Sandman.

A few years ago I wrote a column for Commonweal (February 28, 1992) on comic books and how they had become a refuge for some very fine, and very serious, storytellers. And I signaled that Sandman, written by Neil Gaiman, was not only a wonderful comic but one of the best bits of fiction altogether being produced these days.

Now I have to make a correction. Sandman is not one of the best pieces of fiction being done these days: as it approaches its conclusion, it emerges as the best piece of fiction being done these days. And that, not just because of the brilliance and intricacy of its storytelling--and I know few stories, outside the best of Joyce, Faulkner, and Pynchon, that are more intricate--but also because it tells its wonderful and humanizing tale in a medium, comic books, still largely considered demimonde by the tenured zombies of the academic establishment.

And never mind also that Gaiman has won awards and admiration and, most important for a writer, envy, from the whole civilized world. What he has done with Sand man is establish the fact that a comic book can be a work of high and very serious art--a story that other storytellers, in whatever medium they work, will have to take into account as an exploration of what stories can do and what stories are for.

Not that he doesn't have antecedents, and not that he doesn't acknowledge them. Will Eisner and Jack Kirby in the forties, Wally Wood and Carrnine Infantino in the fifties, and lately Frank Miller and the superbly gifted Alan Moore--all of whom have been demonstrating that comics are a legitimate fictive mode--or, in Gaiman's simpler, better phrase, a machine for storytelling, no less rich, and no less exciting, than any other.

There are nods, throughout the issues of Sandman, toward all of those strong precursors: Gaiman is not the sort to forget or pretend to forget his guildmasters.

Nevertheless, with some excitement, I have to announce that Sandman, at issue number 71 as I write this in September, and with maybe three or four more issues to go, is a new thing. With the conclusion of the series, which began on a monthly basis in 1988, Gaiman will have created a single, massive tale--as long as a Henry James novel--which works both as an allegory of the storytelling imagination (a "metafiction," if we must use the word) and as--a term I do not use frivolously--a tragedy. And when I say "tragedy," I am thinking of Lord Jim and Lear and Gilgamesh: stories that exist to remind us of the terrible cost of being human.

Here's what happened. In 1987, DC Comics approached Gaiman to revive, with changes, an old DC character from the forties. Gaiman chose a relatively obscure character, the Sandman, who in the forties was a guy who would dress up at night in a gas mask, zap bad guys with his gas gun, and leave them to sleep it off until the cops came to pick them up next morning.

All Gaiman used was the name: "Sandman." The master of dreams; the master of stories; Morpheus, whose name means both "god of sleep" and "shaper of form" (make no mistake, when it comes to recondite allusions, nobody has a patch upon our scarily well-read lad). So he invented a theogony--a Family of more-than, less than gods, the Endless as he calls them, anthropomorphic projections of fundamental human perceptions. In order of age, the family includes Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium (who was once Delight).

The point of this psychic genealogy, is that Dream is at its center. We tell stories, create myths, write gospels of every sort, because we cannot tolerate the irrational. Absurdity offends us, as Norman Mailer says in Oswald's Tale (Random House), just because it attacks our sense that there is a reason for our pain. Is all this sadness for nothing? we ask. And the human answer comes back, again and again, no: it's for something but it may be for a little bit more than what you were expecting.

Sandman, in other words, is about failure: about the failure of the imagination successfully to encompass the chaos of ordinary human life, about the failure of all our stories to explain to us why we are such an unhappy people. Some critics--those at least smart enough to recognize the fineness of Gaiman's work--have described him as a "postmodern" writer, and that phrase, stupid as it innately is, may begin to catch the special quality of his work; but only glancingly.

I won't detail for you the plots, subplots, and skerries-within-subplots that are the tapestry of the work: like the best of Dickens, this is serial storytelling, and part of the fun of the thing is seeing how many more balls the author tosses into the air each month, and whether he can keep them all aloft. He (Charles and Neil) does.

But I will--and now, with the series approaching its end, I can--give you a sense of its grand design.

Dream of the Endless, the Lord of Stories, is imprisoned in 1916, by a necromancer in England. He frees himself in 1988 (coincidentally the year of the series, beginning) and regains his kingdom, only to find that he has become somehow tainted--spoiled--altered-by his captivity. Humanized, in fact. From that beginning, the rest of this great and discursive series of tales is all about Dream--Story--discovering that he is intimately involved with the fate of human beings, and can in fact not exist without them.

I don't want to belabor this but in fact Sandman fascinates us so just because it is a parable of the epochal transformation of the human imagination that began right around the time of the Renaissance. In that age, our myths began to be humanized: beginning, say, with Shakespeare, we began to realize that the gods had not invented us, but that we were in the process of inventing our gods. By now in the series Dream of the Endless has died--or committed suicide--but since stories cannot cease, anymore than the mind can stop thinking, Dream of the Endless has also been reborn--but this time as the exaltation of a human child, rather than as an anthropomorphic configuration. Gaiman is too subtle to say it, but I'm not: as the series ends, the Word is made Flesh, and from now on our stories will be the stories of the gods among us, rather than the gods whose chief characteristic is their apartness.

It is the history of Western storytelling altogether, and especially of the stories we like to call "modern." It is profoundly incarnational but also-Gaiman is very learnedly Jewish-wisely melancholy about the giant cost of moving from the transcendent to the immanent. If you can really read, it is simply magnificent metafiction, a story about story.

I hope DC will have the good sense to publish the entire run, but they probably won't. I know of nothing quite like it, and I don't expect there will be anything quite like it for some time. How often is a new, and deeply human, art form born? (How often do we invent a new--a really new--sin?)

If Sandman is a "comic," then The Magic Flute is a "musical" and A Midsummer Night's Dream is a skit. Read the damn thing: it's important.