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The Annotated Sandman #4
The Annotated Sandman, Vol. 4
In-depth, informative and entertaining, The Annotated Sandman is a fascinating look at the celebrated comic book series written by New York Times best-selling author Neil Gaiman.
The Sandman is one of the most acclaimed titles in the history of comics. A rich blend of modern myth and dark fantasy in which contemporary fiction, historical drama and legend are seamlessly interwoven, The Sandman is also widely considered to be one of the most original and artistically ambitious comic books of the modern age. By the time it concluded in 1996, it had made significant contributions to the artistic maturity of comics as a whole and had become a pop culture phenomenon in its own right. Critics and readers alike agreed: The Sandman proved that comic books were not simply a genre but were instead a rich and unique medium combining both art and literature.
Now, DC Comics is proud to present this literary classic in an all-new Annotated Edition format. Edited with notes by Leslie S. Klinger, The Annotated Sandman is a page-by-page, panel-by-panel journey through every installment of The Sandman. Using the original comic book scripts and hours of conversations with Gaiman himself, Klinger presents a wealth of commentary, references, and hidden meanings that deepen and enrich our understanding of the acclaimed series. This fourth volume, comprising issues #57-75, completes the title’s original run and features an all-new set of appendices, including a detailed chronology of the events of The Sandman and an exhaustive index of all of its unforgettable characters.
The Sandman is one of the most acclaimed titles in the history of comics. A rich blend of modern myth and dark fantasy in which contemporary fiction, historical drama and legend are seamlessly interwoven, The Sandman is also widely considered to be one of the most original and artistically ambitious comic books of the modern age. By the time it concluded in 1996, it had made significant contributions to the artistic maturity of comics as a whole and had become a pop culture phenomenon in its own right. Critics and readers alike agreed: The Sandman proved that comic books were not simply a genre but were instead a rich and unique medium combining both art and literature.
Now, DC Comics is proud to present this literary classic in an all-new Annotated Edition format. Edited with notes by Leslie S. Klinger, The Annotated Sandman is a page-by-page, panel-by-panel journey through every installment of The Sandman. Using the original comic book scripts and hours of conversations with Gaiman himself, Klinger presents a wealth of commentary, references, and hidden meanings that deepen and enrich our understanding of the acclaimed series. This fourth volume, comprising issues #57-75, completes the title’s original run and features an all-new set of appendices, including a detailed chronology of the events of The Sandman and an exhaustive index of all of its unforgettable characters.
544 pages, Hardcover
First published November 10, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 7, 2021
It’s often said that stories have meanings because they end. Gaiman feels determined to play with all the possible meanings of that here, spinning his own dark fairy tale out of all of the threads of cloth that came before him. It’s remarkable to think about where this particular tale started and how the story has grown and changed since it began - by the end, all the meta and intertextual ruminations on storytelling have simply become just one of its many-faceted parts, and what I was left with here is a really chilling and tragic story of humans playing and fighting and simply trying to understand the Endless facts of our human existence. If I wished that sometimes the storytelling was a little more direct, or that Gaiman had knitted a nice jumper instead of this one-armed, three-legged, two-tailed piece of clothing, well then maybe I’ll just have to go back and make sure I re-read it someday.
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June 20, 2019Much better in annotating than previous three volumes. We get to glimpse at the way Gaiman ties back all the characters - both main and a few that have been in the periphery, and see how it all comes together in the end.
The ending isn't spectacular in any sense but its that is coming since the very first comic. Dream's unwillingness to change in the past had cost him relationships and when he finally starts to - just a little, it doesn't end well. He keeps well on his promise and its the promises he keeps that eventually culminates in his end.
The ending isn't spectacular in any sense but its that is coming since the very first comic. Dream's unwillingness to change in the past had cost him relationships and when he finally starts to - just a little, it doesn't end well. He keeps well on his promise and its the promises he keeps that eventually culminates in his end.
