So why did I want to talk to him at all, you ask? Well, in the comics desert wasteland that was the 1990s, his comic The Sandman was a bright spot in a rather dull universe. It was one of my favorite comics of that decade. Preludes and Nocturnes • The Doll's House • Dream Country • Season of Mists • A Game of You • Fables and Reflections • Brief Lives • Worlds' End • The Kindly Ones • The Wake

There are about four hundred billion cells in the human brain - all it takes is for one to misfire and start a reaction where a cancer forms and kills the human. There are about four hundred billion galaxies in the universe - one star has gone mad and the madness is spreading like cancer. The whole of creation is at stake. It’s up to Morpheus the Dream King to save the universe. I really appreciated all the aspects of this story. From the great cameo appearances by different members of the Endless (Dream has a truly fascinating family) to my very first introduction to Dream's mother and father-this was a welcome addition to my Sandman collection. The title gives it away as an "overture" in music is the opening part to an opera or it can mean an introduction for something more substantial (and the entire run of Sandman is quite substantial). The story and prose alone would have been enough to merit this a 3-4 star rating alone. But in conjunction with this truly beautiful artwork makes this a sublime comic. It's the kind of book I will grab off my shelf and show it to my friends. Expansive and atmospheric, jammed with brainy, contemplative moments and dry humor…. Gaiman’s vivid, wild imagination is grounded in Williams’ and Stewart’s beautiful, captivating artwork…. Sandman fans will surely be elated not only by the return to the story but also by the stunning, gorgeous artwork, which outshines the original.”­­­— Booklist (starred review) Do you know that feeling you get when you listen to your favourite album or piece of music and you’re just wiped out? You sit there. You think. You imagine. You dream. It’s cathartic. It’s purifying and cleansing; it’s almost liberating. Do you know what I mean? This piece of profoundness; this thing of beautiful art was that and more. The story itself is quite successful at what it sets out to do. It sets the scene for the first volume of Sandman, and it sheds a bit more light on the Endless family. We meet their parents, who are about as sane as you might expect. And the story is appropriately big, with the fate of the universe at stake, and deceptively intimate, as its the sort of story that largely takes place with a very small group on stage at any given time. Naturally, I loved the way Gaiman wrote it, and I don't think Sandman fans will be at all disappointed.However, I didn’t expect what I got in the sense of storyline. Don’t get me wrong. It was a great story, just not the one that I expected taking in account that it was a prequel to the main series. I understood, thanks that Neil Gaiman gave a dictionary meaning of “Overture” that this it’s not only a “beginning” but a show containing the main themes of what is to come. So, I wasn’t surprised to find Daniel here, I won’t detail his role in the main series to avoid critical spoilers. The story centers on why Morpheus found himself so weakened at the beginning of Volume 1: Preludes & Nocturnes that he could be captured by mere humans casting ancient spells. What takes shape is an epic adventure that goes well beyond anything that occurs in the 10 volumes that come afterward. The scope is huge, ranging throughout the universe, time, space, and numerous dimensions. There are very few mortal characters other than a little girl named Hope Beautiful Lost Nebula. The majority consist of immortals like Morpheus (quite a few of him, in fact), his siblings, various alien beings, and even stars themselves. Most interestingly, we meet the parents of the Endless - it didn’t even occur to me that was possible. But these parents are fairly distant from their children - the disfunctionality runs deep here. On his journey Dream encounters multiple aspects of himself forcing a bout of severe reflection and mediation, here forms the core group of an innocent girl rescued and Dreams feline countenance for an intensely personnel adventure. We meet the majority of the Endless, The Corinthian with his toothed eyes, Merv Pumpkinhead, Lucien and even the temperamental forces of the old dears, bless them.

