DC's Sandman Inherited A Noble Flaw Identical To A Founding Avenger

Spinning out of the momentum of his recent appearance in Knight Terror, the Wesley Dodds: The Sandman comic series has become an unexpected star of DC Comics’ Golden Age line of comics. The series has already made a great effort to give the noir-inspired superhero a variety of new characteristics to make him stand out from the rest of the original Justice Society.

The most interesting of these has factored directly into his core gimmick, the sleep gun, and how such a device paints his entire modus operandi as an ethical superhero who wants to win fights without fighting. The first two issues have already shown the pros and cons of Sandman’s ethical mission. However, the more that’s expanded, the more this Golden Age hero’s journey mimics the story of a certain Avenger.

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Sandman Doesn’t Want to Fight Fire With Fire

While most typical superheroes within DC Comics are perfectly fine beating up criminals to pursue justice, Sandman fights crime much more reluctantly as he wishes for a more pacifist solution to ending fights. This morel direction was masterfully crafted around his original gimmick, the sleep gun, with writer Robert Venditti using the non-lethal weapon as a representation of Sandman’s newly-founded belief that excessive violence was abhorrent when another solution was possible.

While both Wesley Dodds: The Sandman #1 and #2 (by Robert Venditti, Riley Rossmo, Ivan Plascenia, and Tom Napolitano) have shown that Sandman is still willing to get his hands dirty if necessary, Sandman’s true goal throughout the early issues is to revolutionize crime fighting so that violent confrontations are no longer necessary. The narrative sees Sandman desperately trying to revolutionize the sleeping gas he uses so that he can not only pacify criminals without doing them harm but also have this gas used for the US Army as an alternative to fighting wars through lethal means.

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Sandman’s Ideals are Noble But Flawed

From a moral standpoint, Sandman should be commended for his attempts to try and make a less violent solution to crime, as it has long been the critique of many that characters like Batman only embolden crime thanks to his excessively violent form of crime fighting. Sandman’s ambitious ideas are akin to Superman’s in terms of their ethical and optimistic natures; but while this may be the case, their practicality is another matter. This issue was directly brought up in Wesley Dodds: The Sandman #1 when Sandman –under the guise of his alter ego Wesley Dodds– attempted to pitch his sleep gun for military use to one Colonel Breckinridge.

Despite the potential lives the device could save, Colonel Breckinridge explained that from a logistical standpoint, the weapon simply wasn’t viable. If an entire platoon of enemy soldiers were knocked out, where would they be detained? If a quick split-second decision had to be made how would slow-moving gas hold up against a bullet? Questions like these were asked by the Colonel, and while a very intelligent man, Wesley was incapable of coming up with an answer. In an interesting parallel, this song-and-dance of envisioning a more peaceful method of ending crime and warfare yet having to resort to violence is the exact same story arc that one of the founding Avengers underwent.

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EMH’s Ant-Man Had A Similar Moral Crisis Over Superheroing

During the events of the beloved Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes series, Hank Pym, known better as Ant-Man, also wanted to revolutionize how superheroes went about dispensing justice. While many other superheroes would end their relationship with supervillains after they’re arrested, Ant-Man tried to take things to the next step by creating an ethical rehabilitation center for the villains arrested by S.H.I.E.L.D known as the ‘Big House’. The ironic twist of the Big House is that, despite its name, it was actually incredibly small, with the inmates of the rehabilitation center being shrunk down until they had served their sentence.

Throughout Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Ant-Man prioritized new pacifist means of helping others as opposed to the other Avengers who had very little moral qualms around fighting those that put innocents in danger. Ant-Man’s morel conviction to be a superhero that doesn’t use extreme violence to solve situations was so strong that he went as far as quitting the team during the series’ seventeenth episode after he gravely wounded the villain King Cobra after said villain hurt his lover Wasp. This unique morel compass of Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’ Ant-Man is directly paralleled through Sandman’s similar desire to forgo the violent tendencies of his Justice Society teammates and try to find new ways to be a hero. However, both also undergo a similar crisis when their good deeds lead to disaster.

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Sandman and Ant-Man Created Their Worst Nightmares

In a cruel case of irony, despite their pacifist intentions, both Ant-Man and Sandman’s scientific pursuits lead them down the tragic path of creating the very things they deplore. In Ant-Man’s case, he attempted to create the artificial intelligence known as Ultron designed to help the inmates of the Big House and pursue the superhero’s ideals of saving others. Unfortunately, through a twisted form of logic, this AI developed the notion that the best way to maintain peace was to commit mass genocide on the human race. Thus, Ultron, who was designed to promote Ant-Man’s ideology of pacifism and helping others became the warped antithesis of everything the superhero stood for.

Now, as was revealed in Wesley Dodds: The Sandman #2, Sandman has also created his own bane thanks to his early experiments with his sleep gun. The comic revealed that before he was able to perfect the nonlethal sleeping gas produced by his gadget, he discovered a horrifying variant that could melt the flesh off someone’s very body. Sandman stoutly discarded the concoction and kept the formula for its creation hidden, so it may never be used by anyone. However, a masked intruder was able to learn about the formula’s existence and stole it to create their own hyper-lethal weapon, taking on the supervillain moniker of ‘The Fog’.

The Fog had taken on the visage of a dark doppelgänger of Sandman and now, thanks to the newly acquired gas formula, he has begun to commit ghoulish and untraceable murders. Sandman, in an almost identical circumstance to Ant-Man, now has to grapple with the fact that his scientific formulas that were meant to be the end of violent warfare have now become the key murder weapon for a serial killer. No doubt this will cause the Golden Age superhero no shortage of guilt and likely bring him to a breaking point. However, this situation gives Sandman the opportunity to become an even greater hero than Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’ rendition of Sandman.

Sandman Could Improve On Ant-Man’s Failings – Or Fail Just As Bad

This dichotomy between the two heroes shows that their journey to bettering the world will come with great setbacks. Unfortunately for the case of Hank Pym in Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, these failings became too much to bear, eventually causing the once passive hero to adopt the more violent ‘Yellowjacket’ moniker in the forty-fourth episode of the series. As Yellowjacket, Hank was far more willing to harm others to get the job done, in fact, he almost took a near sadistic glee in showing how more outwardly aggressive he was as Yellowjacket compared to his tenure as Ant-Man.

It was evident that Hank was a broken man, with his depiction as Yellowjacket clearly depicting him as unstable and filled with self-loathing. But while Hank Pym tragically abandoned his lifelong pursuit, Sandman still has a chance to push past adversity and see his dream of a more peaceful world become a reality. The introduction of The Fog will cause Sandman to reflect upon his naivety, however, it does not mean he has to give up his mission as a result.

Recognizing the faults in the plan he initially proposed to Colonel Breckinridge could lead him to become a far more intuitive hero, one who, while aware of humanity’s unfortunate predisposition to harm one another, can make a more informed effort to help others as a superhero. But, it is just as likely that The Fog could be the first in a long line of grievances that could see Wesley Dodds fail in his crusade and end up the same as Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’ Yellowjacket. As Wesley Dodds: The Sandman continues, these questions will slowly begin to answer themselves in what is shaping up to be an enthralling comic story.