February 20, 2017
Having now completed Neil Gaiman's original 75-issue run of Sandman, in the annotated editions of Leslie Klinger, I can say without a doubt I've just read the greatest comic book ever written.
The fourth volume of material (I'll call it that even though the series has been reprinted a variety of ways at this point with different numbers to each set) reveals how Gaiman found the shape of his story, and even how he originally thought (as per Klinger's ever-insightful glimpses into Gaiman's own reflections) Sandman was not going to amount to much, as he'd poured all his greatest inspiration into other works, and considered Sandman a place to pass off weaker thoughts. He couldn't have been more wrong. As it turns out, the culmination of all that work is his best work, even twenty years later (no offense to those who love his subsequent prose adventures).
This volume includes the climax, Dream's death. The final issue revisits Shakespeare's bargain with Dream. I remember thinking, five long years ago when I read the first volume of Klinger's work, that this was a silly thing for Gaiman to do, make his creation the inspiration for an acknowledged genius; it seemed somewhat presumptuous. But now it seems something else, a reflection of everything Gaiman sought to accomplish with Sandman, how he wasn't really thinking or talking about dreams at all, but the basic struggle of existence and making sense of that. Dream belongs to a collective known as the Endless for a reason, and the end of his story reflects his conclusions about his cumulative experiences, especially as things came to a head following the events recounted in the first stories, where he became a prisoner for nearly a century and had to reclaim everything that was once his. One by one each subsequent story was about someone releasing themselves from illusions (clever, that), including the recurring figure of the long-loved mortal Hob Gadling, who reflects in one of the final issues the disparities between the real past and the way it's imagined in the present, and whether or not the two can be reconciled. Fact and fiction, the stuff of the endless narrative of time; stories. Dream considered himself the lord of stories, and of course Gaiman spent most of his time using Sandman to tell whatever stories he wanted to, and that was his right, but the point was that there's a reason we tell them and a reason we shouldn't let them claim us, because it's far too easy to trap ourselves, let alone allow others to trap us.
So I think a movie based on Sandman (and I wonder if such a thing really should resist the urge to create a series of movies, as has been tradition of late), should start with Shakespeare, and maybe include the imprisonment and release, search for Destruction, and of course Dream's death, and then end with Shakespeare, as in the comic.
What Gaiman did, and Klinger after him, was present a thing that helped preserve a lot of history, whether in stories or the real world, a lot of which is rapidly being lost to obscurity, as tends to happen. Sandman is meant to explain, on one level, why we tell stories at all, and so of course there are a lot of stories within it, most of which have nothing at all to do with Dream, who so often remains aloof from even his own existence. At one point in this volume, he even declares the moral of The Emperor's New Clothes to be that children and halfwits blurt out the obvious because they don't know any better, just as if they aren't exposing the complacency around them to the betterment of everyone. Well, Gaiman ultimately decides Dream's existence is about complacency, and the whole series about his rousing from that complacency whether or not he allows himself to admit it...
When Matthew the raven, a character Gaiman inherited from Alan Moore (as he does, in some respects, the idea of referencing Guy Fawkes, memorably evoked in Moore's V for Vendetta), has to decide how to respond to Dream's death, it's the emotional crux of the whole thing. Matthew is not a character often mentioned as part of the legacy of Sandman; most often it's Dream and Death. But Matthew is in some respects the soul of the story, an ordinary guy who in his afterlife is transformed into Dream's raven companion, who eventually wonders what happened to all the previous raven companions, and actually becomes the common link between Morpheus and Daniel, father and son, Dream and Dream. Matthew's existence is a dream at this point, and he chooses to embrace the dream, and thus, Dream, and thus becomes the stand-in for readers of Sandman. He becomes arguably the best character of the story, symbolic of the great craft Gaiman brought to it.
