It’s like he always had prepared himself for this conclusion, and his sister tells him so. Dream has set a lot of things in motion throughout the story, and there are some explicit reasons for what happened at the end of this volume, but many of Dream’s preparations predate those final reasons. The story itself remained a bit vague for me.

In any case, he’s always interesting, and the focus is on him in every scene he appears in. He’s moody and depressed from the start, and I think that Gaiman slowly filled in the reasons why. He himself would say that he is too occupied with his responsibilities to care about others but on some occasions he simply doesn’t seem to understand others. I said above that he’s cold and inhuman, and sometimes he is and sometimes he isn’t, just like dreams are sometimes pleasant and sometimes cruel. His character has depths but his development is subtle, where slight variations in his stoic behavior are telling. Sandman himself remained a bit of a mystery all the way through. The story is strong enough to enjoy once I accepted the artwork. But I don’t have a good feeling for what is industry standard for the imprint that The Sandman was part of.

I have to say, none of the artwork for The Sandman has impressed me over its entire run. My guess is that since Gaiman wrote a rather long story this time, DC needed an artist who could produce a lot of pages in a shorter time, and this is the result. It looks too simple and stylised in an annoying way with too many blocky faces and flattened perspectives. He took the mountain of material that he had created, and put it all together in surprising ways. The shape of a story can be made out when we look back at the whole of it, but also many loose ends that stick out. I think that the answer is a little bit of both. My big question is whether Gaiman had worked it all out this way from the start, as the experience of reading the series feels very much like a collection of many individual tales which Gaiman came up with in the moment. In fact, so many things come together that half of it you hadn’t even expected to be relevant. The three Fates, also known as the Kindly Ones, make sure that it all ends in tears. More and more, the story starts to resemble an old Greek tragedy now.

In this volume, the interpersonal coldness of Dream catches up with him, and his distancing from human affairs. Characters from earlier stories show up again, like Rose Walker, Lucifer, Cluracan and Loki. The longest Sandman volume and an important one, where all the various plot-threads, side-tracks and set-ups of the previous 8 volumes merge towards a conclusion.

The Sandman, Vol. 9 by Neil Gaiman