Post by rberman on Dec 12, 2019 16:10:25 GMT -5
Note: The Confessor also has a thread covering this material at a higher level of generality, so interested parties will wish to consult it here.
Issue #1: “Sleep of the Just” notations
I haven’t read this series before now either, but I do have the Absolute Vol 1 edition that I’ve been waiting to crack. I just read issue #1 for the first time.
• Basic story: An Aleister-Crowley type attempts to summon and imprison Death. Instead he gets Dream. Afraid to release him, he imprisons Dream (a.k.a. Morpheus) in his basement for decades, until the wizard's now-elderly son accidentally breaks the spell. Morpheus gets out and wreaks vengeance upon his captors. Now he needs to find three items which were taken from him when he was imprisoned.
• The issue title introduces the theme of sleep as well as judgment; some people are just, while some people are not. The cult members are all uniformly evil, driven by greed and lust. Even young Alexander is nothing but wicked. But other people have suffered as innocent victims during Morpheus' decades-long imprisonment.
• Are we to understand that all the evils of the twentieth were caused or perhaps augmented by the unbalancing effects on human sleep wrought by Morpheus’ imprisonment? If so, the art doesn’t point us that direction.
• The major themes are being put in place. We hear of “The Endless,” a group of entities including Dream, Death, Destiny, and Desire. Do they all start with “D”?
• Paul calls his lifelong boss Alexander “darling” once, which I assume means they are homosexual lovers. Or is that just one of those British things? Probably not.
• The overall vibe of this story is very Lovecraftian. Secret societies meeting in Old World mansions, using museum books to perform dark rites which summon eldritch force with whom there is no bargaining. Gaiman also namechecks Stephen King’s book “It” and Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.”
• One series of vignettes involves a WWI soldier. That conflict did not ingrain itself upon the American psyche nearly so much as its sequel did, but the horrors of trench warfare burned into the European collective memory.
• This issue sets up a clear-cut “collection quest” story for Morpheus: He must retrieve his helmet, pouch, and amulet. I’m confused by the amulet. It’s taken by Hathaway when he summons Morpheus. But then an identical amulet is given to the rogue cultist Sykes by a demonic force, in exchange for the helmet. Then that amulet is stolen by Ethel Cripps when she abandons Sykes. So, are there two amulets? I trust future issues will clarify this.
• Page 2 contains Norse (or if you’re Tolkien, dwarvish) runes in the page border, but I could not transliterate them into anything meaningful, so I guess that’s just decoration rather than Easter Egg.
• The television show Babylon 5 played homage to this series by having an alien race named “Gaim” (proununced “Guy-eem”) in honor of Neil Gaiman. They wore helmets just like Morpheus’ helmet, a fact I did not realize until just now when I saw his helmet in issue #1. Gas masks are a further reminder of the grip that WWI has on modern Britain. See also Dr. Who episodes "The Empty Child" and "The Deadly Assassin" etc.
•
Issue #1: “Sleep of the Just” notations
I haven’t read this series before now either, but I do have the Absolute Vol 1 edition that I’ve been waiting to crack. I just read issue #1 for the first time.
• Basic story: An Aleister-Crowley type attempts to summon and imprison Death. Instead he gets Dream. Afraid to release him, he imprisons Dream (a.k.a. Morpheus) in his basement for decades, until the wizard's now-elderly son accidentally breaks the spell. Morpheus gets out and wreaks vengeance upon his captors. Now he needs to find three items which were taken from him when he was imprisoned.
• The issue title introduces the theme of sleep as well as judgment; some people are just, while some people are not. The cult members are all uniformly evil, driven by greed and lust. Even young Alexander is nothing but wicked. But other people have suffered as innocent victims during Morpheus' decades-long imprisonment.
• Are we to understand that all the evils of the twentieth were caused or perhaps augmented by the unbalancing effects on human sleep wrought by Morpheus’ imprisonment? If so, the art doesn’t point us that direction.
• The major themes are being put in place. We hear of “The Endless,” a group of entities including Dream, Death, Destiny, and Desire. Do they all start with “D”?
• Paul calls his lifelong boss Alexander “darling” once, which I assume means they are homosexual lovers. Or is that just one of those British things? Probably not.
• The overall vibe of this story is very Lovecraftian. Secret societies meeting in Old World mansions, using museum books to perform dark rites which summon eldritch force with whom there is no bargaining. Gaiman also namechecks Stephen King’s book “It” and Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.”
• One series of vignettes involves a WWI soldier. That conflict did not ingrain itself upon the American psyche nearly so much as its sequel did, but the horrors of trench warfare burned into the European collective memory.
• This issue sets up a clear-cut “collection quest” story for Morpheus: He must retrieve his helmet, pouch, and amulet. I’m confused by the amulet. It’s taken by Hathaway when he summons Morpheus. But then an identical amulet is given to the rogue cultist Sykes by a demonic force, in exchange for the helmet. Then that amulet is stolen by Ethel Cripps when she abandons Sykes. So, are there two amulets? I trust future issues will clarify this.
• Page 2 contains Norse (or if you’re Tolkien, dwarvish) runes in the page border, but I could not transliterate them into anything meaningful, so I guess that’s just decoration rather than Easter Egg.
• The television show Babylon 5 played homage to this series by having an alien race named “Gaim” (proununced “Guy-eem”) in honor of Neil Gaiman. They wore helmets just like Morpheus’ helmet, a fact I did not realize until just now when I saw his helmet in issue #1. Gas masks are a further reminder of the grip that WWI has on modern Britain. See also Dr. Who episodes "The Empty Child" and "The Deadly Assassin" etc.
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