#sandman analysis

Cain tells the title story: Sometimes, rooks will gather in a circle around a single bird that makes specific calls. Then either the entire flock flies away peacefully, or they turn on it and peck it to death. No one knows why it goes one way or the other.

Matthew immediately asks for the explanation which Cain obviously refuses to give.

“It’s the mystery that endures. Not the explanation.” That’s what he says after killing Abel for giving away his mystery at the very end.

It’s his style of storytelling, and probably that of many other storytellers and writers, too: Some stories are more powerful unexplained and not a puzzle to be solved, because the mystery is the whole point.

And Cain is the keeper of the House of Mystery for a reason: He understands that we’re drawn to unanswerable questions, and that an explained mystery becomes trivial while an unexplained one keeps on letting us obsess over it.

I mean, just think about us idiots (affectionate) and the Sandman as a whole. There are enough things left unclear, like: What exactly happened to Delight/Delirium? How and why did the first Despair get killed? And these are just the most obvious ones. But people will keep on speculating about them until the cows come home, and that’s part of the fun.

When Abel reveals the mystery at the end of the issue, Cain kills him (again). And of course that’s just what he does, but this is also about certainty ending a story and hence taking away a little bit of its magic. And he will not let the story end. Because the mystery is the thing that keeps it going, as simple as that.

Eve: Truth in Contradictions

Eve’s story is a retelling of the mythology of Adam’s wives (not just Eve). She’s talking about three of them, drawn from Jewish midrash, apocrypha and centuries of feminist revision. But she’s also constantly hedging: “That’s a matter of opinion,” or, “Some say...” She won’t commit to a single version because some stories have multiple true forms, and forcing a single one onto them isn’t a thing to her:

Lilith was the first wife, created equal and split from an originally hermaphroditic Adam. She refused subservience and to lie beneath him. So she was ultimately expelled from Eden and, in some accounts, mated with angels/the sons of God and/or demons to birth the Lilim (hello Mazikeen). She was the wife who was too equal and too strong.

The second wife has no name. God made her from nothing while Adam watched. He saw what she was made of and couldn’t look at her because of it. She was either destroyed by God or simply cast out (the accounts differ). She was the wife without any mystery about her, too real and therefore also too horrifying.

Eve was the third, made from Adam’s rib while he slept (so he didn’t see her “construction”). She was the wife who was just right (if you subscribe to a patriarchal view): not too equal, not too repulsive in her realness, with enough mystery left.

(Of course, she and Adam still ate from the Tree of Knowledge and were cast out anyway.)

Eve concludes that it’s true Adam had three wives, but that it’s also true that he only married once. She tells her own origin story here, and she positions herself as one part (but really all three) of a maiden-mother-crone trinity. Of course there’s an implicit critique running through it all: Lilith was rejected for being too strong. The unnamed wife was rejected for having no mystery about her. Eve was initially only “accepted” because Adam was asleep when she was made, so he didn’t have to see what she was “made of”. It’s about the male fears at the basis of patriarchy (especially female autonomy and embodiment).

Eve’s storytelling is relational rather than absolute. The three wives are separate women, but they’re also three aspects of the archetypal feminine that runs through The Sandman like a thread. But most of all, they’re three versions of the same old story of a power-over-dynamic that has been the truth for women since time immemorial. They all coexist without cancelling each other out.

Abel: How Death (of the Author?) Makes a Story

Most of us know how the biblical story of Cain and Abel goes (and Cain has told it previously in “Preludes and Nocturnes”): Cain killed Abel out of jealousy over whose sacrifice God preferred. But if we’re trusting Abel’s secret, that’s not all there was to it. Obviously, Abel met Death after Cain had killed him (although Abel calls this “finish fighting” for Daniel’s sake). And both Death and Dream were kind to him: Death because she let him go with Dream instead of taking him to the Sunless Lands, Dream because Abel was lonely (well, it could be argued that neither of them were kind, especially not Dream, because Abel said he was lonely and wanted a friend, not that he wanted the brother who killed him. But Dream was always interested in a good story I guess, great “surprise” 🙄).

