“This was kinda just a bunch of…stuff? Nothing but stuff? There was a lot of stuff, but it was almost completely disconnected stuff?
It’s like…maybe Neil Gaiman got bored of writing Sandman stories and wanted to write this instead? Which is fine, but I was like, “Does this need to be a Sandman book?”
I am not sure I’ll finish this re-read. I can see where Sandman was big at the time, but a few decades have changed comics so much. Now it’s a lot more common to see a book like this, thoughtful and mystic and shit. Then it was SUPER unusual to not have costumes and punching, but now you see that sort of thing a lot. And what that means is that if I want to read something thoughtful, I once had only a few options, and now I have a lot, and I think I enjoy some of them a lot more than I’m enjoying Sandman.
It feels weird to trash a classic book like this. I guess I don’t feel like I’m trashing it…It almost feels like Sandman was a keystone, something that needed to exist, but it’s greatest achievement is facilitating something bigger. You don’t build the archway for the purpose of highlighting a keystone, right? You build the archway to give a pass-through, the keystone facilitates that, but nobody builds an arch because they’re like “Check out this dope keystone! Better build an archway!””