oh, mama raised me well

so since i finished the original sandman run last week, i decided to finally delve into the expanded universe stuff that's been being put out over the last couple year

i'd read the two death tpb's, which i both adore, quite some time ago. i'll probably revist them, but some stuff in them hits close to home (tho tbf there's a lot of little things in sandman that hit close to home in different ways). i haven't read dream hunters or the thessaly books or the lucifer series, tho. so i'm kind of skipping around

(i also feel like i should go back and start locke and key over again b/c i DID read the first couple gn's but not much past that and i know there's a sandman crossover, sooooo)

(tony also bought me, for my birthday, the key to hell from the pin collection that got put out for locke and key, so i feel obligated now lolol)

i think back when i originally finished sandman i wasn't too keen about a new dream - which feels typical when you spend ten volumes with a character over their development arc and then they are simply gone. but i am interested in daniel as dream and how he interacts with things - a being the same as morpheus but also not

re-reading sandman felt like an intimate experience, none of my other friends have read it, so it very much feels like it's one of those special things that's just mine, which is fine. but reading the new stuff is all unknown to me! completely new! it feels less restrained, in a way? the introduction of dora, daniel's disappearance (different than dream's disappearance that opens the original book) and the feeling that something is not quite right.

i finished re-reading sandman today (blew through the last three tpb's on my work shift) and it's still a masterpiece

i can't remember if i read it a time between the first time i read it (in the late nineties, finding it hidden in plain sight at my hometown library) and now (another library, naturally). i THINK i may have, but i can't recall for sure

i forced myself to take my time with it. when i first read it, i devoured it, blew through it, and missed SO much. didn't make connections between the characters that come and go, how the story intertwined around them. but this time i MOSTLY did. a few that came up at the end i had to double back and remember who they were from the very first book, a name i'd left behind

it made more sense now, i understood how the pieces fit together, at least

even knowing that dream dies doesn't change the heaviness and the suspense of the books/issues that precede that. the destruction of the dreaming by the furies is no less brutal or foreboding than if i didn't know. i think the knowing almost makes it moreso - an ending will happen here and you must prepare for it, however you see fit