Take a peek at this excerpt from the forthcoming first volume in the Annotated Sandman series, out January 10 from Vertigo Comics. You can pre-order the volume here.

Edited by and with an introduction and notes by Leslie S. Klinger, the expert researcher and editor behind the Edgar®-winning New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and the critically acclaimed New Annotated Dracula, The Annotated Sandman is a panel-by-panel journey through every issue of The Sandman.

Beginning with issues #1-#20, this volume provides commentary, historical and contemporary references, hidden meanings and more, presented side-by-side with the series’ art and text. Using scripts and hours of conversation with Gaiman, Klinger reveals fascinating details of The Sandman’s hundreds of unforgettable characters and its place in literary history.

[Read an excerpt from The Annotated Sandman]

We hope you enjoy this reprint, which first appeared in the Mojo: Conjure Stories anthology and subsequently in the collection Fragile Things.

1. “Come back early or never come”

In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door, I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence.

Sometimes I telephoned her. I let the phone ring once, maybe even twice, before I hung up.

[The me who was screaming]

I.

Cthulhu, they call me. Great Cthulhu.

Nobody can pronounce it right.

Are you writing this down? Every word? Good. Where shall I start—mm?

Very well, then. The beginning. Write this down, Whateley.

I was spawned uncounted aeons ago, in the dark mists of Khhaa’yngnaiih (no, of course I don’t know how to spell it. Write it as it sounds), of nameless nightmare parents, under a gibbous moon. It wasn’t the moon of this planet, of course, it was a real moon. On some nights it filled over half the sky and as it rose you could watch the crimson blood drip and trickle down its bloated face, staining it red, until at its height it bathed the swamps and towers in a gory dead red light.

Those were the days.

Or rather the nights, on the whole. Our place had a sun of sorts, but it was old, even back then. I remember that on the night it finally exploded we all slithered down to the beach to watch. But I get ahead of myself.

I never knew my parents.

My father was consumed by my mother as soon as he had fertilized her and she, in her turn, was eaten by myself at my birth. That is my first memory, as it happens. Squirming my way out of my mother, the gamy taste of her still in my tentacles.

Don’t look so shocked, Whateley. I find you humans just as revolting.

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