While Watchmen gets all the plaudits for being the greatest comic of all time, there is another contender that probably deserves it more. The Sandman debuted in 1989 and no one, not even its creator Neil Gaiman, thought it would last. However, the series proved everyone wrong, morphing from a Alan Moore's Saga Of The Swamp Thing inspired horror book to something completely different.
As great as Watchmen is, it is still a work that is dependent on comics and their history to inform it. Gaiman, by contrast, used The Sandman as a vehicle for myth, using a lifetime of literature to create something that comic readers had never seen before and would never see again. This list is going to rank the 10 volumes of The Sandman (no Endless Nights or Overture) from worst to best.
10 A Game Of You
A proviso- being the worst volume of The Sandman still makes a comic better than 99.9 percent of everything else out there. That's A Game Of You in a nutshell. In any other comic, it would be an amazing volume, but in The Sandman, it's the least of them all.
It follows Barbie, a bit character from an earlier volume of the story, and the quest to save the kingdom that exists inside her imagination from a mysterious evil called the Cuckoo. The whole story is about the role imagination plays in identity and the role identity plays in life. It's casually brilliant in a lot of places, but it lacks something that the other volumes of the book have.
9 Dream Country
One of the more interesting things Gaiman did while writing The Sandman was doing one off issues in between some of the longer story arcs as a palette cleanser, a place to write about things that wouldn't fit elsewhere, and a place for new readers to come onto the book.
Dream Country contains four of these one off issues, including the World Fantasy Award winning The Sandman #19, "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It would be the only comic to win the World Fantasy Award. All of the stories in this volume are great, but they aren't the greatest. Gaiman was just finding his footing on the book and it shows a bit.
8 The Wake
The final volume of the book, The Wake is a story about endings and saying good bye to the past while also saying hello to the future. It has some of the best art in the entire series, as Micheal Zulli, Jon J Muth, and Charles Vess put their all into bringing Gaiman's melancholic, but no less beautiful for all of the sadness, scripts to life.
While The Wake is easily one of the best endings any comic has and will ever have, it's a somber affair. There are some very cool parts in it (Batman, Superman, and Martian Manhunter discussing having a TV show), but it doesn't have the same oomph that preceding volumes have.
7 Fables And Reflections
Fables And Reflections is the second short story collection. While none of these stories have the award winning pedigree of Dream Country, they fit better into the overall story that Gaiman is trying to tell about Morpheus and even give some pertinent information about happenings in the Dreaming that will play a big part in the book as time goes on.
The stories jump around 1800s San Francisco to the Rome of Emperor Augustus to ancient Baghdad in the time of the caliphs. There are werewolf stories and an assembly of the greatest storytellers in the cosmos assembling to tell bedtime stories to a single human child. It's not the best of the short story collections, but it is wonderful.
6 The Doll's House
The Doll's House is the most straight up horror the book gets. It reads a lot like Moore's Swamp Thing, but that's because it was Moore who taught Gaiman how to script a comic and Moore's Swamp Thing is the book that got Gaiman back into comics.
Following Rose Walker as she learns the truth about her family and who she is, it introduces horrors like the Corinthian, an escaped nightmare who is the inspiration for all serial killers, the grisly truth behind DC's second superhero called the Sandman, and takes readers to a serial killer convention. It's a great story, but Gaiman still hadn't found his own way on the book yet.
5 Season Of Mists
Season Of Mists begs the question what happens when the Devil gets tired of being the devil and leaves Hell? Lucifer, tired of being the Enemy and Great Deceiver, decides that it's time to do something else with his immortal life and kicks everyone out of Hell, locking the gates and giving the key to Morpheus, as revenge for Morpheus humiliating him in the first volume of the book.
What follows is gods and spirits from around the universe coming to Dreaming and trying to win the rights to Hell from Morpheus, who doesn't want control of the whole thing. Add to that what exactly happens to the damned who have been kicked out of Hell, and readers get an amazing story.
4 Worlds End
Worlds End is the last short story collection. Inspired by The Canterbury Tales, the framing device is a bunch of travelers caught in a reality storm and taking refuge at the Worlds End Inn. There, they tell stories to pass the time.
The brilliance of this story comes in the fact that it is stories within stories within stories. It touches on some familiar characters readers know and gives readers a rather chilling glimpse as to what is to come. It's amazing.
3 Brief Lives
Morpheus's youngest sibling, Delirium, is down in the dumps. She wants help to find their lost brother, Destruction, and Morpheus, in the midst of a break-up and needing something to do with his time, agrees to help her. The resulting quest will have severe ramifications that set the tenor of the last three volumes of the book.
Brief Lives is a volume that is obsessed with death and that's fitting. It's the beginning of the end and it shows that no one, not even immortals, get to live forever. Delirium is a lot of fun, as well, a bright spot in a rather dour volume.
2 Preludes And Nocturnes
Preludes And Nocturnes is the beginning of The Sandman mythos. Morpheus, His Darkness Dream Of The Endless, is trapped by a human sorcerer trying to cage Death, and is held prisoner for 70 years. He eventually escapes, but going home finds the Dreaming in shambles. The rest of the book is his quest to find his items of power and restore his kingdom.
This volumes introduced readers to the mythos of the book, giving them a glimpse into a larger world, one behind the waking world. Gaiman takes readers to the Dreaming, Hell, London, and various other locales in his quest, involving John Constantine and the Justice League in the proceedings. Infinitely re-readable, everyone should read this book once. And then ten thousand more times, just to be safe.
1 The Kindly Ones
The Kindly Ones is the second to last volume of the book and it's where all of Morpheus's chickens come home to roost. Because of his actions in Brief Lives, the Fates are after him and he must find a way to slow them down long enough to make his play.
This one has it all. The angular, impressionistic art by Marc Hempel gives the story just the right edge, and Gaiman just writes his heart out in this one. There's also a sense of inevitability to the whole thing. Fate can't be stopped. It's dark, beautiful, sad and funny. It's the best of the best.