I love Morpheus' answer to Lucifer when he visits Hell. Lucifer: "The million lords of hell stand arrayed about you. Tell us, why we should let you leave? Helmet or no, you have no power here - what power have dreams in Hell?" Morpheus: "You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly. But - you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar... Ask yourselves, all of you, what power would Hell have if those here imprisoned were not able to dream of Heaven?"
Morpheus... the only one who can fool Lucifer and be still alive...except, maybe, the Presence when he tells his son, Lucifer, the story about Monkey King and Buddha.
@@tickled41 It means that even if there are many adaptations, some of which are less successful than others, and even though perspectives and values change... The truly great stories will stand the test of time and remain relevant. But not only that. It also means that poor adaptations or changing perspectives won't touch the original story or tarnish it. Even if some aspects of Shakespeare's work would be seen in a less flattering light at some point in time, the story itself would live on and on. The same is true of ancient tragedies, metaphors, creation myths, cultural epics etc. Because those stories touch something about what it is to be a human, and that remains.
@@topilepojarvicomposer6157 This is an interesting take, but misses what's mentioned in the video. It's a play on the effects of dreams, how they might supersede real life. The original works Shakespeare based King Lear on actually had happy endings. Shakespeare had the power of Dream on his side, and the original works were forgotten. Dream knows this, his friend does not.
@@ShadeslayerGreats thanks for expanding on that. It's been a while since I watched this video (I came to see if I had and noticed the comment that I replied to), I need to rewatch it. My comment was more based on the context in which the line was said in the Netflix series. Edit. I watched the video and partly disagree with it. I think when Dream says that stories return to their original form, the original form he is speaking of is as they exist in collective subconscious (not something I believe in, but that exists in The Sandman universe). So even if Shakespeare changes the ending, it only becomes what it was always meant to be. But you are correct that I missed the fact that Shakespeare changed the ending, and that Gaiman probably knew it when he wrote that line. So, maybe I'm wrong about this...
Well DAMN _But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted_
@@ashton1860 Once a dream is attained it is no longer a dream you can attain as you now have it. It is "once wanted". You no longer have that dream to work towards and thus no longer something to fill your life. Thus life must be filled with something else, and in Shakespeare's case it is another story, but it is always at the cost of something else. It could also be a comment on what we desire at the time and whether we still desire it once we have it. It's not uncommon for people to fawn after something relentlessly and then not be satisfied once they I have it. We can search for something, believe we wanted it, attain it, and finally realise it was in the wanting that we found purpose and having whatever we thought was desired is perhaps meaningless to what we gave up for it. This is also my interpretation, I would encourage you to think on it but perhaps challenge it if you disagree. I also hope it was helpful.
@@christophergiannetti8339 agreed. It should also be noted that Dream specifies that this is the fault of mortals, meaning that those who live eternal are more prone to think each action as influencing their eternities. Your life goal is to own and protect a certain forest? (This is my personal dream, to be a land use planner and lawyer). Well, to someone such as Dream that would be foolish. To devote your whole life to something that will inevitably wither away (eventually everything does, after all) is short sighted. To him it's the wanting that is valuable because as long as it remains a desire it is malleable and can be replaced. For example, to seek a girlfriend. By the time you have one your desire changes to wanting to make her your wife. Then, perhaps, to being a good parent, and so on, and so on. But if you were to be granted your wish for a great girlfriend, then perhaps that's all she ever would have been? A fun lover and friend but would never marry you? I don't think this example is quite right, but it's all I can think of for now.
Anson Brehmer Did you just bring a point THE JOKER made in The Dark Knight about the nature of Chaos, into a discussion on the concerns of dreams and aspirations made by The Concept of The Dream itself AND LUCIFER MORNINGSTAR?!? That was smoother than the Atom Mirror covered in baby oil.
I realise now that you need to have read the entire sandman comic to fully understand this video. I watched it 3 times, once before I started the comic, the scond time after I read the story aboyt midsummers dream, and the third time, after finishing the comic. I have to say that all experiences where diferent, and inlighted me on diferent parts of this work. Well done man. Well done.
I reread the series every time I get a new volume. I think I've got six or seven of them now, and I get something different out of reading the issues back to back than I did in single issues. I actually once had a college professor use the first volume as a case study.
