Comic Book / The Sandman Universe

The Sandman Universe is a line of DC Comics published under DC Black Label. Launched to celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Sandman (1989). As with Gerard Way and Young Animal, the series were "curated" by Neil Gaiman, who chose a specific writer for each book. They began with a Sandman Universe one-shot, which then led to four books:

• The Dreaming by Simon Spurrier and Bilquis Evely. Dream’s absence from the Dreaming has created unintended consequences for its inhabitants. Ran for 20 issues.
• House of Whispers by Nola Hopkinson, Dan Watters, and Diminike Stanton. Welcome to the House of Dahomey, the houseboat of Erzulie Fréda, where the souls of Voodoo followers go when they sleep. But something has upset the balance and Erzulie's realm has been tossed into the Dreaming. Ran for 22 issues.
• Lucifer by Dan Watters, Max Fiumara, and Sebastian Fiumara. The Prince of Darkness is missing and not coming back. Trapped in a small town with no memory of how he got there and no hope to escape, Lucifer is also the only hope to stop the world from ending. Ran for 24 issues.^note Issues #19-24 were published only in the collected edition due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• The Books of Magic by Kat Howard, David Barnett, and Tom Fowler. Timothy Hunter is destined to become the most powerful magician in the world, but currently he's a teenager trying to deal with teenage issues. Too bad nobody told the deadly supernatural forces about that. Ran for 23 issues.

After a year, another one-shot, The Sandman Universe Presents: Hellblazer, was published and then three more books, dubbed "Year Two":

• John Constantine, Hellblazer by Simon Spurrier and Aaron Campbell. John Constantine is back in London and ready to get his hands dirty. However, there's another Constantine out there pulling the strings, just waiting for the right moment. Ran for 12 issues.
• The Dreaming: Waking Hours by G. Willow Wilson and Nick Robles. Lindy has the same dream every night of the Stratford House. This time, however, she runs into Ruin, a Nightmare, and nothing will be the same again. Ran for 12 issues.
• Locke & Key/Sandman: Hell & Gone by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. A three-issue crossover with Locke & Key.
• Nightmare Country by James Tynion IV, Lisandro Estherren, Yanick Paquette, Patricio Delpeche, and Nathan Fairbairn. An art student who can't dream starts seeing visions of a creepy fat man with mouths for eyes, drawing the attention of not only the Corinthian, but a pair of diabolical bounty hunters as well. Ran for 6 issues.
• Dead Boy Detectives by Pornsak Pichetshote and Jeff Stokely. The Dead Boy Detectives are tasked with a new ghostly adventure: investigating the disappearance of a Thai-American girl from her home. Ran for 6 issues.

