#annotated sandman

Apparently NG had problems with beginning the story.

In one version of the script, Odin sent his wolves to fetch Loki and Thor. In another version, the Phantom Stranger, a longstanding DC character (first appearance: The Phantom Stranger #1, Nov. 1952) who also plays a significant part in NG's Books of Magic series, was slated to appear. NG intended that the Phantom Stranger would be waiting for Dream at the shores of the Dreaming, to warn him that he had guests waiting for him, and still arriving, in the castle. The Stranger there points out that Hell is the most desirable plot of psychic real estate in the DC Universe (a sentiment put into the mouth of Death in the published version). That script notes that the Stranger and the Sandman "have obviously known each other for a very long time." In an interview with the website Universe HQ, in 2000, NG talks about the relationship between the Sandman and the Phantom Stranger: "There is a script that was never used in Sandman # 24. In the first five pages of this issue, I originally wrote a version where Sandman is flying back from Hell and ends up finding the Phantom Stranger. They are there, standing, and have a conversation about what is to happen, saying mysterious things that only have meaning for themselves. It did not work very well, because Sandman and Phantom Stranger are very similar. I had a page and half of this, and I thought, This is just silly, and I cut everything."

The cavern is part of Teutonic mythology relating to Loki, one of the asir. According to some sources, he is brother to Odin; others state that he is bound to Odin by blood-oath (see 24.4.5, below). He is generally seen as the god of fire, mischief and evil. After reviling the gods at a feast arranged by Egir, he enraged the gods and was pursued by Odin, Kvasir (see 24.1.4, above), and Thor. He was bound with the entrails of his son Narve (by his third wife Signe) and put in a cave where the giantess Skadi placed a serpent, the venom of which drips onto his face. Signe (Sigyn) holds a cup or bowl to catch the poison, but when she steps away to empty it, drops fall onto his face, causing him to writhe and the earth to tremble. According to legend, he will remain bound until Ragnarok, the day of the final battle, when he will break free to lead the forces of evil against the gods. Then he and Heimdall, another son of Odin, will fight to the death.

On Alternate Scripts

Fimbulwinter is prophesied to be a terrible season, three years of cold and three years of rising lawlessness, preceding Ragnarök.

In an alternate script, Odin seeks Hell not to hide from Ragnarök but to avoid war, to end the disputes among the asir, Giants, humans, dark elves, and dwarves over territory. [sounds like they went with the alternate script for the show then]

Who is This Guy?

Several readers wrote to the editors, asking the identity of the dark figure visible behind Dream. The editors had no answer, and NG's script describes only a "grotesque thingie."

Order and Chaos

NG comments in the script, "Okay, now what I want to do here is bring in chaos and order. Frankly not a concept I have much time for in the DC universe:

It seems to be another way of talking about vaguely magic-ish gods, of whom the Lords of Order are splodgy shapes that sort of glow (not very orderly) and the Lords of Chaos are disembodied smiles (not particularly chaotic) — unless we're talking Hawk & Dove type titles, in which case Lords of Chaos and Order are good or bad magic gods, Order being a bit nicer than Chaos — straight out of Dungeons & Dragons. Up until now I've tended to simply avoid them (and slag them off in The Books of Magie)." The names Hawk and Dove have been used repeatedly as duo characters in the DC universe, but NG refers here to the series appearing in the late 1980s and early 1990s entitled Hawk and Dove in which it is eventually revealed that they are respectively a Lord of Order and a Lord of Chaos.

The Lords of Order first appeared as a group in Dr. Fate, Vol. 1, #1 (Jul. 1987), although only Nabu (created in 1941 but revealed here to be one of the Lords of Order) is named there. Beginning in 1963, British fantasy writer Michael Moorcock (1939-) wrote extensively about the metaphysical forces of Order and Chaos (drawing, among other sources, on the work of Poul Anderson, in particular his Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953)) and the struggle for the Cosmic Balance. NG, in a private conversation with this editor, acknowledged Moorcock as an important source for the characters appearing here.

