Back Issue #151

DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES ISSUE June

2024

1 5 1 . o N 10.95

The Sandman and Death © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

$

™

A star-studded look at

NEIL GAIMAN’s GAIMAN’s

Sandman Mystery Theatre’s MATT WAGNER & STEVEN T. SEAGLE Dr. Strange’s nemesis Nightmare • Marvel’s dream-master Sleepwalker Casper’s haunting horse Nightmare & more

The Best in POP Culture!

ZOWIE!

THE TV SUPERHERO CRAZE IN ’60s POP CULTURE

by MARK VOGER

HOLY PHENOMENON! In the way-out year of 1966, the action comedy “Batman” starring ADAM WEST premiered and triggered a tsunami of super swag, including toys, games, Halloween costumes, puppets, action figures, and lunch boxes.

Meanwhile, still more costumed avengers sprang forth on TV (“The Green Hornet,” “Ultraman”), in MOVIES (“The Wild World of Batwoman,” “Rat Pfink and Boo Boo”), and in ANIMATION (“Space Ghost,” “The Marvel Super Heroes”).

ZOWIE! traces the history of the superhero genre from early films, through the 1960s TV superhero craze, and its pop culture influence ever since. This 192-page hardcover, in pop art colors that conjure the period, spotlights the coolest collectibles and kookiest knockoffs every ’60s kid begged their parents for, and features interviews with the TV stars (WEST, BURT WARD, YVONNE CRAIG, FRANK GORSHIN, BURGESS MEREDITH, CESAR ROMERO, JULIE NEWMAR, VAN WILLIAMS), the artists behind the comics (JERRY ROBINSON, DICK SPRANG, CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE GIELLA), and others. Written and designed by MARK VOGER (MONSTER MASH, HOLLY JOLLY), ZOWIE! is one super read!

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CLIFFHANGER!

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

CINEMATIC SUPERHEROES OF THE SERIALS: 1941–1952 by CHRISTOPHER IRVING Hold on tight as historian CHRISTOPHER IRVING explores the origins of the first on-screen superheroes and the comic creators and film-makers who brought them to life. CLIFFHANGER! touches on the early days of the film serial, to its explosion as a juvenile medium of the 1930s and ‘40s. See how the creation of characters like SUPERMAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA, SPY SMASHER, and CAPTAIN MARVEL dovetailed with the early film adaptations. Along the way, you’ll meet the stuntmen, directors (SPENCER BENNETT, WILLIAM WITNEY, producer SAM KATZMAN), comic book creators (SIEGEL & SHUSTER, SIMON & KIRBY, BOB KANE, C.C. BECK, FRANK FRAZETTA, WILL EISNER), and actors (BUSTER CRABBE, GEORGE REEVES, LORNA GRAY, KANE RICHMOND, KIRK ALYN, DAVE O’BRIEN) who brought them to the silver screen—and how that resonates with today’s cinematic superhero universe. NOW SHIPPING! (160-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-119-6

COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION (EXPANDED EDITION) by KEITH DALLAS & JOHN WELLS

NOW IN FULL-COLOR WITH BONUS PAGES! In 1978, DC Comics launched a line-wide expansion known as “The DC Explosion,” but pulled the plug weeks later, cancelling titles and leaving dozens of completed comic book stories unpublished. Now, that notorious “DC Implosion” is examined with an exhaustive oral history from JENETTE KAHN, PAUL LEVITZ, LEN WEIN, MIKE GOLD, AL MILGROM, and other DC creators of the time, plus commentary by other top pros, examining how it changed the landscape of comics forever! This new EXPANDED EDITION of the Eisner Award-nominated book explodes in full cover for the first time, with extra coverage of LOST 1970S DC PROJECTS like Ninja the Invisible and an adaptation of “The Wiz,” Jim Starlin’s unaltered cover art for BATMAN FAMILY #21, content meant for cancelled Marvel titles such as Godzilla and Ms. Marvel, and more! SHIPS MAY 2024!

(144-page FULL-COLOR SOFTCOVER) $26.95 • (Digital Edition) $10.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-124-0

IT ROSE FROM THE TOMB An all-new book written by PETER NORMANTON

Rising from the depths of history comes an ALL-NEW examination of the 20th Century’s best horror comics, written by PETER NORMANTON (editor of From The Tomb, the UK’s preeminent magazine on the genre). From the pulps and seminal horror comics of the 1940s, through ones they tried to ban in the 1950s, this tome explores how the genre survived the introduction of the Comics Code, before making its terrifying return during the 1960s and 1970s. Come face-to-face with the early days of ACG’s alarming line, every horror comic from June 1953, hypodermic horrors, DC’s Gothic romance comics, Marvel’s Giant-Size terrors, Skywald and Warren’s chillers, and Atlas Seaboard’s shocking magazines. The 192-page full-color opus exhumes BERNIE WRIGHTSON’s darkest constructs, plus artwork by FRANK FRAZETTA, NEAL ADAMS, MIKE KALUTA, STEVE DITKO, MATT FOX, WARREN KREMER, LEE ELIAS, BILL EVERETT, RUSS HEATH, THE GURCH, and many more. Don’t turn your back on this once-in-a-lifetime spine-chiller—it’s so good, it’s frightening!

(192-page SOFTCOVER) $31.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-123-3 • NOW SHIPPING!

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Volume 1, Number 151 June 2024 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow

Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond!

DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER ARTIST Kelley Jones (Art originally produced in 1991 for an unpublished Wizard magazine cover. Original art scan courtesy of Heritage Auctions.)

COVER COLORIST Glenn Whitmore COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Kevin Sharp SPECIAL THANKS Mark Arnold Andy Mangels Bret Blevins Brian Martin Shelly Bond Dave McKean Bob Budiansky Shawn McManus Edward Chu Joe Norton ComicArtFans.com Amanda Powers DC Comics Tom Powers Colleen Doran P. Craig Russell Mike Dringenberg Steven T. Seagle Martha Frankel Bill Sienkiewicz Stephan Friedt Jill Thompson Neil Gaiman Charles Vess Marc Hempel Matt Wagner Heritage Auctions John Wells Nelson Hoeppner J. H. Williams III Kelley Jones Alex Winter Teddy Kristiansen Woodstock Bookfest Alisa Kwitney Michael Zulli Ed Lute

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BACKSEAT DRIVER: Editorial by Michael Eury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 PRO2PRO: Neil Gaiman and Alisa Kwitney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 An intimate dialogue between the Sandman author and his former editor DREAMING OF SANDMEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Meet the earliest Sandmen of comic books in this fun special feature BACKSTAGE PASS: The Sandman – Artists Only . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Thirteen superstar illustrators reflect on their time drawing Sandman FLASHBACK: Nightmare, the Galloping Horse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Every kid needs a pet… even a ghost boy like Casper BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: Welcome to My Nightmare! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 A villain history of Marvel’s magical Doctor Strange foe BACKSTAGE PASS: Sleepwalker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 A wide-awake Bob Budiansky discusses his creation of the Marvel Dream Police PRO2PRO: Matt Wagner and Steven T. Seagle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 The co-writers of Sandman Mystery Theatre revisit their pulp-ish crime series BACK TALK: Reader Reactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

BACK ISSUE™ issue 151, June 2024 (ISSN 1932-6904) is published monthly (except Jan., March, May, and Nov.) by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Periodicals postage paid at Raleigh, NC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Back Issue, c/o TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614.

Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 112 Fairmount Way, New Bern, NC 28562. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Eight-issue subscriptions: $97 Economy US, $147 International, $39 Digital. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover artwork by Kelley Jones. Sandman and Death TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. All editorial matter © 2024 TwoMorrows and Michael Eury. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 1

by M

It was August of 1989. I had just arrived at DC Comics as its newest associate editor. DC had picked up industry heat over the past few years with Crisis on Infinite Earths; major revamps of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman; and Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Watchmen. Tim Burton’s Batman movie was still in its first run and had triggered a new wave of Batmania (remember Prince’s “Bat-Dance” video? Batman cereal? MTV’s “Steal the Batmobile” contest?) and a bookshelf full of new Bat-publications. The world was Batman-crazy. It was a good time to be joining the company.

A perk of being an editor back then was getting complimentary copies of comic books. Each Friday, DC’s librarian would lug down the hall a squeaky mail cart teeming with new releases (including hardcovers and TPBs!) from every major publisher, plopping a stack of comps on each editor’s desk.

One of my first comp batches at DC included issue #9 of The Sandman, from editor Karen Berger’s office a few doors down. The growing buzz over Sandman was hard to ignore, but I had yet to give it a read. I wasn’t sure of what to make of it, as issue #9’s cover, a spellbinding triptych by Sandman cover illustrator Dave McKean, seemed more like a modern art gallery painting than a comic book. But I couldn’t stop admiring its cover art… just like I would have done were the original art hanging on a gallery wall. This wasn’t like any comic book I’d ever seen.

Its contents similarly haunted me. I had stepped into Part 9 of Sandman’s initial “Master of Dreams” arc. There was no recognizable character—even its title star appeared in a different form in this issue. But from my moment of discovery it was clear that The Sandman was something different, something challenging… something special.

Other readers felt the same way about this cerebral fantasy/ horror comic that starred Dream, a.k.a. Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, and his dysfunctional but delightful family of supernatural entities, the Endless. Artistically, Sandman’s dark imagery embraced the Goth subculture that had mushroomed to a fever pitch by the time of the comic’s 1989 debut. It was written by Neil Gaiman, a clever British storyteller who quickly captivated

ichael Eury

our imaginations. It didn’t take long before just about everyone was talking about Neil and The Sandman. For the general public, 1989 might have been Batman’s year, but you had to be asleep not to notice Sandman’s budding influence.

DC published 75 issues of The Sandman, from 1989 through 1996, in its original run. Sandman started as a “Suggested for mature readers” book but became the first DC series to be branded under its cutting-edge Vertigo imprint, beginning with Sandman #47. The original series has been frequently collected in myriad formats and in different languages.

Sandman has inspired multiple spinoffs, some written by authors other than Neil. Gaiman himself has since returned to write the Sandman saga in additional comics projects. An addicted television audience has lost sleep binging on Netflix’s Sandman series starring Tom Sturridge. The quirky new comic book that first gave me pause back in ’89 has since become a multimedia sensation.

This issue, BACK ISSUE looks back at the early days of DC’s influential Sandman, with interviews with its creator, several Sandman artists, and Matt Wagner and Steven T. Seagle, the writing team of the Sandman spinoff Sandman Mystery Theatre.

To you Sandman fans reading BI for the first time… welcome!

We hope you will continue to visit our fun and informative corner of the comics universe in the TM & © DC Comics. months to come.

And to those of you regular BACK ISSUE readers who may not be intimate with Gaiman’s Sandman—you’re in for a treat.

Sandman may seem like a detour from DC’s mainstream, but its infusion of familiar characters and lore—from the Sandman of the Justice Society, Wesley Dodds, to the use of mostly forgotten characters like Destiny and Element Girl—tethers Gaiman’s lyrical creepshow to the established DC Universe.

In this “Dreams and Nightmares” issue we snuggle up with more than DC’s Sandman family. We have histories of two characters named Nightmare—one, a galloping ghost horse and the other, a foe of Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. Plus there’s a look at Marvel’s superhero answer to Sandman, Sleepwalker.

There’ll be no nodding off during the pages that follow!

2 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

interview conducted by

Alisa Kwitney

Editor’s note: Sandman creator and bestselling author Neil Gaiman—one of the top ten living postmodern writers, according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography—was the keynote speaker at the Woodstock Bookfest in Woodstock, New York, on March 31 through April 2, 2023. At a special bookfest event on April 1, 2023, Gaiman was interviewed before a live audience by his friend, editor, and collaborator, critically acclaimed novelist and writing instructor Alisa Kwitney. The two met during the early days of Vertigo/DC Comics’ The Sandman, when Kwitney was hired as assistant editor to Vertigo group editor Karen Berger.

Alisa went on to solo-edit the Sandman spinoffs The Dreaming and Lucifer and to write the Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold miniseries, which was nominated for an Eisner Award, among other Gaiman-related projects. Kwitney is currently the co-host of the Sandman podcast Endless.

What follows is a transcription of their interview, edited for publication in this magazine.

BACK ISSUE wishes to thank the Woodstock Bookfest and its director, Martha Frankel, for kindly allowing the publication of this edited version of the Gaiman/Kwitney interview. To learn more about this annual authors gathering, visit woodstockbookfest.com. Special thanks also go out to Brian Martin for his transcription of this interview, and to Neil and Alisa for taking the time to review the manuscript.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 3

ALISA KWITNEY: I was thinking, where do I begin with all of this? So, I wanted to start with when I first met you. It was the first—well, almost my first day at work—and Karen [Berger] said to me, “What a shame, Neil was just here, and he’s left.” And I was already a Sandman fan, so I was really disappointed. And then she said, “But you do have the job of packing up his laundry. ’Cause he couldn’t fit it in all of the books we gave him, so here’s some of his excess laundry.”

NEIL GAIMAN: It was one of those slightly-mad-but-it-worked things that actually worked. Susanna Clarke of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel, [was] asked in an interview what the best advice I had ever given her was, or probably what [was] the best advice she’d ever received from another author. She admitted that it was me telling her if you’re doing a book tour of America, signing books, just mail your laundry home. [laughter] Because you’ll never be anywhere long enough to actually get laundry done. So plan ahead to just post your laundry home.

KWITNEY: Do you remember what I did on that first day? I’d just graduated from Columbia’s fiction writing program, and I was thinking, “I’m sending this brilliant writer his laundry back.” I (had) such a temptation to put some of my laundry in, but then I could get fired. So what I did instead is, I asked Karen if she had some Peds in her desk. In the old days, women wore sneakers or comfortable shoes to the office and then sometimes changed into fancier shoes. She did, and I put them in an envelope that said “Do Not Open Until Christmas” and put it into the laundry that I sent you. I don’t know if you remember that.

GAIMAN: I was just baffled. [laughter] I thought, “She’s weird. This new one is very strange.”

My favorite memory of you, the point where I thought, “Oh, I really like her”… We would have these long conversations about writing. And it’s a weird thing that if you’re a writer, and if you’re a young writer, you really want to talk about writing, only you wind up getting led off the subject a lot, and suddenly you’re talking about agents or your talking about publishers, whatever. And with Alisa, we’d actually talk writing, we talked the mechanics of plot, we’d talk how to do things.

And we used to talk about other writers, too. And I remember one day I was talking about a particular author that I was a huge fan of, and I mentioned this author Robert Sheckley. Science fiction author, very prominent in the ’50s and ’60s.

Kyle Cassidy.

KWITNEY: An absurdist.

GAIMAN: Absurdist, a very brilliant author, and satirist I think as well. And Alisa said to me, “What do you think of Sheckley’s work?”

And I said, “Well, I think that in the ’50s and ’60s he was writing the sharpest short stories of anybody out there, and he was a brilliant, funny writer. He influenced what Douglas Adams did hugely, whether or not Douglas had read him or not before he did it, he was still doing the same thing. And I thought he was absolutely fabulous, and then you can kind of watch him burning out his brain on recreational pharmaceuticals, and he kind of lost it completely.”

And Alisa said, “He’s my dad.” [laughter] And I said, “I’m… so… sorry… I… said… that.”

And she said, “No, that’s what I think, too!’ And I went, “Oh. Oh, good.” And that was our first great bonding moment, I think.

NEIL GAIMAN

KWITNEY: And I think that was kind of fresh in your mind when you were titling one of the Sandman storylines.

GAIMAN: It was. One of the Sandman storylines is called A Game of You. And that was shortly after you came on, and nobody, except you and me really, knew that I was referencing a Sheckley book that I happened to be incredibly fond of that nobody has ever read called The Game of X, later—here’s one for trivia people—remade by Disney, or made

by Disney, into a film called Condorman, that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the book Game of X in any possible way except that you get into the credits of Condorman and you discover that’s where it’s from. And let’s throw in another little Sheckley thing, which is, last year we went up to the graveyard, Alisa and I. KWITNEY: The Writers and Artists graveyard here in Woodstock.

GAIMAN: And if you go looking in there, you will find a beautiful slab, a black slab, with a galaxy on it, and the words “Robert Sheckley” and his dates, and then the word “Writer.”

And he’s here, too.

4 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

KWITNEY: Yeah, he lived in different places, and my half sister, Anya Sheckley, and I, we decided that the best place to bury him, since he’d come to live here, was in the Writers and Artists cemetery.

[With Sandman,] let’s go back a little. When I started working as an assistant editor, I was doing a lot of what was called trafficking. I would get the scripts and send them off to a penciler. The penciled art would come in—none of this was digital back in the day—and I would then get it lettered to the script, write where the balloons went, and that would get sent to the inker, then to the colorist. And my day would begin to end in terms of hustling and sending things out that were very time sensitive, probably around six o’clock. You were in England and it was around midnight, and that was just at that time when you were stopping writing. ’Cause you were a night writer then.

GAIMAN: I wasn’t stopping writing then, that was around the time that I needed to talk to another human being, to get enough adrenaline to keep going until probably about four in the morning.

I was a nocturnal writer until I was sort of in my mid-30s. And one day, it went away. I think it went away about exactly the same time I gave up smoking.

KWITNEY: I remember that time, and I need to ask you something. The scripts were wonderful for Sandman because you used them as a confessional and a journal—there’s all these wonderful details you would talk about when you were writing, and the fact that you couldn’t imagine being a day writer.

So I want to ask, could Sandman, which is so much about dreams—could you have written that as a day writer?

GAIMAN: I wrote a lot of Sandman during the day. Over the years, probably as much Sandman was written during the day as was written at night.

But I was a night writer mostly in self-defense. And also because I was in my 20s, and early 30s, and I was really good at writing in the middle of the night. I’m not anymore. It takes me sort of five times as much work and energy to put a decent sentence together at two o’clock in the morning. I can no longer pull all-nighters. It is wiser for me to go to bed, get up the next morning, and write.

But back then I would get up about one o’clock in the afternoon, I would do whatever mail needed to be done. I would go out, do the shopping, make the dinner, so that at the point where my kids turned up at about four o’clock, look after them. My wife would get back from work at about sixish, and there’d be dinner, and then we’d bathe the kids, read to them, do that stuff, and about nine o’clock at night the kids would be asleep and I would go off to write. I was basically working nine to five, it was just the wrong nine to five. [laughter] And it was really, peculiarly good for my social life, because I had a handful of people around the world who were still up and they were all in America, so I made a lot of very good American friends.

There was a lot of talking at midnight, at the point where you’re sort of doing that first little fade. When I stopped being able to write at night, I remember, I was sitting typing, and it was two or three in the morning, and then I lifted my head and I looked down, and from where my head had been resting on the keyboard, there were about 300 pages of the letter M! [laughter] And that was the point I discovered that, okay, I am no longer a night writer.

ALISA KWITNEY

KWITNEY: That is now being published in a limited edition. [laughter] So the thing that would happen is, at six o’clock a lot of people had left the offices at DC. And it was your midnight, and so there was this weird moment when I was just able to take a breath. I didn’t have kids at that time, and it was usually just before the other editors that worked under Karen and I—Tom Peyer and Stuart Moore—would go to the Irish pub which was called the Irish Pub for a beer. And so you and I would talk and we talked, and I felt so inadequate, because until that point I had considered myself fairly well read. And all of a sudden you would bring up all of these writers and these books that you’d read that I’d never heard of: The Secret History by Procopius, the Flashman series [by George MacDonald Fraser], The Golden Ass [by Apuleius]. How did you come to read so many obscure and wonderful classics?

GAIMAN: I suppose the best bit about being technically an autodidact—but there are no autodidacts—and the best bit of being an author is, you get to follow your “obsessions places.”

And also, I was ridiculously lucky when I was a young, starving journalist, that several places took pity on me and gave me book review columns. And the great thing about being given book review columns, which are not genre-dependent, is all of the publishers then send you their catalogs. Or they used to. Which meant that every three months

Meet Our Dreaming Duo (above and opposite) Neil Gaiman and Alisa Kwitney, and some of their works. (previous page) Our opening background is from Dave McKean’s original cover art to Sandman #6 (June 1989). Scan courtesy of Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com).

TM & © DC Comics.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 5

Wakeup Call Original artwork by Mike Dringenberg for a Sandman house ad appearing in DC titles in late 1988, signed by both the artist and Neil Gaiman.

This extraordinary piece commanded $96,000 in a September 8, 2021 Heritage auction.

TM & © DC Comics.

or every six months I’d get all the publisher catalogs. And I’d just go through them and go, “That looks interesting, that looks interesting, that looks interesting.” And then they would arrive!

And because we had no Internet back then, I would read them all. Everything. Everything that arrived, I would read.

And, you know… I was a book kid—if not from birth, my earliest memories that are solid have books in them. I remember the first book that I loved. I remember the first books that my mother bought me. Some of them I still have! I remember the libraries that formed me. You know, the little local library where I would go all through the summer holidays. I would just get my parents to drop me off in the library on their way to work and then walk home.

KWITNEY: Okay, but none of this explains to me how you knew about The Secret History by Procopius! [to audience] How many people here know that book? [silence]

GAIMAN: My guess on Procopius and The Secret History would be that it was a Penguin Classic and it looked interesting from the Penguin Classics catalog and because I had book review columns I was allowed to say, “I’ll have that,” and they would send it to me.

But also, I loved that stuff. And that’s the flip side of all of it, is, I was, I was a young writer, I’d suddenly discovered, as a 22-, 23-year-old journalist and writer, that all of the stuff that I kind of thought was boring in school was absolutely, devastatingly interesting if you had any chance of going in and finding a story there.

I had not been a history fan, and suddenly I was devouring history books because I would find things in them that I could steal. I was loving myth.

It was like a giant, undisciplined research project.

And you’d read a lot of rubbish on the way, but the good stuff would stick.

And you know, years and years later, you and I did Norse Mythology together. Originally, when we started out, we thought your job was probably going to be being my research assistant.

KWITNEY: As you were for Alan Moore.

GAIMAN: I would go out for Alan and go and find things for him.

And then very rapidly we discovered that actually, while that was useful, the best thing you could do was turn up, take my phone away, be there while I wrote, and then whenever I would need to know something that would normally send me off down an Internet rabbit hole, I would instead turn to you and say, “Such and such a god, such and such a thing, such and such a… could you just go and find me what the Vikings would have used to transport stones with?” And you’d go away [to do research] and you’d go, “It’s something called a stone boat, and this is how it worked.” And I’d go, “Okay, got it.” Because I knew that if I disappeared off down there, I would not surface again. And if I had you there, I would get my thousand words of Norse Mythology written.

KWITNEY: I still remember the day, because I think we were in your house and you were in Boston at the time. There were so many things tugging and pulling at your attention, which as a writer I know happens. You were sort of, “Just one more thing,” and I said, “Can I look at your phone for a moment?,” which is, you know, a fairly intimate thing to say to a person. You know, you hand your phone over and said, “Okay.” And then I said, “I’m not giving it back until you’ve written five pages.”

And that’s what happened.

GAIMAN: That was Thor’s wedding.

KWITNEY: Thank you, thank you, my finest moment.

One of the other things interesting about the Norse Mythology book is, we worked on it together for about seven years in bits and pieces, and I think it had about three different iterations or incarnations. And I want to ask you how you remember it coming together in your imagination?

You know, finding that balance between verisimilitude and what you can get, and giving yourself the freedom to create.

6 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

NEIL GAIMAN’s EARLY DC WORK In addition to the original Sandman series, Gaiman’s early contributions to the DC Universe include:

TM & © DC Comics.

• Black Orchid #1 (Holiday 1988)–3 (Feb. 1989) Prestige Format miniseries reimagining the star of her own short-lived 1970s series in Adventure Comics. Illustrated by Dave McKean.

• Secret Origins #36 (Jan. 1989) Poison Ivy origin, “Pavane.” Illustrated by Mark Buckingham.

• Swamp Thing Annual #5 (1989) 42-page story guest-starring Brother Power, the Geek, illustrated by Richard Piers Rayner and Mike Hoffman; and 10page Parliament of Trees story, illustrated by Mike Mignola.

• Secret Origins Special #1 (1989) 11-page framing story with a Batman cameo, illustrated by Mike Hoffman and Kevin Nowlan; and 10-page Riddler origin, illustrated by Bernie Mireault and Matt Wagner.

GAIMAN: It was a fascinating process. We set a lot of boundaries at the beginning, and actually wound up keeping to them. One of my rules was, every one of these stories, I have to be able to point… I can’t change anything. And I can’t make anything up. And you and I would, you’d be like, “Why can’t you make something up?,” and I’m saying because it would be cheating. It would be like playing tennis without a net or trying to write a 15-line sonnet. It wouldn’t be right. The whole point of this is that I have to take the structure, the scaffold of the stories, and I’m gonna set rules for myself so I’m only gonna do stories really from the [Medieval Icelandic literary works known as the] Edda. I’m not going to dive off into obscurity, I’m not gonna take stuff that’s later, like Wagner or whatever.

I’m actually just going to stick with the stories in the Poetic Edda and in the Prose Edda.

And that was really fun, and it meant that there were choices I could make while I was telling. There was one story, which I got criticized for in some fancy review or other and I got to feel very superior. But it was actually that criticism that made me do the notes in the paperback. The paperback of Norse Mythology has fancy notes at the back, pointing out where everything comes from. There were a few reviews of the hardback where the reviewers knew a little, knew quite a lot, but had missed the fact that there is one story that has one version in the Poetic Eddas, and one in the Prose Eddas. And the Prose Edda is kind of awful and the Poetic Edda is at least kinder—it’s basically about a young lady being… in one version she is forced into marriage, and in the other she thinks it’s quite a good idea.

And I went with the one where she thought it was quite a good idea, and got told off for that.

Your Grandfather’s Sandman Original Sandman Wesley Dodds cameos in the first issue of Sandman. Written by Neil Gaiman, penciled by Sam Kieth, and inked by Mike Dringenberg.

TM & © DC Comics.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 7

Not Your Grandfather’s Sandman Our first clear look at Dream, from Sandman #1, by the series’ original art team of penciler Sam Kieth and inker Mike Dringenberg.

Original art courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

8 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

The Time of Her Life (top) Rare editorial variant of Sandman #8 (Dec. 1989), featuring the premiere of Death.

Cover art by Dave McKean. Gaiman-autographed copy courtesy of Heritage. (bottom) Inside, we see Dream’s sister “at work” as she takes a struggling comedian (who just bombed with Batman jokes). By Gaiman, penciler Mike Dringenberg, and inker Malcolm Jones III. TM & © DC Comics.

KWITNEY: I had an experience that was kind of like that, because I wrote Sandman: King of Dreams back in… I think it was in the ’90s or early ’00s. [Editor’s note: It was published in 2003.] And it was sort of an introduction to Sandman, and so we’d had the Endless, we’d had a gallery of the Endless, and I think the original art was Mike Dringenberg, and Neil wrote an introduction to each of the Endless. There’s Destiny. Morpheus… And the last one is Death.

And so I had the idea for King of Dreams that we would have different art from all the different artists who had done other versions of these, but we’d go with Neil’s original Endless, the Endless that are the…I’m assuming everyone here knows who the Endless are. The Endless are a family of immortal, sort of older than the gods beings, and the Sandman or Morpheus is one of them.

GAIMAN: When I first came to America, people would say, “We love Sandman, we love the Endless, it’s so amazing to see a dysfunctional family in comics.” And, I’d never heard that term before. So I remember, after a while, saying, “What exactly is a dysfunctional family?”

And they would explain it to me. After a while, I figured out that that’s what we in England call a family. [laughter] KWITNEY: You wrote and I was working on [DC/Vertigo’s] Sandman when we were in our 20s, early 30s. You have revisited the material, and now you’ve created it for a different format for the Sandman Netflix TV series. What feels different?

GAIMAN: You know what’s different? Everything’s different, and everything’s the same. The biggest thing that is different is… I had no budget restrictions when I made the comics. I had page restrictions, I had to hit 24 pages unless I could talk everybody into giving me a couple of extra pages and losing some ads. Sometimes I could. But whatever I wrote cost the same, because an artist would draw it, and Todd Klein would letter it, and Danny Vozzo would color it, and… it cost the same! They weren’t paying us very much, but that didn’t matter.

Now, trying to make it with Netflix, we have a budget to hit. And we’re already making it with amounts of money that are inconceivable to me. And with that, when I talk to Allan Heinberg, I don’t have to be the showrunner who does all of the heavy lifting on Sandman. That is my friend Allan, and he is doing a magical and amazing job.

[Editor’s note: Sandman executive producer/co-developer Allan Heinberg’s TV credits include the hits Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy, and Gilmore Girls, plus the screenplay to 2017’s Wonder Woman movie.] I have to do all the heavy lifting on Good Omens, but on Sandman I get to be the one to just sort of lean over and go, “You don’t want to do it like that.” “You sure about that?” “No, no, if you Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 9

want to do it like that…” [laughter] I get these lovely phone calls from Allan saying, “Okay, Neil, this is what’s going on, so I want to do this to solve it but I’m not sure about that. What do you think?” Or, “You wrote this character, does this work?

Can we get away with this?” And sometimes I’ll say, “Yes,” and sometimes I’ll say, “No.” And if I say no I try and say, “But, what if we did that and stuff?”

But you’re always going, “Okay, we have ridiculous amounts of money to make this, and we do not have enough money to make it. So how are we going to fix that, and what are we going to do?” And that for me is the, is the weird paradox of making television as opposed to writing novels where every word I put down costs me the same. And making comics, where everything I ask an artist to draw costs the same. It doesn’t cost any more.

We’ve been looking at how to do Sandman Overture one day.

And in Sandman Overture, which is also the first Sandman story, it’s a giant universe-spanning space opera of unimaginably grandiose proportions. And it’s, “Okay, how are we going to be able to afford to make this thing?” The last thing I was thinking when I wrote it was one day we’ll have to do this on television.

KWITNEY: One of your skills has been to write scripts that are geared a bit for an individual artist’s strengths. I remember your saying, “Well, for Season of Mists we’ve got Kelley Jones. You ask for 5,000 demons, he’ll give you each one a different one.”

You must have had a strong visual sense just starting out. How did you develop that? How did you develop such a strong visual sense that’s been good for comics, for TV and movies?

GAIMAN: I didn’t realize there was anything odd about it until I started working with writers, particularly working with novelists who loved what was happening in comics and wanted to do comics too. And then suddenly, watching a tiny handful of them write good comics, and the vast majority of them crash and burn. And crash and burn kind of painfully. And these were my friends and these were people who were brilliant, these were people who were really good at the thing that they did. But the thing that they did was all about building pictures in people’s heads. And I realized that I’m, you know, I’m amphibian.

I think part of it is for me, the thing that drives me is the story.

I’m not a novelist. I have written novels. I will write more novels.

I love writing novels except for the loneliness and the backache.

But… that’s not what I am. Whereas there are some people out there who are novelists. They write a novel. When they finish that novel, they begin the next novel. And they’re not even short story writers.

And I look at them and go, “How can somebody not be a short story writer, how can you not want to take stories, and tell stories in different ways?”

KWITNEY: A lot of books and works from back in the ’90s and the early ’00s, sometimes they have strange little warts and things that came from [the fact that it] was a different culture back then.

Nothing that you’ve written seems to have that weird “wartiness.” You know, you look at old episodes of Friends and you think, “Oooh, that’s a little cringe-y now.” You have managed to avoid that. Clearly, a part of it is that you follow your own internal compass and your wonderfully strange offspring’s imagination. But what else has helped you avoid those pitfalls? Like, when you were researching Wanda for Sandman and all of the material you did, how did you avoid the Friends trap of looking dated?

GAIMAN: Oh, I don’t think I have. I think you can go back into Sandman and see places where my heart may have been in the right place, but, you know, it’s dated.

Having said that, I think in some ways I was lucky, and in some ways I was doing my best— and we all were—to treat people with respect. I remember, an example of that would be in the late ’80s, all of my lesbian friends, without exceptions, referred to themselves as “dykes” in conversation.