Sandman, and Watchmen, and Dark Knight Returns, and Grant Morrison's lesser-known Zenith, happened at a time when superhero comics had reached an ebb from which it seemed only complete reinvention could save them. This was DC's second Silver Age renaissance, this one carried outside of regular continuity and thus mostly unrecognized for what it was. Moore was saying goodbye to a childhood obsession, Miller presented the first human Batman adventure, and Gaiman had a look at what lay beyond superheroes in the superhero landscape, the archetypes that had made them possible. Quite literally, he had his Sandman be the inspiration for the original Sandman, and occasionally wear a mask that evoked the Golden Age superhero, including in his climactic encounter with the forces that seek to destroy him. Everyone thinks it was Moore who saw superheroes to their natural conclusions, but it was Gaiman who evoked gods most clearly, most...evocatively.
Later, he'd write American Gods, which is all but a sequel to Sandman, or at the very least a companion; were it written as a comic I have no doubt at all that there would have been pales faces with black hair dotting its pages at regular intervals, much as in Sandman itself, something that explains everything else, provides a continuity, a context. Klinger gives plenty of context in his volumes, but so did Gaiman.
I see no way
why any such play
should ever be forgot.
The fourth volume of material (I'll call it that even though the series has been reprinted a variety of ways at this point with different numbers to each set) reveals how Gaiman found the shape of his story, and even how he originally thought (as per Klinger's ever-insightful glimpses into Gaiman's own reflections) Sandman was not going to amount to much, as he'd poured all his greatest inspiration into other works, and considered Sandman a place to pass off weaker thoughts. He couldn't have been more wrong. As it turns out, the culmination of all that work is his best work, even twenty years later (no offense to those who love his subsequent prose adventures).
This volume includes the climax, Dream's death. The final issue revisits Shakespeare's bargain with Dream. I remember thinking, five long years ago when I read the first volume of Klinger's work, that this was a silly thing for Gaiman to do, make his creation the inspiration for an acknowledged genius; it seemed somewhat presumptuous. But now it seems something else, a reflection of everything Gaiman sought to accomplish with Sandman, how he wasn't really thinking or talking about dreams at all, but the basic struggle of existence and making sense of that. Dream belongs to a collective known as the Endless for a reason, and the end of his story reflects his conclusions about his cumulative experiences, especially as things came to a head following the events recounted in the first stories, where he became a prisoner for nearly a century and had to reclaim everything that was once his. One by one each subsequent story was about someone releasing themselves from illusions (clever, that), including the recurring figure of the long-loved mortal Hob Gadling, who reflects in one of the final issues the disparities between the real past and the way it's imagined in the present, and whether or not the two can be reconciled. Fact and fiction, the stuff of the endless narrative of time; stories. Dream considered himself the lord of stories, and of course Gaiman spent most of his time using Sandman to tell whatever stories he wanted to, and that was his right, but the point was that there's a reason we tell them and a reason we shouldn't let them claim us, because it's far too easy to trap ourselves, let alone allow others to trap us.
So I think a movie based on Sandman (and I wonder if such a thing really should resist the urge to create a series of movies, as has been tradition of late), should start with Shakespeare, and maybe include the imprisonment and release, search for Destruction, and of course Dream's death, and then end with Shakespeare, as in the comic.
What Gaiman did, and Klinger after him, was present a thing that helped preserve a lot of history, whether in stories or the real world, a lot of which is rapidly being lost to obscurity, as tends to happen. Sandman is meant to explain, on one level, why we tell stories at all, and so of course there are a lot of stories within it, most of which have nothing at all to do with Dream, who so often remains aloof from even his own existence. At one point in this volume, he even declares the moral of The Emperor's New Clothes to be that children and halfwits blurt out the obvious because they don't know any better, just as if they aren't exposing the complacency around them to the betterment of everyone. Well, Gaiman ultimately decides Dream's existence is about complacency, and the whole series about his rousing from that complacency whether or not he allows himself to admit it...
