Profile: Dian Belmont

Dian Belmont
First appearance: Adventure Comics #47, February 1940
Creators: Gardner Fox, Ogden Whitney

History: Dian was a girlfriend to Golden Age Sandman Wesley Dodds (who to me is the only true Sandman character in the DCU, and NOT the one concocted by the disgraced Neil Gaiman, which was supposedly based on Greek mythology's Morpheus). She was portrayed as a socialite and freelance investigator, the daughter of a district attorney named Lawrence Belmont, but Dian vanished from the Sandman strip after about a year. Sandy Hawkins, later established as a nephew of hers, replaced her in the strip, and IIRC, was created by Mort Weisinger, though Jack Kirby and Joe Simon took over the writing for the remainder of its run. (And during their run, the concept of Wesley using sleeping gas pistols was curiously abandoned in favor of grappling hook tools.)

Was subjected to the following act of discrimination: in All-Star Squadron, written mainly by Roy Thomas, it was established in the 18th issue that Dian was murdered by National Socialist agents while wearing a Sandman disguise during WW2, and they mistook her for Wesley.

What's wrong with how this was done? Fortunately, little, since it was self-contained, not written in gruesome shock tactic terms like much of what came down the pike in the early 2000s, and Thomas was a talented writer who did have a good enough idea how to handle such a storyline in a way that could be used to provide Sandy with some motivation.

Was there anything good to come out of this? The aforementioned motivation provided for Sandy the Golden Boy, which was handled organically enough back in the Bronze Age when they did it. However, much as I'd like to think the later Sandman Mystery Theater series from the mid-1990s Vertigo imprint was a great way to rework her background in a tale that might've been an alternate continuity, I will decidedly recommend avoiding that series altogether, because it appears to have some connections to Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, and based on what was discovered about him and even his writings, that's why, if Sandman Mystery Theater drew inspiration from Gaiman's atrocity, it's best forgotten.