The Endless Sandman

This semester, the first of my junior year at Franklin & Marshall College, I am fulfilling my humanities requirement by taking ENG273: Graphic Novels. Most people, when I tell them that I am taking this class, are become quite excited and interested that it's a class at F&M. They dive into how they wish they could have taken a class like that and eagerly ask what books we're reading. It's interesting to me how enthused they are when the topic is breached, as if they are taking the class vicariously through me.

Graphic novels are a very interesting medium. They fuse together words and pictures uniquely as I have never seen before. My first graphic novel was Alan Moore's Watchmen during my freshmen year of college. It was several months before the movie came out, and I am so glad that I read it before I watched it. Following that, I dove into Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Vol.1, V for Vendetta, Spiegelman's Maus I and Maus II, Bechdel's Fun Home, Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Seagle's It's a bird... . Each of these are absolutely amazing pieces of art and literature.

One of the best graphic novels I have read to date though is The Sandman series. Currently I have read volumes one through... seven or eight, I forget, but plan on finishing the series very soon. The best part of the series is how imaginative it is. Neil Gaiman has created concepts and realms beyond the wildest of some of our imaginations!

"There are seven beings that are not Gods,
that existed before humanity dreamed of Gods,
that will exist after the last God is dead.
There are seven beings that exist because,
deep in our hearts, we know that they exist."

I have long exhausted my supply of physical copies of Sandman unfortunately and have thus gone to reading the later volumes

online. This wonderful quote came from a site that was recommended to me to continue my reading (http://www.comicoo.com /sandman/index.htm). The series focuses on one of the seven Endless, as they are called, named Dream. Each endless has complete control over their realm, their plane of existence which intersects the planes on which all living things exist. Pretty wild, right? But they are not Gods. No, they are something very different.

The series starts with the capture and imprisonment of Dream in the twenties by a cult of magicians. Eventually Dream is able to escape but it is almost sixty years after his initial imprisonment, which have left dreamers in a constant flux of visions due to the chaos in the realm. The rest of the first volume follows dream searching the globe for three objects that were stolen from him in his absence.

Each volume after follows Dream or dreamers who interact with Dream, leading up to some grand series climax in the second to last volume. Unfortunately I haven't gotten there yet, but once I do I'll update and share my full review of the series with my avid two followers, who probably don't actually follow. To anyone reading, let me know you're out there.

The reason I love graphic novels is in their form. Combining literature and art into a medium that is greater than the sum of its parts is simply amazing to me. Sandman really stretches the limits of the medium just like Watchmen and Maus have done. The imagination within the panels are enthralling and just brilliant to read and look at.

Well I'm not exactly sure what this post was meant to really be about, other than me rambling about my love for comic books and graphic novels. I hope it was interesting and made someone read a good book.