I’m finally getting around to reading Sandman at the moment and frankly I’m finding it to be a bit overrated – but considering the way everyone from Ellison to King fawns over it in each volume’s introduction, that’s easy enough. I guess it was a much bigger deal in the 90’s when it was fresh and perhaps unique; at this point I just see how Gaiman has re-used a lot of the motifs over the years. (American Gods is practically a pastiche.) Also the art quality is pretty shabby sometimes, but I guess that’s why they’re releasing the “remastered editions”.
Are the other spinoffs worthwhile? (There sure are a lot of them.)
Finished reading it a week ago, absolutely loved it. 
Sandman started in the 80s around the same time as Watchmen, Dark Knight, etc., making it actually much more of a big deal at the time. It’s hard to imagine now but overall comics were shit at that time.
I cannot disagree more with the positive review of this article. As a huge Sandman fan I had been waiting for something like this for years and years. This series failed on numerous fronts and was a huge disappointment. It falls into Gaiman (whom I adore) meandering around and yet not really building towards anything. Sandman meets some members of his family he’s never met before, which should have been incredible, and yet these characters felt thrown together and overly simplistic. Worse, they don’t fit into the carefully crafted world of the Endless at all. Some of this work reminds me of misses by the great Grant Morrison, where he goes so meta he ends up saying very little at all. The ending does seem clever at first, but again it feels almost lazy and doesn’t really have those carefully crafted threads that made the original series so enthralling.
One of my critiques about BoingBoing is occasionally the reviews seem more like shills, paid advertising. This one sure did.
There are just a lot of representations that were harder to find in media at the time as the early books were largely pre-internet.
I agree somewhat, as I’ve been rereading the omnibus and don’t find it quite as captivating, but it still holds up for the most part for me. There is still a lot of wonderful mystery and whimsy woven throughout the whole thing.
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