It’s way beyond cliché at this point to call Watchmen the greatest superhero comic ever written-slash-drawn. But it’s true. In the world Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created, it’s 1985, Nixon is still president, the Cold War is at absolute zero, and the nation’s superheroes consist of a bunch of neurotic, washed-up has-beens, mostly without actual superpowers, mostly retired.
As the novel begins one of them, the Comedian, is murdered. What follows is an astoundingly dense, beautiful, sad story that begins as a noir mystery and ends with the destruction, or possibly the redemption, of the entire world as we know it. To tell this story Gibbons and Moore deployed about a dozen fugually interwoven plots and an intricate system of echoing visual motifs. The result is a masterpiece so powerful it caused the entire genre of superhero comics to immediately rethink its most sacred conventions.
Morpheus is the Lord of Dreams. As our story begins, he has been magically captured by an occult group. A pale, skinny man clad in black — he’s the quintessence of goth — Morpheus escapes, but his kingdom, the Dreaming, a kind of geographical expression of our collective unconsciousnesses, has fallen into disrepair, and he must restore it to its former glory.
Melancholy and occasionally very ruthless, Morpheus is one of the Endless, a pantheon of beings that includes Death, Despair, Destruction, and various other eternal principles that begin with D. In writing SandmanNeil Gaiman merrily pillaged the world’s mythologies, and those of his own brain, to produce a rich, literary and often beautiful mix of horror and philosophy. Has any comic begotten as many goth tattoos as Sandman? Unlikely.
Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show “Family Feud” has died. He was 79.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
