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. 

Lucifer, We Hardly Knew Ye

I spent much of Friday night and some of Saturday morning watching the long-anticipated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman on Netflix. I have heard some complaints (or to be more accurate, I have heard many complaints about the complaints) about the race- and gender-swapping that occurred between the adaption from the comic to the show. Frankly, I don’t care one way or the other; it makes surprising little difference to the storytelling, which remains superb. But then it is neither horrifying blasphemy nor a brave necessary redressing of an error. As far as characters are his creations, he has every right to control their representation.  But while Neil Gaiman can retrofit his own work as much as he likes, I do not think he should have made the DC canonical figure of Lucian into Lucienne (though I think I can see the dramatic reason why he did it).

Nor do I have any problem with the character of Lucifer Morningstar being played by a woman. Angels (even fallen angels) have no gender; this is why Gaiman himself first imagined Lucifer as the androgynous rock star David Bowie. There is no reason why it should matter one whit whether the devil is played by a man or a woman. But I was rather hoping for something more like this:

Tilda Swinton as the angel Gabriel in “Constantine”

Rather than this:

Sorry, that was actually Florence Foster Spencer, renowned as The World’s Worst Opera Singer. Here is Gwendoline Christie as the Netflix Sandman Lucifer:

You can see my momentary confusion. I’m not saying the Fallen One cannot or should not be played by a woman; I just don’t know if this lipstick Lucifer would be the image I would choose for the role.

I don’t know, though. She’s giving off kind of a Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) vibe. I guess that’s pretty evil?