I guess it's getting to be a cliche that I write to praise whatever comic I'm reading at the moment, but this post is just that: I restarted my collection of Vertigo's Sandman Mystery Theatre, and I'm glad I did.
I wasn't going to, initially. My Great Big Comics Re-read is in progress, as it has been for almost three years, and oddly enough it felt like I'd just recently read the collected and single issues I have. A few years ago I'd unearthed my old copies, which started about 24 issues in and missed the first issues of several successive storylines, and then at my now-departed local comics shop I found some beautiful collected editions that gathered one year's worth of issues in each volume. I picked up the first two volumes, which got me up to speed on where my single issues had started.
When I first started reading the series in the 90s, it was because of my interest in the wider DC Golden Age, spurred in part because of James Robinson's Starman series (which at one point featured a crossover with SMT and its artist, Guy Davis). It took a while for other Golden Age heroes to appear, but I was intrigued by the re-imaginings of characters like Hourman or the Crimson Avenger. And then I was further drawn in by the dark storylines and the trappings of the period.
It also helped that the series was subtly connected to Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where Wesley Dodds (the main character of SMT) is mystically influenced to start his adventures. This connection takes the form of prophetic dreams that plague Dodds in each story, and relate to the case he's working on. The connection was further exploited in the Sandman Midnight Theatre special, where Dodds encountered Dream during his captivity.
On this reread I'm less interested in the connections to the rest of the DC Universe (or the Vertigo-verse), but find myself more transfixed by the period details. I can't claim to be a great 1930s buff, but some of the other stories I've been enjoying lately, like HBO's Boardwalk Empire, put me in mind of SMT because of when they take place.
Part of the period detail is the look of Wesley Dodds, who's portrayed in most of the storylines less as a Batman-style playboy adventurer, and more as a kind of nerd who fights crime. Instead of being tall, handsome and strong-jawed, he's a bit dumpy and wears glasses.
But this portrayal of the main character brings to mind the other thing I'm enjoying about reading this series again. A key theme is the cruelty and indifference of the period, and it's unflinching in showing the effects on the victims and criminals of all the violence, racism and other horrors on display. Even the cops are casually cruel, as when one hints that he disavowed his sister because she married a black man; even Wesley Dodds wrestles with his own prejudices during a storyline that involves the murder of a string of gay men.
The reason I like this aspect of the series is that, especially in comics, we treat the 1930s as a time of innocence and fun, but it was actually fairly violent. It wasn't a patch on the 20s, when Prohibition turned basically all Americans into criminals, but it cemented the power of the gangsters who made their reputations in the previous decade. And on top of that, the Depression caused a huge dislocation of life and its certainties, which led to violence and fascism basically everywhere.
The Depression and the onset of fascism are hinted at in the book, but it's impossible to discount their influence on the tone of the book, and they make it a powerful response to the more libertarian/objectivist readings of superhero comics (e.g. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns).
That said, I don't know if I've ever met anyone else who read Sandman Mystery Theatre when it was running, so I consider it one of the also-rans of Vertigo. This is unfortunate, because I consider it one of the better-written books from the imprint, for the reasons mentioned above. I'm glad that DC published those large collected volumes I found, but the thing I'd really love to see is an HBO adaptation of the book - I think the themes would work quite well on TV now, and they'd be able to make the setting look really good.
And more than anything, it'd be nice to see the book gain some new fans, and potentially lead to more collected editions...
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