It was a quarter of a century ago this month, but I vividly remember buying the very first issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It was from a speciality comics shop in Preston, Lancashire, called Thunderbooks. I had recently started a journalism course at Preston Polytechnic, an 18-year-old from a working class northern family who was the furthest from home he'd ever been (not quite 20 miles) and suddenly among people who were all more funny, clever, sophisticated, well-read and stylish than I could ever hope to be.
I had no real idea what I was doing there, or whether I could pull it off, or if I deserved to. Solace came from comic books; after growing up with an unalloyed joy of comics I'd recently just come out of a teenage phase where I'd abandoned them as something shameful and childish and a bar to being noticed by girls. Books such as The Dark Knight and Watchmen had encouraged my return, as well as a growing maturity and darkness in many of the regular titles that suited an 18-year-old in the late 1980s.
Thunderbooks was my salvation and bolt-hole, and I would go on Thursdays to pick up new comics. In the window this particular October Thursday was Sandman number one. I'd seen the ads in other comics – A pale-faced, black-clad Goth-y character and the Eliot-ian slogan "I will show you terror in a handful of dust" – and thought it might be something on par with the other horror books I was enjoying – Swamp Thing, which Alan Moore had left just the year before, and Hellblazer, which had been going for less than a year. The cover of Sandman was a Dave McKean collage that was instantly arresting. If I recognised either Gaiman or McKean's names from the Violent Cases graphic novel I owned, neither really registered with me when I picked up the comic along with whatever else was about that day.
Sandman 1 began with the words, "Wake up". Seventy-five issues on an almost-but-not-quite monthly schedule later, it would conclude with the same phrase. In the intervening years Sandman became a phenomenon, Gaiman became a superstar writer, the title (along with Hellblazer and Swamp Thing) was folded into DC Comics' new edgy grown-up line Vertigo, and my comics reading ebbed and flowed with only one constant purchase: The Sandman.
From that first issue I was hooked. The art by Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg was skirting the grotesque and warped, like those old horror compendium titles such as House of Mystery, rather than more conventional DC comics fare. The Sandman – though, like in Doctor Who, the titular character is never referred to by that appellation – was captured in 1916 by an Aleister Crowley-esque British occultist, Roderick Burgess, who was trying to snare Death. Instead he got Death's younger brother, Dream, that thin white duke of the land beyond sleep, clad initially in an insect-like helmet. Dream was contained in a ramshackle house until 1988, when he finally broke free. In the interim a strange sleeping sickness affected the world, a symptom of the dreamlands struggling to cope without their lord.
All we knew about Dream at that point was that he was on his way back from somewhere impossibly distant, exhausted after trials that were never elaborated upon, thus allowing his capture and imprisonment. The story of where he'd been and what he'd been doing have never been told. Until, that is, the publication today of Gaiman's return to Sandman for the first time in a decade, the first issue of a six-part miniseries entitled Sandman: Overture.
Back in the old days, when comics publishers wanted to push what they thought was a particularly exciting issue, they would slap on the front in bold letters: "Because You Demanded It!" Someone would die, someone would leave a super-team, someone would come back from the grave.
The first thing I thought when hearing the news that Gaiman was returning to Sandman was, "Is this what people really want?" Gaiman said on completion of the 75th issue of the original run that he could have written another five issues but wouldn't have been able to look at himself in the mirror. Sandman was what it was; a finite story that began where it should have and ended with the death – and rebirth – of Dream. What more was there to be said?
Gaiman's return to Sandman was always one of those idle "wouldn't it be great?" things for me, alongside "wouldn't it be great if they made a new Indiana Jones movie?" and "wouldn't it be great if the Sex Pistols reformed?" Which goes to prove you should be careful what you idly ponder. The Sandman story doesn't need more telling; Gaiman presumably doesn't need the money. I can't say I'd heard people clamouring for the untold story of what Dream was doing before he was captured by Roderick Burgess. Therefore there can only be one possible reason for this comic's existence, and that has to be because it's great.
And guess what: it is - though if you want to find that out for yourself, stop reading now.
It begins across the galaxy on a planet inhabited by sentient plants. One of them is dreaming about an aspect of Dream in flower-form who, after observing, "Something is waking up", dies in flames. We are used to Dream appearing in different forms to different beings, but there's something about this … has he ever died before, save for his not-quite ultimate death at the end of the main run?
Then we cut to London in September 1915 – the year before Dream is captured by Roderick Burgess. The Corinthian – created by Dream to "reflect humanity" and, as we know from the main series, going rogue as a particularly nasty serial killer (he has little mouths for eyes) is lining up his next victim when he is intercepted on the way to his assignation at the Dirty Donkey pub (a nice touch; this hostelry was in Gaiman's short story "We Can Get Them For You Wholesale", first published in the porn magazine Knave, of all places). He finds himself in Dream's "London office", where he is about to be summarily uncreated as punishment for his crimes when Dream is summoned back to his realm. He barely has time to put on his war helmet when he's whisked across space by forces unknown.
The art on the six-issue series is by JH Williams, perhaps best known for his work on Promethea, written by Alan Moore. He does an excellent job of portraying the different scenes in different styles – straight comic-booky illustration for the opener on the plant world, mono line drawings for Dream's London office, beautifully painted panels featuring Dream's siblings Destiny and Death (who looks suspiciously Winona Ryder-esque) as they foreshadow what is to come with portentous discussions about the meaning of the death of Dream's plant-aspect.
With The Corinthian taking advantage of Dream's sudden disappearance to embark on his serial killer life, as well as appearances by Destiny and Death and those recurring characters from Dream's realm Lucien the librarian and Merv Pumpkinhead, the issue up to this point felt similar in tone to Alan Moore's story "Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow", the "ultimate" Superman story, in which he distilled everything from the character's history into a few pages. Is Sandman: Overture merely Gaiman tying up loose ends, giving us one last look at his creations?
No. The first issue is largely a drawing of breath, which is exhaled on the fold-out spread when Dream materialises wherever he has been summonsed – amid a host of aspects of himself. Some seem familiar – is that the giant cat aspect from issue 18's Dream of a Thousand Cats? Is that the moon-faced Dream from the cover of issue 39? A Dream in African robes? A Dream who looks as though he's sprung full-blown from the brow of Jack Kirby? We're used to the different forms and shapes Dream adopts, but we've never seen them gathered as separate entities, coming together for something big. And going from the look off his face on the closing page, neither has he.
Sandman: Overture is six issues, coming out every two months, so it's the best part of a year before this story will be told. But it already feels special, like the comics event it is trumpeted to be. Dream is a long way from his realm, but for me reading this comic feels exactly like coming home.
