Creative Staff:
Story: Simon Spurrier
Art: Bilquis Evely
Colors; Mat Lopes
Letterer: Simon Bowland
What They Say:
The unbelievable finale of Simon Spurrier and Bilquis Evely’s Sandman Universe epic is here! The citizens of the Dreaming make their final play against the artificial intelligence that seeks to replace them with cold rationality…and the fate of Dream is revealed!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Though this came out a week prior (digitally and in limited print availability), it took me some time to get to it simply because I was so frustrated by the last issue and how the run has shaped up after such a strong start and so much potential. Simon Spurrier has a lot of talent but his take on the book turned so dialogue-heavy, so complex and difficult to follow as a monthly, that combined with really hard to read lettering ti just turned me away. I absolutely adored it for what he was trying to do and for the gorgeous artwork form Bilquis Evely that would have kept me on it even longer simply because there’s such creativity and imagination used in bringing The Dreaming to life. But the storyline and intention was just so muddled so as to be incomprehensible.
This book ended up being nearly unreadable from the start as it’s been made purely for print readers. The double-page spread has half of it with dialogue going sideways, which if I was on a tablet I could actually turn. But reading on a desktop? No can do. So it was a struggle right from the get-go as we see how bad off the various lands are as control is lost and we see how everything is falling apart across the Dreaming. Thankfully, guided view helps with this book to get us into the details and while there’s a lot of exploration of the big concepts and ideas that make up the various lands of the Dreaming and all that as they shatter and fall apart, it’s just a tough read overall that doesn’t do much for me. If anything, I feel like I’m even less well-read than I already knew I was going by it.
But what we do launch into in the rest of the book helps, even if in the end we just get a glorious reset to how things fans wanted it to be. With the unmaking that’s going on and the AI believing that it is impossible to be stopped, it’s when Dream finally returns from his own project – pulled in by all of this – in order to deal with it. It comes at some cost, largely for Rose and Ivy, but also for Dream himself as after working through tying up loose ends he’s simply back where he started in charge of everything. Perhaps a little wiser, a little more understanding, but also with a group that works the Dreaming that aren’t quite as beholden to him as before. It’s welcome to see the House’s back to normal with some minor changes, to see Matthew flitting to and fro, and especially to see Lucien finally have some real agency. But at the same time, it just feels like this was a far too long and erratic path to go on to get to this point.
In Summary:
This issue frustrated me in a lot of ways as it comes on top of the last couple of books that really just made me want to throw down the whole thing. There are a lot of positives to this ending in that it does get us back to a place where someone can pick up from it and launch into the kinds of stories that we should have been seeing for the past two years. But it’s been such a rough and frustrating ride that I can’t bring myself to invest in the property any further until I read other reviews and only then when it’s wrapped up a storyline in a trade. I’ve loved the artwork for this series but have felt burned by the storytelling and lettering. The book sticks the ending but it was such a wobble in mid-air as to throw me off the whole game.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: April 28th, 2020
MSRP: $3.99