I was brought up on 2000AD comics with Judge Dredd bestriding a post-apocalyptic landscape and a catalogue of other dystopian characters (Does Strontium Dog – a mutant bounty hunter – ring a bell for anyone else, or is my memory playing tricks on me?).

However, that experience has left me thinking of Graphic Novels as kind of fat comics and having “put aside such childish things” I haven’t ever read one or considered them as literature. But then again, definitions of literature and art can be quite amorphous, squeezing amoeba like, through the cracks in the walls of categorisation with which we seek to confine them. I hadn’t read any litRPG until a couple of years ago but have found it differently entertaining and entertainingly different. My son-in-law distributed at Christmas copies of an 86 chapter self guided adventure he’d written which took me back to the days of Steve Jackson’s The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and  a recent social media discussion about copyright and the end song from Minecraft has highlighted the literary elements in game design.

Which is all by way of saying that I shouldn’t fall into snobbishness about what constitutes literature – particularly as my favoured genre of speculative fiction has, for so long, endured a somewhat patronising gaze from those within what Amitav Ghosh described as “the mansion of literary fiction.”

But I suppose the challenge in reviewing a graphic novel is to do justice to all its elements. Alongside  considerations of plot, characterisation and writing there is now the matter of artwork and layout, a consideration of images and presentation that butts up against those used in film and even poetry.

In terms of plot, Gaiman’s first volume  delivers an entertaining series of episodes to introduce us to the demon Morpheus, lord of dreams and younger sibling of Death, captured and imprisoned for 70 years by mortals and finally escaping to reclaim his power and possessions in a world that has changed  somewhat.  Each chapter in this first volume has the feel of a short story, a series of linked episodes like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Gaiman in his afterword to this thirtieth anniversary edition – as is the nature of artists who have grown beyond their first works –  reflects on a certain roughness to this first exploration of Morpheus. However, this early incarnation of the Sandman  is still a compelling character whose travails keep the reader turning the pages, even though the first image of him eludes us until well into the first chapter.

When Morpheus does finally appear on the page, it is an eye-catching depiction that brilliantly enhances the mystery and charisma of his character. There is – as Gaiman admits – a certain Gaimanesque aspect to the dark clothes, pale colouring, tousled hair, and gothic vibe with which Morpheus stalks the pages.  But there is also the delightful motif that Morpheus’ speech is in white on black, a distinction that instantly separates him from more mundane characters, even that of his elder sister. Ironically it was Terry Pratchett’s characterisation of Death with his ALL CAPS speech where I first saw this kind of dialogue motif, but in the Sandman’s voice (and thoughts) it becomes even more effective.

The artwork is glorious, deftly conjuring character and setting and proving once again how a picture can paint a thousand words.  There are also visual choices that the graphic novel format offers which are perhaps less available to films. Where films have a single sized screen to fill, the graphic novel can choose how big to make each image, from full page illustration to small portrait inserts.

The comics of my youth were often framed in a cage of rectangular images marching left to right across the page. Still worse were the 6 frame O’level French picture stories that we had to apply our creativity to. (Places which opened with “Le soleil brille.” in the first frame, or – if one was lucky enough to squeeze out an extra couple of words for the word count – “Le soleil ne brille pas.”)

In The Sandman the constraints of form are delightfully cast aside as panels march up or down the page in varying sizes and shapes, sometimes rectangular, sometimes a crazy paving of panels, but all drawing the eye through the speech bubbles and through the story. This kind of thing may be old hat to those familiar to the graphic novel genre – but as a late returner to the format it is refreshing way to be enjoy a story with images as carefully constructed and arranged as any paragraph of text.

In word and image this first volume brings the character of Morpheus, Death’s younger brother, compellingly to life and delivers a richly imagined and imaged world for him to walk through. I will be curious to see how his character and Gaiman’s collaboration with the artists, Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III develops in subsequent volumes.