And I’d put that in a script, and you said, “I need

Little Jed in the Land of Marvelous Dreams Writer Gaiman, penciler Dringenberg, and inker Malcolm Jones III produced this heartfelt tribute to Winsor McCay’s classic comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland for Sandman #11 (Dec. 1989). Original art courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

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to check whether that’s an okay thing to say, for a lesbian to describe herself that way.” And you went off to a lesbian bar in New York—if it wasn’t you it was Karen, but I think it was much more likely that she’d send you! And I got the “Okay, I looked at their notice board. Everything is sort of dykes on bikes and dyke picnics, and I think it’s okay.” [Alisa laughs] But… there was no intention. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to offend people, and it wasn’t that we didn’t want to upset people, because we were writing Sandman, and if I wasn’t upsetting people, I wasn’t doing my job. But I wanted to upset the right people. [laughter and applause] My favorite back then was a letter that we got from a group calling themselves the Concerned Mothers of America, which I still suspect was one person. And they got very, very angry about Game of You, and they got incredibly angry because it had Wanda. It had a trans character, and that was not okay. And they wrote to us and they let us know that from now on, the Concerned Mothers of America and the American Family Association were boycotting Sandman.

And when we stopped putting these gay and lesbian and trans and wicked and immoral people into our comics, we should write to the American Family Association newspaper, and let them know that we had repented, and they would start buying our comic again. [laughter] And strangely, from that day forward, sales started going like [motioning upward] that! [laughter] So we never apologized, and years later when the Million Moms—who also were an offshoot of the American Family Association and a direct descendant of the Concerned Mothers of America, who renamed themselves the Million Moms— announced that they were going to be boycotting the TV series Lucifer, which, of course, was a Sandman spinoff, because it had Lucifer in it as a main character. I thought, “All I know is that Lucifer is gonna be just fine.” Every season they would redouble their announcement that they were boycotting it, and every season the viewing figures would go up and up. And I’m like, “They never learn!” And may they never learn—I love these people! Just faintly hoping they’ll boycott everything!

Although the best boycott we got was still the Good Omens boycott! There were so many things that I wished that Terry Pratchett [Discworld author and Gaiman’s Good Omens collaborator— ed.] would have been alive for. [applause] I miss Terry daily. But the thing that I wish he’d been alive for the most, ’cause he would have loved it so much, was when a small Catholic group announced that because we had a Black Adam and Eve, and God was voiced by a woman in Good Omens, and there’s a demon in it who’s quite nice, that this needed to not be on the screens anymore. And they apparently got 20,000 signatures on a petition that they sent to Netflix to tell Netflix not to show Good Omens. [laughter] And Netflix agreed that they would promise not to show Good Omens and they would never screen Good Omens, which, seeing that it was an Amazon Prime show, [laughter] they were absolutely in a fantastic place to not show Good Omens anymore.

I wished Terry had been around for that one.

KWITNEY: You wrote the novel Good Omens with Terry during the time when you were working on Sandman.

GAIMAN: Yup. KWITNEY: Can you say anything about how that came about, and also, how it was this was your first novel?

GAIMAN: Like everybody, I had a novel that I’d written when I was 21 or 22 that will remain forever in my attic. I pulled it out once, read it to [daughter] Maddy, and then sent it back to the attic, going, “It has one decent page.” I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, because there was one page where it sounded like me. Everything else was me desperately sounding like everybody else.

But yeah, so I had this idea for a book. And I wrote the first 5,000 words, and sent it to a handful of friends to see what they thought, one of whom was Terry Pratchett. And then Sandman took off.

I was writing Sandman and somewhere in 1989 I got a phone call from Terry saying, “Neil, that thing you sent me. You doing anything with that?” I said, “No.” And he said, ‘Well, either sell me the idea,

Helming the Realm of Dreams Lord Morpheus sporting his Helm of Dream, in an undated oil painting by regular Sandman cover artist Dave McKean. Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 11

All cover art is by Dave McKean.TM & © DC Comics.

COVER GALLERY

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or let’s do it together, because I know what happens next.” And I said to him, “Well, let’s write it together.” ’Cause as far as I was concerned, this was an awful lot like Michelangelo ringing you up and saying, “Do you want to paint a ceiling together?” [laughter] I thought, “I will learn things. I will learn how to craft a novel from Terry.” So at the time, I was writing Sandman, and I was writing Books of Magic at the same time. From nine o’clock ’til midnight I would write Sandman. From midnight ’til two o’clock in the morning I would write Books of Magic.

And from two o’clock in the morning until I couldn’t see, I would write Good Omens. Right now, 35 years later, I just look at that and go, “I was mad. How did I do that?” But I did.

And I’d wake up the next early afternoon, and there would be a call from Terry Pratchett on my answering machine, there’d be a little red light flashing. I’d press a button and the tape would rewind… I’m explaining all this because I feel like I’m sort of, you know, we’re in archaic, archeological territory here. It was a machine, it had people’s voices on it! [laughter] And I would press the button and Terry’s voice would say, “Wake up! Wake up, c’mon, get out of bed, you lazy bastard! I’ve just written a good bit!” And I would call him and he would read me whatever he had written that morning. And I would read him whatever I had written much, much earlier that same morning.

And then we’d talk about the story and we’d talk about things and we’d try and make the other one laugh… and then the aim would be to get back to it and write the next good bit before the other one could get there.

We had an incredible amount of fun. We plotted a sequel, but then never got to write it because I moved to America.

And we sort of figured that we needed to at least be on the same time zone.

And also there was a level on which Good Omens was something that we had written for fun. I remember about nine weeks into writing Good Omens, I got a call from Terry. The phone just rang and I said, “Yeah.” He said, “It’s me. Listen, Good Omens.”

Which wasn’t called Good Omens at that point, it was called William the Antichrist. [laughter] He said, “Look, how long have we spent on this book so far?” And I said, “About nine weeks.”

He said, “What’s the longest we could possibly keep working on it for?” I said, “Probably another six or seven weeks, and we’ll finish it.” And he said, “If nobody buys it, we can swallow that, can’t we?” And I said, “Yeah, we’ll be okay. I think they’ll buy it.”

And he said, “But if they don’t…” I said, “Well, if nobody buys it, then we had fun for 17 weeks and we made each other laugh.”

And he said, ‘”Yeah, we did.”

You know, Good Omens was this fun, weird, mad project we did for fun. After that, the idea of coming back and doing more Good Omens… We were always very aware that lawyers—people with slim briefcases and very, very slim watches—would have to

Streaming Endlessly Promo poster touting the August 2022 premiere of Netflix’s The Sandman series.

TM & © DC Comics.

get into the same room and discuss how it was going to work. And that there were publishers out there who would write enormous checks if we agreed to do it, which kind of took some of the fun out of it. But we also had a story we wanted to tell… which, just confusingly, is not the story of Good Omens II. Good Omens Season Two is like the sandwich filler that would allow us to get to the story that Terry and I plotted out in Seattle.

To date how long ago this was, we were at the World Fantasy Convention in Seattle. Good Omens had not yet come out.

It was November 1989, and we were sharing a hotel room to save money. In his latter years, Terry would buy the hotel before he got there and have it repainted. But this was back when we were saving… sharing a room.

And Terry went off to bed at a sensible hour like 11-ish, and I crept into bed when the bar closed. You know, creeping across the room. He’s on one end of the room, I’m on the other. And I creep across the room incredibly quietly—you know, you slip your shoes off as soon as you get to the room and you tiptoe. And I’d just reached the bed when a voice from the darkness said, “What time of night do you call this, then? Your mother and I have been worried sick about you.” [laughter] Jetlag had caught up with Terry and he was wide awake and I was pretty awake, so we just sort of lay in our respective beds, plotting the next Good Omens novel. So if I ever get to do Season Three, that will be that story. [applause] And then my obligation to Good Omens and to Terry will be done and I can lay that one down.

[Editor’s note: At this point in the interview, the floor was opened for questions from attendees. What follows are some of the audience’s questions and Neil’s replies, edited for BACK ISSUE.] QUESTION 1: I love The Sandman. You’ve talked a little bit about adapting it for TV. I want to ask about Neverwhere, which was a television miniseries before you adapted it as a comic [six episodes, airing in 1996—ed.]. Have you ever thought of going back to other stories based on the plot of Neverwhere?

GAIMAN: Neverwhere, unlike everything else, began life as a TV show. And it began life as a TV show that I found myself very disappointed with. I’d written these scripts, and I was not seeing what I had written on the screen, as a result of which I went, “I’m turning it into a novel.”

There are lots and lots of people who have approached us over the years about turning Neverwhere back into a TV series.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 13

There have been scripts written. There was also a period of about ten, 15 years when there were movie rights to Neverwhere under option and a number of film scripts for Neverwhere were written by me and by other people.

Right now the rights are back with me and Lenny Henry, ’cause Lenny and I co-created Neverwhere.

We’re definitely looking at turning it back into television. I know I don’t want to do it. I guess I feel with Neverwhere like I would run the risk of turning into my own typewriter. I wrote it as a TV, six TV episodes.

I turned that into a novel. I turned that into a much longer novel because my American editor basically said, “This British novel is written for British people.

Please make this bigger.” And I just don’t want to do it again. I love the story and I love the characters.

Having said that, the novel that I am halfway through right now is a Neverwhere novel. It’s called The Seven Sisters, from Richard’s [Neverwhere character Richard Mayhew] point of view. It takes place about six months after the events of Neverwhere, and in world chronology it takes place about 25 years after the events of Neverwhere, because time is kind of weird and screwed up in it. [applause] QUESTION 2: Have you always wanted to be a writer?

GAIMAN: I always wanted to be a writer. I didn’t think I was going to be able to survive, and I didn’t think it was ever gonna happen. And I guess as an early teenager, I would think, “Well, am I going to wind up an English teacher or a librarian who writes on the side?” Because I admired English teachers and I admired librarians. And they were the people who I just thought were the coolest people in the world, so it was going to be one of those two. But maybe I could write on the side. And then I never wound up being either an English teacher or a librarian. But I wrote. I never really wanted to do anything else.

Occasionally people would say, “Well, if you weren’t a writer, what would you be?” And that’s kind of terrifying for me, ’cause you don’t want me driving your Uber. You really do not want me putting up your shelves. Eventually I decided that if I couldn’t be a writer, I would like to be a Freelance Religion Designer. [laughter] And just have people call me up and they’d say, “Hello, I’d like a religion, please.” And I would say, “Okay, is it for you, your family, for an entire nation?

How do you feel about guilt? Do you want a lot of holidays, and where do we stand on dietary restrictions?”

And, you know, just sort of work with you and design a religion for you.

Shop Talk (top) Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett at a September 1990 signing for the first American edition of their novel, Good Omens, at the legendary DreamHaven bookstore and comic shop in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (bottom) A Sandman print by Mike Dringenberg, signed by the artist and Gaiman, produced in the early 1990s by the Utah comic shop Night Flight, where the pair made a promotional appearance together. Courtesy of Heritage.

Photo: Eclief / Wikimedia Commons. Sandman TM & © DC Comics.

14 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

QUESTION 3: When a new story idea comes to you, do you know what format you want to do it in?

GAIMAN: What a great question. Mostly, I know. But sometimes I’m wrong. When I got the idea for Anansi Boys, I thought of it as a film because I could see bits of it moving. And I tried writing it as a film a couple of times and it just didn’t have any life to it, and I didn’t know what I was doing. And then I thought maybe it was a novella. And I mentioned the story one day to my editor over lunch, and she started jabbing her fork at me and going, “That is a novel!” And I was so terrified I agreed to start trying to write it as a novel because… fork! [laughter] There are things that I’ve thought were poems, that I’ve tried writing as poems that weren’t, and turned out to be prose. And there were things that I thought were

probably prose that actually didn’t quite work, but then flew when they were poems.

But mostly for me the thing that I think of is, does it have a voice? If it has a voice, it is probably either a poem or prose. If it’s pictures, if it’s moving things in my head, then it’s probably comics or it’s a film. If it feels to me like what’s important is actually seeing things physically move, hearing lines actually said by people, then it’s probably film or TV. Whereas if I can tell that story in images, but I could do it in static pictures, then it’s probably comics.

And then there’s other little bits to it like, okay, if I cannot imagine anybody over the age of four reading it, it’s definitely a children’s picture book.

QUESTION 4: I know you and [musician] Tori Amos seem to have a relationship back and forth. Do you have a favorite reference that you have done of her and vice versa?

GAIMAN: Oh, what a lovely question. I think my favorite reference that Tori did of me has to be the one she made before she’d ever met me, because that created our friendship.

It was 1991, I was at the San Diego Comic Convention, and a young man named Rantz Hoseley was in the signing line. And he got to the front of the signing line at the convention and he handed

me a cassette, which was a thing we used to have in the old days. Your parents will explain it to you.

And he handed me a cassette and he said, “This is an album done by one of my friends. She sings about you on there, please don’t sue her.”

And I took the cassette home, along with the others cassettes that other people in signing lines gave me. When I got back, this [cassette] was not ahead of any of the others. I remember the first tape that I’d been given by somebody who was very proud of it was like Norwegian sort of Gloom Metal. It was sort of an [affecting a Norwegian accent in a deep voice] “Oh, lord Morpheus, come down from the sky and bring your sister too, she’s cute” sort of thing.

And then the next time I drove anywhere, I put on the one that was a proto version of Tori Amos’ “Little Earthquakes.” And my jaw dropped. And I just thought, “This is amazing. This whole thing is amazing.” And the “Me and Neil hanging out with the dream king” [line] was like, “Oh, that’s really weird. Everybody else is singing about Sandman, and you’ve noticed that somebody made this thing.”

There was a phone number on the back, and she was in the UK at that point, so I phoned the number.

And we made friends over the phone, and we’d

After Midnight During Sandman’s early years, Gaiman would write that series in the daytime then script the four-issue Presige Format miniseries The Books of Magic in the wee hours of the morning. (left) Cover to issue #1 (Dec. 1990) by John Bolton, who also illustrated (right) the issue’s back cover spotlighting Zatara the Magician.

TM & © DC Comics.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 15

The Eyes Have It (top) This rare 1953 pamphlet (courtesy of Heritage) served as a prototype for alarmist shrink Dr. Fredric Wertham’s 1954 indictment against comic books, Seduction of the Innocent.

Wertham wielded this “injury to the eye” image—shown here in a panel from Jack Cole’s Golden Age shocker “Murder, Morphine and Me!” in True Crime Comics #2—as a calling card for his mission, in the process driving American moms and ministers into a fearful frenzy. (bottom) And then this happened. Neil’s Corinthian, in a tasty cover by Reiko Murakami for The Sandman Universe: Nightmare Country #3 (Aug. 2022).

TM & © DC Comics.

chat every week. And then she said, “Oh, I’m doing this little gig at a place called the Canal Brasserie.” And I went there. There was the owner of the Brasserie and his friends at a table, and a journalist… and Tori’s publicist, who was chauffeuring the journalist around. And there was me. And that was the first Tori Amos gig I saw.

And after the gig we walked home and just sort of went off for this long walk… She was going to film the video for “Silent All These Years” the next day and she was miming it all out and acting it out for me in the underground station. And I just thought, “You are going to be my friend forever.” And here we are, 33, 32 years later, and we’re still friends. [applause] QUESTION 5: What made you want to put teeth in the Corinthian’s eyes?

GAIMAN: Fredric Wertham was a psychiatrist in New York in the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s who wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, which was a book that—using facts and figures that Fredric Wertham was much later, after his death and people went through his papers, discovered to have been made up—proved demonstrably that juvenile delinquency was caused by reading comic books. Wertham wrote about all of the terrible things that happened in comics, which then caused the Comics Code of America to be founded, and EC Comics to be put out of business, and all sorts of things like that.

And one of the things that obsessed Fredric Wertham was something he called the “injury to the eye motif.” He had lots of panels showing injuries to eyes or threatened injuries to eyes. And I was fascinated by that. I’d read Seduction of the Innocent and I’ve also read its sequel A Sign for Cain and I was fascinated by his fascination with the fact that comics seemed to be up there with injuring eyes.

So when I started thinking, “I need a great villain, I need a villain, I’ve never really created a good villain, what do I want to do with my villain?” I thought, “Oh, the injury to the eye motif. Let’s make a villain that would have freaked Fredric Wertham out!” [laughter] And I thought it’s also something that you can do in comics that allows for interesting places that the story can go. If I do things from the Corinthian’s point of view, I could have dark glasses which then get taken off and then, you know, I could show him from his point of view biting somebody’s fingers or… of course, he’s going to eat eyeballs. Injury to the eye motif. So that really was the, sort of the thing that, the engine that powered the Corinthian, was the late Frederic Wertham. [applause] Thank you so much—those were great questions. And thank you, Alisa!

KWITNEY: Thank you.

ALISA KWITNEY is a former DC Comics/Vertigo editor and is the Eisner-nominated author of graphic novels, romantic women’s fiction, urban fantasy, and young adult novels. She was the editor of the Sandman spinoffs The Dreaming and Lucifer and writer of Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold miniseries, and is currently the co-host of the Sandman podcast Endless.

16 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

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I’M HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN’S OLE LUKØJE, A.K.A. THE SANDMAN. LITERATURE AND FOLKLORE ARE FILLED WITH GUARDIANS OF DREAMS LIKE ME -- AND SO ARE COMIC BOOKS, WHICH FOR DECADES HAVE BEEN…

THE FIRST SANDMAN OF COMIC BOOKS, WESLEY DODDS, PREMIERED IN 1939 IN NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR COMICS #1 AND QUICKLY GRADUATED TO HIS OWN FEATURE IN ADVENTURE COMICS. ARMED WITH HIS SLEEP-INDUCING GAS GUN, HE WAS A MEMBER OF THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA.

DID YOU KNOW THAT MARVEL COMICS HAD ITS OWN SANDMAN? IN 1943?? IN MARVEL MYSTERY COMICS #41, BOY ADVENTURER JIMMY JUPITER NARROWLY ESCAPED THE LAND OF DREAMS’ SANDMAN WHILE JOURNEYING INTO THE REALM OF FAIRIES.

SANDY THE GOLDEN BOY DEBUTED IN 1941 IN ADVENTURE #69. FOR A WHILE, SANDMAN DONNED THIS SUPERHERO COSTUME AND FOUGHT CRIME WITH HIS SIDEKICK. COMICS LEGENDS SIMON & KIRBY PRODUCED MANY OF THEIR ADVENTURES.

ZATARA THE MAGICIAN, ONE OF DC’s EARLIEST STARS, ENCOUNTERED THE GOD OF SLUMBER, MORPHEUS, IN ACTION COMICS #100 IN 1946.

A VILLAINOUS SANDMAN -ACTUALLY A FEMALE COMMUNIST AGENT NAMED MADAM MORPHEUS -- BRANDISHED A SLEEP WEAPON IN 1954’s PLASTIC MAN #51.

18 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

RUDOLPH AND HIS PAL GROVER VISITED CLOUDLAND IN DC’s RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER #6 (1955) AND MET THE SANDMAN, WHO LIVED IN A CASTLE AT THE CORNER OF SLEEPY ROAD AND SLUMBER CANYON.

A MAN’S OBSESSION WITH BRINGING TO LIFE THE “DREAM GIRL” HE SKETCHED PROVIDED HIM AN AUDIENCE WITH NONE OTHER THAN KING MORPHEUS IN DC’s HOUSE OF MYSTERY #69 IN 1957.

MARVEL’S BETTER-KNOWN SANDMAN HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DREAMS, ALTHOUGH HE’S OFTEN TRIED TO PUT THE WALL-CRAWLER TO SLEEP -PERMANENTLY. THIS SHAPESHIFTING VILLAIN DEBUTED IN 1963 IN AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #4.

IN 1963’s WONDER WOMAN #140, PRINCESS DIANA WAS GRANTED THREE WISHES BY THE GOD OF DREAMS, MORPHEUS.

BY THE ’60s, WESLEY DODDS HAD RETURNED TO HIS ORIGINAL SANDMAN COSTUME WHEN MAKING OCCASIONAL APPEARANCES IN JLA/JSA CROSSOVERS… INCLUDING THIS INGLORIOUS 1966 COVER SHOT ON JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #46!

ALSO IN 1966, A SLEEPSTIMULATING SUPERVILLAIN CALLED SANDMAN CREATED NIGHTMARES FOR THE MAN FROM R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. IN ARCHIE COMICS’ LIFE WITH ARCHIE #58.

ANOTHER EVIL SANDMAN APPEARED IN 1966, ON ABC-TV’s BATMAN. SEASON TWO/EPISODE 33 INTRODUCED ACTOR MICHAEL RENNIE AS DR. SOMNAMBULA, A.K.A. THE SANDMAN, WIELDER OF HYPNOTIC SAND.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #94 (1971) INAUGURATED ITS “HALL OF GOLDEN AGE HEROES” FEATURE BY REPRINTING THE ORIGIN OF THE GOLDEN AGE SANDMAN (AND STARMAN, TOO).

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 19

ONE-TIME SIDEKICK SANDY WAS TRANSFORMED INTO A SAND-MONSTER IN 1974’s JLA #113.

EVENTUALLY HE WAS CURED, AND AS SANDY HAWKINS LATER TOOK ON THE MANTLE OF SANDMAN.

THE GOLDEN AGE SANDMAN RETURNED IN A NEW STORY FOR DC COMICS PRESENTS #42’s “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO…?” FEATURE. “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SANDY THE GOLDEN BOY?” FOLLOWED, IN ISSUE #47.

WESLEY DODDS’ EVOLUTION INTO SANDMAN WAS TOLD ANEW IN 1986 IN SECRET ORIGINS vol. 2 #7.

HECTOR HALL, SON OF THE GOLDEN AGE HAWKMAN AND HAWKGIRL, FIRST APPEARED AS SILVER SCARAB IN 1983 ALONGSIDE INFINITY, INC. HE PERISHED IN ACTION BUT ESCAPED DEATH, IN 1988 BECOMING THE NEW SANDMAN, LORD OF THE DREAM STREAM.

IN 1989 THE SANDMAN #1 INTRODUCED DREAM -- MORPHEUS -- THE LORD OF DREAMS AND ONE OF THE ENDLESS. AND THUS BEGAN A FASCINATING SAGA WHICH CONTINUES TO THIS DAY.

OF COURSE, LONG BEFORE THESE SANDMEN OF COMIC BOOKS, WINSOR McCAY’s COMIC STRIP LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND (1905–1927) TURNED DREAMTIME INTO STORYTIME!

20 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

SPECIAL THANKS TO JOHN WELLS AND HERITAGE AUCTIONS. NIGHTY-NIGHT!

Sandman, Sandy, Zatara, Plastic Man, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, House of Mystery, Batman, Blockbuster, Justice League of America, Wonder Woman © DC Comics. Jimmy Jupiter, villain Sandman, Spider-Man © Marvel Comics.

Archie, Betty, the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. © Archie Publications, Inc. Hans Christian Andersen Sandman drawing by Vilhelm Pedersen/courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

SIMON & KIRBY REUNITED TO INTRODUCE AN ALL-NEW SANDMAN IN LATE 1973. THIS SANDMAN, AIDED BY HIS NIGHTMARISH LACKEYS BRUTE AND GLOB, WAS EVENTUALLY REVEALED TO BE DR. GARRETT SANFORD.

The Sandman and the DC Bullet TM & © DC Comics. Unless otherwise note, artwork appearing in this feature is courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

interviews conducted by S h e l l y

Editor’s note: We certainly won’t disagree with Norman Mailer’s description of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman as “a comic strip for intellectuals.”

The Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist’s accolade may seem to single out the comic book’s writer in its praise. Yet Gaiman, even in his greener years when Sandman was a new project, understood that comics is an illustrative medium, where words and pictures coproduce a unique narrative unlike any other form of art or entertainment. From its thought-provoking, sometimes startling multimedia cover art by Dave McKean to its interior artists, beginning with penciler Sam Kieth and inker Mike Dringenberg, Sandman has always been graced by some of the industry’s most extraordinary artistic talents.

For this issue’s coverage of The Sandman, as editor I wished to shine a spotlight not only on the series and Neil Gaiman but also the artists who brought Neil’s Master of Dreams to life each issue. But so many different artists have drawn Sandman… where’s an editor to start? And realistically, interviewing all of them for an ongoing periodical like BACK ISSUE would be a massive undertaking that would jeopardize deadlines and induce ulcers. What’s an editor to do?

As I had turned to my former DC editorial colleague Alisa Kwitney in procuring this issue’s Gaiman interview, I similarly asked another DC

Bond

colleague, Shelly Bond, for help. We had earlier worked together at Comico the Comic Company, and not too long after I jumped to DC, Shelly took a similar path—although she landed in group editor Karen Berger’s corner while I was working with superhero group editors. Shelly eventually became Sandman’s assistant editor and went on to work on numerous DC projects, including many bearing the Sandman “brand.”

Shelly reached out to many of Sandman’s artists, asking them all the same questions; you’ll note from their responses that not every question went answered. Her first question—“So tell me, do you prefer rough or smooth, and why?”—merits an explanation. As Shelly clarifies, “That was the assistant comic book editor’s first question when getting ready to send out the edited script and a deadline. One of the perks for a penciler getting a job on a monthly series like The Sandman was getting free DC Comics art board. The only dilemma was choosing between a rough or smooth surface. It was often a case of consulting with one’s inker, but it begins with the penciler being comfortable in talking to the hand which holds the lead that gets it all going, the assistant editor’s.”

A baker’s dozen of talented illustrators replied to Shelly’s queries. What follows are their responses, plus samples of their Sandman artwork.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 21

Sandman credits: The Sandman #1–4 (inks), 6–11, 14–16, 21, 28 (pencils); Who’s Who in the DC Universe #5 (Sandman), 8 (Death), 15 (The Dreaming, The Endless) Other significant works: Alien Worlds; Kelvin Mace; Doom Patrol; Magic: The Gathering SHELLY BOND: So tell me, what was it: rough or smooth board for you, and why?

MIKE DRINGENBERG: Rough or smooth was less relevant to me than paper size…

At the time we began work on Sandman, DC was transitioning away from the older 14” x 21” stock (which was afterwards only used for covers) to the current 11” x 17” standard; I preferred the older size because the art could be more detailed.

On the whole, I took a cue from Bill Sienkiewicz (and by example, Dave McKean) and never limited myself in terms of physical media, focusing instead on the emotional impact of the images, on their dramatic aspects. Consequently, I used a variety of substrates while working on Sandman; I enjoyed playing with photocopiers… In order to achieve certain effects, at one point early in Doll’s House I made background color holds by photocopying gingham fabrics onto drafting vellum.

Additionally, I used of a wide variety of marking materials (pencil, laundry marker, ball-point pens, charcoal, lithographic crayon, etc.). Malcolm Jones was an extremely versatile inker, but on those occasional panels or pages that I handled myself, my preferred inks were almost exclusively acrylic-based (usually Faber FW), and only rarely did I use white-out, preferring the 19th Century watercolor technique of scraping pigment off the substrate with a razor blade or an X-Acto knife.

At the time I lived in a region with a notably arid climate, with a very low average humidity. In summer this could easily be as low as 2–3%. In watercolor terms, that meant that a wash could literally evaporate before you had any chance of working color into it, which limited the use of traditional “wet” watercolor techniques.

However, this offered an interesting advantage in that pigments didn’t penetrate very deeply into the substrate, and therefore didn’t really spread its fibers; which meant that color washes could be layered for intensity and scrubbed or scraped off to reveal the substrate with little damage to the surface. This goes back to my preference for acrylic inks: India inks are more finely ground and more readily permeate the paper surface, essentially staining it, which in turn necessitates the use of whiteout to correct mistakes or create white-on-black effects. In that climate, however, acrylic ink tended to dry on the surface and could easily be removed.

as “Salt Lake Horror.” These earlier Lovecraftian associations also influenced the choice of background locations that eventually found their way into Sandman.

BOND: What’s the one Goth article of clothing or artifact you would swap with a member of the Endless?

DRINGENBERG: None. It’s actually the other way around: I often drew the Endless in the style and clothing we usually wore; in that regard, Sandman remains an artifact of its time. The style wasn’t specifically “Goth” per se, so much as post-punk, glam-punk, or maybe proto shoe-gazer. Goth style codifications happened long afterwards. I took my sketchbook everywhere, and figures in Sandman were often drawn from life, or were taken from photos shot in situ of the people I knew (with eternal thanks to the wonders of same-day film processing).

BOND: Is there one panel you wish you could remake/remodel?

DRINGENBERG: There are any number of them, there were so many missed opportunities…

A classic example would be the Dream Vortex scenes from The Doll’s House... I got the basic idea for this from Dave Sim, from his parody of Nixon’s “The Six Crises” in Cerebus’ High Society story arc. For the most part, these particular issues were drawn in such a way as to make the reader hold the book sideways and read the pages downward (which offers some interesting, more cinematic, possibilities for left-right panel flow). However, there is one hilarious passage in which Cerebus staggers into his war room partly drunk and reeling with a hangover, which forces the reader to fully rotate the book until—as Cerebus gets splashed with a bucket of water—the book resumes a normal upright left-right page flow, before finally settling back on its side, and continues to be read downward as before.

I love these kinds of structural experiments, and applied it successfully to Sandman for the dream sequences in issue #10.

The placement and direction of word balloons is critical to pulling off this trick, and having done it once, I decided to have a go at doing it one better for the Dream Vortex. The vortex itself was created by smearing mylar acetate with ink (as if it were the glass plate when making a monotype), then splattering it with cleaning fluid; this was then used to make a color hold.

I’d used this technique earlier on (and in a more restrained fashion) near the end of “Tales in the Sand.”

Circa the mid-1990s, Sandman co-creator Mike Dringenberg with his friend Cinnamon “Sin” Hadley, upon whom the artist based Death’s appearance.

Dmcgauley/Wikimedia Commons.

BOND: What’s a favorite memory or lost tale from your years working on The Sandman?

DRINGENBERG: Sandman has a lot of lost tales… most of them don’t bear remembering. I suppose there is one I can relate, having to do with the deeply strange nature of Salt Lake City…

When I was still in college, some years before I ever began work on Sandman, my friends and I enjoyed playing a board game called Arkham Horror (for any gamers who might be reading this, this was the original Chaosium version, not the one currently available). It was an excellent beer-and-pretzels kind of game, and on one occasion we noticed that there was an analogous location in SLC for almost every one depicted on the game board: GilGal park; the Old Saltair Pavilion (which featured prominently in the 1962 supernatural horror film, Carnival of Souls); the LDS temple complex made a good stand-in for Lovecraft’s Temple of Dagon.

This prompted us to make our own version of the map and play it 22 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

Death doing her job, from Sandman #8 (Aug. 1989).

Original art by Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III, signed by Dringenberg and Neil Gaiman.

The final panel’s shot of Death was clearly influenced by artist Dringenberg’s friend, Cinnamon Hadley.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 23

An introspective Death in a 1991 Dringenberg painting, originally conceived as the proposal art for the character’s first miniseries, Death: the High Cost of Living.

My original intention was that the reader begin to rotate the book until they were fully holding it upside down, but now reading it right-to-left, like a manga (which—inverted—still preserves the “normal” left-to-right page flow); then the rotation continued, following Rose and her dreaming housemates around the spiral vortex until Morpheus appears in the lower-right corner of the page, restoring order—and the pages to their usual sequencing. Sadly, I can only assume my notes about balloon placement were lost, and the text ended up printed conventionally, with left-to-right flow. DC has subsequently continued to print it this way, but hopefully we can correct at some point in a revised edition.

Prior to working on Sandman, I’d read Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and its Double, a collection of essays and lectures in which he proposes an “alchemical” theater, in which the audience becomes actor—an active participant in the performance, and the actor on stage becomes a kind of modern shaman guiding the audience through the performance, the play, to a communal

catharsis. Metaphysical intentions aside, I was fascinated by the way this changed the performance dynamic and through that lens, I saw Dave’s structural experiments (which actively involved the reader in the process of creating the narrative) as a way of creating a greater intimacy with the content.