The Lords of Chaos first appeared in Justice League America, Vol. 1, #32 and Justice League Europe, Vol. 1, #8 (both Nov. 1989), as the natural opponents of the Lords of Order.

The name "Kilderkin" is a joke — the obsolete word was a measure of beer or ale, half a barrel.

According to John Camden Hotten's 1865 Slang Dictionary, “Shivering lemmy" is "the name given by street-folk to any cager who exposes himself, half-naked, on a cold day, to obtain alms. The 'game' is unpleasant but exceedingly lucrative."

Remiel and Duma

Duma is usually identified in Jewish tradition as the angel of silence, associated with the underworld; he is said to guard the place of the dead, who are of course silent. Remiel ("God raises up") is said to be the angel of the resurrection of the dead, watching over those souls who rise to Heaven.

The Merkin

Another joke-name: A "merkin" is a pubic wig (the term was first recorded in 1617), used by women to conceal their shaved genitalia. (It has achleved a second life on the Internet as a slang - and derogatory - term for a denizen of the United States, in the form of a corruption of "merican," the colloquial abbreviation of "American.")

Eve

Note that, this being the Dreaming, Eve's appearance changes, in stages, from a woman of about 70 (according to the script) to a girl of about 20. As will be seen in Vol. 3, 40.16.3, Eve embodies the Three-in-One in herself.

The Egyptian Pantheon

The Egyptian gods represented here are not the chief deities: Anubis, the son of Isis and Osiris, was originally the god of the underworld, but by the fifth Egyptian dynasty he was supplanted by Osiris, whose attendant he became, serving as merely the guardian of tombs and the patron of embalmers. Bast, who also appears as a lion-headed woman with a solar aura, is the personification of life and fruitfulness, and while her worship was widespread, she was not one of the more potent gods. In her cat-headed aspect, she was generally known as Pasht. Bes is described as a shaggy-haired dwarf god who wears a lion's skin and bears a tail. In his gental aspect, he is a patron of dance, music, and pleasure and a protector of children and child-bearing women, justifying his designation as a "household" god.

Susano-o-no-Mikoto

NG sets the stage in the script: "It's funny. People think I plan way ahead, and in some ways I do; and indeed, this is the oldest Sandman idea I haven't used: this storyline was formed at about the same time I wrote Sandman 4, which was in about May 1988. I rang Rick Veitch prolific (comic artist/writer and proprietor of King Hell Comics) and told the story to him, and he told me I couldn't do it, because he wanted to do a story called King Hell, in which Lucifer was also going to quit — in Rick's story it was in order to wreak havoc and work evil in the world. And I sighed and said okay, I'll forget all about it. But then, for various reasons King Hell failed to materialise, and I thought, well, at least I get my 'Lucifer quitting' storyline back. And then it was just a matter of waiting... It actually makes me strangely uncomfortable when I get one of these story ideas which turn up fully formed and then sit at the back of your head, whispering in the darkness. Sandman 8 was one of them - I knew from the beginning that he'd meet Death, in a park, and they'd wander together around New York until he'd cheer up; I knew about the serial killer's convention about a year before I got there; and poor Rainie Blackwell, with her faces that fell off, was waiting, sad and lonely in her little apartment, a good year before I finally put her on paper in Sandman 20. But this one's had the longest gestation period of all of them, which is good on one hand, but bad on another - I have to recreate for myself the sheer joy I had when I realised that Lucifer could just get tired of hell, of being the adversary, of all that shit. That just one day he'd give it all up and go off and do something else. Just the sense of surprise at the idea. Theologically speaking, the whole idea for this plotline originated from a quote from — I believe - Teilhard de Chardin. Hang on, and I'll go and look in a big book of quotations and see if I can see it. Nope. Not in any of the books I've got. Anyway. From memory, the quote runs, 'I believe there is a hell, because the church teaches us that there is a hell. I do not have to believe that there is anybody there’. Something like that."

