The series takes readers through the kingdom of dreams, and Gaiman, like a magnificently deranged Gnostic tour guide, spends as much time off-road, exploring the diversions, back roads, dives, and alleyways of his story, as he spends on the main highway, collecting data for a never-to-be-published Fodor’s Guide to the Dream World. In addition to the broad range of allusions and sources, Gaiman’s non-linear approach to the narrative can sometimes pose challenges.

No wonder Norman Mailer famously pronounced The Sandman a “comic strip for intellectuals”. Any Sandman reader quickly realizes that Gaiman is comfortable drawing equally from such disparate sources as African folklore, Shakespeare, Aleister Crowley, Roy Orbison, Jack Kirby, serial killers, Greek mythology, Dante, and the Bible. And with that expansion, Gaiman also expanded the audience for mainstream comics in ways that no one, not even Alan Moore, had accomplished. Gaiman’s Sandman remains his comics masterpiece and one of the most important and influential comics ever published.Ĭonceived originally as a horror series, The Sandman quickly emerged as something more, branching into urban fantasy, literary history, modernist fairy tale, and revisionist mythology. Gaiman, along with Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, led the legendary “British Invasion” of American comic books in the ’80s that redefined the role of the modern comic book writer.

While Gaiman may be more familiar to readers as the Newberry Medal-winning author of The Graveyard Book and the adult novel, American Gods, he first made his reputation in comics. It’s also, with all due respect to The Kindly Ones, heavy enough to bludgeon most poor burglars beyond recognition. Printed on oversized, quality paper with detailed annotations in the margins, the book is one of the most impressive editions of a comic book ever published. In this first of four volumes, Klinger has delivered a gorgeous reproduction of the first 20 issues of Gaiman’s most famous comic book series.

It seemed funny at the time, but Gaiman clearly never envisioned Leslie Klinger’s The Annotated Sandman, nor the heft that would accompany it. In his 1995 afterword to The Kindly Ones, the longest of Neil Gaiman’s individual Sandman collections, the author joked that the book was heavy enough “to stun a burglar”.

The annotated sandman