Were I to redraw The Doll’s House, there’d be a lot more of that kind of thing. When originally drawn, I hadn’t yet developed a full understanding of image resonance, or how to manipulate within the work… There’s more to it than that, but looking back on it, it wouldn’t have been at all difficult to expand on the epic scale while forming an ongoing Stimmung, a sense that it was all one interconnected dream.

BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable or CD player while drawing a page from a Sandman story?

DRINGENBERG: When I’m composing a page layout (or any image, really), visualizing it in my mind’s eye, I tend to prefer quiet; sometimes Baroque chamber music (especially Bach or Vivaldi; maybe Albioni, Telemann, or Scarlatti’s guitar suites); nothing vocal. Classical guitar is also a favorite when I have some thinking to do.

When I get around to fleshing it out or inking it, the soundtrack could be almost anything depending on my mood. I’ve always had very eclectic and wide-ranging musical tastes… I might just as easily listen to jazz (my dad was a Miles Davis fan, so I heard a lot of jazz growing up), classical, delta blues, R&B, ’60s blues rock, ’70s prog rock, glam rock, punk rock, Krautrock­—which trends into industrial (by which I mean groups like Tiergarten, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire, and Faust), new wave, dub, ska, or reggae. As far as “new” music went, at the time we were very lucky to have had a local record store with a fairly direct pipeline into what was happening in London. We usually had new releases from Factory, 4AD, Mute, and other indie record labels within a couple of weeks of their release in the UK. Sometimes my “work soundtrack” went pretty far afield… I drew Sandman #6 more-or-less on location at Bill & Nada’s, an all-night diner (now long gone) that served as the backdrop for 24 Hours. Bill & Nada’s had a very surreal atmosphere at 3 a.m., as if the embedded cigarette smoke layered over the wall murals took on a life of its own... Old Bill McHenry, painted as young rodeo star, riding his palomino; all slightly seasick under the fluorescent lights. I got through that issue with a ton of coffee and French fries (the only things on the menu that I knew were killed-dead); Hank Williams, Gene Autry, and Peggy Lee were all on the jukebox. Fittingly, so was Dinah Washington’s “What a Difference a Day Makes.”

BOND: The Sandman 3000: Underwater, outer space, or otherwise?

DRINGENBERG: None of them. Maybe underwater, but only if it somehow retells the dream-like 2nd Canto of Lautréamont’s proto-surrealist masterpiece, “Le Chants de Maldoror,” in which the vampiric Maldoror, embodied paean of Evil and cruelty, makes love to a shark in admiration of their mutually violent natures.

24 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

Sandman credits: The Sandman cover artist, 1989– 1997; The Sandman (Netflix television series) end credits Other significant works: Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth; Hellblazer; The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch For more info: www.davemckean.com BOND: Reveal something else you were juggling parallel/in tandem while working on your legendary cover run.

DAVE McKEAN: Arkham and Sandman put me on the desks of art directors at record labels, so I started doing a lot of album covers, usually for bands with names like Needlessly Killing Badgers and Scrape All the Things or Just Unpleasant.

If you look at some of them—Mullmuzzler, Testament, Fear Factory, Paradise Lost, Machine Head—they make up a parallel series of Sandman-ish covers.

BOND: Is there one cover you wish you could remake/remodel?

McKEAN: Hard to say, but I think probably #3 and 63 are the only ones I would not want to remake/remodel if I was doing them again.

dave mckean Niccolò Caranti.

BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable or CD player while working on The Sandman covers?

McKEAN: That’s over seven years, so a lot of albums were listened to during that time. In 1989, for number one I was probably listening to Carla Bley, Joni Mitchell, and King Crimson. By the last issue in 1996, I was probably still listening to Joni Mitchell, but also Conlon Nancarrow and Jake Thackray.

(above) A 2012 portrait of Morpheus

by Dave McKean, painted in oil over sections of photographic paper. (bottom) Original cover art to the 1991 trade paperback The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes. Mixed media master Dave McKean blended shadowbox images and random objects including stones for this inventive cover.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 25

BOND: So tell me, what was it: rough or smooth board for you, and why?

KELLEY JONES: Rough. Always rough.

More happy accidents and unknowns happen on rough paper because of the “tooth” that it has. Drybrushing and control of the lines for inking is far greater.

Sandman credits: The Sandman #17–18, 22–24, 26–27 Other significant works: Batman; Batman and Dracula: Red Rain; Deadman; Conan: The Book of Thoth For more info: @kelleyjonesart

BOND: What’s a favorite memory or lost tale from your years working on The Sandman?

JONES: The sound of Neil’s omnipresent computer in the background when we spoke about the story planning. And the spinner rack at my local Tower Books with an empty slot where Sandman #18 should be after I asked if they any more, and the clerks saying, “Did you read the cat issue?”… never knowing I drew it. [Editor’s note: Sandman #18’s story was titled “A Dream of a Thousand Cats,” Part 2 of the Dream Country arc.]

BOND: Reveal something else you were juggling parallel/in tandem while working on your storyline.

JONES: Drawing a couple issues of Grimjack for John Ostrander.

BOND: What’s the one Goth article of clothing or artifact you would swap with a member of the Endless?

JONES: I look terrible in any Goth regalia!

But I’m pale, so there’s that.

BOND: Is there one panel you wish you could remake/remodel?

JONES: Not one thing, except I’d have added the sketchy Sandman doodle by a Production guy on the second-to-last panel in the German edition of Calliope rather than leaving it blank like it was in the story.

BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable or CD player while drawing a page from your Sandman stories?

JONES: Deep by Peter Murphy and Bete Noire

by Bryan Ferry. (They are still on my turntable.)

BOND: The Sandman 3000: Underwater, outer space, or otherwise?

Gage Skidmore.

JONES: All Cats by ten… they finally had the same dream.

kelley jones

Lord Odin negotiates with Dream on this deliriously detailed original art page from Sandman #28 (July 1991).

Pencils by Kelley Jones, inks by George Pratt.

26 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

BOND: Fill in the blank: If only Neil…

JONES: …put a golden ticket in one issue of Sandman and we made a story about that winner’s real dreams.

BOND: What’s a favorite memory or lost tale from your years working on The Sandman?

Sandman credits: The Sandman #19, 62, 75; The Dreaming #47 CHARLES VESS: A favorite memory Other significant works: Heavy Metal; Spider-Man: Spirits of the Earth; Swamp took place in, I believe, 1989, at Thing; The Books of Magic; A Midsummer’s Night Dream; Stardust; Blueberry Girl [San Diego Comic-Con], this being For more info: greenmanpress.com before Neil was NEIL. We bumped into each other for the very first time in an aisle in the dealer’s room, and were able to have a lengthy conversation as people hurried by on either side of us.

At first we gabbed about various fantasy authors we liked, then about a certain comic book series that he happened to be writing. I think at that point there had been only five or six issues published of The Sandman, which I’d read because they came in the comp bundles that DC was then sending to all their freelancers. I was busy running those early stories (whose themes were mainly gothic or contemporary horror, certainly charles vess not my cup of tea, then or now) through Wildwose. my mind when Neil, unexpectedly, asked me if I would be interested in drawing an issue of his comic.

I politely begged off, saying that I already had too many projects on my plate. We continued talking for a bit and then went our separate ways.

Back at home, the [Sandman] issues kept appearing on my doorstep. Curiously, I would look each one over. Then, the poetry of “The Sound of Her Wings” [Sandman #8] took me completely by surprise, followed closely by the African folk tale issue. Both excited me to no end. I realized that Neil had a vehicle that he could take anywhere he wanted it to go. I believe I called him (there was no email in those pre-internet, far-gone days) and said that I would be happy to draw one of his tales. He, in the meantime, had come upon an edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I had illustrated. He asked, “Would you be interested in working with that play again, but this time I’d like to interpret the cast of characters a bit differently?”

Of course, I said yes.

From the final issue of the series’ first run, Sandman #75 (Mar. 1996), William Shakespeare, his daughter by his side, pens The Tempest at the behest of Dream. Pencils and inks by Charles Vess.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 27

Sandman credits: The Sandman #20, 24; The Sandman: Dream Country; Sandman: A Gallery of Dreams; The Death Gallery; Lucifer #62; Sandman 20th Anniversary Poster (2008) Other significant works: A Distant Soil; Legion of Super-Heroes; American Gods; Snow Glass Apples; Amazing Fantastic Incredible Stan Lee For more info: colleendoran.com

A deliriously delightful Death color illustration produced by Colleen Doran in 2012.

BOND: So tell me, what was it: rough or smooth board for you, and why?

COLLEEN DORAN: Smooth. I prefer smooth paper in general unless the art is being printed directly from the pencil. Tonal work generally works best on paper with some texture, ink without. But

with Malcolm Jones III inking my stuff, probably rough; he was such an amazing talent and could do incredible things with ink textures. I learned so much from him.

BOND: What’s a favorite memory or lost tale from your time working on The Sandman?

DORAN: Just getting to know Neil. We had many late-night phone calls about the story “Facade” [Sandman #20 (Oct. 1990), featuring Urania Blackwell, Element Girl from the Silver Age Metamorpho series—ed.] in particular, working closely on mood and body language, which was especially important since everything in the story was basically people sitting around talking. If the acting didn’t work, the story didn’t work. We would stay on the phone very late, sometimes for hours, and that was back before calling plans and so on. It could get expensive and none of us were making any money back then.

Neil is incredibly smart, inspiring, so much fun to talk to.

I don’t talk to him as much as I used to because we don’t have good cellphone service where I live, but I can still get his audiobooks to hear his voice whenever I want!

BOND: Reveal something else you were juggling parallel/in tandem while working on your storyline.

MayCauseDrowsiness.

DORAN: A lot. I was not only self-publishing at the time, I was just overworked in general. Back then I just didn’t make much money, and I would sometimes work on a half-dozen projects at a time. Trying to self-publish and work in the mainstream was crazy-making. I don’t know how I lived through it… I worked constantly, no days off, and was always getting in deadline trouble. If I had a time machine, I’d go back and tell myself to do whatever I had to do to come up with the money to not have to overbook.

COLLEEN DORAN

BOND: What’s the one Goth article of clothing or artifact you would swap with a member of the Endless?

DORAN: Death’s hat. I think I actually owned all of the other clothes, including Delirium’s skirt.

BOND: Is there one panel you wish you could remake/remodel?

DORAN: All of them. I wish I could draw better back then.

BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable or CD player while drawing a page from your Sandman story?

DORAN: I didn’t have a stereo then, I probably just had the TV on.

BOND: The Sandman 3000: Underwater, outer space, or otherwise?

DORAN: Otherworld.

BOND: Fill in the blank: If only Neil…

DORAN: I can’t think of anything he lacks. I wish he could live forever, I guess.

28 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

BOND: So tell me, what was it: rough or smooth board for you, and why?

SHAWN McMANUS: I preferred the rough DC board. For me, the rough paper was better for penciling because the pencil bit into the board better than the smooth paper.

The problem with the rough paper is that the pencils smudged easier than the smooth paper. My solution to this was to tape off the whole page except for whichever panel that I was working on, then do the same for the next panel and so on.

Sandman credits: The Sandman #31–33, 35–37; The Dreaming #31, 39, 50; Sandman Presents: The Thessaliad #1–4; Sandman Presents: Thessaly: Witch for Hire #1–4 Other significant works: Saga of the Swamp Thing; The Omega Men; Dr. Fate; Fables; Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love For more info: shawnmcmanus.net

The Endless’ Desire exits the stagecoach on the last panel of this intricate page by penciler/inker Shawn McManus from Sandman #31 (Oct. 1991).

BOND: Is there one panel you wish you could remake/ remodel?

McMANUS: All of them.

BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable SHAWN MCMANUS or CD player while League of Comic Geeks.com. drawing a page from your Sandman story?

McMANUS: Probably the Police.

BOND: Fill in the blank: If only Neil…

McMANUS: …would adopt me.

The Lord of Dreams in watercolor and colored pencil, in a 2009 specialty illo by Shawn McManus.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 29

Sandman credits: The Sandman #40–49; The Dreaming #13, 14; The Little Endless Storybook; Death: At Death’s Door; The Dead Boy Detectives; Delirium’s Party: A Little Endless Storybook Other significant works: Wonder Woman; Black Orchid; Scary Godmother; The Invisibles; Beasts of Burden For more info: jillthompson.tumblr.com

BOND: So tell me, what was it: rough or smooth board for you, and why?

JILL THOMPSON: Both! For different reasons/ inking tools at different times.

BOND: Reveal something else you were juggling parallel/in tandem while working on your storyline.

THOMPSON: I was in an improv troupe and often performing three to four nights a week in addition to drawing comics!

BOND: What’s the one Goth article of clothing or artifact you would swap with a member of The Endless?

THOMPSON: Well, I do love a cloak… but I wouldn’t trade my motorcycle jacket for anything!

BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable or CD player while drawing a page from your Sandman story?

THOMPSON: I literally watched soap operas every day while JILL THOMPSON drawing Sandman… but Craig © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. Russell had me listening to some real opera as well. I’m a person who draws with podcasts on now, so the equivalent back then was having the TV on one channel in the background!

BOND: The Sandman 3000: underwater, outer space, or otherwise?

THOMPSON: Outer space… what do those who left Earth dream of?

(above) How can you not fall in love with Jill Thompson’s delightful Little Endless? Original art to page 21 of Delirium’s Party: A Little Endless Storybook (2011). (right) Endless siblings Dream and Death in a 2011 mixed media illustration by Jill.

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Sandman credits: The Sandman #50; The Sandman: Endless Nights; The Sandman: The Dream Hunters #1–4 Other significant works: Elric; Killraven; The Ring of the Nibelung; Night Music; The Jungle Book For more info: artofpcraigrussell.com BOND: So tell me, what was it: rough or smooth board for you, and why?

P. CRAIG RUSSELL: Smooth for penciling, and especially inking. I use micron pens now, and rough paper eats them alive. But if I’m doing a color piece, I prefer rough. The color goes on much more smoothly and doesn’t streak.

BOND: What’s a favorite memory or lost tale from your years working on The Sandman?

RUSSELL: I think that would be doing the research for The Dream Hunters. A Japanese fairy tale needs authenticity as to costumes, architecture, and a general feel for Japanese art. I’ve always been a bit mad for Japanese art, and so I had an excuse to buy a whole armload of books for reference.

RUSSELL: “Ramadan” [Sandman #50 (June 1993)—ed.] was the single best original script I’ve ever been gifted with. Its triple ending is a unique series of scenes that grow increasingly dark, moving from colorful fairy tale to that of modern-day bombed out Baghdad.

I could have used a more photorealistic style for those final panels.

p. craig russell

BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable or CD player while working on The Sandman?

RUSSELL: Mostly music from the 19th and early 20th Century, the Romantic era with its wild and colorful orchestration, not the more refined and civilized Classical era.

(left) Dream, in an undated (circa 1990s) ink illo by P. Craig Russell. (right) She’s everything you ever wanted! Desire of the Endless, in a pinup by Craig produced for Sandman Special #1 (Nov. 1991).

Portrait by Michael Netzer.

BOND: Is there one panel you wish you could remake/remodel?

BOND: Fill in the blank: If only Neil…

RUSSELL: …would write me an original script set in a fantasy universe with magic spells and fantastic architecture.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 31

that I am a better artist than he is, but I wouldn’t tell him that.

(left) Destiny, the Endless’ possessor of the Book of Souls and one-time host of DC’s Weird Mystery Tales, in a portrait

by Michael Zulli.

From the collection of Edward Chu. (right) Morpheus and Delirium of the Endless in “Delirium’s Pavillion,” a 2003 specialty painting by Michael Zulli.

Sandman credits: The Sandman #50, 53, 70–72; A Death Gallery #1; The Dreaming #8; Sandman Presents: Love Street #1–3 Other significant works: The Puma Blues; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Alice Cooper’s The Last Temptation For more info: gallerynucleus.com/artists/ Michael_zulli BOND: So tell me, what was it: rough or smooth board for you, and why?

MICHAEL ZULLI: Smooth. I was never much with a brush while working in comics (Puma Blues, etc). A smooth plate finish was faster and left a better line. No one ever gave me a chance to use ink on any of the work, though I had for many years already.

BOND: Is there one panel you wish you could remake/remodel?

ZULLI: Yes, I’d like to do an expanded edition of the Desire short story that Neil and I did, plus one crowd scene from The Wake. [Editor’s note: The Wake is Gaiman’s story arc in The Sandman #70–75 (Aug. 1995–Mar. 1996).]

BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable or CD player while drawing a page from your Sandman story?

ZULLI: Eno, Here Come the Warm Jets. Roxy Music, Viva Roxy Live.

Roxy Music, Avalon. Brian Ferry, Mamouna. Everything by the Cocteau Twins.

MICHAEL ZULLI

BOND: What’s the one Goth article of clothing or artifact you would swap with a member of the Endless?

ZULLI: Destruction’s linen poet’s shirt. I promise

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BOND: If only Neil...

ZULLI: …had written me one more issue of The Wake.

Kyle Cassidy.

Sandman credits: The Sandman #57–61, 63, 65–69; The Dreaming #34, 50; Lucifer #55 Other significant works: Mars; Jonny Quest; Breathtaker; Gregory; Tug & Buster For more info: insightstudiosgroup.com BOND: So tell me, what was it: rough or smooth board for you, and why?

MARC HEMPEL: Definitely rough; the surface texture grabs the pencil better, making it easier to lay down a heavy line… and it holds India ink better as well.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always preferred kid/vellum/rough finish Bristol board for comics.

BOND: What’s a favorite memory or lost tale from your years working on The Sandman?

HEMPEL: Early on, I was feeling a bit insecure about my drawing, as DC Comics was at that time forwarding some hate mail from readers who weren’t connecting with my more expressive approach to comics storytelling. Anyway, I was on marc hempel the phone with Neil for some reason (probably at one in the morning) and mentioned the letters. He asked, “Do you really care what people think?” Good friends always ask the important questions!

(top) An introspective Dream in unused cover art by Marc Hempel for a The Sandman: The Kindly Ones collected edition. (bottom) Sink your eyeteeth into this startling page from Sandman #65 (Dec. 1994), featuring Matthew the Raven and the Corinthian. Signed

by Neil Gaiman and penciler Marc Hempel. Inks by Richard Case.

BOND: Reveal something else you were juggling parallel/ in tandem while working on your storyline.

HEMPEL: I’d just finished writing/drawing Gregory IV: Fat Boy by the time I began work on The Kindly Ones, so that worked out perfectly, schedule-wise.

I believe that the only other major project I was working on during that 1993–1995 time period was my humor comic Tug & Buster, then in the development stage. For what it’s worth, I was also immersed in my then-current hobby and obsession, 3D photography, and was also playing drums in my first band, Psychotic Reactions (which shows up on a flyer taped to the wall inside the Lux nightclub in part four of The Kindly Ones).

BOND: What’s the one Goth article of clothing or artifact you would swap with a member of the Endless?

HEMPEL: I’d let Dream borrow my black fedora. Is he size 7⅜?

BOND: Is there one panel you wish you could remake/ remodel?

HEMPEL: Yes. Quite a few, actually (though I won’t say which).

That said, I’m happy to say that—in my opinion— most of my work on The Kindly Ones still holds up nicely, almost three decades later.

BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable or CD player while drawing a page from your Sandman story?

HEMPEL: Most likely vintage jazz from Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt, Sarah Vaughan…

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 33

Sandman credits: The Sandman #64; Sandman Midnight Theatre #1; The Dreaming #36–39 Other significant works: Grendel Tales: Four Devils, One Hell; House of Secrets; [Superman:] It’s a Bird For more info: teddykristiansenblog.blogspot.com

BOND: So tell me, what was it: rough or smooth board for you, and why?

TEDDY KRISTIANSEN: Rough, always, because I like to feel the grittiness when drawing, both with the pencil and the pen nib and brushes. I also liked the way it could take painted color. It was lovely paper to work on.

BOND: What’s a favorite memory or lost tale from your years working on The Sandman?

KRISTIANSEN: First one was getting the call if I wanted to do Sandman Midnight Theatre (no or very little emailing in those days, so I had crazy expensive phone bills), and second was getting the call for the regular Sandman series. We (at least I) didn’t really know how popular the series was, and I only went in to my work on the project as a WHO IS DOING INTERESTING STUFF IN THE MEDIUM comic reader, and liked what both Neil and Matt [Wagner] were bringing to the medium: playful and with a passion for other mediums, but also a passion for what pictures and words can do together.

Another memory was when I had drawn Morpheus walking in a wet dream universe (Neil´s script notes) and I had made a collage of bums and breasts, made less clear with a painted color over the collage, but in the corner a very small Ronald Reagan, thinking that someone out there must have wet dreams about the ex-president, but it got censored and blurred—not the breasts and bums, but the ex-president.

BOND: Reveal something else you were juggling parallel/in tandem while working on your storyline.

KRISTIANSEN: My initial idea was working from our idea, our imprinted idea of the 1940s, which we know through our exposure to black-andwhite film and photos, so I worked in a muted palette hoping that this would bring the time period easier to the reader. If it works for the reader and brings that sense of time, you never know as we each bring different memories and ideas to what you are reading.

But that was my initial idea I worked from. With issue #64 on the regular series, I tried to do make sure that a guest-artist issue on a storyline, the artwork wasn’t too far from the regular artwork on that storyline, to make sure that the reader wasn’t too distracted, but also trying to add my own little touch.

BOND: Is there one panel you wish you could remake/remodel?

KRISTIANSEN: Not really, but once you have completed a book you’ve learned so much of how to work with the characters and the environment, the mood and tone of the book, your drawing and painting approach, and would like to start over again, but have to go on to the next book, but with that knowledge and learning in your bag.

But there are panels that I have loved to make as commissions, mostly the meeting between Morpheus and Wesley Dodds, and the splash panel from issue #64 with Morpheus.

BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable or CD player while drawing a page from your Sandman story?

KRISTIANSEN: I listened to a lot of Kate Bush (still high on my list), her Hounds of Love album the perfect mixture of abstraction and pop; she’s a master in my eyes. But I have always listened to a list of varied music, depending on the problem I am trying to crack that day. So any music from soft pop, to jazz, to fusion jazz, to guitar heavy music, to classic. These days the playlist has been a mix of the Paper Kites from Australia (ROSES), Trentemøller (Live from Copenhagen), Diesel Park West TEDDY KRISTIANSEN (Shakespeare Alabama), Echo in the Canyon (from Jake Dylan), etc.

BOND: The Sandman 3000: Underwater, outer space, or otherwise?

KRISTIANSEN: Morpheus in the realm of Death, I would love to draw.

A reflection on that.

Original painted artwork by Teddy Kristiansen for a Sandman card from Skybox’s 1994 DC Vertigo trading card set.

BOND: Fill in the blank: If only Neil…

KRISTIANSEN: …would write me a kiddie story. He wrote me a Deadman story for my [DC Comics’] Solo issue that I loved doing, but I have always wanted to do something silly with him. So a kiddie book, Neil! :-)

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Sandman credits: The Endless Gallery; The Sandman: Endless Nights graphic novel Other significant works: Moon Knight; New Mutants; Elektra: Assassin; Stray Toasters For more info: billsienkiewiczart.com BOND: So tell me, what was it: rough or smooth board for you, and why?

BILL SIENKIEWICZ: I’m going to be “that guy” and say I like and prefer them both as well as many other kinds of surfaces like canvas, illustration board, and even plastic paper. So it depends entirely on what the project is, what I’m endeavoring to say with the work via the surface and texture (each has emotional and psychological effects on the reader/viewer).

Instead it was the exact opposite. He would write, then he would write less. I would extrapolate upon what he wrote and play with visuals and then Frank would bounce off of my work and he would rewrite pages. We played and challenged and collaborated like this on Elektra: Assassin and it was hands-down the method that spoiled me for any other writer.

Until Neil. Whereas Frank gave me plot points to expand upon, Neil gave me dream logic, the loveliest and creepiest and most beautiful whispers of suggestions of implications of possibilities of endless maybes to run with for our Delirium story.

So I did.

And I worked and toiled and was pleased and frustrated with what I was coming up with that— dammit—weren’t working or felt too clever by half and not emotionally true enough on subconscious

Delirium, as delineated by Bill Sienkiewicz, from the 2003 graphic novel The Sandman: Endless Nights.

BOND: What’s a favorite memory or lost tale from your years working on The Sandman?

BILL SIENKIEWICZ SIENKIEWICZ: Hands down, work© Luigi Novi / ing with Neil. We have been close Wikimedia Commons. friends since before he even began working for DC Comics, before even Black Orchid.

Neil and I had often talked about absolutely needing to work together on something at some point, but also discussed life and were equally fascinated with entire concept of obsession and what drives artists of every stripe to create.

Of course, schedules and life being what they were and are, we didn’t really get the opportunity to work together until the Endless book. Neil called and asked, and I said absolutely yes.

I’d worked with many of the best writers in comics: Doug Moench, Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, and Alan Moore chief among them. Each was different and brilliant in their own way. Doug preferred writing full scripts, but became amenable on our run on Moon Knight for me to plot and him to write dialogue. Chris was the master of brevity with his plots. He gave me just enough to inspire me and run with. Alan wrote tomes. Everything was incredibly dense and deep, and I remember drawing several pages featuring background characters who would never appear again (with no dialogue) having an animated argument while the protagonist’s story and word balloons were front and center. Alan had taken great pains to write out the entire argument they were having in my script so I could best convey it.

Needless to say, Alan’s scripts were structures like a fine timepiece, and so I could not and would not deviate from what was written (doing so meant I was inspired to “collaborate!”). Meaning mental associations were made; I would go off on seeming tangents visually yet tie everything into the script. It was absolutely jazz to me.

This is how I worked with Frank. He began writing full scripts, and I was so excited by them I did my run riot with them. And I began to worry that I had gone so far “out there” that I feared Frank’s response would be “WTAF, dude.”

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 35

levels and I turned in as many pages as I rejected.

And Neil, bless his heart, asked for all of my rejects and ran with them, inserting them and turning our collective dreams into the Delirium story that saw print. It was a like a beautiful horrible exorcism for me.

Neil not only wrote and rewrote and rewrote yet again saying both less and infinitely more with every iteration based on what I had provided, he had done something Frank had not: he rearranged the order of the pages; I mean, completely.

He flipped scenes, juggled and rejiggered, and put this over there and twisted it all about and it All. Came. Together.

I was actually speechless.

I’m incredibly proud of what we did together. And when we’ve talked about it, I know we both loved the intensity of our collaboration, thrilled it was received so well (it was so very us), and actually relieved we survived it, but I think we both suspect doing something like that again might just release a Dreamscape mashup of the Kraken Cthulu and Hello Kitty, with a lot of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis mixed in.

But I digress.

BOND: Reveal something else you were juggling parallel/in tandem while working on your story.

SIENKIEWICZ: I was doing some film work for Miramax; poster work for a James Gray film called The Yards (with James Caan, Mark Wahlberg, and Charlize Theron). So imagine all of the literal Delirium above and then toss in dealing with Harvey f***ing Weinstein. ’Nuff said.

BOND: What’s the one Goth article of clothing or artifact you would swap with a member of the Endless?

SIENKIEWICZ: It would have to be swapping one of my many toasters for one of Delirium’s fish. Luckily I believe both items operate via the technology Nikola Tesla was working on when he passed. Minus any interactions with pigeons.

BOND: Is there one panel you wish you could remake/remodel?

SIENKIEWICZ: Many of them. Too many to mention, as a matter of fact.

Now I’m depressed. Thanks a lot. ❤ BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable or CD player while drawing a page from your Sandman story?

SIENKIEWICZ: Oh, without a doubt, anything by the Cure. Robert Smith is a f***ing genius poet, so most definitely Disintegration, and the track from that album would absolutely have to be “The Same Deep Water as You”—on continuous repeat. I have never ever tired of that album or that song. (I just had to stop here and put that song on.) “The Same Deep Water as You” is a living, breathing mantra for me. It fits my creativity such as it is, my work and the ebb and flow to and from “the zone” perfectly.

Also, any solo album by Robert Plant (I’m a dyed in the wool Led Head, but especially a fan of Plant’s perpetual quest for artistic beauty and stretching of boundaries and identity. Songs would likely have been “Slow Dancer,” “Big Log,” and “Stranger Here…Than Over There,” to name but a few). And, of course, Laurie Anderson and anything at all from Vangelis.But especially the original soundtracks for Blade Runner and The Bounty.

BOND: Fill in the blank: If only Neil…

SIENKIEWICZ: …lived closer. It’s a selfish answer. But there you go.

From 2011’s The Absolute Sandman vol. 5, a spellbinding Death portrait by Bill Sienkiewicz. Original art from the collection of Nelson Hoeppner.

36 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

Sandman credits: The Sandman: Overture #1–6 Other significant works: Detective Comics; Batwoman; Promethea; Chase For more info: jhwilliams3.com

Last page from The Sandman: Overture #1 (Dec. 2013), illustrated by J. H. Williams III and colored by Dave Stewart. Overture was Neil Gaiman’s six-issue prequel to the Sandman saga.

BOND: So tell me, what was it: rough or smooth board for you, and why?

J. H. WILLIAMS III: I tried using whatever it was that DC used to send me for ages, usually not happy with the rough or the smooth. But there was a period of time where somehow there had been a between surface, a semi-smooth, during part of the Promethea days, which I felt was really ideal to work on. But then at some point during that time a new batch of boards arrived that no longer were semi-smooth, and Editorial really couldn’t find answers about it, with no record of there ever being semi-smooth offered—quite strange.

So I ended up going on a quest to find that semi-smooth finish on my own, which I did. And I never went back to the company stuff. Only it doesn’t come with pre-ruled production lines or marks. So, I do that myself.

BOND: What’s a favorite memory or lost tale from your time working on The Sandman?

WILLIAMS: There are several. But two things that stand out the most are wonderful conversations with you, Shelly, about music and TV culture, and the other is a cherished moment with Neil.

While working on a next chapter’s script for Overture, he read parts of it to me over the phone for about 30 minutes or so.

It was my own personal story-time with Neil, his soothing voice enhancing the joy of it.

BOND: Reveal something else you were juggling parallel/in tandem while working on your storyline.

WILLIAMS: Probably the biggest thing to navigate at the time was the turbulent relationship I had found myself in with DC over conflicts that had arisen from my time on Batwoman. Compartmentalizing my work on Sandman from other issues involving the company was not easy.

But I was invested in what Neil and I and the rest of the team were doing to not let those rough times get in the way.

BOND: What’s the one Goth article of clothing or artifact you would swap with a member of the Endless?

WILLIAMS: Morpheus’ ruby. Or, perhaps Destiny’s hooded robe, because all good wizards deserve a hooded robe. But I doubt there’s anything I have that Morpheus or Destiny would take in trade.

WILLIAMS: Probably anything by David Bowie.

BOND: The Sandman 3000: Underwater, outer space, or otherwise?

WILLIAMS: How about underwater on an alien world that exists in a parallel dimension, BOND: Is there one panel you wish you could J. H. WILLIAMS III where we meet a version of Dream that lives remake/remodel? as some form of aquatic tentacled sentient © DC Comics.

WILLIAMS: That’s a loaded question. Ultimately, being that must face a dark tide plague capable I’m never satisfied with my work enough, any of it, to narrow it down in that way. But my lack of satisfaction of destroying the dreams of an undersea kingdom. And it’s is interesting, in that I just try to set it aside, that the work this Dream’s interaction with the plague that causes it to use was as good as I could do at that time, and try to tell myself Dream’s own powers to erase/consume dreams. the next set of pages will hopefully be better.

BOND: Fill in the blank: If only Neil…

BOND: What was the album most likely to be on your turntable WILLIAMS: …wasn’t such a genius, just for one year, so more of us could maybe catch up. or CD player while drawing a page from your Sandman story?

