (which factors in some memory-wipes from prior comics but I digress). Timothy’s moral truth therefore unfolds before our eyes.

In the SU continuity, John Constantine’s moral arc has its own establishing beats. The past discussed by John and the time traveler, everyone hates him upon his return to normal life, etc. These are passive, retrospective moments, though- just as much happens in front of us.

‘Bad Influences’ is, effectively, our point of departure. John finds Timothy, fully intending to kill him with a book with poisonous, psychoactive pages. John still felt squeamish about killing a kid on principle, though, so he avails himself to a third party which can be bound and commanded. While Tim is under the influence, he is psychically suppressed and contained by the Vestibulan- an angel who refused to take a side during Satan’s rebellion. The Vestibulan belongs to the Aequiim- guardians of impartiality. Within the hallucinatory construct based on Constantine’s lie, the Vestibulan gives Timothy either / or moral scenarios. Between the certainty of Constantine and Tim’s paranoia, the construct changes. The Vestibulan starts showing Tim choices between equally repugnant scenarios. Incoherent Tim decides this is part of the test and psychically attacks the Vestibulan, shoving him out of his mind and into John’s smartphone.

More than that happened but those are the bullet points.

When faced with the illusion of his inevitable evil, Tim literally fought his way out of a spell-bound stupor. In John’s eyes, you can’t say fairer than that. It even rhymes with something the time traveler told John before sending him back to a “safe” timeline: just be the best version of you.

Following the time traveler’s advice and Timothy’s example, we see John simply behave the best way he can, in the moment, as circumstance allows. Explicatory dialogue has told us that John has treated lives and trust callously, but this is a clean slate, right? What better chance to prove your guilty conscience wrong?

John proves it right, in the end. In the course of his new adventures, John meets a young deaf man named Noah: his genetic child from a long-forgotten fling. John being John, he eventually welches on his soul deal.

The time travler wants the soul inside of John’s body, right? Noah is instructed to smash the phone at the moment of John’s death. The Vestibulan latches onto John’s body. From John’s body, the Vestibulan gets yoinked by the time traveler who sends it back to John. The Aequiim were condemned to Hell for their indifference. The Vestibulan is therefore hounded by demons as soon as the time traveler releases him. Since this is all rebounding back to John, the demons seize a nearby body for a possession vector. John telepathically orders Noah to kill the poor guy to stop the demons from emerging. This sacrificial lamb was a naive, well-meaning magician named Tommy Willowtree who idolized John Constantine and yearned to follow in his footsteps. The demons drag his soul to Hell while he cries out to John for help.

Meanwhile, the deal is still on: John’s real soul is nabbed by the time traveler who instantly rejects it.

I’ve spoiled a lot already but for the sake of keeping things neat: the time traveler is not John. They’re not even a corporeal being. They simply wanted a soul and John was chosen for his shame: he hardly believes he has a soul. John definitely doesn’t believe that he deserves anything in particular after death. His belief in his damnation was what made him such a perfect target. The irony: he made his son kill someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, which didn’t even keep his soul safe for much longer anyway.

Sorta.

See, compelling his son commit a futile murder tainted John’s soul. If the soul is a getaway car for the time traveler, this is basically like setting the getaway car on fire. Also, since John had to die for this to happen and no one claimed his soul in the end, John is now a walking corpse. A zombie with a personality.

Does this have a Fibonacci vibe? With John’s head being the outermost spiral and the bowl (held by Blake’s ‘The Ghost of a Flea’) being the innermost? ‘A Green and Pleasant Land, Part Two’ cover art by John Paul Leon, btw

It is at this point in this long-ass intro that I am reminded of how the first two volumes initially hit me. They struck me as very straight-laced…and a straight-laced comic is like a straight-laced TV show. Establish the premise, then set a rhythm of self-contained stories. Episodic tales can intersect beautifully with linear threads, as seen in the original Sandman. Here, though, the sequences are direct. First John enters the new timeline, then he assembles a crew which includes Noah and a violent, manic Scottish woman called Nat. There’s a few short-lived events with common denominators, then the first macro-plot ends.

I didn’t post about these comics when they came out because I had attitude problems: the more novel-like SU stories were fresh in my mind and the more conventional comic structure caught me off guard. My interest was not immediately piqued. With that bias out of the way, though, I can’t say a word against either ‘Marks of Woe’ and ‘The Best Version of You’. Once the final chapter gets going, the plot threads come together and get good real quick. The ending was just fast-paced and chaotic enough with consequences that must necessarily last.

Now, finally, I can get to the story that made the SU Hellblazer my favorite stand-alone series since the first four SU arcs: ‘Dead in America’.

Early on, John Constantine meets an old acquantance in New Orleans: Clarice Sackville. In ‘Marks of Woe’, John reached out to Clarice by Vestibulan-phone, in regard to his problems with the time-travelling soul eater. John asks for help and is refused: Clarice has no desire to end up like most of his connections. Nonetheless, Clarice (a fellow traveler) is aware of various prophecies. John is both snarky and incredulous: he’s been around enough to know “vague, apocalyptic arsewater” when he hears it. Clarice insists that this is not the usual endtimes hype: these prophesies are specific and substantial. They mention the possibility of “the true and final death of John Constantine.” Clarice goes on to explain that she was responsible for a series of visions and psychic suggestions, leading Tommy Willowtree to the big bad himself. Clarice says that she knows better than to think that Tommy’s fate- corporeal or spiritual -will motivate John to do anything. She put Tommy on the breadcrumb trail because, in spite of his weaknesses, he could potentially solve the whole thing himself, which John’s ego could not bear.

John returned to the fray out of pettiness and then used the object of his envy as a human shield. In the final pages of ‘The Best Version of You’, we learn that John did die, even if it’s not stopping him. ‘Marks of Woe’ is such a fast-paced read that it’s easy to overlook John’s phone call with Clarice. After finishing ‘Dead in America’, I was forced to consider the scope of those prophecies. The Nightmare Country comics appear to take place after the events of the first three SU Hellblazer volumes. Nightmare Country is set in America and concerns a mysterious confluence of powers both oneiric and infernal. Three of the Endless (Dream, Desire and Despair) are involved. Most of Nightmare Country is set in Los Angeles in particular, which is where John, Noah and Nat part ways at the end of ‘Dead in America’.

If the mysterious apocalyptic menace includes the Nightmare Country players…might it also have fourth-dimensional implications? Some needling little impulse is telling me that it may involve Supervillain Tim and the timelines where his influence has spread. It’s interesting to me that Neil Gaiman wrote the first Books of Magic around the same time that he began working on Sandman: Overture (even if it wouldn’t be published for about two decades). Glory of the First Circle appeared in print for the first time in Books of Magic, as did the mundane egg, which went on to play a pivotal role in the first three volumes of the Dreaming reboot.

