MYTHCOMICS: THE SANDMAN OVERTURE (2015)

 

Some million years ago, I wrote some essay for THE COMICS JOURNAL which included observations on the conflict between what I then called "altruism vs. selfhood." I'm reminded of that sense of conflict-- the need for community with others versus the need for a conviction of one's own stand-alone importance-- as I read SANDMAN OVERTURE for the first time. This work by SANDMAN creator Neil Gaiman and PROMETHEA artist J.H. Williams III was originally published in six continuing issues in 2015, but I first encountered in a huge, coffee-table reprint replete with essays about all of the creators (even celebrated SANDMAN letterer Todd Klein) and with a supplementary reprint of the six issues' art sans coloring, the better to show off Williams' consummate sense of design.

OVERTURE is in one sense a "continuity catch-up" work, in which an author returns to an earlier concept and reveals things he either left out or hadn't thought of earlier, not unlike H. Rider Haggard's WISDOM'S DAUGHTER, a quasi-revision of SHE. In 1989 Neil Gaiman began the saga of his main character Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming, by showing him weakened by some undisclosed conflict, so that he was captured by a mere human sorcerer. This imprisonment was principally a device by which Gaiman could allow the reader to learn about Morpheus' world once he broke free of his confinement, sought to regain control of his dream-dimension once more, and became acquainted with all the ways his world and others had changed in his absence. The reader thus also was painlessly introduced to the other members of Morpheus' family, who were also incarnations of cosmic principles-- such as Desire and Destiny, who alone play crucial support roles in OVERTURE. 

Within his dream-dimension, Morpheus is supreme, but he is inevitably tied to the community of mortal beings-- both Earth-humans and all other species who dream. This makes for a dichotomy that's less one of "selfhood vs. altruism" that of "solipsism vs. universalism." Morpheus is always conscious of his connectedness to the rest of the cosmos, and yet his persona is aloof and haughty, as of one who's seen it all. OVERTURE gives Gaiman the chance not simply to tie up some loose ends from the original SANDMAN series, but to examine the dichotomy at the heart of his best-known character.

Also, btw: end-of-story SPOILERS.

Very little of Earth, even DC-Earth, is seen in OVERTURE. The original comic series established that Morpheus's sovereignty extended to the dream-worlds of other species, but this is without question The Sandman at his most "cosmic." The first page gives us an alien world inhabited by three species, one of whom is humanoid "who believed that their planet was alone in the universe" (which POV will seem like a form of naive solipsism by the time the epic's over). But it's not any of the humanoids who witness the Death of a Dream-Lord, but an intelligent plant.

We never meet any inhabitants of this planet again, but we see the impact of the death on Morpheus, for the death of the Dream-Lord-- an "aspect" of Morpheus' own identity-- instantly draws him from his familiar haunts to a convocation of a few dozen other Dream-Lords, all deeply concerned that one of their own has died. I actually don't recall the regular comic book giving us anything like this "multiversal Morpheus"-- seen at the center of the two-page spread wearing his finest Wesley Dodds helmet; I thought Morpheus himself just "morphed" into an alien Dream-Lord whenever he encountered an alien. But even at this point in the story it's a better use of multiversality than I got from the MCU series LOKI, so I can roll with it.

What follows is structured less like a whodunnit than a "Meetings with Remarkable Beings." After conferring with his other selves, Morpheus eventually finds his way to an entity called "Glory," possibly in some way related to God. Glory informs Morpheus that a star has gone mad, creating the chaos that not only destroyed the Dead Dream-Lord but also several inhabited worlds. Morpheus more or less tells Glory "that ain't my department," but Glory spurs him on in the quest by saying that the chaos is occurring "because a child lived and a world died, long ago." 

After the conversation with Glory, Morpheus is joined by one of his other Dream-selves, whom for the time being I'll call the Dream-Cat. Morpheus and Dream-Cat consult with the Kindly Ones, a version of the Greek Moirai. And then, as if to give the series just a little more grounding in common humanity, Morpheus and Dream-Cat pick up an orphan girl named Hope, whose cognomen is sort of a "call-forward" to one of Gaiman's first stories for the regular series, issue #4's "A Hope in Hell." 

