The Sandman Universe: Nightmare Country
While this is branded as “The Sandman Universe” it’s actually the first in a series-of-miniseries about the nightmare known as the Corinthian. It comes to us from writer James Tynion IV who has had a very… uneven track record in my book. At his best, he’s capable of making truly weird setups accessible and fascinating in their own way. See “The Department of Truth” and the first volume of “The Nice House on the Lake” for examples of that. Most of the time he just comes off as a competent journeyman writer who doesn’t deliver anything new in what he’s giving us. See “Something is Killing the Children” and the second volume of “The Nice House on the Lake” for examples of that.
“Nightmare Country” is somewhere between those extremes. Its setup isn’t so weird that I feel it benefits from being made more accessible, but it’s not so predictable that I can’t write it off with this first volume. It may still turn out to be an eye-rollingly dull take on what’s plaguing America today by the end of its run. Yet this first volume is just interesting enough to keep me engaged as Tynion plays with the toys that inspired him to become a comic book writer.
The Corinthian is a nightmare that was first introduced in the pages of “The Sandman” and though he was unmade by Dream early on in that title’s run, a new version of him was made towards its end. If this version comes off as less monstrous than his predecessor, it’s because he has a better understanding about following the rules. Though nothing’s going to stop him from tasting a good eyeball between the teeth of his eyes.
That is until he encounters the work of Madison Flynn. She’s an up-and-coming artist in New York who has a motif in her works of painting things with mouths for eyes. Just like the Corinthian. He’s curious about this but is called back to the Dreaming before he can question Flynn further. Which is too bad for her because she’s set upon by two S&M-themed hitmen known as Agony and Ecstasy. Their pursuit of Flynn will send her into the circle of right-wing billionaire William Teague who has been trying to attract the attention of those with real power for years.
As is usually the case with Tynion’s work, there’s not really anything that feels outright bad here. There’s a decent mystery at the start with why Flynn is dreaming of Corinthian-related imagery, and things do manage to get progressively weirder from there. If anything the biggest problem I have with this first volume is that you don’t get a sense of the story’s real scope until its fifth issue – the arc’s finale. It’s then that we see just how big the story is aiming to be with the presence of a certain All-American Angel and the revelation that another member of the Endless is involved in all this. When I say that the story is just interesting enough to keep me reading, it’s this finale which is the main reason for it.
I do wish the buildup to that point had been a bit more interesting, however. Though he’s on the cover, the Corinthian doesn’t play a huge role in the story early on. He has that initial encounter with Flynn, but after being whisked back to the Dreaming, that’s where he stays and winds up doing some research into her situation while featuring in the flashbacks and different versions of the realm that we see in the story. Then, when he shows up at the climax, it’s mainly to get the story to establish the co-protagonist dynamic we’ll be seeing in subsequent miniseries.
As for Flynn, she’s… fine, I guess. A terminal downer who’s been plagued by depression all of her life, she’s more interesting because of the mysteries attached to her than who she is as a character. There’s the “Smiling Man” that constantly, silently haunts her and at least has a creepy visual to accompany its mysteriousness. We also learn that she doesn’t dream, which is because she’s been tampered with in some way. What that means, I don’t know. Yet this is all that she has going for her as a character right now.
That creepy visual comes courtesy of regular artist Lisandro Estherren. He’s sporting a much more refined version of the loose style he used in “Redneck” and it works for all of the weird visuals that he’s asked to draw here. It reminds me of the kind of work you’d see on old-school Vertigo titles which weren’t defined by how conventionally attractive their art looked. Art in those titles had to be good at conveying the story and emotions of their characters – being able to creatively display violence and or sex was also a plus. Estherren nails all of those things here and I’m glad to hear that he’s sticking around for future installments of this series-of-miniseries.
Maria Llovet illustrates the final issue of this volume, a side story involving a screenwriter who’s asked to write a story about the events we’ve previously seen and how this leads him to a familiar character from “The Sandman’s” mythos. It’s considerably less over-the-top than what we saw from her on “Faithless” but still solid work that has (literal) flash when the story needs it. Yanick Paquette, Andrea Sorrentino, Francesco Francavilla, Dani, and Aaron Campbell all show up to illustrate flashbacks and/or segments set in the Dreaming throughout the first five issues. They all do predictably great work, even in the case of Campbell whose scene is basically a straight-up reprise of the original Corinthian’s final moments from the original “Sandman” series.
While Tynion’s text at the end of that series indicates that he has plans to re-interpret what Morpheus did in that scene, it also brings up another issue I have with this volume. That being how a lot of it feels like Tynion is simply playing with the old toys in the toybox. He gets to relive one of the original series’ signature moments. He gets to fill out the backstory of one its minor characters. He gets to indulge in a lot of the original series’ familiar imagery and language. Sure, Simon Spurrier and G. Willow Wilson did these things too in their “Dreaming” series, but to a far lesser extent and there was always the feeling that they were trying to do something new with their stories as well.
Tynion might still do that with subsequent volumes of “The Sandman Universe.” Not before revisiting even more characters from the original series, as the solicitations for “The Glass House” have already indicated. I’m curious enough to follow him through the next volume as the climax of “Nightmare Country” indicates he’s just getting started. Still, I’m glad this was offered simultaneously in softcover and hardcover, because I got to read it now without paying the hardcover tax.