So Dream brought both brothers to the Dreaming and gave them purpose: Cain to keep the House of Mystery, Abel to keep the House of Secrets. Of course Cain would proceed to kill Abel over and over again, and they’d come to re-enact the first murder/victim story (!) for all eternity. But we’re not told so, Abel just finishes with “…the two hugged each other joyfully and they lived next door from that day to this…”

And if we look at everything through a lens of storytelling, I also think that the distinction between mysteries and secrets matters. Mysteries can be shared and collectively sleuthed over. In a way, they get more powerful through being repeated and pondered. But a secret must be kept because it loses power the moment it’s revealed. Plus, secrets are often so much more personal (which makes it meaningful when someone shares them with you), and that also applies to Abel’s story: It’s specific and full of love for someone who has killed him and will kill him again 🥺

But the true twist comes after all three stories have been told, because Abel solves the mystery of the parliament of rooks (or does he give away a secret? 🧐):

The lone bird in the centre is a storyteller. If the story is good, the flock leaves peacefully. If it’s bad, they kill the storyteller.

Cain is furious and kills him for it (although he probably would have found another reason just for shits and giggles anyway).

The Meta-Structure

And that’s where #40 becomes about structure, because the frame inside the frame inside the frame is the parliament of rooks, and the story enacts its own metaphor: It’s what people do every time someone tells a story. They either walk away satisfied or they attack the storyteller (through criticism, dismissal, or by simply ignoring them/showing them the cold shoulder).

And it hits even harder when we think of it this way: Cain kills Abel for destroying the mystery, so the violence comes from within. He’s essentially the gatekeeper who punishes. And that’s the sometimes ugly truth about creative communities: Artists and writers often criticise each other’s work more harshly than any external audience does.

Jill Thompson’s Art

I have to yap about this a bit because Jill Thompson is one of my favourite Sandman artists, and “The Parliament of Rooks” was her first issue before she utterly broke us all with “Brief Lives” (which comes next—yay to pain! 🙈🤣).

I think the reason why I love her work for #40 is because it needs so many visual shifts: There’s domesticity in the frame with Daniel and Lyta, then there’s “fantastical but still somewhat cozy” in Abel’s house. But we also need a bit of horror later on, and a lot of archetypal imagery in Eve’s story, and OF COURSE the chibi Little Endless Thompson chose for Abel’s story. And I mean, that last choice is quite something if you think about the fact that Abel takes the story of the first act of violence in possibly the entire universe’s history, and it’s getting told in the visual language of cute cartoons with oversized round heads on tiny bodies 🙈

But essentially, Abel takes his own trauma and gives it a form he can cope with (it comes in handy he tells a story to a toddler I guess, but Cain and Abel were far less selective in that department), and Jill Thompson is translating that visually for the reader, too.

Jill Thompson does horror, whimsy, mythology, and structural meta-commentary within one issue and doesn’t make it feel jarring (not in my view anyway, other people’s mileage may vary), and this is something I also live about her work for “Brief Lives”.

The Thing About Stories

Anyway, after that much needed love declaration: “The Parliament of Rooks” is about stories, but it’s not one-dimensional: It’s about why we tell them (to preserve mysteries, to explain ourselves, to cope), how we tell them (authoritatively, tentatively, personally), what they can make us (rigid, vulnerable, repetitive), and who gets to hear/read/judge them (other storytellers, external audiences, ourselves).

And I’d say that the issue’s central point does come from Cain: The mystery is far more interesting than the explanation (she says while she writes meta-analysis 🤦🏻‍♀️🤣). Buuuuut it also immediately gets turned on its head by having Abel explain the mystery, and having the audience somewhat appreciate it, and having Cain kill Abel for it. All three things are true.

So maybe it’s rather that some people need the mystery and some people need the explanation. Stories contain multitudes, and truth in stories is relational.

The issue’s final image is Lyta finding a single raven feather with Daniel. And of course in the context of The Sandman, that’s proof that the boundary between dreams and waking, stories and reality, is permeable (and Daniel can cross it).

It is fascinating how much more likeable Hob is when narrated from the viewpoint of someone with a crush on him, whether this story is exaggerated through rose tinted glasses is of course something to consider. All the tales in World's End are just that, tales. There is a constant undercurrent of exaggeration and make believe to them where even the other patrons of the inn question elements to each of the stories. We are not supposed to take these stories as absolute fact, rather they are supposed to reveal to us more about the narrators as well as their own experiences existing in this magical and strange world.

