Issue #42 begins and ends with section titles that tell you everything: “It Always Rains on the Unloved” and “What Can Possibly Go Wrong?” (they’re all great though):
Dream is heartbroken over the loss of his most recent love interest. She has decided that she no longer loves him. As a result, he orders her quarters erased and no one ever to mention her again. He’s moping in the rain, and it’s not just a bit of drizzle. It’s a torrential downpour that soaks every corner of the Dreaming until Abel’s house is flooding. In short: Dream is miserable and jeez does he make everyone know it. [Also: I really recommend to listen to James McAvoy’s performance in the Audible, which is very comics accurate. His Dream is a drama king, and he’s not quiet about his “grief” about a lost love (it’s actually hilarious). And it’s the perfect contrast to how he comes back from his quest and mourns Orpheus in silence. There so much subtext in that character portrayal that was a bit lessened in the show in my view. I wrote about this tangentially before].
We don’t learn until The Kindly Ones that the unnamed woman is Thessaly, who is never mentioned by name in Brief Lives. In #42, she’s just she, the woman whose quarters are to be erased and never spoken of again. And the desperate, almost imperial attempt to make it like she never existed is the first signal that Dream is not handling this well. The second one is obviously the rain.
Then Delirium arrives at the gates, and this issue becomes something else entirely…
When Control Becomes Its Own Prison
Dream is defined by control and not wanting to let it slip. I often thought that while he definitely commands the rain to fall, he can’t command himself to stop needing it to fall, if that makes any sense? He stands motionless in the downpour for weeks (at least three from what we can gather) while water streams down his face (can’t be seen crying, can we?). Everything around him is waterlogged.
Thessaly, a bit like Nada (albeit in different ways), doesn’t really put up with Dream’s shit, and I think that’s why the ends of both affairs cut so deep: they left him before he was ready to let them go. He doesn’t cope with rejection one bit (the other way round is okay of course 🙄). So all he can do is stand in the rain and drown in it (or raze the Dreaming to a desert, like after Nada).
When Delirium shows up, something shifts though (can I just say that he’s generally warmer, if slightly patronising with her from the outset compared to the show, even if she’s getting on his nerves? He even touches her shoulder and asks her if she’s hungry. And he makes her a hanky 🥹).
Honestly, I’ll never not post these. Their dynamic in the comics is everything. I would have loved to see that kind of humour in the show? Tragedies don’t “untragedy” just because you put a bit of lightness into them.
Dream bids her inside and invites her to stay for dinner (the chocolate people! 🙈🤣). He even apologises for being a bit tetchy. Delirium is so startled by this that she even comments on it. Thing is though: Delirium is offering Dream exactly what he needs: a reason to leave for the waking world to a) seek some diversion from his break-up with Thessaly but really b) trying to find her. That’s the entire engine of Brief Lives. He is heartbroken, doesn’t know what to do with it and is quite possible a bit delirious (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: none of the siblings appear in his life randomly. They are their function, also with him. Also goes for Death, and that includes “The Sound of her Wings” in the comics [it was toned down for the show]).
Lucien Knows—Of Course He Does
Before Delirium and Dream leave, Lucien pulls Dream aside. Lucien is quite possibly closest to Dream and the most steady presence of his entire existence. He knows him. And he knows that Dream is not in a state to make good decisions. So he questions him, not once but twice. Dream informs him they will not find Destruction, that he is just going along to distract himself from his heartbreak, and Delirium will soon lose interest.
Instead of listening to Lucien, he brushes him off: “You worry too much, Lucien. I’ve noticed this before. After all, this is completely straightforward.”
And then: “What could possibly go wrong?”
And honestly, even when I read that for the first time, I had a moment where I basically yelled “dramatic irony, EVERYTHING will go wrong, won’t it?” at the comic in my hands. Nothing about this is subtle if you look at literary devices. It’s, in dramatic terms, the real, actual turn into a tragedy from which there will be no coming back. You might have had hints before, but this was honestly the first time I went, “Shit!” and not just “Oh…” (like in The Sound of her Wings or in Season of Mists. There were signs for the “hero’s fatal flaw”, but you still felt like it might be okay in the end. This was the first time I honestly thought it won’t be). We’re shown someone who is so consumed by heartbreak that he cannot see clearly, and then we hand him a line that will ring in the reader’s ears for the rest of the run. What could possibly go wrong?
