The Sandman Presents: Taller Tales

In The Sandman series, Neil Gaiman created and recreated a vast number of characters to populate his dream kingdom, the place where everyone and everything goes to dream. It's little surprise that some of these characters have spun off their own stories and, in this collection of shorter tales, we see a number of characters from The Sandman books including Merv Pumpkinhead, Thessaly, Lucien the Librarian and Nuala.

Writer Bill Willingham is a mostly worthy successor to Gaiman, treating the characters with wit and charm. His dialogue is particularly skilled, seamlessly fitting his version of their speech in with what you may remember from the original series.

However, we felt he fell down in terms of his treatment of the nature of Gaiman's Dreaming. Willingham implies that the process of creating dreams is by Hollywood-like studios, with actors and directors, which we felt contravened the mythical, magical feel that Gaiman instilled in it. Instead, under Willingham, it all feels quite humdrum and everyday.

The artwork is fun, especially in utilising the skills of so many artists to clever effect in a couple of the stories. One, for example, is a road-trip style journey through the land of dream, where different locations are drawn by different artists.

This is a fun book, though it needs to be taken as a bit of light relief by Sandman fanatics, and won't make much sense to anyone unfamiliar with the original Sandman stories. It's entertaining but ultimately a little shallow, which is perhaps not what fans of the Sandman are likely to be looking for.

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