When Matthew the raven, a character Gaiman inherited from Alan Moore (as he does, in some respects, the idea of referencing Guy Fawkes, memorably evoked in Moore's V for Vendetta), has to decide how to respond to Dream's death, it's the emotional crux of the whole thing. Matthew is not a character often mentioned as part of the legacy of Sandman; most often it's Dream and Death. But Matthew is in some respects the soul of the story, an ordinary guy who in his afterlife is transformed into Dream's raven companion, who eventually wonders what happened to all the previous raven companions, and actually becomes the common link between Morpheus and Daniel, father and son, Dream and Dream. Matthew's existence is a dream at this point, and he chooses to embrace the dream, and thus, Dream, and thus becomes the stand-in for readers of Sandman. He becomes arguably the best character of the story, symbolic of the great craft Gaiman brought to it.
Sandman, and Watchmen, and Dark Knight Returns, and Grant Morrison's lesser-known Zenith, happened at a time when superhero comics had reached an ebb from which it seemed only complete reinvention could save them. This was DC's second Silver Age renaissance, this one carried outside of regular continuity and thus mostly unrecognized for what it was. Moore was saying goodbye to a childhood obsession, Miller presented the first human Batman adventure, and Gaiman had a look at what lay beyond superheroes in the superhero landscape, the archetypes that had made them possible. Quite literally, he had his Sandman be the inspiration for the original Sandman, and occasionally wear a mask that evoked the Golden Age superhero, including in his climactic encounter with the forces that seek to destroy him. Everyone thinks it was Moore who saw superheroes to their natural conclusions, but it was Gaiman who evoked gods most clearly, most...evocatively.
Later, he'd write American Gods, which is all but a sequel to Sandman, or at the very least a companion; were it written as a comic I have no doubt at all that there would have been pales faces with black hair dotting its pages at regular intervals, much as in Sandman itself, something that explains everything else, provides a continuity, a context. Klinger gives plenty of context in his volumes, but so did Gaiman.
I see no way
why any such play
should ever be forgot.
January 24, 2016
This volume concludes the series, though I suppose an annotated volume of the two Death minseries and Sandman: Overture and so on isn't entirely out of the question. This book covers the last major story arcs: The Kindly Ones and The Wake, as well as the final, post-Wake issues of the series. The annotations were, as always, a mixture of interesting and "But I already knew that." The real question is: are the annotated editions worth buying? Well ... if one is a fan of Neil's work, the question is, more accurately: how many copies should I buy? If you're looking for the best possible presentation of the series, I'd go with the gorgeous Absolute volumes (I can't afford them, but we wants them, my Precious. We wants them so much. Gollum! Gollum! ) The Annotated volumes are nice enough, but the artwork is all in black and white. It looks good that way, but it looks even better in color. And, given the recent Sandman: Overture series, some of these notes are obsolete and/or inaccurate. The sad truth is that, as long as Gaiman is capable of writing more Sandman stories, there will never be a definitive Annotated or Absolute edition. It's not a bad problem to have, actually.
August 17, 2022
Okay, I'm taking it down to one star for this one. There were SO MANY things that I noticed that ought--based on the previous volumes--to have had annotations, but did not. Some of these were even quoted poems and lyrics in italics, so there was no excuse for missing them. There were also a couple annotations that mentioned people or places who aren't readily known, like a British garden designer, but weren't explained. We also had some bizarre choices of which annotations to expand upon, like a note that spilled onto a second page because of an extensive quote about a frog found in a fossilized log that could have been summarized in a sentence or two. At least all the annotations were in the right place, unlike in those first two volumes.
That said, for nerds like me this volume did include some handy references: a list of every character in the series, a timeline of the entire series (alas that it does not include some of the later issues), and a list of existing books of collections with a brief summary of what's in them, which would have helped me realize that I'd actually been looking for the Absolute Sandman when I got the first Annotated Sandman from the library. Ah well, guess I'll check those out before the next season of The Sandman drops on Netflix.
Notes not related to annotations that I thought were missing:
> I really ought to read some Ben Johnson and John Webster, Shakespeare's contemporaries/followers. Webster's The White Devil and the Duchess of Malfi are described as "grotesque, near-Gothic stories," which are my kind of thing.
