Most Memory Monday posts are just cool/fun/nostalgic panels from the comics of my youth. But this week’s is a little more. There’s an actual story here…
I love mythology in all its forms, so it’s no surprise that I loved Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. And the storyline “Season of Mists” kicked off when I was in college, intensively studying some of the same mythologies he was playing with. So. Cool.
The panel below really caught my attention. It appears during a dream banquet for the gods, and the two humans are dreamers who’ve been “hijacked” to serve as waitstaff (click to enlarge):
And later, we get this moment between them:
I’m not sure why, but I became obsessed with these two people! To the point that I actually came up with a story about the guy waking up, unable to forget this woman he’d met in his dreams…and deciding to find her in the waking world, no matter what. A few years later, out of college and working in the comic book industry, I actually had the chance to pitch that story to an editor at Vertigo.
Needless to say, I did a lousy job pitching it. And even if I had done a masterful job, who knows if they would have been interested? But in any event, I still look at these panels and think to myself, “Whatever happened to those two…?”
(From Sandman #26, May 1991. Story by Neil Gaiman, art by Kelley Jones and George Pratt.)