It's been a good month for fans of the pioneering Vertigo comic The Sandman, particularly if you were at last weekend's Emerald City Comic-Con. Not only were attendees of the spotlight panel for Vertigo and fellow DC imprint Young Animal given a free exclusive digital code to redeem free copies of all 75 issues of the original series, they were also treated to a video of Neil Gaiman discussing the new Sandman Universe imprint launching to celebrate the iconic comic's 30th anniversary.

The imprint debuts on August 8 with The Sandman Universe #1, a one-shot comic plotted by Gaiman, co-written by Nalo Hopkinson, Kat Howard, Si Spurrier and Daniel Watters, drawn by Bilquis Everly and with a cover by Jae Lee. It will set up the story hook for this new imprint: twenty-three years after being appointed the Lord of Dreams, Daniel has gone missing and chaos reigns across the Dreaming.

RELATED: ECCC's Vertigo/Young Animal Panel Explains the Sandman Universe and More

That will lead into four spin-offs (for which artists have not yet been announced), with September seeing the debut of The Dreaming (written by Spurrier) and The House of Whispers (Hopkinson) and October ushering in The Books of Magic (Howard) and Lucifer (Watters). As exciting as all these sequel spin-offs sound, however, this is not the first time the world of Morpheus and the Endless has been expanded upon.

Testing the Waters of The Dreaming

Chris Bachalo and Mark Buckingham's art from Death: The High Cost of Living

The very first Sandman spinoffs arrived in 1993, right as the original series was in the middle of its run. March of that year saw the start of the three-issue mini-series Death: The High Cost of Living. Written by Gaiman, pencilled by Chris Bachalo, inked by Mark Buckingham and lettered by Todd Klein, the mini follows a teenager named DiDi leading a suicidal boy named Sexton on a journey of self-discovery while claiming she's Death of the Endless, having taken human form as she does once a century to better understand humanity.

One of the first titles published under Vertigo (created that year to incorporate Sandman, Swamp Thing and other mature comics), it was a big success and won two Eisner Awards, with Gaiman winning Best Writer and the mini's editor Karen Berger winning Best Editor(the creative team would reunite for a similar miniseries, Death: The Time of Your Life, in 1996).

1994 saw the release of WitchCraft, a miniseries written by James Robinson, pencilled by Teddy Kristiansen, inked by Peter Snejbjerg, colored by Daniel Vozzo and lettered by Richard Starkings and Comicraft. The three-issue mini followed the Three Fates (who appeared at Morpheus' summons several times over the original series) as they helped a high preistess of theirs take centuries-long revenge against the chief of a barbarian clan that murdered an entire coven of their followers. A sequel miniseries, WitchCraft: La Terreur, written by Peter Milligan and drawn by Duncan Fegredo, followed in 1998.

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In 1993, as Death: The High Cost of Living was racking up sales and acclaim, Vertigo also decided to bring back the very first Sandman: the gas gun-wielding superhero PI Wesley Dodds (who'd die in Post-Crisis DC continuity a few years later and serve as the catalyst for the start of JSA). Dodds, created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Bert Christman in 1939, starred in Sandman Mystery Theatre, a film noir-inspired comic written by Matt Wagner (and later Steven T. Seagle) and largely pencilled by Guy Davis (although other artists like John Watkiss, R.G. Taylor and Warren Pleece would also contribute). Running for 70 issues until 1999, Dodds met Dream in the one-shot Sandman Midnight Theatre, co-plotted by Gaiman and Wagner, written by Gaiman, painted by Kristiansen and lettered by Klein.

Dave McKean's cover for The Dreaming #1

In June 1996, three months after The Sandman had ended, the first volume of The Dreaming was launched. With Gaiman onboard as creative consultant, the comic, as initially conceived by editor Alisa Kwitney, began as an anthology series telling disparate stories by a wide variety of creators about the inhabitants of Dream's kingdom The Dreaming, like Marv Pumpkinhead and Matthew the Raven. But after its 21st issue, the focus changed and the title became an ongoing focused on a core group of characters like Marv, Matthew, Cain and Abel, Lucien the librarian, and others.

RELATED: DC Comics, Neil Gaiman Announce The Sandman Universe Imprint

Written by acclaimed dark fantasy writer Caitlin R. Kiernan, the series lasted until 2001, with Kiernan admitting in a 2000 interview that, while she enjoyed writing it, it was also a struggle because "[while] the comparisons are inevitable, and even logical... it's been an uphill battle trying to get readers to look at The Dreaming as a series separate from The Sandman with its own tone and atmosphere and concerns. " Kiernan and artist Dean Ormston also created the 1998 miniseries The Girl Who Would Be Death, which saw a woman named Plath struggling to free her girlfriend from Death's clutches; it was nominated for a GLAAD Award.

