SuperE: Alright, it was semantically injudicious of me to stick to "re-create" when all I meant was there were Sandman before Gaiman's Sandman, and that you'd have to be daft and blind to confuse 'em all.
Skar: Sandman is the work that made him famous, yeah. At least among the comics crowd, but a lot of people kept handing it off to their non-comics reading friends, going, "Ya gotta read this." At least one of my girl friends has a crush on Dream because I made her borrow my graphic novels.
I have to admit when I first picked up Sandman, it was because Dave McKean was doing the covers. I read a small portion of the graphic novel of Preludes and Nocturnes, easily the most horror driven of the batch, I think, and it was not my cup of tea at first. And then I hit issue 7 or 8--SuperE and other fans will know which one I refer to, if I mention it's the one where Sandman's sister shows up. And that was it.
I read them very much out of order, but at the time I didn't have internet access, and Dragon's Keep in Provo (where I got my comics at the time) was having a hard time getting the graphic novels in. I was just too impatient, so I ended up reading the Kindly Ones (the penultimate arc, if you count the Wake as the last) in single issues about the time I got my hands on Season of Mists (third). This should totally have spoiled a lot of things for me, but instead, I just wanted to find out where the missing pieces of the story went. I don't particularly recommend this, but you may find your mileage varying over the series, because he does play with a lot of different themes and sub-genres.