The Sandman in 2025: Legacy, Controversy & Collectors
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Neil Gaiman’s Sandman occupies a strange place in modern comics in 2025. It remains a landmark, one of the defining works of its era, but it is no longer a simple or comfortable recommendation.
For more than thirty years, Sandman felt settled, canonized, almost beyond debate. It was the book you could hand to a curious friend, a student, or someone who “doesn’t read comics” and say: this is what the medium can do at its best. It stood alongside Watchmen and Maus as one of the rare graphic narratives that moved easily between comic shops, university syllabi, and living-room bookshelves.
That status has not disappeared in 2025, but it has been complicated. Rereading Sandman is no longer a neutral act. The story on the page has not changed, but the story around it has, and that shift alters how the work feels in your hands.
When Sandman launched in 1989, DC was already testing the limits of what a mainstream publisher could release. The shockwaves of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns had shown that superhero comics could be grim, self-aware, and formally ambitious. Sandman took a different route. Rather than pushing superhero tropes further, it stepped sideways out of them.
Masks and vigilantes fall away almost immediately. Dream is not a hero in any conventional sense; he is an abstraction given form, the ruler of stories and sleep. Around him orbit the Endless — Death, Desire, Delirium, Despair — not as sidekicks, but as personified forces with their own contradictions. From the beginning, the series signals that it is not interested in endless continuity. This is a story that knows it will end.
That decision matters. Across seventy-five issues and a constellation of specials, Sandman unfolds like a tragedy. Dream is captured, escapes, rebuilds his realm, and slowly reveals a fatal flaw: an inability to change. The question is never whether he has power — he always does — but whether power can coexist with responsibility toward others. The answer the series keeps circling is uneasy and costly.
Formally, Sandman refuses to stay still. Horror gives way to historical fiction, then to Shakespeare, then to quiet human drama. Prose pieces, fairy tales, and metatextual interludes sit alongside more conventional genre chapters. Even where some dialogue or representation shows its age, the book’s constant shifting of scale and form keeps it alive.
Beneath that formal play, however, Sandman is obsessed with control.
The series opens with Dream as a prisoner, locked in a basement and stripped of his tools. Everything that follows echoes that image. His authority over the Dreaming is absolute, and with it comes judgment: who is punished, who is forgiven, who is allowed to leave, and who remains trapped.
Again and again, the book returns to different forms of captivity. Some characters are literally imprisoned. Others are trapped by addiction, family structures, trauma, or expectations they never chose. Many are caught inside stories written for them by others, roles that feel inevitable because everyone around them reinforces them. One of Sandman’s sharpest insights is that power is often quiet — a structure so familiar it passes for nature until someone resists it.
For years, this focus on power and its abuses fueled Sandman’s reputation as a progressive work. Readers and critics pointed to its attention to trauma and marginalization, to queer and trans characters, to women and outsiders treated as full subjects. Sandman was often cited as proof that Gaiman “understood” consent, harm, and responsibility.
That is precisely what makes rereading it now so unsettling.
No story illustrates this better than “Calliope”. On the surface, it is one of Sandman’s clearest moral statements. A blocked writer imprisons a muse and repeatedly rapes her to fuel his creativity. His career flourishes because of that violence. The story frames him as monstrous, his success inseparable from abuse, and his punishment as a grim form of poetic justice.
For years, the reading seemed straightforward: a critique of rape culture and the romantic myth of the suffering male genius. Placed alongside real-world testimonies describing coercion, manipulation, and sexual violence involving Gaiman, the story becomes harder to sit with. The text has not softened; the reader’s position has shifted. Questions that once felt abstract now feel immediate. Where does exposure end and proximity begin?
There is no single answer. What is clear is that “Calliope” no longer exists in isolation. It demands to be read alongside knowledge of who wrote it and what is now alleged about him. That context does not erase the story’s critique, but it reshapes the emotional contract between reader and text.
Other parts of Sandman shift in similar ways. The Doll’s House turns the invasion of inner life into literal horror. A Game of You grapples, imperfectly but earnestly, with gender, identity, and bodily autonomy. Brief Lives circles neglect and abandonment, asking what happens when powerful figures move on and leave others to absorb the damage.