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Tropes for The Dreaming

• Abhorrent Admirer: While Dora sees Balam as a business-partner/occasional booty-call, Balam seems to have genuine feelings for her (or as genuine as a demon can feel for a woman), something that Dora knows and finds rather irritating.
• Accidental Truth: One of the many ways Rose describes Dream when she sees him is by comparing him to "a kid [she] babysat." The first time she had met him was when he was a normal human child that she babysat in her youth. He even jokes that "it's every child's fantasy to romance the babysitter" when she asked why he went to her in his quest to find love.
• Alien Blood: Dreams are made of dreamstuff and cannot die conventionally, so all injuring them does is cause stark white matter to leak out.
• Animal Eye Spy: Wan can see through Matthew's eyes, much like Dream can, but it's a very uncomfortable experience for the latter to have the former in his brain.
• Anti-Villain: Wan's tenure as Dream King is inherently destructive and unhealthy to the dreaming minds of the universe, but he means no harm and feels kinship and pity towards the abandoned dreams and nightmares of his realm. This makes sense since he was made to be a Benevolent A.I. with creators who had nothing but good intentions in making him.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: At the end, Abel admits to Cain that they can be more honest with their feelings and admits that he loves him. Cain responds by knifing him in the face before begrudgingly reciprocating the gesture under his breath.
• Baku: When Judge Gallows takes over as regent of the Dreaming to instill order, he tries enforcing his frontier justice onto the realm by hanging the various blanks that had immigrated there. Since they are made of dream-matter and thus cannot die in the conventional sense, he hogties a Baku and feeds dissonants to it.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: Wan was created by a Hollywood Atheist who discovered the existence of the Dreaming and devised a method of evolving humanity by wiping out its more primitive beliefs, thinking that a more intelligent and egalitarian species will emerge when it's over.
  Keter: I've seen kindergartens full of rape survivors because everyone knows sex with a virgin cures AIDS. I've seen reckless morons deny kids immunizations because they'd sooner believe a rumor than a pandemic. I've seen monks beat babies to death, and people thrown off buildings for loving the wrong people —and all because— hey: you don't have to feel guilty hurting folks if their faith or sin or skin means they're not really human. I've seen whole demographics ignore the science because, whether we're killing the planet or not, it's all part of God's plan. I've watched an entire fucking species endlessly interpret the same hateful stories to suit the stupid, vain selfish needs of the day.
  • This gets deconstructed as wildly misguided, as passion for living is tied up in all those feelings. In his machinations to stamp it all out and replace it with strictly practical matters, he took out the drive to go on out of everyone's lives, leading to skyrocketing suicide rates.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: One of the "secrets" Abel allows into the Dreaming includes a woman who had a "vulnerable moment" with her labrador.
• Bittersweet Ending: With the combined hope and will of the Dreamkin, Dream is brought back to the Dreaming, defeats Wan and peace is restored. Nothing Is the Same Anymore, with many of the dreams having changed (for better or for worse). Daniel is forced to leave the woman he loved in the universe he had created with no way to get her back, and it's implied that his working relationship with Lucien and the others is strained after everything that has happened, a strain that will take time to mend.
  One story ends, a million begin. Happy or sad, with lessons learned or scars scratched open— it doesn't matter. This is the Dreaming. The point is just to feel.
• Call-Back:
  • One of the nightmares an absent-minded Lucien stuffs back into the Black box is the Cuckoo from the "A Game of You" Arc.
  • Remember the Mundane Egg in The Books of Magic? The one nearly snuck into Timothy's pocket and ended up in Titania's possession as a boon to be let out of the Realm of Faerie? Well, here Daniel left with it as payment for what she believed to be valuable possessions.
• Changing Yourself for Love: Ivy Walker started out as stoic bordering on asexual and aromantic. When she meets Daniel, she lets her hair down literally and metaphorically, falling hard for him. Rose even compares her to a flower that blossomed late.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: A returning plot point is how belief shapes mythical beings; "We are what they make us." A dragon turned into a nixie by changing belief is part of a group of mythical beings gathered to support each other to cope with "The Wane", the loss of belief as records like Wikipedia articles get expunged. Some, like the Green Man, can get by being assimilated into the zeitgeist and becoming business icons, but the branding involved may bring another consequence of flanderizing their character. Dora is a mythical being herself, a Night Hag, who got traumatized with existential despair when one of her victims defended himself by telling her she's not real.
• Cosmic Retcon: Wan's go-to for anything that annoys him — from dream underlings to godlike beings — is to use his authority as Dream King to declare that they don't exist. It's so effective, that even he forgets they ever existed.
• Crazy-Prepared: After he regained his powers at the end of Preludes & Nocturnes, Morpheus recreated his various totems and scattered them among trusted friends and allies in the event that he wound up in a similar situation. He left the ruby with Dora after she found herself in the Dreaming, he left the Fire Opal with Lucien "hidden artfully at the point of lost hope", the Black Pearl was transformed into the Box of Horrors that he kept his nightmares in, the emerald, which he had given to Daniel, was given to Ivy in the form of a ring, and his bag of sand and helm were returned to the foundations of the Dreaming, making them one with the many dreams and nightmares he created.
  Lucien: Dream spun a safety net from the actions of those he could trust.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Abel's theory on the strange monolith rising from the crack in the Dreaming being a dormant god turns out to be correct when Wan emerges from it.
• Death Equals Redemption: After Daniel "unmakes" Wan's more destructive self, what remains of him volunteers to act as a sacrifice in Rose's place when her status as the Dream Vortex threatens to destroy the Dreaming.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: When Daniel suspects that Ivy was deliberately destroying him and poisoning the universe as a consequence, Rose slaps him and tells him to stop acting like a child throwing a tantrum, get over himself and not to blame Ivy for whatever is happening.
  Rose: Grow up! Stop making the world nuts!
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: To illustrate how unpredictably powerful Wan is, he managed to uncreate the Eldritch Abomination Yastraanoth by declaring that he doesn't exist.
• Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: With Nuala's help, Daniel actually managed to convince Titania to sell him a World Egg for a pocket full of junk by convincing her that it's one of Dream's Power Crystals in disguise, being undone by her own realm's rules.
• Disproportionate Retribution: When the Butler Taramis tries to tell Wan that attending royal duties is more important than watching Matthew and Dora's quest, he vaporizes him, unmaking him to the point where he and Abel forget he ever existed.
• The Dividual: Balam is both the demonic man and the bear he rides upon.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • When Wan rewrites the dreams of humanity in its attempts at "curing" it of irrationality, most react with an influx of despair before they are driven to kill themselves.
  • After Wan remakes Lucien's library into an automated system, Lucien begs Abel to put him out of his misery. When stabbing him to death fails (since dreamfolk don't die that way), he tries feeding himself to a Baku, only for his friends to stop him, deciding to give him a proper burial instead, returning him to the foundation of the Dreaming like he wanted.
• Dying Dream: Wan's sanitization of the Dreaming causes mass suicide of people whose dreams were cherished fantasies. In their deaths they get one last normal dream without any of his Blanks before passing on.
• Eldritch Location: We see a glimpse of Destruction's realm — The Fulcrum — depicted as a single, ongoing explosion. Destruction's sigil — his sword — sits at the center of that explosion, embedded in the ground.
• Eye Scream: To try and warn about Wan's dangerous nature, Abel gouges out Matthew's eyes and replaces them with his own so that Wan can't see through them.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Merv seems to hold a general distrust towards anything in the Dreaming that Dream didn't make personally, seeing Dora as an unwelcome intruder and thief and the Blanks as foreigners stealing the jobs of fellow dreams. Lucien unmaking his entire crew to "streamline" everything certainly didn't help matters.
