The Dreaming, Vol. 3

This series, often meandering, and at times rather flowery, is surely not going to be everyone's taste. And trying to fill Gaiman's shoes with a follow-up to Sandman is far from the easiest of tasks anyway, and perhaps an insurmountable one. But, to my mind, this has improved as it's gone along, and the finale captures some of the mythic scope and metanarrative themes of the former work. It begins with a couple of one-issue stories about the effect on the waking world of events in the Dreaming, which are good, but not spectacular. Those are followed up, however, by the meat of this volume as we discover what's behind events and head towards the finale. There are some unexpected turns along the way, and brief appearances by guest characters that help to raise it up and... well, it may have taken a while to get here, but the pay-off worked for me.