Taken together, these stories once functioned as proof of moral awareness. After the accusations, that assumption is harder to sustain. The empathy on the page collides with unease off the page, producing tension rather than reassurance.
From the industry’s perspective, the response has followed a familiar pattern. Publishers and studios are not courts of law; they are managers of risk. As accusations accumulate under serious journalistic scrutiny, projects slow, messaging changes, and distance is created.
For DC, this recalibration is delicate. Sandman is too central to vanish quietly. It remains a pillar of the backlist, a permanent bookstore presence, and a gateway comic for new readers. What changes is not availability, but framing. Marketing leans more toward the collective nature of the work. The artists and collaborators move closer to the foreground. Gaiman’s name remains, but it is no longer an uncomplicated asset.
The Netflix adaptation embodies this contradiction. The series exists largely because Gaiman’s name once signaled trust. That same name now introduces discomfort. Enjoying the show means negotiating the awareness that viewership still feeds a system that rewards its creator.
Which brings us back to the familiar question: can we separate the art from the artist? In practice, the Gaiman case shows how blunt that question is. The more honest one is how we live with the tension.
Some readers step away entirely. Some keep what they already own but avoid new purchases. Others turn to libraries or second-hand copies. Some continue reading Sandman while refusing to romanticize its author. None of these responses is perfect or universal. What matters is not consensus, but honesty.
Pretending nothing has changed is no longer credible. Pretending the work never mattered is equally false.
One way forward is to treat Sandman not as an untouchable monument, but as a layered cultural object. It contains genuine insight into grief, change, and vulnerability. It also carries fantasies of control and the imprint of an author whose public image has fractured. Both things can be true at once.
Re-centering the collaborative nature of the work is part of that process. Sandman is not only “by Neil Gaiman”. It is shaped by Sam Kieth’s early instability, Mike Dringenberg’s anatomy, Kelley Jones’s gothic excess, Jill Thompson’s fluidity, Charles Vess’s lyricism, Dave McKean’s visual language, Todd Klein’s lettering, and the invisible labor of editors and production staff. The myth of the solitary genius has always flattened that reality; the current moment exposes how fragile and dangerous that myth can be.
In 2025, Sandman is still a great comic. It is also a difficult one. The ease with which it used to be handed to anyone — “here, you’ll love this” — has faded. Rereading or recommending it now means acknowledging the shadows at its edges. If that makes the experience less comfortable, it may also make it more honest.
Should you still collect Sandman in 2025?
Probably yes — but not in the same way as ten years ago.
Sandman has clearly moved out of its expansion phase and into something closer to a legacy phase. It is no longer an IP driven by the promise of future adaptations or hype cycles. Its value now sits elsewhere: in its historical importance, its formal ambition, and the craftsmanship that went into it.
For collectors, that shift matters.
The books that continue to make sense are the ones anchored in permanence rather than momentum. Early first prints and genuine keys — Sandman #1, #8, #19 — still hold their place as cultural markers. High-end editions like the Absolutes, Omnibus volumes, and well-produced archival hardcovers feel aligned with how the series is now read: as a work to be kept, revisited, and contextualized.
There is also growing interest in the material aspects of Sandman that extend beyond authorship. Dave McKean’s covers, Todd Klein’s lettering, original art and production elements all remind us how collaborative the series really was — and offer a way of collecting that focuses on craft rather than personality.
Where caution is warranted is at the entry level. Discovery editions, casual reprints, or speculative buying tied to screen adaptations no longer carry the same logic they once did. The series isn’t building toward a new peak; it has already reached one.
It’s also noticeable that many collectors now prefer the secondary market. For some, that’s a practical choice. For others, it’s a way of framing their interest as preservation rather than promotion. Whether one agrees with that reasoning or not, it reflects a real shift in how Sandman is being approached.
In short, collecting Sandman today is less about chasing what comes next and more about deciding what is worth keeping.
It’s no longer a question of momentum.
It’s a question of curation.