by Neil Gaiman
The King of Dreaming gets caught by some muddling fools who are just clever enough to entrap him but can\’t get who they really want- Death. Sandman is enclosed in their glass prison for ages. While he is trapped people all over the world get stuck in their dreams or suffer otherwise because the dream world is gone rampant without his rule. When he finally gets free he wants revenge but first he has to retrieve three magical objects that were taken from him, without which he is powerless. Most of the story seems to be about his quest to get his belongings back, which includes a trip into hell.
Perhaps I shouldn\’t have been so eager to read it. I liked Dream Hunters so much, but Preludes and Nocturnes did not work for me. I had trouble following the storyline from the very beginning, sometimes the images would not make sense to me, or I couldn\’t see how they progressed the story. Characters come in and out without much introduction and I felt like I was supposed to know who they were just because they were part of a comic- the format is still relatively new to me so there were references and allusions to things that I figure I would know about if I read comics all the time but I don\’t, so I didn\’t. I made myself keep reading and I did find the bit about Sandman visiting hell to retrieve his objects and having a magical duel with a demon interesting, but after that things just mattered less and less to me and pretty soon I realized I didn\’t want to read anymore. Which disappoints me, because so many people seem to rave about Sandman, and it seems like a lot of fans aren\’t big on reading other graphic novels at all; this is one series that is supposed to transcend the genre. But I gather from other reviews as well that it gets better with the next book, so I might give at least one more volume a try before I give up on Sandman as being not-for-me.
Abandoned …….. 240 pages, 1993
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richardmbray
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