After years of hearing "The Sandman" in the periphery of different conversations, I finally picked up a volume and checked it out. As a starter, Endless Nights (apparently the last collection written for the series?) worked well. I have a basic understanding of the characters as well as ideas for how the series itself must look. What was most interesting, though, was the disparity between each story. 
 This is NOT a novel. This is an anthology of short works. 
 This is NOT a comic, but an exploration of the art form thematically tied to a mythology. 
 This is NOT a stopping point, but rather a starting point. What makes this book so interesting is not the stories (and, truth be told, there are a couple of clunkers in there ... places where Neil Gaiman tried too hard to do something - make a statement? develop a character? - that the end result was much less than it should have been) but the artwork attached to each. It is a starting point for exploring the different artists as much as it is to see if the mythology of The Sandman was interesting enough to investigate further. This is an anthology that explains where graphic novels are/were. This is a quiver of arrows ready to be shot off into the future of the literary form. 
 And yet, it is only one. It worked its magic on me because I am still new to the artform and still looking for the best works. It is very possible that this book would have made less of an impact on me had I read it with a more thorough knowledge of Graphic Novels, but I didn't. And that's what makes it interesting.