Island Spirit # 4 (illustrated by Lukas Ketner)

In the last issue of Sandman, The Tempest, we see William Shakespeare writing the final play for Morpheus and the final play of his career.

He writes a speech in which Prospero recounts the imprisonment of Ariel.

“Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
by help of her more potent ministers
and in her most unmitigable rage,
into a cloven pine,
within which rift
imprisoned though didst painfully remain
a dozen years."

This imprisonment is similar to that of Morpheus at the hands of Roderick Burgess, more than 400 years later.

This Island Spirit appears in Sandman # 75, on page 17, in panel 1 and is reflected in the imagination of Shakespeare as he writes the play.

Lukas did a wonderful job with this portrait. There is definitely has a magical feel to the character captured by this portrait, which I really like. He certainly feels like a creature that would inhabit this island prison.