All of it. All of it goes wrong.
And it gets rung in here, with this line, with a king who couldn’t think clearly (Delirium!). He knows he’s using the quest for his own ends, he admits it to Lucien. But what he doesn’t understand is that he’s not in a state to make sound judgment right now (until he does and it becomes choice).
Delirium Is Also Drowning
I know I’ve said this before so I won’t repeat everything, but I honestly think Jill Thompson’s Delirium is amazing.
Del is terrified of Dream (and of rejection). “I was afraid you’d probably be all horrible to me, and you’re so scary, so I thought I’d really try to be good and I was trying so hard to be good and you were still being horrid to me and I was doing my best and then I messed it all up and now you’ll say no and be horrible and it’s all a mess and it’s my fault” lands like a gut punch. That’s not the “quirky youngest sibling”. That’s someone who has learned, over a very long time, to brace for cruelty. And Dream can be incredibly cruel and has been so rather often, whether people want to hear it or not (they lessened it considerably for the show with maybe two exceptions, which honestly doesn’t make his arc land the same way and is IMHO partly responsible for why so many people have rejected the ending, but that’s a different topic).
The dynamic reads less like siblings and more like a frightened child navigating an unpredictable parent. And Dream’s gentleness in this issue (his apology, his flashes of kindness and then his ultimate decision to go with her, if for all the wrong reasons) comes across so unusual to Del that you can tell she keeps waiting for him to have a face-heel-turn.
When Dream briefly leaves to talk to Desire (who tries to pull him off the quest, just like they already told Despair they were worried in #41), Delirium remembers Destruction, specifically the time when she was still Delight and he told her that things were changing. That there was nothing she could do to stop it. The one sibling who represented support and stability to her (even when he also stands for change) has been gone for three hundred years. So she thinks if she finds him, she’ll be okay, or at least feel better and supported again.
Delirium and Dream are two somewhat broken siblings, each using the other a bit to avoid the thing they actually need to face. Both are in crisis, but their crises look nothing alike…
The Beginning of an End
#42 begins with Dream drowning in drama and ends with him embarking on a quest that will become the hinge on which everything turns. He hasn’t processed Thessaly’s departure or sat with his grief long enough to process it, so he (vainly I have to say) hopes he will see her when he accompanies Delirium. For once, Dream is choosing movement over stillness because stillness means feeling more pain.
Two old men who have lost everything that ever mattered. Sandman and March have so much in common, and yet they are completely different. Literally two sides of the same coin. The idealistic March, with lofty words about justice, firmly convinced of the need to fight and make sacrifices, both his own and others' for what he believes in, and the fatalistic, life-experienced Sandman, haunted by guilt, who wants to do one right thing in a life full of mistakes.
But both men are trying to change the world they live in and both are willing to pay with their lives for it and both greatly influence Lauren's life steps and shape her view of the world.
The two have probably never met. Sandman definitely doesn't know about March and if March knows about Sandman, he certainly doesn't know where to look for him, but I would like to see them talk. But unfortunately it's too late for that.
There appears to be a beautiful new Sandman poster in Times Square!
Who has better eyes than me?
I can make out:
The Endless in the top middle
The Gatekeepers
Top right: Lucienne, Matthew, Cain, Abel, Gilbert (?), Merv, and others. Is that possibly Wanda in the front? (Based on the green jacket) *Maybe* Nada?
Top left: Puck, Loki, The Corinthian. *Maybe* Johanna. Bunch of others I can't make out
Bottom left: Lyta and the Kindly Ones I think
Bottom center: Lucifer. And 4 other figures?
Bottom right: no idea
This is fun!!! Excited for this poster with a ton of characters!!