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 37

Original art by J. H. Williams III for a variant cover for Locke & Key/The Sandman: Hell & Gone #1 (Nov. 2003), a two-issue miniseries crossing over the Sandman characters with Joe Hill’s Locke & Key. From the collection of Mikail Lotia.

Locke & Key © Joe Hill.

Former Sandman assistant editor SHELLY BOND could spot talent and smell a rat sleeping through a deadline at 50 feet.

And yet, she always said she didn’t envy the freelance art life.

She was once quoted, “If it came to it, I would be the worst freelancer on Earth, sleeping all day and listening to music all night!”

Bond spent over two decades at DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint with credits on Eisner Award darlings including The Sandman and Fables, and comic books to TV series i-Zombie, Bodies, and Dead Boy Detectives. She created Minx, the first young adult imprint at DC Comics that launched the careers of superstar talents including Mariko Tamaki, Joelle

Jones, and Cecil Castellucci. Currently, Bond is the editorat-large and co-owner of Off Register Press, a Comics & Design Lab she runs with her husband, artist Philip Bond. For the past four years, Bond has been creating unprecedented graphic memoirs on the art and craft of editing comics. Filth & Grammar: The Comic Book Editor’s (Secret) Handbook and Fast Times in Comic Book Editing were brought to fruition thanks to the power of crowdfunding. Bond is currently working on i-Doppelgänger: Portrait of the 21st Century Comic Book Editor, the final part of her editing trilogy. She lives in Los Angeles, and has become the worst freelancer on Earth.

38 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

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Boo-back Rider And you thought Mr. Ed was cool.

Detail from the cover of Harvey Comics’ Casper and Nightmare #30 (Nov. 1970). Art by Warren Kremer.

TM & © Classic Media LLC.

Nowadays, when comic book collectors think of Nightmare, they probably think of the Ziff-Davis/ St. John publication from 1952–1953, or the Marvel villain’s miniseries from 1994–1995, or the black-and-white Skywald Horror-Mood magazine from 1970–1975.

Certainly, unless they are a fan of Harvey Comics, most fans wouldn’t think of Nightmare, the Galloping Ghost horse, who was the friend and companion of Casper the Friendly Ghost, Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, and Wendy the Good Little Witch.

Every kid needs a pet, even a kid ghost named Casper. So what better pet for a ghostly kid than a ghostly pony? Of course, Nightmare was created when Westerns were all the rage on TV and in films, so a horse character totally seemed appropriate rather than, say, a dog or a cat for Casper, although Casper did befriend plenty of those and other animals over the years. But somehow, Nightmare stuck.

40 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

ark Arnold

Nightmare is a female white ghost horse with pale blue fur. Her mane is piled up high as to resemble a powdered wig or bouffant hairdo.

Many people think Nightmare is a male ghost horse, but a mare is a female horse, hence the “punny” name. Even still, there are occasional Harvey stories where the writers goof up and call Nightmare a “him” and “he.”

Many of Nightmare’s adventures were written

by Ralph Newman and drawn by Warren Kremer, but other writers like Stan Kay and other artists like Howard Post and Ernie Colón helped out, too.

Nightmare, the Galloping Ghost was created by Harvey Comics in the vein of many other Famous Studios characters. Though it is not known for sure, she may have been created by artist and writer Marty Taras, the veteran animator who also created Baby Huey. Nightmare made her debut in Casper the Friendly Ghost #19 (Apr. 1954) in a story called “Horse Laughs,” drawn by Taras. This debut story sees Casper traveling to Scotland (because

Horsing Around Detail from the original art from “Horse Laughs,” the story introducing the Galloping Ghost. First published in Harvey Comics’ Casper #19 (Apr. 1954). Art by Marty Taras. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com).

TM & © Classic Media LLC.

that’s where Shetland ponies come from) and meeting a ghostly steed that’s teaching the local ponies to raise a ruckus. By the end of five pages, Casper and Nightmare had become fast friends, and Nightmare soon became a regular in Harvey’s comics for the next two decades.

Nightmare rounded out the cast of ghost and witch characters that inhabited the Enchanted Forest, along with the Ghostly Trio, the Witch Sisters, and Poil (Pearl).

Nightmare starred in ten issues of Harvey Hits: #37 (Oct. 1960); #45 (June 1961); #52 (Jan. 1962); #56 (May 1962); #59 (Aug. 1962); #62 (Nov. 1962); #65 (Feb. 1963); #68 (May 1963); #71 (Aug. 1963); and #75 (Dec. 1963). All were subtitled “Casper and Nightmare.”

Nightmare graduated to her own title called Nightmare and Casper, debuting with the cover date of August 1963. The title was changed with the sixth issue (Nov. 1964) to Casper and Nightmare, where it continued on through #45 (June 1973). The 46th issue later came out with an August 1974 cover date. A final issue was released many years later as part of the Casper and… series with #4 (June 1988).

Nightmare was also a regular backup feature in various issues of many Casper, Wendy, and Spooky titles. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Nightmare was frequently paired up with Harry Horsefly in a series of mostly one-page gag strips.

There are very few appearances of Nightmare after the 1974 cancellation of her own title. This is a shame, as she is quite a dynamic personality and has more of a temper at times than goodygoody Casper.

The New Casper Cartoon Show introduced Nightmare in animated form in its opening theme song: “And the horse’s name is Nightmare, she will keep you all amused,” and also gave a name mention on the closing credits theme song with “Goodbye from Nightmare.”

The first animated appearance of Nightmare was in “The Flying Horse.” The original press release for the episode reads as follows: “Nightmare, the Galloping Ghost, is captured by Ali Boo Boo on his magic carpet. With help from Wendy, the Good Witch, Casper comes to the rescue of Nightmare. During their efforts they are taken prisoners. Finally, Wendy and the little horse are recovered and out of the goodness of his heart, Casper saves Ali Boo Boo’s life.”

She made several appearances in The New Casper Cartoon Show from 1963, and one appearance

in The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper, which ran from 1996–1998. She spoke in the original cartoons, but not the latter, and she was voiced by Frank Welker.

Like any other ghost, Nightmare has displayed the ability to fly; however, she is considered speedier than the average ghosts, even displaying a faster-than-light speed when she took Casper to a distant planet. This explains why there are many images of Casper riding Nightmare… but it begs the question, do ghosts get tired?

Nightmare appeared on a lot of merchandise during her glory days. She was in her own Kenner Give-a-Show projector strip and also as part of various Harvey Comics card games that came out in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and also in various puzzle and coloring book images. There was even a Nightmare Halloween costume.

In recent times, Nightmare has made some cameo appearances in the latest incarnation of Casper comic books as published by American Mythology from 2017 through 2020.

Saddling Up for Fun Great sight gags by cartoonist Warren Kremer on the covers of Casper and Nightmare #42 (June 1973) and 44 (Oct. 1973).

TM & © Classic Media LLC.

MARK ARNOLD is a Pop Culture Historian. He has written two books on the history of Harvey—The Best of The Harveyville Fun Times! and The Harvey Comics Companion—as well as many other books. He is currently working on a book called TV Cartoons That Time Forgot. He also hosts the Fun Ideas Podcast.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 41

“Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?”

— John Lennon With his chalk-white skin and wild green hair, clothed in his green body suit and flowing, ragged cape… often with his black, demonic, horned horse Dreamstalker, Nightmare, Master of the Dream Dimension, was a character that artist Steve Ditko unleashed as envisioned by writer Stan Lee in Marvel Comics’ Strange Tales #110 (July 1963) in a battle against Dr. Strange in Stephen Strange’s first appearance, “Doctor Strange, Master of Black Magic!” For the Marvel reader this was also was Nightmare’s first appearance, but according to Dr. Strange, he was already an “ancient foe.”

Marvel’s official description of Nightmare (www.marvel.com/characters/nightmare) reads like this: “Ruler of his own Nightmare World within the Dream Dimension (linked to and shaped by humanity’s collective unconscious), Nightmare is a Class Three demon who influences the dreams of living beings as they sleep, feeding on humanity’s psychic energies in particular. Nightmare occasionally singles out souls for special tortures, sometimes trapping their dream-selves in his realm. He has even sought to absorb the entire waking world into his own realm, though never with lasting success. Humanity’s chief defender against Nightmare is the sorcerer Doctor Strange, who has fought the demon so often that Strange routinely casts a protective spell on himself before sleeping.”

Nightmare would have a brief appearance in that first Dr. Strange story, tormenting a man with bad dreams. The man seeks the Master of the Mystic Arts’ help, but the astral assistance in the dream world puts Strange’s physical body in peril. Thanks to the help of the Ancient One, Strange escapes Nightmare’s dream realm and finds out the man deserved bad dreams for the crimes he’d committed.

While seemingly underused as a major villain, Nightmare would go on to appear in dozens of stories by a bullpen of different writers and depicted by dozens of artists over the decades, clear up to the present day.

by S t e p h a n

Malevolent Master of the Dream Dimension You know Nightmare’s a threat when the Sorcerer Supreme skedaddles at his arrival!

Detail from Dan Adkins’ eerie cover art to Marvel’s Doctor Strange #170 (July 1968).

TM & © Marvel.

42 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

Friedt

RECURRING NIGHTMARE

Nightmare would return five issues later in Strange Tales #116 (Jan. 1964) in “Return to the Nightmare World!,” again by Lee and Ditko. As a “last resort,” the police ask Dr. Strange for help with a group of victims that can’t wake up. Strange investigates and finds that Nightmare has learned how to capture humans and bring them to his world while they are sleeping. The two battle again and Dr. Strange wins.

In Strange Tales #122 (July 1964), in Lee and Ditko’s “The World Beyond,” Dr. Strange falls asleep and forgets to cast a protective spell, which results in becoming a captive of Nightmare in the Nightmare World. Nightmare soon becomes bored with Strange and wants to go in search of other victims.

Strange summons Gulgol, a creature that never sleeps, Nightmare’s one fear. In return for releasing Strange, Stephen makes the Gulgol disappear… or so it seems. Strange had hypnotized Nightmare, and the whole thing was a con. Stephen wakes up.

It would be a few years before Nightmare would resurface.

In Doctor Strange #170 (July 1968; the series’ numbering continued from Strange Tales), Nightmare returns in the story “To Dream… Perchance to Die,” thanks to writer Roy Thomas and artist Dan Adkins. Dr. Strange would battle Nightmare for the consciousness of the Ancient One. Roy would bring the character back in the story “Eternity, Eternity” in Doctor Strange #180 (May 1969), with interior art by Gene Colan (pencils) and Tom Palmer (inks). In the beginning of what would be a three-issue arc, Nightmare attacks on New Year’s Eve and reveals he has captured Eternity.

This issue would feature a cameo of real-life journalist and author Tom Wolfe. In Doctor Strange #181, Strange enters the Dream Dimension to battle Nightmare and free Eternity… but Nightmare turns the Eye of Agamotto against him. Roy Thomas wraps up the story arc in “And Juggernaut Makes Three…,” in issue #182, with Dr. Strange pulling the Juggernaut from the Crimson Cosmos. Juggernaut and Nightmare throw spells around and, in the chaos, Eternity is released.

Eternity changes Dr. Strange’s name from “Stephen Strange” to “Steven Sanders”… but it only lasts through the next issue, primarily because the next issue was the last issue of this run. Dr. Strange would not have a series until three years later.

NIGHTMARE IN THE 1970s

Dr. Strange was back in the Marvel lineup with his return in the tryout title Marvel Premiere. Marvel Premiere #3 (July 1972) saw the return of Strange in “While the World Spins Mad!,” with cover and interior art by fan-favorite Barry Windsor-Smith (inked by Dan Adkins), and the story suggestion by Stan Lee

It’s Been a Spell (top) The Strange/Nightmare enmity is revealed for the reader’s benefit in the first Dr. Strange story in Strange Tales #110 (July 1963). (middle) In issue #116 (Feb. 1964), the Sorcerer Supreme enters Nightmare’s Dream Dimension. (bottom) Dr. Strange’s revival in Marvel Premiere #3 (July 1972) pits the Master of the Mystic Arts against Nightmare. Try not to faint from awe as you ogle this stunning original art page by the master, Barry Windsor-Smith, with Dan Adkins inks.

Courtesy of Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com).

TM & © Marvel.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 43

(scenario) and Barry Windsor-Smith (script). Barry essentially takes over the character of Dr. Strange for this issue and pits him against his “oldest foe,” Nightmare. This time, Nightmare turns the tables on Dr. Strange and makes him think he’s awake and being tormented when he’s actually in the hospital unconscious after being hit by a truck.

The Master of the Mystic Arts would once again regain his own title with Doctor Strange #1 (June 1974). With Doctor Strange #10 (Oct. 1975), Nightmare returns as well in “Alone Against Eternity…,” written by Steve Englehart and drawn by Gene Colan. Englehart’s Nightmare is tormenting the insane Mordo and harassing the Aged Genghis while Strange is dealing with Eternity, who is determined to end the world. Englehart would carry this story arc for three more issues.

Tony Isabella (script) and Don Heck (art) would use Nightmare in a flashback in Champions #2 (Jan. 1976), revealing Nightmare’s joining of the Hell Lords, rulers of Dark Dimensions. From the Marvel Fandom website (marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Nightmare_(Earth-616)#Further_Schemes): “Nightmare was one of the many rulers of the dead that joined Pluto’s alliance to strongarm Zeus Panhellenios into allowing the arranged marriages for Hercules and Venus to maintain peace for their realms, or else they would invade Olympus.”

Nightmare would not surface again until Doctor Strange #13 (Apr. 1976), “Planet Earth Is No More!” After battles with versions of himself and Eternity destroying the world, Dr. Strange figures out that it’s Nightmare behind Eternity’s dream of destroying the world.

Strange enters the Dream Dimension, defeats Nightmare, and the Ancient One convinces Eternity to restore the world.

It would be Doctor Strange #32 (Dec. 1978) where writer Roger Stern would bring back Nightmare in “The Dream Weaver!” Stern gives us the revelation that the story’s “Dweller in the Darkness” is a “cousin” of Nightmare’s, and Dweller travels to the Dream Dimension to enlist his aid against Strange. Nightmare declines, wanting to defeat Dr. Strange on his own. The Dweller instead settles for taking control of the soul of San Francisco native Barbara Robb. He grants Robb mystical powers and she transforms herself into Dream Weaver, who can use magic to make her dreams reality. Roger keeps Nightmare in the loop in the next issue, #33 (Feb. 1979), “All My Dreams Against Me,” though only in a brief cameo. Clea is tormented by nightmares, so obviously Strange suspects Nightmare and travels to the Dream Dimension to confront him.

Nightmare denies it and hints that he should be seeking a “dweller” as the responsible character.

With Doctor Strange #34 (Apr. 1979), in “A Midsummer’s Nightmare!,” Ralph Macchio takes over the scripting, Rudy Nebres offers a great cover with Nightmare and mystic Cyrus Black, and the interior art is a Tom Sutton (breakdowns) with

What’s Up, Doc? Acclaimed novelist William Rotsler penned a Doctor Strange vs. Nightmare novel published in 1970. (top) From Heritage’s archives, John Romita, Sr.’s cover rough for Marvel Novel Series #7. (inset) The Nightmare novel’s published cover, painted by Bob Larkin. (bottom) Nightmare and the galloping Dreamstalker—a more frightening hellish horse than Casper’s galloping ghost Nightmare, for sure—square off against Dr. Strange.

Original art by Bill Sienkiewicz and Joe Rubinstein, illo’ed for the month of February for the 1980 Marvel Calendar. Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Marvel.

44 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

Stern Stuff (top left) Not to be confused with the Gary Wright song from ’75, Dream Weaver conjures problems for the Sorcerer Supreme in Doctor Strange #32 (Dec. 1978), from writer Roger Stern. Cover art by Keith Pollard and Rudy Nebres. (top right) Stern brings back Nightmare in DS #52 (June 1982).

Cover by Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin.

TM & © Marvel.

P. Craig Russell (finished art and inks) for their interpretation of Nightmare. Ralph has Dr. Strange being pulled into the Dream Dimension to battle Nightmare’s new protégé, Cyrus Black, a former foe of Strange and the Defenders. Cyrus nearly bests Strange and when he fails, Nightmare joins in and instructs Black to kill the Sorcerer Supreme. Black switches sides, saves Strange, and commits suicide to release himself from Nightmare’s grasp, which allows Strange to escape the Dream Dimension.

To round out 1979, Dr. Strange and Nightmare would be the subjects of the seventh Marvel prose novel from Pocket Books. Written by William Rotsler (1926–1997) and with a striking cover by Bob Larkin, this was Rotsler’s second contribution to the Marvel Novel Series, his first being an Iron Man/MODOK book for the sixth novel in the series just the month before. Rotsler would vividly bring the spirit of Stan Lee’s dialogue and Steve Ditko’s art into the world of prose and merge it with later Strange/Clea interpretations into an interesting telling of the doctor’s origin, meeting with Clea, and battle with Nightmare in the Dream Dimension.

Rotsler was an interesting choice for the stories.

According to a biography found on Wikipedia, William started his colorful life as a science-fiction fan and contributed art to several of the early fanzines, dating back to 1948. He started in the adult film industry in 1958, first as a stills photographer and later writing, filming, starring in, and writing about adult films. He created the magazine Adam Film Quarterly, later known as Adam Film World, where he would often novelize adult films. In 1969, Harlan Ellison suggested that William try his hand at writing sci-fi stories; Harlan credited Rotsler with the title of his short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” which Harlan borrowed, with permission, from a panel illustration of William’s of a ragdoll with no mouth. Rotsler would win scifi’s Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist four different times in 1975, 1979, 1996, and 1997; and was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula for his short story “Patron of the Arts” in 1972, which was later expanded into a full-length novel in 1974. Rotsler wrote novelizations for Futureworld (1976), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), Vice Squad (1982), and wrote the DC novelization of Blackhawk (1982). Under the house name “Victor Appleton” he co-authored with Sharman DiVono six Tom Swift books in 1981–1982. He also entered the world of Star Trek with novelizations of The Wrath of Khan (1982) and The Search for Spock (1984); he’s credited with creating Lt. Uhuru’s first name, Nyota.

NIGHTMARE IN THE 1980s

In the 1980s, Nightmare branched out and was used in more stories.

His first recorded interaction with any heroes other than Dr. Strange was with the tiny titans of toy fame, the Micronauts. Nightmare would surface again in Micronauts #29 (May 1981) in “To Sleep… Perchance to Dream!” Here, artist Pat Broderick would give us his version of Nightmare and would co-plot the story with scripter Bill Mantlo.

As the Micronauts are trying to help Commander Rann, Doc Samson has them shrink, enter Rann’s brain, and enter various dreams all controlled by Nightmare. After successfully healing Rann’s brain, Nightmare leaves and the Micronauts win.

Nightmare would promptly return in Dazzler #4’s (June 1981) “Here Nightmares Abide!” Tom DeFalco would provide a script for Frank Springer to illustrate (cover and interior). Dr. Doom kidnaps and sends Dazzler to Nightmare’s realm in search of the “Merlin Stone.” Dazzler battles Nightmare and he decides the Merlin Stone isn’t worth it and allows her to take it back to Dr. Doom.

Nightmare again makes a brief appearance in Doctor Strange #50 (Dec. 1981). Roger Stern and artist Marshall Rogers give us the action in a story with no title. While looking for the missing Clea and Morgana Blessing, Strange stops in the

Universal Nightmares If you think of Nightmare exclusively as a Dr. Strange villain, dream on! The Master of the Dream Dimension has become a go-to Marvel menace. His 1980s appearances include: Ghost Rider #78 (Mar. 1983); Incredible Hulk #298 (Aug. 1984); and Sleepwalker #12 (May 1992).

TM & © Marvel.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 45

Dream Dimension. A brief battle with Nightmare and Strange concludes that the missing people aren’t there, and he moves on.

Doctor Strange #52 (Apr. 1982), “Life-Times,” has Stern and Rogers again using Nightmare briefly, followed by having him help Strange in Doctor Strange #53 (June 1982), sending him back to Ancient Egypt to interact with Rama Tut (Kang incarnation) and the Fantastic Four!

Nightmare would next torment Ghost Rider. J. M. DeMatteis (script) and Bob Budiansky (art and co-script), in Ghost Rider #77 and 78 (Feb. and Mar. 1983), bring Nightmare into interaction with Ghost Rider (Johnny Blaze) as well as Mephisto and Zarathos. The conflict requires the inclusion of Dr. Strange, the Son of Satan, and Dr. Druid.

Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema would sneak Nightmare into a story arc for The Incredible Hulk #292–299 (Feb.–July 1984).

Nightmare gives the Hulk increasingly bad nightmares that cause Bruce Banner to lose control of his alter ego.

Nightmare would meet the Wall-Crawler in Web of Spider-Man #7 (Oct. 1985), when Nightmare enlists the aid of Spider-Man’s subconscious mind to stop a dream manifestation of the Hulk, thanks to Peter David (script) and Sal Buscema (art).

Writer Bill Mantlo, with the help of artist Bret Blevins, would again use Nightmare, but this time against Cloak and Dagger in Strange Tales #3 (June 1987), in a reboot of the Strange Tales series which combined the recently cancelled Doctor Strange and Cloak and Dagger series into one split-book title. The story arc with Nightmare as the antagonist would run through Strange Tales #7 (Oct. 1987) and include the Dr. Strange half of the book in the finale.

Bob Harras (script) with Dan Reed (art) and Marie Severin (inks) would bring Nightmare back to the Ol’ Greenskin’s pages in Incredible Hulk #360 (Oct. 1989) for a one-off story involving a team-up of Nightmare and D’Spayre to torment Betty Banner in her dreams.

Beginning in Alpha Flight #57 (Feb. 1989), in the “Wrath of the Dreamqueen” story arc by James Hudnall (script), Hugh Haynes (art), and Gerry Talaoc (inks), it is revealed that Alpha Flight antagonist Dreamqueen, the ruler of the dimension “Liveworld,” is actually an offspring of a “succubus” named Zhilla Char, and Nightmare, the ruler of the Dream Dimension.

She can influence and alter both dreams and nightmares though she is not really a succubus. This arc would run until Alpha Flight #70 (May 1989). Nightmare made appearances in the first and last issues of the arc.

Gruesome Gathering A boastful Nightmare, before his fellow Fear Lords, in the backup from Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme #32 (Aug. 1991). Written by Roy Thomas, Dann Thomas, and JeanMarc Lofficier, with art by Larry Alexander and Tim Dzon.

TM & © Marvel.

GAUNTLET plotline) might be subtitled ‘Fear in the Marvel Universe.’ The Dweller in Darkness was prominent in DR. STRANGE (second series) #32. As for the others at his secret conclave: The Lurking Unknown spooked Jane Foster in THOR #136; Kkallakku, the Fear Eater is from MARVEL COMICS PRESENTS #1–4; this particular Scarecrow debuted in DEAD OF NIGHT #11 and fought alongside the Thing in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #18 and fought Kalumai again in MARVEL SPOTLIGHT NIGHTMARE IN THE 1990s #26; D’Spayre first appeared in MARVEL TEAM-UP The decade of the 1990s would find Nightmare #68, and Nightmare in the very first Doc story in frequent use by writers in the Marvel Bullpen, in STRANGE TALES #110, while Nox (Greek for even receiving his own miniseries. ‘night’) is a new creation, of whom you’ll see His first appearance was in a short story more in near-future issues.” Roy is at his best as he included in Marvel Fanfare #51 (June 1990), ties together several story arcs over the years into a brief one-off by Dean Schreck (script), Gene what reads like a coherent combination of them Colan (art), and Al Williamson (inks) that has all. This arc would run as a backup through Doctor Nightmare tormenting humans in their dreams.

Strange: Sorcerer Supreme #33 (Oct. 1991).

Nightmare next plagues the teams Excalibur As Roy Thomas reveals to BACK ISSUE, “I and Power Pack in Excalibur #29 (Sept. 1990), always found Nightmare one of the most interroy thomas thanks to Michael Higgins and Seth Kruchkow esting of Dr. Strange’s foes, yet I don’t feel I ever (script), Chris Wozniak (pencils), and Josef Super Festivals. cracked the secret of how to best utilize him, Rubinstein (inks). More torments were in store as Nightmare plagues Ghost Rider/Danny Ketch in Ghost Rider vol. 3 since he didn’t have any human background, etc. I feel I should #11 (Mar. 1991) in “Nightmares of Truth,” thanks to the talents have worked harder at it.

“In his very first plot for Dr. Strange, Steve Ditko clearly came of Howard Mackie, Larry Stroman (art), and Mark Texeira (inks).

Roy Thomas and Jean-Marc Lofficier would co-write a back- up with Doc’s ideal foe,” Roy continues. “Stan Lee recognized up story in the “A Gathering of Fear, Part 1” story arc in Doctor that and wanted him brought back from time to time... but Strange: Sorcerer Supreme #31 (July 1991) that involves the Fear they, too, seemed content to have him remain a somewhat Lords, including Nightmare. As explained in the letters column superficial character, albeit a visually effective one. At least they of that issue: “The sequence of ‘The Book of the Vishanti’ (which (Ditko?) came up with the wonderful note that Nightmare rode begins in this issue and leads into the upcoming post-INFINITY a horse—a night ‘mare,’ I take it.”

46 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

The anthology title Marvel Comics Presents (MCP) #79 (Sept. 1992) and “If the Enchantress Should Fail…” The following (June 1991) includes a short story of Dr. Strange dealing with issue pits Nightmare against Amora (Enchantress) as she seeks Nightmare as envisioned by Robert Campanella (script), Steve to rescue Heimdall from Nightmare’s clutches. Both stories are Geiger (pencils), and Mark McKenna (inks). MCP #90 (June illustrated by Geof Isherwood.

1991) would take a different approach with “…Fangu Lives!”

Howard Mackie continues using Nightmare in a run of Steve Buccellato and Marc McLaurin provided a script for Steve Marvel Comics Presents #117–122 (Dec. 1992–Feb. 1993), pitting Buccellato’s pencils and Ian Akin inks that flashes back to him against Wolverine, Venom, and Professor X, all issues the classic days of Marvel’s monster stories, this time featuring the artwork of Sam Kieth. with Nightmare as your host and narrator.

In a crossover running through Morbius, the Living In the hands of Gregory Wright (script), Vampire #8–9 and Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme Denys Cowan (pencils), and Mike Manley (inks), #52–53 (Apr.–May 1993), Nightmare takes over Nightmare would take on the Deathlok the Morbius’ physical body, attacks Dr. Strange, Demolisher by controlling Deathlok’s human and subsequently takes over the Master of the persona, Michael Collins, in his dreams, causing Mystic Arts himself! Nightmare soon made mere the cyborg to go on a rampage only to battle cameos: in Secret Defenders #2 (Apr. 1993) and Ghost Rider (Danny Ketch). This would last two Marvel Comics Presents #146 (Jan. 1994). issues, Deathlok #9–10 (Mar.–Apr. 1992).

Nightmare would receive his very own fourHoward Mackie would once again utilize issue limited series with Nightmare #1–4 (Dec. Nightmare in a pair of issues of Marvel Comics 1994–Mar. 1995). Writer Ann Nocenti would Presents. “Hauntings,” in MCP #99 (Feb. 1992), provide the script, with artwork by Joe Bennett howard mackie would feature Nightmare haunting Wolverine’s and Mike Witherby. The miniseries would be Gage Skidmore. dreams. In the next issue, #100, Nightmare is tora gothic romance—well done by Nocenti, but menting Dr. Doom, who tries to utilize Wolverine and Ghost Rider probably not what most true Nightmare fans were looking for. to free himself from Nightmare’s antagonism. This issue does not In an email to BACK ISSUE, writer Ann Nocenti explains, have a flip cover (a standard of MCP), nor is this a true anthology “I can only guess at what I was thinking 30 years ago, but I issue, as all stories in this issue are interlinked. The anthology imagine what I was trying to do was to give Nightmare a taste format and the flip covers would return with the next issue. of being human. And since Goth was a ‘thing’ in the ’90s, “Nightmare really has always been one of my dream characters perhaps I figured Nightmare could leave his realm, walk New (pun definitely intended),” jokes writer Howard Mackie to BACK York City, and blend in with ease.

ISSUE. “I am an unapologetic fan of the early Doctor Strange stories by Stan and Steve, and Nightmare’s design grabbed me right away. To me, Nightmare is a writer’s dream. When I’m writing any character—like Ghost Rider’s host Danny Ketch or Peter Parker/Spider-Man—and have him drawn into Nightmare’s realm, it allows me to really can really peel away the layers to find what makes a character tick. Exploring a character’s greatest fears—the things that haunt him when he closes his eyes—is a truly fun experience for me as a writer.

“Utilizing Nightmare in a story always gave me personal insight into these things that dwell in the darkest recesses of my own mind… the things that only emerge when the lights are low, the eyes close, and sleep descends.”

Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme #38–40 (Feb.–Apr. 1992) finds Nightmare and the Fear Lords battling against Dr. Strange and Clea in the capable hands of writers Roy and Dann Thomas and R.J.M. Lofficier and artists Geof Isherwood and Jim Sanders III, in the arc titled “The Great Fear.”

Bob Budiansky writes the next story to involve Nightmare, in Sleepwalker #12’s (May 1992) in “Dark Dreams and Darker Schemes!” Nightmare tries to convince Sleepwalker to return to “Mindscape.” Joe Quesada supplies the pencils, and Michael Bair with Jimmy Palmiotti on inks.

Howard Mackie returns Nightmare into another conflict against Ghost Rider and Danny Ketch in Ghost Rider #30 (Oct. 1992) in a story arc called “Claws and Webs.” The difference this time is, the cover and interior art are by penciled by Andy Kubert and inked by… his father, the master himself, Joe Kubert!

Tom DeFalco would use Nightmare in a Norse Gods backup story, “Enter the Nameless Dimension,” in Thor #451

Wake Up, Wolvie!

Logan is haunted by Nightmare in Marvel Comics Presents #99 (Feb. 1992). Plot by Rob Liefeld, script by Howard Mackie, art by Larry Alexander and Bud LaRosa.

TM & © Marvel.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 47

“He meets his match in the ‘real world’ echo of the egotistical horror director, who makes money off, and seems to enjoy, the fear of others. Just like Nightmare. Horror films can be seen as reflections of what people and society fears, like nightmares.”

This miniseries featured Club Fear, a haven for horror buffs, and its virtual-reality Nightmare Chairs. “With Club Fear, I imagine I was trying to leave a door open, a portal between Nightmare’s realm and New York City, so he could come and go, if any writer in the future needed such a portal, or wanted to pick up on the twisted romance with [horror actress] Roxanne.” And as with The Sandman’s Endless over at DC, Marvel’s Nightmare limited series included its own frightening pantheon. “Then with the nonsense supporting cast creatures from nightmares—Doggerel, Dementia, Paranoia, Neurotica, etc.—I imagine I was trying to ann nocenti manifest Nightmare’s own nightmares.” © Luigi Novi / In summing up the Nightmare four-issue series, Wikimedia Commons.

Nocenti contends, “The story is as zany, illogical, and twisty as a nightmare! I have no idea if that was intentional, but reading a few pages of it 30 years later, that’s how it felt to me. And wow, the art team is phenomenal! Perfect art for Nightmare.”

Nightmare would continue to appear and persecute Marvel heroes through the rest of the 1990s: Generation X, Spider-Man, and Excalibur, finishing out the decade in Captain America #8–11 (Sept.–Dec. 1998) would run the story arc “American Nightmare,” with Nightmare possessing Captain America in the final three of the four issues.

Nightmare made a total of 160 appearances in comic books up to 2011 and has continued to appear ever since. He would even be seen on television in animation: in The Super Hero Squad Show episode “Blind Rage Knows No Color!” (original airdate: 1/15/11), where he is voiced

by Jim Parsons of Big Bang Theory fame; and in the Ultimate Spider-Man episode “Strange Days” (original airdate: 7/8/12), where he is voiced by Mark Hamill, who is known for voicing villains such as the Joker.

