With Lucy W. today we abandon space and come back to Earth, where we meet one of the DC Golden Age superheroes, the Sandman. So far, the character had three live action appearances: in the first one, he was actually a villain in the Batman tv series, portrayed by Michael Rennie, a thief allied to Catwoman who used a special powder to put people to sleep and control them as sleepwalkers. In The Flash 1990s tv series, Sandman is named Nightshade and portrayed by Jason Bernard, but he retains his looks and his sleeping gas gun. A proper version of the character appears in Smallville: this time, the real deal Wesley Dodds is portrayed by Ken Lawson, and we meet him as a retired superhero who has a prophetic dream about the death of his former teammate Star-Spangled Kid, but before he can save him he’s slain by Icicle. In the comics, the character has quite a long history and a glorious past, despite his odd looks and skills. Let’s see together.
Wesley Dodds was born in Manhattan, New York City, around the 1910s. He was the son of the rich industrialist Edward Dodds and his wife Marina, but he lost his mother when he was still a child. When his father came back from World War I, he had his son accompany him in his many travels, especially in Asia. Between China, Japan and India, young Wesley learnt a variety of things, from origami to martial arts, and he came back to the United States only to attend college. Intrigued by 
literature and philosophy, brilliant Wes wanted to become a professional writer, but his father’s sudden demise forced him to take the reins of the family business, and he became a businessman just like Edward. He also served his duty as a naval pilot during the 1930s, but during this period something more serious started happening to him: he became suddenly haunted by extremely vivid, horrific dreams in which he witnessed several crimes, always with a lot of details. Dodds at first believed it to be just stress, but the cause was much weirder: Dream of the Endless had been imprisoned on Earth, and to balance his forced inactivity fragments of his soul (and powers) had been splintered among several living beings, Wesley Dodds included. It didn’t take much for Wesley to realize that the crimes he saw in his dreams actually took place not much time after, and he took this unexpected gift of prophecy very seriously. He built a laboratory underneath his estate, and he resumed his Oriental teachings by practicing martial arts again, and by using his knowledge of herbalism to synthesize a number of gasses of different uses, from sleeping ones to hypnotic ones. He then collected among his father’s tokens a World War I gas mask, provided himself with a gas gun, and created a masked identity to fight crime. From that moment, he started hunting down the criminals he saw in his dreams, knocking them out and leaving them with a poem enclosed in an origami, as a signature. The Sandman was born.
During one of his early exploits, as someone was controlling the robot Elektro to try and kidnap the British Royal Family, Sandman crossed paths with the Crimson Avenger, the world’s first masked hero: after a brief fight, the two realized the real enemy was the Phantom of the Fair, and joined forces to take him down. The Crimson Avenger gave the Sandman some useful tips, and helped him perfection his design for the gas gun. While the Sandman kept earning a victory after the other, stopping a series of foes like the brutal vigilante Scorpion, the poisoner Doctor Death and the serial killer Tarantula, also Wesley Dodds went on with his life, and he made the acquaintance of Dian 
Belmont, a wealthy socialite who was the first one to discover his dual identity. Albeit they never got married, Wes and Dian fell in love and stayed together for their entire life. In the following years, as World War II erupted, President Roosevelt called all the Mystery Men to help their country, and Sandman answered the call, becoming a founding member of both the Justice Society of America and the All-Star Squadron, participating to war actions across the ocean and stopping and exposing spies and foreign agents on American soil. The most bizarre adventure he had with the JSA involved a unique terrorist, Ian Karkull, a time-traveler who was targeting the men who would have become Presidents of the United States in the following fifty years. The Justice Society confronted the mad scientist and destroyed him, but upon dying Karkull released a huge amount of chrono-energy that affected all the heroes nearby, mutating their metabolism and having them age much slower than any normal human being. Back home, Wesley continued his activity as a vigilante, and took with him a sidekick, Sandy Hawkins, the orphaned nephew of Dian. With Sandy the Golden Boy by his side, Sandman knew a new, brighter time… until an accident mutated Sandy into an uncontrollable monster and forced Sandman to put him in a coma. Guilt-ridden, Wesley Dodds retired from action, dedicating his time to Dian and to find a cure for Sandy. But the dreams would have soon come back to call for him…
A brooding genius who walks between two worlds, Wesley Dodds is a brilliant philosopher and a poet, a skilled engineer and a resourceful inventor, an accomplished chemist and an infallible detective. As the Sandman, he has the gift and curse of prophetic dreams, erratic and cryptic visions that only his superior intellect can properly interpret; he also ages much slower than normal people, looking in his fifties while touching the nineties; his equipment includes an experimental silicoid gun, that can shoot sand in any known form, including glass and cement, a wirepoon gun, a modified Plymouth, and of course his trademark gas gun, that emits gasses of his own creation with a variety of effects, from simple sleeping gas to a “sleeptalking truth serum”, from one that inspires night terrors to one that puts an adult man into a permanent coma. A disciplined martial artist whose body is just as honed as his mind, Sandman inhabits both our world and Dreamworld, a citizen of two realities who walks daily on a dangerous border.
Who's Who 