I saw one of these for sale at my local Evil Corporate bookstore yesterday. Nice, but I already have the Absolute editions. Unless this version has a different ending or something, I’ll pass.
Very nice, but nothing is going to beat the five Absolute volumes currently front and centre of my bookshelves. I can see it as a great budget option for those not able to afford the Absolutes or a great gift for someone new to Sandman.
I don’t know much about this Sandman stuff, but that’s an original printing of Tea with the Black Dragon! That thing was out of print for so long, it took me almost 20 years to get my hands on a copy.
Yeah, to be honest, I’d rather reread Tea with the Black Dragon.
Why can’t they make cheaper versions of these things? Things I can actually buy and haul around with me and read without having to worry about destroying a hundred-dollar investment? An edition like this seems more like something to be stowed on a bookshelf and gazed at adoringly.
Aren’t the lower quality graphic novel versions still around to serve that purpose?
Even those are shockingly expensive, actually.
Comics in general took a turn for the expensive around the time my generation started to look for better quality art, better paper, better writing, etc.
Comics actually have a really terrible cost to duration of enjoyment period; $5 gets you 10-15 minutes of entertainment, at best. Which is largely a function of small amounts of text mixed with art that takes a lot of time to produce.
ooh - a worthy volume to accompany my complete Far Side
I really enjoyed Tea with the Black Dragon, but I haven’t read it in probably 15 years, and it’s somewhere in the back of my attic. Any idea how well it holds up as a book, and how well it works for younger people who weren’t around Silicon Valley in the days it was writing about? (Technically I wasn’t either, since I lived back east and didn’t move here until the early 90s, but I was part of 80s-computer-boom culture and had been here long enough to know the local details by the time I read it.)
So I have owned 3 different editions of the complete Sandman. I purchased the trade paperbacks back when I was reading them for the first time in 1998 or so, I gave those to a friend and upgraded to the rainbow hardcovers, which were nice enough, and most recently I’ve replaced those with the Absolute editions, which are the pride of my graphic novel collection. The general consensus here seems to be that these editions are not nicer than the Absolute ones, which is nice to hear because I don’t want to own a 4th set.
I do hope that we get a 6th Absolute (7th if you include Death) once this year’s new story is complete.
Since I stil have the complete run of the comics and the original trade paperbacks, I’ll probably pass on this.
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