Preludes and Nocturnes

Morpheus, one of the Endless, is kidnapped and upon escaping discovers the world has changed. The first volume is about him trying to regain his power. The book introduces characters, places, and plots.

There is something I need to confess. Neil Gaiman’s books have never really appealed to me. I am completely baffled by them. When he tells a story, I never know where it will go.

In this volume, there is an overwhelming amount of happening. Some characters (both new and recycled) ended up being flat and boring because there were too many. Although I didn’t find the main character to be bad, he became flat and boring as the story progressed. Among them, only John Constantine really appealed to me.

There was also a lot of confusion and overwhelming in the plot. The author presented many ideas, some of which were overlooked and left you wishing for more elaboration. I’ll be interested to see how the second volume improves on the overall story.

This is a black-and-white first volume of the first 20 issues of "The Sandman", an epic series written by Neil Gaiman.

Leslie S. Klinger has annotated this volume, and will annotate the rest as well. The annotations range from historical - e.g. information on William Shakespeare's name and the versions of it - to clerical, the arcane but foremost the explanative, i.e. sorting out everything that surrounds The Sandman canon, i.e. the characters, the places and places.

My first edition actually contained some misshapes, e.g. blackened annotations and huge smudges, but apart from that the binding is sublime. The fact that this book is in black-and-white - the original versions being in colour - just brings the annotations more to the front, in my eye.

Although Klinger's "annotated Sherlock Holmes" is much more interesting to me personally, especially considering its extreme depth, breadth and plethora, this book is definitely worth its money and I'm eagerly looking forward to the second volume.