Morpheus and Dream-Cat undertake other meetings-- with a city of sentient stars, and with both Time and Night, the respective father and mother of Morpheus, but they serve more to illustrate the cosmos in which the Sandman moves than anything else. In essence, Morpheus is no longer seeking to solve a mystery, for he knew as soon as Glory spoke of a "child spared" that he Morpheus was responsible for the chaos of the mad star. The madness was created by a woman on an alien world who, through no fault of her own, was born a "dream-vortex," a concept Gaiman had dealt with in a "later" story in A DOLL'S HOUSE. Morpheus sought out the unnamed woman long before she began to create any chaos, but he declined to act because, as his present-self says, "I thought myself too wise, too noble, too gentle, to murder."

This forbearance, then, is what costs Dream one of his dream-selves and lots of collateral damage to boot. Upon confronting the mad star Fomalhaut, the star subjects Morpheus to the ultimate solipsism, propelling him into a black hole, in which there is "no light, no information, no dreams." Morpheus is only "rescued," if one can call it that, by his conceptual brother Destiny, who pulls Morpheus from the black hole because Destiny's own garden has been invaded by a mysterious ship. Morpheus does not recognize the ship, but he acknowledges Destiny's intuition: that the ship belongs to him. Boarding the ship, Morpheus finds it inhabited by Dream-Cat, a ghost-like version of Hope, and a few thousand alien beings, whose purpose is to erase the chaos of Morpheus's mistake by "re-dreaming" the cosmos into a "new continuity." Morpheus succeeds in getting his "do-over," but he's so exhausted by his efforts that-- wait for it-- he's weak enough to be captured by a mere mortal sorcerer, thus setting the entire continuity of the original comic into motion. Then there's a coda, a little on the confusing side, revealing that "Dream-Cat" never existed, for "he" was Morpheus's sister, the aforementioned Desire, who assumed the masquerade because she knew that he was too self-absorbed to accept help except from a being who seemed to be another version of himself.

OVERTURE is a good metaphysical romp. Both writer and artist deliver a breadth of extraterrestrial manifestations that suggests the prose works of Olaf Stapleton, albeit one tied to a previously established continuity, as much as any other "DC crisis." I don't think a reader not acquainted with the SANDMAN mythology would get a lot out of OVERTURE, though.

A small personal digression: as I was reading the section in which the multiversal Dream-Lords confront Morpheus, for some reason I thought of the encounter between Superboy's dog Krypto and "the Space Canine Patrol Agents" from a few of the goofier issues of SUPERBOY in the sixties. There was no literal resemblance between the depictions of Dream's other selves and Krypto's encounter with other anthropomorphic superhero dogs, and yet, that's where my mind took me-- a little before reading the page in OVERTURE #3 in which Gaiman and William humorously depicts the SCPA as a viable entity. I suppose it's possible that I either saw the OVERTURE page if I flipped through the book-- though I don't think I did-- or that on some occasion I read about the SCPA's appearance in some online essay. Or maybe I just-- dreamed it all?

MYTHCOMICS: "RAMADAN" (SANDMAN #50, 1993)

A few months back, an acquaintance asserted the extinction of the literary tradition of "Orientaliam." In its original use, this term usually concerned non-Oriental artists, principally Europeans and Americans, who attempted to reproduce the tropes associated with Oriental cultures.

(Parenthetical aside: it's currently incorrect to use the term "Oriental," with "Asian" being preferred, though both words connote "Eastern-ness." I'll use "Oriental" just because that was how this quasi-genre was traditionally denoted, ranging from William Beckford's VATHEK to the pulp magazine ORIENTAL STORIES.)

My associate was largely correct about the extinction of literary Orientalism. However, one of the few exceptions to this rule appeared as recently as 1993: in the stand-alone story "Ramadan" in SANDMAN #50.

According to Craig Russell's statements online, Gaiman wrote the script with Russell in mind, and the choice was borne out in full. Visually, "Ramadan" is a powerful evocation of many of the visual tropes common to medieval Arabic culture-- minarets, semi-clad harem-maidens, genies and ifrits, weird beasts like a Pegasus and a phoenix, and lots of calligraphy-inspired lettering (the last courtesy of Todd Klein). As for Gaiman's story, it might be characterized as a love-letter to the Thousand and One Nights, whose stories are frequently referenced-- although the content of the "letter" might be seen as a farewell missive.

Only once in the story does Neil Gaiman define for his readers the Muslim custom of Ramadan, though there are throughout the narrative references to the fasting-rituals associated with the holy day. Fasting is a form of renunciation, of giving up the pleasures of the body-- food, sex, etc.-- to commemorate the day. But main character Haroun Al-Raschid, ruler of the medieval city of Bagdad, finds himself obliged to give up his entire city.