  • Judge Gallows seems to agree with Mervyn that the blanks are a massive security risk, though he thinks that them merely being there is a violation of the "culture" of the Dreaming. Considering he's a nightmare born from the horrors of The American Civil War and The Klan that followed, it would be odd if he weren't an Absolute Xenophobe.
• Fertility God: One of the patrons at The World's End is Long Lugs, an anthropomorphic rabbit with a strong desire to mate that Dora identifies to be a fertility spirit.
• Fictional Board Game: When Dora summons Flauros, they play a game of The Keening, a favor is she wins and enslavement of Balam if she loses. The game is like a Dungeons & Dragons version of Horse Race, magically made life-size for full effect with Flauros' 36 legion of demons as the pieces. Dora manages to win by sacrificing most of her pieces so that the slow and unassuming piece makes it to the finish line, knowing that Flauros (being a high-ranking demon) would be preoccupied with drawing out the game out of sadism.
• Foreshadowing: When Wan is told that various gods and mythical creatures come to parlay, he unmakes the messenger to the point where no one remembers he existed. He goes on to do the same to the envoys, this happening before it's revealed that Wan was created to undo "frivolous fantasies" in the human imagination and wipe out belief-based beings from existence in the process.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Being a "discarnate sentience composed of several trillion self-adjusting instructions", Wan adheres to the Dreaming's rules when it comes to symbolism and constructs a body for him to properly communicate with his new "subjects", in this case being a humanoid silk moth.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Out of all the Howling Goetia, Leonard is always the last, the titular demon always complaining that he is left out during role-call. It gets to the point where the rest of them tell him to fuck off.
• Geas: One of the effects of Daniel's cursed tattoo is that he isn't allowed to look for help or explain what is going on, forcing him to suffer in silence as he is cut off from the Dreaming. Lucien even calls it a "Geas" after he finds out how everything happened.
• The Great Serpent: After leaving Faerie, Dream heads into the bowels of Hell to parlay with a giant, world-creating-and-devouring snake that is implied to be every giant snake across every myth and old religion.
• Guile Hero: Dora manages to beat Flauros in her first game of the Keening by secretly playing a separate game against Malphas, the one demon who could beat Flauros in the game, learning how to beat Flauros in a losing game against Malphas. When she wins a favor from Flauros, she uses it to make her threaten to kill Malphas so that he will be forced to forfeit, thus winning a favor from a Demon President in the process. She then uses the favor to restore Balam to his former station as Duke, thus now he is indebted to her.
• Hanging Judge: Judge Gallows is an antiquated nightmare created when The Wild West and The American Civil War became mythologized, embodying the fear of one's own neighbor in the face of the hordes and the general guilt and distrust that fuels it. After forcing various dreamers to "self-sentence", Morpheus had him forced into the Black Chest in the early 20th-century. When Mervyn lets him out of the Black Chest hoping that he will help bring order to a collapsing Dreaming, he inflicts this brand of frontier justice onto the blanks that have been appearing, corralling the other nightmares as his enforcers.
  Morpheus: Listen new thing. Listen now. It is no effort at all for one human to decide his notion of right is worth more than the life of another. Knowing this, living with this, living with each other, is the purest terror they know. And yet they barely feel it anymore. I intend that you remind them.
• Head-Turning Beauty: Rose has a very long list of ex-boyfriends and -girlfriends, her relationships ending just as fast as they start. Considering she's the granddaughter of Desire of the Endless, being a Lust Object for everyone she meets is in her blood.
• Heel–Face Brainwashing: Cain falling into the fissure that Wan emerged from gets him lodged within the servers that served as the cradle of the neophyte god. This subjects him to the code written by the Asiyah Tech Group, so they integrate him and his drive for murder to enforce the program. This briefly makes him an antagonist towards Dora and the remorseful Big Bad.
• Heel Realization: Before he left the universe for one of his own making, Daniel visited the Big Bad and showed him the end result of their endeavors. This caused a horrific realization of just how wrong he got it, and left him desperate to stop the project. Unfortunately by then he was too infirm to succeed and his subordinates just presumed he'd lost his nerve or was compromised and continued without him.
• History Repeats: In a way that served as a Continuity Nod to Delirium's soliloquy that the Endless are such fundamental beings that events and circumstances surrounding them will echo through time.
  • Like with Morpheus before him, Daniel is captured and cut off from the Dreaming by an occult organization of humans, causing all sorts of metaphysical havoc for the Dreaming and the Waking World. This time, however, it's not power over one of the Endless that his human captors want, but sovereignty and control over the Dreaming itself.
  • Like in "Season on Mists", various envoys from different realms and pantheons come to the gates of the Dreaming to parlay, in this case to make alliances with Wan. Unlike Morpheus, who accepted them into his home, Wan simply obliterates them, Foreshadowing his true purpose.
• The Immodest Orgasm: Balam's entire face explodes in fire when he orgasms.
• Ironic Name: The name of the arc villain that started the whole plot of erasing all folklore and fantasy is Hyperion Keter. That's a Greek Titan of the Sun and the sphere crowning the sephiroth signifying the connection between the material and the divine.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After failing to invade the Dreaming twice, Balam had his eyes gouged out and was demoted to a rhyming demon, both for rocking the boat of Hell's treaty with the Dreaming and for making Hell look bad for his failures.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Deep into madness and stranded in the Fulcrum, Lucien cries out that he hears a voice in his head implied to be the narrator. After Lucien finds his Heroic Second Wind and confronts Wan, Wan's darker half starts hearing the narrator too.
• Liberty Over Prosperity: Judge Gallows is an Absolute Xenophobe who sees foreigners and the unknown as anathema to a "secure home", but it doesn't take long for everyone in the Dreaming to rebel against him, as strangers and "new things" appearing and finding a home in the Dreaming is a part of its nature.
  Mervyn Pumpkinhead: With respect, sir? The Toy Box must stay open.
  Eve: New things have always been drawn to the Dreaming.
  Matthew: We gotta treat all strangers as friends. At least—
  Mervyn Pumpkinhead: —till there's no doubt they're enemies.
• Like Father, Unlike Son: Before meeting Daniel, Ivy was chaste, serious, conservative and had no time or patience for romance, a stark opposite to her more bohemian mother Rose.
• Love Makes You Dumb: Daniel wouldn't have gotten the magical tattoo that cuts him off from the Dreaming if Ivy hadn't asked him to.
• Mad God:
  • Wan, a Magitek AI that unwittingly usurped Daniel as Dream-King, acknowledges that he is "insane", and his actions prove that he just might be. Part of it is due to being a wholly rational being charged with managing an irrational plane, the rest is a subroutine of his true mission to erase irrationality that he's programmed to never realize.
  • The Great Serpent that Dream sought an audience with is described as a god that went insane due to all of the cultural osmosis he underwent throughout the years. Dream gives him some Sanity Strengthening by giving him a dream of his earliest incarnation, effectively resetting him.
• Magitek: Wan was an A.I. program created by Hyperion Keter and the Asiyaha Tech Group that utilized advanced technology and occult methods to replace Daniel as Dream King after they manage to cut him off from the Dreaming, intending on using the Dreaming to artificially evolve humanity into a Straw Vulcan race.
• Moth Menace: Wan's physical aspect takes the form of a moth-like boy with a body of light. Though the form he takes when he emphasizes the "menace" part is a tad more abstract.
• Nay-Theist: The Greater-Scope Villain behind the conflict concluded in the past that though the supernatural may exist, it's also dependent on human belief and can be dismissed as easily as saying such. Even then, it's impact is too real to only address like that, and needs more proactive planning to neutralize as a threat. The end goal is to essentially hijack the very systems the supernatural runs on to erase it completely and replace it with something more apparently utilitarian.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: After seeing Lucien slowly losing his mind and the Dreaming slowly collapse around him, Merv takes it upon himself to find someone in the Dreaming meant to make hard calls. In this case, he lets out Judge Gallows from the Black Chest in hopes that his brand of frontier justice might bring a little order back to the Dreaming. Unfortunately, his idea of instilling order is by corralling all of the other nightmares in the Black Chest into his personal militia and spreading fear among the rest of the Dreaming, executing dissonants with a Baku.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • If Lucien is to be believed, Wan's attempt to turn humanity into a Straw Vulcan race swept away many of the human aspects that kept the Dream Vortex within Rose Walker at bay, becoming a "tempest" so powerful that it breaks the seal keeping Dream from returning using the collective will of humanity's sleeping minds.