Nightmare plagues heroes’ dreams and wishes to turn the real world into a division of his own Nightmare Realm in the Dark Dimension. As many fans over the years have noted, whenever anyone ‘A Killer of a Love Story’ in the Marvel Universe has a bad dream, In writer Ann Nocenti’s (top row) four-issue Nightmare is always involved. And Nightmare always loses.

Nightmare limited series (Dec. 1994–Apr. 1995),

(bottom) the villain leaves his Dream Dimension to experience life in the “real” world. Cover art and interior pencils by Joe Bennett, interior inks

by Mike Witherby.

TM & © Marvel.

Haunting the wilds of Oregon, now semi-retired so he can devote even more time to uncovering the gems of comic book history and empty-nesting with his wife, STEPHAN FRIEDT helps with entries at comics.org and comicspriceguide.com, and provides editorial consultation and an occasional writing assist for Defective Comix Studio at defectivecomix.com.

48 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

The Marvel Universe comic book scene of the 1990s is regarded by some as a creative wasteland. Contrary to that opinion, the decade offered readers the breathtaking work of Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross on Marvels, the outstanding Thunderbolts with one of the greatest first-issue surprise endings ever, and the just-plain-fun Untold Tales of Spider-Man. While not remembered as fondly as those titles, Sleepwalker was an underrated series that stood out from the grim-andgritty books that overtook the comic racks at the time.

So, why didn’t Sleepwalker gain the traction that the other titles did? That’s what BACK ISSUE is going to explore in this hopefullynot-sleep-inducing article about the series, its origins, and its outstanding cast of original B- and C-level villains.

IN MY DREAMS

Everyone reading this issue knows that Morpheus, a.k.a. the Sandman, controls the Dreaming in the DC Universe. Who protects the dreamers in the Marvel Universe? The Sleepwalkers do. But what happens when one becomes trapped inside the mind of a college student? That’s the premise behind Sleepwalker,

by E d L u t e created and written by Bob Budiansky.

Sleepwalker #1 (June 1991) introduced readers to college student Rick Sheridan and his supporting cast of characters, including his faithful dog, Rambo, and his girlfriend, Alyssa. Rick’s dreams were haunted by a mysterious purple-and-blue-clad figure that looked like an alien. To combat having these nightmares, Rick tried his best to stay awake. Unfortunately, that would only last so long until his body shut down from a lack of sleep.

During a robbery attempt at a local convenience store, Rick was attacked; too tired to fight back, he was knocked out. At that time, the alien-like creature from his dreams appeared and defeated the robbers. The creature told Alyssa that he is a Sleepwalker.

Subsequent issues revealed that Sleepwalker was not an alien, but a member of a police force that protects people’s dreams. He had been tricked by Cobweb (another denizen of his home realm, the Mindscape) into entering Rick’s mind, where he became trapped. Sleepwalker could only come out when Rick was asleep.

Although Sleepwalker first saw print in 1991, the concept for the series started half a decade earlier.

According to Bob Budiansky, “The idea for what would become Sleepwalker first sparked within me during one of the weekly editorial meetings I attended when I was a Marvel editor and which were chaired by former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter. This particular meeting probably happened in 1985 or ’86. Among the things that Jim talked about was how, in the real world, Superman would be treated by the nations of Earth if he actually existed. He said that rather bob budiansky than being welcomed by most nations of the Facebook.

Earth as a hero because of his good deeds and good looks, nations would instead unite to figure out how to defend themselves against and, if necessary, defeat this near-omnipotent alien being. They would look upon Superman A New Hero Hits the Streets as a threat to their very existence!

“And so the thought occurred to me that simply because Marvel’s “Evildoers’ Worst Nightmare,” created by Bob Superman happens to look like the stereotypical all-American male Budiansky, premieres in Sleepwalker #1 (June 1991). of that era, people have no hesitation to accept him as the hero he is despite the fact that it’s common knowledge he’s an alien.

Cover art by Bret Blevins.

But what if he is still heroic and looks like a true alien—a creature TM & © Marvel.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 49

that doesn’t look like us, and, in fact, appears repellent to us?

How would humans react to him if that’s how Superman looks?

“So Sleepwalker began as the anti-Superman,” Budiansky continues, “instead of an alien who just happens to look like the perfect human. I made him an alien who is a green-skinned, bug-eyed monster, at least to our eyes. And he’s heroic. At first I wanted to name my character ‘Alien.’ But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Alien was a poor choice because it had already been used for the 1979 movie of the same name, which is probably the reason others mistakenly think I came up with the [Sleepwalker] idea in the 1970s.

“With that germ of an idea in mind, I evolved the character in my head over the next few years. I came up with the name Sleepwalker and tied his origin and abilities to dreams, which was an interest of mine. Instead of coming from an alien planet, like Superman, Sleepwalker would come from an alien dimension. I began writing the backstory for Sleepwalker and sketching out his look probably around 1989.”

Sleepwalker and his design fit in nicely with the rest of the Marvel Universe. While most of DC’s heroes look heroic, this isn’t always the case with those from Marvel. Much like the Thing and the Hulk, Sleepwalker definitely doesn’t look like a traditional hero. Budiansky explains, “I wanted to accomplish two things with the character that were more important than anything else: he looked monstrous to human eyes and he was a hero.

“The first goal was easy—just design him to look monstrous,” explains Budiansky. “So I did. But I didn’t want him to look

too monstrous because I wanted readers to be able to relate to him, so I made him humanoid but not human. My second goal was more of a challenge—why would someone not from our world decide to act like a hero when he arrives here? The answer I came up with was that it was it was in his training to act that way—he acted heroically in the world he came from, so upon arriving on Earth he continued to act the same way.

He was one of many Sleepwalkers, whose mission was to guard the dreams of sentient beings, such as humans, from intrusion by beings with evil intent.”

The creator drew further inspiration from yet another DC Comics character—make that characters. “A major part of my inspiration for the Sleepwalkers came from a comic that was one of my favorites when I was a kid—Green Lantern,” Budiansky reveals. “Earth’s Green Lantern was but one of a protective corps of Green Lanterns that spanned the galaxy. Once Sleepwalker arrived in the conscious world—ours—and acquired a better understanding of it, he took it upon himself to continue his mission, except in a different realm with different adversaries.

I also decided Sleepwalker needed a human connection to create more character conflict, connect him more intimately to our world and give readers another character to relate to and hopefully care about. So I trapped Sleepwalker in the mind of college student Rick Sheridan.”

The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time of grim-and-gritty heroes and anti-heroes throughout the comic book industry.

Sleepwalker was none of those things. Why did Budiansky feel this was the right time to bring Sleepwalker to fans?

“I don’t know if 1991 was the ‘right time’ for Sleepwalker to see print,” Bob replies. “Sleepwalker went against the grain of what was popular in Marvel Comics in those days.”

As noted earlier, Budiansky’s development of Sleepwalker dated back to 1989. “Eventually, I completed a treatment that included Sleepwalker’s backstory, a description of his abilities, profiles of the cast of characters I planned to surround him with, and sketches of what Sleepwalker and his supporting cast would look like.” Events at Marvel in the very early 1990s opened the door for Bob’s new creation. “At that time, Marvel had a New Projects Committee comprised of several editors that had been appointed by editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco,” explains Budiansky.

“The committee’s job was to review submissions for new comic books. If a majority of the committee liked a submission, it would be kicked upstairs to Tom for his review. If it made it all the way through the approval process, Tom would green-light the submission for publication as a Marvel comic.

“Sleepwalker went through this review process. I was actually the head of the New Projects Committee, however I recused myself from reviewing Sleepwalker. But the other editors liked my treatment and passed it on to Tom. Tom liked it too, but asked me to make a few revisions. The primary change he requested was to give Sleepwalker more interesting super-abilities. That’s when I added his warping power, his ability to warp inanimate objects. I thought the surreal nature of that power was a good match for a being who came from a dream dimension. The paintings of surrealist Salvadore Dali were the partial inspiration for that idea. So after I submitted another one or two drafts, Tom finally approved, the book was added to Marvel’s publishing schedule and the first issue came out in 1991.”

Man of My Dreams Sleepwalker #1’s opening scene wastes no time in establishing the dream-link between teen Rick Sheridan and the series’ creepy protagonist. By Budiansky and Blevins.

TM & © Marvel.

50 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

DREAM A LITTLE DREAM OF ME

A major component of the Marvel Age is that the heroes are portrayed as real people with real-life problems, thus making them more relatable. Problem-plagued Peter Parker is the poster child of this and was on Budiansky’s mind as he developed the series—especially the main characters.

Budiansky divulges, “One thing I always liked about Spider-Man, at least the one I grew up reading, was that Peter Parker usually found being Spider-Man a burden, which created a lot of interesting conflict for him. Being a hero interfered with his family life, his romantic life, his academic life... every significant aspect of his life was a mess because of his alter ego.

“I wanted to bring some of that perspective into Sleepwalker, but double down on it, at least at first. In the beginning, Rick didn’t understand Sleepwalker. All he knew, at least from the news reports he was hearing, was that a terrifying monster was roaming the city and he, Rick, was somehow responsible for releasing it into our world while he slept. And the only way he knew that he could prevent this from happening was to not fall asleep, which, of course, was impossible. I think the dire situation Rick found himself in added a lot of depth to his character while simultaneously making him more sympathetic to the reader. How could you not feel for this poor kid’s predicament?

“Once Rick began to understand that Sleepwalker was not the menace he thought he was, he had to figure out a way to get on with his life while coexisting with this entity within him. But this new relationship had its own stresses that Rick had to cope with, and he often failed to do so successfully.”

The phrase “stranger in a strange land” immediately comes to mind when considering the predicament of Sleepwalker. He was cut off from the other Sleepwalkers and the Mindscape into this weird place where he found himself trapped inside the mind of one of the local inhabitants.

“Meanwhile, Sleepwalker had his own learning curve to deal with: he found himself mysteriously trapped in Rick’s mind,” continues Budiansky. “He felt imprisoned.

Rick and Sleepwalker couldn’t He was only able to escape it co-exist in the same place at the when Rick was unconscious. To same time, so they needed a way make matters worse, he escaped to communicate. While they found into a strange world that wasn’t different ways to connect with each his and where most people reacted other as the title progressed, to him with fear and violence, one of the more inventive ways just because of how he looked. So bret blevins was to leave answering machine Sleepwalker found his situation messages for each other. extremely frustrating. Even when Facebook. he did have the freedom to move around in our world, he had a poor understanding BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS of its ways, and had to learn on the job, so to The Sleepwalkers were from the Mindscape, a speak. Eventually, he, too, figured out how to dimension that humans’ minds visit when they more peacefully coexist with Rick, even walking are asleep. They are the police force of the his dog when necessary, but their relationship dimension and patrol it to protect those visitors continued to be stressful for both. The two were from the denizens of the Mindscape including inextricably linked, and although they learned to Cobweb and the other demons such as the cooperate and care more about each other, they Mindspawn and the Agents of Despair. Although would have been much happier if they could the Mindscape may sound similar to Dr. Strange figure out a way to free themselves from the ties foe Nightmare’s Dream Dimension [see the Nightmare “Bring on the Bad Guys” article in that bound them together.”

Don’t Fret— It’s Bret!

Sleepwalker’s early issues benefited from the artwork of Bret Blevins, as this surreal splash page from issue #2 proves. Note Budiansky’s creator credit. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com).

TM & © Marvel.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 51

Sleepwalker’s Rogues’ Gallery (top) Sleepy vs.

Cobweb, from issue #3. (bottom left) Follow the arrow’s point to the villain of Sleepwalker #4 (Sept.

1991), Bookworm. (bottom center) The Chain Gang rattles our hero in Sleepwalker #7. (bottom right) Lullaby’s got Sleepy on a string in issue #9. Covers

by Blevins, except for #4’s, which is penciled by Rick Leonardi with inks

by Blevins.

this issue—ed.], it was another dimension entirely and created specifically for this series.

“In Sleepwalker’s origin story, I established that he came from a dimension in which a group of Sleepwalkers guarded people’s dreams,” Budiansky reveals. “So I had to come up with a name for this place. The obvious name, ‘Dreamscape,’ had already been taken by a recent movie [the 1984 science fiction/horror film Dreamscape—ed.], so I came up with Mindscape instead. I believe somewhere in the Nightmare story I wrote that the Mindscape and the Dream Dimension were very close to each other [Sleepwalker #12 (May 1992)]. Perhaps they were different neighborhoods in a greater dimension. I decided early on to not have Sleepwalker come from the same place as Nightmare; I figured that place belonged to Dr. Strange’s mythos. I wanted Sleepwalker to have a home dimension of his own.”

Even though most of the action in the series took place on Earth, some took place in the Mindscape.

DREAM WARRIORS

One of the standouts from this series was its vast array of original offbeat villains that Sleepwalker faced, foes such as 8-Ball, Bookworm, Cobweb, and the Chain Gang, amongst others. Although this book was populated by many newly created baddies, it also featured a few pre-established villains that helped connect the title to the wider Marvel Universe.

Budiansky tells BACK ISSUE, “Another favorite comic

TM & © Marvel.

52 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

of mine from my childhood was The Flash. One of the things I really liked about that book was Flash’s so-called ‘Rogues’ Gallery.’ He had a very colorful cast of villains that took turns attacking him issue after issue. And the villains had a wide range of abilities; only a few of them had abilities relating to speed. So the Flash’s Rogues’ Gallery inspired to me take a similar approach when coming up with Sleepwalker’s villains: create a diverse, colorful cast of villains unique to Sleepwalker.”

After a quick cameo appearance on a TV news reports in the first issue, 8-Ball made his first full appearance in issue #2 (July 1991), along with his gang. 8-Ball/Jeff Hagees wore a black costume with an 8-ball for a helmet. His main weapon was (you guessed it) a specially designed pool cue. He was accompanied by his gang including 9-Ball (yellow costume), 11-Ball (red costume), and 6-Ball (green costume). While 8-Ball would return to menace Sleepwalker, the others wouldn’t be seen again.

While there were many new villains created for the title, only 8-Ball found a home outside of the series. Budiansky states, “8-Ball was the first one I came up with, and I designed his look as well. I think in terms of pure wackiness, he was probably the wackiest of all the villains I created.

Maybe that made him extra appealing and was the reason other writers used him in their books.”

8-Ball also appeared in She-Hulk #5–6 (Sept.–Oct. 2004) and Daughters of the Dragon #2 (Apr. 2006), amongst others.

Cobweb was one of the most powerful demons in the Mindscape and had been plaguing the Sleepwalkers for millennia. Sleepwalker had been chasing the villain when he entered Rick Sheridan’s mind. Cobweb quickly left Rick’s mind leaving Sleepwalker trapped inside. “I decided Sleepwalker needed a primary antagonist from his home dimension, the Mindscape,” Budiansky states, “so I created Cobweb—he was creepy and nightmarishlooking, he preyed on the dreams of people, and he was responsible for trapping Sleepwalker in Rick’s mind. He also served as a vehicle that allowed me to reveal more about the Mindscape to Sleepwalker’s readers and add to his mythology.”

Is the pen mightier than the sword? That’s a question that issue #4 (Sept. 1991) examined, as the cover blurb read: “In Battle with Bookworm…

He’s Lonely! He’s Literate! He’s Lethal!” With a cover tease like that, you just had to pick it up!

Socially awkward, lit-loving graduate assistant Nelson Gruber was caught in the crossfire when an experiment went awry. He gained the powers to make the characters in his precious books come to life. Sleepwalker, with Alyssa’s assistance, found a unique way to stop Bookworm’s villainous ways.

Sleepwalker #7 (Dec. 1991) was an Infinity Gauntlet crossover in which Rick was gone as a result of the events of that classic miniseries. In fact, the splash page depicts Sleepwalker (now free anytime because Rick isn’t there) walking Rick’s dog, because someone’s got to do it. The issue also debuted more additions to Sleepy’s Rogues’ Gallery. An accident (what else?) gave powers to four escaped convicts turning them into the Chain Gang (Weak Link, Master Link, Missing Link, and Uplink).

In issue #9 (Feb. 1992), Sleepwalker first encountered Felicity Hopkins, a.k.a. Lullaby. Hopkins

could sing her victims to sleep and then control their actions.

While it appeared that Hopkins had Sleepwalker under her control, that wasn’t the case. On the final page, he revealed that “Sleepwalkers never sleep!”

The “Color Blindness” story arc in #13–16 (June–Sept. 1992) introduced Selena Slate, who became the villainous Spectra in issue #14. She became romantically linked to Sleepwalker later in the series. This issue also introduced the Thought Police (Nightstick, Cuffs, and Wiretap) to the growing list of Sleepwalker adversaries.

Although Sleepwalker faced off against many original adversaries, he did encounter several Marvel mainstays.

One that fit nicely with Sleepwalker and the series’ theme of dealing with dreams was the Dr. Strange villain Nightmare in issue #12 (May 1992). Nightmare “was a natural fit as an antagonist for Sleepwalker,” Budiansky reveals. “Rather than create a similar villain and leave myself open to accusations of copying, I just decided to use the original... with the permission of the Dr. Strange editor at the time, of course.”

Nightmare wasn’t the only previously established villain to make an appearance in the series. The Hobgoblin made a visit during one of the more memorable storylines. The sixpart “Mindfield” storyline ran in issues #19–24 (Dec. 1992– May 1993) and contained a Freaky Friday vibe as Rick and Sleepwalker switched bodies. Rick (in Sleepwalker’s body) encountered other Sleepwalkers in the Mindscape while Sleepy had to deal with Rick’s problems on Earth. To make matters worse, Alyssa’s mind had visitors as well. 8-Ball also made a return appearance. The interaction between the two villains was another highlight of the arc.

Budiansky discusses the genesis of the storyline: “They were already sharing space in Rick’s mind. It just seemed like a natural progression to have them switch bodies. I thought it would make for a fun story to have each experience life as the other one.”

used special effects to commit his crimes much like Spider-Man’s foe Mysterio. The then-recently-introduced Danny Ketch manifestation of Ghost Rider was riding high behind a hit comic series [see BI #124—ed.], so it’s no surprise that he was chosen to guest-star in Sleepwalker. He appeared in issue #11 (Apr. 1992). An Avengers team featuring Black Widow, Vision, Black Knight, Crystal, Hercules, and Sersi made appearances in a two-parter in issues #26–27 (July–Aug. 1993), helping cement Sleepwalker’s place in the Marvel Universe.

Sleepwalker wasn’t confined to his own book during this time, making appearances in other titles as well. The “Portals of Power” storyline was a three-issue crossover between Sleepwalker and Darkhawk. Like Sleepwalker, Darkhawk made his debut in a self-titled series in 1991. The story began in Darkhawk #19 (Sept.

1992) before moving to Sleepwalker #17 (Oct. 1992), and finally concluding in Darkhawk #20 (Oct. 1992). As usual when heroes meet, they fight before they realize they have the same goal. SpiderMan was a busy guy during this time—not only was he starring in four titles on his own, he also guest-starred in this event.

Sleepwalker, like most other books from Marvel during the ’90s, wasn’t immune from the gimmick cover phenomenon.

While not as clever as Ghost Rider’s glow-in-the-dark cover for issue #15 (July 1991), or the foil-embossed cover to Silver Surfer #50 (June 1991), which did a nice job emulating the look of the character, the cover to Sleepwalker #19 (Dec. 1992) was a cardboard cover with an image of the title character. There were perforated sections where readers could punch out the eyes and mouth to make a Sleepwalker mask.

SWEET DREAMS (ARE MADE OF THIS)

Being a part of the Marvel Universe means not only that you exist within that fictional enclave, but that you interact with other heroes. Sleepwalker was no exception to this.

Issues #5 and 6 featured guest appearances by Spider-Man in a storyline called “Web of Confusion.” The two-parter teamed up the heroes to fight against Spidey’s villain the Kingpin and the newly introduced Sleepwalker baddie Crimewave (Carl Wilkinson). Crimewave didn’t last long as an underworld villain in the Marvel Universe, though. Issue #6 was his last appearance—which is too bad, because even though the MU has a plethora of criminal overlords, Crimewave was a fun villain that could have made his mark as a standout amongst Silvermane, Hammerhead, and the others.

Budiansky relates, “I was a long-time fan of Spider-Man, so I was itching to write a story in which I could guest-star him, and, in fact, I devised a two-parter. At the same time, my editor was encouraging me to feature even more guest-stars to help keep sales up, so I wrote stories that included some of the rising Marvel stars of that era, including Deathlok, Ghost Rider, and Darkhawk.”

The Michael Collins incarnation of Deathlok appeared in Sleepwalker #8 (Jan. 1992) as the heroes fought against Mr. FX, another newly created adversary that, as his name suggests,

Dream Teams Sleepwalker was firmly engrained into the Marvel Universe, with Deathlok, Ghost Rider, Darkhawk, SpiderMan, and the Avengers among the heroes dropping by.

TM & © Marvel.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 53

To Dream No More Sleepwalker concluded its run with issue #33 (Feb. 1994), with this terrifying cover by the series’ final artist, Kelly Krantz. Inks by Art Nichols.

TM & © Marvel.

YOUR WILDEST DREAMS

The art on the series was fantastic and perfectly captured the feel of Budiansky’s stories. With characters as idiosyncratic as Sleepwalker and his foes, you needed an artist would could capture that and still provide the action that readers craved.

With Budiansky behind the writing desk, it left artist Bret Blevins the task of bringing these characters to life on the page.

“When I first met with the editor who would oversee Sleepwalker, Don Daley, I told him that Bret Blevins was my number one ideal choice to be the artist,” Budiansky relates.

“Don agreed to my suggestion, we asked Bret, and, to my utter delight, he agreed.

“As the Sleepwalker artist, Bret was everything I hoped he would be—he brought energy, imagination, brilliant storytelling, action, humor, superb draftsmanship... I could go on and on listing Bret’s contributions to the book. The downside was that Bret’s work on Sleepwalker helped raise his profile among the other Marvel editorial offices, and eventually another editor offered him a book with better sales—I think it was Ghost Rider— which meant more royalties for Bret.

“So, Bret departed after issue #17. By that point in Sleepwalker’s publishing tenure, sales had cooled off, which meant declining royalties, so it wasn’t considered an attractive destination for established pencil artists. Instead, editor Don Daley offered it to newcomer Kelly Krantz, who did the best he could illustrating the book until its cancellation. My impression was that Kelly found illustrating my stories challenging when he first took the assignment, but he improved as he gained more experience.”

While not as polished as Blevin’s art, Krantz’s work on the book was solid and kept the unique feel of the book keeping it set apart from the other titles available at the time. Krantz’s first issue was the Infinity War tie-in Sleepwalker #18 (Nov. 1992). He remained with the series until the final issue #33 (Feb. 1994).

Sleepwalker continued to face a variety of villains from his own Rogues’ Gallery throughout the rest of the run of the book.

Cobweb and 8-Ball continued to return to menace our heroes and Spectra even made a return appearance, but this time as love interest to Sleepwalker. The last issue featured a final showdown with Cobweb. The question on many readers’ minds was, Did Sleepwalker ever get free of Rick’s mind? You’ll have to read the story to find out.

“Sales had dropped to the point that Sleepwalker was no longer considered profitable, so Marvel cancelled it,” laments Budiansky.

DREAM ON

Although his self-titled series was gone, Sleepwalker was far from forgotten, even though it would take until the next decade for him to reappear. Marvel Team-Up vol. 3 #15 (Feb. 2006) saw his return, with a prominent cover appearance to boot. This would lead to several more appearances throughout the new millennia. Although Sleepwalker never gained the same status he did with his own series, he remains a part of Marvel’s pantheon of original characters.

When the series was originally released, it was at a time that DC’s The Sandman was on the stands and gaining a popular following. It was obviously on the radar of Marvel’s Marketing Department because some of the house ads for the series directly

referenced the Distinguished Competition’s title. Was Sandman in the back of Budiansky’s mind when developing the book?

“When I created Sleepwalker, I wasn’t thinking of DC’s Sandman at all,” Budiansky tells BI. Regarding those house ads, Bob surmises, “My guess is [Marvel was] trying to ride on the coattails of a book they considered successful at the time of Sleepwalker’s publication. But the two books are nothing alike.

I certainly wasn’t trying to compete with Sandman.”

Sleepwalker was a unique book during a time when most were trying to fit into the grim-and-gritty mold. The characters stood out and the villains were eclectic. The artwork perfectly fit the tone of the title. All in all, this is a title that readers shouldn’t sleep on. If you haven’t read this book, get out of bed and find yourself some back issues.

Budiansky exclaims, “Getting Marvel to publish my creation, Sleepwalker, was one of the highlights of my career in comics!” For you and for us as well, sir!

Thanks go out to Bob Budiansky for his invaluable time and assistance with this article. Thanks also to Bret Blevins, who responded to a request for an interview but unfortunately couldn’t schedule an interview time prior to deadline. A special thank-you to Joe Norton for the loan of some Sleepwalker issues that were missing from my collection.

Educator, freelance writer, and comic-book historian ED LUTE lost sleep to bring you this article. Hopefully, the nightmares will go away now.

54 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

mATT WAGNER Michael Rhode.

conducted by T o m

Powers

transcribed by Amanda Powers

STEVEN T. SEAGLE

TM & © DC Comics.

© Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons.

On February 28, 2023, I had the honor of talking to Sandman Mystery Theatre co-writers Matt Wagner and Steven T. Seagle via Zoom regarding their superb collaboration on this longrunning Vertigo superhero-crime series featuring vigilante

Wesley Dodds and his partner Dian Belmont. Without further attention-grabbing adieu, I am raising the curtain on this enthralling conversation…

– Tom Powers

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 55

TOM POWERS: Matt, why did you want to bring Sandman Mystery Theatre to Vertigo?

MATT WAGNER: Initially, it was not Vertigo. At the time I started to talk to Karen Berger about it, Vertigo was still just gestating in her mind. Sandman Mystery Theatre was just going to be a DC title, and then the imprint got launched, and it just became its second title. I also really wanted to do something with Guy Davis. I was a big fan of his book Baker Street that he did for Caliber Press, which was a small press publisher in the 1980s.

If someone hasn’t seen Baker Street, it is a contemporary punk, female version of Sherlock Holmes, and Guy’s art was just terrific on the book, and I really loved the humanity and the sense of atmosphere, so I contacted him via his publisher and said, “Look, man, I’d love to do something with you. You deserve a bigger audience, and I’ve got a pretty good in at DC. Why don’t you just go through the DC Who’s Who and send me some ideas on characters you might want to play around with?” There was no great surprise that the four characters he sent me were all people wearing cloaks and hats! [laughs] One of those happened to be the Golden Age Sandman, and Guy said, “I know they won’t let us do this because of Gaiman’s Sandman.” I said, “No, that’s why they will let us do it,” because, at that point, they were trying to capitalize on the success of Sandman, but, of course, what made it special was Neil’s writing, and unless you could clone him and get two or three times his output, he couldn’t write a whole lot more books. In the first issue of Gaiman’s Sandman, he had made a brief reference to Wesley Dodds as the Golden Age Sandman, and the fact that Morpheus was mystically imprisoned during this time period is what screwed up Wesley’s psyche and his dream state. It prodded him into adopting this secret identity and going out on the streets at night. Of course, the gas mask emulates Morpheus’ dream helmet. At that point in the ’80s, everyone was revamping characters, so I pitched it to Karen, saying, “Hey, let’s do a revamp of the Golden Age Sandman and give it a different, more contemporary approach.”

I also had briefly discovered a big interest in contemporary crime fiction with the classics like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but also the more hard-edged stuff like Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, and David Goodis. And Karen thought that was a great idea.

What really sealed the deal, though, was that Guy had done up three to four pages of character designs wherein he established this more contemporary, realistic look to the Sandman’s costume. He even had a schematic of the gas gun, which we included in the first collected edition. It just looked so great, and Karen bought into it right away.

I had a couple other aims with the series, one of which was to treat pulp literature through a more contemporary lens in the fact that when you look at a lot of crime fiction, it tends to be: A) pretty macho, and B) fairly rightwing in its outlook. I wanted to show that progressive ideals didn’t just pop up in the 1960s in America. They have been around for a long time. Of course, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as fascism was sweeping across Europe, there was a huge fascist movement sweeping America too. There was a giant meeting of the American Nazi Party that filled Madison Square Garden in 1939, so we wanted to portray a character who was kind of enlightened, which Wesley is. Also, we wanted to have a realistic romance in that most comic book romances are tortured and kind of clichéd. We wanted to have a situation where a couple genuinely liked each other and functioned well as a couple. That was spawned from the fact that I had reread the original Golden Age adventures of Sandman—the original stuff from back in the late ’30s—which was very unlike almost any other costumed character at the time, and Dian Belmont knew Wesley Dodds was the Sandman.

I have to think those early comics are all very informed by the pulp traditions that came before them. The comic book motifs had not yet been set in stone, so they were looking to the pulps for inspiration, so I assume that was inspired by the radio version of The Shadow and Margo Lane, who knew The Shadow’s secret identity. But I thought that was a great opportunity to give us the core of Wesley and Dian’s relationship—because the mysteries are fun and how we tell the stories, but the core that runs through the comic is their relationship.

In addition to the Sandman Mystery Theatre series, Wagner’s early contributions to the DC Universe include: POWERS: In terms of your initial three story arcs • The Demon #1 (Jan. 1987)–4 (Apr. 1987) for Sandman Mystery Theatre, “The Tarantula” Four-issue miniseries written and penciled by Matt, with is delineated in issues #1–4 (Apr.–July 1993), “The Art Nichols inks, starring the Jack Kirby–created supernatural hero Face” unfolds in issues #5–8 (Aug.–Nov. 1993) and Etrigan the Demon. the tale of “The Brute” is depicted in issues #9–12 • Legends of the Dark Knight #28 (Mar. 1992)–30 (May 1992) (Dec. 1993–Mar. 1994). What did you learn from Three-issue Two-Face storyline, “Faces,” written and illustrated writing these first 12 issues of the series?

by Matt.

WAGNER: When you are working as a writer like • Batman/Grendel (Aug. 1993) this, what we were basically trying to portray here Two-issue Prestige Format miniseries combining Matt’s vengeful were the sort of situations that have since become Grendel with DC’s Dark Knight. Co-published by DC Comics and known as hate crimes. We were trying to search out Comico the Comic Company. the motivation of what leads someone to do that, and, of course, nobody is born a monster. How do they get to that stage where they will brutalize somebody and develop hatred and act on it?

As might be evident in that time period, Steve [Steven T. Seagle] and I loved doing research; we loved trying to strike the vernacular and the mindsets of the ’30s, which are, of course, different than today. We tried to stay true to that—even using stuff that would now probably send the “woke” crowd into hysterics. That’s the way people talked back then. You can’t really gloss over it. You can portray it in a way that shows how it is unenlightened and needs advancement, which came eventually. But you can’t just pretend that it didn’t happen.

The Demon, Batman, and Two-Face TM & © DC Comics. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

MATT WAGNER’s EARLY DC WORK

56 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

STEVEN T. SEAGLE: We didn’t get a lot of complaints about the racist language in the book, which, again, we researched and made sure was appropriate for the time of the stories. But people definitely complained about cuss words, saying, “No one cussed in the ’30s. Those words didn’t even exist!” But they’re easy to trace in the literature of the time. Our letter writers tested us, and we loved nothing more than providing proof from the period.

WAGNER: In talking to Neil Gaiman at the time—this was before Vertigo would allow writers to use the word “f*ck”—it was mainly due to their printer, who wouldn’t let them do it for whatever reason.

SEAGLE: I think there was an issue with shipping “profanity” over international borders while DC was using Quebecor in Canada to print—fears of books being seized at customs inspections.

WAGNER: But Neil and I talked about how if you had something else you wanted to get past Editorial that you thought might be questionable, you threw a “f*ck” into the script, and they guy davis would focus on that word and not the other Xenopedia. things you were trying to get past them [laughs].

POWERS: On the subject of controversial choices for Sandman Mystery Theatre, when it comes to the storyline “The Face,” which was illustrated by John Watkiss, wasn’t there a bit of controversy surrounding the coloring of some of the characters?

