Out of the Toybox (4): Dream a Little Dream

 

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman was a series of 75 comic books released by DC Comics between 1989 and 1996, and then republished in a series of graphic novels.  It was (and is) extremely popular and was part of the publishing explosion (including Maus and The Dark Knight Returns) that helped lift comic books into a new realm of literature. The Sandman was Morpheus, Dream of the Endless, one of the seven Endless: anthropomorphic personifications that embody primal forces, including his brothers and sisters Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium (formerly Delight), and Destruction.

Sandman Incarnations: Original Packaging

DC Direct came out with a line of Sandman action figures circa 1999. This included a boxed set called Incarnations.  I finally got into Sandman after buying a couple of the graphic novels at Eckman’s Card, Comic, and Toy Show, and I started getting some of the action figures wherever I could. I ended up with Dream, his two variants from Incarnations (with the little green Baku, eater of nightmares), Death (two variants), Daniel (the bleached new version of Dream), and the red-jacketed Desire. Not shown but in the collection: Morpheus’s raven, Matthew.

Three figures I was unable to get from this series are Wesley Dodd (two variants of the Golden Age Sandman) and Delirium, Dream’s wounded little sister.

Here's a Man-Thing from Marvel Comics, and a Sarek, Gorn, and Talosian from Star Trek (Playmates; many more to come in that series), a Mystic from The Dark Crystal and an Aughra from The Age of Resistance, and a Spawn of Cthulhu from Legends of Cthulhu by Warpo.  They're in this group because they're all out of the same drawer.