The Sandman Omnibus Vol. 1-3

The Sandman, collected as a pack of 3 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. The Sandman Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the first half of Neil Gaiman's landmark series, the story of Dream of the Endless, ruler of the realm of sleep, from his captivity and escape through the rebuilding of his kingdom. It is horror, myth, history and literary fantasy in one voice, and it made comics respectable as literature: issue #19, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," became the first comic ever to win a World Fantasy Award. Painted covers by Dave McKean, art by Sam Kieth, Kelley Jones, P. Craig Russell and more. The foundational Vertigo masterpiece in a single oversized volume. The Sandman ran for seventy-five issues between 1989 and 1996 and is the book that proved comics could be sold to people who did not read comics. This half contains Brief Lives, Worlds' End and The Kindly Ones, which is where the whole series turns out to have been a tragedy with a fixed ending all along. The Wake closes it. Gaiman planned the finish from early on and refused to continue past it, which is why the series holds together as a novel rather than a run. The third Sandman omnibus gathers everything Neil Gaiman wrote around the main series: the prequel, the spin-offs and the two stories about Death. Overture is the prequel Gaiman wrote twenty years later with J.H. Williams III, explaining the exhaustion that led to Morpheus' capture in issue #1, and it is some of the most beautiful art ever printed in a superhero-adjacent comic. The Death stories are also the most accessible entry point to the whole mythology.