What Robert Venditti and Riley Rossmo’s Wesley Dodds: The Sandman lacks for in substance, it makes up in style. Which is not necessarily to say Sandman is not substantive, so much as that between Alan Scott: The Green Lantern and Jay Garrick: The Flash, Sandman has fewer new continuity wrinkles to iron out, and is in that way more of “just” a Golden Age Sandman story.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s been a little over 25 years(!) since Matt Wager and Steven Seagle’s Vertigo series Sandman Mystery Theatre ended, and only this past year that we finally saw the whole thing finally collected. While Rossmo and colorist Ivan Plascencia present something a little brighter and more animated than Guy Davis and David Hornung, Dodds certainly feels of a piece with its predecessor. I am certain that a new episodic mystery comic set in the 1940s is more than DC can handle without feeling like they have to “crossover it up” and so forth, but it’s nice to imagine, huh?

[Review contains spoilers]

Venditti’s Dodds isn’t a particularly good mystery; like an episode of Law and Order, indeed the character who isn’t a regular is the killer. That might be the only improvement I’d seek here; Venditti still manages to make it more than a superhero story, examining questions of lethal and nonlethal weaponry, violence and nonviolence, ahead of the United States' entry into World War II.

The tension, as always, is that Wesley is such a reserved character, his plan to defeat the Axis alliance with sleep gas almost naive, contrasted with the ghastly presence of his Sandman persona. It is not as though the Sandman is breaking arms or cracking heads (more than most) as it is, but through the story Wesley comes to find that even what he thought was a mitigation of his sleeping gas was too powerful, that perhaps the only way to be innocent is to hold no weapon at all. Not, indeed, that he gives up being the Sandman, but maybe we see the last page appearance of the Justice Society has a hedge against Wesley’s otherwise-dark path.

In Venditti’s plot being, in the main, somewhat flimsy, a lot of the book’s heavy lifting falls to Rossmo. From the first pages, Rossmo has command of this book — jagged panels setting the scene in a church, the figure outline of the Sandman containing a criminal’s terror, more jagged panels drawing the reader’s eye through a splash page depicting the horrors of war. I’m reminded of the superlative job Rossmo did five years ago on Martian Manhunter: Identity (a book that has not gotten the acclaim it deserved since that time); what sometimes seems absurdist art with impossible hairstyles is in fact exactly the art we need for Dick Tracy-esque tales like each of these.

To the question of to what extent, if any, Venditti’s Dodds coincides with Sandman Mystery Theatre, Wesley does mention having fought the Tarantula, villain of Theatre’s first arc. But equally here, Wesley’s partner and paramour Dian Belmont knows his identity, which came later in Theatre — which is to say, the two series are more tonally connected than they are connected by continuity. Moreover, Dodds ends with the introduction of Sandy Hawkins, Dian’s nephew and Wesley’s future sidekick, who was a fictional character within the story of Theatre. This further separates the books, even as — Batman-esque — the arrival of a young sidekick additionally suggests a way out of the uncertain doldroms in which Wesley ends this book.

Tim Sheridan’s Alan Scott retells the Green Lantern’s origin in line with his coming out; Jeremy Adams Jay Garrick seeks to (re)integrate daughter Judy “the Boom” Garrick into continuity. In comparison, again, Dodds is trying to do much less, though there is a welcome nod to the Sandman’s appearance in Knight Terrors, the way in which Dodds connects to current events. At the same time, there’s some weirdness here, like an image of Ruby Sokov, current “Red Lantern”; that’s a character in Geoff Johns' Justice Society of America and Jeff Lemire’s JSA, but Wesley, deceased in the present, hasn’t ever encountered her, unless this is a reference to forthcoming events I’m not aware of.

As with Alan Scott (maybe not as much Jay Garrick), I’d happily read more of Robert Venditti and Riley Rossmo’s Wesley Dodds: The Sandman. These assuredly suggest there’s a way to do stories set in the Golden Age with modern sensibilities; maybe not ongoing series, as at times I think past-set books like World’s Finest struggle for content month in and month out, but another miniseries, and for Dodds, a stronger mystery? Sure, why not?

[Includes original and variant covers]