bosermoki's review
adventurous
dark
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
kjboldon's review against another edition
3.0
surprisingly not that illuminating or as comprehensive as I'd've thought. doesn't add much more than what's in Hy Benders book. many unannotated pages, and black paper shows fingerprints. BUT the black and white reproduction of the comic is lovely.
blurrybug's review against another edition
4.0
This was weird.
Confusing, touching and kinda gross at times, or gory rather.
The Annotations was kinda wasted on me, the write small writing was difficult for me to read so I only looked at it if I was confused by anything.
I might continue this but not with the annotations.
I'm just left wanting more to understand it and not wanting more cause I didnt understand so much of it...
Confusing, touching and kinda gross at times, or gory rather.
The Annotations was kinda wasted on me, the write small writing was difficult for me to read so I only looked at it if I was confused by anything.
I might continue this but not with the annotations.
I'm just left wanting more to understand it and not wanting more cause I didnt understand so much of it...
rhiannatherad's review against another edition
4.0
Happy to finally read this...if only the library's copy wasn't missing a bunch of torn out pages.
rouver's review against another edition
4.0
Seeing Neil Gaiman's annotations, thoughts, & notes accompanying the stories from Sandman was pretty interesting. If you haven't read the comics, I would not recommend these volumes, as the annotations give spoilers. Disappointingly, these are also black & white....you'll want to read the comics in color. I can appreciate that printing these tomes would have rendered them exorbitantly expensive.
philipf's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting, but the annotations, especially the ones detailing trivia from comic books feel incomplete, and in a couple of places, are just plain wrong.
rungemaille's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
gossamerchild's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I think I appreciated this even more the second time around (more than the second time, I guess, if you count the the standard issue graphic novels). The beauty, the dark, the hope, the horror - all of it hit me harder with this reread. I cannot WAIT for the TV show.
daaave's review
4.0
I'd been wanting to get into Gaiman's Sandman for quite a while so I was really excited to see that the university library had a copy of the annotated volume 1 (Issues 1-20). The annotations were really helpful in keeping me from getting lost. Gaiman draws from so many different sources of inspiration that without this little road map, I don't know that I would have felt the full effect of the writing. I really loved the first 16 or so issues, the continuing stories were really interesting and there was some great suspense. However, when I got to the latter section of the book, they become one-off stories that didn't really interest me very much. I definitely want to continue and read more, but if it continues to just be one-offs, I don't know how much longer it can keep my interest.
books_n_pickles's review
2.0
I own and love my copy of the Sandman series, and since I'm not a need-to-own-every-variant type of fan, the books with extras are a definite library pick-up. Thank goodness. I'm reviewing only the "Annotated" part of The Annotated Sandman when I say that I was disappointed--Gaiman's story itself is as excellent as ever.
In hindsight, I think I went in with expectations too high, in part because I didn't do my research. The other annotated books I've seen are [b:The Annotated Wizard of Oz|116592|The Annotated Wizard of Oz (Oz, #1)|L. Frank Baum|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386924272l/116592._SX50_.jpg|1993810] and [b:The Annotated Peter Pan|10951002|The Annotated Peter Pan|J.M. Barrie|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1302206750l/10951002._SX50_.jpg|1358908], both published by W. W. Norton. I don't have them on hand, but I remember annotations on almost every page, introductions so long that even I almost (almost) gave up on them, and full-color photos and illustrations galore. It's probably immensely helpful that the books in question, and probably a lot of the supplementary materials, are in the public domain.