Tying all these threads together in one tapestry would be bad-ass if it was done right. Remember, to, that season one of the Sandman miniseries included a scene from Overture in which Dream is attempting to confront the Corinthian in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The Corinthian has lately started taking human victims. Dream is about to uncreate him when he is suddenly transported, leaving the Corinthian to make his escape.

The first three SU Hellblazer stories succeed at something far more simple, though: John is a real anti-hero with real shades of gray. Protagonists on negative arcs have, of course, grown popular. Typically, these characters come off as either one-dimensional heroes with rough edges or one-dimensional villains with a little charm.

With 2020-2025 SU Hellblazer, it’s all about the ‘best version of you’ action. All you can do- all anyone can ask of another -is to show up and do your best. Most of us live our lives on those terms. Even when things are bad enough to consider cutting your losses, you always have the choice to continue placing one foot in front of the other. Guilt is a common experience and therefore so is the need to forgive oneself. “Showing up” and “doing your best” in the midst of shame and guilt is to hear a voice at all times, murmuring that you don’t deserve to “show up”. You keep doing it anyway because the point is not where you’ve been- it’s where you’re going.

We’ve all screwed up before but what else can you do after that, except keep going? And do better next time? John makes a rather normal and sympathetic first impression. The trouble is the “do better next time” part.

Like Lucifer in the new SU stories, John Constantine hates losing more than anything else. Many of his most remarkable and creative accomplishments happen under the fear of losing. He tends to look out for number one and not every opportunity to help has a tangible, constructive result. In ‘The Best Version of You’, a mermaid falls in love with an ugly, opportunistic shit of a human who exploits and brutalizes her. When John finds her and they both figure out what happened, he is honest: he cannot undo the damage. Payback, though? “Cheap as chips.” And payback is the only thing he can help her with, in the end (one of the better vignettes in that book, btw- there’s also an interesting one about the British royal family and horse-breeding).

Not every kindness has a productive consequence but life is chaotic: even the incosequential opportunities are not to be shrugged off. In the meantime, you take stock of the things you do have control over, such as yourself. Looking out for number one grows easier.

Then we have the ending of ‘The Best Version of You’, which provides the fundamental set-up for ‘Dead in America’: the interdimensional pride/shame monster wanted John’s soul. The pride/shame monster also wanted John to truly change himself for the better, in order to receive the best soul he can. John escapes because he blemished his soul on purpose, what with getting his son to commit a pointless murder. By the end of ‘The Best Version of You’, both John and Noah are marked for Hell. John’s central motivation in ‘Dead in America’ is getting his son out of the mess that he dragged him into.

Defining oneself through actions in the present is echoed in one of ‘Dead in America’s villains: Elliot Garner, aka Dr. Diablo. Dr. Diablo, as a DC supervillain, goes back far indeed but for now we need only concern ourselves with this particular version of him: an early-Hollywood-therapist-turned-cult-leader who inherited Dream’s pouch of sand from Ruthven Sykes.

Dream’s sand is the central McGuffin of ‘Dead in America’. Most of the story is spent reacting to it and looking for it. Once in America, John hunts down an old friend- Swamp Thing, who has access to a collective psychic plant space called the Green. The Dreaming is the collective unconscious for sentient beings and the Green is the collective unconscious for everything else- one should be useful for revealing the negative space of the other. There are, of course, complications.

A few decades ago, see, Dream was laid low by three beings called The Kindly Ones. According to Etrigan the demon, The Kindly Ones began as rebel angels beside Lucifer. “Angels of hate”, to be exact. For awhile, in Hell, they were the gatekeepers. From here, they carved out a niche for themselves as The Furies from Greek mythology.

So. After their clash with Dream, in the mid-nineties? They scour the Earth for Dream’s left over magical influence, slowly invading and occupying mythic space. Dr. Diablo has since fed grains of Dream’s sand to his clients, some of whom became Hollywood screenwriters. This means that the magic of Dream is part of their new infrastructure. When they finally realize what happened and why, they seek out Dr. Diablo. Yes there is sand left and yes Dr. Diablo knows what he did with it- he just walled it off in his mind, to stop anyone else from getting it. So The Kindly Ones attacked him and dragged part of his soul to Hell- the part that remembers. Unfortunately, Dr. Diablo’s decision to hide the remaining sand depended on other factors in his life, going back to how he loosened the cord on the pouch to begin with: human sacrifice. His own infant son. Since these events go that far back, there is basically a whole separate half of his memories that are currently languishing in Hell.

In the present, Dr. Diablo is a ghost with half of his identity missing. He retains close to nothing of the past and does (little to) no harm in the present. Actions still matter though and forgetting is not the same thing as innocence, as John himself knows. John and Dr. Diablo know a few things in common. Didn’t John himself loosen the cord of Dream’s pouch? As revealed in the 1980s Sandman story ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’?

There are other thematic tabula rasa analogues. The pride/shame monster from the first two books is another: all he wanted was for John to feel redeemed for a little bit so he could grab a soul with some mileage left in it. He attempted this by pretending to be something that John himself might fantasize about but never actually hoped for: himself, older, content and at peace with the past. John’s first impression- that his happy, older self has no soul -is a misunderstanding…but a potentially important misunderstanding.

You know that theory I floated, a million years ago, about the foreclosed timeline of Overture being the Gemworld from Books of Magic? What if one makes psychic contact with other timelines through ‘what if’ thought junctures where your timeline would have branched off into the other? Oh and that foreclosed timeline? It’s held together by a rampant dream vortex- a psychic mind that absorbs other minds into an ever-expanding dream.

In other words: a dream vortex (or the mad star it turns into) prefers itself over everything else. If Supervillain Tim was Tim’s bridge to the Gemworld…maybe the pride/shame monster is John’s bridge?

The pride/shame monster is a sentient thought-form, btw. Aka: a tulpa

I still don’t know if I’m all-in on that Gemworld theory yet but it only ever seems to grow more probable. I also can’t help wondering about these moral layers because of my first prolonged meeting with John Constantine- and it wasn’t ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’. That was a short story. His appearance in the SU Lucifer is likewise short-lived. The first comic I ever read which treated Constantine as a major character was the original Books of Magic, in which he is one of Timothy Hunter’s mentors. Not only was he an instructor of a young magician but he was one of his more humane, well-intentioned and trustworthy instructors.