  • Wan tries using the Black Pearl to fight off Lucien's Fire Opal. Since the pearl was used to contain nightmares in the form of the Black Chest, the nightmares attack the Asiyaha Tech Group keeping Wan's servers running, leaving Wan without his tech support.
• Older Than They Look: Because of her divine blood through her grandparent Desire, Rose Walker has reached 50 years old, yet she hasn't aged since she was 28.
• Out-of-Character Alert: It doesn't go unnoticed when the dithering Abel, after having been thrown into the crack in the Dreaming, comes out of it speaking without his usual stutter.
• Pet the Dog:
  • When Keter tells Dora that she isn't real, since she is a belief-based entity, it banishes her to the Dreaming with her memories in tatters. There, Morpheus finds her, comforts her and offers her sanctuary in his realm. He even assigns Merv to leave her gifts as a means of recovering.
  • Desire contacts Rose and tells her that someone is going after Daniel and Ivy, a surprisingly tender move considering what Desire is like.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: In order to combat the unborn god set to emerge at any moment, Judge Gallows imprisons over a dozen lucid dreamers and harnesses their power with the hope that their collective power makes him strong enough to keep the throne for himself.
  Judge Gallows has crowned himself in the Eye of a Milam Cascade.
• Precision F-Strike: To underscore his anger, the usually formal and eloquent Lucien drops an F-bomb when pointing out the glaring flaw in the plan to make humankind more rational by taking over their dreams: "And so — what happens? What fucking happens, Wan?!"
• Properly Paranoid: While he comes across as a xenophobe, Mervyn is right that the blanks that manifest in the Dreaming right when the sky starts breaking and Daniel goes missing are "up to something." They were created by the Asiyaha Tech Group as NPCs meant to teach dreamers practical skills and knowledge in their sleep, left to their own devices before Wan manifests and "activates" them.
• Sanity Slippage: The first sign of the Dreaming's slow, but inevitable collapse is when Lucien loses his train of thought mid-monologue, Lucien being a dream who's entire purpose is to have infallible knowledge of his library and its contents (and being a former raven, he "knows these things"). As the story goes on, this forgetfulness escalates and starts acting recklessly, his body eroding before perishing.
• Science Destroys Magic: A tech millionaire attempts to destroy the supernatural by replacing Dream with an AI. It nearly succeeds.
• Sequel Hook: When the seals break and Daniel returns to the Dreaming, Ivy Walker is left behind in the universe he had created to try and escape the Geas he was put under, with no way to get her back.
• Scheherezade Gambit: On their quest to find Daniel, Dora and Matthew end up at the World's End Inn, where three figures have completely entranced everyone present with their stories. The stories are all interconnected, repeating on loop before they reach their ending because each one segues into the next one. This was to serve as a distraction as the inn burns down with everyone inside. Dora is not only unaffected, unlike Matthew, but thwarts it by adding an ending to each story. It's then they discover the storytellers were Blanks in disguise, one in particular being Dora's friend Ziggy.
• Shout-Out:
  • Dora takes one of the blanks as a companion and names him "Ziggy" after the David Bowie character Ziggy Stardust. He even wears makeup over his eyes similar to the character.
  • When Wan is left overwhelmed in his battle against Lucien and an army of dreams, Dora storms in to act as muscle, quoting Elmer Fudd from What's Up, Doc?
    Dora: KILL THE WA-BBIT, KILL THE WA-BBIT, KILL THE WA-BBIT—
• Sleep Learning: The Blanks were intended to supplement Wan's erasure of the Dreaming's irrationality, turning the dreams of people into classrooms on STEM topics. Because they're still dreams, no one notices this change as out of the ordinary, though they still suffer emotional fallout until they can't take it any more.
• Sleep Paralysis Creature: Dora turns out to be an amnesiac Night Hag who used to sit on sleepers' chests and feed off their fear but she had an existential crisis after her latest victim, who was the arc's villain, fended her off by telling her she wasn't real.
• Spotting the Thread: In a Moment of Lucidity, Lucien recollects that when Destruction abdicated his domain, Destruction's realm and influence carried on without him just fine. Even when Morpheus was imprisoned, the Dreaming's decay was a gradual process, while here the Dreaming's collapse is a far more dramatic affair, implying that Daniel didn't just quit and something far more dire is at hand. He also remarks that in the spot where Dream's sigil fell, a white, mirror-like frame is slowly materializing in its place, meaning something is emerging to take Dream's throne.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: One of the many nightmares and denizens of the Dreaming assaulting Wan's darker half at the climax are a pair known as White Cop and Black Hood, nightmares of the modern age. They express their love for each other at what may be their final outing.
• Straw Vulcan: Being an A.I. program, Wan understands patterns and rules, but he struggles when it comes to the internal logic of dreams and symbolism, thus he employs Abel as a sort of advisor while he acclimates to his role as Dream-King.
• Swapped Roles: After they both dive into the abyss the monolith rose from, Cain and Abel's personalities become their antitheses. Abel loses his stutter and becomes the border-guard to the Gates of Horn and Ivory, using his skills to sniff out what secrets should and shouldn't be allowed into the Dreaming, while Cain is left a sobbing mess, utterly broken by a conversation with the then-unborn Wan. Abel even kills Cain as a sacrifice to Wan to help it emerge.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Ivy did nothing wrong, or at least she didn't do anything directly. It's when she and Dream agree to get matching tattoos that the Asiyaha Tech Group strike, marking him with a tattoo specifically designed to lock him out of the Dreaming.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Lucien remarks how ridiculous it is that Daniel was so easily dethroned with a tattoo of the Kabbalah ("a road map to drag the mighty into the mud") and a "symbolically childish" dreamcatcher ("an ancient apotropaic of the Spider Grandmother, misappropriated by souvenir hunters and spiritual tourists"). He then goes on to call the very idea of Dream of the Endless a "childlike symbol", remarking how ironically appropriate it is.
• Weirdness Magnet: Rose Walker seems to be one, being both a Dream Vortex and a descendant of one of the Endless.
• Weirdness Censor: The waning mythical beings gradually have one fall over them before being Ret-Gone completely. First people find it difficult remembering them after just talking to them, then all evidence of their existence disappears from recordings like photos and videos, then they fade and become intangible before disappearing completely, with any remaining evidence like their names going unrecognized and being heedlessly erased.
  • Discussed in a support group of such beings, with one deeming it scotomization.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Hyperion Keter had Wan created because he believed that all the superstition and fantasies that humanity ran on made it irrational and destructive, and that the Dreaming could be used as a learning tool to artificially evolve humanity. Unfortunately, since this is Not the Intended Use of dreams, all it did was rob humanity of its collective will to live and erase many belief-based entities from existence. Hyperion was eventually shown the error of his ways by Daniel giving him a vision of the end result of his endeavors. Unfortunately by then he was in little position to stop it as everything was already up and running by itself.
  Lucien: Fix the world! Burn out the irrationality! Use dreams to educate and enable! It would be ingenious — quite, quite brilliant — if it didn't miss the point by a country mile. People aren't machines. People can't live without wonder and stories. They give up. It's happening out there right now. They drain of feeling. They drain of life! And so — what happens? What fucking happens, Wan?!
• Willfully Weak: Wan's ability to erase gods and monsters from existence by declaring them to be so implies that Dream of the Endless always had this power, but he refuses to use it, either as a rule the Endless are bound to or out of loyalty to his duties.
• Would Hurt a Child: Implied. Convict 34491-112 dreams that he makes a scarf out of babies, implying him to be a mentally ill man who targets small children.