WAGNER: I originally wanted to have the Asian characters portrayed in a kind of lemon-yellow—like they were portrayed in comics at the time. But then I wanted the white characters to be bone white—to not be peach flesh—to show that it was a symbolic thing, and neither version was correct. Unfortunately, that didn’t fly, so we had to backtrack and just go with more naturalistic rendering.

SEAGLE: If I may interject, we loved Guy, and we wound up doing more and more with him. As a reader of these books at the time, I actually enjoyed the shifts in styles quite a bit. But, internally, they were not met with any kind of love whatsoever.

So there was also resistance to the artistic shift to John Watkiss for “The Face,” which was then amplified by the muddled attempt to emphasize the print racism of the period in the color palette.

“The Brute” was drawn by Wordsmith alum R. G. Taylor, who was a logical choice for the period of the book but was another jarring departure from Guy for too many readers, which was a pity.

WAGNER: I think readers want dependability. It was initially my idea to switch things up, and I admit I was bringing that over from Grendel, which is a motif of that book, where we changed artists every time we switched the storyline. In retrospect, Guy was such a defining element of the look of Sandman Mystery Theatre and its world that maybe we should have stuck with him for the entire run. That said, I did like working with almost all of our artists. There were a few that were kind of problematic, but, for the most part, everybody was great and brought a real cool sensibility and style to the project.

SEAGLE: There aren’t many genuine historical recreations attempted in mainstream American comics, so it was fun letting different artists work on a period piece. Most of our artists were excited by that opportunity.

Who Knows What Evil?

The Shadow—shown in an eerie 2005 illo by Guy Davis— and his relationship with Margo Lane laid the foundation for the Wesley Dodds/Dian Belmont Sandman partnership.

Art scan courtesy of Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com).

The Shadow © Condé Nast.

POWERS: So, Matt, after you finished your initial 12 issues of Sandman Mystery Theatre, what made you want to partner with Steve? Also, could you please provide some background information on how you first met?

WAGNER: I had met Steve at various points earlier in my career, most specifically, on the infamous Mage tour that I did in 1985, where a group of buddies and I drove all around the country in a van, and in the space of a month and a half, we did 26 signing appearances all the way around the country.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 57

Classical Gas (inset) Sandman’s sleep gun has an important part of the character’s iconography since character’s ongoing strip launched in Adventure Comics #40 (July 1939). Cover art by Creig Flessel. (top) Sandman’s weapon became more dangerous in the harder-edged Sandman Mystery Theatre series. From issue #1 (Apr. 1993). (bottom) A 1994 Sandman portrait by Guy Davis.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

SEAGLE: And he pulled up in Boulder, Colorado—where I was a college student—rolled out of his van and did a signing at Time Warp, which is still a great comic shop in Boulder, though it’s moved around a bit.

So, I met you as a fan on the street corner! I was like, “Oh, my God! That’s Matt Wagner!”

WAGNER: And then you interviewed me for something? I can’t remember what that was.

SEAGLE: That was years later. I was doing a column for the Comics Buyer’s Guide. I thought, “This is how I’ll round out my writing—by interviewing people.”

And I did four installments, realized I should not be interviewing people, and stopped. But thank you for being one of those four.

WAGNER: I was one of the few, the proud. I’d been longtime buddies with Tim Sale, so I suddenly became aware of Steve’s writing via The Amazon, which he did with Tim at Comico. I had never worked with a writer, but I have made the path of my entire career trying sh*t I had never done before.

So, the reason I needed to bring on a cowriter is the fact that I had some Grendel stuff coming up on my schedule. I knew I had to give precedence to my own character and that I wouldn’t be able to handle the workload all by myself, so I talked to Karen and said, “I’d like to try bringing on a co-writer,” and she was amenable.

SEAGLE: I had done the first “Grendel Tales” story in Grendel #40 (Feb. 1990) with Ho Che Anderson, but I was surprised you called me because by that point you knew a lot of way more successful writers, so it was interesting to me that I came to your mind. And if there were three people before me who turned you down, just keep that to yourself!

WAGNER: No, there wasn’t. I will fully admit I was looking for somebody that I wouldn’t clash with, and I knew you were up-and-coming—somebody that would be a little bit hungry for the gig and would fit that mold.

SEAGLE: That’s funny, because Matt invited me up to Portland and said, “Come up here and let’s talk about how we would do this gig,” and my first thought was: “We will clash. This is a bad idea. I’m headstrong.

Matt’s headstrong. This will end in tears, but I do want to go to Portland, and Matt’s a great cook, so maybe he’ll make me dinner.” So, I got up to Portland. I went to your house. I was there about five minutes, and you said, “I’m going to make dinner,” and I’m like “Great! This plan is working out as intended.” And then you handed me your child—your infant, Amanda—and you walked out the door to go buy groceries.

WAGNER: Now, I think I just needed a lemon. I wasn’t doing the whole grocery run. I just needed one thing, but, when you need a lemon, you need a lemon. You can’t substitute anything.

SEAGLE: I think you were like, “Here’s a mark I can leave my kid with, and I have got to get some breathing room from this screaming child!”

And then Matt came back, and he made dinner, which was great, and we just had this conversation about what was happening next in Sandman Mystery Theatre, and we literally never talked about how we would work. We knew who would do what, but we didn’t really go over the nuts and bolts. We just kind of started, and it was extremely easy conversation-wise. And, idea-wise, I liked what he was doing, and I was thinking, “How do we do more of that and keep upping the ante?” And it just… started. So I got home, and I was like, “Wait! I didn’t even agree to this job, and I’m doing it already!” That seemed like a good indication that things would work out. And they did.

POWERS: What did you want to bring to this collaboration, Steve?

SEAGLE: What I thought I would be terrible at is the actual mysteries.

That’s not my thing. I had not done all the Chandler reading that Matt had done, and Matt was like, “I’ll handle that part. Don’t worry about it.” So, I was dialogue, and Matt was “big picture” in the beginning.

What I loved was this alternation between Wesley’s narrative and Dian’s narrative Matt had established—it’s a 50/50 partnership book from the get-go. I don’t know how this current era defines all this, but in that time, there were not many strong women characters at the Big Two, and I, for some reason, was interested in complex female leads in

58 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue

my stuff and was really into that. Nowadays, that may not be allowed, but that was just where my head was, so I loved that I could toggle back and forth between how Wes see things and how Dian sees things. I taught Interpersonal Communication when I was at Ball State University in Indiana, and that kind of frame of reference—how different people see things depending on how they’re coming at it—just made this a really fascinating gig in terms of how Wes sees the world and their relationship versus how Dian sees it all. That was my main draw in that I am a very structuralist writer. I like when there is a formal—in-thedefinition-of-form conceit—to things, and that was there.

I also like that we could give Guy Davis a plot and say, “Here’s what we need,” and it was very Marvel style, i.e., paragraphs of action that—in the first year—Matt wrote up entirely. Guy would pencil it, and then I would dialogue it, and it was just all there in the art. It didn’t matter what you gave Guy; what you got back was everything you needed. Instead of having to write dialogue to support incomplete storytelling like: “They walked to the car and got in,” the acting was perfect, so I could have the text just go straight to subtext and minutia of the pre-war timeframe and the relationship, and that helped elevate the book from the genre trappings. And as Matt said, we loved doing the research, so it was really fun to write with that specificity.

WAGNER: Steve mentioned structure. Another bit of structure based around their relationship is the fact that I decided from the very beginning that each story arc should be four issues long, so that, when they were collected, they would be about the size of a pulp magazine. But every 12 issues, Wesley and Dian’s relationship goes through some kind of stage or change, and Steve and I both would talk about that at the beginning of the year and say, “Here’s where we’re getting them to,” and then it was just a matter of slowly pacing that out over 12 issues.

SEAGLE: This is not standard stuff either—for example, the idea that Dian would later in the series take agency over her own pregnancy. These were big, interesting things that are common for TV, movies, novels, but certainly not common for comics at that time. I think Vertigo ushered in a lot more of that kind of storytelling, but it was not something you were getting in mainstream comics at the time.

POWERS: Matt, can you elaborate more upon how your plotting methodology worked in coordination with Steve’s dialogue?

WAGNER: I also brought that over from Grendel, because once I decided to start writing for other writers on that book, I decided to work plot-and-dialogue fashion because I wanted the artist to have more of a say in things rather than me spelling everything out. And I can draw, so I felt that if I wanted that kind of control, I should just draw it myself. The only reason to collaborate with another artist was to force myself to see through their eyes, to get their visual input in ways that I might not have imagined, so it just felt natural to go that way again in Sandman Mystery Theater.

SEAGLE: And Matt, you had told me when you brought me on, “I’m only going to stay on this another year—that’s all I got in me.” And that year was so much fun and worked so well.

WAGNER: Yeah, I found out it was hard to let go.

SEAGLE: My job was to not let you go! I was constantly like, “You can do another year. You can stay on this little while longer,” and I kept pulling that string as long as I could.

STEVEN T. SEAGLE’s EARLY DC WORK

In addition to the Sandman Mystery Theatre series, Seagle’s early contributions to the DC Universe include: • Justice League Quarterly #14 (Spring 1994) Writer of a 12-page story starring Ireland’s superhero, Jack O’Lantern of Global Guardians fame.

• Hawkman #10 (June 1994)–11 (July 1994) Dialogue for William Messner-Loebs’ plots for two consecutive issues of the Hawkworld spinoff, Hawkman.

• Primal Force #0 (Oct. 1994)–14 (Dec. 1995) Seagle-scripted monthly super-team comic featuring the Red Tornado, Jack O’Lantern, Meridian, Dr. Mist, Cataclysm, Claw, and Golem.

TM & © DC Comics.

POWERS: Dian serves as a dynamic foil to Wesley as she gradually discovers his other identity as a vigilante crimefighter. As an aspiring writer, she is also sharing her experiences with the readers via her journal entries, so you are providing this meta approach to her character, who possesses many layers since she’s a writer who is solving a personal mystery within the narrative fabric of the greater mystery story arcs unfolding in Sandman Mystery Theatre. How did you deal with the complexity of her characterization?

WAGNER: You take that one, Steve! [laughs] SEAGLE: If you think about it, that’s what we’re all doing. If you’re in a relationship, you don’t know that other person. What they tell you is what you know. What you find out—that maybe they’re not even aware of—that’s what you discover. There’s stuff they don’t know about themselves that you can figure out or not, and there’s stuff neither one of you knows, and it just shows up. So that quadranting of selves—which in Communication Studies is known as the Johari Window, devised by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingram—gives us the known self, secret self, hidden self, and unknown self.

That just seemed like a really good driver, so Dian is trying to find out the mystery of what Wesley is doing, but he’s not having an affair; he’s a “superhero,” which was fascinating because it’s also just about a

person in a relationship trying to figure out who that other person is in terms of thinking, “Why didn’t you tell me this stuff upfront?

Do you not trust me with it?” Every time we got to dig down into stuff an actual couple would have beef about—but in the context of a superhero kind of fantasy—it seemed like gold to me.

WAGNER: We were trying to strike a sense of realism—and a sense of positivity—to show how a couple’s relationship matures and advances over time and isn’t just dramatically reactionary, which is how a lot of relationships are portrayed in entertainment.

SEAGLE: What I liked about what Matt had set up—and was a champion for going forward—was these big swings. It wasn’t always minutiae. We thought, “Let’s go big. Let’s run toward it instead of being afraid of it.” A lot of times in serialized fiction, you can’t ever undo what makes it [by definition] the thing it is.

And Sandman Mystery Theatre constantly undid stuff. It still had its full weight and mass moving forward, and the big swings for character arc never broke that.

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 59

POWERS: In terms of your first story arc together, “The Vamp,” which ran through issues #13–16 (Apr.-July 1994) you craft this murder mystery involving Dian’s sorority sisters. You also present a lesbian overtone, which is very fascinating. In issue #13 alone, you have Dian’s friend Carol Swanson kissing her on page 8, and then on page 14, you have Madeleine Giles—who’s later revealed to be the villain of this arc—kissing Carol. This is some edgy stuff even for comics in the early ’90s, and, yes, it’s Vertigo, but it’s still a DC comic.

WAGNER: Steve and I obviously are straight white guys, and we had to figure out a way to get inside the head of the marginalized. That’s what writing fiction is all about.

Steve mentioned earlier whether it would be cool to write things from a woman’s point of view nowadays, but I don’t know. I just find it boring if the only thing we’re allowed to do and write from is our own perspective. I don’t want everything I write to be me. That’s what fiction’s all about—to explore situations all around you that aren’t you and people that aren’t you.

SEAGLE: If I recall, that storyline was riffing on the Parisian American expat crowd of the ’20s and ’30s, in which there was a much more fluid sexuality, and pan-sexuality—before that term was popularized—which was pretty common amongst the art circles, and we were talking about the Gertrude Stein/Alice B. Toklas relationship and thinking about what that might be in New York City.

What does that taboo turn into as a twisted crime story? But part of exploring like that for Sandman Mystery Theatre was always giving humanity to part of the cast, and if the villain is within that community—which in that case she was— she’s saying, “You’re the outlier. These are good people with good intentions who want to be in love—just like everybody else—and you’re messing it up for us,” which drives her good intentions to a dark endpoint.

What I liked immediately about my first story arc was that it’s a Wesley-andDian thing. She’s thinking, “Could I kiss a woman? I could. Would I like that?

Yeah, it’s not bad, actually. Does that take me away from Wes? It doesn’t. But if I broke up with Wes, I could go that way.” For the 1990s and any media at that time, that was a pretty forward-thinking kind of message. Now we’ve arrived as a society at a more open acceptance of identity… or have we?

I think we were ahead of that curve.

The other funny thing about that arc is that I turned in my first dialogue script for issue #13, and I was told that it did not have enough words. I’m fairly minimalist by writing standards, and I thought, “The art’s doing everything, so I don’t need to do much more,” and I handed it in with a four-balloonsper-page kind of vibe, and Karen Berger told me something along the lines of: “It’s good, but Vertigo books have more words than this.”

WAGNER: There again, she was following the Gaiman template.

SEAGLE: And I don’t think she was wrong, actually. I went through and added way too much, which was another problem she noted! Then, I landed in the middle somewhere, but it took me an issue to get my Vertigo wings.

WAGNER: Any time somebody comes back with that kind of critique, you’re of course going to overreact and go the other way.

SEAGLE: Absolutely.

Moonlighting Dian Belmont quickly matured from Wesley Dodds’ Gal Friday to confidant and lover in the pages Sandman Mystery Theatre.

This exceptional portrait of Dian and Wes was commissioned of artist Guy Davis in 2001 and hails from the collection of Alex Winter of Hake’s Auctions.

TM & © DC Comics.

POWERS: Also in issue #14 (May 1994), on pages 15–19, you show this crazy fight between Wesley and Burke, and it’s just really brutal and amazing because usually the foil gradually becomes the friend, but Burke is nearly the enemy.

WAGNER: We were never going to have that happen.

SEAGLE: No—and Wesley is not good at fighting. He’s a pacifist sort of “old money” guy, and he doesn’t know jack sh*t about throwing a punch. I was a scrawny kid in high school, so I related to a hero who couldn’t fight and would barely get out of that kind of situation intact.

WAGNER: It’s why Wes has the gas gun.

SEAGLE: I related to Wes because I wouldn’t survive ten minutes if I had to actually fistfight Burke. I’d have to gas him in the face and run away, which is pretty much what Wes does unless he’s extremely driven by a dream vision.

WAGNER: I always love films where fighting is highly choreographed, but I really like screen fights that are desperate. Two of my favorite films in the world are Richard Lester’s Three and Four Musketeers. When you watch the sword fights, they are just brawls. Half the time, they’re throwing their swords at each other, and they’re grabbing anything that’s in reach and hammering each other with it. It’s not this Zorro sort of absolute finesse and rapier thrusting.

SEAGLE: What we were also trying to show was that in 1930s New York City there was the Art Deco vibe—that was the glamour. But the heroism—

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Hardboiled Comics Sandman Mystery Theatre pulled no punches with its depiction of violence, including this gruesome title splash of the aftermath of a hate crime. From issue #5, illustrated by John Watkiss.

TM & © DC Comics.

every time Matt would bring in our man Wesley, it was not glamorous. It was the worst-dressed, worst-attempted, most ill-fated swing at being a hero that you’ve have ever seen, and I thought that was great.

POWERS: Moving on to “The Scorpion” story arc that ran through issues #17–20 (Aug.–Nov. 1994), you place an emphasis on Wall Street by shifting the narrative gears to the financial world of 1938 New York City. What kind of conversations went into this story?

WAGNER: In that one, we knew who the Scorpion is right away.

I had pointed out to Steve when he was talking about not knowing how to do the mysteries, and I said, “All mysteries aren’t who-dunnits. Sometimes they’re how-dunnits and why-dunnits.”

SEAGLE: This one is back to Guy on the art, and the setting shift for this arc was narratively interesting and surprising. We were in these restrained, closed-room Victorian parlor sorts of things, and now we are shifting big into a financial system that’s recovered from a meltdown and is about to be plunged into war. That’s not something you’d normally look at in a superhero book at all, and it’s not even the focus of a lot of histories of New York City per se. I went into The New York Times—which I would do all the time—and just read front pages for the months that this story arc is set in and see what they were saying about finance—not the financial part—but what the general reporting was saying about finances in the world right then. That was really interesting to research.

POWERS: This story also presents the villain, the Scorpion— Terry Stetson—as using this poisonous whip as his weapon, which makes him almost like a twisted Zorro.

WAGNER: I obviously love Zorro. I later went on to write Zorro for many issues for Dynamite, and I did the Django-Zorro crossover with Quentin Tarantino. Zorro was one of my first favorite loves as far as adventure literature goes. Disney had the show back when I was quite young, and then when I was about 12, we had moved from a very rural setting to a suburban East Coast setting, and we had UHF stations, one of which ran a silent film theater on Sunday night, so I got to see Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s 1920 film The Mark of Zorro, which is fantastic and full of a lot of cool anachronisms.

When Zorro shows up for the first time, he’s got his cloak held in this Batman style—or I should say Batman holds his cloak in Zorro’s style—and he opens it to confront the bad guys, and he’s huffing on a cigarette the whole time—very rakishly [laughs]. So, our story was definitely a move toward doing a dark Zorro, and, of course, the poison whip that’s the sting of the Scorpion’s tail.

SEAGLE: We were also talking about sadomasochism, specifically a hero—or in this case, a villain—who has a whip. It’s not just that you want to do justice; you want to inflict pain and watch people suffer that pain, and you most likely dig it. These tales always have that lurid kind of pulp element to them, and that was the one we were playing with in “The Scorpion.”

POWERS: That comment leads me to another question I have been wanting to ask you both: Why is sex important to the storytelling of a superhero-crime epic that’s set in the ’30s? In other words, why does sex show up in many of your Sandman Mystery Theatre story arcs?

WAGNER: Sex and violence both. When you look at most of my works, I include that all of the time. And the reason is what makes drama is change, and sex and violence are the agents of change. Sex is the beginning of life and the unbridled expression of relationships. Violence is the end of life and the brutal cessation of relationships. Certainly, Shakespeare knew this; his dramas are full of sex and violence. So, when anybody asks me, “Why is there so much sex and violence in your work?,” I reply, “Because it’s boring without them!” [laughs] SEAGLE: The question should actually be, “Why isn’t there more sex in other comics?”

Everybody thinks about sex, talks about sex, and has sex.

Its percentages are like 98%, and for the remaining 2%, 1% are not interested, and the other 1% are medical issues. Yet it’s almost nowhere to be seen in most comics, making it repressed sexuality. And when it is seen, it’s often the grotesque, the porn version. Why is that? Superheroes are naked people with costumes painted on their bodies, so you can see everything on their body except their genitals because we have problems with genitals—especially penises and testicles—in America.

WAGNER: And men have no nipples!

SEAGLE: And yet, with female superheroes, for far too long a time, you can see everything—double standards. They not only have nipples but also those nipples are erect for some reason while they’re fighting supervillains? So here’s a book where the two main characters actually have a normal, kind of tame—and I would dare say—almost uninteresting sex life. But they have

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 61

The Lady Is a Vamp A startling surprise for Sandman on the final page of SMT #15 (June 1994), Part 3 of the serial “The Vamp.”

Autographed original Guy Davis art courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

sex. And then the things that they’re up against are these skewed visions of that—very lurid kinds of “What ifs?”—things that they might become if left unchecked. And we play with that in some of the story arcs where Wes and Dian’s sex life causes trauma or problems. Then, they’re seeing themselves reflected in a way in that they’re thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I am not that at all,” especially in the earlier stories. Sex and sexuality served a lot of plot and story functions beyond typical titillation.

The last thing I’ll say is that the core for both of us was always “Where are Wes and Dian as a couple, and what are they going through?” If what they were doing was really personal and intense, then we made the villain bigger, which put more of a spotlight on Wes and Dian’s “small” problem in a weird way. We would use that technique of inverse sliders: if we had something where Wes and Dian’s daily life was explosive, then the villain needed to recede a little bit—be more mysterious and off-camera so that it didn’t all seem melodra-

matic. That helped us balance what we wanted the feeling of the book to be from arc to arc.

POWERS: Around this time, Sandman Mystery Theatre Annual #1 (Oct. 1994) was also published, which offers a series of vignettes illustrated by different artists. What did you appreciate about working on this unique issue?

WAGNER: The Annual was spawned by my discovery and interest in the work of the photographer Weegee. I had a book of his photos, and one of the last photos in the book was of the costume that is seen in that Annual. It was a mugger that was haunting Central Park during those days, and it just was such an odd image since it looked like a supervillain costume but something somebody would cobble together in their very poor apartment in Manhattan, or Brooklyn, or Queens [laughs]. So, being an Annual, we decided that it was an opportunity to do a bunch of short stories—in my youth, Annuals were always a bunch of short stories, not one long narrative—and weave it all together into the story of how Wes finds out about and tracks down this mugger. I will also point out that the Annual had Alex Ross’ very first story for DC. SEAGLE: In black-and-white paintings, no less!

I also like very much that it was about socioeconomic inequities, which is still a current topic.

Everybody’s assuming that the mugger’s costume is to scare people when, in actuality, it’s just that he’s so poor—that’s really all he could piece together to make a “secret identity” happen: wooden shoes, a burlap sack mask, a stick with nails driven through it as a weapon. For our artistic collaborators on that book, we had David Lloyd from V for Vendetta, and Stefano Gaudiano, whom I had worked with on Kafka; George Pratt, Peter Snejbjerg, Dean Ormston, Guy Davis, and John Bolton also each did a chunk—that was an incredible array of talent in one place and amazing to see.

WAGNER: Yeah, man, that’s a star-studded book.

POWERS: In Chapter 3, titled “The Stakeout,” Wesley comes across these two gay lovers in Central Park when he’s trying to apprehend the mugger, and they run away in fear of him as he just stares at them. Any thoughts on this poignant scene?

WAGNER: Gay people had to sneak around a lot in those days. It’s only fairly recently they don’t. Then again, even in parts of this country, they still do.

SEAGLE: We had a little more time with that issue, so we did a lot of research. We found that there was this field in Central Park where homosexual couples had trysts. The hesitation is simply Wes taking it— deciding they are not his mark—realizing he has no issue with the activity, and it’s none of his business.

The couple, though, assumes the worst and runs.

By the way, because of Matt’s initial inspiration, we put a Weegee-esque character in the Annual— Feegee—and he shows up again later in the series.

WAGNER: There’s also a scene in the Annual where the Sandman is chasing the mugger, and they break through this field, and it’s all full of people sleeping because, in hot summer months in New York in those days, people would camp out in Central Park to escape the heat of their poorly insulated, no-airflow apartment buildings, sleeping right on the grass with a blanket.

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POWERS: For your next arc, “Dr. Death,” which takes place in issues #21–24 (Dec. 1994–Mar. 1995), you introduce Raymond Kessler, a sex addict who is quite misogynistic towards his girlfriend Lucy, and you keep on showing this guy’s sexual addiction across this arc. Why was this aspect important to his characterization?

WAGNER: We were probably fictionalizing Fredric Wertham a little bit in his takedown of American comic books, where he just saw sex everywhere. Some psychologists just have sex on the brain.

SEAGLE: That story was with Vince Locke on art mostly over layouts by Guy, which was fun. It seemed like Wes and Dian were

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‘Sandman Mystery Theatre Annual’ #1

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Joining regular series writers Wagner and Seagle and regular series artist Guy Davis (Chapters 1 and 9) on 1994’s Sandman Mystery Theatre Annual #1 were guest illustrators (1) David Lloyd (Chapter 2), (2) John Bolton (Chapter 3), (3) Stefano Gaudiano (Chapter 4), (4) George Pratt (Chapter 5), (5) Alex Ross (Chapter 6), (6) Peter Snejbjerg (Chapter 7), and (7) Dean Ormston (Chapter 8).

TM & © DC Comics.

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getting bumpy, so somebody who’s out there having a lot of sex while they’re getting a little pedantic on their side was part of the calculus of the relationship. And it is what Matt was saying—it’s sex and death. He’s Dr. Death. It is the beginning and the end of life—“I am the maker of worlds”—you know, a real God complex, which is a doctor thing from time to time in pulp fiction.

POWERS: Talking about Wes and Dian, in issue #23 (Feb. 1995), on page 22, you write this sequence where they very graphically finally get it on as a couple, and it’s quite intimate.

WAGNER: We know we were always getting to that and the challenges of making it seem actual, not overly dramatized.

With Wes and Dian, we had to be able to portray their initial sex scene in a way that A) was erotic, B) was loving, and C) seemed like it would actually happen in a real-life scenario.

SEAGLE: And most tellingly: it’s Dian as the agent—she’s the one who makes the move. She’s the one who tells Wes what they’re going to do. She moves his creepy little stuffed doll to the side of the bed so that she can get on top of him.

WAGNER: Speaking of the doll, I should put in here that it is from the very first Golden Age Sandman story. When Wes goes out to be the Sandman for the first time, he tucks the little doll in the bed, salutes it, and says, “Good night, Mr. Wesley Dodds,” and then goes through the secret door into his sanctum and changes into his Sandman costume. When I read that, I thought, “Man, we got to keep that. That’s just too damn good and weird and uninhibited.”

SEAGLE: Also, at the end of that scene, Dian sneaks out. Some people took us to task for this saying: “She just had sex with him so that she could go investigate his apartment.” But that’s not true at all. I think that she said to herself, “We are bonded now.

No secrets. I’m going to make myself at home.” Then she found out something she didn’t anticipate. Or maybe she did—one of those hidden-self things she suspected and confirmed.

WAGNER: And it’s okay to compartmentalize that stuff.

POWERS: I also want to discuss page 23, where, in the first two panels, we see Dian cuddling—or spooning—Wesley, which continues the dominant stance she assumed by initiating sex with him.

SEAGLE: Men often create media where they put their sex in the dominant role, but that’s bullsh*t. For many of the people I know who are in traditional heterosexual couplings, the woman is in charge of everything.

WAGNER: Those in-charge moments are fluid as well. Sometimes, my wife’s more dominant, and sometimes I’m more dominant.

SEAGLE: I don’t see Wes being dominant, but I’m with you; the roles don’t have to be locked. That’s an expression of insecurity.

WAGNER: We didn’t show them having sex a lot. But there’s going to be plenty of times where Dian’s coupled up in Wes’ arms. It’s not all one way or the other, just the way their narration is in the comic.

POWERS: In the next story arc, “Night of the Butcher,” which runs through issues #25–28 (Apr.–July 1995), you present an incredibly graphic storyline. Specifically, there are dismemberments and bloody torsos on ample display in the beginning of issue #28.

WAGNER: We decided to do a Texas Chainsaw Massacre story, thinking “Let’s go for absolute Italian giallo sort of stuff. We’ve been doing mysteries, so let’s do something that’s horror.”

SEAGLE: And it opens right on that note, as the very first dream is cutting a baby in half, and Wes crawls out of its carcass. I think Guy should have received a lot more credit for how visually inspired and diverse his dream pages were. Some of them were just mind-bogglingly hideous.

WAGNER: And they didn’t look like he ever had any problem with it. It was so easy for him.

SEAGLE: No, and he did them in so many different styles. For instance, he did some in a Tex Avery style later on with so much cool Zipatone on them.

WAGNER: But, as I said, we were just trying to embrace the pulp tradition. When you say “pulp,” that takes in a huge amount of genres, and certainly terror and horror was a big part of the pulp world.

POWERS: With the nameless villain in this story—a cannibalistic butcher—he’s quite a sympathetic one in that he’s mentally ill.

As an example, in issue #28, on page 19, he’s crying for his mother. But this is still a guy who’s cutting people up and mutilating their corpses.

WAGNER: If you look at the film Psycho, Norman Bates has big mother issues.

SEAGLE: We were trying to make a real-world, grounded story. Somebody who does something like that too often is too smart, too cool for school, too clever. Saying that this is somebody who is really damaged—or they wouldn’t do really damaged things—was part of this story. This is the arc where the “Mystery Theater Magazine” pulp starts showing up in the comic book, too. So the writers and an artist of that series within our series are somewhere making a pulp out of Wes’s adventures that the people, especially those on the police force, are reading, wondering if the Butcher is a real guy.

This story arc is also where you start going, “What’s wrong with Burke that this doesn’t bother him more?” There are things you cannot look past, and he’s looking past all these eviscerations like they’re nothing. And you start thinking that this is a damaged guy—that something more is afoot with him.

POWERS: Burke also does not like to see weakness in men, especially in his fellow officers, and he is very powerful in the beginning of issue #27 (June 1995), where he kicks Wesley’s ass in a brutal fashion. This really is a formidable male who is damaged.

WAGNER: Burke is a mobster that didn’t turn out to be a mobster. He should have been in the mafia, and he’s not, but he’s got that same sort of old-world barbarism that he contains by working for the law.

SEAGLE: It’s also interesting that this is a Dian narrative arc. So again, we were trying to get something extremely brutal in opposition of what she’s talking about because we most often disconnected the kind of throughnarrative from having any direct relation to the A-story of the mystery just to get that interplay of soft and hard most of the time.

POWERS: With the next arc, “The Hourman,” that is presented in issues #29–32 (Aug.–Nov. 1995), why did you want to introduce Hourman to the book? You’re getting closer and closer to the JSA continuity of the Golden Age. However, it feels like Sandman Mystery Theatre takes place in its own separate world.

WAGNER: At the same time, we wanted to acknowledge that it was in the DC Universe, and Hourman seems to be a neat

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way to introduce somebody with superpowers but who was a little mundane in the way he got them. He takes a pill, a steroid, and—boom—gets all hopped up for an hour as opposed to coming from a different planet or is bathed in chemicals that give him super-speed. In the original appearances of the Hourman, he advertises in the classifieds and calls himself the “Man of the Hour.” It just seemed a great way to maintain the aesthetic and the narrative vibe that we had set forth and gradually pull in this little bit of the JSA. SEAGLE: We’re also essentially talking about prescription drug abuse. Hourman makes his own pill, but obviously it’s not doctorcontrolled, so there’s this idea of the drug making the man as opposed to the man makes the man. Wes is just himself. He’s got an outfit, a gas mask, and a gun. But this guy is trying to become superhuman through chemical enhancement, which remains a problem to this day as we see entire countries get kicked out of the Olympics for steroid abuse, doping, etc., not to mention a global opioid epidemic. Everything old is new again.

WAGNER: This dichotomy you’re talking about is so perfectly summed up in issue #31 (Oct. 1995), page 21, when they both get into these Halloween costumes to go to the ball, and Hourman is dressed in what turns out to be his actual costume while Wes is dressed in an outfit that evokes the look of the Kirby Sandman costume. They’re both standing in front of a mirror, and Hourman’s like, “Damn, I look cool!” and Wes is just droning like, “I look ridiculous.”

SEAGLE: I love that Wes thinks he looks ridiculous but then has no problem with his own Sandman getup.

