Since it features Death as the lead character, whom Gaiman himself depicted as surprisingly engaging, I think anyone who did use it as an entry point would eventually figure out they weren't bamboozled. Would I've been able to grasp what made Sandman so special, back in 2003, when At Death's Door was originally published? Thompson's take is particularly playful. As far as someone who hasn't, I can't really begin to say. As someone who (embarrassingly recently) has read Sandman itself, I found the material familiar and pleasant. I further assume that it is capable of doing exactly that.

I assume this Jill Thompson variant on material found within Neil Gaiman's epic Sandman saga was created as a handy entry point for reluctant readers. I keep meaning to check out Thompson's Scary Godmother, which looks much cooler than this. Sure I'm a snob, but I just don't get how this is supposed to be more fun for a kid than something that isn't a cutesified adaptation. His prose was already a little clunky and flowery sometimes, but Thompson makes it worse by treating it like Shakespeare - in the kind of lousy Shakespeare production where they don't know how to make the meaning clear through action, but they have to say all the words, so you get some goofy stage business over a soundtrack of classy-sounding gibberish. Not only is it a very weird style contrast, it literally makes no sense a lot of the time because of the way Thompson rushes through it to get to the jokes, and also because in the original book Gaiman was counting on people having already read the previous books. But trying to remake Neil Gaiman's Season of Mists from another character's point of view, and dropping in huge chunks of the original dialogue, doesn't work at all. Why did this have to be done? Jill Thompson could have made perfectly fine goofy big-eyed imitation-manga about whatever, and the parts of this that she wrote from scratch are pretty good for morbid children (I like the slapstick bit about gruesome things happening to a ghost who never complains).

Death by Jill Thompson