Sandman
1897 - Wesley Dodds is born.
1917 - 20-year-old Wesley goes to fight in WWI
1919 - 22-year-old Wesley returns from war & becomes a cop.
1921 - 24-year-old Wesley is promoted to the detective bureau.
1925 - 28-year-old Wesley leaves the police force & becomes a private detective.
1932 - 35-year-old Wesley, still unsatisfied with the limits of the law & plagued with prophetic dreams, dons his gas mask & becomes Sandman.
1941 - 44-year-old Wesley joins the Justice Society when they are formed after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
1945 - WW2 ends.
1953 - 56-year-old Wesley retires the Sandman identity when the Justice Society are called before the Un American Activities Commission. He continues to work as a Private Investigator, only occasionally using his Sandman equipment on the job.
1958 - 61-year-old Wesley is diagnosed with lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking.
1967 - 70-year-old Wesley has a stroke, and dies.
I find it fun to try to cast myself in the role of a reader back in the late thirties when comic book superheroes were suddenly a thing. Superman had happened, and suddenly there was this vast explosion of characters from every direction; every publisher in the country started turning out their version of the costumed hero. There were no rules for what a superhero might look like. What there were, however, were influences from other types of modern (at the time) entertainment. Certain characters that popped up during this era were clearly influenced by other contemporary works. Personally, I think it was less a matter of what those influences were, and more about just how well-executed your new concept was.
Sandman has an interesting mixed bag of influences, but he's a great example of an exceptionally polished concept. Even in his oldest appearances, there has always been a satisfying sense of place and purpose to the character, and the best takes on him have always celebrated that. Let's see if we can find and celebrate them ourselves.
Sandman has an interesting mixed bag of influences, but he's a great example of an exceptionally polished concept. Even in his oldest appearances, there has always been a satisfying sense of place and purpose to the character, and the best takes on him have always celebrated that. Let's see if we can find and celebrate them ourselves.
Sandman's Comic HistorySandman appeared for the first time in a very weird place: issue #1 of New York World's Fair comics from 1939. DC actually published anthology comics to be given out at the '39 & '40 World's Fair, where its new characters (like the newly created Superman) had adventures around the fair itself. In one of the stories, we meet 'wealthy socialite' Wesley Dodds and watch as he adopts his heroic identity Sandman, who chases criminals using his grapple gun, gas launching pistol, and accompanying gas mask.
Thematically, the character was a loose interpretation of the old mythological 'Sandman' who brought dreams by sprinkling magic sand on sleepers, but the only real tie Westley had to that was that he put people to sleep with his gas gun, and sprinkled sand on the folks he brought to justice as a calling card. It was a stretch, but the character's appeal had more to do with his dynamic adventures and consistently great action... he was constantly diving from moving cars, climbing up walls, swinging on his grappling hook.... it was a pretty fantastic read for the era. Reading them now, you get a distinct sense that this character was a direct descendant of radio serial characters like the Shadow, Green Hornet, or the Lone Ranger. The closest analog modern audiences have to this type of hero, I think, is Indiana Jones, who was invented as a deliberate pastiche of these stories. This lineage actually helped define him over the next few years as he joined the Justice Society in All-Star Comics, giving him a unique role to play among all those costumed heroes. |
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As DC transitioned out of the Golden Age in the fifties Sandman changed his costume and took on a kid sidekick named Sandy. This occurred during a brief period as DC attempted to make its Golden Age characters function as contemporary (for the time) heroes, but once the Silver Age began in earnest and the Justice Society began to cross over from its side of the multiverse with the Justice League most Justice Society characters, Wesley included, would revert to their classic costumes. Sandy, for his part, wouldn't appear again for quite a few decades.