> Fascinating note about seventh sons/daughters of seventh sons/daughters being believed to have special healing powers.
> Quote from the ladies that Rose meets at the nursing home:
"A woman shouldn't have to sleep her life away. Women aren't about dreaming. We're about the real world."
"Even your grandma woke before she died. Women are about waking, Rose."
"As mothers we wake them from nothingness to existence."
"As maidens we wake them to the joys and miseries of adulthood, wake them to the worlds of lust and responsibility."
"And when their time's up, it's always us has to wash them for the last time, and we lay them out for the wake."
(Interestingly, that last part turns out not to be totally true for Dream. Elbis O'Shaugnassy lays Dream for his wake, and though Death, Delirium, and perhaps Desire are women, Destiny and perhaps Desire are men (though Desire may also be both or neither).)
> Another quote from an aspect of the Ladies:
Lyta: "I am seeking the Furies."
Crone: "Not the Furies, my Lobelia [the name isn't glossed]. That's such a nasty name. It's one of the things they call women, to put us in our place."
> And then there's this weird leap of logic that seems a bit much: One of the representatives from the necropolis of Litharge is named Moulder. Pretty obvious to someone familiar with the word why. But then Klinger adds speculation that it's also a tribute to Fox Mulder from the X-Files. Um...almost certainly not. The explanation is so obvious that I'm not going to believe that second speculation unless you have some kind of authorial proof.
> Klinger quotes a poem by Victorian poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy called "Ode" (which is terrible metadata), from his collection Music and Moonlight, which sounds like something I should look up.
That said, for nerds like me this volume did include some handy references: a list of every character in the series, a timeline of the entire series (alas that it does not include some of the later issues), and a list of existing books of collections with a brief summary of what's in them, which would have helped me realize that I'd actually been looking for the Absolute Sandman when I got the first Annotated Sandman from the library. Ah well, guess I'll check those out before the next season of The Sandman drops on Netflix.
Notes not related to annotations that I thought were missing:
> I really ought to read some Ben Johnson and John Webster, Shakespeare's contemporaries/followers. Webster's The White Devil and the Duchess of Malfi are described as "grotesque, near-Gothic stories," which are my kind of thing.
> Fascinating note about seventh sons/daughters of seventh sons/daughters being believed to have special healing powers.
> Quote from the ladies that Rose meets at the nursing home:
"A woman shouldn't have to sleep her life away. Women aren't about dreaming. We're about the real world."
"Even your grandma woke before she died. Women are about waking, Rose."
"As mothers we wake them from nothingness to existence."
"As maidens we wake them to the joys and miseries of adulthood, wake them to the worlds of lust and responsibility."
"And when their time's up, it's always us has to wash them for the last time, and we lay them out for the wake."
(Interestingly, that last part turns out not to be totally true for Dream. Elbis O'Shaugnassy lays Dream for his wake, and though Death, Delirium, and perhaps Desire are women, Destiny and perhaps Desire are men (though Desire may also be both or neither).)
> Another quote from an aspect of the Ladies:
Lyta: "I am seeking the Furies."
Crone: "Not the Furies, my Lobelia [the name isn't glossed]. That's such a nasty name. It's one of the things they call women, to put us in our place."
> And then there's this weird leap of logic that seems a bit much: One of the representatives from the necropolis of Litharge is named Moulder. Pretty obvious to someone familiar with the word why. But then Klinger adds speculation that it's also a tribute to Fox Mulder from the X-Files. Um...almost certainly not. The explanation is so obvious that I'm not going to believe that second speculation unless you have some kind of authorial proof.
> Klinger quotes a poem by Victorian poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy called "Ode" (which is terrible metadata), from his collection Music and Moonlight, which sounds like something I should look up.
June 20, 2021
I was wondering how Neil Gaiman was going to end the series and the way it ended here did not disappoint me.
