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raven_cromwellI've just finished the first two issues of Sandman as done on audio, and am partly through Dream a Little Dream Of Me, issue three. (As I best understand it, this first season of the audible version is presenting issues 1-28. Everything collected in Preludes and Nocturns, The Doll's House, and Dream Country. I'm a little worried as to how they're gonna fit so many issues into a ten hour audiobook, especially since the first issue was nearly an hour; but I'm informed the issues did get shorter after that one, which may account for the amount they could translate.)
Brief synopsis, for anyone as unfamiliar as I was before I dove headfirst into the google rabbit hole yesterday:
The only concrete thing I knew about Sandman was how it blended myth and history and gleefully tugged in other characters from across the DC-verse, which is one of the things that made me so deeply. deeply wary of diving into the audible version, even as I thought I'd adore Morpheus and his realm etc. etc. For anyone afeared of the sprawling multiverse, Dream a Little Dream of Me is where the superheroes start to play a role, from what I can find. (There's a brief cameo by Wesley Dodds--the DC original Sandman--in issue 1, but while I'm sure it's a cool Easter egg for fans, it's equally cool! for new readers, since he saves a lady and takes up a little of Morpheus's old role, giving punishment to terrible people.) I was really nervous about three, because the only thing I know about John Constantine is Keanu Reeves once played him in a movie...sometime in the vague mists of my childhood. But this iteration of Sandman seems tailor-made for people like me; we first see Constantine waking from a terrible, terrible dream, and we know that his former lover has Morpheus's pouch and is slowly wasting away by getting high on dreams. He seems a deeply conflicted, compelling man, by the way Taron Egerton reads him, and honestly I don't need! to know much more than that because Morpheus! doesn't know shit about John Constantine either, so is constantly going to need to be updated on any crucial back-story. Which should honestly make any superhero narratives in this run pretty self-contained.
My GOD, what an utter, transcendent joy. As someone whose previously only been able to gaze through the hedge-gap as it were--all while knowing that these were revolutionary comics--to now have these sublime performances bringing them to life is an accessibility joy I can't even quite articulate. The descriptions of art are quite brief, and I've been really astonished by the power Dirk Mags managed to express in an economy of language. There's one in particular that sticks with me: Dr. Hathaway entering Roderick Burgess's study and seeing a mummified hand, upon which each of the fingers have been carefully molded into a candle. OH, John, get the fuck out dude! I was howling, because I'd never quite seen fifteen words scream utter psychopath quite so loudly.
I'd previously heard Anton Lesser, who plays Hathaway, both as Thomas Moore in the brilliant BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall; and as narrator of the Sally Lockhart novels--a wonderful Victorian romp by Philip Pullman which is, honestly, even more beloved for me than His Dark Materials, featuring a financial genius protagonist who shoots rifles in the 1860's and swashbuckles with pirates and ultimately ends up married to an openly socialist refugee, journalist, and aspiring parliamentarian. Lesser's performance as Hathaway is as dynamic as I'd come to expect from any of those outings: frail and so deeply broken, but laced with such ferocious vitriol and venom for the man who'd broken him. Utterly calm and steely-eyed about his death, so long as he could take Burgess down with him.
I'd merely intended to take a brief tour inside the production and then go back to my current reading: Chris Hayes' A Colony In a Nation and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, which work as this wonderful duology on race relations in the United States; but that's for another post. A delayed post, I suspect, because Lesser's reading had me pinned to my recliner, breathlessly rooting for him to succeed. And then! Stephen Critchlow came in as Roderick Burgess and here I sit, nearly two hours in.
(James fucking McAvoy as Morpheus y'all! I'd never heard McAvoy in anything else, and the nuance: simultaneous cruelty and vulnerability and exhaustion he brings to Morpheus is a masterclass in understated acting, particularly as this first issue has such limited dialogue.)
Wax hyperbolic all I might, I can't capture the perfection of Mags' casting, so have some youtube vids to do it for me. This first one gives us both Gaiman as narrator and an extended preview of Critchlow as Burgess:
And this second, amid some general vaguish commentary, gives us glimpses of some other wonderful performances I've not gotten to yet. The crowning achievement of which is an extended sequenc3e with McAvoy in which you get to see his skill:
I've seen some complaints that this version suffers from a rigid faithfulness to its source material, and honestly, I struggle to address those complaints with objectivity. Admittedly, I'm only two issues in, but I'm already ferociously protective of this translation. There may be issues with bury your gays, or other harmful tropes; I’m not far enough to judge. Even if! The complaints have merit: Let me have the experience of the comics in an accessible format in the same fashion in which you! have been able to experience them for decades: let me see them in all their flaws and rough edges, and get the full fandom experience of this series so that I can have as full and nuanced thoughts and discussion of the upcoming netflix version as any other comics fan. Translators don't arbitrarily overwrite creator choices, and that's what putting anything into audio is: not adapting it, but attempting to convey something in the clearest possible way without vision.
