Nearly everyone in my life had been talking about it for the last few days — by sheer coincidence, probably — so I finally said, “Fuck it,” and decided to re-read every single issue of Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” in order, from the beginning. Not necessarily the extra stuff, or the standalone Death stories, but definitely the 75 “real” issues, starting with #1. After all, it had been just long enough for me to forget the details of basically all the stories, and the endings to every single one (because, as I have long maintained, if you’re good at writing crazy mystical shit, you will always cop out on the ending).

And, all right. With my teen angst and stormy college loves behind me, I can say: they’re still pretty good. Sure, it’s nearly 20 years later and no one has called Gaiman out on the fact that he obviously wishes he looked like his protagonist. The art was clearly produced for a company nervous about dipping its toes into the scary “alternative comics” universe. And I still don’t get how people can treat Norse gods and faeries as equally non-silly. But none of that matters!

You know why? Because from 1989 to 1996, Neil Gaiman wrote these stories. Without Google or Wikipedia.

Holy shit.

Do you have any idea how fucking dusty half his research materials must have been? Apart from The Endless, his dysfunctional family of immortals (who may as well have had a sibling named Dysfunction), and a few of the humans, nearly everything in those books comes from somewhere else. Sometimes it’s just a forgotten corner of the DC universe, but usually it’s some obscure bit of history or mythology that’s been around for centuries, but lost to all but the most obsessive scholars. And he dug these bits of trivia out of the libraries and wrote comics about them.

Who the hell was Neil Gaiman writing for here? Clearly he hoped to entertain, and maybe draw some people toward his own highly esoteric interests. But was he really counting on his readers to stroll down to the library and fact-check his work? To read up on Japanese storm deities or the life of Christopher Marlowe or the calendar used after the French Revolution?

I want to believe, as much as the next geek, that we comics fans are a clever bunch, but there is just no way that happened. A good number of his fans were, and still are, strictly interested in the gothy imagery, sitting around wondering which of the Endless they would be*. And most of the rest simply assumed he was inventing most of it, and got all excited when they spotted a reference they understood. (”Wow, he must have read something I also read!”)

These references have become much easier to spot this time around, because I have been using Wikipedia. Seriously, everything is there. Most of it is, at least. At this point, I’m more surprised when something doesn’t have a thousand-year history than when it does. At one point, a very minor character (literally, some dude chained up in Hell) loudly and repeatedly declares that, 1100 years earlier, he was Breschau of Livonia. Could Wikipedia help? As far as I can tell, there was no Breschau. There really was a Livonia, though, and the other characters were correct in their assessment of its present state: “I doubt one living mortal in a hundred thousand could even point to where Livonia used to be, on a map.” I looked at a map, and 24 hours later I’ve already forgotten where Livonia was. Apparently, the real-life Livonian language is nearly extinct.

So I guess that’s everyone’s homework, from now until the zombie apocalypse: pick up a book you haven’t read in a while, and look up everything that made you ask, “Is that true?” the first time you read it. It’ll take forever, and you’ll spend the rest of your life interrupting people to assault them with random bits of trivia. But at least no one will be able to claim the internet made you stupid. Kind of annoying, maybe, but not stupid.

*Nobody ever picks Despair. If scientists discovered a race of depressed, turnip-shaped trolls who had all read “Sandman,” even they wouldn’t pick Despair. If someone you know picks Despair, congratulate them on their frankness, then get them the fuck into counseling.