Cons: If you're finding cons in here, you're looking WAY too hard.
The Bottom Line: With Gaiman's words and art by Glenn Fabry, Milo Manara, Miguelanxo Prado, Frank Quitely, P. Craig Russell, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Barron Storey, there's nothing to do but buy it.
cdm72's Full Review: Neil Gaiman - Sandman: Dust Covers - The Collected...
You start off a review of a book like this with the word “Wow” and go on from there.
“Between 1987 and 1996 most of my working moments, and all of my sleeping ones, were given to telling one story, that of The Sandman.” --Neil Gaiman
There are facets of life that we don’t understand. Everyone dreams. Everyone despairs. Everyone desires. Everyone delights in delirium. Everyone destroys. Everyone is destined for something. And in the end everyone dies. Underneath it all, the Endless embody these facets. In his introduction, Gaiman reminds us “the Endless are not gods, for when people cease to believe in gods, they cease to exist. But as long as there are people to live . . . then the Endless will be there, performing their functions. They do not care a jot whether or not you believe in them.”
During the early part of the 1990s, even people who didn’t read comics, people who’d never seen Clark Kent’s cubicle at the Daily Planet, or people who didn’t know Spider-Man was married, knew that Dream of the Endless was also called Morpheus. The Sandman is, simply, the most well-known and influential (do you honestly believe there would have been a goth movement without the help of Dream’s big sister Death?) comic ever written.
In 2003 Neil Gaiman came back to it.
The Sandman: Endless Nights is a brand new collection of 7 short stories, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by 7 different artists. The thing I never cared for in the original series was that Gaiman is such a complex plotter that the stories he was telling in The Sandman never really made complete sense until you read it as a whole, so reading each monthly issue, by the time the next one came out, you really had no idea what was going on from one month to the next. At least, I never did. Maybe that’s because I didn’t come in to The Sandman until very close to the end anyway. But when I went back and started reading the collected editions, I saw what everyone else had been seeing all along; it’s not just the characters (in fact, The Sandman himself is kind of a boring fellow), it’s the way Gaiman tells their stories. He is quite brilliant. The series was told in stories--obviously, right?--with the first few issues telling the story Preludes and Nocturnes, then there’s The Doll’s House story, followed by Dream Country and so on and so forth. It wasn’t just a straight issue to issue progression like your normal comic. And like I said, Gaiman is complex in his plots. The whole point of one story can come at the end, and it’ll be one minor detail alluded to on the first page of the first issue of that story and then never mentioned again. Everything that happens in between has to happen to get to that end, but the point will be left hanging there. For me, the only way to make that connection between the beginning and the end was to read the entire story in one swoop from one of the collected editions.
Anyway.
That is not the case with this book. These 7 stories are short, to the point, and you don’t need one to understand another. Gaiman also focuses, this time around, on the other siblings, something he’d never really done before. It always seemed to me that the stories told in The Sandman dealt more with the human characters and that Dream was there to guide it along (even if the story could not happen without Dream’s existence, he was sometimes a minor player in the stories), but with Endless Nights, we finally get to see the other Endless in action. (In fact, this latest book would be a great introduction for anyone unfamiliar with the Endless clan. Read this book, then dive into the collected editions. No, don’t pick and choose, and don’t skip around. Just read them.) They’d always been there--they’re Endless, after all--but I’d never seen them in action. It wasn’t until I read " 15 Portraits of Despair” that I truly understood the depth of her suffering.
3:“She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy. She writes ‘plum-blossom’ at the top of a piece of paper. Then she stairs at the paper, unable to think of anything else. Eventually it begins to get dark.”
5:“‘If you smile before the commercial break,’ his whispers to his lover, ‘it means you are thinking about me. If you link now it means you love me, you truly love me, and one day you will come out here for always.’
“He buries his face in a tee shirt that no longer smells like anybody at all and waits for his lover to blink.”
11:“It is a writer, with nothing left that he knows how to say. It is an artist, and fingers that will never catch the vision.”
It wasn’t until I read “What I’ve Tasted of Desire” that this character made such perfect sense to me.
“Most people want things like a candle-flame, flickering, shifting. You, on the other hand, want like a forest fire. I should warn you, getting what you want and being happy are two quite different things.”
“And what do you want from me?”
“Everything. What else is there to want?”
And to me, Destiny was always a bit of a mystery before the story “Endless Nights”
“A page turns. Destiny continues to walk... He is holding a book. Inside the book is the Universe.”
As usual, Gaiman has chosen his artists perfectly. Each illustrator is able to bring to their story something unique about them that helps to complete the story. Bill Sienkiewicz is the only artist alive who could truly do little Delirium any justice. And the art of Milo Manara in the Desire story is almost as beautiful as Desire itself. Barron Storey’s Despair illustrations would have stood just as well on their own without the help of Gaiman’s text, and still been just as effective.
To put it simply, there aren’t enough good things to say about this book.
It was a sad day when that final issue of The Sandman hit the stands. I still remember it. I’ve got 2 copies. And only Destiny would have known for sure that Gaiman would one day return, even though he’d always said he would. If this is the work he produces when he’s taken a break from the characters for 7 years, I would gladly wait another 7 for the next collection. The Sandman: Endless Nights is one of the absolute best Sandman books ever published. Read it.
Newly repackaged, this stunning collection of 20 original stories set in the universe of the graphic novel series The Sandman features works by Clive ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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