(There’s a whole other fucking discussion about the problematic urge to have all your fucking literature sanitized while an author holds your hand and gently steers you around anything that might shock or disturb you. But different soapbox, for different day.)
And at least with issue 1, I’m giving complainers some major fucking side-eye.
(minor issue 1 spoilers ahead)
The queerness in that issue felt vital, if tragic. Watching Adam Thomas Wright and Blake Ritson take Alex Burgess from a trembling, stuttering wreck of a boy, forced to call his father Magus to a broken, paranoid old man, screaming at Morpheus in eerie imitation of his father was a masterclass. But part of what made it a masterclass were the moments of light: Paul McGuire, bubbling over with joy entering that bleak world. Alex, letting himself be brave enough to be with a man who openly showered him with endearments in the middle of the sixties, when being queer sure as shit wasn't in vogue. There's this real moment when you think: ok, if he can go out on this very radical ledge and be queer; if he can find himself as good a man as this; well, he can get his shit together. He'll free Morpheus. And yet, his queerness is neither his redemption nor his doom; it is merely one more moment where he sadly took the easy path instead of the right one. He could reach...a little; he could tell his devotees not to call him magus; he could love another man. But he could not free Morpheus, and in the end, it destroyed him.
But we needed! that moment where we really. really thought he could be brave and radical enough to pull himself out of the horrors Roderick put him in, and the vibrant radicalism of queerness feels a good vehicle for that, no matter how flawed Alex became in the end.
So yeah. If you're keen to dive in--or wanna revisit, honestly--so far, I can't rec the audio enough. Gaiman has assured us it's coming in its entirety to audible, and they've at least! greenlit two more seasons; y'all, I can't fucking wait.
Brief synopsis, for anyone as unfamiliar as I was before I dove headfirst into the google rabbit hole yesterday:
When The Sandman, also known as Lord Morpheus—the immortal king of dreams, stories and the imagination—is pulled from his realm and imprisoned on Earth by a nefarious cult, he languishes for decades before finally escaping. Once free, he must retrieve the three "tools" that will restore his power and help him to rebuild his dominion, which has deteriorated in his absence. As the multi-threaded story unspools, The Sandman descends into Hell to confront Lucifer (Michael Sheen), chases rogue nightmares who have escaped his realm, and crosses paths with an array of characters from DC comic books, ancient myths, and real-world history, including: Inmates of Gotham City's Arkham Asylum, Doctor Destiny, the muse Calliope, the three Fates, William Shakespeare (Arthur Darvill), and many more.This got long! so if that's as intriguing for you as I always found it,
The only concrete thing I knew about Sandman was how it blended myth and history and gleefully tugged in other characters from across the DC-verse, which is one of the things that made me so deeply. deeply wary of diving into the audible version, even as I thought I'd adore Morpheus and his realm etc. etc. For anyone afeared of the sprawling multiverse, Dream a Little Dream of Me is where the superheroes start to play a role, from what I can find. (There's a brief cameo by Wesley Dodds--the DC original Sandman--in issue 1, but while I'm sure it's a cool Easter egg for fans, it's equally cool! for new readers, since he saves a lady and takes up a little of Morpheus's old role, giving punishment to terrible people.) I was really nervous about three, because the only thing I know about John Constantine is Keanu Reeves once played him in a movie...sometime in the vague mists of my childhood. But this iteration of Sandman seems tailor-made for people like me; we first see Constantine waking from a terrible, terrible dream, and we know that his former lover has Morpheus's pouch and is slowly wasting away by getting high on dreams. He seems a deeply conflicted, compelling man, by the way Taron Egerton reads him, and honestly I don't need! to know much more than that because Morpheus! doesn't know shit about John Constantine either, so is constantly going to need to be updated on any crucial back-story. Which should honestly make any superhero narratives in this run pretty self-contained.