WAGNER: There again, he’s haunted into that. That’s an image he can’t control that’s from Morpheus.

SEAGLE: But it was also a way to get him in that original Sandman outfit. We took some flak at the time from people who thought we were really disrespecting the Golden Age. But the more we went on, I think people saw that we knew the Golden Age material, and we were trying to thread it through and keep the timelines intact while looking at it from a street-level view instead of from an ivory tower.

POWERS: With the next story arc, “The Python,” which is told in issues #33–36 (Dec. 1995–Mar. 1996), you have Burke take center stage, which provides an interesting narrative shift.

WAGNER: Well, it was his time.

SEAGLE: And it’s an arc that has everybody out of their element.

Dian goes to a health club, and she feels out of place. Wesley, having had this adventure with this other costumed person, is feeling displaced, and Burke suddenly becomes our kind of front man for the book, so he’s in a different position, and it is a lot about that shifting of things—a creeping unease that everything could be turned over—the impending war in Europe.

The ‘Twisted Zorro’ Courtesy of Alex Winter of Hake’s Auctions, original Guy Davis promotional artwork for the story arc “The Scorpion,” which appeared in Sandman Mystery Theatre #17–20.

TM & © DC Comics.

POWERS: On the topic of the health club, in issue #35 (Feb. 1996), on pages 13–14, Dian is showering, and her body is illustrated

by Warren Pleece in such a natural way.

WAGNER: We absolutely applauded that portrayal. It’s the thing about breasts and comic books—they don’t seem to have gravity. And Warren drew Dian, as you said, looking very naturalistic, like a woman with her clothes off.

SEAGLE: Yeah, Warren Pleece—whom I was a fan of via his Velocity series with his brother Gary—still need a number 1, by the way!—drew this arc, but he followed the Guy models. Societally, there have always been these kinds of “You can look better” campaigns. It’s just that “better” keeps getting redefined as different things in time, and so Dian kind of owning her body was important for where she’s going to go next as a character. And this was a way to tap into that and her insecurities around her friends.

POWERS: Dian also decides to go off to England at the end of this story. What are your thoughts on this surprising conclusion?

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Can the Sandman Cut It? From the Heritage archives, original Guy Davis promo art for the “Night of the Butcher” story arc appearing in Sandman Mystery Theatre #25–28.

TM & © DC Comics.

WAGNER: Neil and I were doing Sandman Midnight Theatre (Sept. 1995) at that point, so that was just deliberate staging to get her over to England so that Wes would follow her across.

POWERS: What were your thoughts on working with Neil on that one-shot?

WAGNER: He was very amenable to it. DC flew me on two different occasions to somewhere where he was touring and doing lectures. One weekend, I remember was in Santa Barbara, where we were in our mutual hotel rooms just hacking out the story. Neil already had the structure of the Burgess mansion and how Morpheus was cooped up there, and we knew as a result that there wasn’t going to be a whole lot of interaction between Morpheus and Wes. Of course, Wes doesn’t remember it afterwards, but Morpheus’s presence is very much felt throughout that entire book.

POWERS: With the next story arc in issues #37–40 (Apr.–July 1996), titled “The Mist,” you get back to the regular continuity and include the Mist, who is a really dangerous villain. What were the origins of this story?

WAGNER: James Robinson was doing Starman.

[Editor’s note: See BACK ISSUE #133 for our Starman coverage.] Both Steve and I had known him for many years. He did the first continuing story arc of Grendel Tales. James and I hooked up and said, “Let’s sort of do a crossover.” I told him, “I’ll take care of the Mist’s origins in Sandman Mystery Theatre, and you can have Wes and Dian in their elder years to guest star in Starman.”

One of the things I particularly loved about the portrayal of Wes and Dian in Starman is the fact that Dian has become famous by that point in their lives. She’s a world-famous author who’s won a Pulitzer, and Wesley is just this kind of strange guy she lives with [laughs].

SEAGLE: [laughs] Seems fitting. The arc is intriguing because it is one of the first World War II microcosm storylines that we get into. There are Nazis, and there are government inventions of weapons that can do terrible things to people. It really started to boil the war tension up in the book.

WAGNER: And included the first kind of paranormal science-fiction elements in the comic, too, with the Mist’s body dissolving and finally becoming insubstantial.

SEAGLE: But in Starman, the Mist is one thing. In the context of World War II about to break out in Sandman Mystery Theatre, “mists” are a different thing. Gas turning a body to garbage is a different thing, and I thought it really resonated what was happening/about to happen in Europe very well.

WAGNER: I did too.

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POWERS: You were talking about history in terms of context, and, in this story, you have a Jewish subplot that touches upon the growing tension between the Germans and the Jews.

WAGNER: All that stuff was happening for real. We were trying to show that progressive thought didn’t just pop up on its own in the ’60s—it had been around for a long time, which also applies to the fascist movement that we were talking about.

Fascism always arises as a reaction to progressivism because progressivism challenges society and wants change, and people get reactionary and resistant to that. Plenty of people in the United States had an unreasonable hatred for the Jews as well at this time. It just wasn’t allowed to flourish and be set loose in the same way it was in Germany.

SEAGLE: We didn’t have our series ending in mind by any stretch of the imagination, but we constantly talked about World War II being a change point and wanted to have that start percolating.

As Matt was saying, a lot of people in the US turned a blind eye to what was going on in Europe and downplayed its severity. For Wes and Dian, we wanted to show that they were aware that there was more going on in certain sectors of society. Again, that came from reading old New York Times pieces and seeing how things were going down.

POWERS: You also make this really powerful decision to reveal in issue #40, page 16, that Wesley’s half Jewish on his mother’s side.

SEAGLE: I think we knew he was half Jewish from the get-go.

WAGNER: I don’t remember whether we did or not, but I’m going to say I was probably inspired with that plot decision from the film Cabaret, which has one of the characters being Jewish and hiding it.

WAGNER: This was also another opportunity to bring in a Golden Age character with the Crimson Avenger, who is another sideline hero character brought in just to show what Wes is doing, but he’s doing it with a completely different tilt, intent, and outcome.

SEAGLE: These issues had some of the creepy dreams where Guy drew the animals in the style of the Fleisher Studios or Warner Bros. We didn’t send him a ton of reference material.

He just imagined what it looked like to walk around the Fair or what an underground torture chamber in the fair would look like, and he drew it out of his head, and it was exactly like what you would have thought somebody who researched it for years would have come up with. He’s a genius that way.

POWERS: What do you think about how you wrote the villain for this story arc? I mean, he’s sadomasochistic, repressed, and gay.

WAGNER: Our thought there was we’d already had a variety of gay characters and given them a very positive portrayal. But the point is that every human’s capable of becoming a monster, and you aren’t saved from that if you are gay.

SEAGLE: The character Robert from “The Face” returns. He’s gay, and he’s got a boyfriend. It’s also to give Wesley this kind of ticking clock of “I know this threat is out there, and now I know exactly who’s going to get murdered.” A lot of these anonymous crimes don’t have a connection to Wesley other than the fact that he’s troubled by his dreams and is compelled to capture the culprit, but this one becomes extremely, intimately personal for him.

WAGNER: And a little closer to home.

POWERS: With your next story arc, “The Phantom of the Fair,” which ran in issues #41–44 (Aug.–Nov. 1996), you bring us to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. What level of research went into that storyline?

WAGNER: We knew we had been aiming for the fair for a long time, because, of course, it’s such a huge, significant part of New York history at that time, and boy, that was a blast. All those wacky exhibits that they go to see—that’s stuff Steve dug up in particular that were real.

SEAGLE: I have a weird hobby niche of World’s Fairs in general, and I had a room in my house that we called the “World’s Fair Bedroom,” in which I had furniture that I bought from the 1939 New York World’s Fair House of Tomorrow, which was in that bedroom until we recently adopted a nine-year-old! But I literally was very into the 1939 Fair. It was the main inspiration for and prototype of Disneyland. That particular World’s Fair had this very good goal, which was to show attendees what the world could be instead of what it is.

So, leave it to Matt to suggest dumping a cruddy underbelly into this pristine vision of the future. But then the fair, as you research it, was rife with corruption and had all kinds of financial problems. It was actually almost bankrupt at the end of 1939 and then rebranded itself in 1940 as a shell of what it was, just to try to make back lost expenses. Also, we were both aware of DC’s real-life entry into the corporate carnival of the fair—they released New York World’s Fair Comics Volume #1 in 1939, which featured both Superman and… of course, Wesley Dodds, the Sandman!

Seems Like Old Times (top) Sandman and Hourman slip into their old threads in Sandman Mystery Theatre #31 (Oct. 1995). (bottom) Blackhawk meets Sandwoman—no, make that Sandy—as a masked Dian chauffeurs the Polish operative in issue #47.

TM & © DC Comics.

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POWERS: In issue #42 (Sept. 1996), on page 20, Wesley discovers Robert is gay, but then his friend is tortured and murdered by the villain in issue #44. Later in that issue, via internal narration on page 17, Wesley reflects upon the time he and Robert had submitted themselves to a humiliating homoerotic college fraternity initiation ritual. I mean, you really go to the edge with his character in this part. You already did this with Dian by showing she’s bi-curious, but now you’ve turned that psychoanalytical mirror upon Wesley.

WAGNER: Boys experiment with all sorts of sh*t when they’re young, and they don’t consider it a branding on their sexuality at all.

SEAGLE: Well, we do now. Back in those days, if you had swimming class in high school, you swam naked, like all the guys just swam naked at the pool or the YMCA. Or if you went to boarding school, mutual masturbation and exploration among boys was not uncommon. But it didn’t define you forever as homosexual or bisexual as a branding label like it would now—whether as a positive or a negative.

It was Kinsey before there was Kinsey. For Wes, and many men of the time, it was like, “This is just something we did, and now we do something else,” so it wasn’t so defined and labeled.

WAGNER: In regard to the killer in “The Phantom,” doesn’t it just seem inevitable that, with the most virulently antigay people, you can look at them, and it’s just so obvious they are internalizing their hatred and expressing it because they can’t find the freedom to express that love and sexuality on their own terms?

POWERS: In issue #44, on page 10, in the last panel, you also make a visual connection to the Corinthian from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman in a dream sequence by saying his name and evoking the image of his face.

SEAGLE: This is just because of “The Phantom” having the zippered bondage suit, mask and stuff that, visually, felt like the Corinthian. There are always these silly little fiefdoms in mainstream/corporate-owned comics. We were quite concretely part of Neil’s Sandman world, but we also weren’t allowed to make it the same character, yet we could allude to “that time when Morpheus was in prison and Wes was living the same nightmares”—Huh…? Relax. It’s just comics.

But whatever. And Vertigo was getting more and more edicts from on high to stop commingling with the DC Universe, and Neil was getting more and more famous and didn’t want anybody playing with his toys—not in a prima donna way, I don’t think—it’s just—that’s his sandbox.

WAGNER: We kept bringing in the other DC characters for a while.

SEAGLE: Never ones to take and edict lying down, we did, but I mean the imprint by and large was getting flak not to do it.

POWERS: Talking about Guy Davis, his one—or several—pages of dream sequences found in various issues of Sandman Mystery Theatre depict Wes’ complex dreams and the fact that he is connected to Morpheus.

SEAGLE: Again, it’s what Neil said in the first issue of Sandman, so the connective tissue is that Sandman’s dreams haunt Wesley Dodds.

‘The World of Tomorrow’ (top left) Grinnell Litho produced this stunning 1939 New York World’s Fair poster illustrated by Vienna-born painter Joseph Binder. Courtesy of Heritage. (top right) DC Comics’ New York World’s Fair Comics #1 (Apr. 1939), featuring the first appearance of the Golden Age Sandman (as well as a blond Superman on the cover)! (bottom) Wes and Dian take in the sights of the ’39 World’s Fair in this detail-drenched shot from Sandman Mystery Theatre #41 (Aug. 1996).

Sandman, Superman, and related characters TM & © DC Comics.

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WAGNER: Through no explicable reason of Wesley’s—it’s just he becomes a conduit for Morpheus.

SEAGLE: We tried to always make the dreams consistent in each arc, but they were wildly different from each other outside of each arc. The dream logic and language of them changed. There was usually a binding poetic device or a narrative prosaic device for how they function in each four-issue arc.

POWERS: One other point I want to make is that you include Jim Corrigan in this story arc, yet he never becomes the Spectre.

WAGNER: I saved that for Madame Xanadu eventually. We were just bringing in the character, adding texture to show that he was existing in that world.

SEAGLE: The JSA framework was around, but if it didn’t serve a story we were telling, we didn’t use it.

WAGNER: We didn’t feel the need to show Corrigan as the Spectre or even to indicate whether he was the Spectre or not yet.

SEAGLE: Gavin Wilson photographed the covers, and Richard Bruning did all the designs on them, but with the cover for issue #47 (Feb. 1997) where Dian’s in the mask and in the car, I was like, “Wow, who is this person, and where is that car? That car is really gorgeous.”

WAGNER: Gavin was very clever about coming up with the gear for all that.

SEAGLE: They were actual photographs, actual models.

POWERS: I also have a note here on issue #48 and its commentary on pulp violence and thugs operating in the publishing world.

SEAGLE: I think this is the one where we’ve got the publishing house under Mafia control, why pulps existed, and why comics took their place, so we were just laying in that groundwork because we knew we were going there for the big 50th issue soiree and building out the meta-world where Sandman was a really tough and interesting continued on page 72

That’s Hardly Fair The Phantom of the Fair tortures a victim on the disturbing cliffhanger to Sandman Mystery Theatre #42. By Wagner/ Seagle/Davis.

TM & © DC Comics.

POWERS: You continue with this theme of including more elements from the DC Golden Age in the next arc, “The Blackhawk,” that runs in issues #45–48 (Dec. 1996–Mar. 1997). I am particularly impressed when Blackhawk—Janos Prohaska—fights back against Burke during the interrogation scene in the beginning of issue #46 (Jan. 1997). I found that very empowering. Any thoughts on the way you depict Janos as a tough heroic figure?

SEAGLE: He’s not what Wesley ought to be, but he’s what Wesley thinks sometimes he ought to be in terms of being a hero and more masculine. Matt Smith draws this arc, and it involves a little bit of “How does Wesley think Dian sees this guy versus him?” The story then opens the door for where the series eventually goes at the end, which is wings up and headed for Europe.

POWERS: At the beginning of the arc, on page 13 in issue #45, Burke, who’s crying over the murder of a prostitute, Gina, has a breakthrough moment with Wesley, the Sandman, by letting him join him in an investigation of her murder. Why was this the right time to present the scene to the readers?

WAGNER: Even Burke’s human. That was just our approach with everything. Everybody has a soft side, even a hard-as-nails tough guy like Burke.

SEAGLE: The portrayal of Burke has gotten harder and harder. He’s granite by the time he gets here, and the only human he actually has in his life he pays for, and that’s taken away from him. His life is always one of loss, but this is what breaks him.

In Burke’s mind, he’s thinking, “A prostitute is human garbage—no one will take that from me.”

And he loses her too, and he’s also wrong about that. He cares more for her than he’s willing to tell himself. At that point, he can’t do anything alone—even the thing he does best. He’s got to have somebody, a system, and, unfortunately for him, the only somebody he could think of that can do it is Sandman.

POWERS: We also got Dian in this arc as Sandy with her little driver mask.

WAGNER: She’s Kato!

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fictional hero in the pulps that Wesley could never be in real life.

Pulp Fiction The splash page from Sandman Mystery Theatre #49 (Apr. 1997) emulated the layout of 1930s pulp magazines, reflecting the issue’s storyline where Wes and Dian poke around the seedy world of pulp publishers.

TM & © DC Comics.

POWERS: Moving into “Return of the Scarlet Ghost,” in issues #49–52 (Apr.–July 1997), why was this story important to you?

SEAGLE: It was the unification of that meta, so historically, this is when pulps died, and comics came to be. This is really the birth of Wesley Dodds recontextualized to the here-and-now with some gore added. Because Matt’s always willing to experiment with narrative forms, he had this great idea to put pulp pages in the comic to tell the story.

WAGNER: And it was our way of getting around that yellow and purple Sandman costume, in that the costume existed, but it existed in a comic book version of our reality.

SEAGLE: Again, there is the ratcheting up of the war as this arc opens with Poland falling to the Nazis, and we know Jonas—the Blackhawk—has gone there from the previous arc, so the drumbeat gets louder in that regard. Also, the dream sequence in issue #50 (May 1997) is actually a piece of every dream sequence from issue #1 up

through #49, with an element or a caption from each recombined to make a single narrative out of all of the dreams to date, to show that there’s something more in Wes’s mind than he knows. I was very stoked to pull that off, but then no one noticed—not editorial, not readers, no one! But it’s there! We likewise have the comic book pages in that issue drawn by the legendary Daniel Torres in a 1930s/’40s style.

WAGNER: It was our way again to explain away the yellow-and-purple costume.

SEAGLE: It’s literally a comic within a comic that explains how Sandman from the pulps turned into Sandman from the comics and why we’re not going to do that costume. There’s no way to make that costume look legit other than the party scene that we already did in “The Hourman” arc. So, we’re going to establish that Sandman got turned into a spandex hero because of the exploits of Wes that even he had no control over. But it was fun to try to go back and write in that old-house style, definitely with word bubbles instead of word balloons for those pages.

WAGNER: I remember when we were doing the Annual, and Alex Ross says to me, “You know this isn’t fair because you’re doing this cool pulp stuff, and in just like a year or two, Wes is going to be in that yellow-and-purple costume,” and I’m thinking to myself, “No, he’s not, buddy.”

SEAGLE: Oh, I hope not!

POWERS: With the next arc, “The Crone,” that runs through issues #53–56 (Aug.–Nov. 1997), you present the setting of a radio show and its many eccentric performers. What went into this story arc?

SEAGLE: We were still just talking about The Shadow and stuff like that, which we hadn’t gone into, and radio drama is such a key part of America and our fixation with media. It’s like doing a story about the current world and not having the internet in it.

How could we miss that?

WAGNER: And the story has a traditional intellectual, who would look at all these new forms of entertainment narrative with a snooty, disapproving opinion.

SEAGLE: It’s also getting us into Dian’s dad and his coming unwellness and certainly the conversation about children that is brewing between Wes and Dian and whether this is a world where that need for future generations even matters. The Crone is the world’s worst mommy/nanny, and the dreams become eerily Dian-specific and kind of harrowing because they’re from Wesley’s point of view more than Morpheus’, which is telling.

WAGNER: In my mind, the worst thing about the Crone is that she hates the movie The Wizard of Oz, which she sees as vastly inferior to the book! [laughs] POWERS: What went into the way you wrote Francis Beauvedere in this story arc? He’s kind of a hapless villain. Wesley sees him in drag and says he doesn’t make a good woman.

SEAGLE: Back then, there were obviously transvestites—as they called them at the time—and cross-dressers—which we will call them later.

Now we would say trans people. And there were people for whom it was a way of life, and there were people for whom it was diagnosed as a psychosis

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and everything in between those poles. Francis was a damaged person. He got really hung up on his mom and was acting out to hang on to her. Francis wasn’t a transgendered person. This is somebody who really got stuck on his mother issues and didn’t process that trauma, so I think the critique was more about his psychology than his appearance.

POWERS: Do you have anything else to say about this arc?

SEAGLE: This is where Matt’s trying to leave me, and I’m like, “Don’t go!”

WAGNER: It was because of the second Mage. Once I started that, there’s no room for anything else. Mage is all-consumptive when I’m working on it.

SEAGLE: I’d gotten him to hang on, so we would still meet up, figure out the year together, and break those into parts. Then, I would write up the paragraph for Guy but get Matt’s input before it went out.

WAGNER: At one point, wasn’t I writing up just a page or two about the whole arc but not doing the full plot for the issue?

SEAGLE: Yes. We would talk about the year, you would do overviews every four months, and I would lean on you as much as you’d let me. But you were like, “I’ve got stuff to do!”

POWERS: Doesn’t Dr. Mid-Nite show up in that arc?

WAGNER: Dr. McNider is in there somewhere.

SEAGLE: Once those characters show up, they’re fair game, but they’re also kind of a distraction because the JSA fan base in our audience really wanted the book to shift to JSA, and that’s not what the book was for me.

WAGNER: Yeah, they wanted more of like “The Hourman” arc.

SEAGLE: But if Wes got injured and needed a doctor, McNider was certainly an option to use, but again, he wasn’t going to be in costume.

POWERS: Your final story together is “The Cannon,” which ran in issues #57–60 (Dec. 1997–Mar. 1998). What are your memories of working on that arc?

SEAGLE: Numismatics was something we hadn’t touched on, but, again, we always had this running thing about money as social status in the book. And this arc was also a big religious thing; the villain was the Cannon, so there was no hiding that kind of idea of the cross pollination of coins and churches. But, at this point, with Matt doing his own stuff, he left me to my own devices, so Sandman Mystery Theatre was evolving into a more of a Wes-and-Dian romance comic.

WAGNER: Oh, you know what—Gaiman had something to do with this. I think he coined the name of the character the Cannon.

SEAGLE: Probably so—in the coins on the eyes, the final rights, and all that stuff. The arc is also a little more Agatha Christie–ish, and Michael Lark’s art is beautiful—that’s for sure.

POWERS: With this story in terms of Dian and Wes’ complicated relationship, there is a scene in issue #57, on page one, in the final panel, where Dian says to Wes, “It’s not the pain of losing the child, Wesley. It’s the pain of knowing I chose to give it up.”

This is some intense stuff that’s going on between them, especially considering the fact that Wes simply let Dian go through with the abortion without any argument occurring between them.

SEAGLE: “The Crone” was that pain happening, and “The Cannon” is the reflection. So, a lot of child loss, whether it’s by choice or by circumstance, it is those two things—the weight of the decision and the depression or acceptance of the choice.

Knowing that the narrative arc was going to shift to Dian, I really wanted to just plunge her into that. She has to work her way through it, and all four of those issues have a romance comic vibe more than the mysteries because I was gutted over what she could be going through. And her process of grief/acceptance drives a wedge between her and Wesley. No matter what

Lord Knows “The Lord of Dreams,” are you, Wes? Would Morpheus agree? Detail from 8 of Sandman Mystery Theatre #58 (Jan. 1998). Script by Steven T. Seagle (with a story assist from Matt Wagner), pencils by Michael Lark, and inks by Richard Case.

TM & © DC Comics.

they talked about, does she feel like Wes should have fought harder? Should she have made a different choice? Was that the only chance she was going to have? When we see them later in Starman, it’s implied they didn’t have any kids. That was the decision they made as a couple, so it had a massive consequence.

I imagine it informs her writing. It’s probably why she won a Pulitzer Prize for her writing because of that particular pain.

POWERS: On page 16 of issue #58 (Jan. 1998), Wesley’s trying to initiate sex with Dian, but she cannot reciprocate his advances since she is still processing her recent abortion. That’s a painful scene in many ways.

SEAGLE: And not because of medical issues—not because she’s in physical pain—but because she’s in psychic pain about it.

And what does the act of sexual intercourse mean to them as a couple now? Are they going to get to the same point, the same impossible choice again? Is this just a repeating cycle going forward? It’s heavy sh*t.

WAGNER: I want to point out that this is a bit of our period approach to things because there are still women that experience this sort of psychic trauma when they have an abortion. But if you’re on the pro-choice side of things—I’ve known plenty of women that have had abortions and suffer no trauma whatsoever in that they just considered it a medical procedure. Whereas, back in 1938 or ’39 or ’40, whenever that was that we had this happening, it was still such a black-market sort of scenario. Even

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the most progressive minds, like Wes and Dian, would be operating under the auspices of the societal condemnation of it.

SEAGLE: I think we did go to some extremes to make sure that it was about what Dian wanted, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have regrets by any stretch of the imagination.

WAGNER: Wesley’s still the Sandman. Even more than other costume adventurers, he’s haunted and doing this almost against his will. That doesn’t make good daddy material.

POWERS: Talking about Wesley, when he’s in his Sandman garb on page 8 of issue #58, he ominously says to Reverend Hawsley, “The Lord of Dreams is not accustomed to casting a tangible shadow. What is your business here, man of God?” Simply put, why is he talking like Morpheus?

WAGNER: Wes is doing that very unconsciously since he thinks it will help intimidate people, but he’s not even aware that he’s adopting Morpheus’ own nomenclature.

SEAGLE: I forget where it is specifically, but somewhere in the series Dian makes fun of the way Wesley talks as Sandman. But, for him, it’s camouflage.

It’s part of a costume, so others can’t track the way he talks back to him. But it’s also very pulpy.

WAGNER: Again, he’s trying to intimidate. When you speak in that creepy third-person sort of sh*t, that’s off putting.

SEAGLE: I think, again, back to the very DNA of what Matt and Guy set up at the beginning, which is that the mask for him is the Morpheus mask. It is him behind a veil, and those dreams are compelling him to do what he’s doing at night, and I don’t think he’s completely in control of it at all times.

WAGNER: Hardly ever, I would think! He has a methodology to how he brings it to fruition, but, as you said, the compulsion is there that is beyond his grasp.

SEAGLE: But he’s got to do it—an addiction metaphor.

WAGNER: That’s why by the time he shows up in Starman, when James was writing that arc, he’s no longer putting on that mask and going out all the time. Morpheus is free; this is over. There’s a scene where he shows up in the mask, and you can tell he hasn’t had that thing on in a long time. So yeah, as Steve said, it’s a mystical compulsion that overtakes him.

Man of Mystery Really, we can’t get enough of Guy Davis’ artwork! Here’s a 2004 Sandman commission

by Guy from the archives of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

POWERS: Regarding this darker character development of Wesley losing his mind, Steve, with your final Sandman Mystery Theatre two-part arc “The Hero,” in issues #69–70 (Jan.–Feb. 1999), you show him becoming temporarily deranged after falling into a trash truck. What lead you to going the distance with this plot point?

SEAGLE: Again, we knew the book was ending, and I kept calmly going to [DC editor] Joan Hilty and Karen Berger, “I know we’re going to get cancelled, and I want to make sure we go out right. Is it now?” And they’d reply, “No, you’re fine.” “How about now?” “No, you’re fine.” And as this last year got set up, I did the first four-part arc in issues #61–64 (Apr.–Aug. 1998), which is “The City,” which is this Rashomon kind of story told from the point of view of Wes and Dian and then Burke and the butler, Humphries. Just seeing how one crime looks from four different perspectives—that was a lot of fun to construct and pull off. Also, it was nice to learn a bit more about Humphries and his daughter, who had been a recurring character in the margins. Then, “The Goblin,” in issues #65–68 (Sept.–Dec. 1998), which is kind of like, “What is the aftermath of babies terrifying me?” for the couple. I kept checking in—“Cancelled or not?” “Well… you might want to think about wrapping it up in the next four.”

So I had an idea of what a final four-partner would be, I plotted it out, and after we’re already working, I get a call that we had to end it after two issues, and I responded, “Sandman Mystery Theatre is always four. It’s been four since the beginning. Please get the other two issues. I don’t care what it takes. Cancel some other book I’m on and take two issues from that—whatever you need. If you want me to do it for free, I’ll do it for free, but it has to be four issues.” There was—I’m told—some kind of behind-the-scenes power struggle tit-for-tat, and Karen could not get the book the exit it deserved. Two issues was it.

So with just two issues left, I was like, “F*ck this. It’s a four-issue story, but the War is the war—it interrupted lives; it interrupted history; it can interrupt this series. We’re going to do two issues of those four issues of the mystery, but then Wes and Dian’s life will propel out of there—interrupted by the War.” The idea that they would just leave the mystery mid-mystery—leave their own series midstream—seemed like the right thing and the best use of a crappy publishing

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decision. For that to happen, though, Wes had to be kind of rock bottom and in need of something else.

Dian had to be at wit’s end and too conflicted over what the city means to her so that when they look at each other and go, “Are we already married? I think we are. Screw this joint. Let’s go,” they just leave the mystery in the hands of Burke, who has proven he can bust people who do bad things, and the Crimson Avenger, who wants to put on fancy superhero clothes and do crime-solving anyway. So, Wes and Dian just exit their own book mid-story.

WAKEUP CALL

POWERS: What about Burke?

SEAGLE: Burke hit his personal rock bottom with the death of his girlfriend. He relied on Wes, and so that says to Wes, “Whatever granite-bullsh*t man you are, there’s reason in there. There’s a you that knows when to ask for help.” Wes feels like they have a certain respect between them. They fought a bunch of times; they’ve let each other go a bunch of times. And Wes is leaving. He knows that his place is with Dian, and they are leaving the United States to try to go help his brother in Poland, with Janos most likely, and he’s got to leave it in somebody’s hands. So that’s who there is— Burke and the Crimson Avenger—and neither one is a perfect fit, but, frankly, neither is Wesley.

POWERS: Doesn’t Burke now also have a new girlfriend—Doris?

SEAGLE: Yeah, he’s tried again. He definitely reconnects. That’s part of what the arc of “The City” establishes.

WAGNER: I always pictured Burke ultimately ending up an alcoholic in Boca Raton.

SEAGLE: Probably, yeah. He was a dirty cop the longer he stayed in, no question. Now he’s a private detective taking money for sh*t he shouldn’t be doing, and then he died in Boca Raton.

POWERS: Regarding the characters Lawrence Belmont and Humphries, do you have any thoughts on them since they’re nicely developed over the years in Sandman Mystery Theatre?

SEAGLE: Dian’s dad gives her that kind of person with whom she’s going to prove her maturity as we go. And then he becomes infirm, and she proves that she is the adult who now has to take care of the kid version of her parent. And then eventually he passes away. You know, that’s the arc of life. That’s what we do—from kid to young adult, to adult, to parent having our own kids. As for Humphries, Wesley strangely comes from money yet doesn’t seem to lavish himself in it, so it feels like a trapping from his father’s legacy since he has passed. Yet Humphries is that fatherly voice on occasion.

WAGNER: But Humphries came with the house. You’re right! [laughs] POWERS: How does he differ from Batman’s Alfred?

SEAGLE: Alfred seems, especially as time goes on, way too invested in everything. Humphries does his job. He helps the person he’s paid to help out, and maybe he’ll make a comment that says, “You’re kind of screwed, buddy,” but he goes home to his room at the end of the night and shuts it off. I think that’s the big difference. But it was nice to give him that issue of “The City,” #63 (July 1998), so you saw he had an internal life as well. He’s got this daughter, Etta, that he cares about, who comes up through several of the stories. He wants Dian to take her under her wing, but sometimes your kid is not the kid you want; whereas, for Dian’s dad, she is the kid that he dreamed he would have, so just paralleling those two characters against each other was interesting. There was a lot about female friendships in this book and the different

TM & © DC Comics.

In case you’ve been napping, in October 2023 DC Comics launched the six-issue miniseries Wesley Dodds: The Sandman! The creative team is writer Robert Venditti and artist Riley Rossmo.

forms those took in that particular moment of society, and that was another person to be that foil for Dian.

POWERS: As we wrap up—and this is a question I’m sure many BACK ISSUE readers would like to hear answered—would you both revisit the Golden Age Sandman if you could do it again?

WAGNER: I don’t know what we would do with it. We already saw where Wes and Dian go ultimately in their old age in Starman. Maybe an adventure where they first come back from Europe because they do obviously return from Europe at some point post-WWII? SEAGLE: We covered a ton of ground. It felt very complete.

Bring Sandman Mystery Theatre back as a TV show and let Matt and I sit in that writers room instead and help people make a new thing out of it. But I do wonder what Wes and Dian did in Europe. I wonder what happened when they came back and what remained of the New York they left. That’s why stories are fun because they tell us parts, and then we imagine the other parts. When I was in fifth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Maxwell, read this book to us called The Blue Man by Kin Platt. Creepy. But I moved before she finished reading the final chapters. I didn’t know what happened, and that’s why I became a writer because I was like “What happened next in that book”? My wife found the book decades later and bought it for me. But I’ve never read the last chapter because I don’t want to know.

