Wide awake in The Sandman’s world

My favorite book is more than a book. It is a comic book. I do not understand why people become uptight with and prejudicial of comic book fanatics. They say comic books are for juveniles and novels are for mature readers. I’ve had my share of prejudice concerning my little obsession. I have received strange looks and skeptical stares. I have even gotten a sermon or two about wasting my time and money on those darn things.

The X-men can be found in comic books, but important people like Mark Twain cannot. One can spend as much as P1,500 on a hardbound Anne Rice or Robert Ludlum novel, but one should not for a Neil Gaiman comic book. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is called hypocrisy.

Let us pause for a moment, shall we? Our brains are divided into the right and left halves. The right lobe, the subconscious half, deals with images and pictures – like magazines and movies – while the left half deals with texts and words – like books. Comic books are a fusion of images and texts. Your imagination is stirred to the fullest.

Most of the things I have learned about life can be found in ten neat little packages: a ten-volume series called The Sandman. Each in the series is a beautiful abstract collage. It tackles the obvious yet unnoticed facets of our ideas and does not care to conform to today’s formula for an instant place on the New York Bestsellers List.

So what is special about The Sandman? It basically violates all the rules for comic book protagonists. Instead of muscle-bound, cheery, colorful superheroes prioritizing the safety of the world, we have a skinny, monochromatic character who goes about his own melancholy way and only cares about his realm, The Dreaming, or the place we visit every time we sleep. This character collects names for himself and part of the multitude of his collection is "The Sandman" but he prefers to be called Dream. To further make reader-association difficult, Dream is not even human. He’s a ten-billion-year-old member of The Endless, a family of anthropomorphic personification of universal entities. The eldest of the family is Destiny, blind and forever roaming in his garden of crisscrosses, twists and turns. His wrist is chained to a book from which he reads out the fate of everything created. Second member of the family is Death, a cheerful and funny Goth girl, so appealing that you almost look forward to ultimately meeting her, then comes Dream who, as I have mentioned, is obsessed with his responsibilities and cares about nothing else. Then there’s the prodigal Destruction, who abandoned his duties. Be wary this red-haired vagabond. He makes bad poetry but has interesting stories to tell. After him comes the twins, conniving Desire and masochistic Despair. They come in twos; one is never without the other. Finally, there is innocent little Delight who becomes the mad Delirium when she realizes that she cannot stay young forever.

Conventional? No. Deep? Yes, indeed!

"It is a fool’s prerogative to speak of truths no one else will utter." Dream once said those very words in the presence of Shakespeare’s Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies. I agree, for how many of us have played the fool in speaking our minds out, for expressing what we think is right? Neil Gaiman, the genius of a man who wrote this beautiful story, acted the fool. He speaks of truths no one else would dare utter. He risked his reputation, of being condemned as a heretic, making his books look satanic, and more so, risking his credibility as a writer to pen a far-fetched tale of seven beings that, being fundamental ideas, are immortal. He writes what he feels like writing because to suppress this gift is to suppress the thing that makes us who we are.

Aspiring writers complain about their lack of ideas and how "everything has been written before." There are so many things out there that can be woven into long and breathtaking things. The Sandman is packed with such ideas. Inside the ten-series comic book’s delicious pages, we can find the price for kidnapping a Greek muse for the sale of inspiration, the fate of an old, forgotten goddess who turns into a stripper just to survive these hard, modern times, a foul-mouthed talking pumpkin, a perverted partnership between prankster-god Loki and the equally mischievous Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an inn at the end of the world, the first and only emperor of America, the family reunion of Eve, Cain and Abel, a far-fetched yet absolutely magnificent explanation for the decline of Baghdad’s legendary beauty, and even a rare and brief incident wherein Lucifer Morningstar himself, while sunbathing in the beaches of Miami, grudgingly compliments God on the beauty of His sunsets.

It is this kind of writing – fearless and regretless – that makes a writer worth his ink. It is a twist, one of the many facets of a prism that everyone looks over and ignores. But that is exactly what makes The Sandman so superb. It speaks its mind and it will not be hushed. It speaks without fear of reproach. It articulates thoughts that are true but everyone scorns. This is the kind of literary art that moves, motivates and propels people. It is the reality no one else would dare utter and we are the fools.

Disturbing as it may sound, The Sandman is the rawest, truest from of literature in our modern times. It does not need a spot on a bestseller’s list to prove that fact. It does not need to be heartwarming either. You see, literature is not something designed to uplift us and give us self-confidence. Literature is not a brassier, at least not in the English sense. However, let us not forget that brassier is French for "life jacket."