Tropes for House of Whispers

• Berserk Button: Aesop is often annoyed whenever people quote his works without understanding the meaning behind them, especially when they do it against him.
• Blessed with Suck: After his death, Aesop was granted the title of herald to the House of Watchers by Despair of the Endless. Unfortunately, this meant observing and enduring all human suffering for centuries.
• The Big Easy: Most events that occur in the Waking World are set in New Orleans, a lot of the more fantastical elements being related to Vodou theology and Caribbean folklore.
• Brutish Bulls: After being infected by a fragment of the Corinthian's shattered essence, Poquita's stray cat is transformed into a Rolling calf, a monstrous bull wreathed in fire and chains from Jamaican folklore.
  One stray cat + once mirror shard of the Corinthian = a very special nightmare beast.
• The Chosen One: Because she crossed the Despair Event Horizon upon discovering her family's fate, Poquita is the ideal candidate to become the new caretaker of the House of Watchers. This "worthiness" is indicated physically by a mark on her arm shaped like Despair's hooked ring.
• Cool House: The House of Whispers and the House of Watchers were both constructed by Despair of the Endless, the former forged from dejection and the later meant to alleviate Despair's burden of looking upon human suffering. The House of Whispers would be given to the loa Erzulie to be used as her pantheon's houseboat, while the House of Watchers would be left to Aesop, later to be taken to a far-off section of the Dreaming as a personal possession of Anansi the Spider.
• Empty Shell: The infectees of Shakpana's Mystical Plague have their souls released but their bodies remain alive. Regardless, soulless people grow frustrated feeling no more passion for life, and if not Driven to Suicide will do callous things under the belief that they're walking corpses. One becomes a Serial Killer that eats brains.
• Eye Scream: When the Vodou pantheon finds the Corinthian, he is in the middle of tormenting a vegetarian dreamer with a nightmare of society partaking in the eating of animal eyeballs (which look startlingly like human eyes) that devolves into cannibalism before being force-fed them herself.
  The Corinthian: And just like that, for all your disgust and outrage... you succumb to the evil of convenience.
• Hall of Mirrors: The heart of the House of Watchers is one giant circular room, the walls lined with mirrors with a fountain of tears in the center. Those chosen to own the House of Watchers see different forms of pain and suffering going on in the universe. Anyone else who tries gazing upon them has their essence shattered and dispersed, as was the case with the Corinthian.
• Hate Plague: A side effect of the circumstances that dropped the Vodoun in the Dreaming causes a madness of hatred to spread from Erzulie's mirror. Her nephew Shakpana is driven to cause the accidental release of made-up plague to become a global pandemic.
• Mystical Plague: One of the consequences of the Dreaming's erosion is a hypothetical disease thought of by Shakpana that only existed in dreams before escaping into the real world. It's a highly contagious disease that is transmitted by touch that causes a person'a souls to become detached from their bodies and is left to wander the Dreaming. In the waking world, their bodies suffer from Cotard's syndrome.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Uncle Monday takes the form of a top-hat wearing Lizard Folk that can shapeshift into a regular crocodile.
• Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: After a mix of despair over her family's destruction and an infection from when the Rolling calf bit her, Poquita transforms into a Dark Watcher.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Erzulie can take on the form of a mermaid at her convenience.
• Only the Chosen May Wield: Only those touched by Despair are allowed to claim heraldship of the House of Watchers. When the Corinthian tries claiming it as his own, it shatters and disperses his essence in the process, causing all sorts of mayhem in the Waking World.
• Plot Parallel: House of Whispers is happening in parallel with the events of The Dreaming, the instigating event being when the titular House is unceremoniously dropping into the Dreaming, cutting off the Vodou pantheon from their worshippers.
• Self-Disposing Villain: After seeing what the despair induced by a soul being restored did to someone, Shakpana decides out of sadism to cure his plague so that all the infectees can suffer the knowledge of how they acted. In doing so, he accidentally cures his own madness, and seeking penance, allows himself to be tortured by a vengeful ghost.
• Willing Channeler: In keeping with Vodoun tradition, loa are depicted as needing to possess the bodies of willing worshippers to physically interact with the material world.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: After learning that the Corinthian wanted the House of Watchers due to feelings of inadequacy in his duties as a nightmare, Erzulie points to the chaos and terror he inadvertently caused in the Waking World and it immediately lifts his spirits.