My GOD, what an utter, transcendent joy. As someone whose previously only been able to gaze through the hedge-gap as it were--all while knowing that these were revolutionary comics--to now have these sublime performances bringing them to life is an accessibility joy I can't even quite articulate. The descriptions of art are quite brief, and I've been really astonished by the power Dirk Mags managed to express in an economy of language. There's one in particular that sticks with me: Dr. Hathaway entering Roderick Burgess's study and seeing a mummified hand, upon which each of the fingers have been carefully molded into a candle. OH, John, get the fuck out dude! I was howling, because I'd never quite seen fifteen words scream utter psychopath quite so loudly.
I'd previously heard Anton Lesser, who plays Hathaway, both as Thomas Moore in the brilliant BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall; and as narrator of the Sally Lockhart novels--a wonderful Victorian romp by Philip Pullman which is, honestly, even more beloved for me than His Dark Materials, featuring a financial genius protagonist who shoots rifles in the 1860's and swashbuckles with pirates and ultimately ends up married to an openly socialist refugee, journalist, and aspiring parliamentarian. Lesser's performance as Hathaway is as dynamic as I'd come to expect from any of those outings: frail and so deeply broken, but laced with such ferocious vitriol and venom for the man who'd broken him. Utterly calm and steely-eyed about his death, so long as he could take Burgess down with him.
I'd merely intended to take a brief tour inside the production and then go back to my current reading: Chris Hayes' A Colony In a Nation and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, which work as this wonderful duology on race relations in the United States; but that's for another post. A delayed post, I suspect, because Lesser's reading had me pinned to my recliner, breathlessly rooting for him to succeed. And then! Stephen Critchlow came in as Roderick Burgess and here I sit, nearly two hours in.
(James fucking McAvoy as Morpheus y'all! I'd never heard McAvoy in anything else, and the nuance: simultaneous cruelty and vulnerability and exhaustion he brings to Morpheus is a masterclass in understated acting, particularly as this first issue has such limited dialogue.)
Wax hyperbolic all I might, I can't capture the perfection of Mags' casting, so have some youtube vids to do it for me. This first one gives us both Gaiman as narrator and an extended preview of Critchlow as Burgess:
And this second, amid some general vaguish commentary, gives us glimpses of some other wonderful performances I've not gotten to yet. The crowning achievement of which is an extended sequenc3e with McAvoy in which you get to see his skill:
I've seen some complaints that this version suffers from a rigid faithfulness to its source material, and honestly, I struggle to address those complaints with objectivity. Admittedly, I'm only two issues in, but I'm already ferociously protective of this translation. There may be issues with bury your gays, or other harmful tropes; I’m not far enough to judge. Even if! The complaints have merit: Let me have the experience of the comics in an accessible format in the same fashion in which you! have been able to experience them for decades: let me see them in all their flaws and rough edges, and get the full fandom experience of this series so that I can have as full and nuanced thoughts and discussion of the upcoming netflix version as any other comics fan. Translators don't arbitrarily overwrite creator choices, and that's what putting anything into audio is: not adapting it, but attempting to convey something in the clearest possible way without vision.
(There’s a whole other fucking discussion about the problematic urge to have all your fucking literature sanitized while an author holds your hand and gently steers you around anything that might shock or disturb you. But different soapbox, for different day.)
And at least with issue 1, I’m giving complainers some major fucking side-eye.
(minor issue 1 spoilers ahead)
The queerness in that issue felt vital, if tragic. Watching Adam Thomas Wright and Blake Ritson take Alex Burgess from a trembling, stuttering wreck of a boy, forced to call his father Magus to a broken, paranoid old man, screaming at Morpheus in eerie imitation of his father was a masterclass. But part of what made it a masterclass were the moments of light: Paul McGuire, bubbling over with joy entering that bleak world. Alex, letting himself be brave enough to be with a man who openly showered him with endearments in the middle of the sixties, when being queer sure as shit wasn't in vogue. There's this real moment when you think: ok, if he can go out on this very radical ledge and be queer; if he can find himself as good a man as this; well, he can get his shit together. He'll free Morpheus. And yet, his queerness is neither his redemption nor his doom; it is merely one more moment where he sadly took the easy path instead of the right one. He could reach...a little; he could tell his devotees not to call him magus; he could love another man. But he could not free Morpheus, and in the end, it destroyed him.
But we needed! that moment where we really. really thought he could be brave and radical enough to pull himself out of the horrors Roderick put him in, and the vibrant radicalism of queerness feels a good vehicle for that, no matter how flawed Alex became in the end.
So yeah. If you're keen to dive in--or wanna revisit, honestly--so far, I can't rec the audio enough. Gaiman has assured us it's coming in its entirety to audible, and they've at least! greenlit two more seasons; y'all, I can't fucking wait.
