As we recounted in passing last time, the arrival of creator Joe Simon and Jack Kirby to the Sandman strip that had been running in the back pages of ADVENTURE COMICS swiftly turned it into a popular feature once again. The stories were much improved, with a thematic thread of dreams running through them all, connecting the character to the mythological Sandman said to make people sleep. And the artwork was light years ahead of anything else in the comic, more frenetic and captivating and explosive. However, World War II intervened and forced both Simon and Kirby to stop work on the series. They stockpiled a bunch of material before they went into the service, but thereafter, other hands carried on in emulation of their style.
All of this was effort expended in vain. By the end of 1945, with the conflict over, the public’s taste for super hero stories was dwindling, and other genres were becoming more ascendant in the field. Humor was one of them. And so, it was decided to reshuffle the contents of MORE FUN COMICS, making it into a thorough humor comic and shifting a few of the more popular adventure strips, notably Superboy, over to the pages of ADVENTURE COMICS. This happened with the 103rd issue, and it displaced the Sandman, sending him into comic book limbo for decades,
The author of this final Sandman story is at present lost to time, but the artwork was produced by a young Gil Kane inked by Marvin Stein. The pair do their best to capture the flavor of Simon & Kirby’s work, but you can perhaps see the impact of the DC editors on their layouts: panels are rectilinear and the figures remain confined by their boundaries in a way that the S & K Sandman pages were not.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
I’m probably in a very small minority but I prefer Sandman having an actual costume rather than the pulp look, pulp being a genre I just could never get into. Sandy I could do without, mostly because it always hurt my brain that Bucky and Sandy used their given names in costume and no one made the connection.
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I believe that the Shield’s sidekick, “Dusty the Boy Detective” did the same.
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And yet Sandy and Dusty is much better that Tim ( Black Terror’s kid sidekick ) or Tim ( Captain Wonder’s kid sidekick ). Plus in Sandy’s case they might have assumed he as called Sandy because of Sandman and not his real name ( Whether Sandy’s classmates would have been fooled if they read a newspaper or magazine ( the Time magazine kind ) that Sandman might have appeared in ).
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Superman also hung out with a Tim, in the Superman-Tim Club clothes-store newsletter/comics. It was a good name to have if you were a superhero fan in the forties! 🙂
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“I am an enchanter. There are some who call me Tim.”
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Here’s another reason Batman was just cooler than other non-powered heroes. If you’re going to put your life on the line fighting crooks who likely will do anything to hurt you to escape, it might make more sense to dress up as a dark, mysterious “creature of the night”. I always thought this Sandman made even less sense. Purple & yellow looks silly to me, as most superhero costumes often do, honestly. Purple & black, like the bruises Sandman might inflict, maybe less so. Ask the Baltimore Ravens.
Readership may have leaned heavier towards a younger audience. But in his “All-Star Squadron” appearances when I was 11 & 12 yrs old, it was a bit of an eye sore to me. The suit and gas mask made him look a little out of place with his JSA colleagues (except goofball Johnny Thunder), but the mask also gave his look more of an edge.
If this was on the stands today, I’d skip it. Unless you got an amazing creative team, but I doubt they’d keep the costume shown here. I remember Starman Will Peyton’s purple & yellow. Plus his late 1980’s mullet, he looked awful. I might’ve stuck it out longer out of respect for Roger Stern. But the art on that series, by multiple people over the course of its publication, seemed mismatched with the character. RIP & no disrespect to those professionals who are deceased.
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Some of these “last stories” you’ve run have shown signs that the strip was played out, and limping towards their conclusion. But I enjoyed this quite a bit. Kane’s action isn’t quite as wild as Simon & Kirby’s (or his own later work!), but it’s still pretty kinetic and exciting. I really like it when the heroes aren’t just beating up bad guys, but also working to make positive changes in their city. That bit on page 5, where the guy signs the petition by holding it up to Sandman’s back — that’s a funny and charming little visual flourish. I wonder if it was called out in the script, or something Kane came up with?
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It was probably a learning experience for Kane, imitating Kirby for a while.
But that story’s a lox — “Hey, I was going to use this grenade on this small fellow in our office here!” Yeah, that’s quite a plan, mister.
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By the time this story was being done Kane was probably just back from WWII service with the USAAF in the South Pacific.
Kane showed a facility for doing a Kirby style. had martin Stein worked very much with Kirby by this time?
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