After reading the first book, it was such a "meh" experience I didn't bother reading any others. Some occult guy traps the dream guy in a glass pot, dream guy escapes and wanders around getting his stuff back, also, his sister is a hot goth chick who happens to be the grim reaper. Later I understood it was peppered with references to other cartoon books, but that eluded me at the time.
Not sure what I'm missing but I just don't get the appeal.
I had the first book at home borrowed from a friend, read it once and thought "hm..". Then reread just like that and thought "hey, this is actually good". Then a third time and thought this was actually genius. Then decided to buy the whole serie.
It took me that long to understand the depth of the text, all the references ( either grabbed from other stories, or from real history), and sometimes realizing all the bits of the story.
And the best part to me: this is exactly reflecting the structure of a dream. It's all a bit weird and blurry, then its deep meaning only appears after careful examination.
My only two gripes are a bad 2.0 sound mix - too much dynamic range, even with compression turned on - and Lucifer was lackluster. Too much “corporate CEO” and not enough fallen angel. Should have pulled in the TV show actor.
But Death, Desire, Matthew, Lucien, even Morpheus himself all rock.
More importantly she doesn’t recognize Morpheus despite working with him.
We watched 1-5 last night and will likely watch 6-10 tonight.
5 was AMAZING. What tension, what dread. All of them are shot brilliantly, with fantastic acting and excellent dialogue.
If you're not a Sandman stan, my advice is to watch episode 1, and then episode 5, skipping 2-4. The first actually-good episode is 6; the Hob Gadling stuff is sort of emblematic of the the comic grows into, so if you like it, you'll like the rest of it.
If you are a Sandman stan, something to note is that they seem to have deliberately severed it from the DC Universe. I'm surprised at how many elements of the first and second book turn out to be been DC tie-ins; for instance, Hector and Lyta Hall in Dolls House were I guess defined by other DC comics? Anyways, they've gone out of their way to cut all that stuff out the series.
I think most of the changes are for the better.
I think the series is fine.
I was way, way into Sandman when I was younger.
This show isn't in my Top N list. I'm curious to see if it gets renewed.
By comparison, the HBO Watchmen series is not only one of the best comic book adaptations of all time, but also one of my favorite TV series of the last 10 years.