@GF said in Sandman:
I feel like Gaiman realized before the comic series was even done that he made a lot of mistakes. For example, there’s an issue near the end of the run where a character remarks that all the stories being told are boy’s stories, with no real women in them. In the context of his work to that point, it came off to me as him realizing and acknowledging his own implicit biases as a writer. That one passage makes me a bigger fan of Sandman than I’d otherwise have been.
I don’t disagree, although I do feel like that particular criticism is one you could apply to World’s End but not to Sandman as a whole. There’s a lot of women in the stories from the start, often centered more than the title character for a given arc, and mixes up the “Boy’s Own” going-on-an-adventure sorts of stories with people sitting around and talking about their feelings (often with some sort of supernatural component).
@Aria said in Sandman:
Morpheus clearly disagrees with her here, feeling that he deserves far worse than this brief brush with madness, but respects her wishes and leaves the choice in her hands. This is extremely important because the entire story up to this point is one in which her wishes, her desires, her choices haven’t mattered to anyone for the last sixty years.
Yeah, and I couldn’t help take that comment she made about whether he was so eager to do horrible vengeance was because she’d belonged to him was a commentary on the male response–in fiction, but also in real life–that men seem to leap on the (at least imagined) chance to fuck up sexual predators with violence without consideration to what the actual victims want. Seeing it in terms of their obligation or opportunity to perform masculinity through violence rather than any consideration of what would or could help. Calliope has been victimized, but she hasn’t been “fridged;” she needs to be rescued, but she’s not just there to motivate Morpheus to feel bad and give him license and motive to act.
He also asks her what she’s going to do now that she’s free, to which she replies that she wants to inspire humanity to be better than this. This is also important because it reflects the power which she has, making her more than a damsel (read: victim) that Morpheus needed to save.
From a visual standpoint, the narrative also ends on Calliope rather than Morpheus […] This is not Dream’s story. This is a story that has Dream in it, but it’s her story.
Very much agreed on both.
Two more thoughts about the episode.
First was the Ric’s portrayal of himself as a progressive feminist. It was touched on in the book, but the real centering of how he depicts himself as promoting women and POC while being a self-obsessed predator with literally no regard for Calliope’s inner life or personhood is new for the show and I wish it was less relevant than it is.
Second was how this really makes me think of how Sandman really does harken back to the old horror comics that were long-defunct (killed by Fredrick Wertham and the CCA) even when the Sandman comic was new, never mind when I discovered it in the early aughts. You mostly got them in two broad types, either unrelated vignettes only connected by the narrator who shows up to be like “THAT’S SOME FUCKED-UP SHIT HUH, I’M ROD STERLING” at the end (Tales From the Crypt itself, but also series like the Houses of Secrets and Mysteries Cain and Abel were drawn from) and the ones where you have initially-unconnected stories that get resolved by the title character showing up ex machina to deliver some nightmarish cosmic justice (like the Specter, before he started hanging out with Batman and the Justice League). Sandman takes from both in terms of its story structure, and Dream of a Thousand Cats and Calliope are essentially one of each.
In terms of the content and structure, it definitely veers more into fantasy than strict horror even if the horrific elements are still present, but you really see the horror comic influences early on. The art in the first issues is extremely characteristic of the old horror styles, as is some of the content (things like Alex’s Eternal Waking, cut from the Netflix series, would’ve fit right in with a cackling Crypt Keeper giving some closing narration). It’s a connection that I hadn’t made when I first read it, but I think it’s a really cool influence on the comic that would eventually start to mesh better with Gaiman’s specific voice and sensibilities as a writer.