All The Weird DC Comics Stuff Hiding In ‘The Sandman’

And because superheroes like to inter-marry like aristocrat families, Lyta’s dead husband Hector Hall is the son of the 1940s Hawkman and later became the 2000s Doctor Fate; in superhero comics, being dead is never an obstacle for career advancement. Who or what is a Doctor Fate, you ask? You’ll find out when both he and Hawkman appear alongside Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in this year’s Black Adam movie. 

Matt the Raven, voiced by Cracked’s friend Patton Oswalt, probably has the weirdest DC backstory of all: when he was human, his name was Matthew Cable and he was a supporting character in the long-running Swamp Thing series (and was played by someone who looks/sounds nothing like Oswalt in the recent live action adaptation). Matt started as a regular government agent but later went insane, gained the ability to alter reality, was possessed by his wife’s perverted dead uncle, and eventually killed himself to spare her any further horrors. So really, turning into the raven companion for the personification of the concept of dreaming isn’t even the weirdest thing that’s happened to this guy. 

Meanwhile, little Jed Walker was the sidekick of the 1970s incarnation of The Sandman, a superhero who protects children from nightmare monsters and once teamed up with Santa Claus. Because DC writers are allergic to keeping things simple, Jed was an alternate-reality version of a post-apocalyptic DC hero called Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. Jed’s aunt and abusive uncle are also originally from the ’70s Sandman series, which gets a shout out through the corny costume Jed wears in his dreams.