When it is revealled that Jim is actually a girl called Peggy in disguise so they can get work on the ships, the quite obvious crush makes more sense to a heteronormative audience, but what I particularly like about this story is its queer potential. See in the comic, it isn't really clarified if Jim goes by Jim because they feel more themselves as a boy, rather than a girl, or if they are disguising themself as a boy just to get work as a means to an end. I would argue that the latter is the more obvious interpretation. Jim tells the other World's End patrons that they are getting too old to keep up the disguise and will eventually have to stop working in shipping, and that when that happens, they will take on a new name, a new identity and do something else, but that for now, the patrons can keep calling them Jim.

*for a lack of clarity around the point in the comic, I am going to use gender neutral pronouns for Jim going forward*

Now from Hob's POV, he figured out that Jim was a girl, and they talk about it briefly along with the sea serpent they saw. I think that at this point, Hob is impressively progressive compared to the previous times we have met him. Now whether or not this is biased storytelling from someone who has a crush on him remains to be seen, but if we take Jim's word as truth, not only is 1914 Hob a fair and honest man who is willing to pay the way of a stowaway and fully respect the secrets of a young girl disguised as a boy so they can work on ships, but he's also totally comfortable flirting with them.

I like that he calls Jim the "handsome cabin boy". I like that this version of Hob, whether real or an exaggeration skewed by Jim's feelings for him, respects Jim's identity. Jim may be a girl in disguise, but Hob doesnt call her pretty, he calls him handsome.

It's all just a bit subtly queer and I like that for Hob (But then I would do, I'm a Dreamling shipper HA)

When Jim finishes their story, they state that they didn't see Hob again after that, but the comics later do give us a possible outcome to Jim's story...

We next see Hob in The Kindly Ones where he is mourning the death of his girlfriend Audrey. He briefly reveals that Audrey was the first person he had loved since Peggy, who was his lover until her death during the Blitz. Whilst it isn't made clear that Hob's lover Peggy is the same Jim that we meet in World's End, it is a bit too much of a coincidence. The timing adds up. If Jim was 16 in 1914, they'd be in their early 40s during the Blitz. Hob remains forever in his early 30s so I'd say its a safe bet that Jim eventually found Hob again and they were together. Hob loved them enough that he wasn't with anyone again until Audrey in the 80s. That's 50 years worth of mourning. A long time not to be with anyone, even for an immortal.

It's funny because we know so little about Hob, but one thing that I have seen commented on here a lot is that comic Hob is deemed to be as Straight as an arrow. Now I admit that the voice actor in the Audible book plays him very straight, but that is still only one interpretation.

All this is to say that I am fascinated with how the Netflix show will adapt this, since Hob in the show already comes across much kinder and more selfless than his comic counterpart. He already has an entire fandom viewing him as queer, and the comics certainly don't outright shut down such interpretations. There are moments in the comics that you have to wonder on. He does call Jim handsome rather than pretty, and when he talks to Audrey's grave he mentions his wives and loves as separate groups. He talks about finding it easy to get sex if you want it, and he talks about it in generally gender neutral terms. In Sunday Mourning Gwen reveals that she thought he was gay when she first met him, though her reasonings were that he knew so many dead people (a dark reminder that these comics were published at the height of the Aids epidemic). He reacts very badly to the news of Morpheus' death. He states on several occassions just how much he liked Morpheus, and he is one of the few people to wake up from the Wake with tears running down his cheeks. I would arguably state that its between Hob and Matthew as to who had the worst reaction to Morpheus' death, showing just how much both Hob and Matthew cared about him, and placing Hob on par with Matthew in the comics is a big deal. He seriously considers accepting Death's gift when she offers it, simply because Morpheus is dead. He doesn't, because at the end of the day, its just not in his nature to do so, and given he then dreams of Morpheus, I like to think that it was a test, that he passed.

When it comes to how the show will adapt all this, I genuinely think it will take a new approach with Jim/Peggy. I think they will be either a trans man, or at least non binary. But I think having Jim be a trans man is the better option. In the comics, Jim's tale is only very subtly queer, Jim clearly likes being Jim, but it seems like its a means to an end, a convenience in order to get work on the ships, rather than being something that is core to Jim's feelings on their gender. Besides, if we assume that Jim is indeed the Peggy Hob talks about in The Kindly Ones, then we know that Jim goes back to being Peggy when they get older and apparently continues living as a woman whilst they are with Hob, otherwise I doubt Hob would have referred to one of his greatest loves by a name they themselves rejected and only used she/her pronouns when talking about them. Nevertheless there is no reason for the show to take this approach, and if they DO decide that Jim should be a trans man, then their relationship with Hob is canonically a queer one. Trans men are men and if one of Hob's greatest loves is a trans man, then Hob is a queer man himself. I genuinely believe the show will take this route and I can't wait to see it.

