The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections (1991-1993)

It’s been quite a while since I read/reviewed a volume of Sandman – I got caught up in other titles. I find that I often enjoy these vinette-filled volumes the best in this series, and this one offers up a good example of that.

In this aptly-named volume, we flit through a number of fables involving people – some real, some imagined, some mythical – who have encounters with Dream. Each story takes its own path and Dream himself is only occasionally a focal point of the tale, but all of them play out with grandness and mystery.

When you take a long-running series like this, one that’s known to twist its shape at various points in its run, and you read it for the first time after it’s all been published and packaged into trade paperbacks, it’s hard to know how intentional some of these volumes were when they were written. Did Neil Gaiman mean for there to be some invisible thread connecting these mostly disaparate stories, or do I invent a unifying force between them because I’m reading them as one collected volume? Hard to say. Either way, the effect comes off well.

As I said, the vinettes range through all sorts of subject matter and take a lot of different forms. There’s a story featuring Mark Twain and the one and only Emperor of the the United States, along with a story set during the French Revolution and one involving Marco Polo finding himself in a sort of dream way station in the desert. There’s a legend from the old county featuring werewolf-like creatures, and there’s the story of the King of Arabia wanting to sell Baghdad to the King to Dreams. Cain and Abel exchange bedtime stories, and we take an extended visit through the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Lots of variety, which keeps my interest. I read, not so much to find out what happens next, but to see what notions will be put forth next, what flights of fancy uncovered. In some stories, Dream is a major player, while in others, he makes little more than a cameo. His siblings make a few appearances as well – Death continues to be the best, and Desire has all the best androgynous fashion.

I’ll also mention that, while I enjoyed the Orpheus section plenty as I was reading it, I retroactively gained a greater appreciation for it after picking up the cast recording for Hadestown (review of that coming later!) I wasn’t particularly thinking about Sandman when I got the album, but I flashed on different panels as I was listening to it, especially the long walk out of the underworld.