When I was a adolescent reading Sandman comics for the first time, I was amazed. Here was a mature, intelligent story that was didn't treat the comics medium like a kid's experience or with an angry indy sneer.
(Much love to Love & Rockets guys, from whom I would buy at least one copy of their amazing work every time I made a trip to the comics shops in Madison, but it was the Sandman stories that kept me coming back each month.)
I bought my first two copies of Sandman in November of 199X, and on the way home I was in a terrible car accident that should have killed me, but didn't. In fact, apart from a few bruises, I was fine. The car? Not so much. My dad rocked on his heels and wept when he saw the damage.
Needless to say, I didn't get back to the comics shop the next month to pick up the new issues of Sandman, so my comics reading slowed down for a while. Eventually, a shop opened up in my hometown so I could make a pick-up list and I got a few more issues of Sandman, and I came to really understand that this Neil Gaiman guy, he's special.
20 years later, I'm sitting in my cube in the lakehouse, and the rest of the world has caught up to Gaiman.

Gaiman, Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer and Damian Kulash spent the night last night recording 8-in-8. The album will be presented at the Rethink Music conference, which is being put on by Berklee College of Music and the music business website MIDEM, along with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the Harvard Business School. They're donating the proceeds of the album to a Boston charity.

Cool stuff. Buy it.