Neil Gaiman announces new Sandman Universe line of comics…

It’s been 30 years since Neil Gaiman first launched The Sandman for DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint. The comic — which followed Dream, the well-named personification of dreams, as he tangled with gods, monsters, and humans while exploring the nature of stories and his own self — ran for eight years, and became one of the defining books of the era. Just a few years after Watchmen, The Sandman proved that comic books could be taken seriously as literature (one issue, which retold A Midnight Summer’s Dream, became the first comic to win the World Fantasy Award).

Gaiman has returned intermittently to the world of The Sandman over the years (including for the 2003 graphic novel The Sandman: Endless Nights and the 2013 miniseries The Sandman: Overture), and the character of Dream has shown up in other DC comics here and there. But in honour of the series’ 30th anniversary this year, Gaiman is coming back to the Dreaming in a big way.

The books will be overseen by Gaiman but written and drawn by brand new creative teams. They will pick up story threads and themes from The Sandman while also adding new characters and concepts.

The project kicks off this August with The Sandman Universe one-shot special, which will catch readers up on what’s been happening in Dream’s realm. The most salient fact is that Dream has now gone missing, leaving chaos in his wake. Other important developments include the opening of a rift between worlds, revealing a space beyond the Dreaming. Dream’s official librarian Lucien is still in charge of all the books that were dreamed and never written, but now, one of those books has wound up in the waking world, to be discovered by a group of children. The Dreaming also has an important new resident, now that a House of Whispers has appeared alongside Cain’s House of Mystery and Abel’s House of Secrets.

The Sandman Universe #1 will be plotted by Gaiman but written by Nalo Hopkinson, Kat Howard, Si Spurrier, and Dan Watters, with art by Bilquis Everly and a cover by Jae Lee. Each of those four writers will then go on to explore the special’s various threads in four new series. Artists for the books have not been announced yet.