The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll's House 30th Anniversary Edition

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That evening, Alexander Burgess goes to sleep. In his dreams, he is confronted by the Sandman. Unable to gain revenge against the man who first imprisoned him, he instead decides to mete out vengeance against the son. He curses Burgess with Eternal Waking - an endless nightmare wherein he experiences terrific horrors which conclude when he wakes up screaming - only to discover that he is actually still asleep, and the self-perpetuating cycle repeats itself over and over. Burgess lapses into a coma. Take the character of Judy, a doomed lesbian woman on the outs with her girlfriend, who appears in one issue only. Did we need to keep the detail that the first queer couple in the story is physically abusive? Did we need the multiple fleeting, florid references to the brutalization of queer, underage, male sex workers? Did we need to create an audioscape of a man “nervously” raping the muse Calliope? Or to painstakingly, without edits, retell the plot-inessential one-shot story “Facade” — the moral of which can be read as “Suicide isn’t tragic if you’re freakish enough”? And could we have taken a second look, perhaps, at the suggestion that “it” is just as appropriate a pronoun as “he,” “she,” or “they” for Dream’s genderfluid sibling, Desire? Image: Neil Gaiman, Colleen Doran/DC Comics This issue establishes that many of the host characters from DC's various horror anthology titles of the 1970s are denizens of the Dreaming. Cain was the host of House of Mystery, while his brother Abel was the host of House of Secrets. The Three Witches were the featured hosts of The Witching Hour and Lucien was the host of the short-lived Tales of Ghost Castle. Another character that makes a cameo appearance in this issue is that of Raven Woman. Raven Woman is later revealed to be the Biblical Eve, who herself, was the hostess of Secrets of Sinister House. Eve, Cain and Abel were also recurring characters in the humor title Plop!.

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Audible’s exclusive audiobook version of The Sandman is a well-produced, fascinating experiment. That’s fitting, given that the original story — a comics series about the king of Dreams — was also a weird experiment. Gregory the Gargoyle is Cain's pet at the House of Mystery and was a regularly featured character in that title. As with volume 1, my rating and review relate only to the annotation work and the actual physical book in my hands, not to Sandman overall. I have food and raiment. I need the tools stolen from me by my former captor. He will give them to me. And he will give me the other thing I crave... revenge. — Dream

Dream's quote, "It was a dark and stormy nightmare..." is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night". The phrase was originally penned by Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton as the beginning of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. I also continue to be fascinated by the places in which Gaiman's descriptions and the final art don't quite match up. I more than understand the desire of a living author to keep any less-than-pleased thoughts about a coworker's work quiet, but I did also appreciate the one place where it slipped through, in a comment that the demon Azazel as it originally appeared in issue #4 looked like a "floating potato." Yeah, Azazel's look is definitely stronger here! Burgess identifies Dream as belonging to a group called the Endless. He makes reference to other members of the Endless, notably Death, Desire and Destiny. Destiny made regular appearances as the host of Secrets of Haunted House and Weird Mystery Tales. Death and Desire have yet to be introduced in the series. Death will make her first appearance in Sandman (Volume 2) #8 and Desire will be introduced in Sandman (Volume 2) #10.