Chardin wrote, in The Divine Milieu (1926-27, 1932), "You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to hold with absolute certainty that a single person has been damned..." In a 1995 interview, however, NG corrected the source to the Abbé Arthur Mugnier (1853-1944), a Parisian theologian and close friend of Edith Wharton, about whom various sources tell the story that when asked if he believed in Hell, he answered, "Yes, because it is a dogma of the church, but I don't believe there is anyone in it."

In "Tomlinson," an 1891 poem by Rudyard Kipling, the titular subject stands before the gates of Heaven, and "The Wind that blows between the Worlds, it cut him like a knife..." The phrase "wind between the worlds" was adopted in 1920 by Alice Brown for the title of her Spiritualist novel of the same name, attributing it to Kipling.

The script for Issue #23 is reproduced as an appendix to Volume Two of the Absolute edition.

The Gates of Hell

NG's script describes the gates of Hell: "You probably remember from reading H.P. Lovecraft as a child, that he's prone occasionally to talk about cyclopean masonry at subtly wrong angles, which is huge and towering and somehow horrible... well, let's do that. The whole thing to concentrate on here is scale - the towering immensity of scale. We're looking at a wall, with huge and nightmarish architecture — it's horrible, vile and huge. Mind-fuckingly huge. Blocks and bricks and rocks and fragments of statues, and bits of skyscrapers and lumps of masonry. Huge buttresses coming out — see if you can get any references on the cathedral at Notre Dame

- then lose the gargoyles. This is a wall. Here and there set in the wall we see a tiny barred window. Now also set into the wall, the opening roughly in the middle of the double-page spread, is a huge gate - large enough for a small cathedral to walk through without bending down

- two barred metal and wooden doors. About half-way up, probably not even visible, is a tiny key-hole, the size of a normal key-hole. One of the gates has swung inward slightly, a distance of feet, which at this scale is just inches."

Livonia

Livonia was formerly the name of a region on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea in the modern countries of Latvia and Estonia. It was bounded by Riga Bay and Finnish Bay to the northwest, Pejpus Lake and Russia to the east, and Lithuania to the south. In an online chat in 1998, NG wrote, "I've been fond of Livonia ever since I learned that it was famous for its werewolf cults, where hundreds of unwilling villagers would be bespelled off for a couple of years to live as werewolves in the desert. The idea for the Breschau character probably came from a seed planted in urgen, lames Branch Cabell's novel [see 22.2.1, above, where he meets his father, Coth, who is being tortured in Hell, although not entirely to his satisfaction."

The Silver City

The "Silver City" is not paradise and it is not Heaven; it is not part of the order of created things. (See 24.14.2 below.) It is inhabited by the angels and the prime deity. It is first mentioned in More Fun Comics #52 (Feb. 1940), written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Bernard Baily.

The Boring Nature of the Act…

NG points out in an interview that this scene is an homage to the scene in Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's brilliant 1967 film Bedazzled, in which Cook, as the Devil, sits atop a post box and has Stanley Moon (the mortal played by Moore) prance around the box a number of times worshiping him, demonstrating the boring nature of the act.

Mazikeen

NG comments, "This is the scene that just sort of grew in my head, after I saw your pencils for the half-headed woman, Mazikeen, Kelley. She just looked so good. And despite the fact the poor woman is almost unintelligible (to the point where I wound up going over every line of her dialogue with [Sandman assistant editor| Tom Peyer, getting him to say it aloud, and rewriting phonetically any he couldn't make sense of once he had) I still want her back: I'm intrigued by a character who is simultaneously attractive and disgusting — the strange push-pull that generates. Anyway - in this panel we can't see her clearly. She's just a female shape coming towards us through the mist, foggy and out of focus, or at least, obscured by the cloud in front of her."

According to E. Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the Mazikeen were also known in Jewish tradition as the Shedeem, a species of beings "resembling the Arabian finn or genii, and said to be the agents of magic and enchantment." The Talmud identifies the Mazikeen as the offspring of Adam following the Fall, born after Cain and Abel and before the birth of Seth (Genesis 5:3).

Mazikeen says, "My Lord Lucifer.. and greetings, my lord."

"No. You are still my lord. I will not forsake you. I love you, master."

