One more DC Universe Sandman appearance - JSA

In light of the DC Comics announcement that Neil Gaiman's Sandman character Death would appear in Action Comics during Paul Cornell's upcoming run, there's been a bunch of great articles about other Death and Sandman-character appearances in the DC Universe - including Once Upon a Geek, and Chris's Invincible Super-Blog, to name a few.

The first one that came to my mind, however, are the Sandman-character appearances in Geoff Johns' first JSA run. Comics Alliance also has a nice run-down, but mentions JSA only briefly and not in as much detail as the appearances by the Sandman Daniel in JLA -- but I found at least twice that Daniel physically appears in JSA.

Remember that in Infinity Inc. #49-51 (when, oh when, will this series be collected?), Hector Hall (Silver Scarab, son of the Golden Age Hawkman and Hawkwoman, and later the JSA's Doctor Fate) returned from the dead supposedly as the new Sandman. Gaiman's Sandman revealed Hall's position to be false, but yet the son of Hall and his wife Lyta, named Daniel, was destined to become the Sandman after Gaiman's Morpheus.

Hall dies, but is later resurrected in JSA: Justice Be Done; he's reunited with Lyta in JSA: Black Reign.

The Sandman backstory is ever-present (in continuity, even) throughout Hector and Lyta's appearances in JSA, but Johns also throws in a specific cameo or two.




JSA: Lost, where the Sandman Daniel warns Per Degaton
from harming his parents.



JSA member Sanderson "Sand" Hawkins, now the Sandman, dons Hector Hall's Sandman guise also in JSA: Lost.



Hawkins as Hector's Sandman, with Sandman characters Brute and Glob, from JSA: Lost.



JSA artist Keith Champagne writes the story that puts Hector and Lyta to rest in JSA: Mixed Signals. See the shadowy Sandman Daniel saving Hector and Lyta's lives by drawing them into his dream world.
There you have it -- still more precedent for Sandman characters in the DC Universe!

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Review: Sandman Mystery Theatre: The Face and The Brute trade paperback (Vertigo/DC Comics)

Before Y: The Last Man or Fables, but naturally after Sandman, one Vertigo series that really caught my attention was Sandman Mystery Theatre. I have to use the phrase "really caught my attention" loosely because, in truth, for a long time I'd only read Sandman Mystery Theatre: The Tarantula and the Sandman/Mystery Theatre crossover Sandman Midnight Theatre. The wonder of trade paperbacks, however, has recently brought us a number of new Sandman Mystery Theatre collections, and so I've picked up the series again with The Face and The Brute.

Unfortunately, I'll say right off that I didn't like The Face and The Brute near as much as The Tarantula. The difficulty is quite specifically in the art; whereas in Tarantula Guy Davis's drew clean, distict, moody lines that perfectly set the 1930s tone of the series, in Face and the Brute, artists John Watkiss and R. G. Taylor each bring more abstract, shadowy scenes to the work. While these styles work for the scare-factor, they render the minor characters nearly indistinguishable from one another. Sandman Mystery Theatre is a blast as a whodunit, but this joy is lost when one can neither tell one member of the Tong Society from the other in the first story, nor Arthur Reisling from his henchmen in the second.

Still, in and of itself, Sandman Mystery Theatre remains something of a wonder among mature superhero comics. It is indeed a superhero comic -- a man in a costume patrols the city and saves lives -- and is even perhaps more a superhero comic than what you'd traditionally find from Vertigo. It's additionally a mystery superhero comic, and I'm hard-pressed to think of another DC Comics that's so specifically ground in both mystery and superheroics, outside the occasional Batman comic. It's a revisionist comic of the type we see more and more now (Identity Crisis, Batman RIP) where old DC Comics stories are reintegrated into continuity, something seen far less when the original Sandman Mystery Theatre isssues first came out. And we can't underestimate the place Sandman Mystery Theatre had in connection to Starman, JSA, and indeed the modern Justice Society and Golden Age revival.

I was struck at the end of Face and The Brute by how little we still know about the protagonist, the Sandman Wesley Dodds. Perhaps because the tropes here are so familiar (mysterious billionare becomes superhero by night), writer Matt Wagner wastes little time delving into the hows and wherefores of Wesley's transformation to the Sandman; indeed the Sandman is nearly a specter in these stories, appearing from the shadows simply to knock the story in this or that direction, his plans intuited mainly by reading between the lines of Wesley's dialogue.

Wesley Dodds himself also remains mostly vague, likely by Wagner's intention. The dim sense we get of Wesley's predilections -- for hand-to-hand combat, for example -- hold only small grains of truth in favor of Wesley's quest to stop the villain du jour. Wesley vertiably (it must be said) sleeps through much of this collection, despite that he appears as the Sandman, only coming to life when he realizes that his slowness to action nearly had dire consequences for his burgeoning love interest/partner Dian Belmont (it is Dian's eyes, in truth, through whom we really see most of the story). It's only at this point that Wesley reveals his feelings for Dian and steps more fully into the story; I imagine it's in the next trade where Wesley Dodds finally more fully comes in to the light.

Sandman Mystery Theatre: The Face and The Brute is in my estimation not the high point of the series; it is, however, a relatively enjoyable next chapter of Sandman Mystery Theatre, enough to make it fairly likely I'll pick up the next volume before too long.

[Contains full covers.]

On now to finish out the all-new Atom, and we'll see where we go from there.

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