I basically “got to know” Constantine originally as a young person’s teacher. In the SU Hellblazer, he starts out willing to kill the young person simply to wall off the timeline he might create…then decides not to. John exhibiting genuine darkness was new to me.

The social commentary in ‘Dead in America’ is another unambiguous win. I remember being nervous about the social commentary in the early volumes of the Dreaming reboot because Neil Gaiman himself struggled a little with it in the original Sandman.

If ‘Dead in America’ had no humor and took itself seriously every step of the way…there would be a lot of opportunities for melodrama, what with the vengeance angels taking root in the American subconscious. To be clear, ‘Dead in America’ shoots straight with seriousness when it matters. To paraphrase one of the more memorable one-liners: Americans can’t stand things being given away for free. Absolutely central to what is being done to the American subconscious.

For John himself, though? The Kindly Ones are imposing a rule-set and a rule-set can always be hacked. One of the more fruitful consequences of irreverence and humor is lateral thinking.

That whole speech, above? It’s directed toward Swamp Thing, in the background there. Now focus only on the bold letters: they start with me us blame betterment, which has thematic relevance but lacks specifity. Next, though: monsters culture cross-polination really good dirt. The message gets more specific near the end, as John wipes saliva from the mouth of a demon and wrings it out on top of a dead flower. Earlier in the book? Swamp Thing reconstituted his body by taking root inside of a vampire (decomposing bodies are good for fertilizing plants, etc.). John is basically telling Swamp Thing to pollinate the flower soaked in demon spit. Maybe Constantine can be reductive and petty but his pettiness ironically enables him to think around corners.

Oh hey- earlier, Swamp Thing tells John that his normally efficient travels through the Green were interrupted. In the new Dead Boy Detectives comics, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine also get derailed in their own psychic space. ‘Dead in America’ establishes that Swamp Thing was intercepted by Dream. The Dead Boy Detectives story strongly implies that Rowland and Paine were intercepted by Despair. This absolutely smacks of the Dream-Desire-Despair entanglement going on in Nightmare Country. John does right by Noah in the end but we still don’t know where Noah and Nat actually ended up, save that it has to do with the film industry in SoCal. A film production outfit in California is also one of the major forces at work in Nightmare Country.

The Sandman Universe: Dead Boy Detectives, volume 1 review (spoilers)

Definitely recommended, if you liked ‘Season Of Mists’ from the original Sandman.

While Lucifer may have been the break out character of ‘Season of Mists’, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine had an equally pivotal role in that story. Neil Gaiman even included Edwin Paine in the epigraph: “You don’t have to stay anywhere forever.” Paine and Rowland are also the ones to bring the self-determination theme into the foreground.

Lucifer, of course, was open about how Dream inspired him to abandon Hell but both of them have their own frames of reference with regard to freedom and duty. Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine systematically “figured out” self-determination due to a lack of any other options.

‘Season Of Mists’ spoilers incoming-

Hell is a separate plane of existence most easily accessed by untethered souls- the dreaming and the dead. When Paine and Rowland end up there, they have uncanny, disturbing experiences that fit in with Hell but undeniably resemble nightmares. At the same time, Hell has its residents and natives, with their own agency. While Dream is trapped on Earth, one of his former captors barters Dream’s helm in exchange for protection. Presumably, there was someone on the other side to barter with. Among the residents, though, are deceased souls that simply feel a sense of belonging to Hell. After Lucifer abandons his throne, many of those souls continue their eternity in the same way: wallowing in the echoes of their mortal suffering and guilt. Then there were the ones like Rowland and Paine, who were trapped by the Hell “insiders”, with no desire to continue business as usual.

The same bullies from 1915 who murdered Edwin get booted out like everyone else. Once they start terrorizing (and eventually killing) Charles, they make him endure a rant: they spent their short lives sacrificing animals and smaller children to Satan, hoping for super powers or whatever. They appear furious that they got nothing in return, other than importing a few unwilling souls to Hell through ritual sacrifice. In the words of one of them, “Nobody in Hell gave a toss!” However cheated they feel, though, they continue behaving the same way they always have.

If Hell attracts Hellions through psychic resonance, then it’s subconscious. When Hell is emptied, many of the ghosts are as conflicted as the dead 1915 bullies. By the end of this chapter, Charles Rowland concludes that this is because they are convinced they have no other choice. When Charles broaches the topic of running away, Edwin is hesitant at first: his bones are still in the attic of the boarding school where the chapter takes place. Charles, who is more recently dead, says “Well, so are mine. Not to mention my flesh and hair and stuff.” Not long after, Edwin comes around with his “(y)ou don’t have to stay anywhere forever” line.

This is the ‘Season Of Mists’ nuance that the new SU Dead Boy Detectives incorporates: the things that others persuade you to believe about yourself.

Also cool: it picks up where volume one of Nighmare Country left off with Thessaly. Like, exactly. We even see the Dead Boys version of Nightmare Country‘s last panel: Thessaly, answering a knock at the door, wearing yellow over white, holding a knife behind her back, with a garbage bag visible on the left. Immediately after she allowed Jamie to ask his one question.

Evidently, Thessaly’s involvement in this story is connected to the Madison Flynn drama.

Beings like dream-kind, who are native to a psychic/astral environment, are sensitive to psychic vibrations. Nightmare Country book one ends with Jamie asking Flynn who killed her. They “feel it” when Flynn squeals from beyond the grave and they notice that Jamie was the one who heard her. Hence the spontaineous combustion. While Thessaly is sweeping up Jamie in a dust pan, she begins to think that the deadly gaze that found Jamie could easily have found her as well. Then there’s a knock at the door.

If the connection is that direct, then the brains behind Ecstasy and Agony empowered an amateur magician to take her off of the playing field.

The “cretin” who knocked on Thessaly’s door wanted to resurrect his daughter. Amateur necromancy is extremely precarious and Thessaly refused. So he gets himself a kumanthong collection (kumanthongs being a Thai spirit embodied in a stillborn male fetus painted with varnish and gold leaf).

Kumanthongs derive their power from the innocence of dead babies. They are powerful but they have limits. Swarming a three-thousand year old witch in broad daylight and kidnapping her should be beyond those limits. In this, Thessaly sees the mysterious force that incinerated Jamie.

The grieving Thai father tries his luck with his imperfect understanding of ceremony and superstition. He starts with a collection of kumanthongs which are far more powerful than expected. He then proceeds to hold Thessaly captive and force her cooperation.

