When Does "The Sandman" #1 (1988) Take Place?
"The Sandman" #1 "Sleep of the Just" is a horror fantasy comic-book written by Neil Gaiman and released November 29th, 1988.
It takes place on the fictional DC Comics Universe timeline in the years:
We know this because the very first panel of the very first page includes a textbox that reads “June 6th, 1916”. Another textbox a quarter of the way through the issue reads “June 1920. The Great War two years in the past…” and much later “1968” and “1982” so we know the narrative starts in 1916 AD and continues through the 20th Century.
1916 AD - 1988 AD
We know this because the very first panel of the very first page includes a textbox that reads “June 6th, 1916”. Another textbox a quarter of the way through the issue reads “June 1920. The Great War two years in the past…” and much later “1968” and “1982” so we know the narrative starts in 1916 AD and continues through the 20th Century.
Other sequential dates are included but the final one tells us it is finally “1988”. Then, when Dream makes reference to the events of the issue, he says, “three score years and ten. A human LIFETIME.” A “score” is an outdated way to refer to 20 years.
20 x 3 = 60 + 10 = 70.
So we know the story takes place over roughly 70 years.
1916 + 70 = 1986.
As hard as it is to imagine an immortal god-like Lord of Dreams being wrong, the non-diegetic omniscient information of the textbox should be taken over dialogue. The 1988 AD end date stands.
This comic-book was retroactively collected into a volume 1 subtitled "Preludes & Nocturnes".
It is a chronologically midway comic in the DC Comics Universe multiverse timeline and can be read first in a reading of The Sandman mythos, after the early prequel novella "The Sandman: The Dream Hunters" (1999), or after the late prequel comic-book mini-series "The Sandman: Overture" #1-#6 (2013-2015).
It was adapted to television in 2022.