Well, if you want to fully undersatnd the video, I am sorry, but you have to somehow read the entire comic. The video references diferent arcs throughout besides the ones that are the main focus. For example, the panel near the end of the video is from the most important arc, the one before the final one. "Our work obliterates us". Did you fully understood what that meant?
when you're a fiction writer of cinema, comics, plays etc., you do kinda lose yourself because you need a certain amount of distance from your own being just so you can assess the emotions, thoughts, and feelings that you experience on a daily basis. This internal assessment allows you to empathize and comprehend the interior life of others when you are creating your characters and their environments. The cost of this fiction creating life is that you sorta become a non-person, and you develop into a recorder of the human condition combined with your own subjective view. Art
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do a serie of videos about Sandman and Neil Gaiman's works. I am more then willing to pay from my pocket for you to do the series with as much detail and time as it takes. I am not kidding. I have been obsessed with Neil Gaiman work for a couple of years, reading all I can about it and I recently stumbled apon your channel. How amazed I was to find this video and how elucidative it was. If you do intend to make more videos talk to me, please.
Sarah, sem querer abusar, por que você não traduz este vídeo e disponibiliza no seu canal? :) Confesso que me perdi em algumas partes e, pelo visto, você captou tudinho!! :)
Como poderíamos fazer para traduzir esta reportagem? Talvez se eu separar por minutos e eu mesmo vou tentando, aí o que tiver dúvida, te pergunto. Qual teu email?
If only everyone who was a teacher had the gift that you have, to share your knowledge with such passion, then every student would love to learn . Thank you for sharing . With great appreciation all the way from Denmark Maria
This is a wonderful reply. During high-school, I questioned that constantly -- where's their passion? When I made it to university, I found that devotion in my TAs and professors and other students. My God do I miss college.
Really stunning presentation. You always capture this tone of uniquely cherishing each 'work' in this series. The material is celebrated, not in an obnoxious way, but tenderly. Very much appreciated. Still haven't watched the Inside Out one because I haven't had a chance to watch the movie yet. Soon! But I know the first thing I'll do after watching is come back to your video on it!
You could read Green Eggs and Ham in that voice and I would still cry. Lots of tears. Holy cow you have the somberest, griefstriken, crestfallen, beautiful voice I've ever heard.
+Confuzzled Tomato Go for it. The first story he mentioned about the immortal man is one of the greatest single stories I've ever read. The Sandman, Watchmen and Transmetropolitan are some of the best works, not just in comics, but (I'd argue) in any genre for the last 30 years.
Well done, well said. As an artist and writer myself, I can relate to this quite directly. It feels very much sometimes like I'm outside of my own life. I do feel isolated often, like an actor on a stage. It can be painful, but I always remind myself of my blessings, and to try to keep at least one foot on the ground. Everything in life comes at a price. It's important to examine the receipt, but also to set it down. After all, regret is a kind of dream too, and maybe isolation isn't what we think. We don't always reach people directly, separated as we are by an artistic disposition, but art itself is nothing if not an intimate form of human contact.
Death: Mostly they aren't too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear. Dream: And I am far more terrible than you, my sister.
Every year, I come back to this video. it's significance escapes even me, but what you did here is truly special and inspired me to never abandon my own dreams, thanks.
8:24 Who else finds it so fitting that the artist used such a subtle way to tell us what is about to happen in a second, just by somehow almost transforming the eye of the second Endless into a moon and a star ? It practically means 'Dream already belongs to Death and she has already 'made all the preparations necessary' to make him a part of her'.
This message made me cry. Thank you so much. Neil Gaiman is good because he's thinking about other times in the history of writing. "Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure forever".
Wow, impressive! The Sandman was one of the highlights of my College years, those stories have always stayed with me, in all these years I haven´t found many works of fiction that have moved me so much as the Sandman. Thanks for an outstanding review.
Neil Gaiman is one of my favourite writers. He was not just the first but only writer of "comic books" that received a prestigious literary award. The following year the snobs changed the rules so that no other "comic book" writers could ever do that feat again.
This theme of dreams becoming reality, or "magic words", is found in the works of the Inklings. C.S Lewis and JRR Tolkien are excellent examples of the idea that the imagined world we create for ourselves can be real. Lewis is far less subtle in separating the "real" world from the "imagined" in Narnia, than Tolkien is with his own Middle Earth. However both are equally profound in illustrating this theme. JK Rowling is a contemporary example of this phenomenon in literature. Words are literally "magic" in her books and so is the imagined world of witches and wizards.
You should read Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. In a way, those comic books are simple, they were written to scare, but sometimes you can find a lot of symbolism, like why Swamp Thing just fights macabre villians...and it's very easy to follow it, but it has some things that must be told!
