DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES ISSUE June
2024
1 5 1 . o N 10.95
The Sandman and Death © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.
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™
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! (192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $43.95 (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-125-7 SHIPS JULY 2024!
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
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
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!
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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.
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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.
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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. 30 • BACK ISSUE • Dreams and Nightmares Issue
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
“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.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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