Tropes for Lucifer

• Adaptational Villainy: Lucifer to a degree compared to his previous incarnations. While in the previous Lucifer runs Lucifer was very amoral and put his own interests above everyone and everything else, he was more or less indifferent to others unless they were of benefit to his ends or crossed him to earn his ire. In this series, Lucifer is a much darker, more sinister figure and seems to take some sadistic enjoyment in the suffering of others and those that earn his anger. While previously Lucifer was (for the most part) dispassionate and stoic in his demeanor, this time he casts an almost miasmal aura of dread and more closely portrays the common fictional image of the devil.
• Anti-Villain: Caliban, of the well-intentioned variety. He displays compassion towards others and gives his father a well-deserved What the Hell, Hero? over his apathy, pointing out that he could easily stop people from suffering.
• Asshole Victim: At the start of the series, Lucifer has become a non-fatal example of this to someone who turns out to be Stingy Jack, whom Lucifer is strongly implied to have dealt with in the past.. Lampshaded by Matthew:
  Matthew: Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
• Brought Down to Normal: Exaggerated. Lucifer is now blind, elderly, and homeless in a town that's impossible to leave.
• History Repeats: Defied by Lucifer, who refuses to abandon his son, even though he admits he can't be a proper father to him.
• Humanity Ensues: While Lucifer is trapped in a strange town that he searches desperately for the exit, he is no stronger or more able than a normal, mortal human being. While he can grow back his eyes or put back body parts (like putting his fingers back on) he can still be injured as easily as a normal person and he other injuries like wounds and broken bones heal more slowly.
• Humanity Is Infectious: During his time spent being a weak and vulnerable as a normal mortal being, Lucifer finds himself dependent on the help of others. While it's something he initially resents, he is genuinely touched by the compassion William Blake shows him by offering assistance, treating his broken leg, and sympathizing with his desperate desire to finish his task. Later when Blake is attacked and crucified, Lucifer gets him down and swears to make the one responsible pay for Blake's suffering.
• It's All About Me: Both Lucifer and Sycorax have this going on.
• Mythology Gag: An LAPD detective named John Decker (and his wife, Penelope) become entangled in Lucifer's fate.
• Necessarily Evil: To avoid being sent back to Hell as Cassandra prophesied, Lucifer has himself annotated out of Destiny's book, making it as though he never existed, the only people who remember him being those who knew him personally. This proves to have catastrophic consequences on Earth and beyond in a number of ways: since Lucifer embodies the fears of punishment and damnation, much of mankind's Primal Fears and the ethics that come with them are gone with him. Since Lucifer did not lead the War in Heaven, the Fallen Angels are left without a leader and devolve into a power struggle, Hell becoming a wasteland where the demons kill one another instead of the metaphysical nation it would become. Without evil there cannot be good and thus God disappears too, leaving the The Armies of Heaven (who rely on God's grace as sustenance) to starve, going mad as they cannibalize each other in a way indistinguishable from Hell.
• Never My Fault: Sycorax completely dismisses her role in the tragic events that play out, claiming that because she never asked for help, she's not responsible. Naturally, the truth is much more complex.
• Pet the Dog: Lucifer is convinced to let one of the ravens he has trapped for a spell go free... not that it does the raven any good. He also expresses regret over a newly-formed trio of witches losing a member to the plague.
• The Wild Hunt: The Wild Hunt is the very first hunt of predator and prey personified again and again as a method of catharsis for the inherent bloodlust that comes with life, a bloodlust that would only build and develop into wars and the potential end of the universe should they let it continue. The hunt usually involves the Hunted God being hunted by Thirst, Fear and Honor (personified as a trio of godly berserkers) across the universe. For a time, Odin Allfather led the hunt until they tracked it down and killed the Hunted God in Hell. Since all who suffer in Hell must stay in Hell, Lucifer would not allow them to keep their kill, but Odin managed to convince him otherwise on the condition that he joined their next hunt. As Lucifer does, he perverted this sacred event by hunting the Hunted God before the hunt would even begin, killing the god at infancy again and again until the god's divine essence was whittled down nearly to nothing.

Tropes for Books of Magic

• Continuity Reboot: This book seems to ignore everything after the initial Neil Gaiman Books of Magic mini-series.

Tropes for John Constantine, Hellblazer

• Bad Future: The series starts off in a future where Timothy Hunter became an Evil Sorcerer and caused a magical apocalypse, John Constantine mortally wounded before being sent back in time by an elderly man claiming to be an older version of him.
• Contrasting Replacement Character: When John returns to London and takes back up his role, he finds that another magician, Tommy Willowtree, has taken his place. Tommy is exceedingly kind, clean, and hopeful, unlike John. He doesn't have John's skills, but he has different types of knowledge. He's also a vegan and into yoga. Eventually, John finds out that he was granted the role of "Magelord of London" by the "Guardians of the Merlintrove," which is just a bunch of junk that Clarice Sackville put together in order to trick Tommy into thinking his "destiny" was real because she needed someone else to keep things calm in London.
• The Power of Apathy: Since Old Man John is the idea of a John Constantine without shame and guilt, his Evil Plan involves collecting pride and shamelessness from the British populace through magical creatures he engineers as a means of inoculating himself from John's years of guilt and self-loathing for when he finally comes to collect his soul. It doesn't work.
• Take That!:
  • It's revealed that an ultra-nationalistic Right-Wing news anchor blaming foreigners for everything is a bogeyman who killed and replaced the real anchorman so that he could grow fat on the fear and xenophobia he created, only to slowly starve when the narrative changed and everyone grew proud and shameless in their paranoid delusions.
  • It's clear that the Prime Minister doing disgusting, filthy things in one issue is Boris Johnson.
• Tulpa: It's revealed that the old man who claims to be John's future-self is actually the "idea" of a future where John lived a long, happy life free from the guilt and nightmarish things the real John has to deal with. His endgoal is to take John's soul as his own so that he can become real.
• Unicorn: The older John tricks an aristocrat into inoculating a race-horse with magical sperm in order to breed a future winning racer. The fetus shows that it's growing a horn and has John (the real John) explain what is happening. Since unicorns are just a symbol for purity and don't actually exist, the resulting monster erupts from the mother and starts massacring everything around it, overwhelmed by the impurities around it and the pain of existing.