There are many types of stories in the Nights-- comical, tragic, ribald, adventurous-- but Gaiman chooses to embody his Bagdad with the world-weariness best represented by "The City of Brass."
Gaiman spends six pages establishing that Bagdad is a place of incomparable marvels, but that all of its joys and wonders fail to give surcease of sorrow to its ruler.

Gaiman flawlessly emulates one of the many repetitive structures of Arabian-Nights narratives: that of having a hero pass through a series of imposing chambers in order to obtain some prize or treasure. Using a key of gold, Haroun, whose disquiet remains obscure, traverses chambers full of forgotten prisoners and fabulous treasures, swords that hang from the ceilings and flames that never die, and two of the eggs of the Phoenix. (One of the eggs, we are told, hatches the Phoenix's scion while only Allah knows what is born from the second one.) The prize that Haroun gains is a device he uses to summon Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, into his company-- and though Morpheus does come, he's not pleased to be called "as one might summon a steward."

Gaiman keeps the reader curious about the ruler's motives as long as possible, when the reader finally learns that he fears that Bagdad, City of Wonders, is destined to go the way of all flesh, and all cities, to be consumed by time and death. Haroun proposes to sell his city to the Sandman if Morpheus can assure him that its wonders will never die. Intrigued by the mortal's selfless offer, Morpheus agrees, and the City of Wonders joins the Sandman in his world of eternal dreams. Haroun for his part continues to live out his life in a now ordinary Bagdad, and like his people he no longer remembers his previous existence. All will live out commonplace lives in a commonplace world, and this extends to the Bagdad of the present, where a young boy has just heard the whole story of Haroun's sacrifice from an old teller of tales. However, though the story is infused with the spirit of Arabian-Nights pessimism, Gaiman allows a ray of hope, telling us how the boy, despite his hunger and poverty, because "behind his eyes are towers and jewels and djinns, carpets and rings and wild afreets, kings and princes and cities of brass."

"Ramadan" shares with other SANDMAN stories the theme of using dreams to anneal the miseries of real life. However, it's also one of the few stories I've covered that has nearly no overt conflict. There is no real conflict between Morpheus and the ruler of Bagdad; rather, the conflict is within Haroun,.who seeks to protect his fabulous city rather than simply enjoying its wonders until he himself passes from the world. His ability to act against the expectations of the readers bears some resemblance to the conflict in Ray Bradbury's "The Last Night of the World," which I analyzed here. Most amusingly for a pastiche of the Arabian Nights, Gaiman frequently has supporting characters start to unwind some long Oriental tale, but neither Haroun nor Morpheus will stay to hear, given that both are more intimately involved in the greater story of the wondrous city's preservation.

AUTHORITIES, PLEROTIC AND KENOTIC PART 1

The reason I wrote this sequel to the 2014 essay OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER was not because that particular subject had been occupying my mind on-and-off for the past three years. Rather, I returned to that obscure topic because I'd been giving more thought to the categorization of different types of presences, focal or non-focal, that appear in fiction, as seen in September's PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES. These meditations got me thinking not only about following up on the implications of the 2014 essay, but also about the application of my persona-classification system to non-focal figures.

A quick recapitulation of the roots of said system: first, though I said this at the beginning of the PALE KINGS essay:

The strongest influence on my theory of the four persona-types has been the work of Schopenhauer, but I'll confess that Northrop Frye's writings on literary dynamis had an impact on the theory...

This was an oversimplication on my part. It's true that Frye's ANATOMY influenced only the concept of the four mythoi, and that his theories contributed little if anything to my concept of literary personas. However, Frye's work led me to a deeper consideration of one of his influences, Theodor Gaster, and my conceptualization of persona-types coalesced from my attempt to bring Gaster's concepts of "plerosis and kenosis" into line with Schopenhauer's concepts of will, as I expounded in Part 1 and Part 2 of WHEN TITANS GET CROSS-COMPARED. A short summing-up of the Gaster concepts appears in this essay, where I cross-compared Gaster's categories with Frye's four mythoi:

,,plerosis is best conceived as the life-force engendered by the contest of hero-and-villain, taken seriously for the adventure and humorously for the comedy, while life is purged or otherwise compromised in the black-comic irony and in the drama.

One of my major differences with Frye is that I don't think he paid enough attention to persona-types in the ANATOMY. Here's his meditation on figures of aristocratic authority, who inhabit what he calls the "high mimetic mode:"

 If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.

