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.

This is John Cleese telling us what it was like to be John Cleese before he was Monty Python John Cleese or Fawlty Towers John Cleese or Fish Called Wanda John Cleese. Those projects basically go unmentioned in this book, though the build-up to Python is covered and Wanda director Charles Crichton is met on a previous project and Fawlty co-star Connie Booth was Cleese’s first wife. The Monty Python story is so well chronicled that it’s hard to imagine Cleese would have much to add to it. Frankly, I opened the book looking for anecdotes about his involvement with the film of Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr. While there’s not a lot, there’s more than anywhere else, and it’s part of a pivotal time, when he and Graham Chapman were a sought-after writing team but hadn’t made their mark yet. In a different world, the pinnacle of Cleese’s career might’ve been writing the pilot episode of the long-running Doctor in the House TV period. But Python happened, and Doctor in the House gets a single parenthesized sentence.