Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part VIII: The Dreaming: Beyond the Shores of Night

Comic trade paperback, 208 pages
Published 1998 (contents: 1996-97)
Borrowed from the library
Read July 2011

The Dreaming: Beyond the Shores of Night

Writers: Terry LaBan, Peter Hogan, Alisa Kwitney
Artists: Peter Snejbjerg, Steve Parkhouse, Michael Zulli, Dick Giordano
Colorist & Separator: Daniel Vozzo
Letterers: Todd Klein, Steve Parkhouse, Annie Parkhouse

The Dreaming was the second of the three ongoings to spin out of The Sandman (the others being Sandman Mystery Theatre and Lucifer). Unlike the other two, it's largely uncollected; there are only two trades, which collect a scattered seventeen issues of the sixty-issue series. Maybe this is because it had a sort of anthology format, moving between different characters and concepts from the Dreaming, the realm ruled over by Gaiman's character-- there's not really an ongoing character narrative.

This first volume collects three different stories, the first of which is Terry LaBan and Peter Snejbjerg's "The Goldie Factor." This concerns a couple of my favorite characters from the Dreaming, Cain and Abel, the brothers were one is an eternal murderer and the other is an eternal victim. They set off after Abel's pet gargoyle, Goldie, who is being misled by "the Great Tempto," the snake from the Garden of Eden. Gaiman's Eve, Matthew the Raven, and Lucien also appear. It's a decent quest story, mostly worth it for the way that LaBan nails the personalities of all the different Sandman characters; I like the interplay between the feuding brothers especially. On the other hand, LaBan and Snejbjerg's Dreaming feels too much like a pedestrian fantasy world, not a place you might inadvertently wander into on the fringes of consciousness.

The second story is Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse's "The Lost Boy," is about an architect from 1956 who wanders into 1996 and finds a world he doesn't understand. Unfortunately, the man-out-of-time story has been done better than here, and though I think the architect is supposed to be a likeable average guy, he's more just boring. This undercuts an ending which I think would have been sweet had it been written better. The best part of this over-long story (it is by no means a four-issue concept) is the return of Mad Hettie, the vagrant who popped up from time to time in both The Sandman and Death. I honestly never paid a lot of attention to her before, but amidst these dull characters, she delights with her matter-of-fact weirdness, as she speaks plainly about mystical happenings to humans and fairies alike. I really liked Steve Parkhouse's artwork, though.

Last is Alisa Kwitney and Michael Zulli's short "His Brother's Keeper," which follows up on a mention of Cain and Abel's brother Seth from "The Goldie Factor," but then tells a story that has nothing to do with that concept at all. Baffling and dull.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part VII: Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2000 (contents: 1997)
Borrowed from the library
Read July 2011

Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold

Writer: Alisa Kwitney
Artists: Kent Williams, Michael Zulli, Scott Hampton, Rebecca Guay
Color Artist: Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh
Letterer: Todd Klein

As with WitchCraft and the Triple Goddess, I doubt anyone was clamoring for a Destiny spin-off, but he is one of the Endless, and he's the easiest for DC to do as it will with, for he predates Neil Gaiman. Curiously, this book follows the same format as WitchCraft: there's a frame story by one artist, and then three substories, each illustrated by a different artist, ranging through time. Our story opens in the far future year of 2009, when bubonic plague has devastated the Earth and a strange man, one John Ryder, shows up at the house of Ruth Knight, one of five survivors in a rural village. He brings with him The Book of Destiny, an 1899 publication reconstructing the meaning of the Destiny Scroll, a page torn from the Book of Destiny. It connects the four comings of bubonic plague to Destiny of the Endless and the mysterious John Ryder himself.

I liked this a lot at first. The art in the frame story (I don't know which of the four artists was responsible, unfortunately) is angular and moody, perfect for this postapocalyptic world, and Kwitney's writing is powerful enough to match. The relationship between Ruth and John is very well done, too-- it's complicated, as each wants something out of each other. The first flashback story is great, too, about the wife of the emperor at the fall of Byzantium and her illegitimate child (who turns out to be John Ryder), who becomes the pawn of Destiny, carrying the plague. But after this, the flashback stories get muddy. What is John Ryder trying to accomplish in 1348 or 1665? It's not quite clear. And thematically, I never figured out what the book was trying to do, either. It wants to be about destiny and Destiny, but there's a lot about plagues in it, and that never really links together. I guess those who die of the plague are destined to die? But so what-- according to the mythos here, everyone has an inescapable destiny, so the plague stuff feels like too much. And as for that ending... I just didn't get it.

