If you read comics long enough, or with any kind of sustained attention, you’ll notice that some series start off strong, with clear, powerful opening issues that define everything that will follow. Others don’t grow into themselves until a few months, or a few years, into the run, when the creative team kicks away the specter of influence and begins to tell their own stories.
Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s most prominent comic book creation, doesn’t become itself until issue #8, the final chapter in the Preludes and Nocturnescollected edition.
Readers will find plenty to enjoy in the opening half-year of stories, but the Alan Moore influence is strong and anyone who goes back and rereads Moore’s legendary Swamp Thing run (as I, of course, have done, in public, not-so-long ago) will see the template Gaiman follows for his opening Sandman story arc: the ponderous DC-mystical-rich questing, an old corporate property revised for a new age, hitherto untold mysteries of the past, superheroes as creepily-colorful background characters, and a deep literary heft with words and sentences that are far more lyrical than the usual mainstream American comic book fare.
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