It's a big shiny hardbound looking package. That's all Absolute Editions are.
You are aware that 'Absolute Editions' are essentially marketing editions to bilk money off collectors right? You are acting like it's the Criterion Collection of comics, or the Library of Congress editions, when stuff like Identity Crisis or Geoff Johns garbage get Absolute Editions.
Barks is ranked Number 7 (Donald Duck) and Number 20(Scrooge) on The Comics Journal's Top 100 Comics of the 20th Century far ahead of the highest ranked superhero entries.
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https://ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelected...threadid=16375)
And The Sandman isn't on the list.
I honestly don't know why this is a surprise but...Watchmen and The Sandman, while they are great works, largely owe their elevated status to being outliers in the superhero fandom -- the fact that the former features riffs and deconstructions of superheroes, while the latter is a fantasy series nominally set in the DC universe and features some DC villains and heroes. But among the wider comics community, they wouldn't rank quite so highly. Nobody with serious taste would put Watchmen above Krazy Kat, EC Comics, Will Eisner, Barks, Robert Crumb, and so on. It would be like ranking Beyoncé over Aretha Franklin. In the case of Gaiman's THE SANDMAN, he's largely updating and reviving horror and fantasy ideas from the '50s EC Comics as well as Eisner's The Spirit (which he admitted was his main inspiration) while borrowing some ideas from European comics.
So that's why I think this OP is bizarre and weird, because I don't see Watchmen and The Sandman as some kind of universal standard to ask other comics' traditions and go "what've you got as good as this". Mainly because it acts as if the main idea of serious comics storytelling people have are these two works, and again they're at the tippy top for stuff a superhero reading fandom might be familiar with but the reason is that it's made by people who have a wider culture than superheroes.