Neil Gaiman's multi-volume masterwork The Sandman is one of the most popular and critically praised comic books of the last twenty-five years. But if you think you've fully experienced the saga in its numerous paperback, hardcover and Absolute slipcased editions, think again. Leslie Klinger, the fellow behind The Annotated Sherlock Holmes and The Annotated Dracula, is applying his literary detective skills once again to what should be the definitive annotated version of the DC/Vertigo series. Hit the jump to learn what Klinger told me about the project.

"Neil Gaiman is a friend," said Klinger. "We actually met through Sherlock Holmes circles.  He is very enthusiastic about my Sherlock Holmes books and was very helpful to me in looking at them and making suggestions about ways to approach the formatting and how to make it accessible to readers.  And when that was finished, I knew all along -- when I started Dracula -- I knew immediately that I wanted Neil to write an introduction for it, and he was very kind and agreed to do that. 

"Over the years, he's been coming to me with suggestions like, 'Les, why don't you do the annotated...' Suggestions like this and like that. We talked seriously about some of those ideas, and I've always joked around with him about wanting to do The Annotated Sandman.  He always said, 'Well, let's wait until I'm dead.'  Then about almost a year ago, maybe more, he called me up out of the blue and said, 'I've realized that I've started to forget why I wrote some of the things that I wrote. We should do this. I'm calling DC.' And I said, 'Well, okay!'  So he pitched it to DC and Karen Berger, in particular, and they said 'Great,' so here we are."

As for when we can expect the book, Klinger says, "I've turned in a draft of all the notes for all four volumes of the Absolute set, which is 78 or 79 issues of the comic.  I have not yet written introductory material, which will be essays about the history of the comic, history of the Sandman, biography of Neil, etc. And I'm sort of waiting for feedback from both Karen Berger at Vertigo and Neil. I'm waiting to hear back from Neil this summer and maybe go through it note by note. So certainly the earliest would be at the end of '11. I think it's probably going to be at the end of '12.  We're still talking about the format. The plan at the moment would be the Absolute Edition pages would be reduced in size. The books would stay the same size, but the images would be reduced down to allow marginal notes, and there will be other pages introduced. There will be some material that will be long, but it won't be in a margin, it'll be on a whole page by itself. This will clearly be notes together with images. There is no point in doing any sort of stand-alone book that would be a companion or anything like that. This will be image by image notes."

"I know there is going to be a lot of production work to put this book together, beyond the writing part. It has been wonderful. Neil has been very generous in sharing the scripts that he wrote for each of the issues. There is other commentary out there; there has been a lot of academic commentary. In some cases, it has been what I like to think of as reverse engineering. I know that Neil Gaiman did a lot of research on x.  I'm going to try and figure out what he found and figure out if that's still the current thinking: historical, anthropological, all kinds of material."