What is The Sandman: The Dream Hunters?

For the tenth anniversary of The Sandman in 1999, Neil Gaiman wrote a new tale set in old Japan: a fox spirit falls in love with a Buddhist monk, and Morpheus, the King of Dreams, is drawn into the effort to save him. Gaiman wanted Amano as his collaborator, but Amano does not draw comics, so the book became something rarer: a prose novella with Amano paintings on nearly every spread, published by DC Comics under its Vertigo imprint.

As a physical object it sits closer to an art book than to a graphic novel: 128 pages of prose and painting, with full-page art, two-page spreads and an eight-page section showcasing the paintings, including a gatefold. It won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Illustrated Narrative and was nominated for a Hugo Award in 2000.

One honest footnote. Gaiman's afterword claimed the story retooled an old folk tale from Y. T. Ozaki's Old Japanese Fairy Tales. No such tale appears in Ozaki's book, and Gaiman has since said plainly that the story was entirely his own invention. In 2008 and 2009, P. Craig Russell adapted it into a four-issue comic: a fine book, but a different object from Amano's, however often the two are shelved together.