The Sandman: The Doll's House
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- There is a separate article about A Doll's House, the play by Henrik Ibsen.
The Doll's House is the second graphic novel collection of the comic book series The Sandman, published by DC Comics. It collects issues #9-16. It is written by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Chris Bachalo, Michael Zulli and Steve Parkhouse, coloured by Robbie Busch, and lettered by Todd Klein. It was first issued in paperback in 1989, and later in hardback in 1995.
Mike Dringenberg pencils the majority of the book, inked by Malcolm Jones III. Dringenberg's characters, from the African queen Nada and the older-than-she-looks Rose Walker to the chillingly charming Corinthian, to Gilbert, the renegade dream who looks like G. K. Chesterton, are strong and believable, and his understated art makes the fantastic elements seem endearingly mundane. He based Dream's androgynous silbling Desire on the work of 80s pop artist Patrick Nagel.
One issue is drawn by Chris Bachalo, who would go on to draw the two Death spin-off miniseries, although here his style is unformed. Michael Zulli also makes his first appearance in this volume, penciling the first appearance of Hob Gadling. Steve Parkhouse, whose broad pen style couldn't be more different to Zulli's delicate realism, handles the inks, and the combination works unexpectedly well.
Both Preludes and Nocturnes and early editions of The Doll's House reprint issue #8 of the series ("The Sound of Her Wings"). This is probably because The Doll's House was the first Sandman collection to be printed, and at the time it was unclear that any others would be issued. When the series became popular enough to be fully collected, issue #8 was also included in Preludes and Nocturnes, to which it is arguably the epilogue.
Issues collected
- Sandman #9: "Tales in the Sand" ... art by Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III
- Sandman #10: "The Doll's House" ... art by Dringenberg and M. Jones III
- Sandman #11: "Moving In" ... art by Dringenberg and M. Jones III
- Sandman #12: "Playing House" ... art by Chris Bachalo and M. Jones III
- Sandman #13: "Men of Good Fortune" ... art by Michael Zulli and Steve Parkhouse
- Sandman #14: "Collectors" ... art by Dringenberg and M. Jones III
- Sandman #15: "Into the Night" ... art by Dringenberg and M. Jones III
- Sandman #16: "Lost Hearts" ... art by Dringenberg and M. Jones III
Synopsis
The arc of The Doll's House is told in somewhat disjointed form, but overall it concerns Morpheus picking up the pieces of his kingdom and existence in the wake of his imprisonment for most of the 20th century, and a machination by his brother-sister Desire.
It opens with a prologue set amongst an ancient African tribe, telling the story of how an ancient queen, Nada, had fallen in love with Dream of The Endless, but when he asked her to be his queen in his kingdom of dreams, she declined and he condemned her to hell.
The story then shifts to the present, where young Rose Walker and her mother Miranda meet her grandmother, Unity Kinkaid, a victim of the sleeping sickness while Dream (also named Morpheus) was imprisoned. Miranda stays in England with Unity; Rose is sent to hire a private investigator to find her brother, Jed Walker, and takes up residence in a boarding house full of peculiar characters. She also dreams of her brother, who is himself having nightmares.
Jed, it turns out, has become the pawn of a pair of Morpheus' escaped creatures, who have been using him to host a small dream dimension of their own, and then falls into the clutches of The Corinthian, who attends a convention of serial killers. Between Morpheus and Rose, Jed is ultimately rescued. However, his rescue results in the freeing of Lyta Hall, the former superheroine The Fury, the wife of the second Silver Age Sandman. Lyta is pregnant with a child conceived in the small dream dimension, whom Morpheus claims as his own - angering Lyta.
Rose finds that she can merge the dreams of those who live in the same block. Morpheus informs Rose that she is in fact a vortex of dream, and that he must kill her to restore order to the Dreaming, or the destruction of her world will result. This turns out to be Desire's gambit, as Desire turns out to be Rose's grandfather, having set up this situation to force Morpheus to kill one of his family. Unity, who would have been the vortex had she not fallen asleep, interrupts and offers herself instead, which satisfies the situation.
After waking from the dream Rose Walker retreats into isolation and tries to make sense of what happened to her and her family. If the dream were true, she reasons, then humans would merely be pieces in a game played by powers which to think about for too long would drive one crazy. At the end six months she decides that she has moped for long enough, concludes that her dream was just a dream and returns to normal life. In the next scene it appears that Dream too has spent the last six months thinking and confronts Desire with his conclusions. He warns Desire that she has overstepped her bounds, that the Endless exist for the mortals and not visa-versa, that if anything mortals manipulate the Endless. Either Desire doesn't understand this or realises that to accept it would drive her crazy or make her abandon her post. Whichever, fickle as she is, she promptly forgets the idea completely and convinces herself she is the mistress of her own destiny. Rose's thoughts are reminiscent of a character in a Cthulu story driven mad after realising the horrors that besiege this world, but Dream's warning to Desire seems to turn that notion on its head. Perhaps what Gaiman is trying to say is that Gods and mythic beings exist, but they are merely pieces in a game we play to understand ourselves. In the final frame of the story Desire's domain is pictured looking much less like the doll's house it appears to be in the first frame of part one and much more like a doll.
A side story in the middle of the book introduces Hob Gadling, an unusual man from the 14th century in that he refuses to die - Morpheus' sister Death obliges his wish, so long as he continues to wish to live. Hob makes a deal with Morpheus to meet in the same tavern, every hundred years, and the two become friends. Hob appears in later volumes.