The Sandman: Overture
comic book miniseries by Neil Gaiman
The Sandman: Overture is a six-issue comic book miniseries written by Neil Gaiman with art by J.H. Williams III. A prequel to Gaiman's The Sandman series, it debuted in 2013, 17 years after the end of the regular series. A deluxe edition combining all six issues was published in November 2015. The series won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story in 2016.
The Sandman: Overture recounts the events leading to the first issue of the original Sandman series, in which the protagonist Dream—a powerful cosmic entity—is captured by a human occultist.
Plot
On a distant planet, one aspect of Dream among the countless versions existing throughout the multiverse is suddenly destroyed. The remaining aspects of Dream gather to investigate. They discover the cause lies in Dream's past: long ago, when a catastrophic phenomenon called a "dream vortex" emerged, Dream chose not to kill the individual who carried it. As a result, the vortex's influence spread, corrupting the consciousness of the stars themselves.
Dream sets out to address the crisis, accompanied by his feline aspect and a girl named Hope whom he takes under his protection. He seeks help from his parents, Time and Night, but these primordial beings show little concern for the cosmos, and longstanding family conflicts prevent meaningful aid.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16912451. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2013, 2015 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Sandman: Overture” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.