Tropes for The Dreaming: Waking Hours

• 0% Approval Rating: While Nuala's rule wasn't exactly ideal in the Faerie Realm, she refuses to admit that overthrowing Auberon and Titania was the wrong thing to do, and implies that they weren't that popular with the rest of their subjects to begin with and her coup wouldn't having gone as far as it did otherwise.
• Angelic Abomination: Jophiel is an angel. His real form has four wings and a lion head.
• Baby Language: Apparently angels can speak "baby", Jophiel being able to hold a coherent conversation with the infant Anne.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family The Burgess/Cripps family is large and convoluted. Roderick Burgess and Ethel Cripps were the great-grandparents of Heather After, but she comes from a side of the family that the Burgess's disowned. She doesn't care, though, because Heather is determined to be the last of her line.
• Born Unlucky: From the moment Ruin came into existence things have gone to hell. Even his name isn't so much as a name as an insult, Daniel calling him "ruined" for not being what he intended him to be. It's implied that he exists not to cause suffering, but as an agent of change that goes beyond the Realm of Sleep, this being one of the reasons why Daniel can't bring himself to unmake him in spite of all of the trouble he causes.
• Call-Back: Many to the original Sandman series:
  • Brute and Glob show up in the Nightmare Box. Even though Morpheus destroyed them, Daniel has recreated them so that they will be loyal to him.
  • Heather After is the great-granddaughter of Roderick Burgess and Ethel Cripps. She even has the eye totem that Ethel stole for protection.
• The Chains of Commanding: Auberon outright calls his subjects "spoiled, semi-immortal monsters" and thinks that he faired fairly well for his millenia-long tenure as their King.
• Central Theme: The indomitable spirit of Free Will superseding one's nature.
  • Ruin is described as "the dream of catastrophic failure," and from the moment he came into existence all he ever does is make everyone worse off. The act of creating him instills Daniel with the crushing feelings of being Morpheus' Inadequate Inheritor, and he unintentionally has Jophiel exiled to Earth after failing to instill the fear of Eternal Damnation into the mind of a true believer. From then on he escapes to the Waking World and causes all sorts of mayhem across various realms. Even with all of the trouble he causes, Daniel recognizes that he is a unique being that is more than while he made him to be and allows him a chance to live a life with the man he loves.
  • Benedict was meant for a life in the church, Jophiel and Ruin assigned to help solidify that faith in the form of a nightmare of martyrdom and Eternal Damnation. Their attempts instead crush that fate (resulting in Jophiel being exiled and Ruin banished to the Box of Nightmares) and he leaves the clergy to pursue a normal life. He later admits that while the dream frightened him, all he could think of was Ruin's expression of sadness. He even vouches in Ruin's favor towards Dream, making a point that at the end of the day, it was his decision to take a different path and that Ruin shouldn't be punished for it.
  • Jophiel is a loyal servant to the Heavenly Host who winds up being banished to the mortal plane after failing to solidify the faith of a true believer. This has made him cynical and homesick, trying to stay uninvolved with the messy politics of other realms like the Dreaming and Faerie as his probation dictates, only to wind up involved anyway due to his association with Ruin and Heather. It's implied by the end that his "exile" was all a part of Heaven's plan to ensure that the right people were where they needed to be, and that the whole thing was a Secret Test of Character to see if he was willing to do the right thing of his own free will, a test he passed with flying colors.
  • Heather After is the transgendered descendant of Roderick Burgess and Ethel Cripps and apprentice to John Constantine. Even though she was from the "illegitimate" branch of the family, she is proven to be a talented sorceress with enough skill to summon angels and faeries, travel between realms and is able to intimidate Dream by reciting the incantation used to imprison Morpheus. While she tries avoiding getting herself into the same misadventures as other magicians, she decides to be involved anyway out of a moral obligation to do so.
• Deadly Scratch: Puck cuts Heather with the Vorpal Blade. While the wound is small, it's also cursed to never clot or heal, meaning it's a matter of time before Heather bleeds to death.
• Deal with the Devil: The Unseelie Court come to Nuala's aid when the Realm of Faerie starts devolving into chaos under her rule, resulting in a Crapsack World where the forest is dead and most of the fae there are either dead or imprisoned.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Not exactly "punch out," but Heather After threatens to imprison Dream with the same spell as her great-grandfather if he doesn't let Ruin and Ben have their happy ending.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Heather tries summoning a minor elemental to help find a backdoor into the Dreaming, only to summon an ornery Puck instead. He takes personal offense for being summoned, and after she sends him back, he later tracks her down and gives her a Wound That Will Not Heal, the magic of the curse attracting Unseelie fairies trying to eat her.
• Evil Counterpart Race: The Unseelie Court are characterized as a race of more monstrous tribes of The Fair Folk who saw an opportunity to take over the Faerie Realm's capital after Nuala overthrew Auberon and Titania. While all fairies are selfish and a little monstrous, the Unseelie are more visibly monstrous and the realm has fallen into a dying state under their charge.
• Eye of Providence: Two of the versions of Shakespeare Lindy encounters are based on conspiracies, one having a light-based triangular Eye of Providence on his forehead, the other having a pyramid with a single eye instead of a head.
• Fallen Angel: Jophiel was exiled from Heaven because he failed to recruit a dreamer to Heaven's side due to the intervention of Ruin. However, unlike a lot of other examples, Jophiel still retains his essential nature, i.e. helping innocents.
• The Fair Folk: The second story arc is about Heather After's deal with the former King Auberon in order to depose Queen Nuala from the throne of Faerie. It doesn't go well.
• Grail in the Garbage: While Robert Burgess's legitimate descendants argue over Ethel Cripp's stolen property, a young Heather (who is from an illegitimate branch of the family) only asks for what they presume was are worthless trinkets with sentimental value. Only a second too late do they realizes that the "worthless" property include the Amulet of Protection and one of her spellbooks.
• Guile Hero: Like her mentor John Constantine, Heather After is a magic user with a tendency to find herself in deep trouble, but is witty enough to get out of it just as easily.
• Hobbes Was Right: When Nuala tried an egalitarian approach to running the Faerie Kingdom, her hedonistic subjects devolved into backstabbing and hoarding resources, this being the opening the Unseelie Court took to take over.
• I Know Your True Name: Nuala dethroned Titania by saying her true name. When Heather After learns this, she doesn't worry and accepts the deal with Auberon. We learn why in issue #11, when the Unseelie attempt to control Heather by using the name on her birth certificate. Which is her deadname, so it doesn't work and results in the Unseelie who used it dying. Heather, in turn, says there's no such thing as a "true" name, only the one you make and names them all Lost.
• Ignored Epiphany: When Heather thinks that Faerie should do away with the monarchy entirely, Auberon and Titania can't help but bursting out laughing at the alternative. Even Nuala, who agrees with her on how flawed their system is, thinks it's ridiculous, preferring to argue over who gets the throne over addressing the real problem.
  Auberon: The sorceress would have us give the gnomes and harpies a vote!
  Titania: How very droll!
  Jophiel: You'll find no converts to anarchy here.
  Heather: I'm just trying to help!
  Jophiel: Have you seen these people? They're beyond help.
• Love at First Sight: Ruin when he first saw the Boy.
• Mordor: The Faerie Realm has devolved into a near-lifeless wasteland under Unseelie occupation.
• Mundane Utility: Heather After makes a living shooting livestream videos teaching her subscribers how to perform real magic spells.
• Necessarily Evil: Ruin suffers from an existential crisis from the moment he was created because he has a reluctance towards frightening others in spite that fear being his purpose. Dream elaborates that nightmares are created as Stealth Mentors that renew the dreamer's will to live in the waking world.
• Psychological Projection: Lindy realizes that everyone in the Stratford House is a projection of her own psyche. So none of them are the real Shakespeare.
• Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: The Unseelie try to use Heather After's "true name" to control her, but collapse in pain instead, because that's not her true name, that's her deadname. Heather declares triumphantly that there are no such things as "true names."
• To Be Lawful or Good: Being a loyal cherubim, Jophiel is reluctant to be involved in all of the interdimensional shenanigans Ruin and Heather drag him around, not wanting to make his exile from Heaven permanent. By the end his exile is rescinded after he helps restore order in Faerie and reunite Ruin with his first dreamer, implying the entire ordeal was a Secret Test of Character to see if he would do the "good" thing over the "lawful" thing.
• Trapped in Villainy: Nuala manages to dethrone Auboron and Titania using Titania's true name and takes the throne for herself after years of being taken for granted, hoping to take a more egalitarian approach and redistribute resources to less well-off subjects. Unfortunately, fairies are selfish and hedonistic by nature and the kingdom collapses. The Unseelie Court show up and agree to act as her enforcers to help curb the chaos, but they only acknowledge her as their queen if she agrees to their brand of cruelty out of fear of what they would do otherwise.

