Ken

Next character we meet in The Sandman is another one of Rose‘s new housemates, and Barbie‘s boyfriend: Ken. Portrayed by Richard Fleeshman, Ken is quite the stereotype, and he admits it with irony. We see him during the Dream Vortex scene as he dreams about receiving a blowjob from a beautiful girl (who’s not Barbie) on a fleshy car Fast & Furious style… needless to say that being caught by your own girlfriend during such a dream doesn’t make miracles for your relationship. In the comics, he’s a secondary character, and there isn’t much more to him than what we saw in the series. Nevertheless, here we are.

Not much is known about Ken: he was a perfectly normal young man, who led a perfectly normal life, and as such he had perfectly normal ambitions, at least from his own point of view. One day he met Barbie, a girl who was just perfect for a man like him: the two of them liked each other, enjoyed each other’s company, and were more than happy to start a romantic relationship… even if apparently they didn’t give the same value to it. Ken and Barbie rented a room together in a big house in Cocoa, Florida, a place run by a cross dresser named Hal Carter, and already inhabited by a G.K. Chesterton lookalike named Gilbert and by a couple of spider-loving twins named Zelda and Chantal. The two of them were incredibly normal if compared to their housemates, and the fact that they were soon nicknamed The Stepford Yuppies didn’t come as a surprise. Both Ken and Barbie were pretty ironic about it themselves, though, and they often joked about the fact that they were the incarnation of the doll couple of the same name. Ken went along with all the other weird people in the house, and even accompanied Barbie to see Hal’s vaudeville shows, but he was quite different from the rest of the bunch… as it became apparent during the weirdest and craziest night of his entire life.

One night, as their new housemate Rose had just come back home after her search for her missing brother, Ken was having his usual dream about managing a mutual fund, become a rich man and access a world of power, wealth and sex he could only (as it was the case) dream of. Suddenly, his dream started fading, and he found himself with Barbie in a childish fantasy world, with talking animals and shiny flowers. Somehow, Ken knew it was Barbie’s dream, and somehow Barbie had seen his dreams as well. When they both woke up in their bed, Barbie was crying, and Ken was inexplicably angry: he started a fight with his girlfriend, telling her things he would have most surely regretted as soon as he calmed down. Bottom line was: both of them had peeked inside each other’s mind, and they knew that they were too different to keep things going. As it turned out, however, the breakup hurt Barbie much more than it did Ken: she truly believed in the relationship and wanted it to last, while Ken was in for the fun. In a matter of a few months, Ken had already found a new girlfriend, Sindie, who actually looked a lot like a younger version of Barbie. When Hal sold his house, Ken and his new girl left and moved together someplace else, the man always hellbent of following his dreams of wealth and glory.

Ken is a kind and well-mannered young man, who’s apparently in for all the weird stuff and unusual people his life with Barbie is full of, but he’s very different from her. More than a romantic future shared together or meaningful relationships, Ken’s ambitions are all about wealth, sex and power, shallow dreams for a shallow man who doesn’t belong to a land of enchanted beauty like the one within his girlfriend’s mind.