All images in this essay are from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman originally published by Vertigo, a division of DC Comics which retains the rights to them, except as otherwise noted. I include them here under the fair use doctrine and make no claim to ownership of these images. | this particular image from here

Şanⅆman ℒeẳrnⅰngs: ④Ɗeatᚺ- No Viłlain Aƒter All

or . . . Everything I ever needed to know, I learned from Dream, Lord Shaper, the Prince of Nightmares.

Maybe it is the way Death is depicted as a cool, non-cynical goth-girl, that makes Neil Gaiman’s depiction of her so compelling. She is certainly a fan favorite. Death doesn’t wear a cowl, that’s her brother Destiny. Nor does she carry a scythe. Instead, her sigil is an ankh — the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph symbolizing life itself. She is not angry or vengeful; rather, Death is matter-of-fact, clear-eyed, and remarkably kind.

She appears early on in the Sandman series at a moment when her brother, Dream, is having something of an existential crisis. The Lord Shaper spends the day palling around with his sister, an experience which helps him out of a rather deep funk. The reader takes a stiff punch in the gut, however, with a panel depicting the death of an infant. This part reveals a tough but true lesson: death comes to the mighty and the small alike — often without warning or reason:

from here

Contrast the tragic scene above with another from nearer the end of the Sandman saga. Death…