I am Kyle's self-indulgence

Word on the street is that Neil Gaiman's Sandman is getting the Absolute treatment.

Considering the price of these volumes ($75 cover price for Watchmen), I can't imagine I'll be buying these anytime soon. A boy can dream, though. I'll be interested to see what is included.

Update: I've found the original source of this information. From the mouth of Neil Gaiman:

I haven’t been told not to say, so I will give you something that is technically an exclusive, which is the last thing I heard that they are definitely doing is an Absolute Sandman. Because frankly, the first twenty odd issues of Sandman (in particular, but there’s more running through) were colored for a process that hasn’t been used for twenty years on that old paper stock. And now the paper stock is amazing, the print process is amazing and we’re still using the colors which look worse and worse with every printing. That’s not satisfactory. We’ve always known we needed to recolor the first two graphic novels and maybe the first couple issues of Dream Country. Steve Oliff took over on Sandman 19 and 20 and made it beautiful but at that point it was a computerized process. We’ve always wanted to recolor those and that I think, is incentive enough. The question is how are we going to do it and what will the Absolute Sandman be? For example, I don’t know whether the physical mechanics of book production will actually allow for a two thousand page book. A complete Sandman book would probably look like something encyclopedia sized. On the other hand, it would be a really cool object. And you could kill somebody if you hit them with it.

Update II: Seeing that dozens of people arrive at this site daily looking for information on The Absolute Sandman, I've decided to keep this post updated with current information.

On two occasions Neil has given further details about the project.

On 15 February 2006 he wrote the following:

I don't think the extras in the trade paperbacks wil be repeated in the Absolute Sandman volumes, mostly because I'd assume people probably have the books with the introductions in. We're looking at putting new stuff in, and we're not yet sure what it's going to be -- I'm going to try and find things like the original proposal and notes, perhaps the script to Sandman #1 for the first volume. Right now Danny Vozzo is recolouring the first 18 issues of Sandman to take advantage of modern printing techniques and to fix things we weren't happy with at the time.

It's going to be a four book set, by the way, of about 600 pages per book, and I believe they'll come out over a couple of years.

The next day he went into more detail about what the coloring changes will be. I won't copy all of it here (you can read for yourself if you're interested), but he basically said they will be fixing errors and simply take advantage of more advanced coloring techniques, without altering the original art or look (much like the Absolute Watchmen volume). It's basically the comic book equivalent of digitally remastering old movies.

Update III: Comic Book Resources provides a panel-to-panel comparison to show the recoloring job in Absolute Sandman. Take a look:

All I can say is: Wow! The changes are far more extensive than I thought, but I must say they look great! The way Neil describes it, the changes are done only because the comics were not colored adequately in the first place. Ideally, the recoloring comes closer to what the artists originally had in mind.