As with volume 1, my rating and review relate only to the annotation work and the actual physical book in my hands, not to Sandman overall.

Well, my complaints about the first volume of The Annotated Sandman hold true for this one as well:

> overall, way too many blank black margins with not as many notes as I'd like (fewer, in fact, than in volume 1, since Gaiman made fewer references to other DC characters as he went on);

> notes not present when I wanted them (one example: the panels in Thermidor in that display a life-sized puppet show using the headless corpses of the recently guillotined--surely there's a historical note worth mentioning there!) (I also felt there was far too little information about the cuckoo in myth and culture in A Game of You: in 34.15.1, George says that he is Gwas-y-gog, a servant of the cuckoo, and the note tells us this is Welsh, but doesn't tell us why on earth the Welsh have such a phrase);

> and shockingly poor production/proofing (one note appeared a full four pages before the panel it referenced, even though the panels before and after it also had notes on the same topic!).

Still a lot of useful tidbits to pick up, especially as we get those calendar-themed historical issues. Not all of it is really enlightening in terms of the plot or themes, but it is fun historical background (which I guess means I'm reading these annotated editions for the trivia?). I was fascinated to discover that the Cobweb Palace and the King of Pain in "Three Septembers and a January" were real and not, as I'd thought, inventions of Desire's. And I want to read an entire book about the Chevalier d'Eon, who lived as both a man and a woman at different times in his/her/their life (occasionally under legal compulsion).

I also continue to be fascinated by the places in which Gaiman's descriptions and the final art don't quite match up. I more than understand the desire of a living author to keep any less-than-pleased thoughts about a coworker's work quiet, but I did also appreciate the one place where it slipped through, in a comment that the demon Azazel as it originally appeared in issue #4 looked like a "floating potato." Yeah, Azazel's look is definitely stronger here!

Now to await the NYPL arrival of the next volume... ( )

For readers who don't have a literary, historical, or myhtological knowledge base Klinger's commentary on Gaiman's text is xtremely useful. Yet, for people like myself who have much of this knowledge already, this book is made into nothing more than a handy reference guide. Klinger refrains from adding any personal speculation or groundbreaking scholarship (such as appeared in Hy Bender's the Sandman Companion), so I am left feeling a bit let down. Some of Klinger's content choices were also a touch strange and un-unfied (including some interview snippets, yet not enough to justify, and similar practices with mention to the original scripts), so I must conclude that this book is really for the Gaiman-scholar-lite, who can't be bothered to read the actual seminal scholarly commentary. ( )