THE SANDMAN (BOOK 4) - NEIL GAIMAN, et. al.

And so it ends. The Sandman series deserves its place of reverence in the “graphic novel” world. Alongside Spiegelman and Moore and a handful of others who worked regular, pulp/trash comic books into “serious” literature in the 80s and 90s the Sandman is an important link in this chain. I remember when I was getting into comics beyond the superhero stuff, in the late 90s and early 2000s, the intimidating and unfriendly nerds at dusty, dingy, dark comic stores (before their more upbeat and welcoming hipster rebrand) would recommend The Sandman series as vital. As I’ve written in the previous reviews, I read them as maybe a 13-15 year old and haven’t revisited them sense. Since my wife had never read them, she picked them up (they’re now packaged as these enormous volumes, putting the whole series in 4 books instead of the 10 smaller books I originally read them as) and I relived my youth by reading after her. And, sadly, now we are done. This reread does confirm a feeling I had carried over from my original read but had lost the specifics of, namely that the series starts better than it ends. Not to say that the ending is bad or that it totally peters out, but rather that the idea and the world that Gaiman sets up is much richer than the stories he is weaving by the end. The first volume is the best, where Dream/Morpheus is trapped by occultists for 80 years before he breaks free and has to take care of unfinished business. That story is interesting and cool and everything in the world is new at that point. As the story progresses the premise becomes the major stumbling block. Namely, there is a bit of a Superman problem, where Dream is so powerful and omnipotent, he is part of an undying and superpowered group called the Endless, that it’s hard for the story to have any stakes. Even the main arc of this volume (spoilers), where the furies are attacking Dream for mercy killing his own son, which leads to Dream “dying” only to immediately being replaced since he can’t really die, doesn’t really have any tension. He can “die” all he wants since he’s endless. Now, this doesn’t prevent Gaimen from finding interesting stories and ideas, it just doesn’t work when he tries to fit traditional narrative ideas, like a fear of death, into stories that don’t really support them. The ongoing story about the immortal Englishman Hobbs is brought to a really beautiful conclusion. It’s always cool to see the rest of the Endless family, and get tantalizing hints about things like there having been an earlier Despair. I wish we’d wrapped up the Destruction storyline better, it’s sort of left hanging and I wish he didn’t feel the end to have some sort of capstone storyline, I wish it just sort of ended, like a dream. As always the art was beautiful and varied. The book deserves its praise, it is a great example of a story that could only really be told as a comic.