In contrast, The Annotated Sandman is in black and white, a few issues have almost no notes in them, and there are very few photos or additional illustrations. I just looked up [b:The Absolute Sandman, Volume One|23753|The Absolute Sandman, Volume One|Neil Gaiman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312226853l/23753._SX50_.jpg|1789924], which is apparently chock-full of the kind of supplementary material I was hoping to find; I suspect that D.C. Comics was stringently avoiding cross-pollination. Unfortunately, The Annotated Sandman is the poorer for it. Imagine my frustration when I hit this note in Gaiman's World Fantasy Award-winning Midsummer Night's Dream issue: "The 'Letters in the Sand' feature of Issue #19 contains a summary of Shakespeare's play, entitled 'Classics Eviscerated,' which is omitted here." Gee, thanks for letting us know what we're not getting. Every single note telling us where there had been an ad page stung a bit too, because it reminded me that the original flow of the story was no longer in tact.
But even the robust annotations that we did get weren't always great, either. Gaiman mentions in his foreword that Burgess's house in Wych Cross was inspired by a real building, but editor/annotator Leslie S. Klinger doesn't discuss this in the notes. Instead, he rambles about bad roads and which trains require transfers and whether the car Hathaway is in is a private car or a taxi and how all of this might have contributed to whether or not he could fall asleep in the car, all just to stoke a *fascinating* (sarcasm) discussion of whether the "Royal Museum" is in London or Edinburgh. But there's no comment about most of Burgess's summoning spell, and I'd been really interested in where Gaiman might have gotten inspiration for some of the words and symbols. Additionally, in the notes for Issue #1, it isn't always clear from the writing whether Klinger is talking about Gaiman's notes for a character, something that happens in another comic, or a real person on which the character is based. Both Hathaway and Burgess are described as if they are real people, and I had to Google them both to discover that they actually aren't. Burgess, in particular, would have benefited from notes that compare and contrast him with the real Aleister Crowley, or a bio flagged with, "Acccording to NG's notes" or the like.
A few other missing things, as they caught my eye:
> In Issue #2, Cain names Goldie the gargoyle for "a friend who went away." Is there a story here?
> In Issue #6, Klinger notes that Dee doesn't recognize what AIDS is...but he doesn't explain the cultural significance of AIDS at the time the comic was published. That's not something you can count on people born after, say, the year 2000 to understand.
> In Issue #7, Dee sings "I think I'm gonna like it here." If this reference to Annie goes unremarked, what other cultural references did Klinger miss?
> Issue #9 and Issue #16 have nearly-identical panels with hands exchanging a heart-shaped piece of glass; from an ancient city in the first and a heart/vortex in the latter. This isn't noted in Issue #9, only in Issue #16 with, "The significance is unclear--is the presence of vortices the price of Morpheus's love for Nada?" (Probably not--see next my note.) It seems odd that this note only appears in the one place. I was also surprised that Klinger doesn't note that a similar image (though in a much smaller-sized panel) appears in Issue #38, where the heart-shaped shard of glass/jewel is the emerald heart of Koschei the Deathless. The black-and-white print in The Annotated Sandman rendered impossible any comment on the coloring, something that has interested me for a long time: my first copy of The Doll's House (Sandman Vol. 2) was an older one in which the glass heart in Issue #9 was green, which made me wonder if there was a connection between it and Koschei the Deathless's heart; in the recolored version (which I bought later to match the other 9 volumes I owned) the glass is blue/clear, which seems to make more sense with the story. I wonder which version Gaiman prefers...
> Though I didn't keep track of them all, there are places where it's obvious that Gaiman hadn't yet published [b:The Sandman: Overture|18310944|The Sandman Overture (The Sandman Overture, #1-6)|Neil Gaiman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1444878181l/18310944._SY75_.jpg|27097530] when The Annotated Sandman was published. Huge shame there, because Overture contains so many callouts to previously published issues. It also addresses Klinger's speculation, described in my note above, with a very likely "No." Morpheus met Nada on earth--so long, long after he first encountered a vortex.
> On an editorial/production side, there were a few places where notes did not appear on the correct page to correspond with where their subject appears in the comic. The particular one I flagged has the added problem of appearing twice: correctly on page 447, noting that the image in panel 6, page 18, Issue # 16, is of G. K. Chesterton; and incorrectly on the following page, 448, where it says that panel 6 on page 19 is a photo of G. K. Chesterton--though there is no photo on that page at all.
