by Eden
The Wake doesn’t really need to do that much — it mostly feels and operates like an epilogue — but it provides Neil Gaiman with the opportunity he needed to close out the story of this incarnation of Dream and look to the next one.
The Kindly Ones is dense. It’s the longest volume of The Sandman, collecting 13 issues (plus one small story from Vertigo Jam). It’s confident, it’s powerful, and mostly, it’s just satisfying that all of this has been leading to this point.
Dream Country is the shortest of The Sandman volumes — it’s just four single-issue stories, plus the script for one of them. But because of that, it’s actually a good sampler of The Sandman. It doesn’t require a lot of prior knowledge (do you know who Dream is? Do you know who Death is? You’re pretty well caught up). To me, it’s where Neil Gaiman actually established what he was doing with The Sandman.