Nightmare Country, volume 2 review (spoilers)

*Nightmare Country –* ‘The Glass House #1’ 1:50 variant cover by Yoshitaka Amano
Speaking of: as a *Final Fantasy* fan girl, I’ve always wondered what it would be like if Amano did another full-length *Sandman* story collaboration, like he did with *Dream Hunters*

Other Sandman Universe comics have met high qualitative bars close to the original.

Two, at least, in my opinion. The Dan Watters Lucifer comics are some of my favorite stories in the pictures-and-word-balloons format. House of Whispers tells a story set in the same world but with its own catalyzing circumstances. It nonetheless features some familiar sights, like the Dreaming and the Corinthian. Even the rebooted Books of Magic and The Dreaming, with their visible weaknesses, succeed in other areas. The recent Dead Boy Detectives reboot hit some careful notes with subtle, thematic callbacks to the ‘Season of Mists’ arc.

Reiko Murakami, variant cover for ‘Glass House #6’

What distinguishes Nightmare Country is relatively familiar circumstances. Obviously we have classic power players like Desire and Despair, but the plot dynamics and the world building unfold like a 90s Sandman comic. With the usual caveats, of course.

The new Sandman Universe comics are situated, roughly, as one big sequel series to the original. Thessaly and the Corinthian are our central viewpoint characters in Nightmare Country and the plot is a few turns of cause-and-effect removed from the original.

‘Thessaly Special #1’ variant cover by Jasmin Darnell

Thessaly stepped in at the end of the first book and her after-the-fact discoveries keep the relevant data points united in one character’s mind. Flynn, embodied as a dream-kind cat (like Matthew is a dream-kind raven), has a deeper perspective but her agency is limited in the waking world. The Corinthian, tasked with her protection by Dream, is the muscle. Thessaly has more freedom to pursue her own ends.

The Corinthian and Flynn are immediately evocative of his trip with Matthew in ‘The Kindly Ones’. The overall dynamic also fits within the tendency the 90s Sandman had toward “odd couple” plots. Corinthian plus Matthew, Rose plus Fiddler’s Green, Dream plus Delirium, etc.

Speaking of unlikely bedfellows, Nightmare Country book two brings back a character whose only prior appearance was as peculiar as it was short.

The King of Pain: last seen in ‘Three Septembers and a January’, during the competition for Joshua Norton’s soul in the nineteenth century. The contenders were Desire, Despair, Delirium and Dream. Desire attempts to dominate Norton with a supernatural visitation and an offer to fulfill any sexual wish. Her/his envoy in this was a walking corpse, who was once a gambler who committed suicide over his debts. Whoever he was during his lifetime, he now introduces himself as the King of Pain.

Norton brushes him off and he slinks back outside to a carriage where Desire and Dream wait. The King of Pain then starts slavishly fawning over Desire while the siblings argue over Norton.

I suspected he might show up after the first Nightmare Country collection. From the beginning, we are acquainted with a pair of undead assassins, loyal to Desire, called Mr. Agony and Mr. Ecstasy. It’s easy to forget one character from a massive comic with many short story anthologies…but if you happen to remember him, he is a clear precedent.

Mr. Ecstasy, Mr. Agony and the King of Pain all attest to Desire’s pattern of using undead servants. The similarities may stop there, though: Mr. Agony and Mr. Ecstasy are “bounty hunters, trained at the Unseen Cathedral”. The King of Pain is not a warrior.

He could very well be something, though.

As in the last book, there are ideas that can draw the wrath of Desire’s assassins. Last time, the targets appeared to be people who are inspired (consciously or not) to write books about the Corinthian. In book two, ‘The Glass House’, the deadly ideas include books “about” the King of Pain.

What remains the same: those who have the deadly ideas claim to never dream and regularly hallucinate a fat, naked, smiling man with Corinthian-like eye-mouths.

Our present inspired-uninspirable is Max Lee. Like Flynn and Jamie, Max doesn’t dream. Also like them, Max exists in a state of perpetual, unsatisfied yearning. Flynn’s friends did not respect or acknowledge one of the largest parts of her life: art, inspired by the Smiling Man. The guy she hooked up with in the beginning only listens to her long enough to sleep with her. While he dreams, he expresses contempt for her while talking to the Corinthian. Jamie has perpetual imposter syndrome and is terrified that everyone is barely tolerating him.

Between them, Max has more in common with Jamie. All three of them live as if acceptance is conditional. If all validation necessarily requires compromise and submission from you, it implies that you- on your own terms -would basically just be “in the way” for everyone else. In a scene where Max says he hasn’t dreamt since childhood, the shape of his body is a white void in the panel.

One notable difference with Max: as alienated as he is, he does fall in love with Kells, who is paired with him by Azazel. His unspeakable itch that he needed to go to a demonic nightclub to scratch: to cuddle, talk and exchange earnest affection. Something we haven’t seen any other inspired-uninspirable achieve.

The specific content of the deadly ideas may be less important than (or equal to) the people who have them. Late in the book, Dream mentions an inverse-echo of the regular dream vortex events, such as the one that swept up Unity Kincaid and Rose Walker.

