From Sandman- A Game of You

Since Sandman re-boot in 1988, DC took a different path into the dark recesses of humanity and the universe with its heroes no longer sporting spandex and saving the day with their heroism. In its vast gallery of heroes, comprising of Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, one may say, they stopped playing to the gallery. Sandman released as a comic which was “suggested for mature audiences”. Sandman pertains to the dark fantasy genre with its setting in the various domains and fissures of time. Neil Gaiman blended mythology, folklore, occult, historical drama and epic fantasy and presented a gamut of characters, in different times, places and situations. In its oeuvre, the comics have for its theme and setting, tales of Calliope, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Emperor Norton, Adam, Eve, Lucifer among many others.

How much of the analysis in the article would be appreciated and made legitimately veritable and won’t remain just a conjecture depends on venerable Neil Gaiman but for the sake of simply analysing and explaining the various contrivances used by the author, the thoughts expressed and various narratives explained remain personal.



Sandman Issue No. 38 is titled ‘The Hunt’ and is a part of the ‘Convergence’ anthology and also a part of ‘Fables and Reflections’ collection of issues. The name ‘Convergence’ is rightly given so as we find in the three issues, ‘The Hunt’(#38), ‘Soft Places’(#39) and ‘The Parliament of Rooks’(#40) people of Earth not only interacting or coming across the protagonist, Morpheus but various other biblical and legendary characters in folktales as well. The convergence is of time as well when the narrative shifts from a certain point of time to other or a native of the living travels to the world of Dreaming in a different time(#39).











In the modern and post-modern era, we often find narratives where the reader is at cross-roads with the narrator and is dithering in his perception whether he should trust the narrator or the narrative,i.e., the story-teller or the story. D.H.Lawrence asserted in

Studies in Classic American Literature:

“The artist usually sets out — or used to — to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”



In ‘The Hunt’ we come across three narratives, Vassily is with his grand-daughter, telling her a story; the story that Vassily tells and the story that the author is telling us for Vassily. At the end, who do we trust? The Author, Vassily or the tale?



Vassily, an old man, an immigrant from western Russia or Eastern Europe, residing in U.S.A. tries to tell his grand-daughter a story of his ‘Old Country’. The girl, as is usual for most girls of her adolescent age, prefers to watch TV over listening to the story. She talks in a very non-chalant way and slightly roughshod manner to her grandpa and says “fer chrissakes grandpa” and justifies it as being normal because she was brought up in America where, as she claims, everyone uses the phrase. At this, Vassily, like a pious Christian starts somewhat fulminating that one must not say Christ’s name in vain and retorts that would she follow the people if they were beheaded and their hearts are buried at cross-roads?



The first page of The Hunt

This is another instance of a Christian practice where bodies (mostly of criminals or people who commit suicide) were buried at a crossing with the belief that if the ghost of the person rises then he/she would lose its way since it is buried at a crossing. Another belief is that since suicide is unholy, and many graveyards were near the crossings, it was the nearest resting place the deceased would get to any sort of religious symbol.



Vassily begins the story and the story is about a man named Vassily. When his grand-daughter is surprised, he says that that was a pretty common name. The story is set in a forest during winter and after a brief introduction of Vassily’s family, the narrator tells the girl that in the story, Vassily runs into a Roman gypsy who was hungry and looking for customers. When the gypsy woman shows the items that she is selling which are, to us, as audience, things that are part of Russian legends. The inventory consisted of many things but the ones she did mention before the narrator’s grand-daughter interrupted are-

Emerald Heart of Koschei

Cloak of the Night

The drum inescapable

Russian folklore tells us the story of Koschei. There are many tales where the name appears and he is a villain with many magical, and sinister powers. With the passage of time, Koschei has become synonymous with male antagonist who would kidnap the heroine, torture her and has evil spells up his sleeve. In most tales, Koschei cannot be killed because he hides his soul in various objects, the most popular one being inside an egg in a duck.



