I’ve been rereading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series to see if it’s appropriate for my 12-year daughter Mabel. Generally speaking, it is—another of those things which was marked “For Mature Audiences” a quarter century ago but seems rather mainstream today.
I’m fortunate to have discovered Sandman when its very first issue came out. I’d already become a Neil Gaiman fan through his reinvention of Black Orchid.
Sandman’s such a classic now that it’s hard to remember back when its cult was small and fragile. The “Preludes and Nocturnes” collection of the first eight issues demonstrates how it took a year or so for the series to find its voice, as Gaiman freely acknowledges in his intro to the book. The breakthrough story was the first one that featured Sandman’s sister Death, which is so good that the same story is used to end the first Sandman volume and begin the second one.
Those early stories are fascinating, but nothing I’ll be rereading soon again. The later stories, however, are extraordinary—at least as good as Neil Gaiman’s most celebrated prose novels, probably better. As serial adventures go, they’re a lot less clunky than nearly all the DC or Vertigo comics they influenced, especially Justice League Dark, which revolves around the same iconic House of Mystery which Sandman initially emanated from. If Mabel really takes a liking to this stuff, I’ll feel justified in finally popping for one of those expensive Complete Sandman or Annotated Sandman anthologies.