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I saw this at the shop. I left me feeling decidedly ambivilent.
I admired it's binding, but not the slipcase it comes in, which looks even cheaper and tackier in comparison.
I also can't escape the feeling that a large chunk of what made The Sandman what it was/it became was the state of the comics industry from which it sprang. In may ways it was a reactionary book that stood out precisely because it was a number of things that other monthly comic books on the shelves at the time were not. That industry is no longer in quite the same state of creative stasis and popular decline as it was then.
As such I have a nasty feeling that it was very much a work or its time. Which is not to say that it was a bad comic, merely that the place it holds in the history of western comics is not entirely down to its own merits as a creative endevour...
Assessing the legacy of The Sandman is, I feel, probably a more difficult task. Alan Moore has apparently joked that Vertigo sprang from a bad mood he was in in the mid-late 80s. It is probably equally, if not more, valid to claim that Vertigo was built around The Sandman, The one comic that, aunlike many of its contemporaries, was able to acclaim unstinting plaudits from a diverse array of writers, artists and critics from outside of the comics field.
The Sandman is undoubtedly an important comic, and I am genuinely pleased to see it repackaged into such a handsome volume, but part of me is still left thinking '...and?' |
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