[Werthead]

I recently set out to reread the collection, one per week, for my blog.

First off, I decided on a bit of context-setting by checking out The Sandman Companion (which is a bit of a misleading title: The Author Interviews Neil Gaiman for 200 Pages may be more accurate).

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Back in the pre-Internet days, it wasn't uncommon to see 'companion' books to television series, movies, sometimes series of novels, taking up space in bookstores, providing episode guides or character biographies or A-Z guides. Since the advent of the Internet these books have been gradually disappearing. Why go and spend £7 on a book about, say, Lost when you can look up the same information online for free, and discuss it with other fans? To stay in the game companion books need to deliver far more original, exclusive information that cannot be found elsewhere, and The Sandman Companion is a splendid example of this.

The Sandman Companion consists of plot summaries of the ten graphic novel collections that make up The Sandman series, as you may expect. However, the meat of the book is an extraordinarily long interview between the author, Hy Bender, and Neil Gaiman. Divided between the ten collections and several shorter chapters on characters, the origins of the series and so on, this interview delves deep into each story, examining the motifs, themes and imagery that Gaiman wanted to explore, investigating what worked and what didn't. Gaiman goes into particular detail on the classic story A Midsummer Night's Dream, going through the issue line-by-line and panel-by-panel to show what he was try to accomplish with this one particular story. It's a fascinating read and an invaluable resource to have at your side when you next reread the series.

The book also features interviews with the artists that worked on the series (including several with iconic cover designer Dave McKean), as well as letterer Todd Klein and editor Karen Berger. Several other SF&F luminaries also chip in, such as Alan Moore, Gene Wolfe, Harlan Ellison, Samual R. Delaney and others, all offering opinions on why the series works and what has made it such an enduring classic of modern speculative fiction.

The Sandman Companion (****), originally published in 2000, is an invaluable resource for fans of the series and features the most extensive look yet into the minds of one of our best modern SF&F authors. It is available from Titan Books in the UK and from Vertigo in the USA.

I then followed up on that with the first collection, Preludes and Nocturnes:

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If Watchmen is the greatest graphic novel of all time, then a serious case can be made for Neil Gaiman's The Sandman to be the greatest on-going comics series of all time. Running from 1988 to 1996, the series incorporated some 76 issues, collected as ten graphic novels (and more recently, four large-format prestige collections). Although an ongoing series, it was bound together by a long-running story arc that spanned its entire length, and told the story of Morpheus or Dream, one of the seven Endless who are manifestations of universal concepts (the others are Death, Delirium, Desire, Despair, Destiny and Destruction). Preludes and Nocturnes is the first part of the Sandman saga, collecting together the first eight issues of the series.

In 1916, an English sorcerer named Roderick Burgess attempts to capture and constrain Death, so that all humans will become immortal. The spell goes awry, and instead he captures Death's younger brother, Dream. Dream refuses to help Burgess with his quest for immortality and is left imprisoned in a magic circle in the cellar beneath Burgess' home. The absence of Dream is soon felt, as thousands of people across the world slip into a 'sleeping sickness' and cannot wake up. One of these people, a young woman named Unity Kincaid, is even raped and bears a child without ever waking up. Years and then decades pass. Roderick dies of old age and his son Alex takes over as Dream's captor. Finally, in September 1989, Alex accidentally breaks the circle (by driving his wheelchair over it) and Dream is freed. After visiting an original form of vengeance upon his captor, Dream sets about reclaiming the 'tools' of his profession and restoring his realm, the Dreaming, to its former glory.

Preludes and Nocturnes opens the Sandman saga in style, introducing the titular character (who is unusually front-and-centre for the duration of the story: many Sandman stories are notable for not featuring him prominently) and the world he lives in. Gaiman weaves an interesting story here. The Sandman's quest to find his pouch of sand, his gemstone and his helmet is a traditional mythic device, as is the descent into Hell to confront Lucifer to find one of the missing artefacts (this in turn sets up the very end of the series, with Lucifer's vow that, "One day I shall destroy him," setting up future events). At the same time there's a lot of other things going on. Established DC Comics villain Dr. Dee abusing the Sandman's powers to torment a diner full of innocent people is one of the more disturbing things you're going to see in a comic. The story ends with a triumphant Sandman driven strangely morose by his success, and unable to think of something else to do, he goes to feed the pigeons in Greenwich Village, where he meets with his sister Death, probably the most popular character in the series. The collection ends on an upbeat note, as the Sandman begins the task of restoring his realm and his life.

