Sandman Poster # 3 FRAMED Morpheus The Sandman #1 (1989) Dave McKean

Description

You are purchasing the item pictured, framed. Priority mail, tracking and $50 insurance is included with purchase. Item will be bagged to protect from dust, packed in packing peanuts and boxed. Just open box and hang it on the wall…makes a perfect gift!

We’d like a new Sandman. Keep the name. But the rest is up to you.” From those fifteen words of creative direction (courtesy of editor Karen Berger), writer Neil Gaiman fashioned one of the most popular ongoing comic titles of the 1990s – the spellbinding seventy-five-issue saga of Morpheus, Prince of Stories, otherwise known as The Sandman. Setting the tone for Gaiman’s beguiling literary dreamscapes were a series of evocative multimedia covers constructed by Dave McKean – the first eight of which the artist conceived en bloc as a sort of portrait gallery. Providing the visual inspiration for the cover of issue # 1 was the poster for director Peter Greenway’s 1987 film The Belly of an Architect, while the haunting central image of the Sandman was modeled after the so-called “Godfather of Goth” Peter Murphy, erstwhile vocalist of the British rock group Bauhaus (otherwise known as the guy who gets blown away in the Maxell tape commercial). “I remember driving through London in 1989 with Neil and saying that I wanted to make a cover with a wooden frame around it, take it outside, and set fire to it. I remember this as the key to the Sandman covers for some reason. This was not going to be a comic series about a specific character who looks a specific way. It was about a concept, the idea of dreaming. The covers in their own way should take the preconceptions of how a comic cover looks and set fire to them. Did we ever get that radical? No, of course not. But several sacred cows were sacrificed along the way. Several experiments tried. Some succeeded, others failed. Several times I found what I felt to be a person issue through these covers, only to bin that idea and start from scratch the next time.” – Dave McKean. The Sandman is a comic book series written by Neil Gaiman and published by DC Comics. Artists include Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Jill Thompson, Shawn McManus, Marc Hempel and Michael Zulli, lettering by Todd Klein, and covers by Dave McKean. Beginning with issue #47, it was placed under the imprint Vertigo. It chronicles the adventures of Dream (of the Endless), who rules over the world of dreams. It ran for 75 issues from January 1989 until March 1996. Gaiman’s contract stipulated that the series would end when he left it. Gaiman crafted the new character from an initial image of “a man, young, pale and naked, imprisoned in a tiny cell, waiting until his captors passed away … deathly thin, with long dark hair, and strange eyes.” Gaiman patterned the character’s black attire on a print of a Japanese kimono as well as his own wardrobe. Critically acclaimed, The Sandman is one of the few graphic novels ever to be on the New York Times Best Seller list, along with Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’, Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. The debut issue of The Sandman was on sale in October 1988 and cover-dated January 1989. Gaiman described the early issues as “awkward”, for he, as well as Kieth, Dringenberg, and Busch, had never worked on a regular series before. Kieth quit after the fifth issue; he was replaced by Dringenberg as penciler, who was in turn replaced by Malcolm Jones III as inker. The Sandman became a cult success for DC Comics and attracted an audience unlike that of mainstream comics: half the readership was female, many were in their twenties, and many read no other comics at all. By the time the series concluded in 1996, it was outselling the titles of DC’s flagship characters of Superman and Batman. Gaiman had a finite run in mind for the series, and it concluded with issue #75. The Sandman’s main character is Dream, the Lord of Dreams (also known, to various characters throughout the series, as Morpheus, Oneiros, the Shaper, the Shaper of Form, Lord of the Dreaming, the Dream King, Dream-Sneak, Dream Cat, Murphy, Kai’ckul, and Lord L’Zoril), who is essentially the anthropomorphic personification of dreams. Throughout the late 1990s, a movie adaptation of the comic was periodically planned by Warner Bros., parent company of DC Comics. Roger Avary was originally attached to direct after the success of Pulp Fiction, collaborating with Pirates of the Caribbean screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio in 1996 on a revision of their first script draft, which merged the “Preludes and Nocturnes” storyline with that of “The Doll’s House”. Avary intended the film to be in part visually inspired by animator Jan Švankmajer’s work. Avary was fired after disagreements over the creative direction with executive producer Jon Peters, best known for Batman and Superman Lives. It was due to their meeting on the Sandman movie project that Avary and Gaiman collaborated one year later on the script for Beowulf. The project carried on through several more writers and scripts. A later draft by William Farmer, reviewed on the internet at Ain’t It Cool News, was met with scorn from fans. Gaiman called the last screenplay that Warner Bros. would send him “not only the worst Sandman script I’ve ever seen, but quite easily the worst script I’ve ever read.” Gaiman has also said that his dissatisfaction with how his characters were being treated had dissuaded him from writing any more stories involving the Endless, although he has since written Endless Nights. By 2001, the project had become stranded in development hell. In a Q&A panel at Comic-Con 2007, Gaiman remarked, “I’d rather see no Sandman movie made than a bad Sandman movie. But I feel like the time for a Sandman movie is coming soon. We need someone who has the same obsession with the source material as Peter Jackson had with Lord of the Rings or Sam Raimi had with Spider-Man.”. That same year, he also stated that he could imagine Terry Gilliam as a director for the adaptation : “I would always give anything to Terry Gilliam, forever, so if Terry Gilliam ever wants to do Sandman then as far as I’m concerned Terry Gilliam should do Sandman…” In 2013, DC Chief Diane Nelson says that a Sandman film will be as rich as the Harry Potter universe. It has been rumoured that Man of Steel screenwriter David S. Goyer has taken interest in adapting the graphic novel into a film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. David McKean (born 29 December 1963 in Maidenhead, Berkshire) is an English illustrator, photographer, comic book artist, graphic designer, filmmaker and musician. His work incorporates drawing, painting, photography, collage, found objects, digital art and sculpture. McKean’s most recent projects are directing an original feature called Luna, and a book with the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. From 1989–1996 McKean produced the covers for Gaiman’s celebrated series The Sandman, all its collected editions, and many of its spin-offs. Further collaborations with Gaiman produced the graphic novels Signal to Noise in 1992 (previously serialized in The Face magazine), about a dying filmmaker and his hypothetical last film; and Mr. Punch, which explored similar themes as Violent Cases through the imagery of the Punch and Judy show.