User:Marcus Brute/More Than Rubies

Note: The small italic text on "The Sound of Her Wings" could either be kept in the article or moved to a seperate one.

"More Than Rubies" is the first story arc of The Sandman, appearing in issues #1-#7. It is written by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III, colored by Robbie Busch, lettered by Todd Klein and published by DC Comics.

The story arc is followed up by an epilogue, "The Sound of Her Wings," in issue #8.

Synopsis
In 1916, Dream is captured and encased in a glass globe in a failed attempt by a fictional Edwardian magician (very much in the vein of Aleister Crowley) named Roderick Burgess to bind Death and attain immortality. Dream bides his time for decades until Burgess dies. Afterwards, his son Alexander becomes Dream’s new captor. Finally, in 1988, Alex's guards grow careless and the guards watching him fall asleep in his presence, allowing Dream to use the sand from their dream to his benefit. When the guards awake and break the seal Dream was in, he is then able to escape. Dream punishes Alex by cursing him to experience an unending series of nightmares. Morpheus, still very weak after his captivity, is forced to make the journey to his realm via the dreamscape.

The rest of the story concerns Dream's quest to recover his totems of power, which were dispersed following his capture: a pouch of sand, a helm and a ruby. The pouch is being kept by a former girlfriend of John Constantine's (Constantine is a character from Alan Moore's series, Swamp Thing). Once that is recovered, Dream travels to hell, where he is guided by the demon Etrigan past a cage of torture, where he meets an old face of someone he loves but has not yet forgiven for their past sins. Upon meeting Lucifer, a sharp dressed man in all white but deep dark black wings and whose shadow reveals a huge beast, Lucifer (an enmity that will have major repercussions later in the series) Dream discusses that one of the demons in Hell have his Helm, a gas-mask looking helmet that a trickster demon is currently in possession of, and offers to give it back to him if he accepts a challenge. Not strong enough to fight yet, Dream accepts to a different kind of challenge, one along the lines of Rock, Paper, Scissors, if to be played by demons. The object of the game is to choose what is strongest, like Paper beating to Rock. The demon chooses a wolf, Dream chooses a horse-mounted hunter. Horsefly stinging the horse, knocking the hunter off. Spider eating the fly. Snake eating the spider. Ox crushing the snake. Anthrax killing ox. A world, naturally nurturing. A nova destroying the world. The Universe, "life-embracing, all encompassing". Anti-life, the "dark at the end of everything, the end of the Universe, gods, worlds...of everything". In the end, Dream calls for hope, and the demon cannot beat it. Lastly, the ruby is in the possession of John Dee, a.k.a. Doctor Destiny, a supervillain from the Justice League of America series. He has warped and corrupted the ruby, rendering Dream unable to use it, and with it he nearly tears apart the Dreaming. However, thinking that it will kill Dream, Dee shatters the ruby, inadvertently releasing the power that Dream had stored in the ruby and restoring Dream to his full power.

"The Sound of Her Wings"
''Issue #8, "The Sound of Her Wings," acts as an epilogue to "More Than Rubies." This issue introduces Dream's older sister Death. She is depicted as an attractive, down-to-earth young goth girl, very unlike the traditional personification of death, and spends the issue talking Dream out of his brief post-quest depression.''

Collected editions
"More Than Rubies," as well as "The Sound of Her Wings," is reprinted in the trade paperbacks The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes (ISBN 1-56389-011-9) and The Absolute Sandman, Vol. 1 (ISBN 978-1401210823)