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If I’m being blunt about this, it’s out of love; a deep affection and nostalgia for The Sandman and the quality of its storytelling when the series is at its greatest. Gaiman and his collaborators — a murderer’s row of industry giants like Kelley Jones, Colleen Doran, Chris Bachalo, and more — crafted one of the very best stories about stories that the canon has ever seen. I want that story to live as long as possible. But I’ll firmly pass if that means we’re going to be revisiting the “A Game of You” arc without any considered updates made to the character of Wanda, a trans woman whose identity is denied at every turn — including by a god of the feminine! — until she dies along with most of the cast and her bigoted family buries her in a suit and with a short haircut, under a stone with her deadname on it. One passage states that Unity Kinkaid dreams of a "tall dark man". On the surface it appears as if Gaiman is describing Morpheus, but it is also possible that he may be describing Desire. Desire's connection to Unity Kincaid is revealed in "The Kindly Ones" story-arc later on in the series.But the Sandman audiobook is a fresh new creation, and the choice to re-create inessential instances of rape, homophobia, and queer tragedy — especially when working directly with the series’ original writer — simply reads as callous. Gaiman himself has said that he would change aspects of the comic if it were written today. Audible’s edition doesn’t. Image: Neil Gaiman, Mike Dringenberg/DC Comics Well, my complaints about the first volume of The Annotated Sandman hold true for this one as well: Fortunately, Gaiman isn’t always the Narrator, and even when he is, the audiobook still has lovely stretches of achievement. The whole opening arc comes off great — the cameos from John Constantine, original Sandman Wesley Dodds, and superhero Mister Miracle are bright highlights. The series also shines in adaptations of Sandman’s single-issue tangent tales, like that of the accidental immortal Hob Gadling, the dreams of cats, and the original 1605 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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The audiobook itself is beautifully produced, and from the casting announcement, it should come as no surprise that the voices are, on the whole, extremely good. I was particularly pleased by Taron Egerton as John Constantine, Bebe Neuwirth as the Siamese Cat, and, of course, the chocolate-voiced James McAvoy as Dream. Ironically, the biggest sore thumb in the cast is Neil Gaiman himself, in the role of the Narrator. Image: Neil Gaiman, Kelley Jones/DC Comics

The Sandman (audiobook) adapts the first three volumes of the complete 10-volume set DC Comics has been printing for decades now. This includes the comic’s opening arc, “Preludes and Nocturnes,” in which the King of Dreams is imprisoned, escapes, and recovers his artifacts of power; the second arc, “The Doll’s House,” in which he seeks out several rogue dreams who escaped his realm in his absence; and every one of the chapter-long stories included in those two volumes and the third.

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This is the first time that the Three Witches are presented as an interchangeable single entity; The Three-in-One. In previous appearances, they have always been presented as separate individuals. It may seem odd to call The Sandman (audiobook) an adaptation. Audiobooks are, after all, translations: readings intended to preserve an unaltered text. But The Sandman isn’t a book, it’s a comic book, and its audiobook isn’t just translating textual words to spoken ones. It’s an adaptation masquerading as a translation — it’s a product of writers and audio artists making choices about how to present purely visual information. It would be a disservice to the many artists who crafted the comic to pretend otherwise. The flaw of the audiobook is that it’s an adaptation where the creators don’t make enough choices.One of the most popular and critically acclaimed graphic novels of all time, Neil Gaiman’s award-winning masterpiece The Sandman set the standard for mature, lyrical fantasy in the modern comics era. Illustrated by an exemplary selection of the medium’s most gifted artists, the series is a rich blend of modern and ancient mythology in which contemporary fiction, historical drama, and legend are seamlessly interwoven. The Sandman: The Deluxe Edition Book Two collects issues #17-31 of the original run of The Sandman, which includes the World Fantasy Award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and tales from the Angoulême International Comics Festival best script award-winning graphic novel “Season of Mists.” This volume also features the Sandman Special #1 and short stories from Vertigo: Winter’s Edge #1-3 that further chronicle the enchanting world of Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, and his kin, the Endless. The Sandman: The Deluxe Edition Book Two by Neil Gaiman – Comic eBook Details I would love to hear audio productions of later arcs of The Sandman, like “Season of Mists,” in which a conclave of gods petitions Dream for the keys to Hell; “Brief Lives,” in which Dream takes his little sister Delirium on a cross-country road trip to find their lost brother Destruction; or the tragic, never-ending story of Dream’s son, Orpheus. Reference is made to Brute and Glob in this issue. Brute and Glob were two nightmares that often worked alongside Garrett Sanford, the Silver Age Sandman. They were regularly featured characters in Sandman #. They make their first Post-Crisis appearance in Sandman (Volume 2) #11. If Sandman in a lot of ways embodied the Goth culture that permeated the end of the millennium, it becomes increasingly relevant in its depiction of such characters as Wanda, a transsexual whose story unfolds late in the volume, a mere subplot in some respects, but emblematic of Gaiman's ability to pierce at the very heart of his topics in ways few others have managed in the quarter century that has since passed with increased awareness and tolerance of the whole LGBTQ community.