The metaphysics of ghosts happen according to different spiritual practices which means there are cultural differences. With the inherent chaos of amateur necromancy combined with the transplanting of a Thai ghost from one place to another, there is a lot of risk involved. The forces that empowered the father to capture Thessaly are maneuvered into a committed position: Thessaly cannot oppose them directly but she can take advantage of the role they chose, in the father’s necromancy. What’s more: the necromantic spell wants to stay active.

The kumanthongs and the binding circle they form around Thessaly are empowered by outside forces. She effectively harnesses the momentum of those forces.

Variant cover by Alex Eckman Lawn for *The Sandman Universe: Dead Boy Detectives #5*

The man’s daughter returns as a krasue: a dangerous, nocturnal Thai ghost. The krasue’s head separates from her body at night to hunt victims, organs hanging from the neck. The narration tells us that the krasue is “the most savage, terrifying, and vengeful ghost of all.” During the day, she “lives as normal.” For a grieving parent, half of a reunion is better than none at all.

Because the kumanthongs are compelling Thessaly’s participation and containing her, they are something of a foundation stone for the whole spell. Which means the outside influence that made them stronger also empowers the spell and its consequences.

Since ghosts are shaped by mortal beliefs and practices, Paine and Rowland appear to have a unique asset that they take for granted: the ghost roads.

To the other ghosts, the boys look like they can teleport at will, anywhere they want. This isn’t wrong but it isn’t the whole picture. When Rowland and Paine do their instant-travel trick, they are moving through something that they call the ghost roads. For the boys, this is little more than a brief in-between state while travelling in spirit form. To the Thai ghosts who eventually follow them through it, it’s gruesome to the point that they prefer to close their eyes and be led by Paine and Rowland.

This mode of travel is usually reliable except for a few moments in the new Dead Boy Detectives when they are jerked to a separate destination, without warning.

The ghost roads, for those who linger long enough to take it in, are a panorama of ghosts, melted together into the surrounding landscape, forever monologueing about the memories of their living agony. A longtime Sandman reader may be tempted to compare this to the suicide forest, glimpsed briefly in Hell, until another connection is made plain.

The faces of the suffering ghosts, embedded in the landscape of the ghost roads, all look something like this. The first time we see such a face separate from the ghost roads, their body shape looks a lot like the kumanthongs. Specifically: the state the kumanthongs were in when they abducted Thessaly. This absolutely matters but consider the word choice in the panel above: among the Endless, isn’t there someone who knows suffering, inside and out? Whose mind frequently returns to the imagery of a pierced eyeball?

If the kumanthongs are the foundation for the botched resurrection spell…and if they can snatch Rowland and Paine directly from the ghost roads…could this tell us anything about the mysterious, external force that caught Thessaly off guard?

If this force was connected with Despair of The Endless, then it would line up with the role Desire played in Nightmare Country. Desire and Despair are frequent collaborators, after all, not to mention twins. If Desire and hir thralls are the “operators” then maybe Despair is the “backup.”

Speaking of Nightmare Country– the Corinthian keeps a notebook filled with his favorite memory-fragments from his first life. One of his favorites involves a mirror, rather like the mirrors that surround Despair in her own realm. If Desire’s servants (Ecstasy and Agony) are systematically killing the would-be authors of works about the Corinthian, it looks even more like the Corinthian is attached to some middle-ground between the machinations of the Endless twins. The Corinthian, by the way, was one of Morpheus’ favorite creations because he functions as a ‘dark mirror’ for humanity.

The *Nightmare Country* version of a scene glimpsed in one of Despair’s mirrors in ‘Brief Lives’

Or not…? This is the image from ‘Brief Lives.’ The hair is different, they’re wearing a shirt and they have a fork. No evidence of Corinthian features either but teeth eyes can slip through in a background detail like this.
The figure in this image appears to have gouged one eye out, which has at least a passing resemblance to the boy feeding his fingers to his eyes.
Maybe the visual similarities are closer to a reference rather than a direct connection. I wouldn’t be surprised if *Nightmare Country* was going for an uncanny resemblance

As cool as this is, though, another aspect of Despair is more relevant to the current Dead Boy Detectives story. Whenever anyone looks into a mirror in a state of despair, their reflection is visible in Despair’s realm, who looks back at them. In the total alienation of despair, all you have is yourself and despair has a way of diminishing even that. Despair warps your self-image and her cold gaze is the only one looking out at you from the mirror.

Even the symbolism of the kumanthongs relate to this: stillborn fetuses, painted gold, their innocence ceremonially bottled for later use. They derive their strength, in part, from the pure simplicity of that innocence. Such power, though, is not easy to wield. It is very simple and its momentum is unidirectional. Such is the power of a permanent, unchanging state of being.

Dom, a psychic who briefly cares for the Thai ghosts appearing in the wake of the spell, thinks something similar. He believes that these ghosts are especially vulnerable because they are children. In his mental narration, their innocence was “cut short”, like stunted beings for whom change is death.

Both Rowland and Paine have been children for decades. Paine only recently cleared his first century. When Rowland falls for a living friend, though, he begins to realize what permanent childhood could mean. Paine sees this as well and believes the solution is to narrow the scale of their activities. What Paine and Rowland have always done together was solve mysteries: that must suffice. The prospect of losing Rowland, though, awakened him to his own discontent with the narrow scale.

Similar frustrations with static existence come through in all of the Thai ghosts but Jai and Melvin stuck with me, in particular. Jai believes her parents moved to America to pursue shallow and mistaken values, which she equates with a generalized tendency of adults to accept comfort over thriving. She fears this, more than anything. Melvin, a loud chlid whose short life taught him the defensive value of a big personality, is perpetually haunted by stereotype threat. When faced with his own despair, he protects himself with fury and a drive toward retribution.

Like the kumanthongs, the energy of despair is unidirectional and gravitates toward itself. More than anything else, despair tempts you with the illusion of inevitability. Not unlike the magnetism between Hell and Hellions, in ‘Season Of Mists’. This dynamic and the realizaiton that you don’t have to stay anywhere (or remain in the same state) forever is the emotional core of this book, which is one thing that I do not want to spoil.

The Sandman Universe: Nightmare Country, volume 1 review (heavy spoiler warning)

Mini-print of Death holding Corinthian’s skull by Jenny Frison ♥️ (packed into the hardcover edition)

The first volume of Nightmare Country riffs on the old enmity between Dream and Desire. The story turns on a struggle between the wealth of dreams and the desires that furnish their creation. Not unlike the wave-breaks against the Corinthian as he wades into the Shores of Night.

Volume one begins and ends with souls who are tortured by thwarted desire, with a strained relationship with dreams (of any kind).