Going back to my point about narrators bias, if MoGF, SoM, tKO, and TW are all narrated by a neutral third party, then this must be the true Hob. A not overly likeable rather selfish man. He has his good points, and he has certainly grown and changed over the centuries, and carries a lot of guilt for his past mistakes, but he is still quite self absorbed. Jim paints a picture of a rose tinted Hob that is far more the dreamy romantic older gentleman that took a young person under his wing. Which is fair enough.

The show is of course its own adaptation, with changes from the comics as it sees fit, but I do feel it's my duty to remind you that the show also has a narrator guiding the audience through its many stories. Dream of the Endless, Lord Morpheus, King of Nightmares and Prince of Stories himself. Take from that whatever you will.

We don’t learn until The Kindly Ones that the unnamed woman is Thessaly, who is never mentioned by name in Brief Lives. In #42, she’s just she, the woman whose quarters are to be erased and never spoken of again. And the desperate, almost imperial attempt to make it like she never existed is the first signal that Dream is not handling this well. The second one is obviously the rain.

Then Delirium arrives at the gates, and this issue becomes something else entirely…

When Control Becomes Its Own Prison

Dream is defined by control and not wanting to let it slip. I often thought that while he definitely commands the rain to fall, he can’t command himself to stop needing it to fall, if that makes any sense? He stands motionless in the downpour for weeks (at least three from what we can gather) while water streams down his face (can’t be seen crying, can we?). Everything around him is waterlogged.

Thessaly, a bit like Nada (albeit in different ways), doesn’t really put up with Dream’s shit, and I think that’s why the ends of both affairs cut so deep: they left him before he was ready to let them go. He doesn’t cope with rejection one bit (the other way round is okay of course 🙄). So all he can do is stand in the rain and drown in it (or raze the Dreaming to a desert, like after Nada).

When Delirium shows up, something shifts though (can I just say that he’s generally warmer, if slightly patronising with her from the outset compared to the show, even if she’s getting on his nerves? He even touches her shoulder and asks her if she’s hungry. And he makes her a hanky 🥹).

Honestly, I’ll never not post these. Their dynamic in the comics is everything. I would have loved to see that kind of humour in the show? Tragedies don’t “untragedy” just because you put a bit of lightness into them.

Dream bids her inside and invites her to stay for dinner (the chocolate people! 🙈🤣). He even apologises for being a bit tetchy. Delirium is so startled by this that she even comments on it. Thing is though: Delirium is offering Dream exactly what he needs: a reason to leave for the waking world to a) seek some diversion from his break-up with Thessaly but really b) trying to find her. That’s the entire engine of Brief Lives. He is heartbroken, doesn’t know what to do with it and is quite possible a bit delirious (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: none of the siblings appear in his life randomly. They are their function, also with him. Also goes for Death, and that includes “The Sound of her Wings” in the comics [it was toned down for the show]).

Lucien Knows—Of Course He Does

Before Delirium and Dream leave, Lucien pulls Dream aside. Lucien is quite possibly closest to Dream and the most steady presence of his entire existence. He knows him. And he knows that Dream is not in a state to make good decisions. So he questions him, not once but twice. Dream informs him they will not find Destruction, that he is just going along to distract himself from his heartbreak, and Delirium will soon lose interest.

Instead of listening to Lucien, he brushes him off: “You worry too much, Lucien. I’ve noticed this before. After all, this is completely straightforward.”

And then: “What could possibly go wrong?”

And honestly, even when I read that for the first time, I had a moment where I basically yelled “dramatic irony, EVERYTHING will go wrong, won’t it?” at the comic in my hands. Nothing about this is subtle if you look at literary devices. It’s, in dramatic terms, the real, actual turn into a tragedy from which there will be no coming back. You might have had hints before, but this was honestly the first time I went, “Shit!” and not just “Oh…” (like in The Sound of her Wings or in Season of Mists. There were signs for the “hero’s fatal flaw”, but you still felt like it might be okay in the end. This was the first time I honestly thought it won’t be). We’re shown someone who is so consumed by heartbreak that he cannot see clearly, and then we hand him a line that will ring in the reader’s ears for the rest of the run. What could possibly go wrong?

All of it. All of it goes wrong.