In the meantime, there was a whole new take on a character with the name Sandman... but it's not the one you think it is. First, in the seventies, a Jack Kirby creation named Sandman began to appear in his own stories. Meant to be the actual dream-hopping character of myth, this take on Sandman was never very adequately explained, had no real backstory to speak of, and never managed to integrate super well into DC proper... but he remains a footnote in the history of both this heroic legacy and in DC overall, if only because he's a Jack Kirby creation. |
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The Golden Age Heroes all had their history rewritten wildly during the Crisis of Infinite Earths, couching them more as relics of the past who would now have modern-day reinterpretations, and it's possible that none of them benefitted from this more than Sandman.
Obviously, he wasn't so much reinterpreted as the name was passed on to an entirely new character in the world of Morpheus, which I think it's fair to say is pretty inarguably one of the top three greatest comic series ever written. Beyond that series, however, Wesley himself ALSO benefitted hugely from this new era of repurposing Golden Age heroes; in the pages of the 90's series Sandman Mystery Theatre by Matt Wagner, one of those perfect pairings of character and creator that create comic gold. Wagner reinterpreted Wesley as a hard-boiled noir character, really taking advantage of the era the book is set in, giving us a fantastic and unique blend of Raymond Chandler-esque crime noir worldbuilding along with something that felt like it was right out of a classic radio serial. There was a particular tone to it that just make this take on Sandman completely unique and fun. Of course, Sandman would also continue to have his ties to the regular world of DC superheroes, most notably over in the James Robinson / Geoff Johns JSA series that did tons of work reimagining the characters associated with the Justice Society, where they reached back into canon and grabbed Wesley's old sidekick Sandy, updating him with a grab bag of sand-related powers and a remix of Wesley's old crime-fighting tools, creating the character Sand, who never quite settled into a fan-favorite role, but would continue to appear in modern JSA comics right up until the New 52. |
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Our Sandman StorySo what is our take on Sandman going to look like? We can get the easy part out of the way first; we're not including most of the takes on the character outside of Wesley Dodds. Sand never really took off as a contemporary spin on Wesley's legacy and doesn't really bring much to the table beyond some surface-level nostalgia. We are obviously going to include Dream and the Endless in our larger world, but the ties between their story and Wesley's are pretty tenuous, so we don't need to get into it much here, other than to say that Wesley did begin his career as Sandman because of his prophetic dreams which are unknowingly coming to him because of Dream.
Otherwise, we're going to focus Wesley's story on his role as a Noir radio-serial hero. perhaps the biggest change we're going to look to make is in his life outside of the gas mask. The original comics described Wesley as a 'wealthy socialite'. This actually describes a lot of the superhero's civilian identities in this era, but from a modern perspective, Bruce Wayne has basically claimed that character archetype so hard that it seems odd to apply it to anyone else. Matt Wagner did such a good job making Wesley work like something out of a bizarre Dashiel Hammett novel, so we're instead going to give him a career after WWI as a police officer, then detective, and then a private investigator. |
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This also informs his costume, because even though we can safely say we're not using his yellow and blue travesty of a fifties-era costume, there's still a small distinction between his classic suit-with-a-cape and the Matt Wagner trenchcoat look. I'm actually a huge fan of that Golden Age cape; it fits so well with the dashing adventurer trope of that era, and even though the trenchcoat is COOL it's also a distinctly '90s choice. Still, that hard-boiled detective in a gas mask look is SUCH a unique spin, it makes him distinctly a detective rather than a superhero. The idea that he was on the Justice Society while looking like that just feels so much more engaging as a piece of the larger world. He can still scale buildings and jump from cars, he just gets to grumble more while he does it.
Back to our take on his story. Wesley is probably one of the most solidly defined heroes of his era. His standalone adventures were actually already REALLY good in their original form, and then we also get those adventures reimagined in the Matt Wagner Series, where they're great all over again. Since our Justice Society is forced to retire, we did the same with Wesley, although there's not a huge distinction between operating as a masked superhero, and just being a licensed private investigator who sometimes puts on a gas mask and uses some unique tools and weapons, so you have to imagine he sometimes blurs the edge of his retirement. He actually is one of the longest-lived heroes of his generation, and I kind of imagine him continuing to work long into his sixties. |
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