Japanese Sandman

I just finished The Dream Hunters, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano. In it Gaiman takes an old Japanese tale and retells it replacing the King of All Night's Dreaming with the Sandman from his earlier series. (The Sandman is amazing--yes, it is a comic book, but it is as good as most of the best literature being written these days.) This story was very good and the illustrations are a fantastic addition. I have read many books with illustrations, but rarely do the illustrations help tell the story in such an effective manner. The illustrations are all watercolors, and many of them are brilliant. Gaiman's prose is as good as ever.

What I don't know, and have no real way of discovering, is whether the book would be as interesting to someone who had not read through the Sandman series. In other words, how much of the reason I enjoyed this book is because it was immediately lumped in with a series I thought was amazing? In this respect, the story here felt much like the issue of Sandman entitled "Ramadan." One note in favor of the independent quality of this book is that Gaiman also wrote a couple of other books tied into the Sandman world in which Death was the star--and those two books were terrible.

Anyway, if you liked The Sandman or if you like the idea of reading an illustrated Japanese fable, I'd recommend it.