My Weekly Book

The Sandman Companion - Hy Bender

As someone who often claims to be a big fan and a very serious reader of comics and graphic novels, I have to admit that it is shameful of me not to have read The Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s masterpiece of the genre. In my own defence I will say it was spread over some 76 issues and is now contained in a 10-volume trade paperback collection. And that it is shockingly difficult to actually get your hands on the earliest volumes, a saga that has been going on for six months or more as I fruitlessly tried visiting bookshops, ordering it online and searching on eBay – all to no avail.

[Buy from Amazon] [Search on eBay]

In order to keep my hands busy while doing all that I invested in this companion volume which has some rather interesting things to say about comics as a medium in general as well as about The Sandman in particular. No apologies for the lengthy quote; it is that interesting:

If we can be deeply moved by words alone (as in novels) or pic­tures alone (via paintings) why not by the marriage of the two?

Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren, The Einstein Intersection and Babel-17, agrees. “Each medium does things the others can’t and one medium isn’t replace­able by another. What you can do in comics you can’t do in movies. What you can do on the stage you can’t do in a novel. It’s not the content one should look at. It’s the intensity and the vividness with which the form of a medium disseminates the experience of the medium itself.

“For example,” continues Delany, “comics handle time in ways that verbal narrative and movies can’t match. In a comic, you can have three panels in a row where the actions are half a second apart, followed by a fourth, the same size and on the same row, set a century later; and the transition will feel perfectly natural. A comic can also slip into slow motion or fast motion seamlessly. And a comic can ramp up the impact by going back and forth, panel by panel, between close-ups and far shots, building tremendous energy by their alternation. The same effects in a novel or film would come off as terribly awkward.”

Comics can actually be seen as falling somewhere between novels and films. The visuals of a comic tend to make it more accessible than straight prose, easing you into a narrative by giving you a foundation of images to play with. At the same time, a comic is static and can provide only selected details of a scene, so it forces you to fill in an enormous amount of information with your imagination. The lat­ter process gives you a more introspective and intimate experience than you’d have watching a movie.

Groundbreaking comics writer Alan Moore is especially taken by the combi­nation of words and images, which he says has a biological component. “Our brains are divided into right and left halves,” explains Moore. “The right brain is the pre­-verbal, subconscious half, which deals with images and the left brain is the verbal, reasoning half, which is concerned with language. Comics is a medium that, almost uniquely, brings both halves of the brain into play at once. That is, when you look at a comics panel, the right brain decodes the pictures at the same time the left brain decodes the words. There are many ways to exploit this process as an artist; for example, by creating an image that shows one thing and accompanying it by text that says something quite different, you can achieve a sort of flash in a reader’s mind. The range of subtle effects possible is extraordinary and, so far, has been almost unexplored. It’s this kind of potential that makes comics exciting for me.”

Artist and comics philosopher Scott McCloud emphasizes a different juxta­position: the one between two sequential panels. In his landmark book Understanding Comics, McCloud notes that when we see only part of something, we automatically complete the missing pieces with our imagination. To demonstrate, McCloud’s book shows one panel in which an axe is being raised behind a man and a second panel in which an “EEYAA!” sound effect floats over a moonlit city. As McCloud puts it, “I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example, but I’m not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime; each of you committing it in your own style…” McCloud expands on this notion to cover any sequence in comics: “Several times on every page, the reader is released like a trapeze artist into the open air of imag­ination, then caught by the outstretched arms of the ever-present next panel. [Within a panel] the artist can only convey information visually. But between panels, none of our senses are required at all. Which is why all of our senses are engaged… No other art form gives so much to its audience while asking so much from them as well.”

Don’t buy it if you don’t like spoilers. As well as extensive interviews with Gaiman, commentary by Bender and a blow-by-blow account of what happens throughout the entire series it includes input from the creative team that worked alongside Gaiman, an examination of some of the themes readers will find in each volume, a decent smattering of artwork plus a few gorgeous colour plates in the middle. Because The Sandman is an extremely dense and multi-layered text with a plethora of references and allusions, both visual and textual, a reading companion is an extremely useful thing to have. But I think it’s important to remember what it isn’t as well as what it is.

Two criticisms have been levelled at this book (while accepting that it’s still an important and useful work for readers of the series - for more information, see links below). One, that it’s primarily Neil Gaiman talking about his own work with little critical challenge. This makes it a really important primary source for anyone interested in what he believed he was up to – but not in any way a critical study. The second is connected, kinda sorta. If Bender isn’t offering Gaiman much of a challenge, how much weight should we actually give to his own views on the series? How critical, challenging or objective was he able to be in the (literal and figurative) presence of a writer that he so obviously greatly admired? In the vernacular, is he not fanboying Gaiman just that little bit too much? Come to that, if you want to be really postmodern about this, how much store should the reader put in Gaiman’s expressed opinions, on the principle that once you’ve published something and it’s out in the world, it belongs to the readers to make of what they will.

To be fair, the book is called ‘The Sandman Companion’ not ‘The Sandman: a critical essay’ and therefore we are getting exactly what it says on the tin. I am finding it immensely helpful in coming to terms with Gaiman’s truly impressive creation. As long as you bear in mind what it is you are reading. And, interestingly, I found this whole argument strangely indicative of the confused place that comics/graphic novels hold in our cultural consciousness.

However, I also feel that the critical essays can’t be that far along the road…

Some links:

• Brief Wikipedia article on Hy Bender
• Author’s (pretty brief) website
• Four-colour commentary: The Sandman Companion
• Neil Gaiman: comics bibliography

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 6:51 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.