Neil Gaiman's Sandman: Award-Winning Classic Graphic Novels

I wasn't in a great place in 1993. My mind was all over the place and my stress levels were through the roof.

I was studying History for my Bachelor's degree, so the vast majority of my reading matter was about the Holocaust. Hardly a subject for escapism, yet that was what my psyche desperately craved.

That was when a friend handed me Neil Gaiman's Sandman novel The Doll's House. She thought it might appeal to me. I opened the book, stared at the pictures, then began to read.

It was the first time I'd ever encountered a graphic novel.  Maus was on my reading list, but I hadn't got there yet. My introduction to the whole genre came from that opening chapter The Sound of her Wings.

I was entranced. My friend quietly pottered around, fetching drinks and waving at me to carry on, whenever I apologetically glanced up. Her remit had been to calm me down. As far as she was concerned, this was job done.

I dived furthermore into the realm of the Endless, losing myself in stories and characterizations unlike anything that I'd ever read before. While I was there, I failed to notice anything more of the world around me. I didn't notice it subtly changing in my view.

Two decades later, I'm not entirely sure I ever came back.

Sandman described a universe so vividly etched in my imagination, that I have to occasionally remind myself that it's not real. I quote it a lot. It's become a frame of reference, shortcuts to describing a mood, between myself and the friends familiar with these tales. The characters populating them are like old friends, once removed, on the other side of fiction.

Twenty years later, I realize that so much of my philosophy and outlook on life was tempered by reading Sandman back then.  It remains so to this day.

Before celebrities, Gods and the universe, there were the Endless. Before the big bang spluttered our solar system into being, the Endless were already ancient.

They assumed their roles for us, as they had always done for others. When the first single cell split into a burgeoning hungry consciousness, the Endless were ready and waiting.

No-one really knows their origin. It's possible that they merely popped into being, at the instant that awareness broke through to reality. A primal something, incomprehensibly old and distant - probably not in our cosmos nor even our dimension - must have been the first to think and feel.

All things start somewhere. 

Before there was life, there was the potential for life. All those wisps of gas which never burned. Falling stardust which could not form a critical mass. The Logos which was not spoken; the Word without a God.

They had their journeys too. Some might be still on-going. But even those which flickered briefly - pregnant with possibility - and were gone, caused a path to be forged. A beginning, a middle and an end.  Its passage was marked in the annals of Destiny.

Destiny is the eldest of the Endless. Did he watch alone throughout all those seemingly infinite eons when nothing much happened? He must have, because he's the eldest.

It's perhaps more comforting to believe that he existed only when a thinking mind rationalized that he must have been there. But that would require something alive enough to philosophize such things.

But all things living must die. Death is Destiny's younger sister. She came next. When finally matters arranged themselves enough for life to occur, Death found Destiny already waiting. If he told her about the fathomless expanse of time before, then we never got to find out.

The Endless were not created because a striving mind imagined them into creation. Because two of them were there before it was possible. Dream is the third sibling. It is he who is also known as the Sandman, and the hero of these stories.

All life (and potential life) has its destiny; all life must some day expire. But it takes full awareness to dream.

Those earliest dreams must have been about sustenance - food, shelter, comforts - wished into being when those essentials were left unsatisfied.  Dream would have stood by witnessing the very moment when 'I want' became 'I will have'.

When the first grasping mind propelled its owner into fighting, the fourth of the Endless was there. Destruction presided over those primal struggles for resources. He went on to nurture the ways of war.

Destiny saw it coming. Death collected the fallen. Dream continued to build worlds of imagination, pressing consciousness into awareness of self and needs. Destruction took the fallout to its logical conclusion.

It took a long time for life-forms to progress from such simple minds to those capable of complex thoughts. Brains had to grow large enough to make possible emotion, and to attach those feelings to stimuli from the wider world. Then to act upon them.

The twins Desire and Despair were next. They took their places amongst the Endless, weaving much more complicated journeys to be charted in Destiny's book.

How many more ages passed before the youngest of the Endless joined their ranks?  Did Delight come the second one of Desire's goals was sated?  Or when hope was developed as defense against Despair's cruel hooks?

Maybe it was much later than that. A living being found sanctuary, all that it wanted was right there. Safe from all predators with no need to fight. No burning desires nor reason for anxiety. Perhaps this was the mind which formed around the notion that life was good, and Delight was there to welcome the realization.

We do not know, but this we can say with certainty - Delight could not last.

Civilizations rose and fell. The Endless were there to perform their duties well. But with sophistication of minds and society comes the need to escape reality.  Fragile Delight was lost under the weight of myriad pressures, distractions, wild imaginings, competing agendas, grief and loss, more things to want, conflicting advice, social scares, anxieties, and the sheer cacophony of being alive in a world with such much in it.

The Endless did their jobs well. Delight transmuted into Delirium, and she never did come back.