Sandman

Like seemingly everybody, I'm a Neil Gaiman fan. Old school; I started buying The Sandman with issue #8, and I picked up the complete run of the series in hardcover at a time when I couldn't really afford it.

I also follow the man's blog, and lately he's revealed that DC wants to assemble an Absolute Sandman collection with lots of little goodies and recoloured art.

Recouloured art? Isn't that like George Lucas going back and screwing up the Star Wars movies that he made back when he was a real director? No, says Neil.

Because frankly, the first twenty odd issues of Sandman (in particular, but there’s more running through) were colored for a process that hasn’t been used for twenty years on that old paper stock. And now the paper stock is amazing, the print process is amazing and we’re still using the colors which look worse and worse with every printing. That’s not satisfactory. We’ve always known we needed to recolor the first two graphic novels and maybe the first couple issues of Dream Country ...

I read him saying that sort of thing and was thinking “yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm happy with the editions I have now, I'm not gonna get suckered into being a fanboy sinking even more money into a book I don't really need.”

Then he published a before-and-after sample in his blog.

Zowie. If you have any love for Sandman at all, you have to go see. Neil says:

Leaving aside the crispness of the reproduction here, one thing that's impressed me over and over as we've worked on Absolute Sandman is the number of places where what seemed like poor storytelling on an artist's part turned out to make perfect sense once the colouring was fixed.

Seeing those panels, I believe it.