Forbes article on Dream Hunters

THE OTHER DAY A LONG LINE OF people waited outside a Virgin Megastore in New York. No, a pop star wasn’t the lure. They were hoping to get a signed book from author Neil Gaiman. Neil who? Gaiman is a celebrity in the growing world of comics aimed at adult readers. His latest book, The Dream Hunters, is a “graphic novel” featuring the Sandman, an ethereal deity who lords over Gaiman’s world of disconcerting dreams. The entire first printing of 70,000 has been shipped out with a minimum of publicity.

Gaiman has been writing these books since 1989, when he resurrected a dormant figure from the 1940s (the “Golden Age” of comics) called the Sandman. Some 75 stories later, publisher DC Comics is sitting on a literary gold mine. More than 7 million Sandman books and magazines
have been sold. Remarkably, in a business that, like news magazines, sells in fresh installments, every story remains in print.

The new book sells for $30 and is bound as carefully as a piece of art. Many of the eager buyers became addicted while in their late teens, but lots of older readers migrated over from the adult fiction
aisles.

Gaiman had put the Sandman to sleep in 1996. Then DC Comics commissioned a tenth anniversary poster by Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano, making his first foray into American comics. Gaiman loved the poster and agreed to write again, but only if Amano illustrated the book.