kjboldon's review against another edition
3.0
Glad I borrowed and did not buy. I think Hy Bender's Sandman Companion works better.
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.
books_n_pickles's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
2.0
As with volume 1, my rating and review relate only to the annotation work and the actual physical book in my hands, not to Sandman overall.
Well, my complaints about the first volume of The Annotated Sandman hold true for this one as well:
> overall, way too many blank black margins with not as many notes as I'd like (fewer, in fact, than in volume 1, since Gaiman made fewer references to other DC characters as he went on);
> notes not present when I wanted them (one example: the panels in Thermidor in that display a life-sized puppet show using the headless corpses of the recently guillotined--surely there's a historical note worth mentioning there!) (I also felt there was far too little information about the cuckoo in myth and culture in A Game of You: in 34.15.1, George says that he is Gwas-y-gog, a servant of the cuckoo, and the note tells us this is Welsh, but doesn't tell us why on earth the Welsh have such a phrase);
> and shockingly poor production/proofing (one note appeared a full four pages before the panel it referenced, even though the panels before and after it also had notes on the same topic!).
Still a lot of useful tidbits to pick up, especially as we get those calendar-themed historical issues. Not all of it is really enlightening in terms of the plot or themes, but it is fun historical background (which I guess means I'm reading these annotated editions for the trivia?). I was fascinated to discover that the Cobweb Palace and the King of Pain in "Three Septembers and a January" were real and not, as I'd thought, inventions of Desire's. And I want to read an entire book about the Chevalier d'Eon, who lived as both a man and a woman at different times in his/her/their life (occasionally under legal compulsion).
I also continue to be fascinated by the places in which Gaiman's descriptions and the final art don't quite match up. I more than understand the desire of a living author to keep any less-than-pleased thoughts about a coworker's work quiet, but I did also appreciate the one place where it slipped through, in a comment that the demon Azazel as it originally appeared in issue #4 looked like a "floating potato." Yeah, Azazel's look is definitely stronger here!
Now to await the NYPL arrival of the next volume...
Well, my complaints about the first volume of The Annotated Sandman hold true for this one as well:
> overall, way too many blank black margins with not as many notes as I'd like (fewer, in fact, than in volume 1, since Gaiman made fewer references to other DC characters as he went on);
> notes not present when I wanted them (one example: the panels in Thermidor in that display a life-sized puppet show using the headless corpses of the recently guillotined--surely there's a historical note worth mentioning there!) (I also felt there was far too little information about the cuckoo in myth and culture in A Game of You: in 34.15.1, George says that he is Gwas-y-gog, a servant of the cuckoo, and the note tells us this is Welsh, but doesn't tell us why on earth the Welsh have such a phrase);
> and shockingly poor production/proofing (one note appeared a full four pages before the panel it referenced, even though the panels before and after it also had notes on the same topic!).
Still a lot of useful tidbits to pick up, especially as we get those calendar-themed historical issues. Not all of it is really enlightening in terms of the plot or themes, but it is fun historical background (which I guess means I'm reading these annotated editions for the trivia?). I was fascinated to discover that the Cobweb Palace and the King of Pain in "Three Septembers and a January" were real and not, as I'd thought, inventions of Desire's. And I want to read an entire book about the Chevalier d'Eon, who lived as both a man and a woman at different times in his/her/their life (occasionally under legal compulsion).
I also continue to be fascinated by the places in which Gaiman's descriptions and the final art don't quite match up. I more than understand the desire of a living author to keep any less-than-pleased thoughts about a coworker's work quiet, but I did also appreciate the one place where it slipped through, in a comment that the demon Azazel as it originally appeared in issue #4 looked like a "floating potato." Yeah, Azazel's look is definitely stronger here!
Now to await the NYPL arrival of the next volume...
sookieskipper's review
I did enjoy cultural and historical contexts given in this volume. Still miss the thought process behind the writer though.
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