Still, at the end of 1988, a 28-year-old Englishman published a comic-book series called The Sandman, and it meant something—something about the fading conviction that traditional fiction was the highest path, the greatest art.

Even the most powerful cultural commitments to an art-form can change, of course. In the Poetics,
Aristotle named epic poetry as the summit of the artistic impulse, and
as late as Dante in the 14th century, with the Renaissance revival of
classical learning, this remained the accepted view. But by the time Paradise Lost
was finished in 1667, the surprise wasn’t so much that Milton had
written a good epic, but that he had managed to write an epic at all.
Epic poetry had come to seem a strange device of olden days—with drama
and lyric poetry (and, in the 18th century, the novel) taking its place.

In other words, the novel as an art-form didn’t seem the only—the
obvious, the necessary, the first—place for artistic ambition with the
literary genius Neil Gaiman had. And that says something, doesn’t it?
Something about the fading conviction that traditional fiction is the
highest path, the greatest art?

The Deep Stuff of Legends — Review: ‘The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes’ by Neil Gaiman