Sandman: A Game of You

Neil Gaiman created such a rich and expansive world with Sandman that he could have potentially continued the series indefinitely. Gaiman himself acknowledges this and has made it clear that his decision to end Sandman after a healthy 75 issues (plus a few extras) was a creative one. Just because the Sandman universe has the potential for literally as many stories as one can imagine doesn't mean it ought to go on forever. The variety and limitless bounds of Sandman serve a less mercenary purpose than just perpetuating the series. By having access to as many private worlds as there are characters, the comics can tell stories that don't star Dream himself. This stops the story from becoming a dull chain of foregone conclusions, seeing as Dream is depicted as being more powerful than even the gods of antiquity.

"A Game of You" revolves around Barbie, a character from "The Doll's House" who was so minor she only appeared in a few panels and even then not with all that much detail or dimension. By the end of "The Doll's House" Barbie was on the verge of divorcing her seemingly perfect husband Ken (ha-ha) and in "A Game of You" she's living in a run-down apartment building in New York City slowly embracing her inner freak. Her friends are her neighbors, a transsexual calling him/herself Wanda and a lesbian couple named Foxglove and Hazel (Fox being the obliquely referenced former lover of one of the ill-fated diner patrons from "Preludes and Nocturnes"). Before long, Barbie's fantastical dream world, also first referenced in "Doll's House", starts to break into the real world. When her massive dog protector Martin Tenbones crosses over into the flesh and gets shot by police, Barbie finds she can no longer control the outpour of her dreams.

In short, Barbie's dream involves a cobbled-together high fantasy setting in which she is the reigning princess. The recent turmoil in her life has given some extra umph to the dream's antagonist, the Cuckoo. One of the Cuckoo's agents pursues Barbie in the real world, precipitating a confrontation in the dream that brings about the end of Barbie's entire inner world.

Dream himself only shows up at the very beginning and in the penultimate chapter of the story. His presence puts the entire struggle into perspective. Barbie's dream isn't really a world made whole cloth from her own fantasies. Rather, it's just one of many dreams to occupy that particular segment of the Dreaming. Morpheus (called Murphy by the denizens of Barbie's dream) does his usual thing, which is to say he shows up to do some cosmic justice in the disconnected regality of a very old, very power being. His arrival in Barbie's dream brings about some of the most impressive, mind-bending images in the entire series. It also serves to put a surprisingly comforting spin on oblivion. "A Game of You" is essentially a story about coping with loss in its many forms. Morpheus makes it clear that, at least in the Sandman universe, mortality is all a part of a great balance and to come to an end is only natural.