The opening story, Proposition Player, is the longest (130+ pages) and most interesting. I don’t know what the uninitiated would make of these, with their injokes and unexplained walk-ons, but the stories stand up by themselves, especially the 60 or so pages of Thessaly the witch. It’s a collection of Other Stuff, including a number of adventures of minor characters from the Sandman universe. Bill Willingham is best known for his series of comics, Fables. This is hefty hardback full of horror comedy. I particularly liked The Thessaliad and Thessaly: Witch for Hire because Thessaly is kind of a bad ass, but the shorts about the Dreaming were wonderful, and the Danny Nod library adventurer story was so amusing that I'm going to be laughing over that one for years to come.

It also helps that these storyarcs (no matter how short lived) are actually quite fantastic reads. For someone (like me) who likes to collect all of the stories by her favourite authors, collections like this are a lot more handy than trying to find the single issues of the comics (often years after the fact). Most of them don't last long enough to have enough issues to make up a graphic novel (due to their lack of selling power), but collecting a selection of short runs by a well-known author can work from a marketting perspective. There should definitely be more compilations of this sort published, not only because there's so much god material out there to be collected, but also because it's hard to find copies of some of the one-shot story arcs that get published.

The Thessaliad by Bill Willingham