Preludes and Nocturnes is a great story. It's clearly early days for Gaiman and the story creaks a bit in places. It's also rather more obvious than the later, more subtle collections, and the desire for a somewhat plot-driven narrative to hook in the readers means that a lot of the more reflective moments from the later collections are missing. At the same time, revisiting the collection reveals a host of details that crop up again later on, such as an early glimpse of Merv driving a bus (he doesn't reappear until The Kindly Ones, the penultimate collection) and the introduction of Nada, Dream's former lover whom he condemned to Hell for reasons that will later be revealed. The book also wears its influences a bit more obviously than later stories: The Devil Rides Out and the works of Alastair Crowley inform the Burgess sequences, whilst the gates of the Dreaming (the Gates of Horn and Ivory) are straight out of Homer and Virgil. Gaiman's use of established DC characters such as John Constantine and Dr. Dee was also an obvious strategy to attract other DC readers, but for those unfamiliar with the DC Universe, their appearance and the assumption of familiarity is a bit jarring.

Preludes and Nocturnes (***½) is an intruging opening to the series, ranging from mythology to the occult to superheroes (and villains) and back again, taking in multiple times, worlds and characters. It is a powerful work of the imagination, but in places feels constrained by being part of the DC Universe and has a few rough edges, the result of a writer near the start of his career but already showing great promise. The collection is available from Titan in the UK and from Vertigo in the USA. The collection also forms part of The Absolute Sandman, Volume I, which is a handsome leather-bound edition of the first 20 issues of the comics series and comes complete with extra material. This edition is available from Vertigo in the UK and USA.

[temp]

I don't generally like/read comics...but I was determined to give it a try, so I researched around to find out "what is good"...and was referred to sandman. I got the first few collections (starting with preludes...)

It was "just okay" to me, but I think I say that more because comics just aren't my thing as opposed to the sandman itself...

[amphibian]

temp;366094 said:

I don't generally like/read comics...but I was determined to give it a try, so I researched around to find out "what is good"...and was referred to sandman. I got the first few collections (starting with preludes...)

It was "just okay" to me, but I think I say that more because comics just aren't my thing as opposed to the sandman itself...

Like many series, the Sandman takes a little bit to find its voice. The entire run from Seasons of Mists to The Wake are among the finest works I've ever read. The stuff that comes before that 70s Stones-like run is of lesser quality, but things that happen there continually influence the subsequent events.

The Endless Nights and The Dream Hunters are very, very good too.

[sewer.rat]

The Sandman as a whole is a definitive work. It was of course, the only comic book to win a World Fantasy Award which may or may not place it as a definitive piece of literature as well. What I think it did was recognize that skilled writers of fiction existed in the comic book world. Real writers were writing stories that weren't sold in bookstores, that were relevant to current topics and actually had something meaningful to say.

Comic books readers had known this for years, it just took something like Sandman to help others to recognize this as well. Whether it did any good or not, I'm not sure. We've suffered through a couple decades of badly interpreted comic book movies and television shows. It's only these last few years that comic book adaptations are getting away from focusing on the tights and capes and more on what exactly the writers were trying to say. 'The Crow' was the first step, I think. Afterwhich, I think we had to wait for 'Batman Returns' and 'The Dark Knight'. The TV show, 'Heroes' is trying really hard to change people's perceptions of super powers and the stories of those that have them. Hopefully, 'The Watchmen' will be the next step in bringing to the screen story driven comic book movies.