Despite my comment at the beginning, I think there's definitely possibility in a story about Destiny, as in all the Endless. The inescapability of Fate has been the basis of many a tale. Destiny looks cool, sounds cool, and even gets in a good joke here, to my surprise. But this story isn't it; it never coheres into saying or doing anything in particular.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part V: WitchCraft

Comic trade paperback, 133 pages
Published 1996 (contents: 1994)
Borrowed from the library
Read June 2011

WitchCraft

Writer: James Robinson
Artists: Teddy Kristiansen, Peter Snejbjerg, Michael Zulli, Steve Yeowell
Colors: Daniel Vozzo
Lettering: Richard Starkings

This isn't the first Sandman spin-off-- it's predated by the launch of Sandman Mystery Theatre and the first Death miniseries-- but it's kinda the first standalone one. (I say "kinda" because it did garner a sequel, but said sequel was never collected in trade paperback.) Its subject is a little odd, though; I refused to believe that any Sandman fans were clamoring for a return of the Three Fates or the Three Witches or the Three Goddesses or whatever they were. (I mean, they don't even have clear names.) They would just pop up sporadically and be cryptic; I think they had a role in the finale, but maybe the Three Furies were something separate? I don't know and I don't really care.

The story opens with a Pict barbarian coming to Londinium and raping a Roman woman. She's a priestess of the Triple Goddess, though, and lets off a prayer as she dies. Too late to save herself, but the Triple Goddess decide that she will get her revenge: when she and her killer are next reincarnated in the London area, her killer will die. This takes over a millennium, but finally a young maiden is due to marry a guy who turns out to be a rapist. She's secretly a witch, and so is he, and though the Triple Goddess try their best, it doesn't quite come together, everyone dies, and no revenge is had. At this point, I wasn't really into the story either way-- didn't hate it, didn't love it. Did kinda wonder what the point was. (Except that the introduction had told me, but I'll come back to that later.)

So they're left to try again in 1842, where for some reason the priestess has been reincarnated as a man-- and not just any man, but Sir Richard F. Burton (though he's no "sir" yet). What? This just seemed bizarre to me. The killer is actually his mother's lover, and willingly so. Richard Burton is chastised by her for not allowing her her sexual freedom. But he chases the lover anyway and, whoops, the lover rapes Burton. I guess because he's just so evil? Then Burton meets up with gypsies, who teach him sex magic or something (you know gypsies) and then he finds the lover, but doesn't kill him, and goes on to be imperialist bastard we all know and love. And who wrote awful, dull travelogues.

The last bit brings us to the 1990s, when the priestess is now an old lady, and the barbarian is her baby-raping, wife-mind-controlling, priest-killing warlock son-in-law. Because he just wasn't evil enough? It's starting to get over the top at this point. Anyway, the grandma wins, and the Triple Goddess sentences him to be reincarnated throughout the past as the victim of every sex crime ever. Leaving aside the fact that "sex crime" sounds a bit too 20th-century in the mouth of a pagan goddess, it's just what!? I don't even understand what this is supposed to mean. Does it make rape into an empowering act for women? Or is it poetic justice (because raping men is funny maybe)? Or something? God, how bizarre. The book tries to pull back from it by having one of the Goddesses say "I actually started wondering if the matter deserved all the fuss we'd given it," but you know, that ending still exists!

Like Black Orchid (it must be a Vertigo thing), this collection contains a fawning introduction from someone I've never heard of, but I think is supposed to be famous maybe, Penelope Spheeris. Spheeris describes the book as creating "a comic-book world for those who are evolved enough to know that ultimately there is justice in the world." There's nothing evolved about this book! It depicts men as eternal rapists and women as eternal victims, whose best outcome for "justice" is that the men can secretly be the victims of the rapes they commit. She also claims that it shows the power of women as "immeasurably strong and immeasurably subtle," though I feel like being victimized through the millennia is pretty much neither. And lastly, she's quick to claim that men will like this book too even if it is all about female power (really?) because the stories "are sexually titillating without being sexist. They are sometimes erotic, but in an artful, beautiful way... and in a way that allows the WitchCraft women to keep their power and their moral strength." WHAT!? Did we read the same book? Because in the book I read, every sex act bar two is coerced. This book is not remotely titillating-- sex is nasty, brutish, and short, a means to an end for one or both parties in every case. None of the participants are ever drawn attractively. And let's not even talk about the assumption that "boys and men alike" need sex on display to enjoy a story about women anyway...

I freely admit that Penelope Spheeris's introduction is not James Robinson's fault. But it does show the same warped, unpleasant set of values that seems to underly this entire book. Ugh.