Both of them are presented with mysteries. Madison Flynn is an artist haunted by a persistant hallucination of a large, gelatinous figure with mouths for eyes, which she interprets in various states in her art. Jamie is commissioned to write a screenplay about a mysterious, legendary murder.

Flynn names her mystery the “smiling man” and her interpretations make an impression on one of her flings. Said fling falls asleep at her place and dreams about the pictures. While this is happening, we learn he is a regular victim of the Corinthian in his nightmare state. The usual havoc is about to ensue when the Corinthian notices the pictures.

Jamie’s mystery is a murder victim who turns out to be Flynn. The first one runs its course before our (ahem) eyes. The second mystery is almost immediately noticed by someone else: Thessaly, from the original Sandman, currently living under the name Lamia. Under any name, though, she never suffers obfuscation.

Lamia decides to save Jamie some legwork and channels a necromantic link through which he can speak directly to Flynn. When he asks her how she died, he sees a vision and bursts into flames. A moment before, he saw the eye of Desire bracketed by two uncanny faces: a gimp mask and a mutilated smile that would have been at home in some recent Batman comics. The faces are succeeded by the hook that is Despair’s sigil and a final image of an angel.

Jamie, it seems, is the latest in a number of victims. Taking Lucien’s word for it, Jamie is the sixteenth target in a particular series of attacks.

When Lucien brings it up, though, the body count rests at fourteen. Lucien discovers a book is missing from the Dreaming’s library and tracks it down: in the posession of the Corinthian who is, at that present moment, sitting in a diner with Flynn after finding her in the waking world.

Like a lot of awkward situations, it “wasn’t what it looked like.” The Corinthian was, in fact, talking to Flynn about her paintings and why his face is in them. The activities of the first Corinthian in the waking world, though, give Lucien reason to be vigilent. In his first flawed incarnation, the Corinthian became a menace- a mythic archetype among serial killers who eventually became one. The elder Dream of the Endless, Morpheus, uncreated him. The Corinthian had been a favorite creation of Morpheus, though, so he eventually recreated him taking pains to ensure that the new Corinthian would not have the weaknesses of the old.

Certain activities in House of Whispers notwithstanding, the younger Corinthian has not pushed boundaries (the boundary around killing humans for fun, anyway). Nonetheless…the whole comic revolves around the fear of his appearance, what with Flynn being our major viewpoint character and her visions of the smiling man. The cover of volume one is the Corinthian’s face with a red filter, all three mouths grinning and bearing their teeth like angry chimps.

In ‘The Kindly Ones’, though, the younger Corinthian goes on a long, eventful fetch-quest that involves rescuing a baby. Morpheus sent Matthew with him but the Corinthian eventually returns alone, bringing the child safely to the Dreaming unsupervised. If this is the nightmare that launched a thousand serial killers, it’s not quite the same nightmare.

As likely as it may have been in the hands of another writer, the Corinthian is not the big bad of this story. Madison Flynn may be the most direct point of empathy for the reader but our perspective is divided largely between Flynn and the Corinthian. They’re basically the two main characters.

A good story does not say everything at once, though, and this is only the first volume. The identity behind the curtain might not even get us very far.

This agency is first seen in the apparent killers of the unwritten Corinthian texts: Mister Ecstasy and Mister Agony, who are quietly followed at all times by the same smiling apparition that haunts Flynn. They are, respectively, also the bearers of the grotesque smile and the gimp mask seen by Jamie before his death.

Although we are never told, explicitly, who is directing Agony and Ecstasy, we do see something happen, after the pair take an early victim. Mister Agony produces a pocket watch, which speaks to him when opened: “Madison Flynn. Age 20. Brooklyn, New York.” Given what we know of Flynn’s inclusion among the unwritten authors of the Corinthian, the equation is clear: Madison is the next author on the list. We know, at least, that the power above Agony and Ecstasy has an awareness of the Dreaming. More specifically- one of its natives.

At first, I thought these were the same characters from ‘A Hope In Hell’. Tiny, fey-like demons can be seen during the challenge for Morpheus’s helm, referred to as “the twins”- Ecstasy and Agony. The appearance of an angel seems to confirm an association with Hell…but not for this reason. Daniel recognizes Agony and Ecstasy as “(b)ounty hunters, trained at the Unseen Cathedral”. Shortly, they’re both seen in the Threshold- the throne of Desire, whom they call their “employer”. In ‘Three Septembers And A January’, Desire employs an undead servant called the King of Pain.

Also in ‘Three Septembers And A January’, the King of Pain began existence as a gambler that committed suicide over his debts. In his reanimated state, he has a frozen smile like Mister Ecstasy. When Daniel is summoned by the Corinthian, he says that the bounty hunters of the Unseen Cathedral used to be human and may, in some way, remain so. Maybe Desire has a pattern of using undead servants.

Let us not forget their third companion- the same “smiling man” that haunts the restless mind of Flynn. Flynn has not dreamed since childhood, which almost creates an association between the smiling man and a sleep-deprivation hallucination. In the world of The Sandman, dream-kind such as gods and nightmares are known to psychically manifest as hallucinations or entities in one’s dreams. If the smiling man is a nightmare or some other dream-kind, then maybe his resemblance to the Corinthian is more than skin-deep.

Even if he is dream-kind, though, he is obviously more aligned with Desire than Dream. And, presumably, to be aligned with Desire is to be aligned with Despair. Despair’s sigil was emphasized, in Jamie’s fatal vision, equally with Desire, hir servants and an ambiguous angel.

Ambiguity is rather the trouble with identifying angels in the Sandman universe. Angels bound to the Silver City have delicate, cursive lettering. The Silver City’s stewards of Hell are known to acquire similiar lettering to Lucifer but not quite the same.

At least, they do in the new Sandman Universe comics. Remiel kept his cursive writing until the end of Gaiman’s Sandman and even into Mike Carey’s Lucifer comics. During the SU Lucifer reboot with Dan Watters, the angel lettering in general began to resemble Lucifer’s.

I remember, when I first read the original Sandman comics, thinking that Desire and Lucifer had some of the most interesting lettering. I noticed they were similar but- in my mind, at least -they were impossible to confuse with each other. As an adult, I’m less certain. Possibly because the cursive angel lettering got phased out a long time ago. I suspected there was a vague thematic association going on in the Dan Watters Lucifer. Like, maybe Remiel’s lettering is changing because he is becoming acclimated to being the steward of Hell, and therefore more “of” Hell than the Silver City. For whatever reason, though, Lucifer’s lettering hasn’t been completely unique for years and now here we are. During the original Sandman, the lettering of Desire and Lucifer resembled each other but no one else.