[stone monkey]

My problem with Sandman is that I bought each and every issue of it back in the late 80s/early 90s. And I find it terribly dated now. Graphic storytelling has moved on in a fairly big way. That's not to say it wasn't terribly influential and groundbreaking back in the day; it's just that the only level on which that I think it can be approached nowadays is as some sort of historical artifact.

I also find it a bit... adolescent; on rereading it, I find that the whole thing seems to be trying just that bit too hard to represent itself as being clever and meaningful. In places it has a variety of cod portentiousness about it that may have struck me as interesting and cool back when I was a teeneager but now seems just a little bit laughable.

[Werthead]

Onto the second collection, The Doll's House.

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The second Sandman collection picks up from the last one, with the Sandman continuing the process of restoring the Dreaming to its proper state, and also introduces a whole slew of new characters and storylines that will continue to resonate within the series until its very end.

Rose Walker and her mother travel from the USA to the UK to mee an unknown benefactor who has paid for their trip. The benefactor turns out to be Unity Kincaid, a victim of the sleeping sickness that swept across the world between 1916 and 1989, whilst Morpheus was imprisoned by Burgess. Whilst she was sleeping, Unity was raped by an unknown assailant, and had a baby, who turns out to be Rose's mother. Rose and her mother are stunned by this revelation, but Rose also takes advantage of the financial largesse of her very wealthy grandmother to undertake a search for her brother Jed, who disappeared several years ago.

At the same time, Morpheus has detected the forming of a 'vortex', a dangerous focii of dream-energy that could disrupt the dreams of the entire human race and kill them. Before he can shut down the vortex, which takes the form of a person, he decides to use it as bait to lure out several inhabitants of the Dreaming who fled to the waking world during his imprisonment, such as the thoroughly amoral Brute and Glob, the personified dream-place Fiddler's Green and the Corinthian, created by Morpheus to be the 'ultimate nightmare'. This results in Rose and her family being placed in extreme jeopardy.

Several other stories are also wrapped around this one: we learn why the Sandman's former lover, Nada, was glimpsed in Hell in the opening volume. We learn that his younger brother/sister Desire is plotting something behind his back. We also meet arguably the Sandman's only true human friend, Hob Gadling, from whom the touch of Death was lifted in 1389, making him immortal. Once a century Hob and Dream meet at the same pub and compare notes on how their lives have unfolded over the past century. This story, Men of Good Fortune, is a stunning piece of work and one of the seminal chapters of The Sandman (alongside the likes of The Sound of Her Wings from the first collection and the forthcoming Midsummer Night's Dream, Three Septembers and a January, The Dream of a Thousand Cats and Ramadan). It also introduces Will Shakespeare, whose amazing writing skills are revealed to be the result of a pact made with Dream, in return for which Shakespeare agrees to pen two special plays for Dream. But more on them when they appear.

The Doll's House represents a quantum leap forward in Neil Gaiman's writing and storytelling abilities. So many storylines revisited in future stories are set up it's pretty breathtaking, from linking this version of the Sandman to the previous DC one (an ineffective, slightly bumbling human crime-fighter called Hector Hall) to the establishing of numerous characters we will meet again later (such as Lyta Hall) and the establishing of several new regular characters, such as Matthew, Death's new raven, and Fiddler's Green. It also features one of Gaiman's most effective moments of horror, with a convention for serial killers (inspired by the World Fantasy Conventions of the mid-1980s) giving rise to moments of both disgust and jet-black humour (panels on deconstructing the stereotypes of female serial killers or how to make money from your hobby). There's also some nice tributes to other comics: as well as the 1970s version of The Sandman we also get a pastiche of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strips. As well as the obvious nod to Shakespeare we also get to meet Christopher Marlowe (who is dismissive of Shakespeare's first play, Henry VI, whilst his own masterwork Faustus is getting vast amounts of acclaim).

We also get some more clues as to what The Sandman is about. The legend of Nada shows that the Sandman has made some mistakes in his past and he needs to correct them, whilst Men of Good Fortune shows that the post-imprisonment Sandman is a slightly warmer person than before. A century spent alone has given him the chance to reflect on things and it's interesting seeing his cold, heartless side giving way more easily than before. The story ends with Dream confronting Desire and the immediate crisis solved...but Lyta Hall is living in mortal fear of what Dream told her (read and find out), which sets up events much later in the series.

