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What I Learned from Reading The Sandman: Overture
I was afraid to read The Sandman: Overture, Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams’s prequel-which-is-not-a-prequel to Gaiman’s beloved The Sandman, because I didn’t want to experience those characters differently from the way I did when I was 16. I can’t read The Sandman much differently than I read it in high school, even now; I reread it too many times for it to ever feel fresh or strange again. My own writing from five years ago is more likely to catch me off guard than a comic series I read at the turn of the last century, cared about too much, and never entirely stopped thinking about. I memorized the damn thing, and it occupies a specific shelf in my mental library. I wasn’t looking to revise that understanding.
“That’s fine,” I thought, when the first issue hit the shelves, “I’m sure I’ll read it at some point.” Over a year later, in a Seattle comics shop, I considered picking up the only issue they had—but who wants to start in the middle? I would read Overture when it was collected into a single volume. Then Overture was collected into a single volume, and I no longer had an excuse.
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Here’s what I learned from reading Overture: the overwhelming sense of creative possibility, of the absence of limits, which I felt reading Sandman for the first time had nothing to do with when I read it. It’s still there, in this book. Overture is a baroque work of pure imagination; as in a dream, anything can happen, but everything that does happen feels both natural and inevitable.
Here we find enormous toothed flora, decorous delegations from fantastic realms, a dreamer who in his sleeping hours is drafted into a body and life that bears no resemblance to the person he is when awake. Stars can talk, and go mad; a brave princess rescues a beautiful prince; even the dead can dream. A talking pumpkin expounds on when a cigar is just a cigar while firmly clutching a stiff broom handle, and creatures like the piggable—”piggables is like pigs and also like vegetables”—are everywhere. I would be happy to read a book that was one-tenth as inventive as this one; as it is, I dreaded putting it down.
J.H. Williams III’s lush artwork makes an impossible world feel more vivid than reality. It’s not just that he switches styles to fit the many different tones of the story, shifting from bright, flat colors in one scene to soft watercolors in another. His illustrations set the mood—think of the image in which Dream’s body is depicted as a house, complete with fanged monsters, mysterious fires, and a pair of enormous eyes peering out from different levels of the building. Williams’s art can even be funny: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite as adorable as his picture of a sinister tentacled creature sleepily rubbing its eyes with the edges of its tentacles.
Though the events of Overture take place before the first volume of The Sandman begins, the book is meant to be read afterward, and readers who are new to the series might find themselves lost. That’s all right. They’ll get to it in due time. But if you love the series and have somehow not read Overture yet, do it now. It’s delicious. Sandman remains the rare fantasy that’s actually more interesting than real life.
The complete The Sandman: Overture is available November 10 in graphic novel format.