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Episode 1510 Talkback - BOMC: The Sandman: Dream Country
Adam_Murdough
Posts: 506
A captive Muse. A vision of feline supremacy. A Shakespearean comedy of Faerie, for Faerie. A Silver Age suicide, assisted by Death herself. These are but a few of the points of interest along our CGS guided tour of 'Dream Country': third and shortest of the collected volumes of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, consisting of four self-contained stories, including the award-winning 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' (1:04:28)
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Comments
If one were to put these Sandman stories into a chronological order - the most obvious example through these first three collections would be to have issue #9 "Tales in the Sand," as the first story of Morpheus within those already read - one would see a sharp difference in his mannerisms, more aloof and almost tyrannical in this earlier story, with a softer, by comparison, Morpheus in "Calliope" or even "The Doll's House." Gaiman did this purposefully, and it's obvious once you know this, but with the way the series jumps around in time - with the primary narrative thrust taking place in the "present" - it manages to get hidden and becomes a subtlety that adds yet another layer to this series.
[if you couldn't tell, I love Sandman]
Looking forward to the rest of the discussion.
chris
"At the 1991 awards, comic book The Sandman issue #19 "A Midsummer's Night Dream" scripted by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Charles Vess, won the Award for Best Short Fiction. The widely circulated story that the rules were subsequently changed to prevent another comic book from winning is not entirely true. The official website states: "Comics are eligible in the Special Award Professional category. We never made a change in the rules." Gaiman and Vess, however, won the Award under the Short Fiction and not the Special Award Professional category."
In other words, once they noticed the loophole they changed things so that prose fiction could only be compared to prose fiction, but kept comics eligible in the Special Award category. They technically never had to amend their rulebook; everyone involved just got the message that they didn't want to compare apples to oranges again, but they nonchalantly wanted to keep the option available to honor comics.
Gaiman has been honored by the WFA people several times since, so I they obviously don't have anything against him or what he's associated with. The whole idea that the board is prejudiced against comics or whatever is a misconception. The majority of their members wanted the Sandman issue to WIN, which it did. I think it's to the board's credit that they were open-minded enough to consider a comic in the first place, since it isn't like they were in the habit of considering works that weren't straight prose in the first place. But this one comic impressed them so much that they were like "Okay, we don't have any protocols as to how to handle comics (yet), but let's be open-minded and go for it, vote for it, and then afterwards we'll figure out how to handle something like this in the future." And then they get criticized for it. It isn't like they considered movies or TV episodes or scripts for the "best story" category before, but for comics they felt compelled to do it. Then after it happened they recognized how strange it was to be comparing pure prose works vs. something else. I don't see a problem here. The mythology of "People are out to get comics; they hate our favorite medium" is understandable but incorrect here.
Personally I've always thought the issue was overrated, and dry and boring compared to the other issues in Dream Country. It's impressive on one level, but I think that its greatness relies a lot on getting shine from Shakespeare's original work. It's still a good issue but I don't think it stands head and shoulders over the other issues around it.
Honestly when going into this episode (which I greatly enjoyed, guys, don't get me wrong) I misremembered things and thought that it was the "Dream of the Thousand Cats" issue that won the WFA.