Cain (Sandman)

Cain is a fictional character that appears in DC Comics. Originally the 'host' of the 1970s EC style horror anthology House of Mystery, the character was revived by writer Alan Moore who introduced him into his Swamp Thing, and by Jamie Delano, who occasionally used him in a cameo role in his title Hellblazer. However it was Neil Gaiman's comic book series, The Sandman that more fully developed this 'reinvented' character into the more mature, post-Comics Code version of the DC Universe.

In Gaiman's Sandman universe, the biblical Cain and Abel come to live in the Dreaming, at Morpheus' invitation. They live as neighbours in two houses, somewhere in the Dreaming. This may be based on the verse in the Bible which says Cain was sent to live in the Land of Nod.

Gaiman's Cain is an aggressive, overbearing character who kills Abel frequently in a kind of macabre form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. In the Dreaming, Abel's death is impermanent, and he seems to recover after a few hours or so. Cain is a thin, long-limbed man with an angular, drawn face, glasses, a tufty beard and hair drawn into two points above his ears.

He seems unable to control his frequent murders of Abel, and in his way expresses remorse for them; there is a genuine bond between the two, despite the surface contempt. The two frequently play key roles in the story of the series; it is they who take Morpheus in on his return to the Dreaming after his escape from capture, and they aid The Corinthian with the child Daniel during The Kindly Ones, the ninth collection of issues in the series. Together, Cain and Abel know stories of mysteries and of secrets; Cain is the teller of stories of mysteries. According to their appearance in Swamp Thing, the difference is that a mystery may be shared, but a secret must be forgotten if one tries to tell it.