Lucifer’s ‘e’ looks like a crescent moon with a line through the middle. Desire’s ‘e’ looks like a backwards 3. ’h’, ‘t’, ‘f’ ‘y’ and ‘a’ are also different. In general, though, Lucifer’s lettering looks like faux-Hebrew and Desire’s lettering is faux-Hellenist. Desire’s lettering also has more resemblances to the typical comic font.

So it looks like the angel in the pages of Nightmare Country could be said to have the post-Watters lettering. Which means that the lettering alone will not tell you which angel. My guess, right now, is that the Nightmare Country angel is an original character.

And while the angels, in the SU, are a homogonous group, Desire is one of the Endless. Maybe the post-Watters SU emphasizes Lucifer’s nature as an angel more than his uniqueness. But the lettering of the Endless is always distinctive. If their voices issue from a source with no apparent connection to them, there almost must necessarily be a hidden connection.

Speaking of: Agony and Ecstasy. I hyperfocused on the lettering because it seemed like an avenue that could either confirm or deny the connection to ‘A Hope In Hell’. At the end of the first volume of Nightmare Country, Agony and Ecstasy are revealed to be former humans. Even before then, though, I overlooked an even more fundamental reason why Ecstasy and Agony cannot be demons: they have the same lettering as Dream. The first Dream, meaning Morpheus.

Dream of the Endless is connected to every dreamer and dream-kind but each singularity is not, necessarily, identical to him. Morpheus was also known to “store” his power in enchanted objects. One such stone, an emerald, ends up in the hands of Daniel Hall. Evidently, Dream put enough of himself into the emerald to regenerate his soul, giving us our second Dream. The undead husks of Agony and Ecstasy could be similarly invested. Sandman: Overture reveals that Desire would go at least as far for infiltration and espionage.

The Corinthian’s internal narration in Nightmare Country touches on his faint memories of his earlier existence; his defeat at the hands of Dream, at the serial killer convention. Mention is made of Morpheus’ parting curse: may none of the attendant serial killers ever succeed in ignoring who they are and what they’ve done. His curse was the withdrawal of a dream, exercised by the power of the Dreaming. Perhaps Ecstasy and Agony were once human serial killers who were somehow shaped by that expenditure of dream magic. One cursed by separation from the Dreaming would probably find the perfect outlet by serving Desire. In his mental narration, the Corinthian is also very aware of the differences between the current Dream and the Dream he once knew.

When Jamie asks Flynn who killed her, she reveals five images. Agony, Ecstasy, Desire and the mystery angel. And the sigil of Despair. Come to think of it, the smiling man resembles Despair almost as much as he resembles the Corinthian.

The Books of Magic review (light spoilers)

The collected edition of Neil Gaiman’s opening run on The Books of Magic is one of the most unconventional comics I’ve ever read. While plot construction is one of Gaiman’s strengths, this story does not rely on it much.

Or at least…it doesn’t rely on plot the way most stories do. Lots of stuff happens off camera. The central narrative details the education of a young boy named Timothy Hunter. Timothy has the potential to become the greatest magician of the current age and is taken in hand by DC/Vertigo’s “trenchcoat brigade”: John Constantine, Doctor Occult, Mister E and Phantom Stranger. While Tim is receiving all these words of wisdom, other characters are frequently rushing around doing other things.

Major characterization details are hinted at more than they are shown. With a bit of context this can be overlooked: Neil Gaiman wrote these comics when he was commissioned to do an ensemble story for DC featuring all of their occult characters. The four volumes anthologized in the collected edition were also meant to be a frame work that later stories would spring from. Meaning that Neil’s chief obligation to DC & Vertigo was to establish that a bunch of characters exist in the same universe so other writers could craft stories about them interacting with each other.

So, of course, many of those implied character beats are meant to be callbacks or references for the benefit of readers already familiar with the source materials. Neil Gaiman also took the opportunity to introduce several original characters besides Tim Hunter. One of them, Mister E, has a naming scheme that makes him fit in with the likes of Dr. Occult and Phantom Stranger. He’s a Neil Gaiman creation designed to fit into the overall DC occult universe. If you’re like me and you’re learning about many of these characters for the first time, it’s easy to assume Mister E is another pre-existing character.

Neil Gaiman cannot resist an opportunity to throw a wild card into situations where you are tempted to assume you know what is going on. With this in mind, the subtle introduction of Mister E has got to be intentional.

Another interesting original: Glory. The first time I ever heard of that character was in Sandman: Overture in 2013. The Books of Magic miniseries was first anthologized as a trade paperback book in 1993 though. In retrospect, it lines up: Neil Gaiman has said that he was thinking of the plot of Overture since the early nineties. He originally planned to publish the story that would become Overture as part of the original Sandman run. Even so…it’s a little hard not to be gobsmacked by that character’s appearance in an early nineties comic. For me, anyway.

Comic franchises like DC doing crossover ensemble stories have long been par for the course. When I say that The Books of Magic is one of the most unconventional comics I ever read, I mean the relationship between it’s stated subject matter and it’s script. Most of Timothy’s would-be mentors attempt to shelter and educate him. Tension mounts when Tim is not sheltered and instead learns firsthand. This, in turn, forms a response to the lectures.

Speaking of the lectures…consider the various qualities they attribute to magic. The lessons of Phantom Stranger and Mister E are the furthest from waking, physical life. The lessons of Constantine and Dr. Occult are the closest. Phantom Stranger and Mister E discuss universal generalities of time and space which relate to magic. Constantine and Dr. Occult discuss magic in terms of it’s accessibility from waking existence. The generalities often have smaller details which are consistent with the more specific lessons.

While traveling with John Constantine, Timothy meets magicians who reside in the physical world who discuss their magic in words that have double meanings that can just as easily be true of our reality. Upon arriving in America, Constantine says that, as a boy in England, the comics he read made America sound like a fantasy land. All America was to him as a child was a world where a lot of colorful, larger than life characters were- and also where he was not. As I read that I was reminded of the Atlantis vignette from the lesson of Phantom Stranger.

The Atlantean magician says that Atlantis itself is a symbol of the art (meaning magic). All interactions with Atlantis are with emanations of the original- not the original itself. Later, in the company of Dr. Occult (who occasionally transforms into a female alter ego named Rose), Timothy travels through Faerie, the Dreaming, Hell and a cave where dwells a bard singing songs about a mythic king who sleeps beneath all countries. This could be Heinrich Barbarossa, King Arthur, the Roman Emperor Julian, King Solomon or any other living king that passed into the myths of people who dreamt of their return.

