The best Sandman stories to read after watching the Netflix series

Neil Gaiman’s The SandmanIt is multi-splendored. This comic is part pulp horror comic, part urban fantasy comic, and it features many mythological and Shakespearean cameos. It begins as a story of Morpheus, immortal King of Dreams. His quest for redemption becomes something bigger: it is a story on the nature of stories and how they relate to humankind.

This original series of 75 issues, as well as its many spinoff books and series, are a rich anthology with beautifully illustrated stories and vividly written stories. They range from soul-stirring to bone-chilling.

To celebrate the much-anticipated live-action television adaptation of The Sandman, which premiered this weekend on Netflix, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite volumes and issues from the comic for those looking to explore the universe of the original series in more detail. Have a great night and happy reading.

24 Hours (Issue #6)

Image: Neil Gaiman, Mike Dringenberg/DC Comics

The SandmanIt began its existence as a horror comic, but it grew into something more. “24 Hours” is the horror version of Sandman At its peak: despicable, haunting and upsetting. A one-act-play in which diner patrons go insane together.

The story is mostly stand-alone: John Dee, a D-List DC Comics villain, has obtained Dream’s ruby, which contains much of his powers to realize the dreams of others. Dee already has a dark soul and the ruby further corrupts him, making his body look ghoulish. Recently freed from imprisonment, Dee slinks into a diner and makes its patrons his first victims — using the ruby’s powers to manipulate their desires and warp them into monsters, or subdue them into servitude and adulation.

It all started from the beginning SandmanThis makes it very clear that dreams as well as nightmares go hand in hand and can’t exist apart from the other. “24 Hours” applies that rule to the sort of dreams we have when awake: secret ambitions, desires, and fame. They are the stuff we build our lives on, but they also our undoing — and the most frightening thing about them is that we don’t need the cruel supernatural push of John Dee to be consumed by them. —Joshua Rivera

The Sound of Her Wings (Issue No. 8)

Image: Neil Gaiman, Mike Dringenberg/DC Comics

The issue is not available in any other format The SAndman stands out as more definitive in my mind than issue 8, “The Sound of Her Wings.” This has very little to do with the particulars of the story itself, which alone registers as a more or less minor aside in the larger story of Dream’s return to power after a century of imprisonment. “The Sound of Her Wings” is significant because it marks the point in which the then-fledgling fantasy comic finally found its own voice, or rather, the moment when Neil Gaiman stopped trying so hard to write a DC Comics story and instead allowed himself to fully write a Neil Gaiman story. Take it from Gaiman himself, who said in a recent interview, “I’m incredibly fond still of ‘The Sound of Her Wings,’ the first meeting of Death, because that is the first time I felt like I sounded like me.”

The issue follows Dream who, listless in the wake of his mission to recover his lost symbols of office, follows his sister — the anthropomorphic personification of death — as she performs her duty of ushering the recently deceased into the “sunless lands” of the afterlife. It’s a medley of tones, at once whimsical and melancholic, macabre and life-affirming, heartrending and achingly poignant. “The Sound of Her Wings” is a the story of an immortal being gaining perspective through an up-close observation of humanity and a reaffirmed grasp of the value and meaning of both life and death. —Toussaint Egan

Men of Good Fortune (Issue #13)

Image: Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli/DC Comics

“Men of Good Fortune” has one of my favorite premises for what’s essentially a pretty basic short story: In 1389, Robert “Hob” Gadling, a loud, brash tavern patron, is boasting to all who will hear about his latest idea. Death, he says, is “a mug’s game,” something that people only do because everyone else does it, and they’re all suckers for it. But Hob Gadling, he’s no sucker like the rest of us. He’s just not going to die.

Death, her sister Dream, and their brother are also in the Tavern. They decide that it would be fun to see Hob keep his word. So Dream sits down and calls Hob on his bluster, saying if Hob intends to not die, he’ll have to tell Dream about it, and meet him at the same pub in 100 years. So that’s what they do, for centuries.

Michael Zulli brought this story to life, and his rich pencils would be reappear all throughout. The Sandman’s run, “Men of Good Fortune” does something The Sandman’s stand-alone short stories were uniquely good at: taking the cosmic everlasting scale of the Endless and using it to make smaller stories resonate that much more. For all of his power and wonder, Dream’s story is only compelling for the ways it intersects with ours, even if all he does is walk into a bar and exit with a friend. —JR

Seasons of Mists Vol. 4)

Image: Neil Gaiman, Kelley Jones/DC Comics

Warning! Spoiler Alert for the upcoming Season of The SandmanGwendoline Chrissy as Lucifer shows that the creative group is keen to expand on the role. That would be a way to continue the Season of Mists storyline where Lucifer exiles all hell-bound souls of the dead, as well demons, from the scene. Dream is then given the key. It’s a particularly sophisticated revenge scheme, aimed straight at Dream’s unbudging sense of duty: He can’t walk away from the responsibility of owning hell, but as it turns out, it’s a valuable piece of unreal estate, and everyone from defunct godly pantheons to the forces of Chaos wants it, and wants to bribe or blackmail or murder him to get it.

Dream is the way he navigates through the circumstances Season of Mists We learn a lot more about him and his ways of handling his responsibilities. However, the true joy of the arc lies in learning more about the characters. Sandman cosmos — about the key players, how they work and what they want, and what intrigue between heaven, hell, and the courts of Faerie looks like. —Tasha Robinson

The Brief Life (Vol. 7)

Image: Neil Gaiman, Jill Thompson/DC Comics

The complete contains 10 volumes with very few duds. SandmanThey are all slightly different. None of these comics combine the best aspects of every aspect of the comic like vol. 7, Short Lives. There’s Endless family drama. The Waking World. The Waking World. Funny and sometimes disturbing interactions between mortals, immortals. An intelligent talking dog and an irritable severed head.

Best of all, it’s a road trip story about two estranged siblings looking for a third, and the siblings are simultaneously nigh-omnipotent beings beyond the ken of man and don’t know how to drive a car. —Susana Polo

An Epilogue, Sunday Mourning (Issue #73)

Image: Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli/DC Comics

Character is the best thing about you The Sandman is Hob Gadling, the Englishman from the 1300s who swore he would never die and then didn’t. Each of the feature issues are excellent in their own ways. I have a particular fondness for his final issue. In it, a guy born in medieval times travels to Renaissance fairs and becomes homesick over every thing. Of course there’s an emotional core to the story about Hob’s unflagging zest for life and his own grief at outliving everyone he’s ever loved — but also, every time I go to a Renaissance faire, I have Hob Gadling in my head, complaining that the beer is served cold, nothing is covered in shit, and there’s no one walking around with untreated face tumors. —SP

The Sandman: The Overture (Limited Series).

Image: Neil Gaiman, J.H. Williams III/Vertigo

While the 6-issue limited series was published in six issues, The Sandman: The Overture Serves as an instant prologue to issue one Sandman, it’s best read as an epilogue to the 10-volume series. Overture details the story of the “great battle” that left Dream in the weakened state we find him in “Sleep of the Just,” chronicling his journey to a distant galaxy to investigate the murder of one of his aspects by a renegade star whose madness has metastasized into a “dream vortex” that threatens all of existence.

It’s a sweeping odyssey across a vast cosmos teeming with primordial oddities and strange allies, rendered through the impeccable visual storytelling of J.H. Williams IIIBatwoman, Promethea), whose grandiose widespread panels and layouts evoke the sum total of the original series’ artistic ambitions in breathtaking detail. The Sandman: The Overture is a beautiful elliptical bookend to a saga over a quarter century in the making and a brilliant capstone to Neil Gaiman’s magnum opus. —TE