THE SANDMAN (pt. 2) - NEIL GAIMAN, et. al.

The reading has, shamefully, slowed down but not stopped. I’m slogging through a couple of long, complicated volumes, perhaps too many at the same time, and I needed a shorter, familiar thing as a sort of pick-me-up or pallet cleanser. Like I said with the last review of The Sandman, I read these things over a decade ago (maybe 20 years ago now? fuck) and this is a reread spurred on by my wife getting into the series and reading them for the first time. I read them in bed, right before I fall asleep, which is fitting given the topic of the book. Or the ostensible topic, actually, the lack of Dream, the main character of the series, makes this installment much weaker for me than the first one. As I noted in my review of the first volume (this is the second volume of a 4 part completion, I originally read the trade paperbacks, so each of these reprints is 3-5 of those collections) I remembered many of those stories, but this time that was not the case. I remembered the strongest arch in this collection, which is the storyline about Lucifer giving the keys to hell to Dream, who was attempting to free a woman he’d condemned to hell millenia ago. This story is Gaiman at his best, it’s weird and wide-ranging, it smashes a bunch of different mythological figures together, it allows for beautiful and strange art, it largely coheres into a satisfying story. I remembered the storyline about famous local yokel Emperor Norton, though that storyline is much shorter and involves less pay-off than I had recalled. Sadly, the rest of the volume was closer to that. The Cuckoo storyline, which introduces a whole new slate of characters and situations that are not really connected to the main Dream-storyline at all, besides Dream himself entering as a sort of Deus ex Machina at the very end, fell flat for me. It’s a sort of fantasy pastiche that doesn’t play with the cliches it’s highlighting enough to warrent their inclusion. There’s a trans character that is treated better than I would have guessed, given that the thing was published in the 90’s, outside of a weird episode that suggested the Moon itself was transphobic. There were sections about Dream’s son, Orphesus as well as a story about Augustus Caesar that were good but too short to have a big impact. I know it seems like I’m slagging it off, so let me reel it back a little. The series is still incredible, the originality and strangeness and incredible art is on a level that is largely unmatched in comics. The stuff with the Endless, Dream’s siblings is great, though I remember feeling it didn’t pay off on my first read through. I enjoyed reading it for sure and I’m excited to finish the series. All that being said, the first volume had the more memorable archs.