The magical countries of Faerie, Hell, the Dreaming, Atlantis and America are all alternatives to physical reality that provide the opportunity for genuine change to manifest. Many of the magicians residing in the physical world that Timothy encounters have rather simplistic ways of “clipping out of bounds.” Zatana and her father (two of the pre-existing DC characters) discovered magic while talking backwards. Madame Xanadu, another established DC character, begins simply with a Tarot reading. She freely admits that the Tarot symbols could be interpreted on any number of symbolic levels or literally.

This all pops when Timothy and Constantine visit a magician who wants nothing more to do with the practice of magic and insists that anything else is a better use of time and effort.

Magic, for Baron Winter, is everything outside of reality. Atlantis and the fantasy realms of divergence are paths outside of reality that begin with imaginary contrast or re-interpretation. Earlier, with Phantom Stranger, Timothy’s encounter with the Atlantean magician is situated between the distant beginnings of the universe and the birth of human myth, rather like a link between them.

Anyone else think that there’s no way that *isn’t* the same Hamnet from the *Midsummer Night’s Dream* story in *The Sandman*?

It really starts to look like that when these characters are discussing magic they’re actually talking about imagination. However I don’t think The Books of Magic is a narrative treatise in the same way that Promethea is. Yet it is difficult to look past the prominent dialogue. Dialogue (or just someone talking to you without an answer) is a way of directing attention. While Tim is being lectured by Earth-dwelling magicians, a clash between the trenchcoat brigade and the evil magic cabal known as the Cold Flame happens elsewhere. One character in particular is reputed to have fought valiantly in Timothy’s defense. Later, when Tim is alone with him, he’s rather less protective. Details like that draw your attention to what is stated to Timothy versus what he directly observes.

Yes this relates to a plot point and the pay-off at the ending is realizing what happened much earlier while your attention was directed elsewhere. Come to think of it, I think there’s a word for a kind of stage performance you do where you carefully control the audience’s attention so you can do cool things in their blind spots that they don’t notice til later. Involves cutting people in half and rabbits in hats. Cain took a run at it in Season of Mists.

I’ve been light on spoilers so far but now I’m gonna get into some speculation that could spoil some stuff, in case you’d rather not know.

That this was written near the inception of the original Sandman comics appears significant. I have not yet read any of the following Books of Magic comics after this point that were not written by Gaiman. I do have the three recent Books of Magic collected editions from the Sandman Universe run, though, so I’ll probably review those sooner or later. I have also been meaning to review the SU House of Whispers comics but they’re just so dense that I think I better re-read them first.

Back on topic though: Gaiman said that the story that would eventually become The Sandman: Overture was in his head in the early nineties. He also originally intended to publish it within the original Sandman series. The appearance of Glory at Faerie in Books of Magic resembles what might be some early groundwork he was laying for his original Overture plan. The idea of the Gemworld, introduced in Books of Magic, could also tie into that.

Early in Overture, we see all manifestations of Dream, from the eyes of all who have seen him, all interact with each other. It at least seems possible that, along with the “emanation” metaphysics, those different facets are also intertwined with his soul. When Timothy encounters the Gemworld and the regions beyond it with Mister E, mention is made of diverse timelines and how they cluster in matrices of probability. Overture is the only other story within the world of The Sandman that also prominently features different timelines. Mister E also points out, in their journey through future timelines, a cancerous god whose soul forms a hive mind with his followers. I think this sounds like the mad star who became a dream vortex in Overture.

I don’t think I’m ready to commit to the theory that Mister E showed Timothy the foreclosed timeline of Overture but it sorta looks like it. This then leaves us with the conundrum of the mundane egg which also plays a role in the later Sandman Universe stories.

Marvel 1602, volume one

Sooo I read my first Marvel comic not so long ago! I gotta say I was way more impressed by Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602 than with the relatively new re-imaginings of older properties in recent film. And yes, as is typical of me, I won’t be taking any particular care to avoid spoilers.

Granted, some of these characters I knew nothing of prior, other than their names and certain details of their back stories. I remembered enough of that one Iron Man movie right before The Avengers to know who Nick Fury was and I briefly dated a guy who was really into Dr. Strange (he once said something about Dr. Strange comics being one of the first in the industry to involve Eastern religion).

Those were the characters I knew the least about, though. As someone who was in first grade during the early days of Cartoon Network, I was sometimes able to catch episodes of the older Hannah-Barbara Fantastic Four cartoon. Around the same time, the Fox Kids Saturday morning block was getting off the ground with contemporary animated versions of Spider-Man and X-Men.

(If I may stop for a silly digression, idiosyncratic usages of punctuations are funny. Especially when you know a given punctuation choice is supposed to entirely be a matter of personal preference with no relationship to grammar. I mean, I can’t think of a whole lot of superheroes just now that use hyphens in their names. Just now, I really can’t think of any others except Spider-Man and the X-Men. There. It’s out of my system now)

I enjoyed both but Spider-Man held my interest a little more, possibly for no other reason than that Peter Parker’s double-life in a large urban setting and occasional brooding reminded me a little bit of Batman: The Animated Series which, in my opinion at the time, made it slightly better by association. More recently, I’ve been hooked by the Netflix Marvel shows, particularly Daredevil and Jessica Jones. In high school I knew a few fans of the Punisher but learned virtually nothing about him until the movie came out. At that point I decided he’s a completely impoverished catch-all of Batman tropes. The Punisher is a blandly moralizing serial killer whose rejection of a wider moral context, in and of itself, is awkwardly framed as compelling (punishment versus justice). Essentially, he’s the Joker without humor, Batman without morality and Two-Face without character development. Oh yeah, and he’s fascist-friendly. So the Netflix Daredevil show scored points with me by making him the villain of the second season.

This was my frame of reference coming to Marvel 1602, which I was originally interested in when a random Wikipedia link led me to a Daredevil elseworld page. I read a little more and the re-imagining of the X-Men characters piqued my interest. I read a little further and found that Neil Gaiman was the author of the story arc that constitutes the first graphic novel and it then became mandatory reading. I can nit-pick a few of his novel-length prose stories and his short stories range from so-so to delightfully clever, but the man is absolutely unparalleled with it comes to comics. When I finally write my Promethea review, that will be a nice segue toward the specific genius of Neil Gaiman’s contribution to graphic literature (it contrasts with Alan Moore’s writing style and Promethea contains departures from Moore’s typical MO that makes the contrast relevant). For now, though, I’ll just say Neil Gaiman continues to be my favorite graphic lit writer.

