This could have been its own story very easily if you took Morpheus out. But I thought that Morpheus really should have bad a bigger part to play. I liked that Gaiman wanted to give other characters within his massive world some spotlight. I liked seeing Barbie get a bit of her own agency in this tale, though I do admit that the severe lack of Morpheus outside of a couple moments was a little disappointing. Gaiman builds a whole new fantasy world, and even within the limited scope of this arc I felt like I got a sense of what kind of place this was. Barbie finds herself going into a dreamscape in which she is a princess of a kingdom that is being threatened by a malevolent entity known as The Cuckoo, and while she is unconscious, her neighbors want to help bring her back. Wanda is trans and we are going to talk about her a LOT in a bit). Now Barbie is living in New York City in an apartment complex with a number of quirky neighbors, including a lesbian couple and a trans woman named Wanda (the description says ‘drag queen’, but that’s not accurate. By the end of that arc things weren’t going so well for them. She and Ken were other residents in the house that Rose Walker lived in, and functioned as a cheeky nod to Barbie dolls. In this story, instead of having a focus on Morpheus or any of the Endless, we focus on the character of Barbie, one of the side characters in “The Doll’s House”. I will start with what I did like about “A Game of You”. But I was happy to go back in, as it’s always kind of fun to see Gaiman tinker with other characters and build upon past stories and plot points that didn’t seem relevant in the moment. I honestly had NO memory of this collection on this re-read, which didn’t really bode well for how well I connected to it the first time around.

But now we’re back in, and I have revisited “A Game of You”, a collection that has been both lauded as a fan favorite, and also been criticized in more recent years. Review: Since “The Sandman” series has now slipped mostly into full fantasy, we got a small break from it during Horrorpalooza.

This story stars Barbie, who first makes an appearance in THE DOLL’S HOUSE and now finds herself a princess in a vivid dreamworld. Stir vigorously with a hurricane and Morpheus himself and you get this fifth installment of the SANDMAN series. Book: “The Sandman (Vol.5): A Game of You” by Neil Gaiman, Shawn McManus (Ill.), Colleen Doran (Ill.), Bryan Talbot (Ill.), George Pratt (Ill.), Stan Woch (Ill.), & Dick Giordano (Ill.)īook Description: Volume Five of New York Times best selling author Neil Gaiman’s acclaimed creation THE SANDMAN collects one of the series’ most beloved storylines.Take an apartment house, add in a drag queen, a lesbian couple, some talking animals, a talking severed head, a confused heroine and the deadly Cuckoo.

The sandman vol 5 a game of you