This formula overlooks certain distinctions between different types of rulers. Some of these protagonists are genuinely heroic in all senses of the word, such as Homer's Achilles. But others, despite their level of authority, are closer to being what I term "demiheroes," which means that they align more with the idea of the sacrificial victim than of the hero. Indeed, Shakespeare's most famous protagonists-- Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth-- are closer to being victims than to being heroes. Frye passed away in 1991, but I imagine that if he had somehow lived long enough to become acquainted with the two examples I contrasted in PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES-- Neil Gaiman's Morpheus and Nozomu Tamaki's Mina Tepes-- then I hazard that he would have seen in both of them the pattern of the high mimetic mode. Despite the fact that both characters possess supernormal powers that make them somewhat superior to their natural environment, Frye might have perceived that they were both rulers of fantasy-realms and were thus forced to deal with limitations upon their powers. I think the fact that both characters possess temporal authority is less important than what they do with it. Both Morpheus and Mina seek to consolidate their kingdoms, but the former seems concerned mostly with maintaining a status quo-- which in my mind associates him with a very high rank of demihero-- while Mina Tepes is more heroic in nature, forging her kingdom against a horde of opposing forces.

It would seem axiomatic that such authority-figures can also take on the persona-roles of either "monsters" or of "villains," but I'll deal with those eventualities in Part 2.

PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES

The strongest influence on my theory of the four persona-types has been the work of Schopenhauer, but I'll confess that Northrop Frye's writings on literary dynamis had an impact on the theory, even if I renounced his confusion between dynamis and dynamicity in the essay DYNAMIS AND DYNAMICITY. Frye showed a slight tendency to equate social station with "power of action," probably because he was following Aristotle in his groundbreaking formulations in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

To quickly summarize between the personas of the "hero" and the "demihero," one incarnates the value I've called "positive glory" while the other incarnates that of "positive persistence." I won't repeat the distinctions I've made in earlier essays' I merely revisit this topic to correct my possible tendency to assign the persona of the demihero to the "ordinary man" rather than figures of high social station. (Not that this is a dominant tendency, as seen in some of the characters cited in DEMIHERO RALLIES.) 

Since positive persistence is not really correlated with social station, it's entirely feasible for demiheroes to be not only aristocrats, but rulers of whole domains, who may command considerable forces. However, not all kings and princes function to display "glory," and many function simply to keep their positions stable, a practice which allies with the value of persistence, as much as any of the "ordinary man" protagonists I've touched on.

Within the medium of comic books, one example of a powerful ruler is DC Comics' Morpheus, a.k.a. The Sandman. I've reviewed only two works in Neil Gaiman's corpus of Sand-stories, here and here, and in both of these storylines Morpheus is largely concerned with simply keeping his dream-empire stable for however long the universe lasts. He does undertake a personal duel of sorts in "A Hope in Hell," so he's certainly not without courage. However, for the most part Morpheus does not engage in any form of combat, nor is he concerned with the hero's goals of casting out evil in order to promote good. Thus the Lord of the Dream-World aligns with similar demiheroes who only perform positive actions when pressed to do so, like the LOST IN SPACE characters, to whom I've perhaps devoted the most analysis, starting here.

An example of heroic rulership appears in Nozomu Tamaki's DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND. The "bund" of the title is the domain ruled by Mina Tepes, queen of the world's vampires. Mina, like Morpheus, spends a fair amount of time protecting her empire from incursions, and though she and her retinue are much more violent than Lord Moepheus, the difference between them is more one of their personas than of physical dynamicity.  In the arc titled THE SCARLET ORDER, the origin of the vampire race is revealed, and Tamaki makes this narrative reflect elements of heroic glory:

Vampires are in essence spawned by a mystic force known only as "the Darkness," and its goal is much the same as that of the three vampire-lords from the first arc: to successfully begat a child to perpetuate its heritage. Tamaki's description of the Darkness' methods reminded me somewhat of the Hindu myth of Prajapati, who creates a woman to be his mate. Like Prajapati, the Darkness must then seek to overcome the woman's resistance to spawn the offspring he desires. But the unnamed "Woman" does resist the dark god's purpose, just as Mina resisted the corrupt desires of the three lords, and from the fact of the Woman's defiance springs the history of the vampire race.

By comparison, Gaiman's work in THE SANDMAN generally rejects the heroism expoused by earlier DC characters who shared the "Sandman" name. Nor is Morpheus alone in being a great ruler who exists largely to police his domain: this principle also applies to the character Lord Emma in LOVE IN HELL, though admittedly he (she?) is a support-character to the starring demiheroes of the series.

