One of
DC Comics' first
superheroes, he was created by
Gardner F. Fox and
Bernard Christman and made his
debut in "
Adventure Comics" #40 in April of 1940.
Wesley Dodds was born
rich,
bookish, and
frightened of his stern and aloof
father. After his mother died, Wesley was sent to live abroad, mostly staying with people his dad did
business with -- mainly in the
Far East, where he learned
yoga and a number of
languages and
martial arts techniques.
He graduated from
Princeton with honors, but he began to have
bizarre nightmares about
criminals,
injustice, and an imprisoned man in a strange
helmet. Though Wesley didn't know it, the man was
Morpheus,
the Sandman himself, whose
imprisonment by
Roderick Burgess was causing
bizarre dreams and
sleep disorders worldwide. Fearing that his nightmares would drive him mad, Wesley took his dreams as
inspiration to start working against injustice and
crime.
He bought a number of
gas masks similar to Morpheus' helmet and developed a green
gas that functioned as both a
truth serum and a
sleep gas. Wearing the gas masks, a
trenchcoat, and a
fedora, and firing his sleep gas through a specially-designed
gas gun, Wesley became the Sandman in 1938 and began fighting crime in
New York City.
Wesley later met and fell in love with
Dian Belmont, the daughter of a district attorney. Dian discovered the Sandman's
secret identity and began assisting him on some of his cases. He later became a
founding member of the
Justice Society of America (and started wearing more
stereotypically superheroish costumes, which I never ever liked -- that original
retro gas-mask-and-fedora look was
cool) and even acquired a
sidekick --
Sandy Hawkins, who was known as
Sandy, the Golden Boy. Sandy eventually became the
ward of Dian Belmont, and since Dian and Wesley had been
shacking up together long enough to become common-law husband and wife, Sandy became the equivalent of Wesley's son.
The Sandman later joined the
All-Star Squadron, but began to curtail his superheroing activities after suffering a
heart attack. Sandy was also gravely
injured when a "
silicon gun" he was working on
exploded and
mutated him into a
giant sand monster. Wesley placed Sandy into a state of
suspended animation and worked for nearly fifty years trying to cure him. During this time, Wesley was also using his
fortune to better
society, and Dian became a best-selling
author, even winning the
Nobel Prize for Literature.
Sandy was eventually captured and cured, completely by
accident, by a
supervillain -- since he hadn't
aged in the time that he'd been
transformed, he is still in his early-to-mid-twenties. He has become a
silicon-based life form and adventures under the codename of
Sand with the current incarnation of the
JSA. Wesley, however, had suffered a
stroke and finally
retired from
crimefighting. However,
retirements in
comic books are never completely permanent, and the Sandman was cast, along with the rest of the old Justice Society, into an
alternate reality, where they had to
battle the
Norse gods for
two whole years! After they got out of that, Wesley immediately had another
stroke, and after that, he was aged to over 80 years old by the villain
Extant in DC's
Zero Hour crossover.
After Dian died, Wesley was
stalked and
attacked by a
supernatural menace called the
Dark Lord. Fearing that the Dark Lord wanted to use him to gain more
power, Wesley threw himself off a cliff and died. Not that
death in comics is in any way permanent, as he has made a couple of revivals since then.
Research from http://www.comicboards.com/dcguide/Who/Sandman1_Bio.htm