Over the last year I’ve been doing a lot of comfort reading for obvious reasons. This has consisted of me rereading a lot of old Vertigo comics, and now I’m left with the one I’ve been putting off: The Sandman.
This is the comic that has made the rounds so much in critical circles that it’s just considered to be Objectively Good. If you have an issue with any part of this book, the error is with you and no blame can be held with the writer, editor, or artists.
That makes it sound like I’m setting up to say I don’t like it. It’s not true; I dearly love this series. However, I got into it in early college at the beginning of my love for comics. (Hence my battered collection of trades, which is NOT depicted above.) There’s really no separating my discovering this series from my having my world-view expanded with the influx of all these new stories.
But I haven’t flipped open a Sandman book in the better part of a decade. I’ve changed a lot in that time and I’m wondering if I’ll still find anything in these pages now.
I’m only two and a half issues in but so far so good; the mystery of the story is still gripping and Gaiman’s relaxed yet highly stylized form of dialogue still makes for enjoyable reading.
The art has also been cleaned up, which for me is a blessing. The first trade of Sandman was one of the first three American comics that I bought, but it took me almost a year to read it because I found the artwork so off putting. Concepts in the art are much less garbled in this reissue even if the pages are a still little more busy than I would like.
Probably will get into a deeper review of the series later. This was just a first impression of what I’m reading right now.