The Doll's House

I'm happier with it than I expected to be / remembered being. I think I mostly recalled it as a slight story, an interlude before things got really good with Season of Mists. There's some real humanity in here, and some solid tension.

I'm unimpressed by the ending, by Dream's insistence that the Endless are servants of humans parallelling Rose's "we're just toys to greater forces". You look at the actual distribution of power and it becomes clear that Rose is right and Dream is full of it. (Yes yes, The Kindly Ones. We're not there now.) So far I feel like Sandman is at its best when it treats its stories as specific tales of specific characters and lets the universality emerge from that ("The Sound of Her Wings," or Morpheus deciding he wants a friend in Hob Gadling). It's weak when it tries to make universal statements, as here, or "if there were no dreams in Hell it would hold no power".

Misc thoughts:

• This must have been mindblowing as single monthly issues in 1989. It's still impressive today.
  
• Either I've quickly gotten used to Mike Dringenberg's Dream, or he's adjusted his style to fit better with Sam Kieth's. Either way, I'm pleased by the art.
  
• The couple of pages where Rose is dreaming and the page is rotated ninety degrees? Very nice.
  
• I'm not sure what the Hob Gadling story is doing in here. I like it, but it doesn't seem to fit in with the arc.
  
• Oh right, the cereal convention. It's... squickier than I recall. Perhaps I've gotten more sensitive.
  
• Again, lots of echoes of things to come. I appreciate that.
  
• Rose can ... just remove the vortex from herself? This seems to undermine the whole premise of the "and now i have to kill you" thing. (Resolving plot points without invoking character agency is a consistent problem I have with Neil's early writing: see also Neverwhere.)
  
• I am not sure what I think of the "So I'm going to decide it was all just a dream" ending. It irritates me, but I think it's the right way to end Rose's story.