The Sandman: The Doll's House (****½) is a radical improvement on the first Sandman collection, Preludes and Nocturnes, and gives the series a sense of purpose and direction. With the story Men of Good Fortune Gaiman's writing reaches a strong new level of maturity and intelligence, whilst Collectors may be among the most disturbing comics ever created.

The story is available from Titan in the UK and from Vertigo in the USA. It is also packaged with the first and third collections in The Absolute Sandman Volume I, available from Vertigo in the UK and USA.

[Skywalker]

Awesome review Wert.

Made me want to reread the whole dang series again

[Werthead]

Delayed due to the board giving me 303 errors for most of the last week:

Dream Country:

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The third Sandman collection represents a change of pace from the first two. Whilst the first two were unified by a central story arc that ran through each one, Dream Country is essentially a short story collection, featuring four tales that although self-contained, do illuminate parts of the backstory and the ongoing overall storylines of the entire series.

The first story is Calliope. A young writer, Richard Madoc, has a bad case of writer's block following the success of his first novel. In desperation he turns to the occult to find a way out of his problem and enlists the help of Erasmus Fry, an elderly author and successful playwright. It turns out that Fry owes his success to his imprisonment of Calliope, one of the nine muses of antiquity (and the former muse of Homer), and he passes control of Calliope over to Madoc. By holding her hostage and abusing her, Madoc gains the inspiration he needs and becomes a bestselling writer, churning out novels, a poetry collection, screenplays and even becoming a gifted director. Unfortunately for Madoc, he is unaware that Calliope is also the former lover of one of the Endless...

This is an interesting story. The notion of 'the muse' is explored here, although the literal personification of Calliope can be substituted for whatever a writer uses for inspiration. The abuse and over-use of the muse resulting in a horrendous case of writer's block, perhaps permanantly, is an interesting idea to use for a story, but it works well. We also get some intriguing backstory for The Sandman overall, including the tantalising revelation that somewhere out there Morpheus has a son (although those who know their Greek mythology will be way ahead of the game here). For those interested in writing graphic novels and comics, the complete script for Calliope is included in the book as well.

The second story is much more straightforward and fun. The Dream of a Thousand Cats sees a cat travelling the world, preaching a message to all the other cats, and we see the impact of that message on a young kitten. This story has been called 'cute' but it really isn't. The dream the cat is trying to bring into reality really isn't very nice (especially for humans) and the final line and image are brilliantly contrasted with what is going on in the cat's mind. This is as self-contained as Sandman stories come, and shows Gaiman's wit and imagination in full flower.

The third story is the legendary A Midsummer Night's Dream. Back in Men of Good Fortune (included in The Doll's House), Dream and William Shakespeare made a deal whereby Dream would give Shakespeare access to a font of imagination in return for Shakespeare writing two plays for him. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first, written for Dream to show as a piece of entertainment to the real faerie king and queen, Auberon and Titania, who return to the mortal plane with their retainers for the occasion.

This is a splendid, clever story which rightfully won the World Fantasy Award in 1991. As the play unfolds events offstage are illuminated by it: Titania's enchantment of Shakespeare's son (who died several years later), Robin Goodfellow (Puck)'s irritation at being portrayed by a mortal and the running commentary provided by several of the faerie court viewing the play, with some disagreement about whether they should congratulate the mortals for their art or eat them. There's also some more scene-setting for later stories (an invitation is extended to Dream who hasn't followed up on it by four centuries later). The highlight of the collection, this is an amusing story, although probably of most interest to established Shakespeare fans.

The final story is Facade, about an extremely obscure DC hero who finds herself lost and lonely, living in her apartment with a weekly conversation with the guy who signs her pension cheques as the highlight of her week. This is a somewhat bleak story about a hero with the power to save the world but who loses herself in the process, but it is given an uplifting ending by the arrival of Death, who is fleshed out a lot more here than in her previous brief appearances.