The part about him watching and relishing his hurt really hit me. I'm only 17 but my dream is to become a writer and I feel the exact same thing whenever something bad happens in my life. I even wrote a poem about just that a couple of months ago.
Good stuff! I always saw the Morpheus-Shakespeare relationship as you do, but I did not see that Neil Gaiman himself fitting in quite that way. The reason I did not see it actually makes the point even more illustrative: Unlike writing novels, comics are a bit more of a collaborative effort, where the writing alone is not complete without illustration, and this is something that I had taken -- naively -- to separate the roll of Neil Gaiman from that of Shakespeare or Morpheus. Of course, I completely missed the whole point of choosing Shakespeare specifically. Sure, Shakespeare is a particularly famous writer, but the choice is not quite so arbitrary: He was a playwright! the script for a play also is not complete without a production, a director, and actors: These are a great analogy for the drawings of the artists. Likewise, this brings us back to Morpheus. Morpheus in a sense seems to be an individual creator, but then why would each dream have a personality of it's own? Perhaps the Corinthian, for instance, is one of Morpheus's actors.
I have to thank you Nerdwriter1, you have made a video I have favorited as my 2,000 favorited video. This may not seem like much to others, but it's a big milestone for me. I started being on RU-vid back in 2008 when my family first got a laptop, and since then every video I have in my favorites has chronicled my likes and interests over the years. My favorites list has become something of a time capsule of everything I've loved or been a fan of, and every time I walk down it I am reminded of who I was before over the years, and of how I have changed. Change is central to the story of The Sandman, and I saw no other video taking the 2,000th spot but your video. The way you analysed dreams and their meaning to the comic spoke to me, and it pleases me to find someone who was as influenced by the series as I was. I even used that "shadow truths" quote as my senior quote when I graduated high school. When I read Sandman I am reminded of all the things that I like or have liked, all the stories I have taken in and I ask myself how they have changed me over the years, and I am glad to say I am still changing even now. From me in my middle school days to the freelance journalist I am now, I see myself laid out in my favorites list, and now whenever I see the Sandman video you made, I will be reminded of all I am and ever was up until now, and reminded to keep on changing, hopefully for the better. Thank you Nerdwriter1 for making this video, and to any who have read this far into my comment, thank you for understanding how favoriting a video has meant a lot to me over the years. Here is to 1,000 more videos to favorite, to the man I will become at that point, and the dreams that will shape my and others' worlds.
Seeing this nearly a full five years after you made it and it was amazing! Please, please, please revisit - so much to talk about here and I love how you do it! Thanks for considering and for your well composed pieces!
I've only listened to Sandman on Audible (comics are ordered, don't worry) and I assumed the second play was going to be Hamlet which was inspired by Hamnet's death. Cautionary tale of don't get to lost in dreams (his stories) and neglect real life while also being wish fulfillment (brings him to life again) only for his character to be remembered when his son is forgotten. Something to think about, another interpretation.
Holy shit, thsi was so well done and made...I really loved the way you dissected the significance of sandman, and I myself as a writer, resonated deeply with your analysis...great job!
Dude! That is excellent. As a Shakespeare enthusiast and a recently converted graphic novelist enjoyer, this scratched my itch for what to pick up next. Of course, the thing about itches is that once one is gone, another one, one deeper and more fierce, emerges.
Man, you are awesome. Thank you very much for this video. As a Sandman fan since when I was too young to read it but secretly read it anyway, I must say this is the most poetic, profound and meaningful analysis of this amazing work by Gaiman I have ever come across. Thanks once again.
Oh Evan, did you ever read the unique take on Sandman in "The Dream Hunters"? It's the Japanese themed story illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano. I think you would enjoy it immensely and I while on the surface it appears to be a simple passion play with a varnish of Ukiyo-e aesthetics, but there are some important derivations that I think are quite telling.
Akshan Pant thank u ! i like the way this one is illustrated and the artist's style fits perfectly ! i did a little search i think it's Omnibus1&2 ! but of course it's the most expensive but very carefully executed !
This reminds me of the song “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park with George. Sondheim has the artist sing about watching the world “from a window” as he works on his art. This whole play explores the idea of how an artist has to distance themselves from their world to create.
This was as beautiful as it was phenomenal. Keep doing this. Sandman impacted my life in ways I’d never been able to put to words and this resonated so deeply
Sorry, I got excited. With the exception of two people, nobody I know has even heard about this story (that's including people I have told about it but have forgotten about it anyway). I can't seem to articulate the influence this series has had on me. However, you do it beautifully. By the way, I pulled the trigger and am now one of your Patreon contributors. I've loved your stuff for awhile but I'm not swimming in money. This video convinced me that contributing is an important and worthy investment.