"Lucifer. Where you go, I will follow. Let me go with you please. I must stay by your side forever."

Lilith and the Lilim

Lilith is a complex mythological figure. Originally a storm god in folklore, she became the first wife of Adam, preceding Eve; in Cabbalistic tradition, she is a wife of Samael (Lucifer). She now symbolizes the evil or treacherous woman, the femme fatale. Although here Lucifer may mean it literally (Mazikeen appears to be half-demon), a "daughter of Lilith" generally denotes an evil woman, a witch, one of the lilim (see Vol. 3, 40.16.3).

“Empire of the Senseless (1988) is an apocalyptic novel by Kathy Acker; Jonathan Carroll's Sleeping in Flame (1988) is a novel of magical realism, about reincarnation and the power of stories. According to NG's script, the pile of books also includes Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), a novel about two girls who never leave their home, M.R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (which includes the titular "Lost Hearts" —see 15.13.4), and Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror (1978), a history of the 14th century.

The Jonathan Carroll connection is far from coincidental.

In several interviews, NG admits that he discarded the idea for "A Game of You" after he discovered Carroll's 1988 novel Bones of the Moon, which has a similar story of a woman haunted by her dream-fantasies.

Upon learning that NG had abandoned his storyline, Carroll urged him, "Go for it, man. Ezra Pound said that every story has already been written: The purpose of a good writer is to write it new. I would very much like to see a Gaiman approach to that kind of story." (Quoted in SC, p. 119).”

Kathy Acker is obviously the first inspiration for Delirium (the one we will meet in Season of Mists) before Jill Thompson and Bill Sienkiewicz gave us the much more Tori Amos-inspired version (and no, Delirium never really dressed colourfully, so what we’ve seen in the Netflix trailers so far is fairly comics-accurate. The only colourful things about her were pretty much always her hair and her mismatched eyes)…

vs.

NG's script sets out his plan for the cat-communications:

"I don't want normal word balloons. Now the normal comic tradition of doing animals communicating is thought balloons, which I don't want because it makes it seem they're all telepathic or something, so that's out.

However, I think that my initial idea, which was word balloons with no arrows, might be too cumbersome and confusing. (My idea was that we'd lightly colour code them. But then I thought, what are the odds that they'd be coloured correctly? Or that people would realise?)

So l've been pondering another way of doing it. One suggestion is, rather than proper long pointed arrows, we'll have basically round balloons with little nubs pointing toward the speaker. (I'll draw this out, so you can see what I mean:) or, if the nubs don't work, then possibly just rounded balloon arrows, instead of points—just something to set the cats apart."

Cemeteries

The cemetery images are based on Highgate Cemetery, in Hampstead Heath, London.

Siamese Cats

"Blue-point Siamese" is a variety of Siamese cat with a white body and bluish mask, ears, legs, and tail.

The variety was bred in the 20th century but was not recognized by the Cat Fanciers' Association (CFA) as distinct until 1934, when standards were established for show-cats. The CFA denoted four varieties: seal (brown) point, blue point, chocolate point, and lilac point.

The Carrion Kind

Crows, condors, vultures, and other birds who live on the corpses of other animals are referred to in literature as the "carrion kind." As a result (and perhaps drawing on this story), Dreams of the Carrion Kind was the title of an album in the death-metal genre released by the U.S. band Disincarnate in 1993, including the song "Cupid of the Carrion Kind." Another death-metal/goth band Tristania, from Norway, used the lyric "My carrion kind" in its song "Angina" in 2001.

A Cat May Look At a King…

NG writes in the script, "We're looking at a huge jet black cat. And I mean huge-it's larger than a panther.

But it's a cat, not a panther-the proportions are different. And its eyes are eyes of flame red and yellow. [So he wasn’t angy 🤣 It’s just the cat-equivalent of the flame coat. Why not have a flame fur instead of horror-Kitty eyes? Yeah, I think it was a good idea to change the red eyes from the first print to the version you see today]

It seems almost to absorb light. This is where the initial idea for the story came from-seeing a black cat as I was driving, just sitting watching the traffic go by, looking like a patch of shadow, a patch of blackness with eyes.

