The beauty of an anthology series is you don’t have to read them in order – or even read any of the other stories in the series – to enjoy it.

OK, it’s a lesser beauty but a fine thing all the same.

For example, if you skip one or read the last one first, it makes no impact on the story or stories. Each story is self-contained. 

Take an old TV show like “Gunsmoke.” A viewer can watch almost any episode and have everything they need to know like or dislike that one episode. There are few TV/streaming series like that today; everything fits together like a puzzle now; every episode and every season is interconnected. Skip one episode and you could be lost; jump into Episode 3 of season four and you will most definitely be lost.

So, it’s a small pleasure – a lesser beauty – to realize that I read “The Neil Gaiman Library Volume 1” then read “The Neil Gaiman Library Volume 3” without realizing it wasn’t the second volume until sitting down to write this review. 

And it doesn’t make a bit of difference in the stories.

I can read the second volume now with no worries of anything being spoiled by having read the third volume first.

“The Neil Gaiman Library” is a three-volume series collecting comic books either written by or adapted from the short stories of Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is best known for “The Sandman” comic book series which has become an Audible audio series and is a Netflix series in production. But note, you don’t want to read “Sandman” out of chronological order.

But “The Neil Gaiman Library” is not “The Sandman.” 

Instead, it contains several shorter comic book stories – short is as relative as beautiful. The four stories fill about 200 pages, with about 150 pages of extras.

Here, readers find an intriguing twist on the Snow White fairy tale, a poignant look at what happened to the surviving sibling of Narnia, a fascinating/frightening tale of a cat’s loyalty and a little tale about the end of the world … again. Among other gems.

A fun collection. And even better, you can read the stories inside “Volume 3” in any order, too.

Small beauties, indeed.