J.H. Williams' art is absolutely stunning. At times, the illustrations will make your head spin - quite literally, if you're not willing to turn the book around a few times to follow some of the more serpentine configurations. A few fold outs invite the reader into the book - as immersive an experience as you are likely to have reading a graphic work. And Dave Stewart's colors are a roiling phantasmagorical dream in vivid color. The difference between this work and so many other graphic novels is that the illustrations and color here were designed. Not just drawn and inked, but designed, carefully. There is a craft happening here that is a ritualistic invocation of the imagination. It is a solemn, nearly worshipful thing to read this work, and utterly immersive. He ends up in this weird area where all the forms of Sandman are. It's a bit like one of those Doctor Who specials where we get to see all the various Doctor Who incarnations at once. Actually, quite a bit of this felt like an ambitious Doctor Who episode. Lots of timey-wimey stuff and the decay of the universe is a common theme in Doctor Who - and Neil Gaiman has written for Doctor Who in the past. Neil Gaiman done a game of words such delicious to read that you can’t do anything else than to be amazed by those sentences.I have two confessions to make: 1) I don't like Neil Gaiman's fiction. I . . . just . . . can't. So kill me. 2) My single experience with Neil Gaiman in person left me feeling a little snubbed. Long story, but I met him at the World Fantasy Convention, where I approached him and tried talking to him, but I found him rather cold and uninterested, constantly looking for important people to talk to. I don't want to go on and on (I could) about the whole experience, but that is the summation of my feelings. I frankly didn't like him much. In fact, I think he was kind of a jerk. The artwork is done by JH Williams III, and he quite simply puts a world (or three) right in your lap and draws it like he's been there, astonishing, the perfect man to collaborate the creative genius that is The Sandman. With Overture, Gaiman sets his thoughts to a prelude and explores the events that lead into the original Sandman series. We see Dream or Morpheus take on a quest of such import that the stakes are simply everything in existence. And while it sounds complex, and it is trippy at times, Gaiman’s written it in an accessible way that you can follow and make sense of. The ending especially is kinda brilliant as Gaiman almost defines Dream as the most powerful being of the Endless. After all, what can you achieve in dreams - everything? And Morpheus controls all the dreams everywhere…

So far, you only have read my complains of that my expectations weren’t to be found in this overture, so you may wonder why such good rating of 4 stars… In the epilogue, Desire reveals to Despair that the successful rescue of the universe was the result of Desire's third attempt to assist Dream. The first two attempts were thwarted by Dream's refusal to accept help, and Desire was able to start over by using Father Time's saeculum, symbolized in the story by a warped timepiece hidden in Mad Hettie's memories.Despite all the unfair shit-talking that's been done about 'Sandman' over the years, criticism about the mediocre-tending-toward-awful artwork that plagues the early-going of the series are legitimate. As unfortunate as it is that between 'Vol. 1 - Preludes and Nocturnes' and 'Vol.4 - Season of Mists', the art is tolerated more than enjoyed, Gaiman's still evolving ideas were strong enough to keep readers interested. The early material has been re-colored, and one issue completely re-inked. The first couple volumes aren't some tedious chore to suffer through; the story just improves dramatically with every chapter. Gaiman settled in by volume 4, and artists Jill Thompson, P. Craig Russell, Jon J. Muth, Charles Vess, Marc Hempel, Teddy Kristiansen, Bryan Talbot, and Michael Zulli made the last 6 of the 10 collected editions into some of the best artistic performances DC produced in the 1990's. Moving from Sam Keith's crude, Wrightson-inspired style to Mike Zulli's meticulous work on 'The Wake' -- the first mainstream comic to use uninked, intricately rendered colored pencils -- is an evolutionary progression that mirrors the journey that Morpheus makes through the series, and in a way, the art balances out. J.H. Williams III displayed such stunning work of art that you can’t do anything else than to be amazed by those images. The Sandman: Overture is the prelude to the entire Sandman saga. Ever wonder why some two-bit magician snared Dream in the 20's? This book takes the long way around but explains things pretty well.

This is considered volume 0 as it comes before the very first Sandman comic Gaiman ever published. But it was written, designed and published AFTER the series was over.The Sandman: Overture is an accounting of events in the world of the Sandman mythos that led up to this imprisonment. I hate to use the term "prequel," as that term is tainted by a couple of really bad examples of retroactive storytelling wherein the original (which occurs later, chronologically) is demeaned by the "prequel". Two movies should clearly demonstrate this: Phantom Menace, and The Hobbit. But I digress. It’s taken two years for Neil Gaiman and his art team to complete the six issue limited series prequel, The Sandman: Overture, but they finally did it! It’s easy to see why it took them so long when the results are so utterly impressive - high quality work takes time but it’s always worth the wait. On an alien world, an aspect of Dream senses that something is very wrong, and dies in flames. In London 1915, while intending to deal with the troublesome nightmare The Corinthian, Morpheus is alerted to the same wrongness and is summoned to an alien world to investigate. I re-entered the world of comics after a 30-year hiatus thanks to fellow FanLit reviewer Brad Hawley’s impassioned Why You Should Read Comics: A Manifesto! and his 10-part essay on Reading Comics. It was clear that Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN series was the gold standard for sophisticated, intelligent comics for adults. Having read Brad’s review of the entire series, Welcome to The Dreaming: An Introduction to THE SANDMAN, I embarked on the 76-volume epic. At least you will know who the parents of the Endless are. That it’s kinda funny since I never thought that The Endless would have parents. Yes, they are call brothers and sisters between them, an implication of being a family, so, I guess that it was “normal”, as normal can be a family where the children are The Endless, that they have a father and a mother, hey even an aunt! I’m not kiddin’!