The tale crumples into postmodern mush.įables picks up again with 'Song of Orpheus,' which positions the Sandman mythos in ancient Greece for a haunting retelling of the myth of Orpheus.įables' sole present day story, 'Parliament of Rooks,' is another winner.

The duds keep coming with 'Soft Places,' in which explorer Marco Polo finds a desert oasis where space, time and reality loose their meanings. This story does not have the depth Gaiman obviously intended for it. Next is 'August,' in which Sandman instructs the Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, to spend a day disguised as a beggar. Sandman's occasional overlapping into other DC series is usually awkward and this is no exception.Īfter that is 'The Hunt,' in which an old man annoys his teenage granddaughter (and readers) with a banal fairy tale about a savage who finds one of Sandman's lost books. In the next story, 'Thermidor,' Sandman hires Johanna Constantine, an ancestor of John Constantine of the DC series Hellblazer, for a rescue mission during Revolution-era France.

The story features terribly underdeveloped versions of Sandman's family (Despair talks like some Spiderman villain) but Gaiman's treatment of Norton (a real life person) is funny, heartfelt and wholly entertaining. The collection starts off on a high note 'Three Septembers and a January.' The story shows the role of Sandman's family in the life of Joshua Norton, a San Francisco man who declared himself emporer of the United States in 1859. It contains some of Sandman's best moments and some of its worst. Due to this, Fables and Reflections is hit-or-miss. These stories are from different points in the series' development and are collected here only because there is no other place for them. Fables and Reflections, placed sixth in the Sandman library, collects most of these.Īnother thing that separates Fables from other Sandman volumes is that it is a hodgepodge.

Tales from ancient Rome or Elizabethan England were limited to single issue stories bordering bigger epics. However, he set all of Sandman's long story arches in the present. Gaiman was free to visit any time and place he wanted to. One of many things that separated Neil Gaiman's Sandman from other comic book characters is that the foreboding but likable king of dreams has existed since the beginning of time and is supposed to be an archetype common to all cultures.

The sandman fables & reflections