And here it is. Season Of Mists was the first Sandman storyline I was in on from the start. By now I'd read Doll's House in collected form, and the stories in Dream Country in their issues. It would be a while yet before Preludes And Nocturnes got collected, but I didn't appreciate then what a neat piece of writing the summary at the start of the Doll's House collection was. I was thrilled to see Mike Dringenberg back on art - I'd formed the idea of him as the definitive Sandman artist, but i wasn't to know he was only doing the prologue and epilogue. I didn't love Kelley Jones' art, but I wouldn't deny his artistry, and of course we also got Matt Wagner for that unexpected boarding-school story, complete with Death in jogging get-up trying to cope with the sudden influx of dad people.

Season Of Mists sets out the overall theme of the whole Sandman epic had we but eyes to see it. A lord of a domain gets fed up of his responsibilities and decides to quit. As simple as that. Of course, Lucifer is not a good person and once he makes up his mind he goes ahead and does it, never mind the consequences. Morpheus, though, we are reminded, is not a good person either. A good person does not sentence a woman he loves to thousands of years in hell because she rejects him. But because he has changed, once this has been pointed out to him, he tries to, belatedly, do the right thing. it is this new-born sense of a right thing and the seriousness he treats his own responsibilities that makes what Lucifer does unthinkable for him. Nonetheless what has been set in motion will have consequences, not all of them good or fair. Rules and consequences are hugely important in Sandman, and they can seem arbitrary, unfair and even evil to people caught up in them. Dream might have improved in some ways since his imprisonment, but he is not always a nice person, nor would he want to be.

A Game Of You reinforces this idea. Barbie, lost and adrift in new York, her identity shifting, dreamless while the Cuckoo takes over the world she created. The Cuckoo does terrible things, but is not evil - it's dangerous. She is what she is. Like Thessaly and Dream, she doesn't change and acts according to her nature, unlike Barbie and Wanda, who are shifting their identities in different ways. But we know Dream has changed too, ins spite of himself - and what does that imply?

So the evil villain of the story gets what she wants and escapes having done terrible things. Meanwhile, because of seemingly arbitrary rules of Thessaly's witchcraft, Wanda remains in the apartment to face the storm. How can any of that be fair? It isn't. It's just the way things work out. There will be more of this.

All of these are thoughts on rereading the series from the start (so far) for the first time since it came to an end. I don't know if I ever reread the whole thing in one go - my copy of Season Of Mists isn't on the shelf, maybe I was waiting to replace it before tackling it from the start. Who knows? I get the impression A Game Of You isn't the most popular story in the Sandman epic, but I like it a lot, in part because it seems to grow out of Barbie's unexpectedly rich, vibrant and beautiful dream in A Doll's House, but Colleen Doran's reworking of part three, which was, frankly, terrible in the original issue, is a revelation, and the whole story reads beautifully in one sitting, though you have to roll your eyes at the fates of the trans and the black character, which sticks out a mile now.

The stand-alone stories are uniformly excellent. I love the historical tales, particularly Thermidor, a real favourite for me. Johanna Constatine trying to smuggle a head out of Revolutionary France at the height of the Terror. Genius. (For some reason the issue didn't ship to my comic shop and I never got a copy and it was long time before I read it - it might even have been after the Orpheus special came out.)

Also here are the Death and Sandman galleries, a Desire story drawn lividly by John Bolton, the story that accompanied the Dream statue and the script for an issue of Season Of Mists, in which Gaiman remarks offhandedly that Lucifer deserved his own comic. Mike Carey went and proved him right on that count.