And, a little patch of white, the Siamese is at its feet, not sitting but standing. It looks very nervous. They're in an underground cavern, stalactites and stalagmites, lit by a circular pale light, floating by the Sandman-cat's head."

The proverb "A cat may look at a king" is described in E. Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898):

“An insolent remark of insubordination, meaning, I am as good as you”, or “Are you too mighty to be spoken to or looked at? You may wear stars and ribbons, and I may be dressed in hodden grey, but a man's a man for a' that?” The origins of the proverb are unknown, although stories are told of actual kings and actual cats. It is recorded as early as 1540, and in 1652, A Cat May Look Upon a King was the title of a political pamphlet by Sir Archibald Weldon attacking English kings. Although she admits that she can't remember where she read it, Alice quite reasonably repeats the saying to the King of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when he objects to the gaze of the Cheshire-Cat.

The Most Beautiful Cat You’ve Ever Seen?

“The current storyline, 'The Doll's House, fogged and blurry though it is thematically (due, I'm afraid, to my own lack of skill and experience, but I'm doing my best), is intended to be about women; about men's attitudes to women [🙄]; about the houses and walls that people build around themselves and each other, for protection, or for imprisonment, or both; and about the tearing down of those walls.

It's also dark fantasy-horror-edged, as DC's marketing department described it, an image I like: the black velvet robes of dark fantasy, edged with jagged razor-blades, rusting, perhaps, but still sharp enough to slice an eyeball, to open a vein...

And we've already shown that Sandman is part of a number of different areas of the fantasy horror theme park: We visited Olde Occult World in #1, Ye Original Inferno in #4; we visited a place in #6 that they didn't have a name for before we went there, but it's not a place l'd want to return to in a hurry, and...

This is going to be worse.

And if it's going to work it has to be worse. In #6 we showed what it was like for the victims. Dr D was 'the Other'. He wasn't to be sympathised with, or understood. In #14 we're going to meet a bunch of human monsters that make Dee look innocent. And we're going—if I can manage it—to make them real human beings. I want to explore human evil—specifically that aspect of human evil we term the serial killer as well as I can from my perspective. Not glorifying it, or romanticising it, but not making it any easier on the reader than it really is.

I suppose this is my equivalent of something like Thomas Harris's (fictional) books Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, or Dr. Elliott Leyton's (nonfictional) study Hunting Humans.”

They’re a musical bunch…

The singer sings a lyric from "Lydia the Tattooed Lady," written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg for Groucho Marx in At the Circus (1939). This serial killer undoubtedly sees no irony in singing about body parts that he likely plans to remove from their owner.

Here he sings the chorus from "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," the signature hit of Nancy Sinatra (daughter of legendary singer Frank Sinatra) recorded in 1966 and written by Lee Hazlewood. Again, the serial killer (who later appears on the "Religion" panel and explains that "God tells me to do it") sees no irony in singing about stomping on victims.

"It's a Small World" is a popular attraction at the various Disney theme parks and features the 1964 song of the same name written by the Sherman Brothers. In the script, Funland's hat is specifically identified in the script [sic] as "Mickey Mouse ears," and the song is closely identified with Disneyland, while the attraction itself presents endless images of doll-like children dancing about— a fantasy made to order for this pedophiliac killer.

DC Connections…

Samuel Morris, a.k.a. Homo familiaris, "The Family Man," a notorious British serial killer, was dispatched by John Constantine in Hellblazer, Issues 23-24, 28-33, and therefore is unable to attend. Constantine obtains his invitation to the Con but leaves it behind on the killer's corpse. [Can I just say that I would have loved the idea of Johanna getting an invitation and giving it a bombastic side-eye? 🤣]

As we will see, this is not the real Bogeyman, The Bogeyman was killed in 1985 by the Swamp Thing, drowned in the Louisiana swamps, in Swamp Thing (Series 2), #44 (Jan. 1986).

