I didn’t like this one as much as I did the first one, and I don’t think it’s because I read the Kindle version. The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited (the 30th anniversary editions), a service I’m already paying for, so why not try it out in that medium? The formatting on the Kindle version is actually pretty great when you get into the actual comic. The story zooms in on panels and focuses on all the right spots, and it’s big enough to read. The introduction and foreword (and afterword) were not formatted at all, and were impossible to read, even on the biggest screen I was able to pull it up on. So, I didn’t mind reading it this way, and might in the future, but it’s not my favorite. I missed the full color pages in my hands.
No, I think the reason I didn’t enjoy this one as much was just the story. Morpheus slides into the background for most of it, and I really liked his being the center of it in Vol. 1. Here, we’re mostly following a new character, Rose Walker, and Rose is fine? I guess? I didn’t really care for her, but I didn’t dislike her, either. She was just there. Rose first travels to England with her mother to meet a mysterious woman, and then to Florida to try and find her missing twelve year old brother, who had been taken by her father when her parents split, and then shuffled from foster situation to foster situation before finally being lost track of. Both siblings have connections to Dream/Morpheus and his creatures of Dream, four of whom it turns out, escaped the Dreaming while Morpheus was imprisoned.
The side characters were much more interesting than Rose and her family. The two standout issues involved a serial killer convention, and one where Dream meets the same man every hundred years for a drink. I was semi-intrigued by the reversal of the Doll’s House metaphor (humans thinking they are like puppets being manipulated by powerful creatures like Dream, then Dream turning around and saying that it was the humans that had the control, and they the puppets), but it wasn’t enough of a part of the narrative to really do much for me.
Still, definitely going to keep going with this series.
[3.5 stars]