In Neil Gaiman’s classic 1988 comic book The Sandman, there is a magical library of every book ever written or dreamed of. The library is imagined as a crush of books, piles and shelves crammed with volumes, and spiral staircases leading up to more books.
That’s how I like to remember the first comic book store I ever stepped foot inside, a spare storefront in Northern Virginia with racks of new graphic novels and fanzines and trading cards upfront and boxes full of back issues in the back.
The year was 1988. I’m thirteen. The father of George W. Bush is running for president against the son of Greek immigrants. Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse team up — briefly — in the hit animated feature Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and George Michael shook his denim-clad tuchus and sang about ‘Faith.’ I am a child but I dream about being a man.
The library in The Sandman is overseen by Lucien, an elf-life librarian and a faithful servant of the moody King of Dreams, and the comic book store was run by the coolest adult I had ever met, a serious-looking horror movie and UK comic book scholar with a huge defiant afro. He wore vests and fingerless gloves and was visibly, and appropriately, annoyed whenever I asked him a question about the Justice League or Kryptonite.
Did he have a name? I think so. Probably. I never dared to ask him. It took everything I had to shout things like “WHO IS MORE POWERFUL, DR. FATE OR THE SPECTER?” He wasn’t just the guy who rang up and bagged your purchases. He was a high priest in the church of geek, and I was but a lowly congregant.
But he would, sometimes, upsell me. Instead of answering my questions, he’d absentmindedly recommend, say, Matt Wagner’s pioneering anti-hero saga Grendel, his nose buried in an obscure manga. He was the man who steered me towards Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s superhero epic Watchmen, a genre-shattering masterpiece with a simple thesis: superheroes are fascist.
Watchmen interrogates America’s love of caped crusaders and men of steel and concludes that the land of the free and the home of the brave believes in its bones that violence solves everything (it creates more problems.)
Thanks to this alpha nerd, I would discover other British writers like Grant Morrison, who wrote DC’s trippy meta-comic Animal Man and the surrealist costumed freakshow Doom Patrol. He also turned me on to Judge Dredd and Cerberus and Grimjack. I remember he begrudgingly loved Marvel’s Fall of the Mutants X-Men crossover event.
He was also the first person I heard call comic books “graphic novels.” Those words carry such weight. Graphic novel. I made my dad chuckle once when he heard me refer to my “graphic novel collection.”
At that time, there was a full-on revolution at DC Comic and Marvel, a race to reinvent their most prized characters. The comics I discovered were dark and political. Some were funny. And a few didn’t even feature superheroes, they were just comic books about people living their lives.
The last time I went to that particular shop — maybe 1993 — I was buying issues of Terry Moore’s self-published complex love story Strangers in Paradise and Daniel Clowe’s creepy Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Both were different, but neither was about mutants or vigilantes or aliens.
And then there was The Sandman. I remember my mom gravitating to the cover of the first issue, painted by the brilliant Dave McKean, a surprising multi-media portrait of a man with glowing eyes, his face disappearing into a black and white mist of pencil-like scratchings, framed by shelves filled with photo-realistic treasures, like a geode and an hourglass and orchids. She was surprised. There was no fighting. No capes. No laser beams or punching.
This was art. At least, that’s what she thought. She thought McKean’s covers were beautiful, and that felt validating.
The Sandman was one of the first comic books I ever read that didn’t give me what I wanted immediately. I had to work for it. The comic took its time, and I didn’t care if I kept reading or not.
The original Sandman was a DC comic superhero with a sleeping gas gun. Like Moore and Morrison, Gaiman was bored by good guys with gadgets and glowing green space rings. The Sandman took its time and taught me patience. And in exchange, I was slowly introduced to a dark world of romance and monsters. A glamorous Lucifer and a smart alec with a pumpkin for a head. Sinister fairies and cosmic politics.
Gaiman’s comic book was for grown-ups, and it appealed to teens because it wasn’t trying to impress, relate to, or sell me anything.
It’s the story of a dysfunctional family, and the title character is a mopey little misfit prince who doesn’t fit in anywhere. The Sandman blends mythology and Jung and H.P. Lovecraft and sets it to the music of The Cure. It is scary, sad, and in love with humans as they are, not as they could be or should be.
I know his contemporaries, like George RR Martin and JK Rowling, are responsible for immensely popular works, but Gaiman’s influence on the fantasy genre is immense. Those Harry Potter books owe a debt to Gaiman’s magical melancholy, even if he’d never write a story about how some people are born special and others are not.
He is a profoundly compassionate writer with a sly, wise imagination. He reminds me a little of Clive Barker without the leather fetish.
My mom and dad were mindful of the movies and TV shows I watched — R-rated movies were always vetted — but they let me read whatever I wanted, even if that meant having nightmares after reading Stephen King books.