Dream Country (****) is an excellent addition to The Sandman mythos, although it can be criticised for being on the short side (collecting only four issues, compared to the previous two collections' eight apiece) and only padded out to a reasonable length by the Calliope script. But the quality of the actual stories more than makes up for it. The collection is available from Titan in the UK and Vertigo in the USA, and rounds off The Absolute Sandman, Volume I, available from Vertigo in the UK and USA.

Season of Mists:

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The fourth Sandman collection finally follows up on the promise that Lucifer made to destroy Morpheus back in the opening collection. Destiny summons the Endless to a meeting, where we meet Delirium (who used to be Delight) for the first time and get some more information about the missing brother of the Endless. During the meeting Desire baits Dream about the treatment of his lover Nada, whom he banished to Hell for spurning him. Dream realises he/she is right, and resolves to travel to Hell and rescue his former lover, despite Lucifer's vow.

Season of Mists takes Dream on a journey into Hell and a confrontation with the Morningstar...but not the type of confrontation he was expecting. Dream ends up, slightly bemused, as the keeper of the key to Hell, and is soon being petitioned by gods and representatives from many pantheons (including the gods of Chaos and Order, and deities from the Egyptian, Norse and Japanese pantheons) anxious to get their hands on the finest plot of real estate in the multiverse, at the same time as he is also trying to find his missing love, and Death is attempting to repair the damage caused by countless legions of the dead suddenly being released back into the mortal world.

After the short story interlude of Dream Country, it's good to be back to a solid, long story arc. Although it's a reasonably long tale it's not the most dynamic story in the Sandman canon, and unusually most of it takes place in the Dreaming with only a few scenes set in the real world, and a longer chunk set in Hell. This allows us to see a bit more of the Dreaming and its inhabitants, but the meat of the story is seeing how the different pantheons interact together and who actually has the best claim on Hell.

As usual, Gaiman fills the story with neat little details and touches. The notion of there being a library in the Dreaming where all the books writers dreamed of writing but never got round to it is a fascinating one, and it's amusing to see books there such as Tolkien's The Lost Road (which was supposed to be a big story about his island kingdom of Numenor, but he abandoned it after a few pages). Elsewhere there are nods back to earlier stories: when Dream fears he may be destroyed in Hell, he decides to make time for a brief drink with his friend Hob Gadling, although they are not due to meet for another ninety-nine years. He also looks in on the newly-born son of Hector and Lyta Hall and gives him a name, Daniel, to Lyta's rage and horror. Elsewhere there's nice touches about the various gods, such as Chaos being personified as a young girl and Order as a carboard box, and Thor trying to impress some of the female deities present with his hammer, which gets bigger if you rub it (which is mythologically accurate)! Finally, we get a glimpse into the Sandman's collection of artefacts he has accumulated over the years, and see the skull of the Corinthian, a city trapped in a bottle and an old pocket watch, all of which are explored in future stories, in some cases years down the line.

As with previous collections, Gaiman interrupts the linear narrative of the story to give us a self-contained story in the middle of the collection which nevertheless comments on the action around it. A young boy left alone at boarding school for the holidays (after his father is among the hostages taken by Saddam Hussein in the build-up to the Gulf War) is suddenly joined by all those who died in the school over the previous century or so. It's a rather grim story, but ends on an interesting, optimistic note.

Season of Mists (****) isn't quite up there with the best of the Sandman collections. It is a tad overlong given its relative lack of actual incident, but for expanding our knowledge and understanding about Hell and the Dreaming, for introducing important new characters (particularly Daniel, Cluracan and Nuala) and for resolving the Nada storyline, it does a great job. The graphic novel is available from Titan in the UK and Vertigo in the USA, and forms the opening part of The Absolute Sandman, Volume II, available from Vertigo in the UK and USA.

[Aptorian]

So I borrowed my buddies collection of Sandman comics. I've read some sandman here and there when I was younger but it never really caught my eye. Now that I have read like, it must be the first half of the main run, I can see why. The stories seem disjointed but considering this is a series that runs over the course of 8 years, it is amazingly well plotted. I keep being amazed at minor characters or events mentioned in the beginning of the series now coming to fruition as fully developed stories later on.

