The Sandman: The Dream Hunters #1 Cover

It’s a surprise that the original The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (by Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano) has been around for ten years now – time passes and this prose begins to build up dust as each year seems to float by, although you’d never know it. The Dream Hunters is another example of Gaiman’s fine work in storytelling. One of which never ages, but instead stares back at the reader with a wistful smile, looking to be broken into and enjoyed again and again. As though the writing itself is lost in time and the reader’s imagination is all that can ignite thoughts and feelings.

Ten years later, those thoughts and feeling have been ignited once more, this time in the form of a comic drawn by P. Craig Russell. Anyone unfamiliar with Russell ought to know that he loves adapting prose into comics. As Gaiman puts it, “His opera comics and his [Joseph Rudyard] Kipling and [Oscar] Wilde adaptations are remarkable and fine”. Russell’s sense of design and flow, are key. The way that he keeps his opposing lines dynamic, not forming symmetries, while keeping his lines fine and nuanced allows him to suggest the volume of the figure with shape alone (note the wave-like curves in his lines). The cartoony elements give his characters warmth and life, and his backgrounds are ornate without being over-rendered. This balance of halves remains the pinnacle of Russell’s art, establishing him to be one of the most admired and original artists today.

Russell's backgrounds are sight to behold.

That said; it is interesting experiencing a familiar story in a new way. Beginning with the Amano influenced cover art by Yuko Shimizu and ending with a scene from earlier in the comic, depicting the fox longingly staring at the crescent moon, The Dream Hunters #1 is as delicate a work as the original The Dream Hunters was. Finding the perfect pieces of text in the original must have been a challenge, but each perfectly illustrates and compliments the accompanying image. Whether using words or pictures, both pieces of work continue to challenge readers with what Gaiman and Russell know best, storytelling.

Unlike most adaptations, which attempt to improve upon the original, The Dream Hunters #1 proves itself to be different in the sense that nothing remains hidden to the reader. Instead, depicting the insecurities that all of Gaiman’s works reveal, always staring back, with that wistful smile.