And it gets rung in here, with this line, with a king who couldn’t think clearly (Delirium!). He knows he’s using the quest for his own ends, he admits it to Lucien. But what he doesn’t understand is that he’s not in a state to make sound judgment right now (until he does and it becomes choice).

Delirium Is Also Drowning

I know I’ve said this before so I won’t repeat everything, but I honestly think Jill Thompson’s Delirium is amazing.

Del is terrified of Dream (and of rejection). “I was afraid you’d probably be all horrible to me, and you’re so scary, so I thought I’d really try to be good and I was trying so hard to be good and you were still being horrid to me and I was doing my best and then I messed it all up and now you’ll say no and be horrible and it’s all a mess and it’s my fault” lands like a gut punch. That’s not the “quirky youngest sibling”. That’s someone who has learned, over a very long time, to brace for cruelty. And Dream can be incredibly cruel and has been so rather often, whether people want to hear it or not (they lessened it considerably for the show with maybe two exceptions, which honestly doesn’t make his arc land the same way and is IMHO partly responsible for why so many people have rejected the ending, but that’s a different topic).

The dynamic reads less like siblings and more like a frightened child navigating an unpredictable parent. And Dream’s gentleness in this issue (his apology, his flashes of kindness and then his ultimate decision to go with her, if for all the wrong reasons) comes across so unusual to Del that you can tell she keeps waiting for him to have a face-heel-turn.

When Dream briefly leaves to talk to Desire (who tries to pull him off the quest, just like they already told Despair they were worried in #41), Delirium remembers Destruction, specifically the time when she was still Delight and he told her that things were changing. That there was nothing she could do to stop it. The one sibling who represented support and stability to her (even when he also stands for change) has been gone for three hundred years. So she thinks if she finds him, she’ll be okay, or at least feel better and supported again.

Delirium and Dream are two somewhat broken siblings, each using the other a bit to avoid the thing they actually need to face. Both are in crisis, but their crises look nothing alike…

The Beginning of an End

#42 begins with Dream drowning in drama and ends with him embarking on a quest that will become the hinge on which everything turns. He hasn’t processed Thessaly’s departure or sat with his grief long enough to process it, so he (vainly I have to say) hopes he will see her when he accompanies Delirium. For once, Dream is choosing movement over stillness because stillness means feeling more pain.

Dream then visits Bast in a dream he conjures specifically for her, and he really makes sure that no one knows because he does regret especially Ruby’s death. This is right after the conversation with Pharamond:

[Well, Death once told Destruction they could all know everything and most of the time just choose not to. So Bast is definitely onto something here…]

We immediately get that there is, or at least was, a lot of mutual understanding between those two, and that even in a dream, he doesn’t want to put Bast at risk (hence the complete lockdown in advance—he’s really not taking any chances here). And also that Dream used to be different in the past, and given that Egyptian Gods are not that old in cosmic terms, it does make you wonder…

Bast still maintains her presence as a goddess through the faith of those who remember or are in any way close to her. She is diminished from what she once was, and especially the end of the scene when she wakes up is rather sad. But has anyone ever noticed this (Chloe is the little girl Dream met on the plane):

Anyway, when Dream comes asking about Destruction, Bast receives him with a familiarity that suggests they have been finding their way into each other’s company for a very long time (and also that she wishes they had been lovers, and she still teases him about it. The scene when she asks him to be his Tom and he wonders if she’d really ask that of him is honestly priceless. I mean, what if she’d said yes? Could Dream be talked into something for intel? 🤔🤣).

But not to worry, it turns out that she lied to him during Season of Mists, and that she doesn’t know where Destruction is anyway, but at the end of the day, it’s not really about the information she can or cannot provide I think. It’s rather about Dream’s desperation (that he’d never truly admit of course), because he’s going to a goddess who doesn’t have much power left, and he asks her for help in hopes she knows something. But she doesn’t and hence probably would have been safe from Destruction’s defences anyway…

Delirium’s Closed Realm

The way Delirium closes her realm is distinctly different between show and comics. While show!Delirium does it after Desire tells her that Dream basically doesn’t care about her and only wanted to find Nada, comics!Delirium initially just retreats to her realm because Dream calls off the search for Destruction after Ishtar’s death. She even says she’s available in case anyone wants her.

So it can be assumed her sigil turns black only after she notices that no one wants her, because she doesn’t even know at this point that Dream lied to her about really wanting to find Thessaly (he only tells her this later. And I think it’s important that he tells her first, and that he’s not landed in it by Desire like in the show, which honestly cheapened the whole thing a bit for me).