WAGNER: [laughs] Yeah, that’s great!

POWERS: Is there anything you would like to add about working together?

WAGNER: It’s just as Steve said—I think it surprised both of us with how easy it turned out to be. From a writing standpoint, we were each other’s first love! [laughs] SEAGLE: [laughs] Who would have thought, Matt? I literally assumed it was a doomed venture from the moment you suggested it! Live and learn!

TOM POWERS teaches English at Montgomery County Community College, which is located in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. He is also the author of Gender and the Quest in British Science Fiction Television: An Analysis of Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Red Dwarf and Torchwood (McFarland, 2016).

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 75

Sleep Tight!

Matt Wagner shows his skill at drawing the Golden Age Sandman matches his ability to write the character.

According to Matt, who kindly shared this previously unpublished illustration with BACK ISSUE, “It was a piece I did as a thank-you to [comedy actor] Patton Oswalt for writing the intros for both volumes of the huge, new SMT Omnibus editions.” Wow! We’re honored to share this gem.

Sandman TM & © DC Comics.

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Send your comments to: Email: euryman@gmail.com (subject: BACK ISSUE) Postal mail: Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief • BACK ISSUE 112 Fairmount Way * New Bern, NC 28562

Find BACK ISSUE on

SPIDER-ROGUES ARE IN VOGUE

Semi-regular reader since BI #126; really enjoyed most of the past year’s worth of top-notch comics journalism. I feel inspired by a certain letter in #143 to gush about upcoming subject matter like Danny DeVito pines for a Jersey Mike’s sub. BACK ISSUE #145 will be covering my favorite Rogues’ Gallery, and I am wildly anticipating each and every article on their eclectic membership.

Doc Ock had loads of iconic Bronze Age moments, which I’d find tough to distill down to the length of an article, let alone a 20-page lead. Three stick out to me as especially significant to my understanding of him as a character (apart from later revelations of his backstory and his “Superior Spidey” tenure, but that’s beyond BI’s stomping grounds). The killing of Capt. George Stacy, even if it was by complete accident, was one of ten-yearold me’s first experiences with a “real” death of a character I’d liked following, which got me all hot and bothered about how that would affect Peter’s life and Gwen’s welfare; it also embittered me toward Octavius for what felt to me like it would be for life. Ock “marrying” Aunt May just to try and inherit her (alleged) wealth was both a wonderfully silly soap-opera beat and a sign that Otto will manipulate anyone he sees fit, even those he apparently has genuine feelings for, just to serve his own ends. Talk about petty! And the storyline of him going after Aunt May’s inheritance of a Three Mile–esque nuclear facility, only to end up clashing with the “ghost” of Hammerhead, is just the sheer height of Bronze bombast, a blast to revisit when it was reprinted in Marvel Comics Digest #1 in 2017, one of very few times in my life that I had the classic experience of reading comics on my front porch with a soda.

The Lizard is one character I’ve had mixed feelings about. His tragic backstory is the first one I tend to think of when I’m reflecting on how villains get their start; his power set, particularly his early ability to summon other reptiles to serve as an army of sorts, is fun and terrifying, and his on-off friendship with Spidey was one of the first I really latched onto when it recurred in my reading. At the same time, it seems like his whole existence has been steadily diminishing returns with the same plot beats hit too often to leave much of an impact anymore. (“Oh, you don’t say, he betrayed his family again, is devolving into a monster, and has been lurking in the sewers

for the past month? I wonder if Spidey will try to stab him with the antidote needle soon, and how the heck it takes six months to do all this nowadays whereas Lee and Ditko pulled it off masterfully in ten or so pages in JUST ONE ISSUE.”) YouTube’s GodzillaMendoza a couple of years ago did a brilliant job addressing a lot of my feelings regarding Dr. Connors and his scaly alter ego. Great character, but I just wish modern writers and artists went somewhere vastly different with him.

Kingpin is definitely more of a Daredevil Big Bad today, but I also like his earliest status as the culmination of Spidey’s anti-crime campaign riling up the New York underworld, the natural end product of Big Man, Hammerhead, Silvermane, etc., all attempting to solidify their status against the Wall-Crawler through both traditional gangland tactics and funding the creation of supervillains like Rhino. Wilson Fisk represents the evolutionary apex of both lines, intimidating enough to claw to the top of the Maggia pecking order and strong enough to throw his own weight around (remember: densely packed muscle, not dense fat) when the need to fight is felt. If Spidey’s first decade were a video game, Kingpin would be the natural candidate for, as Japan’s GameCenter CX, would put it, “true final last boss.” (By the way, can you tell I greatly loved the Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon’s use of the gangland characters to drive much of the plot development?)

I’ve given a lot of my love for the mob villains to Kingpin, but I will say Silvermane’s arc from influential leader to bawling baby was truly weird and shocking, both in the comics and on Spidey’s ’90s animated series.

Hammerhead was another favorite (thanks, Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro for PS1!) just because of the weird head shape and how he could ram people with his steel noggin Rhino-style. For a kid that hadn’t quite discovered the joys of Dick Tracy’s enemies, particularly Flattop and his surprisingly huge extended family, that was just crazy stupid fun. (I did love the Daffy Duck classic The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, so at least I had a good basis for when I got into the “real deal” decades later.)

Jackal is so creepy, both in his motivation and his methods; he didn’t need the ‘90s Clone Saga to more than earn his all-time bad guy bona fides. I often mistake Carrion for BI #140’s Sauron and vice versa; I guess there’s only so many ways one can conceive of a dino/man guy with wings who kidnaps people with his talons, so small wonder I get mixed up on them. At least I don’t confuse them for Vulture; the latter, TM & © Marvel. an old man with a very green and feathery look, is memorable enough to stick out in my memory.

(Unless, of course, he’s mind-swapped into a younger body, in which case, all bets are off.)

Tarantula, the Spanish assassin with the steel-tipped heels, was a cool villain to introduce in the first issue of Spectacular Spider-Man vol. 1, as a slightly different take on who might embody the term “Spider-Man.” Beyond that, I can’t recall him much, and I’m not sure if he’s even being used at all today. There’s one villain in sore need of a PR boost!

Puma, another villain who I feel could’ve had a bigger carbon footprint on the reading public if only he’d been more active for far longer than just the mid-’80s. He’s a character archetype I just gravitated towards: a Native American running a big business like a born-’80s yuppie by day, chasing Spidey in a costume straight out of a cheesy Mystery Science Theater 3000 film by night. Both sides

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 77

of his persona have continued to affect American culture in recent years, so I’m surprised he hasn’t made some kind of comeback.

“Spider-Foes Only a Mother Could Love?” How many of them even have mothers, I wonder? Looking at the online preview, it looks like you’ve got many of the animal-themed ones like Kangaroo and Gibbon covered, and I can imagine you’ve saved room for the likes of Rocket Racer and Big Wheel, two infamous gimmick-based baddies who both had at least one ’90s cartoon episode each devoted to them (and both eps are somehow considered the worst of their respective season, go figure; I at least got the pleasure of discovering them in the first place, and who doesn’t love a big ol’ motorized menace to artificially add motion?). The alltime poster child of weird one-offs, the Spot, has been on something of a comeback trail in the past decade, and recently served as the ostensible lead baddie in the Across the Spider-Verse film this year, so I’m assuming he’s off the table this time around. At least he made the BI #145 cover, right above Mr. Negative of SpiderMan PS4 fame!

So many rogues, it’s hard for me to anticipate which of their features will end up my favorite. Oh, heck, I’ll just say I’m looking forward to them all and see what you and your farm team of fabulous fact-finders can do for each. See you in... uh... seven-ish, as of when I’m writing this!

– Ben Kellogg

Even the way he was depicted escalated the savagery aspect with fangs and talons. Instead of a rousing fight, it was now brutal bloodletting.

If Stan and Steve meant him as a one-time opponent, maybe things would have worked out for the best that way?

Complete and satisfying in itself. Better than some of the storylines I luckily missed, especially the one noted where he was “killing and eating his own son.” Not my idea of entertainment.

Did enjoy when Roy Thomas was questioned about who gave the Lizard fangs. He thought it likely was Gil Kane.

Unfortunately, beyond visual decoration, it started him down the road to being a more ferocious creature and not just a maladjusted scientist in a startling form.

Of course, when these villains were first created, no one knew they’d still be in use 60 years later and under different writers and editors all looking to do something different.

– Joe Frank We fielded your question about the character-crammed cover to its artist, Dusty Abell, who replied:

Great insights you’ve shared in your letter, Ben… which you wrote before even reading BACK ISSUE #145!

Astounding cover! Good thing I had a magnifying glass and a spare 20 minutes. So fun to get beyond the characters I didn’t know, or for which I’ve no nostalgia, and meticulously attempt to find the early Steve Ditko opponents I wholeheartedly enjoy.

Laughed at spotting some more obscure ones like the Living Brain, the Looter, and, on my third search, the Crime Master.

Did I somehow miss the Burglar, the Cat, Dr. Stromm’s robots, and Joe Smith? Or were they hiding behind the logo or UPC box? Still, if Dusty Abell included them, that would have officially made this cover more crowded than an aisle at Comic-Con International.

Perhaps, in a future issue, once his drawing hand heals from doing this rendition of the Sinister Sixty, you can ask him questions about the cover? How long it took? Who had to be included? Did he realize, afterwards, that he forgot anyone?

Any characters more fun for him than others?

Laughs inside, too. Probably the funniest was artist Ross Andru basing a house on an existing one, which he’d photographed, and the residents being badgered by fans who recognized it.

Ordinarily, with BACK ISSUE, I might read an article and feel I missed out on something in overlooking a series 50 years back. Here, in some cases, it was just the opposite. I was only too happy to have missed clones, symbiotes, and the like.

While I loved Amazing Spider-Man #12, with Doctor Octopus unmasking Peter and rejecting the obvious, due to a brilliant plot twist, glad I was long gone by the time he was wooing Aunt May, caught near a nuclear explosion, or fighting gangster ghosts.

Ditto the Lizard. His first story (#6), along with the prerequisite action, was emotionally balanced and sympathetic.

A villain, no question, but with a catch such that Spider-Man didn’t want to actually hurt him. So, a terrific complication.

Later appearances diluted or lost that all-important aspect.

TM & © Marvel.

WHERE’S WEBHEAD?

The “Sinister Sixty,” that’s a great one, Joe! There’s actually 91 villains altogether, but Sinister Sixty sounds so much better! It took about six months for me to complete both pieces, in my spare time in between my fulltime gig at Warner Bros. Animation, the Rogues first, followed by the Heroes second. I had the tremendous good fortune to collaborate with two of the best artists in the animation business, Jonard Soriano (background design) and Thomas Yamaoka (BG Paint/Color)... I handed off a super rough idea of what I was looking for and in a matter of days Jonard came back with the awesome Daily Bugle background all the Rouges and Villains appeared in and on top of… then Thomas took that and wove his digital painting magic on it and

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in less than a week I had a completed, painted background just waiting for a wild assortment of characters and creatures to be placed on it! Getting the assist with the background really allowed me to give the characters all my focus and attention, and I planned it in advance to economically reuse the same background for both pieces… smarter, not harder! I actually only drew Spidey once as well, but flopped him horizontally from one piece to the other to add just a little variety. I also dropped his “Spidey Sense” tingling from the Heroes piece!

Marvel initially sent a list of all the approved Spider-Verse characters I was supposed to choose from, heroes, villains, and supporting characters. I actually proposed about a dozen or more characters that surprisingly weren’t on their “pre-approved Spidey list of characters,” and they went them! I just knew I wanted to try including everyone I could from the eras I read Spidey during, and that I wanted to draw! You’ll notice there’s a slim amount of characters from the 1990s–2010s—the Silver and Bronze eras were my jam! (That’s not saying there aren’t some great characters from that time period, though—the Superior Octopus is one of the best villains of the last decade!) I honestly didn’t get any notes [requested revisions] from Marvel on the Villains piece once it was done, which amazed me! I was so happy I was able to get Draco from the Power Records adventure in there! The only ones I recall them nixing at the submission approval list stage for the Rogues, that I recall, were Cardiac and the Punisher!

There were a couple changes asked for on the Heroes piece at the rough approval stage. I originally had Mary Jane holding the orange-boxed Mego Spider-Man action figure from 1974 (they requested a change to the Toy Biz figure from the mid ’90s).

I originally had John Romita, Sr.’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Spider-Man balloon float up in the sky above the Spidey Mobile (I was asked to remove that), and Silver Sable was originally holding a sniper rifle (totally understood being asked to lose that). I was frankly amazed I got the Ben Cooper Spider-Man Halloween costume in, though!

The one character I regret not including was the Burglar! He shoulda been in there!

My personal favorites artistically include Puma, the Lizard, and Morbius… I figured if I only ever get to draw these characters one time, I wanted to try and do the most iconiclooking representations I could manage for them all. I was really happy people responded so favorably to both pieces.

Glad ya dug it Joe, thanks! You can always check it out in greater detail over at dustyabell.com too.

– Dusty Abell

FAST AND FURIOUS BI RELEASES

The last few editions of your fine publication have been excellent, they have been released fast and furious lately but that’s fine by me… as long as they continue to come out!

The Neal Adams issue [#143] was a classic. I gleaned some new information from the fine piece on Power Records by Rob Kelly.

In the Savage Lands edition [#145], my favorite articles were the ones done on the dreadful Annihilus by Jason Shayer and the very comprehensive article by Jarrod Buttery on one of our favorite jungle boys, Ka-Zar. I always like to look ahead at what is coming up in future releases of BACK ISSUE and possibly pick up a sampling of The Avengers TM & © Marvel.

BACK ISSUE TM & © TwoMorrows. All Rights Reserved.

featured characters from local comic shows up here in Canada. It heightens my love of this magazine!

As for the Spidey issue, it was Amazing—whoops, sorry, it was Spectacular! My sweet spot growing up was the mid- to late ’70s Spider-Man group of comics, so this issue really nailed it, bringing back some great memories with friends and the local spinner rack at 7-Eleven.

Issues #146–148 look so fearless and wonderful that I will be sure to not miss my Zeta-beam on the day of release!

– Jason Jaroslawsky Nice subtle plugs for #146–148’s contents in your closing comment, Jason. Thanks for being in BI’s corner!

Next issue: Get ready, True Believer, for our star-studded Marvelmania Issue! SAL BUSCEMA’s Avengers, FABIAN NICIEZA’s Captain America, and KURT BUSIEK and ALEX ROSS’ Marvels turns 30! Plus Marvelmania International, Marvel Age, Marvel Classics, PAUL KUPPERBERG’s Marvel Novels, MICHAEL USLAN’s missed Marvel opportunities, and Marvel Value Stamps. Featuring CHRIS CLAREMONT, JACK KIRBY, KEVIN MAGUIRE, ROY THOMAS, and many more Men and Women of Mighty Marvel! Marvelmania Avengers cover illustration by Sal Buscema. Don’t ask—just BI it! See you in thirty!

Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, Michael Eury, editor-in-chief

Dreams and Nightmares Issue • BACK ISSUE • 79

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

TM

Edited by MICHAEL EURY, BACK ISSUE magazine celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through recurring (and rotating) departments like “Pro2Pro” (dialogue between professionals), “BackStage Pass” (behind-the-scenes of comicsbased media), “Greatest Stories Never Told” (spotlighting unrealized comics series or stories), and more!

Go to www.twomorrows.com for other issues, and an ULTIMATE BUNDLE, with most issues at HALF-PRICE!

BACK ISSUE #141

BACK ISSUE #142

ER EISN RD !!

AWA NER WIN

BACK ISSUE #138

BACK ISSUE #139

BACK ISSUE #140

CLASSIC HEROES IN THE BRONZE AGE! The Lone Ranger and Tonto, Flash Gordon, Popeye, Zorro and Lady Rawhide, Son of Tomahawk, Jungle Twins, and more!

Featuring the work of DAN JURGENS, JOE R. LANSDALE, DON McGREGOR, FRANK THORNE, TIM TRUMAN, GEORGE WILDMAN, THOMAS YEATES, and other creators. With a classic 1979 fully painted Gold Key cover of Flash Gordon.

NOT-READY-FOR-PRIMETIME MARVEL HEROES! Mighty Marvel’s Bronze Age second bananas: Doc Samson, Jack of Hearts, Thundra, Nighthawk, Starfox, Modred the Mystic, Woodgod, the Shroud, Thunderbird and Warpath, Stingray, Wundaar, and others! Featuring the work of BUSIEK, DAVID, ENGLEHART, GERBER, GIFFEN, GRANT, MANTLO, MICHELINIE, STERN, THOMAS, and other A-list talent!

DINOSAUR COMICS! Interviews with Xenozoic®’s MARK SCHULTZ and dinoartist extraordinaire WILLIAM STOUT! Plus: Godzilla at Dark Horse, Sauron villain history, Dinosaurs Attack!, Dinosaurs for Hire, Dinosaur Rex, Dino Riders, Lord Dinosaur, and Jurassic Park! Featuring ARTHUR ADAMS, BISSETTE, CLAREMONT, COCKRUM, GERANI, STRADLEY, ROY THOMAS, and more. SCHULTZ cover.

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BACK ISSUE #144

BACK ISSUE #145

BACK ISSUE #146

SPIES AND P.I.s! Nick Fury from Howling Commando to Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Ms. Tree’s MAX ALLAN COLLINS and TERRY BEATTY in a Pro2Pro interview, MARK EVANIER on his Crossfire series, a Hydra villain history, WILL EISNER’s John Law, Checkmate, and Tim Trench and Mike Mauser. With ENGLEHART, ERWIN, HALL, ISABELLA, KUPPERBERG, STATON, THOMAS, and cover by DAVE JOHNSON!

SUPER ISSUE! Superboy’s Bronze Age adventures, and interviews with GERARD CHRISTOPHER and STACY HAIDUK of the Superboy live-action TV series. Plus: Super Goof, Super Richie (Rich), Super-Dagwood, Super Mario Bros., Frank Thorne’s Far Out Green Super Cool, NICK MEGLIN and JACK DAVIS’ Superfan, and more! Featuring a Superboy and Krypto cover by DAVE COCKRUM! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

BRONZE AGE SAVAGE LANDS, starring Ka-Zar in the 1970s! Plus: Turok—Dinosaur Hunter, DON GLUT’s Dagar and Tragg, Annihilus and the Negative Zone, Planet of Vampires, Pat Mills’s Flesh (from 2000AD), and WALTER SIMONSON and MIKE MIGNOLA’s Wolverine: The Jungle Adventure. With CONWAY, GULACY, HAMA, NICIEZA, SEARS, THOMAS, and more! JOHN BUSCEMA cover!

SPIDER-ROGUES ISSUE! Villain histories of Dr. Octopus, Lizard, Kingpin, Spidey’s mob foes, the Jackal and Carrion, Tarantula, Puma, plus the rehabilitation of Sandman!

Featuring the work of ANDRU, SAL BUSCEMA, CONWAY, DeFALCO, GIL KANE, McFARLANE, MILLER, POLLARD, JOHN ROMITA JR. & SR., STERN, THOMAS, WEIN, WOLFMAN, and more!

DUSTY ABELL cover!

MEN WITHOUT FEAR, featuring Daredevil’s swinging ’70s adventures!

Plus: Challengers of the Unknown in the Bronze Age, JEPH LOEB interview about his Challs and DD projects with TIM SALE, Sinestro and Mr. Fear histories, superheroes with disabilities, and... Who Is Hal Jordan? Featuring CONWAY, ENGLEHART, McKENZIE, ROZAKIS, STATON, THOMAS, WOLFMAN, & more! GENE COLAN cover!

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TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

BACK ISSUE #147

BACK ISSUE #148

BACK ISSUE #149

Great Hera, it’s the 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF BACK ISSUE, featuring a tribute to the late, great GEORGE PÉREZ! Wonder Woman: The George Pérez Years, Pérez’s 20 Greatest Hits of the Bronze Age, Pérez’s fanzine days, a Pérez remembrance by MARV WOLFMAN, a Wonder Woman interview with MINDY NEWELL, and more!

With a stunning Wonder Woman cover

by Pérez!

DC SUPER-STARS OF SPACE! Adam Strange in the Bronze Age (with RICHARD BRUNING & ANDY KUBERT), From Beyond the Unknown, the Fabulous World of Krypton, Vartox, a Mongul history, the Omega Men, and more! Featuring CARY BATES, DAVE GIBBONS, DAN JURGENS, CURT SWAN, PETER J. TOMASI, MARV WOLFMAN, and more! Cover by CARMINE INFANTINO & MURPHY ANDERSON!

’80s INDIE HEROES: The American, Aztec Ace, Dynamo Joe, Evangeline, Journey, Megaton Man, Trekker, Whisper, and Zot! Featuring CHUCK DIXON, PHIL FOGLIO, STEVEN GRANT, RICH LARSON, SCOTT McCLOUD, WILLIAM MESSNER-LOEBS, DOUG MOENCH, RON RANDALL, DON SIMPSON, MARK VERHEIDEN, CHRIS WARNER & more superstar creators. Cover

by NORM BREYFOGLE!

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BACK ISSUE #150

Our oversized 100-PAGE SUPER SPECTACULAR sesquicentennial edition, featuring BATMEN OF THE 1970s!

Exploring the work of Bronze Age Batman artists BOB BROWN, DICK GIORDANO, IRV NOVICK, FRANK ROBBINS, WALTER SIMONSON, ALEX TOTH, and BERNIE WRIGHTSON. Plus: revisit FRANK MILLER’s first Batman story!

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AMERICAN COMIC BOOK ALTER EGO #189 CHRONICLES: 1945-49 JOHN ROMITA tribute issue! Podcast

Covers the aftermath of WWII, when comics shifted from super-heroes to crime, romance, and western comics, BILL GAINES plotted a new course for EC Comics, and SIEGEL & SHUSTER sued for rights to Superman! By RICHARD ARNDT, KURT MITCHELL, and KEITH DALLAS.

(288-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $49.95 (Digital Edition) $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-099-1

SHIPS SUMMER 2024

BACK ISSUE #153

ALTER EGO #190

ALTER EGO #191

BACK ISSUE #152

MITCH MAGLIO examines vintage jungle recollections recorded shortly after the comics heroes (Kaänga, Ka-Zar, Sheena, Jazzy One’s passing by JOHN ROMITA Rulah, Jo-Jo/Congo King, Thun’da, Tarzan) JR., JIM STARLIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, with art by LOU FINE, WILL EISNER, BRIAN PULIDO, ROY THOMAS, JAIMIE FRANK FRAZETTA, MATT BAKER, BOB JAMESON, JOHN CIMINO, STEVE POWELL, ALEX SCHOMBURG, and HOUSTON, & NILE SCALA; DAVID others! Plus: the comicbook career of realARMSTRONG’s mini-interview with Romita; life jungle explorers MARTIN AND OSA John Romita’s ten greatest hits; plus FCA, JOHNSON, FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, & more!

Crypt, and more!

#191 is an FCA (FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA) issue! Documenting the influence of MAC RABOY’s Captain Marvel Jr. on the life, career, and look of ELVIS PRESLEY during his stellar career, from the 1950s through the 1970s! Plus: Captain Marvel co-creator BILL PARKER’s complete testimony from the DC vs. Fawcett lawsuit, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and other surprises!

MARVELMANIA ISSUE! SAL BUSCEMA’s Avengers, FABIAN NICIEZA’s Captain America, and KURT BUSIEK and ALEX ROSS’s Marvels turns 30! Plus: Marvelmania International, Marvel Age, Marvel Classics, PAUL KUPPERBERG’s Marvel Novels, and Marvel Value Stamps.

Featuring JACK KIRBY, KEVIN MAGUIRE, ROY THOMAS, and more! SAL BUSCEMA cover.

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BACK ISSUE #154

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BACK ISSUE #155

BACK ISSUE #156

KIRBY COLLECTOR #91

BIG BABY ISSUE! X-Babies, the last days of Sugar and Spike, FF’s Franklin Richards, Superbaby vs. Luthor, Dennis the Menace Bonus Magazine, Baby Snoots, Marvel and Harvey kid humor comics, & more! With ARTHUR ADAMS, CARY BATES, JOHN BYRNE, CHRIS CLAREMONT, SCOTT LOBDELL, SHELDON MAYER, CURT SWAN, ROY THOMAS, and other grownup creators. Cover by ARTHUR ADAMS.

BRONZE AGE NOT-READY-FORPRIMETIME DC HEROES! Black Canary, Elongated Man, Lilith, Metamorpho, Nubia, Odd Man, Ultraa of Earth-Prime, Vartox, and Jimmy Olsen as Mr. Action! Plus: Jason’s Quest! Featuring MIKE W. BARR, CARY BATES, STEVE DITKO, BOB HANEY, DENNY O’NEIL, MIKE SEKOWSKY, MARK WAID, and more ready-for-primetime talent. Retro cover by NICK CARDY.

THIS ISSUE IS HAUNTED! House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Unexpected, Marvel’s failed horror anthologies, Haunted Tank, Eerie Publications, House II adaptation, Elvira’s House of Mystery, and more wth NEAL ADAMS, MIKE W. BARR, DICK GIORDANO, SAM GLANZMAN, ROBERT KANIGHER, JOE ORLANDO, STERANKO, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, and others. Unused cover by GARCÍA-LÓPEZ & WRIGHTSON.

BRONZE AGE GRAPHIC NOVELS! 1980s GNs from Marvel, DC, and First Comics, Conan GNs, and DC’s Sci-Fi GN series!

With BRENT ANDERSON, JOHN BYRNE, HOWARD CHAYKIN, CHRIS CLAREMONT, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, JACK KIRBY, DON MCGREGOR, BOB McLEOD, BILL SIENKIEWICZ, JIM STARLIN, ROY THOMAS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, and more. WRIGHTSON cover.

30th Anniversary issue, with KIRBY’S GREATEST VICTORIES! Jack gets the girl (wife ROZ), early hits Captain America and Boy Commandos, surviving WWII, romance comics, Captain Victory and the direct market, his original art battle with Marvel, and finally winning credit! Plus MARK EVANIER, a colossal gallery of Kirby’s winningest pencil art, a never-reprinted SIMON & KIRBY story, and more!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #35 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #36 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #37

RETROFAN #34

RETROFAN #35

An in-depth look at the life and career of writer/editor DENNY O’NEIL, and part one of a career-spanning interview with ARNOLD DRAKE, co-creator of The Doom Patrol and Deadman! Plus the story behind Studio Zero, the ’70s collective of JIM STARLIN, FRANK BRUNNER, ALAN WEISS, and others! Warren horror mag writer/ historian JACK BUTTERWORTH, alternative cartoonist TIM HENSLEY, & more!

TOM PALMER retrospective, career-spanning interview, and tributes compiled by GREG BIGA. LEE MARRS chats about assisting on Little Orphan Annie, work for DC’s Plop! and underground Pudge, Girl Blimp!

The start of a multi-part look at the life and career of DAN DIDIO, part two of our ARNOLD DRAKE interview, public service comics produced by students at the CENTER FOR CARTOON STUDIES, & more!

STEVE ENGLEHART is spotlighted in a career-spanning interview, former DC Comics’ romance editor BARBARA FRIEDLANDER redeems the late DC editor JACK MILLER, DAN DIDIO discusses going from DC exec to co-publisher, we conclude our 100th birthday celebration for ARNOLD DRAKE, take a look at the 1970s underground comix oddity THE FUNNY PAGES, and more, including HEMBECK!

Take a ride with CHiPs’ ERIK ESTRADA and LARRY WILCOX! Plus: an interview with movie Hercules STEVE REEVES, WeirdOhs cartoonist BILL CAMPBELL, Plastic Man on Saturday mornings, TINY TIM, Remo Williams, the search for a Disney artist, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Saturday morning super-hero Space Ghost, plus The Beatles, The Jackson 5ive, and other real rockers in animation! Also: The Addams Family’s JOHN ASTIN, Mighty Isis co-stars JOANNA PANG and BRIAN CUTLER, TV’s The Name of the Game, on the set of Evil Dead II, classic coffee ads, and more! With ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, MARK VOGER & MICHAEL EURY.

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New from TwoMorrows!

ALTER EGO #186

ALTER EGO #187

ALTER EGO #188

KIRBY COLLECTOR #89

KIRBY COLLECTOR #90

Focuses on great early science-fiction author EDMUND HAMILTON, who went on to an illustrious career at DC Comics, writing Superman, Batman, and especially The Legion of Super-Heroes! Learn all about his encounters with RAY BRADBURY, MORT WEISINGER, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, et al—a panoply of titans! Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more!

DOUBLE-SIZE ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! The Marvel side includes mini-interviews with JOHN BUSCEMA, MARIE SEVERIN, JIM MOONEY, and GEORGE TUSKA—plus “STAN LEE’S Dinner with ALAIN RESNAIS” annotated by SEAN HOWE! On the DC side: talks with CARMINE INFANTINO, JOHN BROOME, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, JOE KUBERT, & MURPHY ANDERSON—plus a GARDNER FOX photo-feature, and more!

KIRBY CONSPIRACIES! Darkseid’s Foourth World palace intrigue, the too-many attempted overthrows of Odin, why Stan Lee hated Diablo, Kang contradictions, Simon & Kirby swipes, a never-reprinted S&K story, MARK EVANIER’s WonderCon 2023 Kirby Tribute Panel (with MARV WOLFMAN, PAUL S. LEVINE, and JOHN MORROW), an extensive Kirby pencil art gallery, and more!

WHAT IF KIRBY... hadn’t been stopped by his rejected Spider-Man presentation?

DC’s abandonment of the Fourth World?

The ill-fated Speak-Out Series? FREDRIC WERTHAM’s anti-comics crusade? The CIA’s involvement with the Lord of Light?

Plus a rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other columnists, a classic Simon & Kirby story, pencil art gallery, & more!

Cover inks by DAMIAN PICKADOR ZAJKO!

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All characters TM & © their respective owners.

Spotlights ANGELO TORRES, the youngest and last of the fabled EC Comics artists— who went on to a fabulous career as a horror, science-fiction, and humor artist for Timely/Marvel, Warren Publishing, and MAD magazine! It’s a lushly illustrated retrospective of his still-ongoing career— plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more

RETROFAN #33

BRICKJOURNAL #85

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #33 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #34

Meet the Bionic Duo, LEE MAJORS and LINDSAY WAGNER! Plus: Hot Wheels: The Early Years, Fantastic Four cartoons, Modesty Blaise, Hostess snacks, TV Westerns, Movie Icons vs. the Axis Powers, the San Diego Chicken, and more!

Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited

by MICHAEL EURY.

LEGO MINIFIGURES! Customized minifigs by fans, designing the Disney minifigures from LEGO House, spotlight on minifig fan artist ROBERT8, and more! Plus, all our regular features: Nerding Out with BRICKNERD, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BANTHA BRICKS: Fans of LEGO Star Wars, and Minifigure Customization with JARED K. BURKS!

STEVE GERBER biographical essay and collaborator insights, MARY SKRENES on co-creating Omega the Unknown, helping develop Howard the Duck, VAL MAYERIK cover and interview, ROY THOMAS reveals STAN LEE’s unseen EXCELSIOR! COMICS line, LINDA SUNSHINE (editor of early hardcover super-hero collections), more with MIKE DEODATO, and the concluding segment on FRANK BORTH!

DAN JURGENS talks about Superman, Sun Devils, creating Booster Gold, developing the “Doomsday scenario” with the demise of the Man of Steel, and more! Traverse DON GLUT’s “Glutverse” continuity across Gold Key, Marvel, and DC! Plus RICK ALTERGOTT, we conclude our profiles of MIKE DEODATO, JR. and FRANK BORTH, LINDA SUNSHINE (editor of DC/Marvel hardcover super-hero collections), & more!

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RETROFAN #32

Featuring a profile of The Partridge Family’s heartthrob DAVID CASSIDY, THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN, LEGO blocks, Who Created Mighty Mouse?, BUCKAROO BANZAI turns forty, Planet Patrol, Big Little Books, Disco Fever, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.