Joe Sanders

This is a book I really wanted to enjoy and recommend but am rather ambivalent about. (I first read "The Sandman Companion" by Hy Bender which I thought an excellent book but also thought it a missed opportunity to go into the detail that The Sandman deserves.) In contrast, my reservation here with "The Sandman Papers" is that the essays go into too *much* detail and are overly pedantic in their focussing on very narrow aspects of The Sandman. I was really hoping for something which took a broader sweep than is done here as opposed to the concentration on minutiae. Perhaps my rating is unfair - ie. I'm penalising the book for not being what it does not claim to be ! - and quite a lot of the different essays are interesting in themselves and academically well written. It just took a lot longer to read this book than it normally would. I'm not averse to academic writings so I can only attribute this to a diminishing interest as I read through the different essays. So, not something I'd recommend everybody go out and read but, if you're really interested in The Sandman, probably worth giving it a try. A worthy effort.… (mehr)

A selection of academic papers concerned primarily with Gaiman's 'Sandman.' If you've read the comics, some of this is a bit tedious: every paper has lots of expository material you already know.

A few of the papers are worthwhile; some tell you nothing you don't know; and a couple are annoyingly obtuse, imposing an unsupportable misreading. But this is typical for any collection of such papers.

The editor should have advised his contributors that the one name by which the story's protagonist is never called is: 'Sandman.' It's surprisingly irritating to see that name used where 'Morpheus' is customary. The editor should also do the kind thing and delete or fix B. Keith Murphy's factually incorrect references to Watchmen, which he has obviously never read.… (mehr)