Koschei/Koschey appears in various tales such as ‘Mary Morevna’(where Baba Yaga also makes an appearance), ‘Tsarevich Petr and the Wizard’, ‘The Snake Princess’, ‘Ivan Sosnovich’. Alexander Pushkin‘s poem ‘Ruslan and Ludmila’ has King Koschei as an evil wizard. In this story, we find that his heart is inside an emerald.



Koschey revived by Ivan with water, from Marya Morevna (The Red Fairy Book, 1890)

Koshchey the Deathless by Ivan Bilibin,

Cloak of the night is something that the writer has crafted from his imagination. The drum inescapable, the gypsy says is made by Empusa from the hide of a Wyvern, and the wood of Yggdrasil. She assures Vassily that nothing can escape him if he beats the drum.



Empusa is a shape-shifting female being in Greek Mythology. Aristophane’s(a Greek playwright of 5th century BC) play Frogs contains Empusa who appears in front of Dionysus while they travel to the underworld. In Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana Empusa appears as a beautiful woman who seduces a young man to feed on him. Empusa has often been associated with Hecate.



Wyvern is a two-legged dragon with a pointy tail often found in Welsh, Irish, Scottish and English legends and tales and appears as a mascot of various institutions.



A wyvern in the flag of Medieval Wessex

Yggdrasil is a holy tree which connects the Nine Worlds in Norse mythology, Ásgarðr, Vanaheimr, Álfheimr, Miðgarðr, Jötunheimr, Múspellsheimr, Svartálfaheimr/Niðavelli, Niflheimr and, Helheim and various creatures live in the tree. It is a rendezvous point where all the gods assemble.



“The Ash Yggdrasil” (1886) by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine

Vassily’s grand-daughter is astonished that some gypsy woman can have such precious artefacts with her and asks him how did she come to possess all these items. Her grandpa says that she must be crazy to think that an old gypsy woman would possess such things. On further questioning by her that it is him that said so, Vassily continues the narration. This is the second instance when we are made to question, what to trust? The tale where the woman does possess these things or the narrator who says that one would be ‘crazy’ to think that she may ever have all these things.



When Vassily asks the price of the artefacts, he is interrupted by his father who takes him away and says that the folk in the forest mean them harm and Vassily shouldn’t talk to them and the gypsy woman is “not of the people”. The forest is the known world, where Vassily and his father have always been. Not just the outside, unknown world but even people from there pose a threat to him. As is usual for birds who are fledged to leave their nest, Vassily would soon be leaving the Old world for the New, unknown world.



In Vassily’s second meeting with the gypsy woman, he tells her that his father thinks her items are “valueless”. The gypsy woman replies that “value’s in what people think, not in what’s real. Value’s in dreams”. Here lies an uncertainty as to what are we to treat “dream” as. Since the story revolves around the protagonist, Morpheus, an anthropomorphic personification of Dream, Value is in Dream, the protagonist, in what a person dreams when he is asleep or, what one dreams/wishes for? She gives him a picture of the Duke’s daughter and offers to tell his fortune by reading his palm but she suddenly sees something in his face and is terror-stricken. What is noteworthy is the signs she makes from her palms, the left one wading the evil eye and the right the devil.







Since then, the boy loses delight in his regular hunting and wood-cutting. The gypsy woman brought a certain change in him. He wants to get out of his shelled existence, he suffers from wanderlust now. Packing his things, he sets off for the journey and “encounters the gypsy woman for the last time”. The reader finds the gypsy woman, lying on the ground, dead with blood all over her clothes and especially oozing from her throat and “hardened to a black crust”. How was she killed is not mentioned. Beasts attack their prey’s neck to kill it but as is shown in the panel, her body is intact and the flesh remains uneaten. The narrator is unreliable since the cause of death is not mentioned at all.