Interestingly, very few American-made superheroes have any propensity to be rulers, whether due to aristocratic birth or simply taking power by force of will. Thus they must be seen as "ordinary men" who make the transition to heroic status, which only shows that even characters who start out as demiheroes can feel the demands of "noblesse oblige."

MYTHCOMICS: "THE DOLL'S HOUSE" (THE SANDMAN #10-16, 1989-90)

In the same year that Neil Gaiman began his long run on THE SANDMAN title, he also did a couple of (apparent) tryouts for the SWAMP THING title: scripts that appeared in SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5, reviewed here. One of Gaiman's stories, which revived DC's "Brother Power" character, posited a world of "doll elementals" as the reason for Power's existence, in line with the plant elementals Alan Moore had introduced as a rationale for Swamp Thing's existence.

Over the next two years the SANDMAN title showed Gaiman stretching his creative muscles, as he varied between "short dreams" (essentially stand-alone stories, often featuring Morpheus of the Dreaming as the "host") and "long dreams" (longer, more involved story-arcs, some of which did not bear fruit until the end of the series). The first long arc, "The Doll's House," also invoked the image of dolls, but, like the famous Ibsen play, with a somewhat negative connotation, in which dolls were seen not as magical non-living presences-- as in the Brother Power story-- but as metaphors for being helplessly controlled by another's will.

As rendered by then-current Mike Dringenberg, the world of the Dreaming was taking on increasingly more complex, almost Jungian connotations, and this in part accounts for readers' enthusiastic reception of a world where dreams were real. "Doll's House" is perhaps not the best exemplar of this unique perspective. Though it's a long arc, parts of it are still more like short stories than anything, particularly "Men of Good Fortune," which has nothing to do with the plot of the arc, though it has a loose thematic relationship to the rest of the story.

At this point in the series Morpheus, having been released from magical captivity, is dealing with various problems in the dream-world he rules. Four entities, his "creations," have escaped the Dreaming, and there's an additional threat in the appearance of a "vortex," a rare phenomenon in which a mortal manifests the ability to wreak havoc on the dream-world. Morpheus must corral his errant creations and terminate the threat to his kingdom.

I said that Gaiman's conception was "almost" Jungian, because at this point Gaiman is still strongly oriented upon the Alan Moore model. In his early works for DC Comics, Moore helped pave the way for 'adult comic books" within the context of genre-productions, and one of his main strategies was to take an ironic or reductive view of key genre-fantasies. I won't attempt to recount the fine details of Gaiman's arc, particularly since they don't dovetail particularly well, but almost all of them relate to the ides of exposing some personal or cultural fantasy as deeply flawed or misunderstood. Taking them on an issue-by-issue basis:

#10-11 -- this issue introduces Rose Walker, the mortal vortex, who will in time learn that her everyday waking existence is actually a threat to the world of dreams.

#12-- Superhero Hector Hall, who took upon himself the identity of "the Sandman" within the pages of another DC comic, is exposed as nothing but a ghost with delusions of grandeur, manipulated by two of the nightmare-creations that escaped Morpheus' realm. The issue not only undermines the original Simon-Kirby conception of a "dreamworld superhero," from which Gaiman's Sandman was very loosely derived, it also features a few sequences in which a young boy experiences fanciful dreams evocative of Windsor McCay's "Little Nemo," but wakes up to ugly realities (a rat biting his face, for example),

#13-- the "Good Fortune" issue, in which Morpheus allows a mortal man to enjoy virtual immortality. During Morpheus' visit to Elizabethan England, it is revealed that a certain Bard owes his talent to having made a Faustian bargain with none other than the King of Dreams.

#14-- Morpheus tracks down one of his nightmare-creations, the Corinthian, to a very special convention, in which seasoned serial killers come together to discuss their avocation. In addition to destroying his creation, Morpheus forces all of the mortal killers to see themselves without the benefit of self-delusion. To some extent comic-book conventions and their attendees are the butt of the issue's satirical jokes, though it's reasonably clear that Gaiman isn't drawing a one-on-one comparison of comics-fans and serial killers.

