Family Reunion: The Sandman Overture #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Since my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me why anyone would consider a digital publication of any kind when he’s sure he probably has a slightly used yet still perfectly good Juggs Magazine he could sell me floating around somewhere, was sold out of The Sandman Overture #1 when we visited yesterday, this review is based on the digital version available on Comixology and read on a seven-inch Android tablet.

So. A prequel to a beloved genre series that is widely considered to be a classic, released about 16 or so years after the original series ended. That almost always ends well.

Seriously: I’ve read through The Sandman Overture, written by Neil Gaiman with art by J. H. Williams III and purported to tell the story of what Morpheus was up to just before that dink Roderick Burgess trapped him in a snow globe, and I’m not sure what I think about it. Because it’s a comic book that’s almost impossible to consider on its own merits… not that that’s a bad thing. After all, if The Phantom Menace hadn’t been tagged with the words Star Wars, it would be best remembered as a Twitter hashtag whenever it aired on the SyFy Channel after Sharknado.

But if you take The Sandman Overture #1 as part of the epic tale of Sandman, that means that you’re not only tacking onto a mythology that took 16 or so years for Gaiman to write, but one that spans thousands of years and just about the entire universe. Gaiman took the long view with Sandman, and there’s no reason to think he’s not doing the same with this miniseries.

But the trouble is that we don’t have the entire miniseries yet. We just have this one issue. And while the sum of the parts might wind up being spectacular, I just can’t say that about this single issue. What we have here is, well, a prequel. And one that shows some disturbing signs of succumbing to the same pitfall that all-too-many prequels to genre properties have fallen over the years.

Fan service.

Something is drawing Morpheus in, and he doesn’t know what it is. All he knows is that something is wrong. As he travels across the universe, trying to take care of his normal business, he knows that there is something inevitable he has to face… as do his siblings Death and Destiny. Destiny knows because he has the Big Book of Everything (apparently Destiny has a day gig at the NSA), and Death, well… Death claims that she just recently took Morpheus. Meanwhile, Dream goes to one of his satellite offices (really. I did not make this up) to deal with The Corinthian, before the compulsion to face what is calling him sends him back to his kingdom for his helm and other symbols of his office before traipsing off and being drawn into a gathering of some… unexpected parties.

So right out of the gate, Gaiman seems to be operating under the assumption that anyone reading The Sandman Overture #1 has read at least some of the original Sandman series. Because if you haven’t you’re not gonna have any idea who the hell most of these people are. Trying to put myself into the shoes of someone who’s never read Sandman, I would know who Dream is (since we get a solid introduction) and I’d get that Destiny was maybe related to him because he talks to someone he calls his sister who refers to the three of them as kind of a unit… but I wouldn’t know that the sister was Death (her name is never given, and while you might guess because she refers to “taking” Morpheus, someone uninitiated might think she was a grifter or a stolen kidney dealer or something). I would probably figure out that The Corinthian was a nightmare, but I’d probably be wondering how the hell he got into the real world.

So while I have been known to note when a book is unsuited to new readers, I think it’s doubly important to make that statement here, since I can easily see comics fans picking up an extra copy of this comic to hand to non-comics readers who might have been hesitant to dive into the 10-volume commitment of Sandman. I’m speculating here, but if I had to pick any single comic book issue as the most likely candidate to find its way into the hands of non-fanboys and fangirls, this is it… and it is just too inside baseball to the Sandman mythology to make a lick of sense to them.

Now with that said, I have read Sandman from the very first issue, so I got a kick out of seeing these characters for the first time since I was 25 years old. It was cool to see Morpheus and Death and Lucien and ol’ Merv again… and some of those appearances actually made sense within the scope of the story we’ve been given so far. But I was damn concerned that we spent seven pages with The Corinthian. I suppose it is possible that The Corinthian might play a larger role in the eventual capture of Morpheus – something not particularly indicated by his assertion at the end of his appearance that he plans to run like hell and hide – but if he doesn’t, that means that he was here for the sake of being here.

The Corinthian’s appearance here doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know about the character from Sandman. The only thing it adds to his greater story is that we learn he was just breaking out of the Dreaming around the time Dream was captured by Burgess, but otherwise it changes nothing about the character… and that concerns me. Because It makes me feel like Gaiman added The Corinthian because the character’s a fan favorite, and that kind of arbitrary fan service can be death to an actual story. Again: we spent seven pages with this character that didn’t move the greater story forward an iota, so my concern is that somewhere there is a checklist on Gaiman’s desk that will be ticked off whether they help the story or not. Don’t get me wrong, I’m kinda hoping to see Hob Gadling and Cain and Abel and even that goofball Hector Hall again… but not if we’re just gonna peel off from the main story for the sake of hanging out with them.

There is a reason why fandom in general was so excited to hear that J. H. Williams III was the guy doing the illustrations on a new Sandman comic: in a lot of ways, he’s the perfect guy to do a story about dreaming and the strange perspectives therein. Williams, as always, uses the entire page – apparently both pages, if I’m interpreting the digital rendering correctly. On most pages, he creates interesting and weird panel borders that act as pieces of even larger images – the panels that are delineated as the insides of The Corinthian’s teeth are damn cool, and Destiny opening his book to show even more story panels inside was simply spectacular. And Williams’s painted looks and occasional fine black and white panels gives everything a dreamy (ha!), ephemeral quality. Look: unless you’re gonna bring Sam Kieth back as a bookend for the first few issues of Sandman, you’re probably not gonna find a better artist for a Sandman story that J. H. Williams III.

If you’ve never read Sandman before, for the love of God, don’t try to start here. You’re gonna have no idea what the hell is going on. However, if you are a Sandman fan, there is going to be a lot of cool stuff in The Sandman Overture for you to revisit… and that is kind of the issue’s downfall. We spend a ton of time with an old favorite who does nothing to advance the story, and I fear that we might spend more time with fan favorites for the sake of hanging out with old friends…

…but with that said, Sandman has always been a story about, more than anything else, stories. And it has just occurred to me that Gaiman is a smart enough and clever enough writer that this story could, when it is all said and done, be a prequel about prequels. Meaning he might have something to say about how prequels seem to fall back on old familiar characters and simple fan service to distract the audience from the hard fact that, since it is a prequel, you know what’s going to happen. And if that’s the case, the whole of The Sandman Overture could wind up being a worthy addition to the original 10 volumes.

But as a single issue? Yeah, I’m a little concerned.