When the last living thing dies, my job is finished. I’ll put the chairs on tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.
I’m not saying that Dream is the same character as Sherlock. I’m just saying that he’s inhuman, superior, inscrutable, eloquent, quick to anger, utterly convinced of his own rightness, and has a notable mind-game-playing sibling, an otherworldly voice, and his only friend real friend is a quintessentially British man.
In the first twelve pages of The Sandman: Overture #1, we are told the beginning of four different stories. Of course, they are all actually parts of the same story, a structure that Sandman readers will be very familiar with. Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III have already produced a single issue so engrossing, inventive, and beautiful that I’d almost be perfectly happy to have the story end here. Of course, if it did, I’d never find out how it ends.
That’s a thesis statement, not a review, so lets actually get down to business. Spoilers will be kept to a minimum, for folks who’ve read Sandman or not.
If you ask female comics fans what brought them into the medium, there are a number of titles that you will hear quite often. The X-Men are popular gateway characters, as well as Batman and the work of Rumiko Takahashi and Alan Moore. But you’ll also hear women say that trade collections of Neil Gaiman‘s The Sandman was what got them hooked on comics in large numbers.
This week, Gaiman himself returns to the seventy-five issue series, completed in 1996, with a prologue miniseries The Sandman: Overture, and as the series is one I’ll recommend to anyone, and comixology has put the entire thing on sale for $1 per issue, I thought I’d offer a list of contained single issue stories that don’t spoil parts of the main plot of Sandman.