#15-16-- Morpheus finds that the last of his errant creations, an entire dream-realm known as Fiddlers' Green, has taken mortal form and come into contact with Rose Walker. Though Morpheus' initial contact with Rose saves her from one of the serial killers, he then tells her-- within one of her dreams-- about her true nature, and that he must kill her to prevent her from destroying his world. He almost does so, but learns, through a very involved plot-line I won't recapitulate, that one of his supernatural siblings has been manipulating him to commit that transgression in order to destroy him  Although Rose survives, she lives on with the feeling that all of humanity are merely "dolls" to greater, merciless forces, echoing Shakespeare's theme in KING LEAR: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport,." However, in his confrontation with his plotting sibling, Morpheus reveals a new wrinkle: that he and all of his metaphysical kindred are also merely "dolls," for they are brought into being by the passions and aspirations of mortal beings. At the end the sibling in question refuses to acknowledge the truth revealed by Morpheus, and the story ends with her thinking that she's "nothing like a doll at all."

It's a promising theme, that of the interdependence of mortals and their archetypal creations, but "Doll's House" doesn't live up to its potential. It's obviously an amalgam of separate story-ideas that Gaiman sought, only with partial success, to meld into a unified structure. Nevertheless, even if this early Gaiman work goes a little overboard with all of the "beautiful dreams hide nasty realities" schtick, there's still enough attention to the symbolic resonance of the dream-world that it isn't totally reductive in nature. One example is "Fiddler's Green," who is apparently the incarnation of an Earthly Paradise, without any attempt to reduce him to something else. Rose Walker is a little on the dull side, as if Gaiman wanted to make her as simple as possible for contrast's sake, but I found this simply made it harder to invest much conviction in her character.

It's a flawed story, but not so over-intellectualized as to fall into the category of the "null-myth," and it does prove to be of major importance in elucidating Gaiman's not-quite-Jungian concept of a universe of dreams.

MYTHCOMICS: "A HOPE IN HELL" ( SANDMAN #4, 1989)

Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN series remains at the forefront of the Vertigo books that contributed so much of the cultivation of the superhero idiom into the form of adult, rather than juvenile, pulp.

To be sure, Gaiman's "Sandman"-- an immortal, almost conceptual being who belongs to a small family called "the Endless"-- was not a superhero as such, and most of his stories did not even participate in the combative mode that I deem the primary domain of the superhero. But Gaiman, perhaps much more than earlier groundbreakers like Moore and Miller, infused DC's superhero universe with the qualities of myth and fantastic literature. Small wonder that Gaiman received something less than a warm welcome by the elitist critics of the 1990s. The JOURNAL, which specialized in well-rounded discussions even with many creators their critics did not like, couldn't seem to get a handle on Gaiman's work, resulting in not one but two really blah JOURNAL interviews.

The overall quality of THE SANDMAN, the feature that made Gaiman famous, is to be sure uneven. In many stories the Sandman-- usually given names like 'Dream" or "Lord of Dreams"-- is a peripheral presence, looking on as misguided mortals destroy themselves in pursuit of foolish dreams. But in the earliest issues, Gaiman had to establish Dream himself as a sympathetic character. In the first issue, Dream escapes captivity after having been bound by a mortal sorceer, and in issue #4, which I'm considering here, he journeys to Hell itself, to get back a sacred helmet acquired by a demon during Dream's durance vile.

The centerpiece of the story is a word-battle between Dream and a demon named Choronzon. This form of contest seems roughly derived from the word battles of opposing bards in archaic Celtic tradition, though the implication here is that to some extent, the two supernatural beings do "become" the creatures of which they speak. This too bears a striking resemblance between the literal battles of Celtic magicians, such as the magical battle of the wizards Fruich and Rucht, cited here.  Literal magical battles took place in a number of Celtic stories, but here, Gaiman is to an extent using a less directly violent, somewhat theoretical version of the transformations. Nevertheless, if Lord Dream fails to "trump" his opponent in terms of his imagined transformations, he will pay the price of becoming the demon's servant in Hell.

Throughout the story Gaiman emphasizes Dream's reliance on "hope"-- hope for his own abilities and powers, in particular. By the end of the contest, Dream asserts "Hope" as a cosmic principle that can in theory cancel out even the destruction of the universe. Even after the contest is won, and the sore-loser demons threaten to menace him anyway, Dream defeats the denizens of Hell by telling them that "the dream of Heaven," and the hope to be free of Hell, are in truth the only things that sustain them against perdition's horrors.

"A Hope in Hell" is a good, though not great, Gaiman story: clearly it functions in large part to help readers map out the "Sandman universe." It's also a foretaste of Gaiman's best work in the title, paving the way for 
"adult pulp's" propensity to find ways to express conflict that did not involve major property damage.