Sandman bits and pieces

[selenak]

All the casting news about a Netflix version of The Sandman sound promising so far. Incidentally, I liked last year's audio version of the first four collections a lot, though they reminded me again that the series starts with far more overt horror than it would have later on, and that "Passengers" and "24 Hours" in particular are among the most disturbing, vicious stories I know. I had never reread them after the initial reading and listening to the audio in 2020 reminded me why. Now, the audio version kept the time frame from the comics - i.e. Morpheus gets out of Wych Cross in the 1980s - whereas I've heard the tv version will move the "present day" time frame to the actual present. This immediately made me wonder about two characters and their storylines in particular, because of the normal human life span, to wit: Unity Kinkaid and Alexander Burgess. The annoucement I linked above does include Unity, and okay, seems she gets even older than in the comics. But there's no Alex Burgess yet, and I was afraid of that.



Alexander Burgess, son of Morpheus' original captor Roderick Burgess, and his lover Paul were among my favourite minor characters of the saga. Alex, who is a child when Dream gets captured but as an adult after his father's death becomes responsible for Dream's continued captivity out of a mixture of fear and some vague hopes for gain is anything but a hero. But keeping Morpheus prisoner instead of releasing him once he can is also the worst thing he does (not that I want to downplay decades of imprisonment, but The Sandman features characters who do far worse things, including our main character). And he pays a terrible price for it. The "eternal awakening" he undergoes is a relentless torture, whereas John Dee, the guy responsible for the cruelty and madness in "Passengers" and "24 Hours", gets off lightly in comparison. (BTW, this isn't meant as a complaint. Their respective punishments say something about Dream at this point.) What started to endear Alex to me was that many a story later, we find out his younger boyfriend, Paul, who in his original appearance could have been just after the money, actually remained around to care for the comatose Alex. What he tells Rose Walker about their relationship sounded both fond and unsentimental at the same time, and very real. And then, in the big climax of the entire Saga, Alex wakes up again, for real this time, miraculously sane, not mad, and reunites with Paul. That The Wake includes the new Dream, Daniel, explicitly forgiving Alex was a moment of grace that brought home how Dream had changed.

Alex Burgess and Unity Kinkaid are about the same age, but Unity's story wraps up in "A Doll's House", the second collection, i.e. relatively early after Dream's escape, whereas Alex only awakes near the end of the entire saga and can't wake up earlier than that if the same point about Morpheus gets made. If Morpheus escapes not in the 1980s, but in the new millennium and our near-present, I figured that Alex Burgess would not make the cut.

On the other hand, the news that a) Johanna Constantine will be played by Jenna Coleman, and b) in addition to Georgian Johanna, there will also be present day Johanna instead of present day John made me cheer. I always wanted more of Johanna - and I did enjoy her origin story as written by Andy Diggle later -, and a look at the A03 archive tells me there are still only five stories featuring her, which I hope and guess will change once the tv version is around. (Though inevitably some of the impending stories will be Doctor Who fusions, what with Clara Oswald having all those canonical alter egos anyway.) . And I'm very intrigued by the slight change revealed by how the casting of Lyta Hall is described. (BTW, Lyta also hardly shows up in what fanfic is at the AO3, and the story written by yours truly over a decade ago still seems to be the only longer one where she plays a prominent role - here, too, I hope for new stories caused by tv.) Lyta is described as a friend of Rose. At a guess, this is in order to connect her storyline more to that of Rose - in the comics, the two run separate except for the fact that Lyta and Hector are in the dreams of Rose's brother Jed - , and to give her more screentime in her initial appearance. Considering the final importance of Lyta in the Sandman story, I can see the point of giving her more than a brief cameo at the start.


Going through old and more recent Sandman fanfiction and dipping in and out of canon also reminded me of what a marvellous example of one of my favourite tropes (if done well) the Endless are - to wit, dysfunctional siblings. Can't wait to see the bickering played out on screen!

Comments

[lilysea]

I loved Johanna Constantine in the comics

but I HATED Jenna Coleman in Dr Who

so I'm thinking "but there are so many good female actors who aren't Jenna Coleman!"

[lilysea]

After seeing Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Simone Garnett in The Good Place, I'm like, yes, I can see her as Death.

My dream cast for death would probably have been either Tessa Thompson or Janelle Monáe, but I suspect they couldn't have afforded either of them...

[chelseagirl]

Hmm, I wonder if Johanna instead of John in present day because John's made the rounds of several of the DC tv shows? They've made a concerted effort to make sure Lucifer will be very different from Tom Ellis' Lucifer, but John Constantine is pretty much . . . John Constantine. (Except when he's played by Keanu Reeves.)

What I want is the Ellis Lucifer and the Christie Lucifer to go on a roadtrip together, and I have a feeling AO3 will be all over that.

