24 in 48 challenge!: Your Favorite Series post

The current challenge for the 24 in 48 readathon is to post about your favorite series. So... one of my favorite series, which I reviewed before I started a blog, is The Sandman comics series, by Neil Gaiman. It tells the story of Dream of the Endless (aka Morpheus) who rules over the realm of dreams. The other main characters are the rest of the Endless (his siblings, anthropomorphic personifications of various concepts), but there is a large cast of characters, human and otherwise.  I mentioned the series in one of my Top 10 Tuesday posts (Top 10 Platonic Relationships in Books) but my reviews are on GoodReads. I wrote reviews the second time I read the series, which was in 2017. I read it the first time in 2011 (starting with volume 3, which is a good one to start with). Volume 2 would also work, I think. The first volume is maybe not the best place to start; I like it but it’s nowhere near as good as the rest. By the end of volume 4 (Season of Mists) I really loved it. I laughed and cried in all the obvious places. It was fabulous.

It is horror/fantasy, and the main series is ten volumes, of which my favorite is probably Volume 7:Brief Lives.  The series gets pretty gruesome at times, but it’s not the dominant tone of the series; it is, however, disturbing enough that I don't recommend it if you're really averse to horror. (I also really loved vol. 4: Season of Mists and vol. 9: The Kindly Ones.)  There are several spinoffs. My favorite of those is probably The Dream Hunters. There are also several comics in a new series called Sandman Universe, written by other writers.




My favorite character is Morpheus, my second favorite character is either Death or Delirium, and my favorite character who is not one of the Endless is probably Hob Gadling, the man who lives forever for no obvious reason.

My favorite short stories in the series:
Men of Good Fortune (vol. 2, The Dolls House)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (vol. 3, Dream Country)
Thermidor / Ramadan, (vol. 6, Fables & Reflections)
The Dream Hunters (published in its own volume)