The Last Sandman Story

"Don't judge a book by its cover."

My copy of Dave McKean's Dust Covers (New York, 1997) has a copy of Dust Covers on its cover.

Although a good cover draws us into a book, we soon learn that the interior art of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comic book series is not by the cover artist, McKean, but by diverse other excellent comic book artists. However, Dust Covers not only collects all of McKean's Sandman covers but also begins with "The Last Sandman Story," a new eight page comic strip written by Gaiman and drawn by McKean. Thus, in this case at least, the cover artist's recognizable style does continue beyond the cover and indeed throughout the volume.

Gaiman and McKean had agreed that this story should be "Something that had the kind of look that was of a piece with the covers." (p. 6) So, for once, we stay with the style of the cover art instead of leaving it behind as soon as we open the book.

They had also agreed to have "More prose than comics - one or two illustrations to a page." (ibid.)

pp. 6-8 and 12-13 each have two large non-sequential illustrations accompanied by substantial prose by Gaiman, not relating a new Sandman story but recounting childhood and adult experiences that had influenced the writing of The Sandman.The strip is "...anecdotal...," not "...something that extends any part of the story..." (ibid.)

I love the dust on the empty wine bottles in panel 2 of p. 6.

p. 9 shows a folded over page of an imaginary comic book with nine panels in which Gaiman, during a Hallowe'en parade in the Village, New York, converses with a man claiming to be the demon Choronzon. This is the only page with speech balloons. The meeting with Choronzon was one of the times, during the writing of The Sandman, "...when reality frayed and thinned." (p. 8)

Make of that what you can. 

Dust Covers IV

The ten volumes of The Sandman by Neil Gaiman tell a long story in sequential graphic art. The one volume of Dust Covers by Dave McKean tells the parallel story of how McKean created fine art covers for all seventy five monthly issues of The Sandman and one Special. Each cover is displayed, often with comments by McKean, Gaiman or both. The book also includes other art, including covers of some of the ten collections.

With all this art plus the comments and the introductory comic strip written by Gaiman and drawn by McKean, Dust Covers is a substantial volume, guiding its readers through the history of a creative process.

A comic book cover usually shows the hero in action in the same kind of graphic art that is to be found within the book whereas McKean quickly dispensed with images of the central character and even with merely representational art. Not really reflecting on the covers, I had not realized that some of them had had to be constructed physically before being reproduced as cover illustrations. On the sides of the cover of no 1, ten shelves hold miscellaneous items, including a book entitled The Gates of Dawn, which is both an evocative verbal image and appropriate for a beginning. However, we could not have known, until Gaiman tells us in his first note for Dust Covers, that McKean had scrupulously erased the name of the publisher, Mills and Boon, in case it was taken to imply that The Sandman was a romance.

I took for granted that the figure on the cover of no 3 was the guest star of that issue, John Constantine, but had not known that it was also McKean's friend, Neil Jones, who had already modelled for McKean's Hellblazer covers. It is obvious that nos 14 and 16 show the Corinthian and Morpheus respectively but not, until McKean tells us, that both were modelled by Gaiman.

Dust Covers III

The Mystery of the Missing Dust Covers has been solved. My granddaughter who lives in our attic and is a keen artist and interested in Dave McKean's work had borrowed it ages ago. But now where is Black Orchid, Volume 3? There is always one book missing.

I had correctly remembered the incidents recorded in the Dust Covers comic strip: encounters with Constantine, Choronzon, Death and Dream. One detail that I had not remembered was that Dream's cloak was the reflection of the room in the window.

It is interesting to learn that Gaiman was told about the Sandman by his mother and that he relayed the story to his daughter. Thus, this story was in the family before it was in the comic.

Gaiman swore as a child that he would remember what it was like to be a child and he vividly presents children's points of view in his fiction. It is a point of view that I am glad to have got away from. I would wish for early maturity or "great wisdom from birth" in any future rebirth. Maybe I would feel differently if I had had a childhood in which we were helped to mature instead of condemned for immaturity. But the point here is that Gaiman displays enormous insight and empathy when he successfully writes childrens' povs.

Dust Covers

I have mislaid my copy of Dave McKean's Dust Covers, the annotated Sandman covers with a new comic strip by Gaiman and McKean. I have come to accept that not being able to find a book when I want to refer to it is a regular part of the deal with books and has to be accepted as such. Longer term, if it never turns up, I can buy another copy.

(Over a very long period, I visited friends regularly, left all my Sandmans to reread, and for them to read, at their place and wound up buying new copies to have at home - but they had been reread so often that I felt that the author deserved a second set of royalties.)

We make literary references by citing author, title, place and year of publication and page number as if every published text was eternally present in a universally accessible Platonic realm whereas, in reality, the ability to make or check the reference is entirely dependent on access to a physical copy of the book.

From memory, then, I think that the comic strip in Dust Covers covers:

the author seeing the Sandman - in reality the Moon and a tree with an outstretched branch - pouring dust onto his daughter's face as she lay in bed;
the Death girl seen by McKean on a plane where a passanger died;
Alan Moore seeing John Constantine in a London sandwich bar;
Death serving in a New York cafe - as opposed to Death serving in a London restaurant;
Choronzon the demon telling Gaiman that he does not understand any of this.

Choronzon is right to the extent that writers and artists do not fully understand the creative process.

(Interrupted by the obligation to deliver Christmas presents to children. To be continued later.)