Vassily picks up the woman’s bag along with her inventory and continues on his journey and later, stops by an inn where the innkeeper, after knowing where Vassily came from tells that the forest is a home to ghouls and ogres. He also gets to know about what Vassily is carrying in his bag and in the night tries to murder him but fails. It is ironic since none of the ghouls and ogres which the innkeeper mentioned did anything to Vassily but the innkeeper, a human, tried to murder him, probably to get hold of his items.



Later, the author mentions that Vassily took back the coin he gave to the innkeeper and set off again, “well-rested and well-fed”. We see him wiping his mouth whereas in the previous page it was mentioned that he ate light. The readers are made to infer that perhaps he ate the innkeeper or this is another instance of the unreliability of the narrator.



Two days later, Vassily comes across a thin man on the road and the reader knows who he is. He is Lucien, the chief Librarian of Dream’s palace. The convergence of the dreaming and the real world begins. Vassily tells the man that he is not selling anything of great value, just oddments and trinkets . Earlier, the gypsy woman had said that it is in dreams and now, a resident of Dream’s palace says that “value is in the mind of the buyer”. He wants a book that Vassily is carrying and also identifies the bag and says that Vassily is not “the first to carry that bag.” The bag becomes a sort of heirloom but instead of being passed on through generations, it is passed on from one person to the other.



Vassily says that he has been told that what he has is the emerald heart of Koschei whereas Lucien says that what he knows is that it was inside a duck egg and destroyed by a man two hundred years ago (In ‘Tsarevich Petr and the Wizard’, Tsar Bel-Belianin is the one who does so). A juxtaposition of russian folklore, the dream world and the real world occurs here. We are to question ourselves the authenticity of the emerald heart. Vassily says that the price of the book is the Duke’s Daughter. Another irony lies here since Vassily said that the items he is carrying are of no value. The thin man(Lucien) says that he can’t pay that and Vassily goes along in his way. The Narrator’s grand-daughter, Celeste asks who the man was and whether he was some fairy or the ilk. She also says that she doesn’t believe in them. Here, we find that her grandpa says that he didn’t believe in them too when he was her age( fifteen years old) and that he started believing in them once he was a hundred and forty or fifty. How could it be that a man who is older than that is alive and doing well, telling her grand-daughter a story. Here, we are made to question the narrator of the tale, the author of Sandman. Are we to believe this narrator or just the tale? How real is his tale?



As vassily, the narrator continues to talk, we see that Celeste asks whether it really is a story of old country because it sounds post-modern to her. As if her asking the question is not strange enough for girls her age, listening to Michael Jackson and going out for parties usually do not know what post-modern fiction is, her grandpa says that if she interrupts him again, he would rip out her throat from his teeth. Is it just his primeval instinct or something else? Vassily continues narrating the story and says that vassily kept travelling and a raven was flying far above his head. In previous issues of Sandman, we come across a raven, Matthew Cable, a man who died and was resurrected as Dream’s raven who acts as a companion, a messenger and does his errands at times. Since the story takes place before Matthew Cable was even born or died, it is perhaps one of the earlier ravens of Morpheus.



Lucien tries to buy the book by offering Vassily a sack of gold but he refuses again. Later, Vassily tries to hunt a deer but a tribal girl gets the deer first. What is strange is that she addresses him as kinsman although they are complete strangers to each other. He follows her to her encampment and though he doesn’t recognise the people there, the narrator says that they were his kin. There is a big, old woman smoking a pipe and a house on chicken legs. She calls him cousin and the narrator tells us that it indeed is Baba Yaga.



Baba Yaga is a supernatural being in the Slavic folklore who may help or hinder people who seek her. What a bogeyman is to the American people, Baba Yaga is to the Russians and Slavs but with more stories attached to it. As is in Sandman, she is known to ride in a mortar with a pestle. She agrees to take Vassily to the Duke’s palace in the mortar in exchange of the emerald heart of Koschei. Every creature has an aura around it that affects other people. Some emit positive ones, some negative ones. As Baba Yaga flew across the sky, babies screamed, mothers miscarried and milk turned sour.