Fairy Tales worse than Reality…

Charles Perrault (1628-1703) was a French politician who, in retirement, penned an influential collection of fairy tales, Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé [avec moralités, sorry Leslie] (Moral Tales from the Past), subtitled Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oie [sic, it’s actually l’Oye] Tales of Mother Goose) (1697). Although it contained only eight tales, the work became the basis of countless adaptations. In Perrault's "Little Red Riding Hood," Father Wolf first eats the grandmother and then eats Little Red Riding Hood as well, the moral being not to trust strange males. In the Grimm Brothers version, published in 1812, Little Red Cap is swallowed whole, and when the wolf is caught by a passing hunter, rescued from the wolf's belly. There are various pre-Perrault versions recorded, and Gilbert's follows the pattern of several involving cannibalization, although some end with the girl rescuing herself after she dines on her grandmother's remains.

Tonight’s Entertainment (just in case you need a playlist 🫣)…

The film program is:

Don't Look Now (1974), a disturbing film about a couple in Venice dealing with the recent drowning of their daughter, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier.

The Collector (1965), based on the novel by John Fowles, about a butterly collector who moves on to capturing a woman.

Manhunter (1986, from Thomas Harris's Red Dragon), the story in which serial killer Hannibal Lecter first appears.

From the Life of the Marionettes (1980), Ingmar Bergman's examination of an ordinary professional man who commits a horrible murder.

In Cold Blood (1967), based on Truman Capote's chilling true-crime book about the brutal murder of a rural family in Kansas.

Compulsion (1959), about the Leopold-Loeb cold-blooded killings in the 1920s, based on Meyer Levin's popular novel of the same name and starring Orson Welles.

Straight on Till Morning (1972), about a shy young woman who unknowingly courts a serial killer.

Carry On Screaming (1966), a sendup of the Hammer horror films, with Jim Dale in a key role.

Night of the Hunter (1955), starring Robert Mitchum as a crazed preacher who marries and murders women.

Real Life Connections…

Canadian Clifford Olson confessed to eleven murders in 1981. In exchange for the promise that his wife receive $10,000 for each of the murders, Olson agreed to show police the locations of the corpses. Desperate family members, seeking closure, agreed to pay his wife $100,000 (Olson gave the police the first location without pay, as a gesture of good faith). Olson remains imprisoned in Vancouver, awaiting parole.

The tortured mind of a serial killer…

NG discusses the reasons for this and the following panels: "I want to begin the speech that's sort of the core of the issue. It's trying to make a serial killer that people can identify with. Not in an “I'm going to do it myself" way, but in a There but for fortune? kind of way. I want to make a serial killer talk about why he's a serial killer, honestly, with self doubt, all that. He's not a driven monster, like so many of the others; he's just another fucked-up human being: and we had to meet the monsters first. But this is really the core scene, around which the whole thing rotates: if we lose this it's all Jasons and Freddies and a thousand un-named splatter monsters. I'm sorry if anyone finds this overly explicit, but I trust you'll all understand what it says and why it's there."

Daniel Goleman, writing in The New York Times in 1991 about notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, noted that as a teenager, Dahmer was fond of impaling animals and keeping their skeletons. "For forensic psychiatrists, such a fascination with death and cruelty to animals is an almost predictable sign in the lives of people accused of being serial killers.... Murderers like this very often start out by killing and torturing animals as kids, said Robert K. Ressler, who developed profiles of serial killers while an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's behavioral sciences unit." But this is not a 20th-century phenomenon: For the I888 article A Thirst for Blood" (Saturday, 6 October 1888, East London Advertiser), covering the lack the Ripper murders, the anonymous reporter consulted the works of contemporary prominent psychologists for precedents for the murders and recorded that Dr. G. Savage, whose essay “Homicidal Mania,” appeared in the Fortnightly Review for October 1888, “gives a ghastly instance of a child who commenced his career... by pulling off the wings of flies. After a time this amusement paled, and the pleasing child took to baking frogs. He next turned his young intelligence to capturing birds and boring out their eyes. And later on nothing would satisfy him but ill-treating other children.”

The Selfish Giant…