Garrett Sanford
64 years ago - Garrett Sanford is born.
46 years ago - 18-year-old Garrett goes to college, studying psychology.
42 years ago - 22-year-old Garrett ears a bachelors in psychology, begins grad school.
39 years ago - 25-year-old Garrett earns a masters in Oneirology, the study of dreams.
36 years ago - 28-year-old Garrett's Doctorate in Oneirology is based on his theories on ways to monitor a persons dreams.
33 years ago - 31-year-old Garrett's Dream Monitor technology allows him to observe his patients dreams, and he begins to theorize ways for a person to be deliberately inserted into another persons dream.
31 years ago - 33-year-old Garrett is approached by Argus to use his Dream Monitor technology to observe the President, who is stricken with sleeping sickness. Seeing him plagued by nightmares, he volunteers to use his technology to go into his dream. He frees the president, but is unable to awaken himself, using his technology to protect the dreaming from inside while his body is kept alive at Argus.
26 years ago - 38-year-old Garrett's technology, built from within the Dreaming, includes the Dream Chute, which he can use to project himself onto the waking world briefly. This makes him a target for stray nightmares, who begin to regularly assault his Dream Dome.
22 years ago - 42-year-old Garrett comes to understand that the attacks from his nightmare foes will never end while he is alive. He disables all the technology of the Dream Dome, including the Dream Chute, and ends his own life.
I can't really speak for anyone other than myself here, but personally, I had no idea this character existed for the longest time. I read Sandman, which very specifically references and retcons this story, without ever realizing there was an original story and original character at play that was being retconned. It was only years later, while reading Infinity Inc, when I saw the characters referenced again and realized that there was more going on here than I realized.
We had no plan of adapting this version of Sandman, but at some point it became clear that he was the lynchpin allowing us to draw several other characters into our timeline. In the end I'm really glad we did, because this is a fun character to adapt.
We had no plan of adapting this version of Sandman, but at some point it became clear that he was the lynchpin allowing us to draw several other characters into our timeline. In the end I'm really glad we did, because this is a fun character to adapt.
Garrett Sanford's Comic HistoryJack Kirby's take on Sandman debuted in The Sandman #1 in 1975, a rare gem of a comic written by Kirby's long-time collaborator Joe Simon, the same creative team behind Captain America. This character is at least on some level meant to be an update of the Golden Age Sandman, but is obviously something entirely unique. This was Jack Kirby's take on the mythological Sandman, the being responsible for bringing dreams to children... the same general idea that would later give us Morpheus. Kirby's version, however, was a child's brain funhouse of imagination and technology, where the Sandman fought nightmares from within his Dream Dome, and went down his Dream Chute to fight nightmares in the real world alongside his kid sidekick Jeb Walker. The first issue heavily featured Santa Claus, as well as Sandman's two pet nightmares, Brute & Glob.
While Jack Kirby did the covers of the remainder of the series, it only went for six issues, and that was, for a while, the last we ever saw of this Sandman. |
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He cropped up again in a single issue of Wonder Woman, and in the middle of professing his love to her (what?) he explained his origin story. We discover that he was originally Garrett Sanford, a mortal scientist who had invented a way to view, and enter, people's dreams. He had ventured in to save the life of the President, and was now trapped inside the Dream Realm. It honestly was a pretty functional explanation of what we had seen in the previous series if we wanted to make that character be part of the larger DC continuity.
This character made one or two tiny appearances here or there, before Roy and Dannette Thomas, the married writers responsible for inventing the Garrett Sanford identity and backstory, bring him back again in the final issues of Infinity Inc, suggesting that Sanford had eventually died, and that Hector Hall, the son of the Golden Age Hawkman who had recently died in the series, had been picked up and made the new Sandman. He and his pregnant wife Lyta go off together into the Dream Realm, to live in his Dream Dome. This is then picked up in the pages of the Morpheus Sandman series. Here we discover that, in the long absence of Morpheus while he was the prisoner of Roderick Burgess (For the love of god, read this series), two rogue nightmares, Brute and Glob, had concocted this whole thing as a way to create their own contained version of the Dreaming. It's just such a completely bonkers journey for a tale to have taken, and I find it very hard not to love this strange artifact of a story. |
Our Garrett Sanford StoryAs I said, we originally had no plans to include the Jack Kirby Sandman in our timeline. While the Morpheus and Wesley Dodds versions of Sandman are huge parts of DC's larger mythology, This version of the character felt like such a weird little vestigial artifact of a story, something that was essentially written out of continuity with little effort and with little repercussion.
What changed our minds was the creation of a new timeline for Doctor Destiny. Unquestionably, we wanted to use the version of the character that appeared in Sandman, but we also wanted him to feel like a Justice League villain, and there is an unmistakable disconnect between those two ideas of the character. What we needed, then, was some way to give Destiny a more comic-book origin that could be mixed in with the horror-movie vibes of his story with Morpheus. The answer was in the story Roy & Dannette Thomas invented as a backstory for Kirby's Sandman. We simplified it a little, suggesting that Sanford's dreaming body is slumbering in an Argus facility while he, trapped in the dreaming, actually uses his expertise in the science of dreams to build the technology that allows him to protect the Dreaming, even while Morpheus is a prisoner on earth In this way we, get to include this clever little nugget of a story, and build out an element of DC's mythology, the Dreaming, in a way that actually connects it to our world of superheroes and villains. |
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