A Sandman Fan Art Gallery featuring Morpheus, Lord of Dreams
Neil Gaiman's
The Sandman is the single greatest comic series ever written, and if you don't agree, fight me! In case you've never stopped to appreciate just how amazing this series really is, pause for a moment to reflect on these points:
- The widespread acceptance of the series' literary merit marked the beginning of mainstream comics' entry into mainstream culture in the early nineties, which, in turn, lead to the rise of nerd dominance of media we enjoy today.
- Many female comic fans cite it as the series that drew them into the culture. (Gaiman once joked that Sandman was a "sexually transmitted" fandom that boys passed onto their girlfriends.)
- Sandman was a massively popular comic book, and it didn't center around superheroes. Once Gaiman had bucked the convention, many other artists followed suit, making it acceptable and eventually even stylish to write comics without capes.
- Sandman was the first popular series to prominently feature openly gay characters in substantive roles, rather than a topic-of-the-week capacity.
- The success of the series made Neil Gaiman a household name, and let's face facts, the man is a cultural treasure.
- Finally, Sandman seriously raised the bar for comics as art. It looked like no other comic that had come before it, and to this day, it remains one of the most visually striking titles ever penned.
For all of these reasons and more, this week we celebrate our cult-like adoration of Neil Gaiman's oeuvre just ahead of his fifty-fifth birthday by rounding up some of the best Morpheus fan art to be found on the web, and folks, there was a LOT of fan art to sift through. As ever, if we've mis-credited a piece or overlooked a piece you think should be included in this gallery, drop us a link in the comments below!