The dream vortex seems to require a sentient anchor to latch onto, at first. In the late stages of a vortex, the initial anchor can be subsumed in the conglomerate of blended souls but it at least starts with one dreamer (Sandman: Overture).

Flynn, Jamie and Max all resemble one another and they all see the Smiling Man. At the same time, the words and behavior of the angel “Morrie” imply that there is a part of this that is less bound to one person.

Each iteration of the deadly idea accumulates from the older versions. In the beginning, the inspired-uninspirables had ideas to write books about the Corinthian.

An oddity about Ecstasy, Agony and the Smiling Man: they all have the word balloons and lettering of Morpheus. The late elder Dream, as opposed to the current Dream that grew from Daniel Hall. Black word balloons, wavy boarders with soft white letters. In the world of The Sandman, the lettering of the Endless is absolutely unique. They only appear for a single character. If the speaker is not the given Endless than the given Endless has either shape-shifted or has invested something/someone with their soul.

In ‘The Glass House’, we learn that the demon Azazel has been carrying the blood of Morpheus ever since he was captured in ‘Season of Mists’. That is, blood shed by Morpheus in their brief fight. With the blood of Morpheus, Azazel had something of a private stash of dream-magic, with which he plies mortals with their most depraved and violent fantasies in exchange for their souls.

Morrie the angel, meanwhile, snorts dream sand, presumably from the same pouch that Morpheus once tracked down with John Constantine.

If this was about a demon and a renegade cousin of the Endless running an infernal fly-by-night operation, the possible uses for dream-magic would be evident. Yet the Morpheus lettering coming from the Smiling Man suggests that the good luck of a few soul-hawkers is not the only reason why we’re finding dream-magic tucked out of the way.

Especially since Dream (Daniel) wipes the memory of the Corinthian when he fails to convince him to abandon the mystery voluntarily. Dream also convinces Max, Kells and Flynn to stay in the Dreaming. After the manner of his predecessor, Daniel is implacable in his duties. To one of the new (potentially permanent, never to reveal any secrets) residents of the Dreaming, Daniel says that he suspects some kind of reverse dream vortex.

Which brings us back to the hidden stashes of dream-magic that seem to keep coming up. Azazel, with his soul-hustling, has a good enough reason to want dream-magic. But what about the Smiling Man and the deadly ideas?

I suspect that the content of the deadly ideas are not completely incidental. Morrie says, at one point, that a story touched by Dream of the Endless is more powerful than any other story.

Now…whatever was initially going on in the first Nightmare Country, with the Smiling Man, Madison Flynn and the fourteen other people who died before her…Dream got dragged in at the end, by the Corinthian. And, as we know, Dream saved Madison Flynn from death by turning her into a dream cat. In other words, the story of Madison Flynn is now touched by Dream of the Endless.

Jamie got involved- in all likelihood -because he was an inspired-uninspirable, who saw the Smiling Man. This, alone, seems to put him on the hit list of Agony and Ecstasy and therefore Desire.

Now, though, it appears writing a screen play about Madison Flynn has the same effect that writing about the Corinthian used to. Ditto the King of Pain. If Morrie’s plans require stories touched by Dream, commissioning a movie about Madison Flynn makes sense.

Yet there were already fifteen dead people (counting Flynn) who were inspired by the Corinthian. The fact that they may all have been interpreting the Smiling Man seems relevant. Thessaly attempts to cut through the obfuscation by pretending to be Jamie with a finished screen play.

Thessaly, “pretending” (artist is Reiko Murakami, variant cover for Thessaly Special #1, roughly in the middle of ‘The Glass House’)

If the inspired-uninspirables all see the Smiling Man, then is the tendency to imagine art/stories/etc. of the Corinthian pure coincidence?

If Morrie requires stories touched by Dream, then one way to make something happen with Dream is to target someone in his neighborhood. Too close a confidant could be a liability. It would have to be someone close to him- someone with Dream’s ear -who is not constantly at his side. It would also help if this person’s feelings are not always in agreement with Dream. The Corinthian wouldn’t be a bad target.

One possibility: the whole point was to make something happen that involves Dream. Once you have a thing that happened, you have something to talk about. Or, in other words, a story.

In could be that simple. That could explain why Azazel’s demonic playground is called ‘The King of Pain’. Who is that person, in this world, except someone who did something with the Endless, once? If all you needed were scraps of Dream-related history, it’s the kind of thing you might cling to.

The Smiling Man appears to be able to locate an inspired-uninspirable at any given moment. And they, of course, can locate him. But don’t the words of the lesser mouths have the lettering of Dream? Just like Ecstasy and Agony?

If the Smiling Man can find the inspired-uninspirables, perhaps the Smiling Man can consume them. Or consume whatever he detects in them: something to do with Dream.

Could the inspired-uninspirables all be manifestations of the inverse vortex? Unlikely, since Dream is apparently at ease housing two of them (Flynn and Max) in the Dreaming. The vortices are not normally harmless.

If the dream vortex unites dreamers in a voracious psychic mass…maybe the new vortex pulls something toward them? Haven’t we met (a round, naked, smiling) someone who is good at finding and absorbing things?

‘The Glass House’ #1 1:100 variant cover by Jenny Frison- beautiful rendering of the younger Dream but also sort of reminds me of Lestat

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.