Fables & Reflections

Morpheus, the King of Dreams, walks through nine mostly self-contained stories, and in many of them he watches more than he acts. Each tale has a different artist, and together they step away from the single long storyline of the earlier volumes in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

The settings span centuries. A self-proclaimed emperor rules in nineteenth-century San Francisco, the French Revolution unfolds, and Augustus reigns in Rome. Marco Polo wanders a desert, and a caliph spends a night in medieval Baghdad.

One story retells the myth of Orpheus and ties it back to the Endless, the family Morpheus belongs to. The stories come from several places: issues 29 to 31, 38 to 40 and 50 of the monthly series, plus the Sandman Special and a short piece from a Vertigo Preview.

This is the sixth Sandman collection, published by DC Comics under its Vertigo imprint, with an introduction by Gene Wolfe. Stories, memory and the cost of holding power recur from tale to tale, and the short length of each piece makes it an easy place to read the series in single sittings.