Baba Yaga as depicted by Ivan Bilibin, 1900

Baba Yaga’s hut standing on its chicken legs, 1900. Ivan Bilibin.

The narrator tells Celeste to only trust the story and not the story-teller. Was it really the heart of Koschei or was Baba Yaga duped? Gaiman leaves it to his readers to ponder upon. Vassily enters the Duke’s palace and we find that he is imprisoned by the butler. It is then that Lucien appears again and along with many other things says that the last time he had mislaid a book, it was when the continents were not in the current shape but Vassily wouldn’t understand it. What he is referring to is the Pangaea. The time in which the story is set and what the background of Vassily is, he wouldn’t know that continents were once all together and formed a giant heap of land, the Pangaea. Lucien is certainly more intelligent that Vassily and knows more about the universe than the people of Earth.



Vassily rejects the offer of his freedom for the book which he refuses by saying that he can run at the same pace on his all fours as he can in just two. He asserts that he is kin to Dwarrow and Nightgaunt. In Norse and Icelandic myth, Dwarrows are Dwarves whereas Nightgaunt is a fictional creature in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and appear in the poem ‘Night-gaunts’ and the novella The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Gaiman incorporates Modern American mythos into his oeuvre as well with this reference.





A creative visualisation of Nightgaunt

A cover of the book ‘The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath‘ showing Lovecraft on the left panel

To meet the price, Lucien takes Vassily through a door which hadn’t been there before. Obviously, this is a portal and it leads to the library of Lucien in the Dreaming world where, although he tries to hide from his master, Morpheus arrives to. As the situation is explained, Morpheus agrees and asks Vassily to give the book. The book is The Merrie Comedie of The Redemption of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe was a playwright during the late 16th century in England and is renowned for his tragedies. His The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus tells the tale of a learned scholar and doctor who, after signing a deal with Lucifer gets to practice 24 years of magic and necromancy in lieu of his soul. In the end his soul is taken away by the agents of Lucifer and damned in hell. Lucien has all the books which were never written and only dreamt by the author and this book is not any different to the others in Dream’s Library.



Morpheus takes all of them to the lady’s bedchamber and we are told by Morpheus that she is dreaming of goblets of sour blood. A common myth associated with such a dream is that when women menstruate they often dream of blood.



Once they are out of there, Vassily eats with Lucien in Dream’s palace and later wakes up in a forest. With what is explained in the comic, we are made to understand that he shifts his shape to a wolf and romps with another wolf and they “celebrate their union”. The running and attacking is a mating ritual. This explains a lot of things in the comic. His inner wolf-ish instincts made him suspicious of the innkeeper and that’s why he probably ate him. He could run on all fours because as we are to understand, he is a werewolf. People from hundreds of leagues away to celebrate their wedding. The narrator ends his story here. Just like us, readers, Celeste has various questions too but Vassily refuses to say anything and just says “it just was”.



The dining room in Dream’s palace

Celeste starts to nag and Vassily says that the story is not about her boyfriend who belongs to a different race or about the people. It was about what Vassily saw when he looked at the sleeping woman. The story ends with Vassily saying that Celeste’s grandmother never let him forget that she beat him to the deer and as Celeste is awe-struck at this, he bids her good night.



In the end, the narrator Vassily becomes the story. If we regard this to be true then it would explain why it is mentioned that he is more than a hundred and fifty years old, why he said that he would rip out her grand-daughter’s throat. To go by D.H. Lawrence’s assertion, we must believe the story and not the story-teller but in this case, the story-teller becomes the story and how much are we to believe him since he narrated his own story? And we are the juncture of a bigger question, do we trust the real story-teller, the author?



As Harper Lee had said, “the book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.” We are made to think after we have completed reading the graphic novel what to believe and whom to believe. To read a comic which has Slavic folklore, Norse and Greek mythology, old world charm, a fantasy world of the Dreaming along with American Horror mythos, one would have a whale of a time. The pièce de résistance is the fusion of it with a triple-layered narrative which practically lends it a modern epic stature.

