![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
re-reading Sandman
2021-06-26 10:49Some random notes, mostly on the first 9-10 issues. Spoilers.
* Dream can be a total asshole, e.g. putting Nada in Hell for rejecting him for the sake of his people. OTOH when not being Angry Man he's got something like a moral sense; he tries not to bring Constantine into the Toxic Dream Dump and takes responsibility for him when John insists on coming anyway. He lets himself be yelled into mercy killing Rachel. He advises Hob to get out of the slave trade.
* In issue 3, we know that from his POV, Dream is literally running on fumes, unmaking letters of commission to regain scraps of power. But from Constantine's POV, he can trivially open alarmed doors, fend off dream things, summon light. Granted Constantine seems to be a pretty weak magician, running more on cleverness and fate and ritual magic rather than conventional quick-spell power. Still, you get a sense that "Endless on fumes" is still pretty powerful from a human perspective.
* Also I wondered if Rachel's fate was the first appearance of Dream's part-time psychopomp powers. It's hard to tell, he says she'll die "soon" but that's vague. So maybe she died naturally in a few minutes, but without pain because of his dream. Or maybe he expedited and directed her end.
* I've long noted that Death seems to have an optional relationship with time, the flagrant example being when Orpheus visits her and sees her 20th century apartment. But there's a hint right in issue 8, when she tells Franklin she'll see him soon.
* Death asking if Dream had seen a movie, when she knows full well Dream had been stuck in a cage for the century, is kind of assholish of her.
* I just like the detail of how Dream is always looking away when Death does her "sound of wings" thing.
* Dream can be a total asshole, e.g. putting Nada in Hell for rejecting him for the sake of his people. OTOH when not being Angry Man he's got something like a moral sense; he tries not to bring Constantine into the Toxic Dream Dump and takes responsibility for him when John insists on coming anyway. He lets himself be yelled into mercy killing Rachel. He advises Hob to get out of the slave trade.
* In issue 3, we know that from his POV, Dream is literally running on fumes, unmaking letters of commission to regain scraps of power. But from Constantine's POV, he can trivially open alarmed doors, fend off dream things, summon light. Granted Constantine seems to be a pretty weak magician, running more on cleverness and fate and ritual magic rather than conventional quick-spell power. Still, you get a sense that "Endless on fumes" is still pretty powerful from a human perspective.
* Also I wondered if Rachel's fate was the first appearance of Dream's part-time psychopomp powers. It's hard to tell, he says she'll die "soon" but that's vague. So maybe she died naturally in a few minutes, but without pain because of his dream. Or maybe he expedited and directed her end.
* I've long noted that Death seems to have an optional relationship with time, the flagrant example being when Orpheus visits her and sees her 20th century apartment. But there's a hint right in issue 8, when she tells Franklin she'll see him soon.
* Death asking if Dream had seen a movie, when she knows full well Dream had been stuck in a cage for the century, is kind of assholish of her.
* I just like the detail of how Dream is always looking away when Death does her "sound of wings" thing.
an Endless question
2019-01-28 22:09There are only six shrouds in the chamber beneath Litharge. Why?
Sandman comic panels
2013-04-26 17:46I recently read The Sandman Papers, most of which were interesting though some were "oookay, academics can be weird." Then last night I re-read Preludes and Nocturnes... and then, inspired by one of the papers (on The Tempest) and Scott McCloud, I went back and looked at the paneling. What's square, what's not, what's borderless? First I was looking at "The Sound of Her Wings", where we meet Death, and... well, I noticed a lot of variation, but not a lot of pattern. Tended to the rectangular, but borders were often simply missing, or present only as part of the park bench. One page the background color was pink, except for one panel where it was blue.
I also found myself wondering if the final page, where Dream scatters his bread and joyfully hears the sound of (pigeon) wings, is actually a hint of his decision to commit suicide. Most of the comic is about what Death does, after all, and there's that poem about welcoming death. Then "She has responsibilities. I have responsibilities", which sounds like he's finding comfort in getting back to work again, but then... the wings, as if the pigeons are a foretaste of the sound of *her* wings at the end of it all.
Anyway. After that I went looking at the chapters in general, and I think I saw more of a pattern. The first issue is pretty whacked out, panel-wise, including lots of circular panels, usually as facial closeups, especially if seen through an eyepiece, the glass cage, or a scrying ball. There's lots of "panels on top of backgrounds", and curvy panels, and diagonal borders. Of course, the whole issue is largely "magical".
Then the next issue, Dream in the Dreaming with Cain and Abel, hardly has a rectangle anywhere, it's all curvy borders. Most of Constantine's issue is standard rectangular panels, diagonalizing or warping a bit when the dreams get heavy. That seems to be the basic pattern: everyday stuff uses traditional panels, dreaming stuff uses curves, some stuff in the middle uses diagonals.
I also saw one part where a unified scene was nonetheless broken up by diagonal gutters, for not obvious reason. (Unlike Spike: Shadow Puppets, where an otherwise unified 'picture' of a diner is broken by a gutter in the middle, and on the left Spike is coming out of the doorway of the diner and in the right he's moved across the street, so there's a temporal function.)
Sidenote: I was long impressed by how long and dense the first issue feels, and wondered if it was from the sheer fast pace of changes, like the ending of the third arc in Twelve Kingdoms, which feels (pleasantly) like it's a lot longer than 22 minutes or whatever. At some point I discovered it actually has more pages than a standard issue.
I also found myself wondering if the final page, where Dream scatters his bread and joyfully hears the sound of (pigeon) wings, is actually a hint of his decision to commit suicide. Most of the comic is about what Death does, after all, and there's that poem about welcoming death. Then "She has responsibilities. I have responsibilities", which sounds like he's finding comfort in getting back to work again, but then... the wings, as if the pigeons are a foretaste of the sound of *her* wings at the end of it all.
Anyway. After that I went looking at the chapters in general, and I think I saw more of a pattern. The first issue is pretty whacked out, panel-wise, including lots of circular panels, usually as facial closeups, especially if seen through an eyepiece, the glass cage, or a scrying ball. There's lots of "panels on top of backgrounds", and curvy panels, and diagonal borders. Of course, the whole issue is largely "magical".
Then the next issue, Dream in the Dreaming with Cain and Abel, hardly has a rectangle anywhere, it's all curvy borders. Most of Constantine's issue is standard rectangular panels, diagonalizing or warping a bit when the dreams get heavy. That seems to be the basic pattern: everyday stuff uses traditional panels, dreaming stuff uses curves, some stuff in the middle uses diagonals.
I also saw one part where a unified scene was nonetheless broken up by diagonal gutters, for not obvious reason. (Unlike Spike: Shadow Puppets, where an otherwise unified 'picture' of a diner is broken by a gutter in the middle, and on the left Spike is coming out of the doorway of the diner and in the right he's moved across the street, so there's a temporal function.)
Sidenote: I was long impressed by how long and dense the first issue feels, and wondered if it was from the sheer fast pace of changes, like the ending of the third arc in Twelve Kingdoms, which feels (pleasantly) like it's a lot longer than 22 minutes or whatever. At some point I discovered it actually has more pages than a standard issue.
