The Sandman by Dirk Maggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Fine Adaptation, but the Graphic Novels Are Best For The Sandman (2020), Dirk Maggs adapts to an audio format Neil Gaiman’s first three Sandman graphic novel collections. I reread the graphic novels while listening to the audio version and renewed my appreciation of the former while being (mostly) pleasantly surprised by the latter. Preludes and Nocturnes (1991; issues 1-8 1988-89) introduces Dream, aka the Sandman or Morpheus, one of the Endless (his siblings are Death, Desire, Delirium, Despair, Destruction, and Destiny), anthropomorphized aspects of life predating all gods. In this first story arc Dream is mistakenly captured by a 20th-century black magician who wanted to capture Death, resulting in strange effects on mortals when Dream isn’t able to give people dreams. Dream manages to escape after seventy-two years of imprisonment and subsequently attempts to retrieve his powerful artifacts, including a trip to hell, an adventure with John Constantine, a duel with the horrible and pathetic Dr. Dee, and a neat conversation with his cheerful sister, Death. The Doll’s House (issues 9-16 1989-1990) continues the first story arc as Dream puts things back in order in his realm the Dreaming that had been messed up by his long absence, including dealing with a “dream vector” and four “major arcana” gone AWOL from the Dreaming and making mischief in our world. The arc begins with stories introducing Dream’s former lover Nada and his one (at first mortal) friend Hob, goes on to depict Rose Walker’s travel with her mother to England to meet her grandmother Unity, and then features a creepy serial killers’ convention (not unlike a comic book convention), an abused youth, and a moving superhero parody. Dream Country (issues 17-20, 1990) is a set of four standalone short stories: Calliope (an ambitious writer discovers that there are worse things than writer’s block), Façade (a former CIA operative tries to come to terms with being a “metamorph”), Dream of 1000 Cats (the dreams of our feline friends are revealed), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare’s troupe performs A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the King and Queen of Fairies and their court). Maggs includes about all of the elements from the plots of the graphic novels, while trying to approximate in an audio radio drama format the information and atmosphere evoked by artistic images and styles and layouts and so on. Their adaptation retains pretty much all the text from the graphic novels, much of it quite witty, cool, beautiful, or challenging, like: “Light drips from the ruby like drops of blood,” “It is never only a dream,” and “It was a dark and stormy nightmare.” The main text added by the audio adaptation is description to set the stage and characters’ appearances etc. For instance, an era marker is spoken each time Dream meets Hob a century later, whereas in the graphic novel each later era is conveyed by pictures of clothes and references in the dialogue (e.g., Chaucer, Queen Elizabeth, slavery). The audio adaptation adds sound effects, like Rose flying on a jet liner, Rose typing a letter, and the Corinthian eating eyeballs. It also adds music by James Hannegan—too much—grandiose synthesizer music to start and end chapters like Danny Elfman’s Tim Burton movie soundtracks on steroids. That said, when restrained during quiet and moving scenes, as in The Sound of Her Wings, the music is effective. The voice acting is mostly fine. Luckily, the moments when average actors try and fail to impersonate famous people like John Wayne are few. Most importantly, James McAvoy as Dream is perfect: lugubrious, intelligent, wry, condescending, and vulnerable. My first reaction to hearing American actress Kat Dennings doing Death was that she should be British like her brother! And they cut her line from the graphic novel mocking Dick Van Dyke’s atrocious British accent in Mary Poppins. But Dennings is finally appealing as the perky punky Death. Except for Calliope, the other major characters like John Constantine, Lucifer, various his demons, Lucien (Simon Vance!), Cain and Abel, Dr. Dee, etc., all sound great. There are things that the graphic novels do better or more impressively. For example: When the layout shifts from vertical to horizontal when Rose falls into a dream. When the art style suddenly changes to Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo. When Rose’s motley housemates dream in completely different art styles. When Dr. Dee is suddenly a small figure on a full blank white page. When Dream gets his purpose back in a ¾-page picture with gold behind his outflung arms. The audio drama cannot replicate the impact of such visual moments (made potent by form and color and layout and text in the graphic novel), even with voice acting, sound effects, and music. The audio version also cannot approximate the different colors of the speech balloons and the different fonts of their texts, like Dream’s black balloons, Lucifer’s ornate font, and Delirium’s multi-colored balloons and meandering fonts. Voice acting may try to simulate that kind of thing, but it is an example of something that comics can do uniquely well (but that most other comics don’t take enough advantage of). Dream of 1000 cats is a story that works best as a graphic novel, because it leaves up to our imaginations what talking cats would sound like, whereas voice actors are too obviously people, so the fantasy doesn’t work well in audio form. There are, to be sure, places where the audio adaptation is more impressive than the graphic novel, like the scene where Rose and her mother meet their grandmother/mother Unity. The fine voice acting and subtle and beautiful music make the scene more moving than when I read it in the graphic novel. Finally, I confirmed my suspicion that the graphic novel is superior as a medium for Gaiman’s story, and that the special strong points of the aural medium are not as impressive as those of the comics medium. But Dirk Maggs and co. did the best they could with translating it from one to the other, and I will listen to the future ones they produce. View all my reviews
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