February 25, 2009

Sandman:The Wake & Sandman:Endless Nights - Neil Gaiman

I have come to the end of the Endless. Tis a sad moment.

The Wake is the last of the Sandman series and while the others could be read in any order, this one should be read last or it doesn’t really make any sense. Dream has died and now his brothers and sister, Delirium, Destiny, Desire, Death and his friends and lovers come to the Dreaming to attend the wake.
The family speaks about Dream and we reconnect with Bast, Rose, Hob and Matthew the Raven. Dream may be dead, but Dream is alive and well in the Dreaming, the young boy Daniel has become/is the Dream King. As Matthew says, “the King is dead, long live the King”

Sandman: Endless Nights
could be a standalone. It’s a collection of tales about various members of the Endless, sort of a biography. We learn about the lives of Despair, about Delirium when she was Delight, a younger-looking Death as she goes about her business and it ends with Destiny.

Neil Gaiman is my favorite graphic novelist at this point. The Sandman series is a wonderful, complex set of stories that one could read over and over and find something new. I preferred some stories over others and didn’t always like the artists work but overall this is the best series of graphic novels I’ve read yet and I can see going back to them.

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