It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book. (Day 4 of 10.)

Season of Mists is widely considered one of the best Sandman arcs, if not the best, and for good reason. I remember loving the heck out of this one first time around, and sure enough I loved it all over again.

Neil Gaiman manages to take eight issues that are, when you boil it down, mostly talk — and spins something engrossing out of it. Plenty of drama, intrigue and trickery; not only important for the overall saga, but just plain making for a gripping tale. Season of Mists was a chance for the author to flex his mythology muscles, playing with characters from a variety of cultures and seeing if they fit. The intrigue here comes not from the stunning events unfolding in Hell — events that would lead to a spinoff series featuring the Gaiman version of Lucifer — but from the interaction between mythic beings from differing pantheons.

They all want something from Dream, you see. They want the keys to Hell, which Lucifer has abandoned, and Morpheus has got to give them to somebody. And while these gods and demigods from around the world will beg, borrow, cheat, lie and steal to get their prize, the core of the story is really the audience Dream gives them all. Their machinations are secondary to Dream’s reactions to them — and from this perspective, we realize that while Season of Mists is a very, very key event in the overarching Sandman saga, it’s perhaps even more importantly the deepest examination of the Morpheus character to date.

It all begins with a family meeting: the first issue of this story and one of the single best Sandman issues overall. Gaiman’s Endless are a superb mix of deviousness and otherworldliness and the typical squabbling of human families we all know and love. What makes these personifications of concepts like Desire, Despair and Death so powerful aren’t the concepts themselves, but the very relatable personalities behind each one: Destruction the black sheep, Desire the attention whore — even Delirium, a loopy LSD victim of sorts, has an endearing little-sister quality. This family interaction is the heart and soul of Sandman. It’s also what kicks off Season of Mists.

This volume’s title refers to the time during which Hell is empty, a time when restless spirits descend upon the world and the dead seem to live again in their ghostly way. We get an inside glimpse at this in Chapter 4, a fine story though a needless distraction from the arc: Chapter 3 leaves off with Dream welcoming the aforementioned host of divine supplicants to his realm, and then abruptly we get this interlude about a student stuck at boarding school while dead students repopulate it. It’s a poignant little vignette, but its timing is maddening.

But otherwise, what’s not to like? Morpheus isn’t the most likeable chap in the world, yet the reader can’t help but he drawn to him. He’s rather curt, the sort who tells it like it is without much emotion. (Unless his pride is hurt… but that’s another discussion.) He suffers neither fools nor politics. That’s why seeing him deal with the likes of a decidedly less grand Odin, a falsely humble representative of an Asian deity, a horrible demon in the guise of an adorable little girl, and many others is so — well, endearing. Sure, Dream is kind of a cold and distant bastard, but he’s just the sort you want to see these manipulative folks facing. In other stories they would play their victims like fiddles. Not here. Dream does not get played.

Not by these people, at least.

That’s it. That’s the sum total of Season of Mists. Lucifer bails out on Hell, leaves Dream to make the decision on what to do with it, and Dream spends a load of pages listening to entities make their pitch. And it’s fantastic.

Sandman might be at its best in shorter stories and one-shot tales, but among the longer arcs Season of Mists stands out as one of the very best: a fascinating dose of political drama that could — amazingly, given that it’s fourth in a ten-book saga — be read on its own and still be eminently satisfying. Wonderful stuff.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”