[selenak]

Re: Lucifer, well, since Tom Ellis' Lucifer is very different from the original Sandman (and later the spin-off) Lucifer, that was a given, but I freely admit casting Christie was inspired. :)

John Constantine: you could be right.

[chelseagirl]

Yes. I was a huge Sandman fan. I can pretty much attribute my marriage to having gone to a con a friend was organizing because Neil Gaiman was going to be a guest and meeting M there. I originally tried the first episode of Lucifer when it broadcast, and didn't continue because it was so non-Gaiman-ish.

But for some reason it became a huge phenomenon over the past year+ when everyone's been watching a lot more Netflix than usual, I gave it a try, and it hit in just the right place. I love it for what it is.

I still 100% stand by my statement: seeing the two of them together, both being Lucifer, would be amazing fun.

(I don't know if you watched the series, but at one point a main character reads Coraline with her daughter, and in the last episode before the network dropped it and before Netflix picked it up to do new ones, Neil narrates as the voice of God. But yeah, he and Mazikeen are definitely very different interpretations from their Sandman versions; I didn't keep up with the Lucifer comics much past the first few, not because of any disappointment in them so much as that I'm not naturally a comic book reader.)

[selenak]

Oh, I didn't mean it as a diss of the series, just as an observation. As its own, very different thing, it is quite charming, though I only watched the first three seasons.

[princessofgeeks]

I will totally watch this show and am hoping for the best.

[selenak]

So say we all.:)

[kore]

Jenna Coleman makes my heart sink, but everyone else sounds good.

Sandman was like one of the first graphic novels I ever read (the other was Watchmen, lol) and I still love it, even though "problematic" doesn't begin to describe a lot of it. Like the opening bit with Calliope's sexual slavery and imprisonment. I think I read the diner story once and never ever again. It'll be interesting to see different takes on those, especially visually. (Calliope's nudity and posing don't look exactly like porn....but....)

[selenak]

Re: Calliope, years ago the original script was online as an example of how the creative process (i.e. from text to pictures) works, and I remember Neil Gaiman's request for the first look at naked Calliope was that her nudity was supposed to NOT come across as sexy but as the nakedness of a concentration camp survivor. This wasn't my association when reading the story, but neither was porn, to be fair. The artist did make some effort to make her look different from, say, Ishtar in "Brief Lives" when she's dancing. In any event the story is so clearly on Calliope's side and loathing of Richard Madoc (in the panel where he first rapes her, the emphasis is on her face, we don't see her breasts or hips) and Erasmus Fry that it didn't impact me the way that the whole John Dee storyline did, where the guests in the diner are so mercilessly tortured to death. Calliope regaining her freedom and Madoc being punished both in a Doylist and Watsonian level helped there, I think. As did the fact that the story at no point pretends either Fry or Madoc were in love with Calliope; even the sex as sex isn't what it's about, it's the power and the exploitation, which struck me as dead-on as to what's going on in the head of people like that.

(And of course I was curious about the hinted at backstory with her and Dream.)

This said, the audio last year came without visuals, naturally, and telling this story in a visual medium will come with the same trapfalls as the original comic.

[jesuswasbatman]

The script was included in the edition I have of the TPB that contains the story.

[lilacsigil]

I remember the advertising for the Sandman series before it came out was an hourglass and the quote "I will show you terror in a handful of dust," so I think it was pitched much more horror than it later became.

Alex Burgess could easily be just moved down a generation - he's the young grandson of the original captor - and be the same age he was in the comics, I think. I hope he and Paul aren't written out completely.

Pleased about Johanna and Lyta, though!

[selenak]

Re: Alex Burgess as the grandson - I hope so, though that still loses the circumstance of him being present (as a child) when Dream gets captured.

Sandman launched Vertigo, didn't it? And Vertigo, I'm told, originally was supposed to be the "adult" (read: horror, violence, and sex) branch.

I'm really looking forward to more Johanna and Lyta.

[lilacsigil]

Sandman was part of a "mature" line in the late 80s, with Swamp Thing and Hellblazer and Doom Patrol and Shade the Changing Man, which all got turned into the Vertigo imprint in the early 90s. But at the time, it was just a mature line of DC comics (there was a Batman title too), not a separate entity as it later became. Sandman was part of and was boosted by the boom in comics in general, and the huge growth of the graphic novel (no wonder Gaiman got sick of the "Comics aren't just for kids!!!" headline) but it was just one title in the line and became less horror-based along the way, since Swamp Thing and Hellblazer were still covering that angle!

[dalmeny]

When I was in my early twenties, a younger colleague asked me to recommend a real horror story that she could read with friends at a Halloween party. I lent her "24 Hours". I still recall the expression she had when she gave it back to me, though I no longer remember her name.