What makes this a different kind of sad is that Delirium usually doesn’t make clear decisions because that’s not really in her nature (and we only see a similar kind of clarity about something in the next chapter). But this is a fairly clear choice and the message is fairly unambiguous, which means she has been pushed past what she can cope with.

Death Tells Off Dream…

Death is at least partly (and probably fully on a symbolic level) responsible for Dream seeking out Delirium, apologising and then looking for Destruction with her in earnest. And seeking Destruction in earnest is where it all goes wrong (or gets better, depending on how you look at it I guess).

And the scene where Death confronts him about Delirium is one of the most important in Brief Lives precisely because she is Death. First of all: He calls her, not the other way around, and I’ve said it on here many times: The Endless are siblings, but they’re also their function. Always, at all times. And if you ask Death for advice, what does that mean? If Death already gave you comfort in “The Sound of her Wings”, what does that mean? If you already reached for her hand but take her arms instead for now, and she’s visibly taken aback by that (like in the show), what does that mean? [He was always closer to Death than to any of his other siblings (also in the show), and there’s a reason for that 🥺] If Delirium finds you after a bad break-up (and many other things that have destabilised you but you never let on before, but they start catching up with you) and asks you to seek Destruction, what does that mean?

On the sibling front, Death isn’t looking away because it’s literally her function to witness what happens at the end of things. So it’s almost to be expected that she’s also at the end of cumulative consequences, and she tells Dream plainly that Delirium closing down her realm and being in a (even more) unstable state is his responsibility in all the ways that matter: He treated the quest as a distraction/a way to find Thessaly, he betrayed her trust and at the end of it, he abandoned her again.

The call for accountability comes from the sibling who arguably knows him best, and whom he loves most. Which is true but also the most… errrr, unsubtle foreshadowing if you’re not completely blind...

This is the literal kiss of Death (not just a cute thing between siblings), because her basically subtly bullying him into seeing Delirium is one of the central turning points…

The Apology

Time apparently shatters instead of flies/flees/fleets (it’s usually tempus fugit)

Dream doesn’t apologise easily or often (well, in the show he somehow does, but that’s a different topic), although he did apologise to Delirium once before in #42, and he also apologised to Pharamond for the death of Ruby. His pride is a part of him, bound up in his sense of function and duty, and to apologise means admitting you were wrong, which means admitting fallibility. And that generally doesn’t sit well with him. But he starts doing it. Sparingly, much more sparingly than in the show, and it works in the comics precisely for that reason.

In the opening of Brief Lives, he agreed to accompany Delirium because he wanted to find Thessaly. He knew he was using his own sister. And by issue #46, after all the deaths and the lying, he finally admits it to her. Resuming the quest almost reads like a peace offering borne out of genuine care here (a peace offering to Delirium. That symbolism again 😩).

[We didn’t get her threatening him in the show either 😒]

I mean, it’s one of the quintessential messages of Brief Lives, if you will: Dream’s rigidity has never protected anyone, least of all himself him. But he’s starting to bend, and the real tragedy isn’t that he can’t change (it never was, and how some people still say that’s the main difference between the comics and the show is quite frankly beyond me, because he also very clearly changes in the comics). It’s that he changes enough to understand what he has done over millennia (of course he’s been hurt, too, but he’s not just a poor misunderstood victim in this; he’s also a perpetrator), that in any other scenario, he even might have been okay, but that he chose to release his son in one final act of love because he had changed, and that it was just too much to carry. Combined with the burden he had felt about his function for so long, it was simply the final straw, and he chose not to back out of the corner he had painted himself into (he could have, up until the very end).

I quickly want to say something about Jill Thompson’s Dream, especially in the scenes with Delirium. I love love LOVE J.H. Williams III’s Dream, as an example, because he’s both beautiful and almost alien-like, and he’s the quintessential pre-fishbowl Dream for me, in every possible way. You can’t really compare their art styles, but Jill Thompson’s Dream is so much more human to me. He is still dark and slightly otherworldly in a way (although again, definitely the most human-looking, and that’s also for a reason), but Brief Lives is the arc where Dream most looks like… he might not survive his own story, if you know what I mean? And the apology scene in particular so massively benefits from her artistic restraint:

To finish: I didn’t know where else to put this, but this still absolutely belongs here (because of the hint at change and the comedy), and once again I have to say: We were robbed…