But this policy didn’t necessarily apply to comic books until I managed to convince my mom to take me to the local comic book shop, which I sold as a sort of book store. The books I read were courtesy of the library and thrift stores, and comic books could cost as much as seventy-five cents a piece when you bought them off a spinner rack at a pharmacy or a newsstand. My mom’s lack of respect for comics wasn’t just about cost. Comic books were kid's stuff at best, silly adventure stories featuring characters that looked like professional wrestlers, and at worst, it was junk food for the brain.
But she quickly changed her mind as she perused the comic book shop, which mixed ambitious, independently published books with the popular stuff that bore the Comics Code Authority stamp of approval.
Comic book creators had worked under the watchful and oppressive eye of the Comics Code Authority for decades, an industry organization that regulated comic book content after that media was dragged before Congress and blamed for corrupting the youth during a 1950s moral panic. The Comics Code Authority was an unhappy compromise: the industry agreed to censor itself instead of the government. For a couple of generations, the members of the Authority bled comic books of anything remotely controversial, the core idea being children had to be protected from Tales from the Crypt and Superman.
The work the writers and artists made under the code could be laughably childish and simplistic, but it could also be thoughtful and subversive.
It is still shocking that superheroes have become a multi-billion dollar phenomenon that has subsumed Hollywood, especially since, once upon a time, comic books were a successfully neutered subculture that appealed to young candy-addicted boys.
But many of the authors and illustrators of those books were brilliant and worked their complicated worldviews into the pages of art that was routinely dismissed by the mainstream. There are modern conservatives who mock what they perceive as liberal bias in big-budget comic book adaptations, nevermind the truth — comic books have always championed diversity and social justice, and if you were an awkward kid in the 80s or harbored a secret that you didn’t want others to find out about because loud, crude prejudices were more welcome back then, the X-Men, that team of outcasts, was a wonderful escape and source of support.
Publishers had learned by the 80s that there was a market for comic books that explored deeper themes than punching and supervillains laughing in their lairs. Some adults wanted to buy graphic novels, and some kids were desperate to be corrupted.
These publishers could sidestep the Comics Code Authority by selling directly to these shops, but to be safe, some of them, like DC Comics, would slap “suggested for mature readers” on the covers of their books. Few things make a fourteen-year-old want to read something more than the words “suggested for mature readers.”
There is currently a right-wing movement to ban books at school libraries across the country. It is a typical American puritan rampage as if art and literature have ever closed a heart or mind. There will always be churlish goody-goodies who want to banish works about joy and sorrow, pleasure and fear, and instead of burning these books, I just wish they’d smack “suggested for mature readers” on the covers.
The Sandman was for mature readers and readers, I was mature way back then. I remember every issue during its entire original run, from 1988 to 1996. I would study them, stoned or sober, as if every page were an all-new Tarot card, filled with mystery and messages from beyond.
And it has finally been adapted after thirty years of development. The Sandman is now a lavish, faithful ten-episode series on Netflix that was shepherded by Gaiman. In this retelling, some characters' race and gender are swapped, and while the tone is still a mix of gloom and hope, the horror of the source material has been dialed down a bit.
As Morpheus, King of Dreams, Tom Sturridge looks the part, but he’s more than just a beautifully sculpted face. Sturridge manages to make the Sandman — a distant, god-like immortal — a slim, likable, goth Dr. Who.
His trusted chief librarian has been reinvented as Lucienne, played by Vivienne Acheampong, and Sanjeev Bhaskar and Asim Chaudhry are his trusted subjects, Cain and Abel (yes, those Cain and Abel.) The series also features all-star character actors like Charles Dance, Stephen Fry, and Jenna Coleman as exorcist-for-hire Johanna Constantine. Comedian Patton Oswalt and Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, lend their voices, and weasely David Thewlis shows up and steals a little of the Dream Lord’s thunder. One of the best casting choices was picking Kirby Howell-Baptiste to play Dream’s gentle sister, Death.
Likewise, Mason Alexander Park’s Desire is a sleek, sensual pip, and I can only hope we’ll see more of them in the second season.
Netflix’s The Sandman is respectful to a fault at times, recreating actual frames from the comic book, and in those brief moments, I fell into the dreamland of my memory, visiting that comic book shop once a month to buy a few precious comic books with money my mother gladly handed over to me.
She would sometimes come into the store and browse with me, but eventually, she’d return to the car to read or listen to the radio or smoke a cigarette, and I’d just… wander. I’d stare at covers and pull back issues sheathed in plastic from boxes and sneak a read in, here and there, especially if the coolest guy in the world was having a heated debate about Star Trek or Batman with another fully grown nerd, one of whom, I remember distinctly, would hang out at the shop while wearing a Mad Hatter-style top hat. That backroom was a maze of boxes and shelves; if there was a door leading out or even a corner, I never found it.
At night, long after the lights are out, I dream of wearing fingerless gloves and flipping through comic books that do not exist in the waking world.
Grief. Friendship. Jazz hands. My debut memoir, ‘Theatre Kids,’ is now available for purchase. You can order it at Amazon or Barnes & Noble or support your local independent bookstore. Look how happy I am (don’t worry, I’m dead inside.)
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of John DeVore's work on Medium. \