Finally...Klinger doesn't ever discuss what the Sandman is in history. He discusses Dream's connections to the earlier D.C. character, but not the cultural figure that inspired that one in the first place. Kind of a big omission.
Okay, so I've done a lot of grousing here, but the book is far from a total wash. For me, Klinger more than succeeded in his goal of helping folks unfamiliar with the larger historical D.C. universe understand the connections between Sandman and its contemporaries and predecessors. I know enough about John Constantine now to be intrigued by Hellblazer (though probably not enough to seek them out). The notes on the Midsummer Night's Dream issue were excellent even for someone familiar with Shakespeare's work, revealing just how much research Gaiman did on for this one issue. My favorite parts, as you can probably guess from my early paragraphs about what I felt The Annotated Sandman was lacking, were quotes from Gaiman's scripts in which he described the images he wanted. They were particularly fascinating for how often the final illustrations varied from the descriptions, and I would have also loved to get the artists' views on what worked, what didn't, and why they opted to take images in different directions (when not simply because of the limits of the printing process). Perhaps some of this appears in The Absolute Sandman.
TLDR: A bit lackluster for this reader who had ridiculously high expectations, not absolutely necessary to appreciate the depth and nuance of the broader Sandman series, but still recommended for anyone on the nerdier side, the kind like me who's willing to buy the originals for multiple readings.
In hindsight, I think I went in with expectations too high, in part because I didn't do my research. The other annotated books I've seen are [b:The Annotated Wizard of Oz|116592|The Annotated Wizard of Oz (Oz, #1)|L. Frank Baum|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386924272l/116592._SX50_.jpg|1993810] and [b:The Annotated Peter Pan|10951002|The Annotated Peter Pan|J.M. Barrie|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1302206750l/10951002._SX50_.jpg|1358908], both published by W. W. Norton. I don't have them on hand, but I remember annotations on almost every page, introductions so long that even I almost (almost) gave up on them, and full-color photos and illustrations galore. It's probably immensely helpful that the books in question, and probably a lot of the supplementary materials, are in the public domain.
In contrast, The Annotated Sandman is in black and white, a few issues have almost no notes in them, and there are very few photos or additional illustrations. I just looked up [b:The Absolute Sandman, Volume One|23753|The Absolute Sandman, Volume One|Neil Gaiman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312226853l/23753._SX50_.jpg|1789924], which is apparently chock-full of the kind of supplementary material I was hoping to find; I suspect that D.C. Comics was stringently avoiding cross-pollination. Unfortunately, The Annotated Sandman is the poorer for it. Imagine my frustration when I hit this note in Gaiman's World Fantasy Award-winning Midsummer Night's Dream issue: "The 'Letters in the Sand' feature of Issue #19 contains a summary of Shakespeare's play, entitled 'Classics Eviscerated,' which is omitted here." Gee, thanks for letting us know what we're not getting. Every single note telling us where there had been an ad page stung a bit too, because it reminded me that the original flow of the story was no longer in tact.
But even the robust annotations that we did get weren't always great, either. Gaiman mentions in his foreword that Burgess's house in Wych Cross was inspired by a real building, but editor/annotator Leslie S. Klinger doesn't discuss this in the notes. Instead, he rambles about bad roads and which trains require transfers and whether the car Hathaway is in is a private car or a taxi and how all of this might have contributed to whether or not he could fall asleep in the car, all just to stoke a *fascinating* (sarcasm) discussion of whether the "Royal Museum" is in London or Edinburgh. But there's no comment about most of Burgess's summoning spell, and I'd been really interested in where Gaiman might have gotten inspiration for some of the words and symbols. Additionally, in the notes for Issue #1, it isn't always clear from the writing whether Klinger is talking about Gaiman's notes for a character, something that happens in another comic, or a real person on which the character is based. Both Hathaway and Burgess are described as if they are real people, and I had to Google them both to discover that they actually aren't. Burgess, in particular, would have benefited from notes that compare and contrast him with the real Aleister Crowley, or a bio flagged with, "Acccording to NG's notes" or the like.
