Note: “As I Go Along” is a new feature in which I review and discuss the best graphic novels and series that I haven’t yet had a chance to read. These are the titles your comic-loving friends have been trying to push into your hands for years, only now I’ll be doing the pushing (or telling you not to bother). The post will include spoilers for those who have not yet read the work.

When a world ends, there’s always something left over. A story, perhaps, or a vision, or a hope. This inn is a refuge, after the lights go out. For a while.

After the action-packed collection “Brief Lives,” which revealed some oft-mentioned but (previously) never spoken history of the “lives” of The Endless, we took another step back in “Worlds’ End,” which was a collection of semi-related short stories set in the “Sandman” universe, much like “Dream Country” and “Fables and Reflections.” What sets “World’s End” apart from those collections however, is that it builds to a specific endpoint. From the beginning of the story, we know that something momentous is brewing, and that all the interesting stories we’re hearing are almost meant to distract us and prevent us from remembering that fact.

“Worlds’ End” begins with two travelers from the world we’re all familiar with, Brant Tucker and Charlene Mooney, getting into a car crash when it mysteriously begins snowing in the middle of summer. While still in a daze, a mysterious hedgehog directs Brant to an inn unlike any he (or we) are familiar with—the “Worlds’ End, a free house.”

It’s later discovered that the inn is one of four where those travelling between dimensions, can stowaway during “reality storms,” which come as the result of particularly significant events. What sets “World’s End” apart from the early short story collections is that it builds to a specific endpoint. From early on, we know that something momentous is brewing, and that all the interesting stories we’re hearing are almost meant to distract and prevent us from remembering that fact. That endpoint is the inn’s guests gathering at a window to watch an enormous funeral procession in the sky, which is led by Desire and includes most of The Endless, more than a few residents of The Dreaming, and a number of other characters Morpheus has interacted with over the course of the series. As such, the most prevalent guess as to who lies in the coffin is Morpheus himself. The procession ends with Death stopping and looking through the inn’s window as the crescent moon behind her is covered in what is likely blood.

The thing is, it’s never actually confirmed that it’s Dream’s funeral we’re seeing. At least not yet. Although that big ending is forever chugging towards us, “Worlds’ End” might just be all about Neil Gaiman reminding the reader that what’s important in a really good story is the distance, not the destination (the telling, not the ending or the stakes). Instead of telling us why people (beings is more accurate) from so many realms are caught in a reality storm (or why we should give a shit), the whole “the world is coming to an end” thing is really just a backdrop for the stories the travelers are telling.

In the end, we learn that Brant is actually recounting the stories he heard at the Worlds’ End to a regular bartender, and that Charlene has ceased to exist (as she chose to stay and work at the inn). So it turns out, what originally appeared to be the frame story, all the travelers gathering, was actually wrapped up in another frame story. Frameception.

Although the stories within “Worlds’ End” have little impact on the main arc, they’re still an incredibly diverse, fantastic read. Despite the distinctiveness that each story (and fictional storyteller) brings, these six separate issues ultimately feel like one complete volume. Somehow, the pieces of the puzzle all fit. My two favorites were indubitably the first, “A Tale of Two Cities,” which Gaiman has admitted is utterly Lovecraftian, and “Hob’s Leviathan,” just because I’ve been captivated by Hob Gadling since we first heard his life story in “The Doll’s House.”

“Worlds’ End” had its fantastic moments, but at the end of the day, the stories I most want to hear are those of The Endless. As such, I’m looking forward to “The Kindly Ones,” the longest “Sandman” collection, which fixes the spotlight back on Dream.

Note: “As I Go Along” is a weekly feature in which I review and discuss the best graphic novels and series that I haven’t yet had a chance to read. These are the titles your comic-loving friends have been trying to push into your hands for years, only now I’ll be doing the pushing (or telling you not to bother). The post will include spoilers for those who have not yet read the work.

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”

In the fifth “Sandman” collection, Dream once again took a backseat, watching the stories’ events from afar, only intervening at the end. Once again, Gaiman takes a tiny thread from an earlier work and weaves it into an beautiful and intricate quilt.  “A Game of You” is centered around Barbie, who we first met as a resident of the same house as Rose Walker in “The Doll’s House.” At the time, she was married to a man named Ken (imagine that), but they’ve divorced, and Barbie’s moved to big, bad New York City, where she lives with many of the interesting cast of characters who make up the story. But more has changed than Barbie’s marital status and place of residence. Chief among these changes: she no longer dreams.

From the outset, it appears this is a story about Barbie’s dreams returning, and as a result, her return to The Land as Princess Barbara, and eventually the skerry’s demise. “A Game of You” is that story, but more so it is a tale, as the title implies, about the question of identity. The reader must consider who and what each character in the collection is, as the characters do themselves.

Barbie, of course, is two different people, depending on whether she is awake or asleep. In the real world, she is a New York tenement dweller struggling to find her way in life following her divorce. No one depends on her but herself, and she is having a hard time keeping even that much responsibility in line. Yet in her dreams Barbie is quite the opposite. She is a princess on a magical quest to save the known world. Everyone and everything needs and depends on her.

Each of the characters has their own “game.” Wanda is a pre-operative transexual, born Alvin Mann in what she’d likely think of as a previous life. However, Wanda is scared of surgery, or perhaps just one surgery in particular, that which would make her a woman in body as well as mind. Throughout the story, Wanda struggles with her gender, and the question of her identity, or “game of Wanda” ends with her being buried in the Midwest by her traditional, God-fearing parents, who refuse to acknowledge the existence of their “son’s” other life, shunning all mention or hints to it. Or does it? Barbie dreams of Death whispering in Wanda’s ear, only she’s in the “perfect female body.” Whatever Death whispers, it makes Wanda smile.

While this volume was missing perhaps my favorite part of the “Sandman” series: the growth and development of the immortal Dream, “A Game of You” offered up some great elements of its own to separate it from previous collections. Most notably, the pacing of the plot and its various cliffhanger endings. While every “Sandman” book begs the turn of the page and “just one issue more before bed” turning into 3, I don’t know if any of the others has made me so desperate to find out what happens next in terms of plot. Furthermore, although it seems like it’d be difficult to expand the series’ mythology when Dream’s not really around, we did learn about the “distant skerries of dream,” places like The Land, where some people return every night, as well as further proof of Dream’s power, albeit indirectly. When Thessaly brings Hazel and Foxglove into the Dreaming, she does so with witchcraft that moves the moon and has dire consequences on Earth: changing the tides and bringing an apocalyptic hurricane into New York City. Clearly, the Dreaming and “reality” are not so separate as they appear.