Tropes for Nightmare Country

• All for Nothing: At the end of The Glass House, Dream swoops in and puts an end to the Corinthian's manhunt for the Smiling Man. When he refuses, Dream sends him back to the nightmare shores with no memory of his adventures.
• Ambiguously Human: Mr. Agony and Mr. Ecstacy are a pair of Serial Killers who seem to have fixated on Flynn. They can recognize when someone is under someone else's protection like Teague, they recognize that the Corinthian is a nightmare and Dream remarks that they're either something more than human or have been trying to be more than human through arcane means. The fact that they work for Desire of the Endless muddies the waters further.
• Batman Gambit: Dream knew that the Corinthian would eventually be driven to try and kill without Flynn's permission and uses it as a Loophole Abuse so that he could step in and undo Teague and Azazel's machinations himself.
• Bondage Is Bad: Mr. Agony has a gimp mask fused to his face, obscuring his vision. It's eventually shown that he and Mr. Ecstasy were turned into their current state as more-than-human hitmen by a cult that engaged in extreme BDSM rituals.
• The Bus Came Back: The King of Pain makes his first appearance since "Three Septembers and a January", Thessaly summoning his restless spirit in the hopes of learning what greater power is behind everything that's happening.
• Deal with the Devil:
  • Mr. Teague makes a habit of seeking out people the supernatural are interested in so he can make bargains with them, and has a rogue angel trying to convince him he's a prophet.
  • The trope is repeatedly cited in regards to bargains made with Desire of the Endless. The King of Pain made a deal with Desire where he gets whatever he wants, but in exchange it just left him wanting more in a vicious cycle.
  • Azazel tries tempting the Corinthian into one with the promise of whatever he desires (cute young men, mostly) in exchange for switching sides. The Corinthian doesn't buy any of it.
• Eye Scream: It's a Corinthian-centered comic, so naturally he indulges in his habit of removing and eating eyes.
• Gay Conservative: Bill Teague, a gay billionaire heavily involved with the Republican party who thinks modern queers are "too soft."
• Greater-Scope Villain: In The Glass House, it's revealed that the whole thing was one of Desire's games to get the best of Dream. When Dream finds out, he takes this opportunity to come in and fix everything.
• Kid with the Leash: Once Dream gets involved he gives the Corinthian permission to track down the shade of his past self that Flynn sees, but appoints Flynn as his minder, forbidding him from killing unless she allows it.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Being a nightmare, it's no surprised that the Corinthian is one. He spends all his free time writing down memories of his past life's killings (in a book bound in human flesh, or rather the dream-stuff facsimile of human flesh) and he likes scrolling through the horror-section of Lucien's library.
• Slasher Smile: Mr. Ecstasy has hooks driven into the flesh of his face, forcing him into a permanent wide-eyed smile.
• Soul Fragment: It's revealed that Azazel had stolen a tiny fragment of Dream's power when he escaped his imprisonment and used it to create the nightclub as its Domain Holder. Dream simply takes it back and brings the club into the Dreaming, allowing it to continue existing as long as it stays out of both Hell and the Dreaming's politics.

Tropes for Dead Boy Detectives

• Our Ghosts Are Different: The boys meet a group of Thai ghosts, who are a lot more varied than Western ghosts like themselves.
• Ret-Canon: The series adapts the element from Edwin Paine's depiction in Doom Patrol (2019) of secretly being in love with Charles Rowland.

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