I recently sat down and re-read all of the main Sandman, 1-75. Gonna write some comments about the whole series here. These comments are not just for The Wake.

I first read the books when they were published. I wasn't a comics nerd but a friend suggested these were special, and they were. I gobbled them up as fast as I could. Did the same on this reread, too, finishing the series in a month. Gaiman's a good writer but in particular he's a good _comic book writer_, the pacing and tightness of these stories is compelling. So is the art, at least at its best.

My favorite of all the story-series is A Game of You. It's the right mix of humanist and mythological, the story is sufficiently weird, and it's just solid. The Doll's House is also terrific. I also think some of the standalones are the strongest parts of the run; Ramadan made me cry, I still love the Orpheus one-shot, and A Dream of a Thousand Cats is fantastic and the single issue I always recommend to newcomers to Sandman.

Unfortunately I don't think the overriding story arc of the series works for me. I never did understand Hippolyta's character or actions in the story. I much prefer the earlier story of Nada, if you want to read something about Dream screwing up his relationship with women. And as much as I like Orpheus, having his mode of death be the event that precipitates the events of the second half of the run doesn't really work for me. I also think The Kindly Ones is fairly weakly written and I didn't much care for the artist's style. And The Wake is a wan ending, although maybe as an anticlimax that's appropriate.

Sandman remains a huge achievement of comics. Fantastic writing, amazing art, and a deep ambition to explore literary canon and reflect it on modern times. I continue to hope someone figures out how to do a film adaptation some day. Into the Spider-Verse gives me hope an animator could be up to the task. Still the problem of making the stories fit into film-shaped boxes.