Anyway, my first proper narrative encounter with Dr. Strange seems to bear some resemblance to Dr. John Dee, an enigmatic and potentially mythic figure who is sometimes presented in fiction as a court magician of sorts in the employ of Queen Elizabeth. John Dee is still somewhat fresh in my mind from the brief mention in Alan Moore’s prose novel Voice of the Fire within the vignette called Angel Language, so I was tickled. To my delight, Renaissance-era Daredevil appeared in fairly short order after the opening scene, as did a charming re-imagining of Peter Parker as Peter Parquagh, a young dogsbody and student under the tutelage of Sir Nicholas Fury.

Close on the heels of this is a fictionalized version of Virginia Dare, the first European child born in America after European colonization began in earnest, who is travelling in the company of an…apparent Native American named Rojhaz. Who is blonde haired and blue eyed. Later, in conversation with Queen Elizabeth, Virginia says that blondes among the Natives testifies to the possibility that the Welsh landed in America before the Spanish and started families with those that received them.

Okay okay okay okay okay I get it. He’s Captain America. Fine. This is a Marvel story, after all, and there’s no other likely candidate and the dude’s name was originally Steve Rogers so it fits. Still, as a Native American, watching white people do Native stuff gets old really, really quickly. Does Rojhaz’s role in the story’s denouement make up for it? Not really, but it was still cool enough to ease the burn. When Rojhaz is revealed to be none other than the original Steve Rogers himself, sent back in time and causing a temporal paradox that threatens the universe, it ties together a big thematic element. The resolution of the paradox also helps this along.

Captain America says he wants to make the future inhabitants of the continent proud to be Americans- minutes before getting knocked unconscious by Nicholas Fury. While the conclusion of this story didn’t quite push me in that direction, it did offer a forgiving interpretation of the meaning of the so-called New World in the European mind at that time, and even ties it into a bigger philosophical question about the nature of possibility and hope.

At the beginning, Virginia Dare and Rohjaz set out for England hoping to persuade Queen Elizabeth to offer more financial support for their colony at Roanoke. At the end, Sir Nicholas Fury is an enemy of the Crown for having disobeyed the newly ascendant King James of England and Scotland, Carlos Javier and his gifted students are fleeing the wrath of the Spanish Inquisition with former Inquisitor Enrique (Renaissance Magneto) and his own followers in tow, all bound for America, empty-handed and exiled.

On the shores of the American continent, the witchbreed students of Carlos Javier begin to hope for a home in which they can be themselves openly and without fear of persecution, while also dreading the imminent arrival of Enrique and the Brotherhood of Those who will Inherit the Earth. Banner, an agent of King James taking Peter Parquagh as a captive and reluctant informant, is also fast approaching. Virginia’s father begins to despair of the future of the colony without Queen Elizabeth or any support from the British Crown and also has to reconcile himself with newcomers who may bring more trouble in their wake. After Clea Strange forces Rohjaz to reveal his true identity, he begins to fantasize about a new America that he would help along through his inability to age. And then he gets sent back to his own time retroactively, permanently closing off most of the effects of his resulting paradox. The colony at Roanoke, abandoned by the Crown and helpless without the meta-humans, is now doomed to vanish. The stark Roanoke disappearance will not happen immediately, but it will happen.

This is framed well by the commentary of Strange’s alien connections, called Watchers. The young Watcher who relayed the news about the paradox through Strange to the meta-humans is instantly consumed with shame. Watchers are a people who, normally, are destined only to watch and appreciate the whole universe objectively. The objectivity of their Watching is implicitly linked to an appreciation for the universe as something that is both ever-changing and also whole and complete unto itself. The young Watcher called Uatu, who assisted Stephen and Clea Strange in resolving the paradox, is heart-broken over the newly emergent possibilities being shut down. For a Watcher, it is a tragedy that any possibility should be foreclosed, as per the simultaneous flux and completion of the universe. The fact that this one particular chain of events needed to be retroactively taken out to preserve the wider universe is undeniable, but that does not prevent one from mourning the loss of the newer and stranger possibilities that almost happened.

While this has all the bombastic sci-fi bells and whistles you could ask for, what with aliens and time travel and paradoxes, it’s still a rather subtle look at what we think of as being possible and how that shapes the scope of our aspirations. It’s subtlety can be detected in that it involves the eventual obliteration of the characters that shaped our perspective as readers, how they navigated the world and what they understood as inevitable facts of life. Our protagonists are oppressed by the cumulative menace posed by the Inquisition, Count Otto Von Doom and King James in the beginning. At the end, they know that they will soon be wiped from existence and their last few moments of subjective life are gravely limited. We nonetheless end with a touching hint of friendship and intimacy between Virginia Dare and Peter Parquagh. In the last few panels, Peter is bitten by a spider and Viriginia says “it’s not the end of the world.”

Each step into the future is a step into a vacuum, it can either be an explosion of possibility or oblivion itself, but one only ascertains which by taking existence moment by moment, forming our dreams in the shelters of our minds and the love of those around us. Very typical of Neil Gaiman, really. It reminds me of what Stephen King wrote in his introduction to the graphic novel World’s End, that in Neil Gaiman’s stories there is a fundamental good will that applies to everyone, that everyone is deserving of shelter, perhaps the shelter at the end of the universe featured within World’s End. Marvel 1602 is also a clear expression of this kindly humanism.

There’s a lot more in this story that I appreciated, but that’s the big one I wanted to get out of the way. I particularly liked the parts of this tale concerning the Renaissance-era X-Men, but unfortunately the high point of that also ties into the low point.

One of our early character viewpoints on the students of Master Carolus Javier’s Select College For The Sons of Gentlefolk is a mutant named Werner, known commonly as Angel, who quickly develops a romance with young Master John Grey. Anyone who follows Neil Gaiman knows that he is, in general, very queer friendly and female friendly and typically pulls absolutely no punches in this regard. As the romantic chemistry blossoms between the two witchbreed youths we begin to see jealous outbursts from Scotius Summerisle (our version of Cyclops), which reminded me of the jealous lover from the first live-action X-Men movie. Not only are there queer characters, but it also looks like a queer romantic subplot is developing and it ties in with previously established nuances of the mythos. I was absolutely over the moon about this for awhile. And then John Grey turns out to be a woman disguised as a man. Like I said, Neil Gaiman normally does not pull punches with LGBT characters. I find it very easy to suspect executive meddling of one kind or another. It’s disappointing, but there you go.

All in all I very much enjoyed this book and can easily see myself re-reading it soon. A very nice way to lose one’s Marvel Comics virginity 😀