The Sandman Universe - Nightmare Country- The Glass House #1 // Review
Max is hanging out at a bar. Not for any good reason, though: he’s there for work. He’s going off to a second bar a little bit later on in the evening. His whole life is going to turn around in The Sandman Universe - Nightmare Country: The Glass House #1. Writer James Tynion IV opens another entry into the shadowy end of the DC Universe in an issue that is woven to life on the page by artist Lisandro Estherren and colorist Patricio Delpeche. The story glides along like a strange dream early on before asserting itself into something promising.
There’s a guy who works in finance. His name’s Max. He goes out with the boss and a bunch of other employees every Thursday. (The people who go to the bar with him always end up getting the biggest accounts.) He asks a few of them every week to go to a second bar. THEY are set for life. So the boss comes over to Max and tells him that he’s taking a few people out to the second bar. And he asks Max what he wants more than anything else in the world. And Max says that he wants to go to that second bar. That’s when things really get interesting.
Max works for a firm called Prophet Capital. The guy who runs the place figures the world is ending. That second bar is called The King of Pain. It has connections with the demon Azazel. Tynion is working with well-established images of good and evil that don’t hit the page with a great deal of novelty. Ancient evils circulate around the corners of the panels without really conjuring up terribly compelling horror. The overall feel of the series DOES have some appealing gravity about it, but Tynion has yet to find the right pulse for the horror at the end of the first issue.
Estherren’s sketchy horror crawls its way across the page under the rich murkiness of Delpeche’s colors. There isn’t a whole lot of differentiation or modulation in the visuals between the bright, shiny corporate world of Prophet Capital, the cool, modern radiance of the first bar, or the ungodly hellishness of The King of Pain. It feels weird, rubbery, and nightmarish. That lack of modulation keeps Tynion’s story from seeming solidly grounded in the waking world. It all feels so slimy and nightmarish. It’s difficult for the reader to get close enough to Max or anyone else to really develop any sense of security that would be peeled away by the horror.
The scummy, reprehensible end of wealthy white-collar life in the US has been explored with much greater depth and insight elsewhere, but the opening issue of the series DOES wield substantial potential as the overall milieu of the series is overflowing with possibilities. Tynion has only to point the narrative in the right direction. Wealthy guys in finance. Demons. Human reprehensibility. Tynion’s got all of the right elements in play. He just has to find the right direction.