And holy crap this comic gets dark at times. That first volume where this Dee character forces a bunch of people in a cafe to torture, fuck and kill each other... good lord. Gaiman has issues. It really is interesting to see how completely uninterested Dream is in the actions of Mortals. He doesn't really care what you do or who you do it to. It's just mortal lives.

I am really curious to see who the missing "Endless" is. As far as I understand it there are seven Endless powers. 3 big ones: Destiny, Death, Dream and 3 lesser ones Desire, Despair and Delirium. I am not quite sure how the author rationalizes this diversion but it is certainly interesting. I can't quite guess what is missing. Time? Doesn't really fit. Probably isn't Life. "The creator" probably personifies that one. Maybe... Change? I don't know. If change is missing it would explain why the Endless seem so "static". But then again, Dream seems to be changing.

This post has been edited by Aptorius: 16 June 2012 - 08:28 AM

[Aptorian]

Mid series spoiler.

Spoiler

Ha, Delirium and Dream are on a mission to find the missing brother "Destruction"! I love delirium so much. She is hilariously unstable.

I was surprised that the missing Endless was "Destruction" sort of seems to fall in under Death and Despair but I see the connection. I still think an opposite to Death would have been more... balanced? But maybe this set of beings is based on the notion that everything has already been made and now the universe hurdles towards its eventual demise.

This post has been edited by Aptorius: 16 June 2012 - 01:35 PM

[QuickTidal]

Aptorius, on 16 June 2012 - 01:32 PM, said:

Mid series spoiler.

Spoiler

Ha, Delirium and Dream are on a mission to find the missing brother "Destruction"! I love delirium so much. She is hilariously unstable.

I was surprised that the missing Endless was "Destruction" sort of seems to fall in under Death and Despair but I see the connection. I still think an opposite to Death would have been more... balanced? But maybe this set of beings is based on the notion that everything has already been made and now the universe hurdles towards its eventual demise.

What I love about Delerium is that she gets these moments of lucidity where she can be surprisingly deep. I also like whichever issue it was where they are in the waiting room of the guy who does "transportation" and she's creating and flinging colourful frogs around. LOL!

Keep reading you have some of the best stuff yet to come!

[amphibian]

Aptorius, on 16 June 2012 - 01:32 PM, said:

But maybe this set of beings is based on the notion that everything has already been made and now the universe hurdles towards its eventual demise.

That is what they think. However, events transpire in such a way that leaves hope very much alive for change and for the betterment of immortals and mortals alike.

The series Lucifer (after a similarly rough and grotesque start) deals with these issues also and really does a terrific job in its exploration of some immortals you see in Sandman. Check that out after you're done with Sandman.

[stone monkey]

Destiny already existed as a DC Universe character, so Gaiman was already constrained by that. The Endless themselves are "anthropomorphic personifications" of concepts. One way of looking at it is that their names (the "D" names that is) are only pointers to the things they define and that they define the things they are not too.

So we have:

Destiny: who also defines unpredictability

Death: who is also life

Dream: who also defines reality

Spoiler

Destruction: who is both change (remember, when something changes the thing that it was is destroyed by that change) and stability

Desire: both wanting and not wanting

Despair: who is also hope

Delirium: who is both madness and sanity

Oh yes, and as to why the other Endless are static and Dream is appearing to change - think about who he and Delirium went looking for...

I read Sandman as it was being published each month in the late 80s/early 90s, so to some extent I regard it as a memory of my pretentious youth. Looking at them these days, I kind of get the feeling that Gaiman was trying too hard to prove that "comics aren't just for kids", as the slogan of the time had it, by dropping as much literary allusion, historical incident and folkloric gloss on the thing as he could. Like a teenager dropping gnomic quotations into their conversation to show everyone how smart they are.

