Back Issue #151 Preview

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

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DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER ARTIST Kelley Jones (Art originally produced in 1991 for an unpublished Wizard magazine cover.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

Don’t STEAL our Digital Editions!

C’mon citizen, DO THE RIGHT THING! A Mom & Pop publisher like us needs every sale just to survive! DON’T DOWNLOAD OR READ ILLEGAL COPIES ONLINE! Buy affordable, legal downloads only at

www.twomorrows.com or through our Apple and Google Apps!

& DON’T SHARE THEM WITH FRIENDS OR POST THEM ONLINE. Help us keep producing great publications like this one!

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

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

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

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

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

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: 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

“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

(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

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

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 YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, in comics at the time. But then IIFwanted the white characters CLICK THE LINK ORDER to be bone white—to not be peach flesh—to showTO that it wasTHIS a ISSUEwas IN PRINT ORUnfortunately, DIGITAL FORMAT! symbolic thing, and neither version correct. 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 BACK ISSUE from Grendel, which is a motif of that book, where we#151 changed AND NIGHTMARES! A who’s who of artists of NEIL artists every time we switched DREAMS the storyline.

In retrospect, Guy GAIMAN’s The Sandman plus a GAIMAN interview, Sandman was such a defining element of theTheatre’s lookMATT of Sandman Mystery Mystery WAGNER and STEVEN T. SEAGLE, Dr. Strange’s nemesis Nightmare, Casper’s Theatre and its world that maybe we should have Marvel’s stuckSleepwalker, with him horse Nightmare, with SHELLY BOND, BOB BUDIANSKY, for the entire run. That said, I did like working almost allKELLEY of STEVE ENGLEHART, ALISAwith KWITNEY, and others!

JONES cover.kind of problematic, but, our artists. There were a few that were (84-page for the most part, everybody was great andFULL-COLOR broughtmagazine) a real$10.95 cool (Digital Edition) $4.99 sensibility and style to the project. https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_54&products_id=1787 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