Welcome, Uncle Monday of the Brotherhood of the Teeth, to the otherworldly domain of Mistress Erzulie Fréda Dahomey, our fair and flirtatious deity of love and glamor….
The second book in the new Sandman Universe started this week, full of magic, deities, and dreams, like any good Sandman book should. This one also has voodoo, which I didn’t know I wanted till I read it. See below for the review of House of Whispers #1.
You might want to brush up on your mythology before reading it, or you can do what I did and read the story first and then do some research; if it’s one thing this issue is good at, it’s making you want to learn more about voodoo (Vodou), beyond the TV stereotypes of candles, chicken bones, and beads.
The wikipedia pages are pretty comprehensive, though I’m sure there’s books out there that are a little better researched. But for a way, way too short explanation: the loa are the spirits of voodoo, and they’re not gods, they’re almost angels, intermediaries between mortals and a supreme creator. They’re not worshipped, they’re served. Within the loa are families that divide the spirits into groups representing different places, personalities, and aspects (like spirits of love, war, or death.)
You can see there’s a lot of the loa in Neil Gaiman’s Endless (though he’s a master of so many schools of stories, it’d be hard to find a mythology that didn’t inspire him) so it’s really fun to read about these new voodoo characters, equal parts ancient and modern, and speculate about how they could interact with the Endless (which hasn’t happened yet, but I sure hope it does.)
Take Erzulie Fréda Dahomey, for instance. As the spirit of (quoting wikipedia) love, beauty, jewelry, dancing, luxury, and flowers, I’d love to see how she interacts with Dream’s sister/brother Desire. So far we’ve seen her as a flirty, sensual, generous woman, the kinder and wiser side of love. According to mythology she can also be spoiled, impatient, obsessive, sulky, and vindictive, the less pretty side of love. Dream’s sibling Desire has been all those things, and more, so I’m wondering if Erzulie is an aspect of Desire, or if they work together sometimes. Or (and this would be fun) if they jealously hoard worshippers and plot against each other if they think they can get away with it.
But the story isn’t just about Louisiana and Haitian Voodoo, because one of Erzulie’s nephews is Shakpana, an African god of smallpox and insanity and, in his spare time, rumors. In Sandman Universe #1, Latoya’s new girlfriend Maggie found a strange book, and she’s letting Latoya’s sisters Habibi and Lumi read it. Turns out it’s Shakpana’s journal, and the book plus the gossip the sisters are discussing via smartphone are going to come back and bite them.
The art in the book is fantastic; lush is the best word, full of decadent parties and music and costumes and food, and of course the sleeping dreamers that wander into Erzulie’s world. (Which is our connection to Dream of the Endless, and Shakpana’s book should only exist in Dream’s Library of Books That Were Never Written, and the Librarian’s slowly losing his mind, so that’s another connection.)
The colors are gorgeous and the costumes are beautiful. I thought the expressions on people were very meticulously done in the beginning and end of the issue, and got slightly more sketched and stylized towards the middle, though with all the amazing details it must have been almost impossible to get a book like this drawn before deadline. There are at least a hundred different people seen in the book, each distinct and separately drawn even if they only showed up for one panel. I love that kind of detail.
My favorite panel, our first view of the party, wasn’t in the available preview images that I can share, and I’m sure that was deliberate; that double page spread is worth half the price of the book all by itself.
(It probably goes without saying, but I got all the voodoo knowledge above from a half hour of clicking links on wikipedia, so if I’ve massively mixed anything up, please let me know in the comments.)