One of my irritations with Gaiman's later work is that he appears to have not grown beyond this - and that he's a much better comic book writer than he is a prose writer; I think he really needs artists to help him out. That's not to say he's a bad writer, he isn't, but I do find his prose somewhat flat and inoffensive and not necessarily stylish - which is not that all that bad a thing, as it means it doesn't get in the way of his ideas, which are usually very good. But we (or I at least) don't just read books for the ideas, I like linguistic fireworks too. A comparable writer in the genre, say China Mieville, has both the ideas to burn and the pyrotechnic stylistic box of tricks - which is why I enjoy him more.

[amphibian]

Weirdly enough, I am of the opinion that Gaiman doesn't get all that gnomic with his stuff. He seems content to work with just below the surface level research, rather than the staggeringly deep explorations of Neal Stephenson or Gene Wolfe (see the Latro in Egypt book for the best depiction of ancient Egyptian life in any book like ever).

[QuickTidal]

I think Gaiman likes to make good art...and that's good enough for me. I love his prose and don't find I enjoy it any less than his comic work. STARDUST for example is one of the best books I've ever read.

[Aptorian]

I finished the story last night. Can't say that I was entirely happy with how the story ended. While I sensed something like it was on its way I still found it... strange.

Still, I cried like a little girl during the last issues. I am a sucker for sad endings.

[QuickTidal]

That's one of the things Gaiman was kind of famous for in SANDMAN...he could do something as dark and sinister as the serial killer convention plotline or the torture diner one...and then chase those stories with utterly charming and heartwarming stuff like "Three September's And A January" about the Emperor of the USA and "Ramadan" about what happened to the golden age of Arabia. I always think he did it on purpose to set us off-kilter. So yeah, while the ending might not be what we might have wanted, one can honestly say that the journey there was well done throughout.

[Abyss]

I loved LOVED loved the Sandman series.

I thought the end was logical. It was nicely foreshadowed and set up through the story and made for a satisfactory end point.

The one sole criticism i ever had was that Gaiman never once dropped the subtlety and had Dream just go full bore vengeful 'behold my might wrath' on anyone.
Yes, he does some fairly nasty things to those who wrong him, but i kept waiting for that one mind-blowing moment when he acted like the uber-god he was supposed to be and we never quite got it from Dream or any of the other Endless. The closest i thought we ever got were Destruction's traps and the moment when Delirium threatens Mazikeen.

Gaiman remains one of my favorite writers of dialogue ever. Nothing is wasted, every word is there for a reason. It's quite amazing. In comics the words are in a way more sparse than in novels so perhaps it shines through there a bit more.

[Aptorian]

Abyss, on 18 June 2012 - 05:29 PM, said:

The one sole criticism i ever had was that Gaiman never once dropped the subtlety and had Dream just go full bore vengeful 'behold my might wrath' on anyone.
Yes, he does some fairly nasty things to those who wrong him, but i kept waiting for that one mind-blowing moment when he acted like the uber-god he was supposed to be and we never quite got it from Dream or any of the other Endless. The closest i thought we ever got were Destruction's traps and the moment when Delirium threatens Mazikeen.

I fully agree. Everyone seems to have tons of respect for these fellows yet we are constantly told that this and this god or creature could fuck them up. And they always seem to be bound by their aspect and old traditions and unspoken rules. I suspect that their power is very personal and is more a case of curses that will make your life suck for a billion years instead of "I will smite you to ashes right here and now" kind of stuff. The only one of them you would expect could and would do that kind of stuff would be "The missing Endless". Or maybe Delirium because she is spooky as hell when she gets angry.

There was that moment during

Spoiler

The "The Kindly Ones" chapter where one of them strikes him with that scorpion whip and he exclaims "you dare!". I really thought "FUCK YES! Somebody finally pissed him off sufficiently to make him angry, in his own realm of all places!". I did not like the notion that he just took his "punishment". I would have liked to have seen him utterly destroy those 3 bitches and then commit suicide for his crime against the order of things, but the guy was so obsessed with the rules.

This post has been edited by Aptorius: 18 June 2012 - 05:49 PM

[RodeoRanch]

"Lucifer" as a companion series is amazing.