How To Read The Sandman/Hellblazer/Vertigo Universe If You Just Want To Love It, 3: The High Cost Of Living

We're a couple of weeks away from Sandman finally coming to television. The previews for it look fantastic. Fingers crossed that this ends up more Good Omens than Neverwhere.

After about a year long break, I dove back into the Vertigo universe, revisiting old favorite stories and reading some for the first time.

The central theme of this season is Death. The member of The Endless. Yes, we have three Morpheus stories, two Lucifer stories, one Lucifer, one Madame Xanadu, and one focused exclusively on Death, but Death of The Endless appears in all but one of these "episodes", even if she just pops up briefly.

Also, if you're only really invested in Morpheus's story, this can be your final season. I have at least one or two more before I'm finished, but this brings an end to the Sandman proper stories.

Season 3:
​The High Cost Of Living

1. Sandman World's End
(Neil Gaiman, Mike Allred, Gary Amaro, Mark Buckingham, David Giardano, Toy Harris, Steve Leialoha, Vince Locke)
Readily available from your local shop or you can order it from Bookshop.org

If you're here for the narrative tale of Morpheus, and the march towards the end of the series, you might not love this volume as much as I do. This is technically a House Of Mystery story (what's that, you ask? well, we'll be seeing more of that next season) that occasionally, but not always features Morpheus. A group of travelers find themselves stranded in an inn where you purchase your food and drinks with stories, so this serves as sort of an anthology of dreams. Each story has a different artist. It's a wonderful read.


2. Lucifer Book One
(Mike Carey, Peter Gross, Ryna Kelly, Dean Ormston, Scott Hampton, Chris Weston, James Hodgkins)
Readily available from your local shop or you can buy it at Bookshop.org

So, last season, Lucifer gave Morpheus the keys to Hell and told him to find someone else to run it. Well, now we catch up with Lucifer and Mazikeen as they have their own fully developed stories to tell. Lucifer is not by Neil Gaiman, but by Mike Carey. And while Sandman is a brilliant tapestry that tells the story of Morpheus from different angles and at different times, Lucifer is one of the best told narrative fantasy stories in comics. Every page leads directly to its conclusion. Every word feels important. It's one of my all-time favorites, and the Mike Carey run is not at all related to the TV shows that are supposedly based on the character. And while I don't remember Morpheus appearing here, Death drops in for a bit, and the events that occured in Sandman that led up to this series are referenced a few times.


3. Madame Xanadu Disenchanted
(Matt Wagner, Amy Reeder, Richard Friend)
currently available on Thriftbooks.org

I'm embarrassed to say I slept on this series when it came out. Madame Xanadu is, like Sandman, a golden age DC character that gets reimagined with her own Vertigo series. It also features Death for a bit, but as cool as that scene is, the series would have been great without it. This volume follows Madame Xanadu from Camelot era Europe to Kublai Khan's dynasty in the Mongolian empire to Revolutionary era France to (sigh) Jack The Ripper era London to the US. There's a lot of interesting class structure in the guise of fantasy here, and just a really well told story by Matt Wagner with Eisner nominated art from Amy Reeder.


4. Swamp Thing Bad Seed
​(Andy Diggle, Enrique Breccia, Martin Breccia)
It's only really affordable on EBay right now if you can't find it at your local store.

This is a mediocre Swamp Thing story that also happens to be a wonderful Hellblazer story. Following the events of the almost unreadably bad Brian K Vaughan run on Swamp Thing (even a brilliant writer like Vaughan has off-times), Diggle tries to piece the story back together by making a buddy/road trip story where John Constantine and the skeletal remains of Alec Holland join up to seek out Abby and then have to do battle with the Alec Holland-free Swamp Thing. Come for the Swamp Thing continuity, stay for the art and the humor.


5. Lucifer Book Two 
(Mike Carey, Peter Gross, Jon J Muth, Dean Ormston, Ryan Kelly)
Hopefully, this will be back in print again soon, but for now, if you can't find it at your local shop, check out Ebay for an affordable copy.

All of the characters and storylines from Book One of Lucifer come together in this volume, which would undoubtedly be a Season Finale for Lucifer. It's epic, emotional, and really well put together. Lucifer and John Constantine would make a hell of a great mythological procedural story. And, yea, Death pops in again.


6. Sandman The Kindly Ones
(Neil Gaiman, Marc Hempel, Richard Case, D'Israeli, Teddy Kristiansen, Glyn Dillon, Charles Vess, Dean Ormstron) 
Readily available at your local shop or you can buy it from Bookshop.org

Like the previous book, a ton of seemingly unrelated Sandman storylines convene here for a steady march towards Morpheus's undoing. Everything changes for everyone involved at the end of this volume. The whole dreaming is altered. It's as intense as the previous Lucifer volume. What follows in the Sandman series is a coda, this is pretty much the climax/final boss fight/resolution of Morpheus's story.


7. Sandman The Wake
(Neil Gaiman, Jon J Muth, Charles Vess, Michael Zulli)
Readily available at your local shop or you can buy it from Bookshop.org

It's probably sacrileige, but this is, in my opinion, by a wide margin, my least favorite of the Sandman stories. It's kind of like how at the end of The Return Of The King movie when there are eight thousand "final" scenes, as every character gets a curtain call, and you realize that the story actually ended an hour ago, and it's just weeping hobbits and disaffected elves waving at the camera for a bit. I debated not including it but it is The End of Gaiman's Sandman run, and it's not terrible, it's just relatively dull compared to the previous volumes.


8. Death Complete Collection
(Neil Gaiman, Chris Bachalo, Marc Buckingham, Michael Dringenberg, P Craig Russell, Malcolm Jones III, Colleen Doran, Dave McKean)
Readily available at your local shop or readily available in hardcover form on Bookshop.org. Hopefully, the paperback edition will be back in circulation soon.

I didn't want to end this season with its weakest episode, so we close with Neil Gaiman's sagas of Death: "The High Cost Of Living" and "The Time Of Your Life", currently collected in one volume. This series is sort of a coda to Sandman: A Game Of You, and even as a standalone is an excellent story.