The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes

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Dream and Gregory the Gargoyle, from Sandman #2, "Imperfect Hosts", pencilled by Sam Kieth; copyright DC Comics

Preludes and Nocturnes is the first graphic novel collection of the comic book series The Sandman, published by DC Comics. It collects issues #1-8. It is written by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III, colored by Robbie Busch and lettered by Todd Klein.

The first seven issues of this collection comprise the "More Than Rubies" storyline. The eighth issue is a more self-contained story, "The Sound of Her Wings." It was first issued in paperback in 1991, and later in hardback in 1995.

The next volume in the series is The Doll's House.

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In 1916, Dream is captured and encased in a glass globe in a failed attempt by a fictional Edwardian magician (very much in the vein of Aleister Crowley) named Roderick Burgess to bind Death and attain immortality. Dream bides his time for decades until Burgess dies. Afterwards, his son Alexander becomes Dream’s new captor. Finally, in 1988, Alex's guards grow careless and the magic circles encasing Dream are broken, freeing him. Dream punishes Alex by cursing him to experience an unending series of nightmares.

The rest of the story concerns Dream's quest to recover his totems of power, which were dispersed following his capture: a pouch of sand, a helm and a ruby. The pouch is being kept by a former girlfriend of John Constantine's (Constantine is a character from Alan Moore's series, Swamp Thing). Once that is recovered, Dream travels to hell to regain the helm from a demon, where he incurs the wrath of Lucifer (an enmity that will have major repercussions later in the series). The ruby is in the possession of John Dee, a.k.a. Doctor Destiny, a supervillain from the Justice League of America series. He has warped and corrupted the ruby, rendering Dream unable to use it, and with it he nearly tears apart the Dreaming. However, thinking that it will kill Dream, Dee shatters the ruby, inadvertently releasing the power that Dream had stored in the ruby and restoring Dream to his full power.

The collection ends with "The Sound of Her Wings", an epilogue to the first story-arc. This issue introduces a character who has become one of the series' most popular and prominent personalities: Dream's older sister Death. She is depicted as an attractive, down-to-earth young goth girl, very unlike the traditional personification of death, and spends the issue talking Dream out of his brief post-quest depression.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Analysis

The series is still finding its feet in this volume. It has a simple quest plot, and each individual episode written in a different style as Gaiman experiments to see what direction he wants to take the comic in.

In the early issues, the creators are often pulling in different directions: Gaiman tends to write his horror and fantasy with a straight face, while Kieth's drawings play up the creepy and fantastic in a somewhat camp manner, much in the style of DC's 70s "mystery" titles; and Kieth's more delicate lines (as seen in his inking on Matt Wagner's Mage) are overwhelmed by Dringenberg's less than subtle inking. The combination works quite well on the chapter in which Dream visits Hell, but ultimately Kieth left the series after five issues, commenting that he felt like "Jimi Hendrix in the Beatles". Dringenberg switched to pencilling (with Malcolm Jones III inking), and his deadpan realism suits Gaiman's early scripts much better.

Dringenberg also redrew two pages of "A Hope in Hell" for the collected edition: a double-page spread in the original comic, they no longer fell on opposite pages in the collection.

The stories in this book conform more to the genre of horror than later books. The sixth issue, "24 Hours", is especially disturbing, describing a madman spending a day torturing the inhabitants of a diner.

Preludes and Nocturnes is also unusual in the Sandman series in that it utilizes previously existing DC characters more than the later volumes. It features cameos by popular DC figures, such as John Constantine, Mister Miracle, and the Martian Manhunter, as well as the demon Etrigan, the Batman villain the Scarecrow and Lucifer himself. Several characters revived for this volume, such as Cain and Abel and Lucien, would become fixtures in the series and come to be regarded primarily as Sandman characters. Many events in this volume foreshadow future storylines. The dreams Lucien mentions as having disappeared from the Dreaming will play a major part in The Doll's House, and Lucifer, the Hecateae and the imprisoned woman in hell who recognises the Sandman as 'Kai'ckul' all return in future volumes.