The Kindly Ones storyline was so entertaining (when it picked up its pacing) that I finished this volume in just a few sittings (which felt strange since I had to push myself to finish volume 3 at times). Dream's development (or lack thereof to some extent) in the series has a good payoff, I thought, and the many characters that we were introduced at the beginning come back for one last hurrah.
The annotations here were also very enjoyable, especially when they made me do a double take at the art and notice little easter eggs left here and there. When looking at Gaiman's work, this series reminds me a lot of American Gods. However, I found myself enjoying this series so much more and I am excited to re-read it - someday. Until then, I look forward to seeing these characters one day again in The Dreaming.
The Kindly Ones storyline was so entertaining (when it picked up its pacing) that I finished this volume in just a few sittings (which felt strange since I had to push myself to finish volume 3 at times). Dream's development (or lack thereof to some extent) in the series has a good payoff, I thought, and the many characters that we were introduced at the beginning come back for one last hurrah.
The annotations here were also very enjoyable, especially when they made me do a double take at the art and notice little easter eggs left here and there. When looking at Gaiman's work, this series reminds me a lot of American Gods. However, I found myself enjoying this series so much more and I am excited to re-read it - someday. Until then, I look forward to seeing these characters one day again in The Dreaming.
December 16, 2020
While this series is still in black and white, the annotations in this are much better than the previous 3 volumes. There's more detail in talking about the characters making cameo appearances in The Wake, and there's also more detailed explanations tying the first appearances of characters that show up later in the series. I was more satisfied with the annotations in this volume compared to previous ones as it felt like finally someone is giving real thought to what the reader wants. If it was in color this would be 5* since I really enjoy the Sandman books.
July 2, 2022
Separating out my opinion of the annotated work versus the original work is hard. Though it is hard to read because of its physical size, I like the form of this work - it captures the bigness of the series and this portion in particular which is the ending. In general I prefer color to black-and-white, but I appreciate the differentness of this version. There could have been more and more consistent annotations. My least favorite form were the full-length poems when the text just had an extract. The best was especially in the Wake, in which the reminders of who was whom was helpful.
August 23, 2022
Neither the best nor the worst storylines from The Sandman. As was too often the case with this series, I was disappointed with this volume's annotations. This time Klinger leans too heavily on explaining when reappearing characters last popped up, without telling you anything about them or, if he does, adding a patronizing "of course" to make you feel bad for not knowing.
March 20, 2024
too little info, too many blank panel sides, too much referencing earlier annotations (for that price). and then tons on shakespeare, where it would be easiest to research on one’s own. sloppy and lazy. the timeline of sandman events is nice though.
October 11, 2017
I wish I could give this 6 stars. I've finished this epic story for the fourth time. I'm sure I'll read it again in a few years.
February 3, 2017
The saga of The Sandman unfortunately goes out with a bit of a whimper. It's not that it isn't interesting, it's that it just drags on and on and on and on. Yes, all the loose ends are tied up, and Gaiman is a talented writer, but it felt like the storyline could have been about half as long and twice as interesting.
With that said, the annotations for this section were more helpful than some of the previous ones, with more information taken from Gaiman's notes and connections to the mythology and folklore. There's also a list of characters cross-referenced to their appearances and a timeline.
With that said, the annotations for this section were more helpful than some of the previous ones, with more information taken from Gaiman's notes and connections to the mythology and folklore. There's also a list of characters cross-referenced to their appearances and a timeline.
September 12, 2016
4.5 stars. Although it ended more or less the only way it possibly could, and although it's obvious that the overall story arc was envisioned from the start, and although Gaiman's genius shines throughout the series, I'm docking a half-star for what I felt were some unnecessary epilogue stories. I wish I hadn't read the annotated versions first- there were several plot points that were spoiled for me by reading the notes. Still, a satisfying emotional punch. I'll be revisiting this story again.
June 21, 2016
Rating refers to annotations, not story
The appendix timeline, list of characters, and editions is a great addition to the notes.
The appendix timeline, list of characters, and editions is a great addition to the notes.
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