Like other reads, this one is being posted a little while after I’ve finished it. Somehow, this one was a very quick read for me, despite it being about 800-odd pages of comics (plus a large amount of Death pin-ups and cover art). 

Somehow, Volume III of this series appealed to me more than the two previous volumes.

I know! I was surprised too! 

When she was first introduced early in the Sandman series, I had my doubts about Death, but in the two mini-series featuring her here—The High Cost of Living and Time of Your Life, especially the former—I really came to enjoy her as a character. I also rather liked two other stories collected in this volume: Sandman: The Dream Hunters (both versions of it, though the art for the original is really notably striking); and The Sandman: Overture, which is a prequel to the series, but is also, for my money, the most interesting of all the Sandman narratives. Conceptually, Overture is Gaiman stretching his wings in a way I was hoping he’d do all along, and the art is vibrant and colorful and utterly striking. There was less twee and “beautiful sorrow” and more weirdness and sharp edges and blunt honesty and awkwardness, and I didn’t really feel ostentatiously flattered by the book once, which is my preference. 

Where it took me a month to read Volume II, this took me something like 3 days—mostly just a few hours in the afternoon on each of those days. Now it’s back at the library, and I do wonder whether anyone else will sign it out. I was clearly the first to read it—some of the pages were stuck together, they way they sometimes are when they come from the printer—and I had to separate them to read the book. Who knows? Volumes I and II can only be borrowed if you request them out of storage, but this one actually still sits in the stacks… for now.