I started reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman after watching this video and now there's a series about it and I loved it. Thanks a lot for bringing new adventures and knowledge to ours lives :)
Thank you so much! I discovered your channel about a year ago and have now gone through and seen most of your videos. However, I have noticed that ever since you went full time, the quality of your work has vastly grown and grown. Keep it up! I am so thankful for what you are contributing through your work.
Yesssssss. Delving into graphic novels now. Such an awesome form of art. Neil Gaiman is also an awesome author. And YOU keep up making the awesome content.
Thank you very much for this illuminating piece. I had the opportunity to watch Midsummer's Night in the globe couple of months back. and, as I watch this it came to me in a wave and made me appreciate the play and, indeed, the Sandman Series much more than I could have without your excellent essay.
Do Understanding Art on Transmetropolitan. Partly because Spider Jerusalem is an intriguing/awesome character and partly because, there are literally countless subjects in it to talk about: religion, politics, ethics, journalism, racism, isolationism and so forth..
0o I Died In A Time Machine o0 In a thousand years, people will think the creators of Transmetropolitan are someone from their era, because they predicted everything.
I was browsing through videos and only half listening until I came to this one, wow, this woke me right up! What a beautiful and poignant review of a graphic novel! I have always loved Neil Gaiman, but to hear it like this, it puts it in such a more personal perspective. Stunning, absolutely grateful you posted this Nerdwriter!
I was speechless. That was absolutely incredible. I have every Sandman comic, it was my favorite series growing up. I am so much more appreciative looking back on them 15-20 years later. Thank you for this magnificent discussion about one of the arcs. Thank you for sharing.
I recently through a RU-vid video discovered the audiobook. For years now friends of mine have been trying to get me into this comic and I've for some reason never bothered with it, the audiobook was amazing and you're narration is almost an extension of it. It's quite hard to find somebody who actually understands the medium let alone tries that hard. Thank you, thank you very much sir.
It took me 2 years, but I finished the Sandman series yesterday. And what a journey it was... What dreams I saw... And it started with this video. I thank you for it.
@@IHJello Gaiman it´s the co showrunner, like in good omens. I think will be a masterpiece in Netflix. The team behind it´s great(Gaiman and Alan Heinberg).
Goddamn this was so good. As a pursuing novelist and painter, I can very well empathize with the isolation, but I cannot help myself. I have to do this.
I'm a new subscriber and I absolutely loved your video on Sandman. Almost 30 years since its first issue, it's still the absolute best comic or graphic novel I have ever read. So much depth and nuance at every page, and you just added more to it. The comparison between Shakespeare and Gaiman is so on point, I can't believe I only figured it out after watching your video. Keep up the good work!
+Jacob De Paz I'd respectfully disagree. Many of those considered "genius" were somewhat isolated from their peers. Nikola Tesla could serve as an example here.
+99thTuesday Isolationism is necessary to avoid distractions. But also, just being in a different or higher status from your peers causes isolation. If you got 30 million dollars overnight and started to _really_ spend it, you would lose a whole bunch of friends real fast.
+99thTuesday I just realized i'm an artist and i just realized it can create extreme isolation. i also think it's due to the intense focus that is necessary to produce extraordinary artwork. that's one of the biggest prices it seems..
So, I discovered your channel by mere change a few weeks ago and I just can't get enough of it, superb work. Sandman is the comic book that changed my life and this video essay just gave me a new layer of interpretation, thank you so much for that.
Sandman is one of my major influences in the way i view books, graphics novels, film, and art in general. Amazing job in analyzing but also showing your passion for Gaiman's Magnum Opus!
One of the things that struck me as especially well done about this video essay was the editing. The youtube video essay is, I think, really the best form of critiquing, analysing and reviewing visual and audiovisual art, because the visuals can so seamlessly be edited into the act of analysis. Especially things like the quote at 7:38 are impressive. How long does it take you to edit a video like this?
I have been following your channel for quite sometime now, and I like your all your works, But to me this is one of Your best. I have watched this over 10 times, literary, and I learn something new each time. You see this is one of those works that I can take a lesson each time and apply it to my life. I would REALLY REALLY REALLLY LOVE if you would do a few more videos of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, for only You can give this wonderful piece of work the justified analysis that is needs. Thanks for the awesome content and I'll keep supporting you and showing your videos to friends and family. Happy Easter and Let's Dream On!!