A few other missing things, as they caught my eye:
> In Issue #2, Cain names Goldie the gargoyle for "a friend who went away." Is there a story here?
> In Issue #6, Klinger notes that Dee doesn't recognize what AIDS is...but he doesn't explain the cultural significance of AIDS at the time the comic was published. That's not something you can count on people born after, say, the year 2000 to understand.
> In Issue #7, Dee sings "I think I'm gonna like it here." If this reference to Annie goes unremarked, what other cultural references did Klinger miss?
> Issue #9 and Issue #16 have nearly-identical panels with hands exchanging a heart-shaped piece of glass; from an ancient city in the first and a heart/vortex in the latter. This isn't noted in Issue #9, only in Issue #16 with, "The significance is unclear--is the presence of vortices the price of Morpheus's love for Nada?" (Probably not--see next my note.) It seems odd that this note only appears in the one place. I was also surprised that Klinger doesn't note that a similar image (though in a much smaller-sized panel) appears in Issue #38, where the heart-shaped shard of glass/jewel is the emerald heart of Koschei the Deathless. The black-and-white print in The Annotated Sandman rendered impossible any comment on the coloring, something that has interested me for a long time: my first copy of The Doll's House (Sandman Vol. 2) was an older one in which the glass heart in Issue #9 was green, which made me wonder if there was a connection between it and Koschei the Deathless's heart; in the recolored version (which I bought later to match the other 9 volumes I owned) the glass is blue/clear, which seems to make more sense with the story. I wonder which version Gaiman prefers...
> Though I didn't keep track of them all, there are places where it's obvious that Gaiman hadn't yet published [b:The Sandman: Overture|18310944|The Sandman Overture (The Sandman Overture, #1-6)|Neil Gaiman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1444878181l/18310944._SY75_.jpg|27097530] when The Annotated Sandman was published. Huge shame there, because Overture contains so many callouts to previously published issues. It also addresses Klinger's speculation, described in my note above, with a very likely "No." Morpheus met Nada on earth--so long, long after he first encountered a vortex.
> On an editorial/production side, there were a few places where notes did not appear on the correct page to correspond with where their subject appears in the comic. The particular one I flagged has the added problem of appearing twice: correctly on page 447, noting that the image in panel 6, page 18, Issue # 16, is of G. K. Chesterton; and incorrectly on the following page, 448, where it says that panel 6 on page 19 is a photo of G. K. Chesterton--though there is no photo on that page at all.
Finally...Klinger doesn't ever discuss what the Sandman is in history. He discusses Dream's connections to the earlier D.C. character, but not the cultural figure that inspired that one in the first place. Kind of a big omission.
Okay, so I've done a lot of grousing here, but the book is far from a total wash. For me, Klinger more than succeeded in his goal of helping folks unfamiliar with the larger historical D.C. universe understand the connections between Sandman and its contemporaries and predecessors. I know enough about John Constantine now to be intrigued by Hellblazer (though probably not enough to seek them out). The notes on the Midsummer Night's Dream issue were excellent even for someone familiar with Shakespeare's work, revealing just how much research Gaiman did on for this one issue. My favorite parts, as you can probably guess from my early paragraphs about what I felt The Annotated Sandman was lacking, were quotes from Gaiman's scripts in which he described the images he wanted. They were particularly fascinating for how often the final illustrations varied from the descriptions, and I would have also loved to get the artists' views on what worked, what didn't, and why they opted to take images in different directions (when not simply because of the limits of the printing process). Perhaps some of this appears in The Absolute Sandman.
TLDR: A bit lackluster for this reader who had ridiculously high expectations, not absolutely necessary to appreciate the depth and nuance of the broader Sandman series, but still recommended for anyone on the nerdier side, the kind like me who's willing to buy the originals for multiple readings.