1996 saw Destiny, the oldest of the Endless (and the only one not created by Gaiman) who is permanently chained to the Cosmic Log, a book containing all of existence, take center stage in his own miniseries, Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold. Written by Kwitney with art by Kent Williams, Michael Zulli, Scott Hampton and Rebecca Guay, the miniseries told of a future 2009 where humanity was decimated by a new strain of the Bubonic Plague and was nominated for an Eisner for Best Limited Series.

With The Dreaming retooled to be an ongoing narrative, all future Sandman anthology stories were released under the meta-title The Sandman Presents. Beginning in 1999 with Mike Carey and Scott Hampton's Lucifer: The Morningstar Option, the banner continued for the next few years with one-shots and miniseries focusing on characters like Thessaly the witch and Bast, penned by various creative teams.

Lucifer cover art by Christopher Moeller

But it was the Lucifer miniseries that went on to have the biggest impact. In 2000, Carey -- following up on The Morningstar Option with penciller Chris Weston, co-inker James Hodgkins, colorist Vozzo and letterer Elle de Ville -- launched Lucifer, which ran for 75 issues and followed the former Lord of Hell (who'd closed up his realm and handed the key to Dream in Sandman story arc "Season of Mists") as he ran a piano bar in downtown LA and went on various adventures while tackling the eternal question of free will. (This comic went on to inspire the current Lucifer show airing on Fox). In 2015, writer Holly Black and artist Lee Garbett debuted a new volume of Lucifer that ran for 19 issues, ending in June of last year, and served as a sequel to the original.

2013 saw Sandman fan favorites the Dead Boy Detectives -- two dead schoolboys who opted to remain on Earth as ghosts and investigate supernatural crime rather than move on to the afterlife -- get their own ongoing written by Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham and drawn by Buckingham and Gary Erskine. Lasting only for twelve issues, the series was the prelude to what would be one of the most exciting Vertigo announcements of the 21st century.

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Before that, though, it's worth mentioning the work of probably the most stylistically unique creator to write about the Endless. Jill Thompson (Beasts of Burden, Scary Godmother) has penned so many Sandman projects that the first word Google autocompletes after her name is actually "sandman."

Having pencilled both issue #40, "The Parliament of Rooks" and the "Brief Lives" arc of the original series, Thompson was clearly well-used to the world of Dream when she released The Little Endless Storybook, drawn in a super-deformed style and depicting the Endless as children.

2003 saw Thompson play into that decade's "manga boom" and release Death: At Death's Door. Drawn in a style aping shojo (girls') manga, the book was a side story to the original "Season of Mists" arc and saw the evicted dead swarm Death's realm while she and the flighty Delirium engaged in antics. More child-friendly and funnier than the original, it was a critical and commercial success.

RELATED: The Sandman Just Explained the DC Multiverse

In 2011, Thompson wrote another Little Endless Storybook, entitled Delirium's Party. Odds are, she'll return to the realms of the Endless sooner or later.

Gaiman Gives His Overture

In 2013 for the series' 25th anniversary, DC announced that Gaiman and artist J.H. Williams III would team up for a six-issue prequel minseries, The Sandman: Overture. Spanning the length and breadth of the cosmos and featuring Morpheus confronting his father, Time and mother, Night, Overture told the story of the giant battle that left Morpheus so weak he wound up captured at the start of the original Sandman.

Sandman Overture
Dave McKean's art from Sandman: Overture

The miniseries was announced and initially solicited as bi-monthly but instead suffered massive delays between issues, with the first one attributed by Gaiman to being on a "giant signing tour" and thus late with the script.

This wasn't the first time Gaiman had returned to the world of The Sandman since its conclusion. In 1996, with the comic winding down, he and Ed Kramer edited a prose anthology called The Sandman: Book of Dreams, featuring work by Keirnan, Gene Wolfe, Tad Williams, and other acclaimed writers.

In 1999, Gaiman collaborated with legendary manga artist Yoshitaka Amano (Vampire Hunter DGuin Saga) on the novella The Sandman: The Dream Hunters. Based on an "old Japanese legend" that Gaiman later admitted he'd made up, the novella won a Bram Stoker Award for Best Illustrated Narrative. It was adapted to comics in 2008 by frequent Gaiman adapter and collaborator P. Craig Russell, with covers by Yuko Shimizu, Mike Mignola, Paul Pope, and Joe Kubert. Russell was also one of many contributors ot the 2003 Gaiman-penned collection The Sandman: Endless Nights, which contained a story for each member of the Endless that took place over the original series' timeline.

We won't know until August how The Sandman Universe and its attendant series spinning out of it will shake out, how they'll cross over with the rest of the DC Universe, or whether they'll live up to the trailblazing legacy of the original. But as this history has hopefully shown, there's a whole range of stories to be told in the realm of the King of Dreams. And who better than his creator to oversee it? However these new comics shake out, you can bet it'll make a very interesting 30th anniversary for Morpheus indeed.